InfoBulletin

April 2009

Issue 109
Upgrade, sit
back and relax,
All of a Twitter,
Fickle Trojans,
IT trends for
2009, Microsoft
RoundTable

coopsys.net

Overview of
InfoBulletin

CONTENTS Viewing IB

(online
versions only)
*** NewsBytes *** View IB Digital
Book editions
Subscriptions
1. Upgrade, sit back and relax Implementation
2. All of a Twitter Privacy policy
Contact
3. Fickle Trojans Details
4. IT trends for 2009 Archives &
index of issues
5. Microsoft RoundTable
6. Q&A: How do I destroy old data tapes? coopsys.net
Services
Clicks of the Trade - save PC power with Approach
single key InfoBulletin
About us

Popular editions
May 2008 Outlook Time Recording: Journal, Video to ruin your ISP? Zoho: software at your service, OCR tips, BGInfo,
How to audit my PC?
August 2008 Risky business, Salesforce review, SteadyState manages multi-user PCs, Do you really need a web site?
June 2008 Time Recording: Outlook Times plug-in, Windows Server 2008 storage, data protection, Convert PDF
documents into Word format
*** NewsBytes ***
80% have no disaster
recovery plan
At a recent presentation on
Practical IT Risk
Management for the NCVO
by Co-Operative Systems, it
was revealed that under
20% of conference
attendees had implemented
disaster recovery plan and none had ever
randomly tested it. Check out our Documents &
policy page and download Risk Assessment
in a Nutshell - a mercifully short template to
base your Disaster Recover planning around.
More background in Risky Business.
Bendy touchscreen makes
flexy e-paper
A team from Arizona State University and E-Ink
(the company behind the technology for
Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader) have
combined to create the first touchscreen
flexible e-paper, leading the way to foldable,
collapsible displays. The inductive screen
overcomes conventional touchscreens'
tendency to break when flexed. Your best bet
for getting a hands-on with a bendy screen is
to join the US Army, the likely early adopters.
Failing that, check their video clip.
Dell special pricing
extended
Contact Us
Google gurgles
One of Google's most recent plunges into new
technology was the release of an oceanic
element to its 3D Google Earth 5.0 application.
Diving to 'visit' the deepest part of the ocean,
learning about ocean observations, climate
change, and endangered species and
discovering surfing hot spots and shipwrecks
are among the virtual attractions. Go one,
splash out and download it!
http://earth.google.com/ocean/. Elsewhere,
Google sent seismic shock waves through the
email world when its Gmail application serving
100-million-plus users went down once at the
end of February for several hours and again in
March. While it may have caused many to
reassess their reliance on the
ubiquitously-used and free service, it's worth
noting that Google's experimental introduction
of Gmail offline access (allowing users to read
and compose Gmails without an Internet
connection) was launched in timely fashion in
January and helps mitigate the effects of such
down time.
Recession beaters look to
Linux
In hard
times pick
up a
penguin.
Linux
servers and
desktop
machines
are coming
under the
spotlight
again as the downturn pushes organisations to
deliver radical IT savings. IDC's Novell-
sponsored survey of over 300 medium to large
organisations found that between half to two
thirds of respondents were evaluating Linux or
planned to increase an existing Linux base.
 Our special pricing for Dell desktops
and laptops as shown in NCVO's
special discounts has been extended
to the end of April. See Co-Operative Systems'
special offers page.
May the Phorm be with
you?
The most explosive battle of words in the
online press this month broke out between
'Internet instigator' Sir Tim Berners-Lee and
behavioural advertising firm, Phorm. The
debate over whether ISPs should allow Phorm
to set up 'black-box' style recorders to
intercept all their customers traffic for the
purpose of advertising analysis has been
rumbling for a while, but Berners-Lee, speaking
at a heated debate in the House of Commons,
was given the chance to air his opposition to
so-called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) of
emails and surfing data. BT was initially cited
as one of the ISPs that would roll out Phorm
technology, but declined an invitation to speak
at the debate organised by the Liberal
Democrat Home Affairs Spokesperson,
Baroness Miller, on the commercial use of
Internet data.
*** end of NewsBytes ***
^ Back to contents ^
1. Upgrade, sit back and relax
Case study: A modern working environment underpins quintessential English period
history.
Help
at
hand.
Back
issues
just a
click
away
Interim Finance Director, Michael Tucker describes how they gradually outgrew their existing IT
support. "The use of IT has increased dramatically in the past three years at the Geffrye, along
with many specialist IT applications, such as an on-line picture catalogue, including a
comprehensive collection and image database, interactive web-site, bookings database, mailing
Among the top 3 drivers in choosing a server
were reduced costs, security/reliability and
availability/uptime. Full survey in the IDC white
paper Linux Adoption in a Global Recession.
Learn how to blether
"a practical introduction to social media"
promises to do just that, with gems from
Graham Holliday on key social media tools,
tracking what people are saying about you,
photo and video sharing, creating and
publishing blogs and micro-blogs like Twitter,
and measuring the return on investment. All at
blethermedia.com 29th and 30th April.
Singing telegrams in a
flash
Two minutes worth of
nonsense: send a singing
telegram. Type in your message
and watch Gina or Humphrey
'sing' it for you at kakomessenger.com. It's live
performance Jim, but not as we know it. Email
one to your friends, if you must.
Set in elegant 18th century
almshouses, the Geffrye Museum
displays the changing style of the
English domestic interior in a
series of period rooms from 1600
to the present day. In essence, it
depicts the quintessential style of
English middle-class living rooms.
While museum visitors could 'walk
through time', viewing 17th
century oak panelled rooms to
reach a late-20th century living
space, the museum's IT systems
unfortunately languished in a less
than modern state, hampering
staff who grappled with slow PCs,
large amounts of spam emails and
insufficient support to match
current requirements.
database, building maintenance systems and security and alarm systems."

