£60k fine by Data Protection Agency

This week, a UK company, A4e, was fined £60,000 for falling foul of the Data Protection Action. An employee had their laptop stolen from their home and it contained a database of personal information. The company would have avoided a conviction if the data had been encrypted.

Contact us if you want some advice on this.

Alan Bullen

Managing Director

Lynx Networks

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Your cabling system could handle so much more

Did you know that your Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6a or Cat7 cabling system can connect also connect VGA, audio and high definition TV at distances up to 90 metres? You just need an "extender" at each end. Contact Lynx Networks if you want more information.

The cost of running a server

It’s useful to know that a server using 400 watts of power would cost about £400 a year in electricity to run. You can use this when justifying the investment in virtual servers. Rather than having, say, six computers each acting as a server, you could have one or two computers running VM Ware, or equivalent, and your eight servers could be virtual. This could save £2,400 a year in electricity and help save the polar bears environment from global warming.

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Milton Keynes Environmental Symposium

Lynx Networks has a small stand at tomorrow’s Environmental Symposium at the Milton Keynes Hilton Conference Centre. We'll be promoting all of our services including our IT Support in Milton Keynes.  I’ll be there and it would be great to see you if you can make it. Go to http://www.mk-chamber.co.uk/ for more info.

How did we reduce our email traffic by 98%?

Last week we implemented Websense hosted anti-virus and filtering for our incoming email. By removing virtually all spam, this has reduced our inbound email traffic by an incredible 98%. This has given us more bandwidth for other applications and cut out the time previously wasted by all staff wading through junk emails.

We previously had a server dedicated to the task but it wasn't completely effective and was costing almost as much in just electricity as the new service is costing us in total.

It you would like to set up this service for you're own organisation, contact Lynx Networks.

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How Burma's internet was crippled

A cyber attack believed to have stated on 25^th Oct has crippled Burma’s internet. It’s a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from enslaved PCs all over the world. These are usually unprotected home PCs that would have been infected at any time but then left by the attackers in readiness to be triggered into action. The criminal attackers provide cyber attack services to clients at a cost.

It is speculated that the attack has been orchestrated by the Burmese government to prevent communications with the outside world during a rigged election.

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Blogging

Setting up and using a blog is dead easy. For example, this blog entry was created by sending an email to my blog (actually, this posting is just an excuse to test it). It’s just the content that can be challenging.

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Orange Home Broadband problem solved

I spent over an hour trying to install my new Orange home broadband router last night. No matter what I tried, it kept failing when it tried to verify my login name and password. Turns out that Orange put my password in all UPPERCASE. Problem now solved.

Temporary wireless broadband service

To give you a broadband connection if your landline broadband goes down, you can get an emergency wireless connection until it's fixed. I know of at least one company that can provide this. It's not cheap but it could be less than the cost of having no email or web browsing for an indeterminable period.

What if your broadband goes down?

Most small and medium sized business rely heavily on their broadband connection. If it goes down it could be down for a week because the suppliers won't guarantee a fix time.. Managers need to have aplan in place to cope without their broadband. I suggest some possible solutions tomorrow.

ADSL broadband risk to business

Do business managers that use ADSL broadband for their internet connectivity understand the potential business downtime and the risks involved? In our experience small businesses often use ADSL broadband services as their only internet connection. However as this does not come with a service level agreement (SLA) from BT, and SMTP email can be difficult to re-route quickly, do the business owners really understand the risk to the business should the broadband be down for an extended period of time?

Did Google grab your wireless password?

Today Google have confirmed that they collected private information, including passwords, from WIFI networks across the UK. I guess this includes Milton Keynes and Bletchley, home of the code breakers. This has highlighted the issue of security on WIFI networks that don't have encryption. Many others only have minimal encryption that can be easily cracked.

If you're not sure how secure your WIFI network is, ask a wireless expert to test it and give you some advice.

Alan Bullen
Lynx Networks plc

The state of IT Support in Milton Keynes

There are several small companies providing IT Support in Milton Keynes and the user should take care to ensure the provider has the engineering expertise in house to cover all of their requirements. Also, make sure that the hours of support cover the times your office operates. In particular, the start time of support in the morning when problems can occur at boot up.

Providers have different methods of charging for phone support, on-line support and on-site support. Some or all of these can be covered by a fixed annual fee.

For further advice, please contact me, Alan Bullen, at Lynx Networks on 01908 633810