Hardware and software liability by Tim Tompkins

                    


 What is a end user license agreement?

Is the contract between the licensor and purchaser, establishing the purchaser's right to use the software.The user has the choice of accepting or rejecting the agreement. The installation of the software is conditional to the user clicking a button labelled "accept".Most commonly, a EULA will attempt to hold harmless the software licensor in the event that the software causes damage to the user's computer or data, but some software also proposes limitations on whether the licensor can be held liable for damage that arises through improper use of the software.

 Do you agree or disagree that the developer should be responsible for his or her development of hardware or software products? Explain your answer.

 Im agree because the developer have to be responsible for this own development of the hardware or software products. His work is to en charge that everything is working efficient in the system, and if something isn't working is their fault because they had not been taking charge of their work.

What are the three levels of loss described in the article?

A second level of loss includes the cost of providing emergency service during the failure of the primary service. Should a product fail, a temporary fix often needs to be applied immediately to allow the customer to continue operation in a semi-normal manner, especially for mission-critical systems in hospital, military, and numerous other important applications. Also in this category is the cost of restoring data, should it be necessary.The third level of loss is long-term. Should a company's systems fail, either due to their own hardware and software, or that which they have purchased or licensed from another company, customers may no longer be willing to trust that company with their business, so the company's long term reputation, and consequently profit, are diminished.

Should hardware and software liability be treated the same or differently? Explain your answer.

Both should be treated the same because this two are important to the company, and if one them is damage it would cost to the company.It is a important document that would be response and taking care of the damage in software or hardware. The hardware and software liability is a license that would make the two parts (user and company) take responsibility in a bug of the system.

  Source:
 http://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ethics/papers/tompkt.html
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement
 
 
 
 

IT JOKES. (Only for Geeks)

CIA Gives the Soviets Gas (1982)

Problem: Control software went haywire and produced intense pressure in the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, resulting in the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion in Earth’s history.

Cause: CIA operatives allegedly planted a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased by the Soviets to control their gas pipelines.  The purchase was part of a strategic Soviet plan to steal or covertly obtain sensitive U.S. technology.  When the CIA discovered the purchase, they sabotaged the software so that it would pass Soviet inspection but fail in operation. 

Cost: Millions of dollars, significant damage to Soviet economy

Medical Machine Kills (1985)

Problem: Canada’s Therac-25 radiation therapy machine malfunctioned and delivered lethal radiation doses to patients,that were there to cure themselves but it was all the opposite for those patients.Start affecting their cells and the immune system.

Cause: Because of a subtle bug called a race condition, a technician could accidentally configure Therac-25 so the electron beam would fire in high- power mode without the proper patient shielding.

Cost: Three people dead, three people critically injured.

Databases

Requirements,Needs and Applications

What are the symptoms of an infected computer?

It’s not always easy to tell if your computer has been compromised. More than ever before, the authors of viruses, worms, Trojans and spyware are going to great lengths to hide their code and conceal what their programs are doing on an infected computer. That’s why it’s essential to follow the advice given in this guide: in particular, install Internet security software, make sure you apply security patches to your operating system and applications and backup your data regularly.

It’s very difficult to provide a list of characteristic symptoms of a compromised computer because the same symptoms can also be caused by hardware and/or software problems. Here are just a few examples:

• Your computer behaves strangely, i.e. in a way that you haven’t seen before.
  
• You see unexpected messages or images.
  
• You hear unexpected sounds, played at random.
  
• Programs start unexpectedly.
  
• Your personal firewall tells you that an application has tried to connect to the Internet (and it’s not a program that you ran).
  
• Your friends tell you that they have received e-mail messages from your address and you haven’t sent them anything.
  
• Your computer ‘freezes’ frequently, or programs start running slowly.
  
• You get lots of system error messages.
  
• The operating system will not load when you start your computer.
  
• You notice that files or folders have been deleted or changed.
  
• You notice hard disk access (shown by one of the small flashing lights) when you’re not aware of any programs running.
  
