mike hawkins - thinking out loud

Most of us have an infrequent need to edit .htaccess, and as a consequence it is easy to forget the syntax and capabilities of this very powerful and essential file.

I subscribe to a newsletter from SecurityProNews and occasionally it throws in a little gem.  Today was one of those days.

It contained a link to a piece of software that had I had not spotted before which goes by the name of Predator.

Free, for personal use, predator is a USB key solution that locks your PC when the drive is removed.  After installation, which is quick and simple, you are prompted for a password - from this a digital key is generated and saved to the USB drive.

When Predator is running (you can choose to run at start-up, or not) the stick is necessary for the computer to be usable. If removed mid-session the screen is blanked (it now supports multiple monitors), Ctrl-Alt-Del and other keyboard and mouse activity is disabled.

Put the drive back, and the PC is ready to go immediately.  No tiresome password needed.  So why did we enter a password at install?  In the case of the key going missing - through theft or carelessness - the password enables you to regain access to the machine.  Cleverly, whilst the key is in place, the software frequently re-writes new keys to the USB drive and locally - meaning that if the stick is stolen - the key will not be valid by the time it is re-inserted by the thief.

Predator works as stated - and is, as mentioned free for personal use.

Written by Montpellier Informatique it is downloadable here - and is worth a try if you have a need for a solution of this kind.  Vista users note that it needs to be installed using Administrator privileges.

So…I was looking through my Google webmaster stats, and noticed that a few small Flash animations on a client’s site had been crawled and analysed - with key text words picked up.  Interesting – so I had a look around, and yes, for those who use Flash more heavily than, hitherto, was advisable it is very good news, in SEO terms.

Search Engine Oracle article

Tie this in with Adobe working closely with Google on their new OS and things begin to add up.

Happy Birthday to Modern Computing!

BBC on the 60th Anniversary of what we recognise as a computer

 Outlook POP3 potential problem:

support.microsoft.com/

Where two POP accounts, utilising same server try and cohabit.