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SecurePrint Keeps Print Jobs Private
The corporate world is rife with examples of someone sending a print job containing highly sensitive data, such as salary numbers or a layoff plan, to a public printer, where someone else picks it up and sees information that wasnt intended for widespread dissemination. Silex Technology America aims to solve that problem with the SecurePrint package.
Priced at $699 for a five-user license and $79 per user thereafter, SecurePrint combines a Silex SX-5000U2 USB print server with two of the companys FUS-200N fingerprint readers. SecurePrint, which began shipping in July, comes with applications for managing enrollment, connecting to the print server and managing print jobs.
I found that the product isnt as elegant as it could be because of the manual setup, but it would certainly be worth the time and effort for a small group of users.
The biggest annoyance for administrators will be enrolling users and installing software. Users fingerprints must be recorded on a fingerprint reader near each users machine, and software to designate print jobs as public or private must be installed on each users PC. The process for enrolling users is typical for fingerprint-scanning software, however.
Once I designated a print job as private, it was held in the printer queue until I released it. Pressing a finger to the reader at the printer released the job through a connection between the print server and software running on my PC.
A potential support problem is that the fingerprint reader must be installed in the second USB port on the print server—if users unplug the device, it may not get plugged in again.
For more information, go to www.silexamerica.com.
–Michael Caton
Quindi Saves Audio, Video
In a recent Tech Directions column, I lamented that businesses are storing petabytes of useless information in the form of PowerPoint slides, which at best are only an outline of the information from the meeting or presentation for which the slides were used. I wrote that it would be better if companies could store the much-more-useful audio that accompanied the slides as they were presented.
Quindis Quindi Meeting Companion 1.2, a simple Windows-based application, actually goes a step further than that. Quindi Meeting Companion makes it possible to capture not only the audio from a meeting but the video as well. The product can work with tools as simple as built-in microphones and Web cams to capture a meeting and sync the audio and video to the slides being presented.
Once I fired up Quindi Meeting Companion and my PowerPoint slides, the program recognized the presentation, and I could then begin recording. Besides capturing the audio and video, the program also let me enter notes and information as the meeting progressed. I could even configure it to remind me to enter notes.
Once captured, a meeting can be viewed using the Quindi application, and I could compress the presentation and even limit video to a storyboard set of stills to save space. In addition to the proprietary Quindi format, I could also export to standard media formats.
Quindi Meeting Companion is priced starting at $299.
Go to www.quindi.com for more information.
–Jim Rapoza
Data Security Is Gripping Prose
“Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity” is a data forensics handbook by experts for experts. Its also a series of unconnected novellas that unravel tales of cyber-crime as detective stories.
Accomplished data security pros will likely find this book an engrossing read filled not so much with helpful hints—although there are plenty of these—as suggestions for how to think through difficult security problems.
I regard “Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity,” published in July and priced at $39.95, as a dish of sorbet between courses of a meal: a sharp, refreshing pause that sets the stage for renewed, often-onerous, cyber-sleuthing.
The 366-page book demands reading, not skimming, as the chapters are stand-alone stories. The code snippets and investigative techniques dont appear to be stand-alone references but instead are contextual examples of the described technique.
The collection of expert authors work well together in this book, which is available now in bookstores or at www.syngress.com.
–Cameron Sturdevant