Engaging their existing supplier in a strategic and advisory capacity, they went through a
comprehensive review and consultation process. Tucker continues, "We wanted to identify IT
support suppliers who not only had the technical staff and capacity to maintain and improve our
systems, but who empathized with the aims and culture of the staff within the Museum. We felt
we knew what needed to be done."

The comprehensive IT management package was to encompass more comprehensive desktop and
facilities management support, an infrastructure review, a support service via email and
telephone, regular on-site visits, additional security measures, and upgrades to email software.

Following an assessment and audit, Co-Operative Systems

put in place a programme of hardware and software
standardisation. Specific measures included installing
clean-up software on all PCs, anti-virus software renewals
and automation, MessageLabs email filtering for spam
control, some PC replacements with new models, new
networked printer/copiers in the Mail room, Education and
Curatorial Departments, Office 2007 software upgrades,
migration from Eudora email to Outlook, and a new
firewall.

Two engineers were despatched at the start of the project

and a more structured service was implemented so that
users feel IT support is pro-active instead of solely
focused on fire-fighting. In fact, the programme is
ongoing with the preparation of a network audit, a
Network Attached Storage box (NAS) in a secure place
away from the servers to provide additional backup
security and faster restore route, memory upgrades to
improve performance, enhancing the telephone system for
voice mail and more advanced call handling, and a review
of the current intranet to ensure it meets user
requirements.

The Geffrye Museum were keen to form a partnership to

progress IT so that their infrastructure didn't lapse in
future. As a result they identified several areas for upcoming refurbishments, such as a new
domain controller to replace the ageing server (still running its turn-of-the-century Windows
2000) and a Terminal Server to provide remote access for senior staff, the latter cunningly
re-using some of the museum's existing hardware. From Michael Tucker's perspective: "We
needed an IT supplier who had sufficient project management experience to deliver these
solutions in a manner that staff of the Geffrye Museum would find easy to cope with, bearing in
mind their wide range of IT skills, and who could provide experience of working with similar sized
organizations as the Geffrye, and had a successful track record. We felt Co-Operative Systems
best fitted these requirements."

