Srcasm

So, I know that all of your Mac users (blech!) might not be excited but I am. I finally went out and bought a web cam for my laptop. It’s a tiny Creative Live! Ultra for Notebooks camera and I have to say, so far I’m impressed. It comes with a few great features that I never thought I’d use (and I might still never touch).

First, the quality is fine for me. I wasn’t looking for an HD quality web cam (if they even make those yet) but I was looking for something that I could easily record content on Viddler, YouTube, etc and this one surely does that. It comes with a feature called “multi-person Smart Face-Tracking”. This is quite a feature. I was skeptical of how it would work at first but after trying it out a bit I see it could come in very handy. It tracks multiple people as they move about the room making sure to keep the people with faces in the picture (the ones without usually creep me out anyway). Continue reading »

I recently sat in a meeting to discuss our company’s laptop security practices. Now, we aren’t a publicly traded company but we should be protecting out data to the best of our abilities without impacting the user too much. There we many topics discussed in this meeting — everything from encryption of the HDs to using encrypted thumb drives to CMOS passwords/HD passwords via the CMOS. It was a fun time and explaining why certain processes would be helpful and others wouldn’t was quite a challenge.

I think we finally came to the realization that encrypting all of our hard drives was not going to be a viable option. The major issue we face is we have too many older laptops that do not offer hardware encryption on the drives. Software encryption is an option but in my experience it’s a slow and painful process that usually requires some work on the user’s end to make it function properly. Continue reading »