Are you like me where you can barely get a signal from your cell phone in your home?  Well, cell phone providers have figured out a way to eliminate poor signals in your home where you need a strong signal the most.  Now introducing what is called “The Femtocell”.

You are probably saying “A femtowhat"?  Trust me, I said the same thing.  A femtocell is basically a mini cell phone tower that is designed for use in a home or a small business.  It uses your existing broadband internet connection to provide the 5 bars of cell phone coverage we are all looking for.  With femtocells, the days of standing outside or near your window to get a signal will be over. 
  
 Femtocells look similar to wireless routers and are used to route cell phone calls through broadband internet connections and then back to cellular networks.  A phone call is made from someone’s cell phone, and as it is being made it is redirected to the femtocell device, then sent through your internet connection and from there is redirected back to the cell network. Even writing that made my head hurt.

Femtocells allow cell phone users to get better signal in indoor areas where before they had little or no service because of a dead zone.  Another added benefit of using a femtocell within your home involves better data performance which results in a better experience with music, photos, and live video on your cell phone.

At this time most femtocells can support up to 5 cell phones at one specific time and they work with all major cell phone signal types. This means that a femtocell can be used with most major U.S. carriers including AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon.
 
Most wireless customers should be able to purchase femtocells direct from their cell phone company.  This would generally include availability from electronics retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart.
AT&T is offering their version for a one-time fee of $150, although I have heard of some people receiving one for free if they complain enough.  Verizon’s offering when it goes on sale should be available for around $250 dollars.  Sprint’s variation of the femtocell sells for around $50 with a $15 a month single line plan or a $30 a month family plan.

In summary, many of you are probably asking yourselves, do I need this contraption?  The answer to that question is, maybe.  If you live in an area that does not have great coverage then I would suggest looking in to one.  I myself might be forced to get one because no matter the cell phone provider, I just do not get any kind of signal at my home.  Shelling out $150 (yes I am on the dreaded AT&T network) for a usable phone at home is worth it in my opinion.  If you have a good signal at home then you probably do not need to worry about it.

If you have any questions at all or would like help determining if you actually could use a femtocell then do not hesitate to contact Kotori Technologies.

Batten down the hatches and nail down the door it’s going to be a rough one!  Ok so I am being a bit dramatic but Hurricanes can cause some serious damage to your home and business.  I was watching TV this weekend and saw on CNN that we have our first named storm.  Alex is off the cost of Central America.  Very close to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Hurricanes go boy, girl, boy, girl, etc.. Then ABCD… right down the list. The next one on the list is Bonnie.  I wonder how far down the list we go this year?  Hopefully not too far.  I hope none of them make landfall anywhere.  But, ask yourself this, do you want to be the business owner that let Bonnie, Colin or Danielle ruin your business.  I mean they are not even employees at your company.

What kind of damage can a hurricane do to your business well let’s talk about the easy ones; physical damage, flooding or, even worse, death.  Those are the ones that the insurance people really get their marketing dollars out for right? They scare you into buying.  Well many times we don’t think of the other issues like disasters that strike that aren’t even in your area.  Ask yourself this… How would a hurricane or other disaster affect my vendors or customers?  Let’s take for example a clothing company in Summerville, SC that gets all of their fabric from a nice textile company in India.  Well most of the time all of that gets shipped from overseas.  The ports are very important to this company as this is how the fabric company gets their raw goods.  What would happen if something happened to the ports or even worse to the company in India.  Where would they get their raw materials from?  I could go on and on about this.  There are thousands of possible issues that go on.  So how does a small business prepare themselves for a disaster of any kind?  Well it all starts with planning.  Here are a few quick tips on how to help you be more prepared.

1)      Have a backup location to do business.  If you know where you will setup shop when the disaster hits then it is one less thing to deal with.

2)      Have the right insurance that will allow you to get set back up and going quickly.

3)      Make sure your vendors have their own disaster recovery plan.  You don’t want them having a disaster be your disaster!  Have backup vendors.  If you can’t then know the risk and try and protect yourself.

4)      Backup your Data daily and test the backups monthly.

5)      Write it all down.  It sound simple enough but a one page document is much more effective place to start when you are in panic/task mode.

