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When I was growing up, I loved watching those “House of the Future” shows where everything was controlled with the push of a button. I’ve recently been working with a company in CT, Cyclone Home Systems, that provides a number of things to homeowners very similar to the things we saw when we were growing up. Of course, they have now-conventional offerings like home intercoms, but the future of companies like this one lies in the futuristic structured wiring, security and automated window treatments offered.

The average consumer can always implement the basics of home security and automation through products like Internet cameras for home security, MPEG capture cards and plug in modules but this new generation of professional automation solutions are another story altogether. The structured wiring system’s combination of media, security and thermostat controls can

…distribute music and television to every room in your house, to control lighting everywhere in your home, to sound a security alarm when an intruder lurks outside, or to remotely monitor areas of your property where security cameras are set up.

Now that’s what those future-thinking shows promised when I was a kid! I haven’t had the pleasure of using any of Cyclone’s products/services, but their description of this “smart” house system is definitely interesting. Two questions: one serious, one not. Serious: whatever happened to those Internet-equipped refrigerators that were supposed to order groceries for us? Not so serious: where’s my jet car?

Technorati Tags: home automation

Browsing some of my favorite tech blogs, I came across an article from 2005 on The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security by Marcus Ranum. This is the sort of IT discussion I like to see - advanced topics tackled in a way the modestly-informed reader can understand. In short, the article outlines the absurdness of:

1. The Default Permit - “…the computer security equivalent of empty calories…”
2. Enumerating Badness - “…around 1992 the amount of Badness in the Internet began to vastly outweigh the amount of Goodness…”
3. Penetrate and Patch - “…the problem with ‘Penetrate and Patch’ is not that it makes your code/implementation/system better by design, rather it merely makes it toughened by trial and error…”
4. Hacking is Cool - “….I find it interesting to compare societal reactions to hackers as ‘whiz kids’ versus spammers as ’sleazy con artists’..”
5. Educating Users - “…like ‘Penetrate and Patch’ if it was going to work, it would have worked by now. …”
6. Action is Better Than Inaction - derides “…product-purchasing decisions by reading Gartner research reports and product glossies from vendors…”

Between the lines, Ranum is saying that computer system security should be addressed through predictive systems rather than permissive & reactive technology or training. What can average at-home users take from this? Realize your computers have vulnerabilities with people dedicated to exploit them. For tech professionals, it seems to be a much more urgent message: adapt the way you think about your world or face security as an endless, sisyphean task.

Technorati Tags: computer security, Marcus Ranum

As online shopping becomes more a part of everyday life, buying a video online has also become second nature to most. Amazon and other providers like them use the medium to

show, directly on your site, movie and TV trailers and previews for a huge range of recent and classic titles

Worth checking out? Sure. It’s another way large bandwidth connections for the masses has improved stores’ ability to market their wares. Will it attract a disproportionately higher number of viewers and buyers? We’ll see!

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Unbox

So what do you think? Instead of presenting just another boring computer mall, I decided to bring readers the straight scoop on the featured computer system deals I’ve found online. Who am I, your humble author? I’ve worked in IT since the early 90s and, specifically, in Web Development and SEO since the late 90s. With experience in everything from building systems to troubleshooting and optimizing, I hope to bring visitors a perspective they can find useful.

Technorati Tags: featured systems