I know many of my friends are in Vegas this week for CES and thought I would point out one of the biggest threats to your computer and network, thumb drives. You see them at most trade shows or even just laying around in public like the one I found at the gym yesterday.
Many of the largest network compromises including governments, top secure military facilities, and even nuclear reactors have occurred because the bad guys have figured out people will grab these thumb drives (“sweet, free hardware”) and stick them into their machines without even a thought about it. The problem is some of the amazing free found USB thumb drives contain trojan software code that gets installed on your machine once inserted. After inserting a malicious USB thumb drive your machine and the security rights it has are provided to the malicious trojan thus the criminals or data stealing or damaging code can spread to your corporate and other networks.
You can even have a network breach/compromise without a target computer even connected to the web or network in a secure DMZ area by one person inserting that malicious thumb drive into a machine in that secure environment. I have seen at military bases where the USB ports on computers were actually epoxy glue filled so that nobody could insert any USB device.
Your USB port and Wi-Fi are two most insecure highways onto your computer besides executing unknown free software from the web.
Save yourself the potential problems and spend $15 for a thumb drive at the store, and always format before use. So just think when you see a free USB thumb drive sitting on a chair or on a table in public, it could be a big trap.
Be secure out there,
Shaan
Update: @Kitestyle_twit on Twitter pointed out one more good tip for mitigating the USB threat and that is disabling the autoplay setting on your computer. But the malicious USB could be placed in almost any computer, and not all will have autoplay disabled. Microsoft should disable it by default in a service pack.
USB Flash Drive Security from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive_security
Why then would I entertain the thought of using any ‘cloud’ based software?
Apples and Oranges. But cloud based software and servers are FAR more secure than your current average computers in your office or home. Employees can take them home, leave them in cars, leave them on desks while away from the office, leave them at their home while on vacation, don’t run or update anti virus or a firewall, and connect all the time to public wifi or unsecured wifi. People in the big Amazon and a couple more top tier data centers are far more secure with their DMZ and process than most goverments, and then there is the 256+ bit encrytion.
Is it because of restrictive costs that Autodesk has chosen to not bring realtime rendering of the kind seen in Showcase to the cloud ?
Thanks
When you say real time I take that to mean a rendered graphical viewport with textures and lighting. Real time viewport rendering so you can rotate an objects with textures and lighting needs a beefy GPU, and a local GPU is currently better for that specific task as opposed to rendering a scene.
We do have some technologies pushing the envelope on this, and no doubt faster Internet to transfer graphics faster from faster hosted CPU/GPU farms will make it even more possible and transparent. We could always host the GPU operations local but the data and much of the non graphical computations in the cloud for the fastest and highest quality solution possible.
Thank you very much.
Another serious USB thumb drive infection.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/16/cybersecurity-powerplants-idUSL1E9CGFPY20130116