Statement from Symantec Corporate

In an effort to keep you up-to-date on the unfolding events surrounding the
Symantec source code disclosure, further investigation of the claims made by
Anonymous brings us to believe that the disclosure was the result of a theft of
source code that occurred in 2006. Since 2006, Symantec has instituted a number
of policies and procedures to prevent a similar incident from occurring.

Affected products include:

• Norton Antivirus Corporate
  Edition
• Norton Internet Security
• Norton SystemWorks (Norton
  Utilities and Norton GoBack)
• pcAnywhere 12.0, 12.1 and 12.5
• Symantec Endpoint Protection
  v11.0, which is four years old
• Symantec AntiVirus v10.2, which
  is five years old code, and a product that has been discontinued

Due to the age of the exposed source code,
except as specifically noted below, Symantec customers – including those
running Norton products — should not be in any increased danger of cyber
attacks resulting from this incident.

Customers of Symantec’s pcAnywhere product may face a slightly increased security
risk as a result of this exposure. Symantec is currently in the process of
reaching out to our pcAnywhere customers to make them aware of the situation
and to provide remediation steps to maintain the protection of their devices
and information.

How you can help customers using Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton
Internet Security, or Norton SystemWorks (Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack)

By keeping your customers’ solutions and virus definitions updated to the
latest version, you will help ensure protection against any new possible
threats that might result from this incident. Additional steps to take include
confirming that your customers are following best practices for protection
technology settings: tamper protection and IPS technologies defend against
vulnerabilities. Also consider enabling the uninstall password feature. This
helps prevents malware or other software from uninstalling Symantec AntiVirus
v10.2 or Symantec Endpoint Protection v11.0.

How you can help customers using pcAnywhere

As always with any remote control product (such as pcAnywhere), it is extremely
important that best practices are followed regarding physical security,
endpoint security, network perimeter security and secure remote access. For
example, all computers should have an endpoint protection technology installed
that is current and up-to-date. Corporate firewalls should not allow inbound or
outbound access to pcAnywhere without using VPN tunnels. Unauthorized
individuals should not be permitted on company property. Additionally,
companies should employ best practices when it comes to the configuration of
pcAnywhere – e.g. password strength, password retry limits, and requiring the
user to approve remote connections.

Symantec is committed to eliminating the increased risk as a result of the
exposure. In addition to a partner FAQ, we will also provide a technical white
paper that addresses initial remediation steps and issue maintenance patches as
a final step.

Given the nature of this ongoing investigation, we have no further details to
disclose at this time but will provide updates as we confirm additional facts.
For general information updates, please visit go.symantec.com/sourcecode.
For specific questions, please contact your Symantec account representative or
reference the partner FAQ or technical white paper being made available to you
via your partner account manager.

So what do you do as the company?   Just get over it?  Try to buy the name (which violates Twitter’s terms of service) ?   Or something else?   With a marketing group and M&A team as large as Netflix, was this an oversight or just one of those things that people didn’t think was important? 

As a business owner or marketer, what would you do?

September is National Preparedness Month (ready.gov) and typically focuses on natural disaster preperation especially as severe weather season is upon us.   But the real question to any family or business is – What are you prepared for?   Do you have a plan for an event which causes you to leave your house or office?  Do you know who all your utility providers are and how to contact them?   What about critical information around letting friends and business associates know what is happening and how to get in touch with you.  There a loads of great information out there along with templates to use around organizing information and gathering all of details necessary.  All of these are great ways to get oranized, but sometimes you just don’t have the time to keep up with all of the changing information.   Here’s a couple of simple ways to deal with all of this:

1. Make sure your computers are backed up somewhere off-site – we call this cloud based backups – there are even some free backup plans if you have only a small amount of data, all automated
2. Use an inexpesive scanner to digitize all of your statements, receipts, etc - along with the backups, this gives you easy access to the information and allows you to get rid of the overwhelming load of paper you’ve been keeping.
3. Make sure you have a couple of essentials like cash, flashlights and gas in your car – I know it sounds simple but a lot of people just expect ATMs and gas stations to be open – the recent flooding in New Jersey towns prove how easy it is for these things to be knocked out.
4. Have a communication plan – know who to call when you have an emergency and let friends, family and business assocaites know something is going on – this way people who are worried about you at least know you have a plan and when you will get back to them.
5. Have a backup communication plan – with the east coast earthquake, the cellular network was overwhelmed and people were unable to contact others.   Everything from BlackBerry Messenger, Skype, email, FaceTime, etc were all up and running as normal even though the major carriers where unable to connect phone calls.

