Today is "Patch Tuesday" - What's in it for me?
Does the phrase "Patch Tuesday" ring a bell? The second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft releases their security patches for the month. Occasionally, there will be a security fix that's so important it will be released "out of band" - too important to wait for the scheduled date, but typically they are released on a standard schedule. This month, there are 17 bulletins to address 40 security loopholes. Three of the bulletins are listed as "critical" and the rest are rated as "important".
It's extremely important to keep your systems up to date against the latest security threats. The updates are free, and for systems containing "Personal Information" as defined by the new Massachusetts Data Protection Law, the updates are required by law!
If you're interested, the full process is described on the Microsoft web site. An advance notification is provided by Microsoft three days in advance, and a separate page on the web site provides more details on the updates: Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for December 2010. There's even a webcast scheduled by Microsoft to answer consumer questions. If you're on managed service with us, we're already taking care of security update management for you, but if not, the updates are available free from Microsoft, and you can self monitor them with Automatic Updates. We typically advise that you download the updates automatically, but install them manually, since every once in a while there can be unintended negative consequences for a particular update.
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Tech Headlines
EHR Adoption Crosses 50% Threshold - Results from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) show that a majority of physicians are now using electronic health records or electronic medical records systems. Read more in InformationWeek HealthCare.
Tablet Sales Expected to Quadruple by 2012 - Already have an iPad? You're leading the pack. Sales of the iPad and other tablets are expected to grow dramatically the next two years. Read more in Mashable/Business. Google Zeitgeist 2010 - Curious about what people searched for in 2010? Google published their yearly summary of the aggregate of billions of search requests in the past year: Google Zeitgeist 2010. For fun, look at previous years to see what's changed.
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Ekaru is now on Twitter! Follow us at www.twitter.com/ekaruIT for up to date news links and updates related to small business technology. We typically update this a few times a day. We're going to keep doing our monthly eNewsletter, but you'll now have faster updates to news and info on Twitter.
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Happy Holidays!
- Your Friends at Ekaru |