Saturday, February 18, 2006

The Windy City gears up to be Wireless City - Wireless World - MSNBC.com

The Windy City gears up to be Wireless City - Wireless World - MSNBC.com: "The nationwide rush to go wireless appears poised to extend to its biggest city yet. Chicago is launching an effort to offer wireless broadband, city officials said Friday, jumping on the Wi-Fi bandwagon as similar initiatives proceed in Philadelphia, San Francisco and smaller cities. [more]"

Yay!!! (though I probably live too far into the suburbs to get in on the action). Still, cool.

Full Disclosure: Security Risks in Using Digital Documents

Editing tips from the NSA | CNET News.com: "Hiding confidential information with black marks works on printed copy, but not with electronic documents, the National Security Agency has warned government officials."

You may or may not know that Microsoft Word embeds a ton of information in your Word documents without your explicit knowledge: things like the date, author (as it was input when Word was installed), and other collaboration and tracking data. A lot of this is stored in "metadata" inside the document.

The article above from the National Security Agency lists recommended procedures for sanitizing documents prior to sharing them digitally or prior to converting them to PDF files.
Interesting read. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, at least go get Microsoft's add-in for Office so that you can review and delete metadata you don't want to share. It's called "Remove Hidden Data" and is for Office 2003 and XP.

Microsoft "Remove Hidden Data" add-in for Office

Monday, February 06, 2006

IE7 Beta goes public

Microsoft's version 7 of Internet Explorer is finally available as a "preview" download. Is anybody else amused that they are using Flash as their primary technology on the IE7 web site? (Flash is an Adobe [formerly Macromedia] product).

Check out the Internet Explorer 7 web site for the preview beta download.