 So as you can see, almost anything can happen in a very short time frame, but if you take just a couple of minutes and make some preperations in advance, you can be ready for almost anything.

Yesterday reports began to
trickle in that Google users in Iran were victim to a man-in-the-middle attack
through the use of an illegitimate SSL certificate issued for “*.google.com”.
This is the latest in a series of events involving a hacked Certificate
Authority, but this time there was clear evidence that the fake certificate was
being actively used.  Details of the attack and consequences are being
written about extensively elsewhere, so we will give a brief overview and link
to those directly involved and others with particularly insightful analysis.

The certificate being used
was issued by a Dutch certificate authority, DigiNotar. The consequence is that
this CA has essentially been given the “death penalty”. Microsoft, Mozilla and
Google have removed the DigiNotar root certificate from their chain of trust
and certificates signed by them will have no more trust than one you generate
yourself.  It is good to see that those who have the strongest position
when choosing which certificate authorities to trust are doing the right thing
here, with a technology that so many people rely on for security, privacy and
economic reason a “one strike and you’re out” system is appropriate.  With
each attack similar to this one, we see that the current system of Certificate
Authorities is quite open to abuse with the combination of centralized and
opaque trust.  Compromises of that trust can have severe
consequences.  The system is clearly broken, and while some are working on
replacement solutions, it is what we have to use in the mean time.

Users are advised to remove
the DigiNotar root certificate.

Firefox:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/deleting-diginotar-ca-cert

Chrome:

http://googlechrometutorial.com/google-chrome-advanced-settings/Google-chrome-ssl-settings.html

IE:

Some newer versions of Windows seem to be automatically checking a CRL and
therefore are able to provide protection without a software update: “All
supported editions of Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and
Windows Server 2008 R2 use the Microsoft Certificate Trust List to validate the
trust of a certificate authority. There is no action required for users of
these operating systems because Microsoft has removed the DigiNotar root
certificate from the Microsoft Certificate Trust List.”

However older versions of
Windows do not provide automatic protection:” Microsoft will release a future
update to address this issue for all supported editions of Windows XP and
Windows Server 2003.”

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2607712.mspx

The DigiNotar root will be
being removed from relevant Barracuda Networks products.

Further reading:

Google Online Security
Blog: An
Update on Attemped Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

DigiNotar Response: Diginotar
Reports Security Incident

EFF: Iranian
Man-in-the-Middle Attack Against Google Demonstrates Dangerous Weakness of
Certificate Authorities

This week, Overstock.com was caught using a similar tactic – they worked with a some universities and had them list links to overstock’s web site using key words.   In the internal Google search engine ranking calculator, links from schools give a web site a lot more credibility than a link from regular site.    This week Google notified Overstock they were in violation of the terms of use.   Subsequently, their search engine ranking dropped like a stone.

So, what’s the lesson here?   For the next few months, lots of reporters are going to be digging into every company’s search engine placement and try to find any issues.   If you are a company big or small, make sure you or your search engine consultants are playing by the rules.   If you have good content and you have good inbound partners to link from, then you will be rewarded.   Google is constantly tweaking the search results grading and will continue to work to refine how companies are graded and ranked.    Play by the rules is their creedo and you will be rewarded.

So what do you think about the recent ‘de-ranking’ by google of these major companies?   Do you feel like you’ve been treated unfairly by Google’s ranking system?   Or is is that you’ve been promised that first search engine ranking placement by a search engine consultant and they have yet to deliver? 

