HitChrome

Imagine a scenario when you’re sitting in your office in LA, and you have your manufacturing unit in Philadelphia and marketing teams and business partners in every continent and clients all over the world. A change in product design or order has occurred, and you wish to send this information to your teams, and departmental heads, but NOT to all. A remote server and FTP? Email? Think again.

Enter Egnyte cloud computing. This is an online, on-demand file sharing service that puts you (the ‘power user’) in charge of who gets what. The interface is quite straight forward. When you sign up, you get an on-demand file server for your account accessible through a unique web address, which you may even customize this secure URL with your company logo.

Egnyte then lets you create a full hierarchy for all your documents on the server. All the users created by you can log into this account (whether in the office or on the move and even from a mobile device), and you decide who gets access to what folders and files by assigning permissions. You can also lock files to prevent them from being modified or deleted.

Power users can also access the folder directly from a desktop application provided by Egnyte — which means you open your Explorer and rename, move or delete your files and folders which will be automatically mapped to your Egnyte server, which again means the changes will be there all to see who log in from their Web browser. And no more renaming of files for each version with every change to keep track — Egnyte creates versions as files change.

Also called Egnyte Local Cloud (ELC) is an easily installable on your computer hard drive or shelf storage (external) devices. Yet another great feature of this service is the off-line access to your files. When you’re not online, you can still work on your files, and once you get your connection, ELC synchronizes your new, modified files to your on-demand file server. Plus, there’s a useful back-up configuration that lets you take back-ups of your entire computer or selected folders at pre-determined times or intervals.

And, by the way, in case you were wondering, ‘cloud computing’ comes from the familiar image that we’ve been seeing all along — that of a cloud used to represent the Internet. Perhaps also goes to suggest that we don’t care what goes on out there so long as we get the service we need — on demand. Which Egnyte does extremely efficiently.

Google’s Chrome scored lowest in a test of password management security, but other browsers didn’t fair much better. The security expert found security flaws in the Firefox 2 password management two years ago. He tested Google Chrome during its beta period and Chapin’s company, Chapin Information Services (CIS) had reported three bugs in Chrome that were not fixed by release time. Chapin said that, along with seventeen other issues in Chrome’s password manager, they created “a toxic soup of potential vulnerabilities that can coalesce into broad insecurity”.

Safari 3.2 for Windows was also added to the CIS testing, and “essentially tied for the worst password manager” with Chrome. CIS’s tests are made up of 21 specific checks to ensure the browsers are not easily fooled into giving up the password information that they have remembered for the browser user.

Phishers could exploit these flaws to trick a browser into disclosing a username and password for a third parties site.

Interestingly, Google Chrome was the only major browser that passed one test; not filling in a form when auto-complete is set to off, but this only brought its score up to 2, the same score as Safari. No browser scores well on Chapin’s tests.

The “winner” was Opera 9.62, which only passed 7 of the 21 tests. CIS have a test suite which allows users to evaluate their own browser against the CIS tests.

For all my weekly musings on the Internet and its many offerings, I’m tame when it comes to actually surfing the Web. My cyber-forays are pretty much limited to news sites, my bank and various other housekeeping-related functions.

So, for me, sneaking around the Web anonymously has never really been much of an issue. Maybe I’m being naïve about the threat of identity theft or maybe I’m just lazy. (My bet is on lazy.)

For some people, however, protecting their identity is of utmost concern. That’s why several of the major browsers - Apple’s Safari, Google and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer - offer Web browsing tools that let you be the proverbial fly on the wall.

It’s called incognito browsing.

Google’s version is called Chrome. At Apple, it’s Private Browsing. Microsoft’s entry to this market is called In Private.

Though they go by different names, these browsers more or less offer the same thing: They erase your footprints. Read the rest of this entry »