Positive feedback from users attests to the success of the assignment so far and the absence of
spam is freeing up time for users to deal with incoming email productively. "We have regular
facilities management visits to check things like the backups are working and to resolve small user
issues", says Tucker. "The staff are now familiar with the IT engineers and have developed a good
relationship with them."

The IT upgrade is thus a mix of the old and the new, an appropriate reflection of the institution in
which it resides, where period rooms adjoin the contemporary wing and the latter is surrounded
by an award-winning walled herb garden, sitting alongside a series of period gardens.

One of London's best-loved museums, The Geffrye

Museum in Shoreditch shows the changing style of the
English domestic interior in a series of period rooms
from 1600 to the present day. Take their interactive
virtual tour "Walk through a Victorian House".

-IB-
 ^ Back to contents ^

2. All of a Twitter
Raise money by chatting? It's every campaigner's dream and the current frenzy is
happening on Twitter.

You could hardly brainstorm a more apt name for a social

media site. "Twitter" is onomatopoeically bang on, and
evokes the buzz surrounding a site that is still a
phenomenon 3 years after it's inception.

Worryingly though, when you trawl through the wads of

media coverage that the tweeting wave has attracted, part
of that buzz continually asks, "What exactly is Twitter for?"

Twitter ye not?

For anyone to whom Twitter is still a

mystery (and that may include many
It's the middle-aged who have dived in and signed up) its
flashmob experience. most simply described as "Texting To
The Web". However, four words don't
Lots of hyper-chat do justice to a phenomenon of such
without all the frenzied communication. It's more than
merely publishing 160-character bursts
running around. to a public group who have decided to
track your texting trail - or become
your 'followers' in Twitter-speak.
So-called 'tweets' can be sent and
Help received with any text-capable phone, a
at Blackberry or similar smartphone, or
hand. any computer with a web browser. And it's the immediacy of the dialogue – perhaps every few
Back seconds - that has users hooked.
issues
just a Microblogging, but for extroverts
click
away However Twitter is much more than the digital equivalent of
gatecrashing a room full of gossipers. Think, setting up a breakout
room of your own AND getting to turn away all the bores at the
door! Except that all of your invitees are simultaneously present in
other gossip rooms too, so that's kind of where this physical
analogy breaks down.

Perhaps a better understanding comes from examining how

Tweeters are using the service. It breaks down into roughly a few
activities:

social media addicts – when FaceBook just isn't enough

the dross of zero-attention-span dullards - "watching YouTube, wondering whether to get

up"

e-traders pushing magazines and online products - InfoBulletin is no different and jumped
unceremoniously on the bandwagon this year with its own IB trail at
twitter.com/InfoBulletin

journalists and media brokers flagging up hot news or fanning their egos "finishing a big
piece on digital media", "just about to do interview on Today"

campaigners and charities drumming up support or raising money

URL shorteners

A key technology that has propelled Twitter to twinkledom is

the 'URL shortener', a method of snipping lengthy web links
down to a diminutive 11 characters or so - easily remembered
and efficient for hard copy, as well as suiting text-style
transmissions. Thus, something like this sn.im/do9ul can point to a much longer web address
such as:

http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/
wearejustdoingthistobestupidnowsincethiscangoonforeverandeverandeverbutitstill
lookskindaneatinthebrowsereventhoughitsabigwasteoftimeandenergyandhasnorealpoint
butwehadtodoitanyways.html

which would be punitively expensive to print and twice as pointless.

Stunningly there are now over 90 over these URL snipping services to choose from; mashable.com
makes an admirable fist of trying to list them all: http://sn.im/do9zk.

Of course it's the journalists in the crowd to whom headlines matter and whose experience with
succinct sentences is a good match for Twitter.