Without getting into the technical details of the internet – the short answer is: it depends.   Every top level domain (TLD) name (.com, .net, .ly, .it, etc) are controlled by a specific country (.com is controlled by the US).  If the main registry for the TLD goes down and the backup copies go down, then all of the domains for that TLD will be inaccessible.  Some countries have started using out of country backup providers but many of the smaller ones simply haven’t gotten there yet.  Last week, Libya shut down their Internet for about 16 hours, fortunately for companies like bit.ly, their domains were still cached outside of Libya and were usable until the connection was restored on Friday only to be shutdown again on Saturday. 

A number of companies (posterious is one) are starting to shift over to new shortcut urls, but what a shift and disruption in their business this is causing, not to mention the engineering expense to plus the loss of brand collateral. 

So what would your business do in this situation?   What’s your backup plan if you own one of these domains?   Currently we own ajci.co but we’re not using it for anything critical (we use it as a short url for posts instead of bit.ly links).  Other domains we own with country specific TLDs we are using but only as a secondary option.   If something were to happen with the internet here in the US, we do have a backup plan in place to use an alternate domain name and an alternate hosting provider.  Just like every area of your business your internet presence deserves a disaster plan.

What is your business doing to ensure a single event can’t shut down your business or an outside entity can’t jepoardize how you communicate with customers?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Recently one of our clients made a bold move and became the first group to live stream video and interviews over the internet from their industry’s annual trade show.  The only company to do it in the event’s 57 year history.  The event organizers thought it was great as it brought the average consumer from their living room (or their office) into the show typically reserved for industry professionals only.  How many other industries are making this move and why aren’t more?

So what does this all mean?   Are the fashion houses getting more Internet savvy?  Are they just simply following the herd and doing what everyone else does to simply keep up?  Do the shows being broadcast bring any value to you?  Are you even going to watch?

Here’s a partial list of New York Fashion Week live streams and their schedules (thanks to Mashable! for being the first out with the list )

• Vena Cava Thursday, February 12:00 p.m. ET
• Wayne Thursday, February 10, 6:00 p.m. ET 
• Peter Som Friday, February 11, 10:00 a.m. ET 
• Perry Ellis Friday, February 11, 11:00 a.m. ET 
• Jason Wu Friday, February 11, 1:00 p.m. ET 
• Rebecca Taylor Friday, February 11, 2:00 p.m. ET 
• Rebecca Minkoff Friday, February 11, 3:00 p.m. ET 
• Costello Tagliapietra Friday, February 11, 3:00 p.m. ET 
• Nicole Miller Friday, February 11, 6:00 p.m. ET 
• Richard Chai Saturday, February 12, 11:00 a.m. ET 
• Alexander Wang Saturday, February 12, 5:00 p.m. ET 
• Altuzarra Saturday, February 12, 8:00 p.m. ET 
• Preen Sunday, February 13, 11:30 a.m. ET 
• DKNY Sunday, February 13, 1:00 p.m. ET 
• Calvin Klein Collection, Men’s Sunday, February 13, 2:00 p.m. 
• Thakoon Sunday, February 13, 6:00 p.m. ET 
• Cushnie et Ochs Sunday, February 13, 7:00 p.m. ET 
• Tommy Hilfiger Sunday, February 13, 8:00 p.m. ET 
• Ohne Titel Monday, February 14, 1:00 p.m. ET 
• Donna Karan Monday, February 14, 2:00 p.m. ET 
• Alice + Olivia Monday, February 14, 5:00 p.m. ET 
• Betsey Johnson Monday, February 14, 6:00 p.m. ET 
• Kevork Kiledjian Monday, February 14, 6:00 p.m. ET 
• Marc Jacobs Monday, February 14, 8:00 p.m. ET 
• Rad Hourani Tuesday, February 15, 10:30 a.m. ET 
• Diesel Black Gold Tuesday, February 15, 1:00 p.m. ET 
• Marc by Marc Jacobs Tuesday, February 15, 4:00 p.m. ET 
• Sophie Theallet Tuesday, February 15, 5:00 p.m. ET 
• Tibi Tuesday, February 15, 7:00 p.m. ET 
• Michael Kors Wednesday, February 16, 10:00 a.m. ET 
• Oscar de la Renta Wednesday, February 16, 12:00 p.m. ET 
• Jeremy Scott Wednesday, February 16, 1:00 p.m. ET 
• The Blonds Wednesday, February 16, 7:00 p.m. ET 
• Calvin Klein Collection, Women’s Thursday, February 17, 2:00 p.m.