• Your web browser behaves erratically, e.g. you can’t close a browser window.
  
   http://www.kaspersky.com/symptoms
  
  

Why MAC is better?

Password Guidelines

Keep it secret, Keep it safe

Choosing the right password is something that many people find difficult, there are so many things that require passwords these days that remembering them all can be a real problem. Perhaps because of this a lot of people choose their passwords very badly. The simple tips below are intended to assist you in choosing a good password.
I'm also starting work on a Password FAQ, which will probably replace this document.
See also my password recovery speeds page, which lists the time taken to break various passwords using brute force alone.

Basics

• Use at least eight characters, the more characters the better really, but most people will find anything more than about 15 characters difficult to remember.
• Use a random mixture of characters, upper and lower case, numbers, punctuation, spaces and symbols.
• Don't use a word found in a dictionary, English or foreign.
• Never use the same password twice.

Things to avoid

• Don't just add a single digit or symbol before or after a word. e.g. "apple1"
• Don't double up a single word. e.g. "appleapple"
• Don't simply reverse a word. e.g. "elppa"
• Don't just remove the vowels. e.g. "ppl"
• Key sequences that can easily be repeated. e.g. "qwerty","asdf" etc.
• Don't just garble letters, e.g. converting e to 3, L or i to 1, o to 0. as in "z3r0-10v3"

Tips

• Choose a password that you can remember so that you don't need to keep looking it up, this reduces the chance of somebody discovering where you have written it down.
• Choose a password that you can type quickly, this reduces the chance of somebody discovering your password by looking over your shoulder.

Bad Passwords

• Don't use passwords based on personal information such as: name, nickname, birthdate, wife's name, pet's name, friends name, home town, phone number, social security number, car registration number, address etc. This includes using just part of your name, or part of your birthdate.
• Don't use passwords based on things located near you. Passwords such as "computer", "monitor", "keyboard", "telephone", "printer", etc. are useless.
• Don't ever be tempted to use one of those oh so common passwords that are easy to remember but offer no security at all. e.g. "password", "letmein".
• Never use a password based on your username, account name, computer name or email address.

Choosing a password

• Use good password generator software.
• Use the first letter of each word from a line of a song or poem.
• Alternate between one consonant and one or two vowels to produce nonsense words. eg. "taupouti".
• Choose two short words and concatenate them together with a punctuation or symbol character between the words. eg. "seat%tree"

Changing your password

• You should change your password regularly, I suggest once a month is reasonable for most purposes.
• You should also change your password whenever you suspect that somebody knows it, or even that they may guess it, perhaps they stood behind you while you typed it in.
• Remember, don't re-use a password.

Protecting your password

• Never store your password on your computer except in an encrypted form. Note that the password cache that comes with windows (.pwl files) is NOT secure, so whenever windows prompts you to "Save password" don't.
• Don't tell anyone your password, not even your system administrator
• Never send your password via email or other unsecured channel
• Yes, write your password down but don't leave the paper lying around, lock the paper away somewhere, preferably off-site and definitely under lock and key.
• Be very careful when entering your password with somebody else in the same room.

Remembering your password

Remembering passwords is always difficult and because of this many people are tempted to write them down on bits of paper. As mentioned above this is a very bad idea. So what can you do?

• Use a secure password manager, see the downloads page for a list of a few that won't cost you anything.
• Use a text file encrypted with a strong encryption utility.
• Choose passwords that you find easier to remember.

Bad Examples

• "fred8" - Based on the users name, also too short.
• "christine" - The name of the users girlfriend, easy to guess
• "kciredref" - The users name backwords
• "indescribable" - Listed in a dictionary
• "iNdesCribaBle" - Just adding random capitalisation doesn't make it safe.
• "gandalf" - Listed in word lists
• "zeolite" - Listed in a geological dictionary
• "qwertyuiop" - Listed in word lists
• "merde!" - Listed in a foreign language dictionary

Good Examples

None of these good examples are actually good passwords, that's because they've been published here and everybody knows them now, always choose your own password don't just use somebody elses.

• "mItWdOtW4Me" - Monday is the worst day of the week for me.