CSO Online has a really interesting article about generational differences from the perspective of IT security. While i'm sure it's not highly accurate from a sociological perspective and is probably guilty of overgeneralising, it still offers some food for thought that might be applicable to more areas than IT security. (As is usual with CSO Online, to get a readable version, use the printer-friendly option.)

The latest Ouch! newsletter from SANS has some great advice for end-users about password selection. If only every computer user read this newsletter regularly, the world would be a much safer place in which to compute!Some other useful related resources:

• my wikispaces page about passwords

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IT Toolbox has a great little summary of the experiences of Mike Kavis, a guy who's been living Microsoft free in an all Microsoft shop - at work! It all started from an "eat your own dog food" challenge (something i did with my wife which finally precipitated the switch to Linux on her part). Check out his other articles in the series:

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CSO Magazine recently released a bunch of really useful security resources. Check them out:

• 10 essential (and free!) security downloads for Windows
• Five free penetration testing tools
• Five steps to successful and cost-effective penetration testing

CSO Online has a great little article about why you shouldn't trust web mail. Check it out and have a good long think about what they say! (Choose the printer-friendly view for a version that's easier on the eyes.)

Linux Journal has an interesting article about how to set up Linux for your grannie. There are some great ideas to consider there.

I recently found IT Security's list of the 25 most common mistakes in email security.

It an interesting read, although not necessarily all of the advice is up-to-date. For example, blacklisting spam sender addresses is useless these days - every spam i've ever seen uses a fake sender address. But the principle still holds: you should mark a spam message as junk rather than deleting it.

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A lot of my work involves network tracing (hence my recent wiki page), and it would be great if i could do this with a really simple, transportable device. Ideally it would have these characteristics:

• Pocket-sized, lightweight
• Two Gigabit Ethernet ports configured as a bridge, so that it can be placed inline on any network connection without affecting traffic flow.
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Michael Reed has a good piece on his experiences in moving his mother from a Windows-based PC to Ubuntu Linux. The result? Amazingly successful, although it did take some tweaking on his part.

It appears a spambot has found one of my personal domains attractive.

Despite this, i've received no spam that has actually made it through my SpamAssassin/Thunderbird setup. The lessons i've been learning about this recently have led me to create a wiki page about it.