I had left the office assuming the tarp was being put back on and left some documents on my desk and a laptop as well.   Suprise on Monday – documents ruined and water all in the laptop – and NO TARP ON THE ROOF.  Those of you who know me, understand that I remained calm (not!), called my landlord calmly (not) and explained the situation calmly (not!). 

So this week, they are working on resolving the roof issue, but as you can tell – I now have a bunch of documents I have to recreate and a laptop which MIGHT be able to be salvaged (we’re still trying to dry it out and see if it will start).  So what are the lessons learned from here?

1. Never assume someone else is going to do something they have shown they are not going to do
2. Plan for the worst, a simple thing like a roof leak can cause major damage
3. Know what to do and who to call in the event of an emergency or issue.
4. Be persistent when an issue is not being resolved to your satisfaction

So an analog world issue causedhavoc in my digital world – a simple water leak causes digital damage and sets me back a day of work.   What would you have done in this situation?  Should I have done something different?   What’s your plan if something like this happened?

Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried the resolution route, that”This year I’m going to…”, inevitably 90% of these are abandoned by March – either because the original premise was too complex or in the end on March 1 it wasn’t as important as it was on Jan 1.  The resolutions I’ve been able to carry from resolution to habit to just another thing I do are the ones where I can see the potential benefit, are easy to integrate in my day to day life and take only a few minutes a day.

For those of you who know me, you know I’m not a “This year I’m going to exercise every day” or “This year I’m going to volunteer 40 hours a week at the local charity”.  While these are great goals they are just not something I would do.  But things like “Take a portion of my salary every month and put it aside to make our year end taxes easier” or “Write a blog post once a week” or even “Get back to doing 1 fun thing as a complete family once a month” – these are things I can handle.

So here’s this year’s plan for both the business and personal

1. Pay more attention to our clients.   While I am always listening to what our clients say, I think I’ve been avoiding the tough discussions with them.  This year, it’s more proactive conversations with clients.
2. Do 1 fun thing with our family every month (like we used to).  In January, it’s an Atlanta Thrashers hockey game.
3. Get to blogging at least once a week – wordpress.com motivated me with their The Daily Post challenge (you can find out more by reading my Jan 1 blog).
4. Give myself a mental break from work 1 day every weekend – since the middle of the year it’s been a 7 day a week operation around here – every one’s mind needs a break.  I was pretty sick in 2nd half of December and it forced me to take a mental break, I was able to come back recharged and ready to go. 

There’s some others more minor stuff that I’m trying out this year, but the 4 above are the big ticket items.

So what are you going to do different this year, in your personal life and at work?   Are you going to use Twitter more (or less)? Are you going to finally get that start-up company you’ve been dreaming about off the ground?  How about that vacation you’ve been dreaming of – are you going to start saving for it?  Trying to run a half-marathon this year, what’s your training plan?

The reality of it is, if you keep doing the same things over and over, you can only except the same results.   How are you going to change the result you are getting by changing the things you are doing?   Let me know, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way.

Signed,

Joe Vivona

W32.Spyrat opens a backdoor using a predetermined port and IP address, allowing an attacker to perform the following actions on the compromised computer:

• Read, write, and execute files
• Steal stored passwords
• Issue commands
• Activate and view a webcam, if present
• Log keystrokes
• Create an HTTP proxy to route traffic through the compromised computer

Do not open this email or click on the URL if received. Read on for the full article at Symantec .