The oxygen of publicity

Of course it's that last category of campaigning and

fundraising that is of most interest to charities. It's
a sort of middle-aged flashmob experience - lots of
hyper-chat without all the running around.
Give it a twhirl
The
recent
The Presentation Is Dead
Sitting in a conference hall these days, everyone
seems to be staring down at their smartphones,
tapping away. It must be tough for those giving the
presentation. Talk about stand-up.
Not that the audience is disinterested. Nor are they
texting their mates with bore-me chat. More likely the
room is full of 'Twittering' journalists sending their copy
straight-to-web, hitting a truly global audience that
consumes the presentation 160 characters at a time.

This is news as hot as can be. Y ou can't help feeling

NFPtweetup ('tweetup' – a meetup-for-tweeters –
every technology spawns its own jargon like topsy)
uncovered a vast range of online tools centred on
Twittering technology. Suites like twhirl.org and
tweetdeck.com enable keen fans to run multiple
tweeting accounts at once and analyse the statistics
from their readers. An obvious application is to
peddle a magazine or news blog if you have one, a
technique skilfully exploited by CharityFinance.
that journalists of a generation ago - who dictated copy
into Bakelite phones for it to appear in the following
day's paper - would boggle at the speed of delivery, if
not the quality of the prose.
From the presenter's lectern, the panorama of hirsute
and balding bowed heads makes it impossible to gauge
whether their attention span is waxing or waning. Have
we made any progress from the days of shorthand-
on-paper in the rush to publish? Very few technologies
allow us to watch and write simultaneously, and if we're
not interacting visually with the speaker, we might as
be tuned into Y ouTube. The Presentation Is Dead.
Long Live The Video Clip?

Freeing the twit inside you

Other tools like hootsuite.com and splitweet.com allow you to

introduce more than one editor or contributor to your Twitter
account so that a buzz can be maintained or shared between a group
- crucial if you are driving a campaign and have a charitable USP to
push. Two examples are Bmycharity, an addictive tweeter promoting
online fundraising for all, whose following went from nowhere to over 200 followers in few
weeks, and clickforachange, which encourages free game-playing to raise money for selected
charities.

Will the real Dalai Lama please speak up?

Identity can be a problem on Twitter; how do you know who is who? For
instance:

twitter.com/thedalai_lama 332 followers

twitter.com/OHHDL 916 followers
twitter.com/hisholiness 2891 followers
twitter.com/OHHDLInfo approaching a mind-boggling 30,000 followers

However there doesn't seem to be much doubt about who is doing the talking
at Number 10, with over a quarter of million hanging on its every word.

A while back, journos postulated that One's Blog might one day appear on the
web. In the meantime twitter.com/one has been taken (and it doesn't look like
the musings of HM's private secretary) so it must be twitter.com/thequeen, if
you can believe it. No tweets here at the time of writing, despite 300 watchful
 subjects. One's lips are clearly sealed.

Tweeting resources

The nfptweetup wiki lists good bullet points and links about Twitter aimed at not-for-profits,
and appropriate uses such as fundraising.

Useful post and slide presentation by Ed Walker, "How not for profits can use twitter"

Social media whores - top tips to Create a Twitter Following

Let someone else do it. twitterfeed.com scoops up your blog posts as often as you wish and
Twitters them for you

Verbosity check twittercounter.com

Finding stuff on Twitter http://search.twitter.com/ and http://tweetscan.com/

More twits than you can handle - update 30+ other social networks on http://ping.fm/

-IB-

^ Back to contents ^

3. Fickle Trojans
A virus that removes other viruses? Nobody knows how it gets there, but friendly it
ain’t.

Trojan horses are no longer huge

hollow gifts made of wood. Neither
are they wheeled in through the city
gates of Troy. Instead they linger
somewhere in a corner of your
computer and they are at least as With its habit of delving
devious as their ancient wooden into financial
counterparts.
information, Tigger.A
So if you were going to build a
Help
modern Trojan, what it would it look
has been dubbed the
at
hand.
like? 'Stockbroker Trojan'
Back First off, dispense with inert
issues wood and start building with
just a flexible code instead.
click Then, have your Trojan knock
away out all other viruses it can
find on a host computer; no point in having those setting off anti-virus alarm bells and
raising user suspicions.
Implant a clever data collection process that scoops up passwords, bank details, credit card
info and anything that could come in handy later on.
Don't embed any malicious code that might let on what you're up to at first. (This is the
equivalent of the Greek Trojan horse minus soldiers). Download your malicious payload at
some time in the future, and do it from any one of thousands of possible web sites, most of
which don't even exist yet but can be registered when the time comes.
Finally, distribute your carefully crafted Trojan with an equally carefully crafted distribution
mechanism that defies discovery.
What Tiggers like best: bankers

What you have built already exists and such a threat is the Trojan labelled Tigger.A.

