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Welcome to the April 2009 issue of the CyberArtisans newsletter! Yes, we're late again , but this time for a good reason — we're busy. Each month we try to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
Yeah, there are a couple of catches, but not big ones. On May 5th, Microsoft will release the Windows 7 Release Candidate to the general public. While not a final version, this one is supposed to be very close, and previous versions have already gotten rave reviews from people who have used it for months. Some have reported that the beta versions of Windows 7 have been less buggy than the SP1 version of Vista. The Release Candidate expires on June 1, 2010, so it's good for over a year. After that, you will probably have to buy a retail version of Windows 7 to keep using it. The announcement is here. In addition to Windows 7 system requirements and features, it includes a link to the Windows 7 site. The download link isn't there yet, but there is a note on the site saying it will be there tomorrow (May 5th). Should you download and install Windows 7? That depends. Since Windows 7 is really a clean-up of Vista, it will be much easier to upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista than from XP. Any device that has a driver for Vista will work with Windows 7. It's possible that some older devices (printers, scanners, and the like) that work with XP will not work with Windows 7. Note that Microsoft provides a clean upgrade path from Vista to Windows 7, while an upgrade from XP to Windows 7 probably requires wiping the disk and doing a clean install. So if you are running Vista and are unhappy with it, downloading Windows 7 might make sense but if you are running XP and are happy with it, you might want to leave well enough alone. Especially it you have an older system, upgrading from XP is probably a techie exercise best left to those of us who enjoy being frustrated by machines. 
The media talk about the Conficker worm has died down, but there may still be a lot of infected systems out there. Now there's an easy way tell if your system is infected. Fortunately, the worm doesn't do disastrous things to your system. Unfortunately, it can do disastrous things to the Internet, so you really want to remove it if your system is infected. Let's start with the test. Open this page (yes, it's a clean page — it was created by a guy who is a well-known Internet security expert). There are 6 icons in a box at the top, along with a legend at the bottom, but the short answer is, if you see all six icons you probably don't have the Conficker worm. "Probably" because there is one condition that would allow you to see all six icons and still have the worm — if you use a proxy server. To tell if you do,
If you don't see the top three but do see the bottom three, then you probably have an infected system. If one or more of the top three are missing, it's possible you have the worm, but have a little patience — it took almost 30 seconds for the middle icon to show up on our system, which is probably a reflection of how busy the site is. Next question: how to get rid of the worm if you have it. Fortunately it's not a difficult worm to remove. Go to this site to see a list of removal tools that have been tested by the Conficker Working Group, a collaboration of some of the best-known names in Internet security.
Cloud Computing is getting a lot of press these days, at least in the technical press. Cloud computing is the idea of having all your data and your programs on a server somewhere. You rent access to the server and the programs rather than installing them on your own system. The basic idea has merit — you don't have to go through the exercise of installing software, you don't have to maintain it or worry about upgrading it, and you can log in from anyplace and have all your programs and data available immediately. Computer maintenance and service, software updating, data backups, virus protection, are all someone else's problem. You just use it, from anyplace in the world where there is an Internet connection. The problem is security. You have to trust the cloud computing supplier with your programs and your data. Unless you back up your own data (which defeats at least part of the purpose of cloud computing), your entire business depends on the cloud computing folks' ability to maintain that data securely despite all the usual problems of system reliability, as well as the problems of attacks from the outside. You will be hearing a lot about Cloud Computing in the next few years. Be skeptical. It will take quite a while for all the security details to be worked out to the point where it is reliable and secure. Some experts believe the challenge is so great that Cloud Computing will be another neat idea that will come and go without being used widely. We'll see.
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