Julie Settle, A&J Computers Inc.

This year, give yourself the gift of security.  Enlist a capable and responsible IT company to be at the ready when you need them. 

Better yet, give yourself the gift of preparedness and proactiveness.  Take the time to have your systems upgraded and cleaned up.  Create a plan of action for the New Year to extend the life of those precious machines.  Allow an IT professional to research the best equipment for your needs now and into the near future at the best price (because many are approved vendors and can get a better deal than you might). 

A viable IT company offers professional service and advice on:

• Preventative Maintenance
• Remote Patch Management
• Equipment Purchases
• Helpdesk and Support Services
• On Call for Break/Fix Issues

As you, business owner, prepare for the annual holiday party, grant vacations and leave of absences, think about who’s taking care of your business while you are out running your business.   Have you checked with your IT guy to see if he’ll be around on Christmas morning for you if need be?  A back up plan of action is always a good idea.

A&J Computers Inc. has provided Helpdesk and IT support services for 21 years. 

Julie Settle

A&J Computers Inc.

For now the site is free for both companies and attorneys.  It’s a great resource for startups, especially those who have not yet established a relationship with an attorney.  Questions are completely confidential.  Each question posed will receive confidential answers by various attorneys who cannot view each others answers.

If you are any type of attorney, I suggest you check out the site and see if it’s for you. I imagine a lot of start ups will. Visit http://www.LawPivot.com for details.

^ Julie Settle, A&J Computers Inc.

Co-CEO Sanjay Jha comments, “Just as Droid was competitive…with iPhone, we want to make sure that any tablet that we deliver is competetive in the marketplace. We will only deliver that when that occurs. Hopefully that’s early next year.”

Other companies competing in the tablet device wars are Research in Motion (RIM), Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Company, Lenovo Group Ltd. and LG Electronics Inc.

^ Julie Settle
A&J Computers Inc.

The top etiquette blunders are listed below for easy reference:

First things first:
Keep work email and personal email SEPARATE. There’s a variety of reasons to do this, and let’s just point out that there is a proper place for Aunt Sally’s “forward this to 8 friends now” message and also that your customer doesn’t need to know that your personal email address refers to you as captainunderpants@freeemailaddress.com . (BTW, there’s no need to test that address. I did and it goes nowhere).

Second:
Please keep tone and personality out of it – or make very sure it comes across – as intended.

Third:
How many emails do you receive a day? i can receive hundreds. When sending a professional message to someone, don’t expect them to remember the previous ‘conversation’. Confirm the meeting with date/time/reason. Another accepted method is to respond using the email with the conversation trail included. A little more work on the recipient’s part, but at least helpful.

Fourth:
Respect the privacy of others. We all send Group emails. No one needs to see everyone it went to. It’s also most likely considered an invasion of privacy. Do you want your home address plastered all over some mass distribution? Neither does anyone else. Use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) option which will shield the addresses.

Fifth:
Check, double check, and then triple check when forwarding emails to make sure that sensitive information from someone else is not included. I’m sure we are all guilty of this. It’s very embarrassing.

Sixth:
Keep the jokes at bay at work. Forwarded (again, personal) emails of jokes and photos are best sent to the personal account (read #2 again).

Seventh:
Step away from the attachments. No joke. Unless a document must be sent as an attachment and the recipient is aware that it is coming, just don’t do it. Attachments (like vermin) carry all sorts of malware, intended or unintended. A recipient’s box can quarantine the message, it can be sent to the Spam folder or it may just plain be manually deleted without being read.

Last:
Don’t send an album of photos (see #6). It’s better to upload to a photo album site and then let friends know about it.

And my personal pet peeve:
Check out the source of a ‘warning’ email before warning your friends and family. Websites like Snopes.com can truly help cut out a ton of life-saving emails with a little research effort on the sender’s part.

Thank you for your time today.

^ Julie Settle
A&J Computers Inc.

