It’s
almost impossible to run a business – no matter how small – without a
computer. Yet years ago we used to do it. Buy a computer today, and you’ve
entered the race to keep up.
“And
you run and you run to catch up with the Sun but it’s sinking… racing
around, to come up behind you again” – the words of Pink Floyd, circa 1973.
I’m writing this in a Hotel room in Paihia, where today my job has taken me.
Where the client is, there go I. The notebook computer I’m using was the best
thing since sliced bread when I bought it 5 years ago. It was fast, did
incredible things, and – here’s a free plug for Toshiba – has never let me
down, and neither did its namesake predecessor.
But, five years on, it’s struggling to keep up, and I have to remind
myself (when I get irritated at having to wait for it) that it is, in computer
terms, ancient. It’s a Pentium 133 which, for those in the know, takes ten
times longer to think about things than notebooks on the market right now. In
just five years. In computer jargon, this old notebook is ‘maxed out’,
meaning that although it is running Windows 98 and Office 2000, those two pieces
of software stretch the machine to its full capacity. Windows XP has been on the
market for over a year, but this poor old thing would have a hernia if I tried
to load XP on it.
So
I am forced into a decision here. My clients have lots of money and resources,
and update their equipment regularly, which means that unless I buy a new
machine (upgrading a notebook is either impossible or not cost-efficient) I am
going to have to ask my clients to ‘convert down’ files before they email
them to me. I mean, how embarrassing. It’s like having holes in your socks and
being asked to take your shoes off, or having an important person arrive in the
country, and picking them up at the airport in a Morris minor. Doesn’t do the
image any good at all. The love of my life (she who must be obeyed, I mean) has
never had to ‘embrace’ computer technology in serious terms, but now wants
to help out by playing a support role in my busy business life. Here’s the
paradox – the time it will take to bring her from zero to full competence on
Outlook, Excel, Word and Publisher seems to outweigh the intended benefit. While she’s learning the software we use now, the next new
version is being released… It seems to me that, in financial terms, buying a
computer is an exercise in obsolescence. You know for sure that your recently
purchased asset will be obsolete in business terms within about 5 years at the
most, with 3 years being more likely. In technical terms, it was obsolete
before you bought it – what you see in the shops is already well behind
what’s on the design bench. Newer, faster, more capacity. It must be very hard
for the manufacturers to maintain high quality when the financial equation is
telling the buyer to make a decision based on a three-to-five year life span.
Why would you pay for a top-of-the-line computer at $5000, which will be
obsolete in 3 years, when you can buy a Kamikaze brand, which will also be
obsolete in 3 years, for $2000? I
guess that’s why leasing or renting is attractive (hire purchase is a no-no)
since the lease payments are fully tax-deductible, at the end of the lease you
probably haven’t paid much more than you would have had you purchased it, and
your three year old computer which is now obsolete is the problem of the lease
company, not you, and you simply swap it for a new one and carry on.
Then there’s the problem of security, in two forms – learning how to
do backups and the discipline of doing that, and then Internet security if you
are able to access the Internet. Let’s imagine you’re a small Charter
operator, you’ve invested in a computer 2 years ago, and you have an accounts
package, a reservations (bookings) package, and a customer database. Two years
down the track you will have all your accounts information, required by the IRD
to be kept for seven years, a history of past bookings and the forward schedule
of this year’s bookings, plus you will by now have a marketing database for
keeping in touch with your past and existing clients. What happens in the event
the ‘hard drive’ on the computer malfunctions – and I mean permanently, in
a way that the data can’t be recovered even by an expert? It happens, and not
infrequently either. What about if you have a fire in your office, or a flood?
What happens if Bob the Burglar decides he likes your computer more than you do?
Firstly, he’s now got the data and you haven’t, secondly if he knows the
value of that data, will he then sell it to your competitors? Take my advice –
every month back up your information onto another computer in your office (if
you’ve got two), and then drop another back up onto disk and send it to a
trusted friend or your accountant. Make sure your computer is password protected
at start-up; if you don’t know how to do it ask your local computer tech to do
it for you. Get it so that when you turn the computer on, after a few bits of
text come up, then it asks for a password – and nothing will happen until you
type the right one in. Now if Bob the Burglar hits, he’s going to need very
high-level technical help to get at your data, and most won’t bother. Don’t
rely on the Windows password – it’s pointless, as I found out. All you do is
hit cancel, and you’re in! Did you know that? I only found out by accident.
