QUIETNESS OF THE LIBRARY
Posted on June 8, 2021 by wgeek
I am in the process of setting up a computer system in our
church library. One of the first things I thought about in this
process is “Locking down the computers”. I decided to observe
a local county library’s way of doing the same.
The library is just down the street from my home. This is a
small library — Only 10 computers linked to their wired network
. They have just installed WIFI, but I am not going to check it
for now. Just want to see how the “protected ” computers are
setup.
Observations:
All are running windows 10.
all have sound enabled. all have usb ports to allow you
to save your work ( assuming you have a memory stick of some
sort ). Limited programs are loaded.
start/run is disabled. no external bat, com or exe files are
allowed. There are some deficiencies noted (so far ):
java applications are allowed if accessed through a web page
This means that if you create a web page on a memory stick
that has java application within it, you can use your browser
to access this application. Voila! An application that you can
control.
I have tried the following java application types with good success..
ssh client.
ftp client.
file browser
None of these cause any harm to their system. I am trying to think of other applications that would be useful if my system at home died.More on this is a future post.
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Wed 19 Jun 2013
Checking my spam box
I occasionally check my spam box in the unlikely event that the spam filter has placed something there by mistake.
Today, I saw what I thought was a spam filter mistake and started to open it. A message popped up. “Be careful with this message. Our systems couldn’t verify that this message was really sent by verizonwireless.com. You might want to avoid clicking links or replying with personal information.” Below this was the incoming message in preview mode. It appeared to be the usual notification of my upcoming cellphone bill — except the amount I owed was listed as 2905.01!
Now if I had received that email in my inbox without any warnings, would I have clicked on a link within it to contest the amount? That is what the sender is hoping for. My actual bill is less than one tenth of that amount which I verified by logging in to my verizon account.
The spam filter continues to explain that “Spammers can forge a message to make it look like it’s sent by a real website or company that you might trust. To help protect you from such messages, we try to verify the real sender using email authentication.”
A review of the 26 emails within my spam box found 4 which could not be verified as coming from it’s listed source.
Be careful with your email.. It is a sneaky world out there!
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