Let me first explain that I work in a vertical that is largely unseen. You can’t really see what we do, when we do it, or how it’s done. That’s how the IT world works – unseen, off-hours…usually late at night or weekends. Basically it’s during the periods when you (the client) may be the least busy – at least online. Let me also say that we run a tight ship here. Never does a systems update, performance check, antivirus checks or clean up session get missed or overlooked. We sweat the technical details. It’s just what we do. And by the next business morning, when our client is back in their office, turning on their desktops, and opening up Outlook email and other necessary programs, everything boots up right on schedule and runs smoothly. And it used to be that because of that, every once in a blue moon, we get a call from a client telling us that our services were no longer required. And when asked, “Why”?, the answer was invariably, “Because everything always runs just fine.” Huh, go figure.

Now in this scenario, the client has received excellent service and is satisfied. Everything’s great, everything’s groovy for them. So where did we fail? We didn’t let them know that the reliability is courtesy of us. We worked ourselves out of a job. Customer service and satisfaction were there…just…not attributed to our efforts.

You bet we immediately took measures to change the way we interacted with our clients. We do a great job and we let them know on a periodic basis just what we did for them to get such great efficiency out of their network, website, email, Blackberry, hosted applications, remote back up, whatever. We make every effort to be proactive in our maintenance efforts. We know when something’s about to break and usually take care of it before the client ever knows it was a problem. And then we share that with them. And they are satisfied. And then so are we.

^ Julie Settle
A&J Computers Inc.

Normally I am very diplomatic in my emails, sending information only and saving conversation for the phone calls. Don’t get me wrong…I know how to send a ‘neutral’ email message. I made a choice. And it backfired. It would be great if there was a way to ‘check’ drafted message before they went out…just in case. You never know. Really.

Then I found it. Microsoft is in beta testing of a software Add-In program called ToneCheck. I downloaded it and gave it try. I sent a scathing email to myself to see what it would do. It caught it alright; said my message was outside my tolerated tone tolerance. And while it flagged something that could have been offensive, ToneCheck is definitely still in beta…phrases I tested to myself were downright ugly. ToneCheck merely flagged them as “Sad”.

Having a college background in English grammar, I am aware of the power in words and their usage. There is a blind freedom that many people enjoy when hidden behind the monitor and not face to face with someone. Words and comments get typed, sent and posted without so much as re-read or thought into how it will be perceived. Society has become numb to words and their implications. Right now are you thinking that your writing skills are too good for automated help? Social psychologists tend to disagree. Nicholas Epley and Justin Kruger conducted a study entitled “Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?” confirming that the senders of email are consistently overconfident in their expectation that the sarcastic tone inflection will be perceived…overconfident to the tune of 15% more than what was actually perceived correctly! Can your business afford to unnecessarily lose 15% of the in process sales prospects? Not in today’s economy. There’s just no replacing the non-verbal cues we send when physically present. Without that added benefit, the reader is left to rely on his/her own set of experiences and insecurities. Scary to say the least.

For now, I believe nothing replaces the old method of saving a draft and reading it later in the day before sending it. Getting a fresh read of the content (aka removed from the emotion of the moment) is the next best thing to having it read by another set of eyes for feedback.

After all, do we really want to trust the voice(s) in the other person’s head?

^ Julie Settle
A&J Computers Inc.

Online:

1. Keep your personal information private on social networks.
2. Install a URL scanning tool to alert you of potentially harmful web links.
3. Review your bank account and credit card statements regularly for questionable charges.
4. Review your credit report and credit score regularly.
5. Choose difficult encrypted passwords, consider using KeePass to safely store all your passwords.

On Your Computer:

1. Keep your operating system and software programs up to date.
2. Install these type software programs: anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall .
3. Back up your computer data regularly.