Now,
about the Internet. If you’re email capable, or if you can Surf the Net,
you’re vulnerable AND you’re a target. Take it from me – I’ve been
around people who have learned the hard way, and luckily I learned from that. If
you’re in a big organisation with your own IT manager, you will have a
‘firewall’ and internal virus protection and can probably relax. If you’re
a small business working either in an office or home, unless you’ve done
something about it you won’t have a firewall, and unless you’ve specifically
done otherwise, your computer is probably not virus-protected. That means the
moment you connect your computer to a telephone line, and the computer is
‘on’, you are vulnerable to attack in at least 3 ways:
Email
virus:
I
can’t go into detail here about viruses – go here to learn about them:
http://www.symantec.com
There
are many thousands of them. Produced by malicious idiots wanting the limelight
as the creator of the world’s most destructive one, regardless of the misery
they cause to millions of people. They should be taken out the back and shot. A
50-cent bullet is cheaper than a trial – and if we send them to prison we have
to feed and house them.
Viruses
come as attachments to emails. You’ll see it as an email with a ‘paper
clip’ sign on it meaning that this email has a file attached to it. They can
be perfectly innocent, come from someone you know, and it’s a photo of the new
baby or a cartoon or a customer list or something. Then there’s another kind,
also appearing to come from someone you know, which often has a file name ending
in ‘.exe’ or ‘.scr’. If you delete the file without opening it, you’re
probably safe. The moment you open it, the programme hidden in the file
unleashes it’s ‘payload’, usually looks for a random file on your hard
drive, grabs your email address book, sends that random file to everyone in your
address book, and attaches a copy of itself to the file before it goes out –
so everyone in your address book gets the virus, and part of one of your
documents. Hopefully not the one containing the ‘real’ accounts that the IRD
aren’t supposed to see. Or the love-letter to your illicit ‘friend’. Worst
still, you may not even know it’s happened until your friends start ringing
you. That’s just the ‘embarrassing/irritating’ kind of virus. Then there
are the vicious ones, that actually harm the data on your computer, and in some
cases renders the data unrecoverable. That’s another reason why you need
regular back-ups. Another type of virus hides on a website that you might visit,
and is buried in the programme code of a page you look at. You’ll never know
it’s happened unless you’ve got protection. The solution? Apart from hanging
one or two of the perpetrators in a very public way, as an example to others, go
down to your local Computer store and buy the latest version of either Norton
Internet Security or McAfee or some other well-known brand. It will ‘screen’
incoming Email, monitor web pages you look at and automatically quarantine any
suspicious file, then help you decide what to do, including safely deleting it.
Then there are the Hoaxers - emails that tell you you've been attacked, and
suggest you delete certain files. All rubbish, of course, but now you've deleted
needed, innocent files so your computer won't run properly. Before taking action
on one of these 'helpful' emails, check out the Hoax page on the Internet at: http://www.symantec.com
Hackers:
Nasty
people. They spend their lives in dark little rooms, permanently wired into the
Internet, and use special machines and software to constantly ‘scan’ the
Internet, looking for a computer that’s also connected, and unprotected. Look
at it this way – on a hot summer evening, you want the windows open, but the
lights attract bugs. The air comes in, but so do the bugs. The simple act of
being connected to the Internet, with your computer turned on, means ‘your
window is open’. While you are looking at email, or surfing the net, this
miserable waste-of-space has found your computer ‘open’ and is busily
looking around your hard drive – looking at your data, your credit card
numbers, your bank records, whatever. Worst still they leave a small programme
on your computer, so that every time in the future you ‘go on the ‘net, this
hacker gets to know what you’re doing, what you’ve looked at. Download
anything ‘free’ from the Internet and it’s 80% likely that hidden in what
you’ve downloaded is something called ‘Spyware’, a little programme that
reports back to the place you downloaded from everything you do in the future.
There’s a little clean-up programme you can get off the Internet for free
called Ad-Aware, made by people who hate Spyware and thus provide it free, and
it will root out those little nasties and allow you to delete them. You can get
it at: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/index.html.
I recently got a computer back that had been used by two other people over a
two-year period, and couldn’t figure out why this darned machine kept trying
to dial the Internet all on it’s own. I ran Ad-Aware over it and found 33
separate Spyware programmes. Nasty stuff.
So,
how do you defeat the attackers? Anyone old enough to remember Star Trek, where
the Klingons used to be able to make their space-ship invisible”? It was
called ‘cloaking’, if my old brain remembers correctly. Well, you can do
that too, with your computer. Make it invisible to the Hacker. I do that by
using Norton Internet Security, but there are other products out there too,
I’m not doing a free plug for Norton. Well, I guess I am actually – I have
never had virus damage despite getting attacks at the rate of 4 or 5 a week
during a particularly bad period. This package includes a Firewall, which kind
of describes what it does – puts a wall up between your computer and the
Internet, then manages the traffic going through it. The Firewall ‘conceals’
your computer from the prying eyes of hackers, while you are on the net. It also
tells you when a hacker has tried to penetrate it. You will be surprised...
I
started talking about the race to keep up, which is what I intended this article
to be, but I seem to have focussed more on protecting yourself from nasty
people. I hope you found it helpful
either way!
Steve Punter ANZIM,
Dip Bus (PMER), FHRINZ
Staff Training Associates Ltd, Auckland, New Zealand.
© Steve Punter 2002 All rights reserved by the author.