It can escalate its privileges on a Windows PC and also installs a rootkit on the infected system,
thus activating itself even when the system is started up in Windows Safe Mode. Worse, nobody
knows how it gets there.

Tigger employs a battery of techniques including taking screen shots, spying on your browser
transactions, exporting passwords from your protected storage, monitoring a dozen popular chat,
email, and remote access applications, stealing web cookies, certificates and FTP and POP3
passwords. In terms of snooping, there's almost nothing it doesn't poke its nose into. With its
habit of delving into financial information, Tigger.A has been dubbed the 'Stockbroker Trojan'.

Conficker - no joke

Meanwhile another pernicious worm threat called Conficker (aka Downup, Downadup and Kido) is
due to hit again on 1-April. Exploiting a known vulnerability in Windows Server services
(Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 and 2008, Windows 7 Beta). Conficker will launch a brute
force dictionary attack against administrator passwords to help it spread through ADMIN$ shares.
Once again further instructions are fetched by connecting to a remote server, which may include
gathering or propagating personal information or installing further malware. This is also another
piece of self-defending malware that can disable some of the tools used to detect and eradicate it.

With 30% of Windows PCs not having been fixed with a Microsoft-released patch from back in
October 2008, Conficker is reported to be one of the largest botnets around, infecting over 15
million PCs by the end of January 2009.

Conficker symptoms can include account security policies being reset, disabling a series of
services such as Windows Updates (thus preventing further security patching), Windows Defender
and Error Reporting Services, slow domain controllers and unusual network congestion.

Protection mechanisms are beginning to struggle with some anti-virus products failing to banish
threats like Tigger and Conficker at all, and the corollary to that is a complete (and expensive)
system rebuild.

Tips for defeating Trojans and worms

Absolutely keep up to date with Windows patches, it’s a

free automated service, and blocks the entry point for
many viruses

Run computers with restricted privileges instead of full

administrative rights

Choose strong passwords

Scan machines using a variety of anti-virus products

Create and keep Ghost/snapshot images of PC setups, cutting down restore times from days
to minutes

Examine router logs and network traffic to seek out abnormal spikes

Contacts

Sophos Anti-Virus for Windows 2000+: removing W32/Confick and Mal/Conficker

Conficker clean-up tools from Sophos

Remove Downadup from infected computers by BitDefender

Conficker Removal with MSRT (Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool)

McAfee Avert Stinger removal tool, a stand-alone utility used to detect and remove specific
viruses

Banking trojans infest Internet

-IB-

Acknowledgements: staff team

 Found this article helpful? Rate it
* ** *** **** *****

Learn more about virtualisation.

-IB-

^ Back to contents ^

4. IT trends for 2009

In credit crunch times, efficiency and virtualisation are on the cards.

At a recent IT conference, keynote speakers outlined trends in two developing areas for 2009: one
on the forthcoming IT priorities for business and the other on virtualisation.

Euan Davis from Forrester Research kicked off with a clear message: the top
IT priority in 2009 is: "Improve efficiency", at least that's what they are
hearing from Forrester survey respondents.