Below are our recommend downloads to keep your computer safe:

• Anti-Virus:  AVG Antivirus, Symantec Anti-Virus, Trend Micro AntiVirus
• Firewall:  MS Windows firewall
• Anti-Spyware:  Webroot’s Spy Sweeper
• URL Link Scanner: AVG LinkScanner
• Credit Report: Federal Trade Commission
• Credit Score: Credit Karma
• Password: KeePass

Below are additional sites listed by the NCSAM:

• Anti-Virus:  ESET NOD32 Antivirus, F-Secure Internet Security, Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Norton AntiVirus, Webroot Internet Security
• Firewall:  ZoneAlarm, Norton Internet Security
• Anti-Spyware:  PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus 2011, STOPzilla (removal)
• Credit Report:  Equifax, TrustedID
• Credit Score: myFICO

A&J Computers offers solutions for all your IT security needs. Visit us at ajcomputers.com for more details or contact with questions.

^ Julie Settle
A&J Computers Inc.

First the big news – RIM is releasing a new tablet device called the PlayBook – while there are a ton of sites and blogs that will give you all the tech specs and other things – here’s my take:  the PlayBook is a logical extension to your blackberry smartphone. Providing an enhanced platform including adobe flash and air which gives application developers more features – I see the PlayBook opening up a number of web based and widget based application areas for companies like ours and enabling a much easier development experience. From reading email on a larger screen to multitasking blackberry and walking around a conference with all the key information at your fingertips – this is a positive development for corporate users.  From an it perspective – one the device is unpaired from your smartphone (bluetooth) all your email and other sensitive information is gone – making the security person in me feel better at night.  So this seems like a win/win device for us here and really I can’t wait for 2011 to come so I can get one (availability in North America slated for q1).

WebWorks is the rebranded and improved widget technology. RIM made a bold move here by open sourcing the runtime and taking a major step forward to attract developers to the device. By allowing a developer to harness the power of the web, access on-device items like email, GPS, BBM and others – the platform is staring to compete on an even level with other device OSes and make development of the so-called ‘super apps’ a ton easier with the removal of the need to code in java.  We will be building some super-apps in the very near future and enable our customers to do stuff on their blackberry smartphones we’ve only just discussed in the past. An additional benefit to open sourcing the runtime – the arrival of extension development. We all know the base of any runtime environment is great (a la .net, java, Silverlight, etc.) – but it’s the extension and control developers which truly empower app developers to take good apps to great apps.   If you’re a developer, this is the platform to build BlackBerry apps on.

The final announcement was around the change in policy by RIM for developers who want to submit the application to AppWorld.  Normally a token fee was charged for administrative purposes and to stop the ‘truly useless’ applications from going up on AppWorld.   Well no more – at DevCon 2010 RIM announced they are going to waive this fee for developers.  While a seemingly small item, this allows the hobbyist developer a no-cost option to publish their application to the masses and opens up development to a whole new genre.

Overall DevCon 2010 was a great experience as always – one thing I found out as I was writing this is the BlackBerry Developer Zone will make available the recordings from DevCon 2010 to all its members for free.  That content is being produced and should be up soon.  If you’re not a member and you didn’t get a chance to become a member, join now for free and see what you’ve been missing (http://blackberry.com/developer).

For any of you who missed the keynotes, announcements, etc. – you can check it out at http://www.blackberrydevcon.com (shameless plug for our web site development team).   WES 2011 is in 7 short months (May 3-5, 2011) in Orlando, Florida – maybe we’ll see you there.

Good-Bye San Francisco, thanks for the hospitality for a 2^nd year and we’ll see you again very soon.

Here are the 2 main questions we are hearing regarding XP’s discontinuation:

1. My whole business relies on Windows XP. What if I need technical support?
        A&J Computers Inc. is here to support your technical needs, and Microsoft will continue to directly offer Extended Support until April 2014.
2.  Can my Windows XP programs run on Windows 7?
        In most cases the answer is Yes. Microsoft has a Windows 7 Compatibility page to help you find out if your programs or hardware will work with Windows 7.

View the Microsoft announcement for full details about Windows XP End of Life at:  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-xp/end-of-sale.aspx.

Please contact us as soon as possible to place any computer orders that require Windows XP preinstalled to ensure they ship by the 10/22 deadline.

Julie Settle
A&J Computers Inc.