Google insisted for secure Gmail & Docs

This piece of article from Security Watch on Google is intriguing. Google has been asked to secure the complete Gmail and GDocs sessions. Though Gmail already has a feature to optionally choose it but not defaulted, these security safeguarders and law makers felt it is not safe to leave it without HTTPS and have urged Google to secure it completely.

These people have not questioned Yahoo, Rediff or for that matter any other mail provider. Gmail was the first one to introduce HTTPS into free mailing environment and they only are questioned for not having it mandatorily put up throughout! Its ridiculous.

Surprisingly, Google is going to work on securing the whole session from next tuesday onwards, on a selected user's base

IEAK

We needed an option to customize IE on over 160 systems in our institution which has standard settings, to let our applications run. Everytime a system crashes, we re-install WinXP and we have to manually change settings to achieve its compatibility with our application. This becomes tedious as we grow by years, still doing the same stuff.

Thanks to Channa, IEAK - Internet Explorer Administration Kit made its appearance and now we dont struggle manually making custom settings changes in IE.

• Firstly, download the package from this site depending on whether you want to deploy on IE6 or IE7 or IE8. We downloaded for IE6 (soon we will for IE7 too!)
  
• Once downloaded, install it.
• Go to Internet Explorer Customization Wizard from All Program. It is here that all the settings are changed and profiles are created. Only place where one can get stuck in the process is at Automatic Version Synchronization (AVS) where it shows the current version of IE on system and asks for updating it through Internet. We will need Internet Connection only during this time of the configuration. It stores these downloaded files in \IEAK-Program-Folder\IEAK6\Downloads\EN\
• Once, all the components are up-to-date, then one can proceed step-by-step and customize the standard values which one wants on each system in the organization.
• In the end, it creates the profile build in the Build folder of the IEAK Program Folder. One has to click on the IE Setup file in the FLAT folder of this Build folder on the client system. On this, it will restart the client system and while startup, it customizes the IE settings.

Quite useful.

ATI Catalyst (CCC)

ATI Catalyst alias Catalyst Control Center (CCC) is a front end to tweak the hardware functions like monitor settings, 3D settings, etc.
Similarly, Intel too has Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) Driver [FROM INTEL] which gives options to tweak the settings thru a GUI.