Windows Vista RTM’ed !

Having said the release date for Windows Vista is set on November 30, 2006 for Business, Windows Vista has been *RTM*ed (released to manufacture).

 This means the entire coding and testing is complete and it’s been sent for ‘packaging’. Sven Hallauer has a lot a tell about this.

 From this month’s end, software developers and device vendors can make sure they have their software and hardware running perfect in the Vista environment for the public release of Vista on January 30, 2007. As everyone is aware, Vista is the only software that has been tested in such a large scale and having builds made available to tester every month, all done in a structured manner.

By Jan 30, we will witness a very big leap from Windows XP! (either way in hardware reqs and software experience) Though this won’t make much difference for the testers who have been using Vista for a while, it’s always exciting to see the final version shipped!

Online Security: Are you really worried about it?

Ok! Recently I got a mail from a friend that warned about providing signin information in some other irrelevant web site. So, I thought why not discuss about that.

Here, I restrict the much broader ‘online security’ to phishing and giving away your login information for one site to some another site that you actually don’t know whether to trust! For example, now mostly circulating invites from a social netwok(this) which requests your user information for other websites so that it can go about and invite your friends to join this network as well.

It’s true that all of your friends will receive a mail from the website on behalf of you to join.  But what you might not be aware is: by providing your login information, you are allowing them to open up your account and that grants access to all resources that you had used and have access to. This may not seem harmful at first instinct, but at some stage it is proven dangerous.

This is what my reply for mail from another friend who asked if she should quit the website.

It’s good if u have not invited anyone! (In this case no need to worry if though if you have joined) I’m really not asking anyone to quit Gazzag! But act wisely. It’s always NOT recommended to use the login/user id and password other than the site that approves the use of that. For ex:

Use your hotmail/ passport/ Windows Live ID account only in places where you see icon like this:  (Live ID Sign In)

Or Use Google Account only in places where you see icon like this:

Even you should know, Yahoo ids had gone for a toss in recent days! And that’s why that have tried coming up with image verification before login! (I don’t know why, but now they have removed this feature I guess. Probably because it didn’t catch up as expected.)Better than this, always double confirm that you are providing your login information only on secure site (SSL based). You can confirm this by seeing the URL on the address bar.

for Live Accounts OR

for Google Accounts

Likewise, It is recommended NOT TO USE any proxy sites for accessing blocked sites. If you are not aware, every bit is logged in the proxy server (though intentionally or non-intentionally).

Now, With ALL said, it’s up to you what you do from now on! Anyway, If you really have decided to leave the site:

<the instructions> Go ahead. But no need to quit since it’s asking for login details of another site. If you are wanna put your hands on it, try to go thro the features of the site w/o providing irrelevant information pertaining to it! If you are already aware of this and you are always cautious about these, that’s fine and good! But if you are unaware of such important precaution to be taken….. better take care of it at least from now!

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That’s what I got to share now!