Remember the best way to survive a disaster is to plan, plan and plan.  Then test, test and plan again when the tests fail.  I truly hope that disaster never strikes you. But when it does knowing who to call and what to do will be your best allies in rising from the storm and being number one!

If you have not heard, Google “Accidently” gathers WiFi data on your home and business when it was running the Google Maps vehicles.  GMailers beware!!!  Don’t get me wrong I think that Google is GREAT.  I just find it hard to believe it was a mistake.  You just don’t start recording WiFi data.  Read more here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/196630/google_has_been_snooping_on_your_wireless_network.html

Hackers found a way in to AT&T’s iPad 3G registry and, using a brute-force attack based on unique ICC-ID numbers, managed to pull down corresponding email addresses for those users — who include members of the US military, executive branch, and media companies.

AT&T has since closed the vulnerability and issued the following statement:

“AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device.

This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses.

The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T.

We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained.

We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted.”

So once again it’s the convenience of the cloud vs. the security of customer information. Increasingly we’re trusting online accounts and services with our personal and financial information, and high-profile incidents like this, if nothing else, force everyone to re-examine what we trust and with whom.

How serious is this loss of data to you? Does it make you hesitant to signup online or on-device?

see original post here: http://www.tipb.com/2010/06/10/att-hacked-ipad-3g-owners-email-addresses-harvested/

As you may or may not know, Kotori Technologies, LLC uses Sunbelt Vipre for most of our clients' Anti-Virus needs. Here is an interesting article from Sunbelt in reference to the Antivirus Product Wars:

All antivirus companies are being hit with the next wave of malware: Rogue antivirus tools like Antivirus 2010. This code throws messages on the user's screen that they are infected, and "download here to get rid of the malware". Sure enough, that gets the trojan installed.
Our CEO Alex wrote about this: "For what it's worth, as someone who is on the inside of an AV company and is intimately familiar with these threats, the reality is that no AV vendor, ESET, McAfee, Sunbelt, Sophos, Symantec, etc. can give you 100% coverage against it.
These new fake antivirus variants are some of the most vicious, polymorphic trojans this industry has seen. They use extremely complex obfuscation techniques which make detection quite challenging by even the best antivirus engine. Many of these rogues are also service-side polymorphic. That means every time an exe is downloaded, it's recompiled on the server-side into a different piece of code.
And, there are about 75,000 new tier-1 pieces of malware coming out every day. So your AV vendor, realistically, is only going to be one layer of protection, no matter what the sales guy might say. (That being said, AV is a must. Just look at viruses like Conficker, Sality, Virut, etc. These are viruses that the industry does a pretty good job at, and if they get into your network and you don't have endpoint protection, it's quite messy.)

Key things to do are:
     a.  No Admin Privs. Try to run as many users on Limited User accounts as you can (always difficult, I know). It won't stop all infections, but it does make a difference -- probably 80% reduced infection vector. 
     b.  Patch aggressively. The key exploit vectors right now are PDF and Flash, then Windows/IE. When I browse the web, I obsessively check Adobe and Flash to make sure I'm fully patched, and I constantly check Windows update. If you're tight on funds and can't afford a professional patch management solution like Shavlik or Lumension, Secunia has an excellent free / inexpensive solution. Or do it yourself, which depending on your network size, can be challenging. However, it really is an absolute must.
     c.  Educate your users. The vast majority of infections these days are caused by social engineering. A user will get a funny video link on Facebook or some other social networking site, click on it, and it will say that they need to "install a special codec", or "update Flash". Or they will be doing a Google search and a malware site will have attached itself to an innocent keyword. The user will click and start getting crazy warnings that their machine is infected. This is the malware trying to get the user to install.
     d.  Do malicious web filtering. There are tens of thousands of pieces of malware daily, but only a few thousand new malware sites a day. Many endpoint protection tools, including ours, offer malicious web filtering. Or use a web gateway proxy. If you're tight on funds, setup a simple Linux gateway and download URL block lists places like malwaredomainlist.com. It's not perfect but it's not bad either.
     e.  Submit malware files to AV vendors. Most, if not all, AV vendors take customer submissions very seriously, and the internal escalations are always senior to anything else.

See original articel by Sunbelt at: http://www.wservernews.com/archives/wservernews-20100322.html