This means:

1. Responding to the business/organisation demand and its capacity

2. Being transparent about costs (this applies to internal IT departments
as well as outsourcing)
3. Communicating what you do and its value

Technical trends

In the long term, Forrester have generally seen a 10-year lead time on technologies. For example
the much lauded Application Service Providers circa 1999 are now finally coming of age in the
Help emerging Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market. SaaS is starting to mature as vendors understand
at how to package it. Among Forrester clients, 68% had deployed one instance of SaaS. The current
hand. question: who is deciding their SaaS strategy?
Back
issues The Data Centre remains one of those elephant-in-the-room topics. Data centres in London are
just a struggling to find sufficient processing capacity as well as energy and power. As a result some
click hosting costs have actually gone up to limit demand.
away
Cloud computing will depend on
economies of scale and
economies of skill. Ensure your
skills match the trending areas.

The 'dash-for-green' still

disguises customer real motives
for lower costs and energy
efficiency, so the two demands
work in sync. RFPs Are Critical
To Support Green IT Planning.

There is a danger in customers

pressing IT suppliers for lowest
cost as a recessionary tactic. The
result can be that customers
receives least qualified support
staff or find their support
resources pared to a minimum.
 Business trends

The top three trends of maximising IT value, communicating IT's contribution and gaining
business value through process improvement are supported by the following assumptions:

2009 will see leaner businesses with some implementing significant IT budget reductions
Connecting cost to value will be a major theme
IT satisfaction in 2009 will decline for a while, perhaps inevitably, as bosses scrutinise the
business case more closely
Technology is still the foundation of the business, so CIOs and stakeholders will look for
value and less fire fighting

More research papers by Euan Davis:

Topic Overview: Green IT

The Three Archetypes Of IT Vendors
Latest research

Virtualisation

John Charterhouse from virtualisation leader VMware reckoned in 20 years he had never seen an
economic case for environmental savings as compelling as consolidation. "The green stuff comes
for free".

One of the driving forces will be the killer disaster: Of those businesses that experience a disaster
and have no emergency plan, 43% never reopen; of those that do reopen, only 29% are still
operating two years later. (Impact on U.S. Small Business of Natural & Man-Made Disasters.
Presented by HP and SCORE).

Among its many advantages, virtualisation can provide a temporary test environment for new
applications, for example trying out a new CRM database, or remotely accessible document
library. Creating a virtual server instance on existing hardware saves down time or buying another
server.

Because a virtual machine (VM) is just a file (or bunch of files), it/they can be moved between
storage media by various replication methods, so disaster recovery (DR) becomes much easier.
For the first time it is possible to test a demonstrable DR plan inexpensively to managers; a big
plus when no extra hardware has to be purchased!

Virtualisation allows us to assign new priorities to applications, perhaps on the basis of CPU
performance or memory availability, rather than installing on hardware with relatively static
performance limits.

It is also easy for IT departments to deploy desktop images quickly, examples being library kiosk
terminals, a power user setup, the basic office user's desktop. The abstraction layer takes away
the uncertainty of drivers and hardware in such deployments.

Mirrored fault-tolerant VMs with low performance overhead are coming too, behaving like RAID
does for disc storage, only for a whole server running live. As one server fails, it automatically
creates a new mirror on next available hardware.

Data centres are no longer vast warehouses. You may not think you own a data centre, but with
many organisations now maintaining a typical trio of servers for mail, documents a database, or
even a blade server you're already in the DC league.

www.vmware.com

Found this article helpful? Rate it

* ** *** **** *****

^ Back to contents ^
 5. Microsoft RoundTable
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but now you can all be together - without actually being
together. Microsoft presents video-conferencing made easy.

The eternal problem of getting people around a table is one we all

know, but when the table is one place and the people are in
different towns, countries or even continents, then expense enters
the unpredictable equation too.

Many jet-setting CEOs may have encountered desktop audio-

conferencing as a relief for their strained travel budgets if not their
posture. Picture strained discussions between equally strained
delegates all leaning forward to ensure their voices are picked up by
the microphone buried in the R2D2-style device centred on the
table. "Are they getting what I'm saying?" is the continual concern.

The all-seeing eye

To overcome this concern, video-conferencing undoubtedly ups the

ante in terms of ease of use, mainly because suddenly participants
can view each others' faces and gauge reactions.

