Windows Server 2008 Managing the user experience, Keeping it all safe and secure

September 23rd, 2008

Windows Server 2008 includes an impressive array of new security applications and features that further enhance enterprise deployments, particularly within hostile environments or under potentially threatening scenarios. Today’s Internet is a brightly illuminated world that casts shadows, and from those shadows arise criminal aspirations that seek to infiltrate, pilfer, and undermine Internet-accessible businesses. Microsoft has stepped up its Windows Server 2008 defenses to better serve the computing public that can’t always defend against unforeseen, persistent, or stealthy attack.

The following paragraphs briefly summarize some of the new and newly enhanced security features of the Windows Server 2008 family:

  • BitLocker Drive Encryption is a security feature of both Windows Vistaand Windows Server 2008 (again sharing a common base) to providestrong cryptographic protection over stored sensitive data within theoperating system volume. BitLocker encrypts all data stored in theWindows volume and any relevant configured data volumes, whichincludes hibernation and paging files, applications, and application data.Furthermore, BitLocker works in conjunction with Trusted PlatformModule (TPM) frameworks to ensure the integrity of protected volumesfrom tampering, even — and especially — while the operating systemisn’t operational (like when the system is turned off).
  • Windows Service Hardening turns Internet-facing servers into bastions resistant to many forms of network-driven attack. This restricts critical Windows services from performing abnormal system activities within the file system, registry, network, or other resources that may be leveraged to install malware or launch further attacks on other computers.
  • Microsoft Forefront Security Technologies is a comprehensive solution that provides protection for the client operating system, application servers, and the network edge. In the Forefront Client Security role, you may provide unified malware protection for business notebooks, workstations, and server platforms with easier management and control. Server security can fortify Microsoft Exchange messaging environments or protect Office SharePoint Server 2007 services against viruses,worms, and spam.
  • Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server provides enterpriseworthy firewall, virtual private network (VPN), and Web caching solutions to protect IT environments against Internet-based threats. Microsoft’s Intelligent Application Gateway is a remote-access intermediary that provides secure socket layer (SSL) application access and protectionwith endpoint security management.
  • User Account Control (UAC) enables cleaner separation of duties to allow non-administrative user accounts to occasionally perform administrative tasks without having to switch users, log off, or use the Run As command. UAC can also require administrators to specifically approve applications that make system-wide changes before allowing those applications to run. Admin Approval Mode (AAM) is a UAC configuration that creates a split user access token for administrators, to further separateadministrative from non-administrative tasks and capabilities. Read the rest of this entry »

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Organic Entreprenuer Secrets and Surprises

September 2nd, 2008

The winter of your business is about reconnecting with yourself, your family, and the fundamental structure of your business. Now is the time to figure out or concretize your reasons for being in business or what your business feeds in you. Even if one reason is ultimately to give you financial freedom, also remember that you should build a business to give you solace and surprises. You should always leave room to be surprised by what your business grows.

Winter is a time to sit back and enjoy the successesof the year from a safe, detached distance. During the summer and autumn seasons, when things are growing and you’re harvesting the fruits of your labour, you often don’t have the time to take a breath and acknowledge the great job you’ve done, the hurdles you’ve jumped, and the milestones you’ve passed. In winter, you can do this without  the threat of being swept away by emotion and losing your head or your direction.

Your business, like a garden in winter, will also have its secrets — things you can’t possibly foresee, and maybe that’s a good thing. One of the secrets of my business that was hidden from me for the longest time was the way all these aspects of my life, my patchwork quilt of experiences, have served my marketing intuition as well as my ability to relate to a large, dynamic set of people at any given time. I couldn’t see the beauty of the design of my own quilt because, truth be told, I love expensive bed sheets and can’t stand quilts. Now I see that the life of a business doesn’t always grow in neat little Beatrix Potter-like rows; sometimes it’s a patchwork. Sometimes it’s chaotic, but no matter how abstract, there is order in the design.

Winter is also a time when it’s so easy to scare yourself silly, but there’s no need to worry. Many people who love what they do during the other seasons of their business start hating what they do or become skittish about the  ness side of things during the winter. It’s a time when attention to detail calls and the call must be answered in order for the business to stay healthy. Dealing with the nitty-gritty of business in winter is no different from dealing with the daily details of your life: you have to exercise, brush your teeth, and comb your hair everyday, or you start losing friends as well as teeth. Read the rest of this entry »

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When Am I Negotiating? 

August 22nd, 2008

Any time you ask someone to say yes or to do something for you or to get out of the way so you can do it, you are negotiating. You negotiate all day long, whether you realize it or not. You are negotiating when you

  • Ask your boss for a salary increase
  • Ask the cable guy for a more-specific time to show up at your house
  • Try to hurry up the cable guy when he is late
  • Decide to marry (This is a lifelong negotiation.)
  • Try to enforce a curfew with your kids

Negotiating occurs in all aspects of life. It happens in your personal life (marriage, divorce, and parenting), in business, in government, and among nations. For example, at the time of this writing, the United States is  in heated negotiations with the Untied Nations council to revise a U.N. resolution on North Korea for conducting a nuclear test. The resolution may result in strict sanctions against the North Koreans. So a  negotiation can be on a global scale or on a personal scale, such as “Honey, please put the seat down.” Read the rest of this entry »

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THE NOBILITY OF THE SEX PROBLEM

August 21st, 2008

Of all the problems which the alert and curious mind of modern man is considering, none occupies him more  than that of the relations of the sexes. This is natural. It touches us all and we have made rather a mess of it! We want to know why, and we want to do better. We resent being the sport of circumstance and perhaps we are beginning to understand that this instinct of sex which has been so great a cause of suffering and shame and has been treated as a subject fit only for furtive whispers or silly jokes, is in fact one of the greatest powers in human nature, and that its misuse is indeed “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”

It is not the abnormal or the bizarre that interests most of us to-day. It is not into the by-ways of vice that we seek to penetrate. It is the normal exercise of a normal instinct by normal people that interests us: and it is of this that I have tried to write and speak. The curiosities of depravity are for the physician and the psychologist to discuss and cure. Ordinary men and women want first to know how to live ordinary human lives on a higher level and after a nobler pattern than before. They want, I think,–and I want,–to grow up, but to grow rightly, beautifully, humanely.

And I believe the first essential is to realize that the sex-problem, as it is called, is the problem of something noble, not something base. It is not a “disagreeable duty” to know our own natures and  understand our own instincts: it is a joy. The sex-instinct is not “the Fall of Man”; neither is it an instance of  divine wisdom on which moralists could, if they had only been consulted in time, greatly have improved.  It is a thing noble in essence. It is the development of the higher, not the lower, creation. It is the asexual  which is the lower, and the sexually differentiated which is the higher organism.

In the humbler ranks of being there is no sex, and in a sense no death. The organism is immortal because–strange paradox–it is not yet alive enough to die. But as we pass from the lower to the higher, we pass from the less individual to the more individual; from asexual to sexual. And with this change comes that great rhythm by which life and death succeed each other, and death is the cost of life, and to bring life into  the world means sacrifice; and–as we rise higher still–to sustain life means prolonged and altruistic love.  his is the history of sex and of procreation, a history associated with the rising of humanity in the scale of  being, a history not so much of his physical as of his spiritual growth. Read the rest of this entry »

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