Microsoft RoundTable is one such video-conferencing solution, a

plonk-it-on-the-desk style device with a 360-degree camera.
Remote participants need no additional equipment, just their
computer and a network connection, to connect to the meeting and
view the panoramic and active speaker video.

Help
at
hand.
Back
issues
just a
click
away
RoundTable is designed to work with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 or Microsoft Office Live
Meeting. It presents remote meeting participants with panoramic video of everyone sitting around the conference
table, fairly comparable to being in the room itself. The 'super widescreen' camera resolution of 3700 x 600
pixels gives away its panoramic credentials (1056 x 144 pixels for video).

Meetings can be more natural since active

speaker detection technology determines
high-resolution video of the current speaker,
switching between participants as they speak.
This tracking helps the flow of conversation
in real time.

The console itself contains a high-resolution

backlit graphical LCD (with device status
icons), a touchscreen-based telephone
keypad and nav keys, as well physical keys
for on/off-hook, flash, mute, volume up,
volume down, and a loudspeaker. The
plug-and-play USB device that also functions
as a standard PSTN speakerphone.

A green cost-saver

At upwards of £2000 it's not necessarily a

minor investment. Factor in transatlantic
flight costs and staff time-savings though,
and such a device can break even on the first
meeting. Moreover, there are fewer cost
 penalties with involving more people in a
video conference - thereby keeping everyone
in the loop – then there are with physically
shifting people around the planet, wherever your green aspirations lie.

Contacts

Microsoft RoundTable home page

Microsoft RoundTable specifications (PDF)

-IB-

Acknowledgements: staff team

Email* Org

^ Back to contents ^

6. Q&A: How do I destroy old data

tapes?

Hi Mark,
Question
We have a number of data tapes from
our older tape drives. I would like
Mark
them destroyed and to get certification
to say they have been destroyed. Do
you know of any companies that can
do this for data tapes?

A few companies that destroy tapes (and other data media such as hard drives or CDs) safely
and securely came across our horizon recently.
Help
at London-Recycling.co.uk employs
hand. industrial fix-cut shredders to
Back destroy confidential waste such as
issues documents, printouts, microfiche,
just a tapes, diskettes, CDs and videos,
click and supplies an audited and
away detailed Certificate of Destruction.

RCS Recycling Ltd can destroy

hard discs and storage media to
"ensuring 100% secure
 destruction of all data", their
normal practice being to shred
hard drives and provide a Final
Destruction Certification as
standard practice. They also
recycle anything within the office,
the company says.

Recommit Ltd is an externally-audited, approved Government contractor that specialises in

purging partitions, overwriting and reformatting hard drives. Where overwriting fails, hard discs
and tapes are physically destroyed and recycled to HMG INFOSEC Standard No 5. The company
is WEEE compliant and provides Duty of Care waste collection notes, and certificates of data
destruction and audit.

Discover answers in more Q&A topics

-IB-

Found this article helpful? Rate it

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Got a "Q" for which you would like an "A" ?

Submit your IT question here:

^ Back to contents ^

Clicks of the Trade - save PC power

with a single key
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! ---

A really quick way of saving energy and electricity costs just by pressing a
single key!

Having clicked Start |

Turn Off Computer
you get the Stand By
option which stops the
Help
at
hard drive motors
hand. spinning - a speedy
Back power saver if you are
issues just rushing off to lunch
just a
click
or a meeting - and
away saves the PC having to
wait 30 minutes or so
for its timer to kick in.

However, just by
holding the Shift key
the Stand By option
changes to Hibernate.
Now when you click
Hibernate, the work
space is saved on to
 disc and the whole machine is shut down, saving even more energy. When
you return, pressing the
power button, means the start up is quicker than switching the PC on from
cold.

You can read more about power settings and how to make the Hibernate
action into a desktop shortcut in this Q&A about Sleep mode.

Related keys

Don't forget the Windows key+L key combination will effect an instant
logout for desktop security in a hurry, assuming you've set a Windows
password!

** try it now **

More Clicks of the Trade

-IB-

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