The ABCs of securing your Windows netbook

Netbooks are likely to be a popular gift this holiday season—they're cheap, highly portable, and the kind of thing that you can give as a gift to a relatively novice computer user who needs a laptop but doesn't need the power or responsibility that comes with a more expensive portable. Netbooks are also looking increasingly good to business travelers, due to their portability and low hardware replacement cost in case of loss, damage, or theft. But even though a netbook itself can be cheap to replace, losing an inexpensive netbook PC can still be very costly. Sure, a stolen or lost netbook will set you back a few hundred dollars for the device, but you have to consider how much the data stored on it is worth. That lost netbook can open you up to identity theft, empty out your bank accounts, or even cost you your job. That's something to think about before you walk out the door with that $300 wonder.

However, with a little bit of planning, a little bit of effort, and perhaps some additional software, you can ensure that if you lose your netbook, whoever finds it has nothing more than a useless, two-pound hunk of plastic and silicon. Not only can you protect and encrypt your data from prying eyes, you can also set your netbook to self-destruct all the data onboard if you lose it.

In this article, we'll give you a basic introduction to securing your Windows netbook in case it's stolen. Advanced Windows users will already know most of what we'll cover, so this article is aimed more at the user who has a new netbook and no idea how to secure it.

Microsoft enables Silverlight video streaming to iPhones

At PDC 2009, Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight video streaming to an iPhone. While Microsoft user experience platform manager Brian Goldfarb said that Microsoft "worked with Apple" to make it happen, don't expect plug-ins for Mobile Safari to start flooding the App Store. Instead, Microsoft worked to make its IIS7 server software capable of sending an QuickTime-compatible stream to an iPhone embedded with a HTML5 <video> tag.

Though Silverlight is more than just a video format—it's more of .NET authoring runtime for web-based applications, much like Flash as become—its media delivery features are what content providers wanted on the iPhone. "The promise of Silverlight is that it's a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows," Goldfarb told BetaNews. "The iPhone is a unique scenario. We talked to our customers...and they said, 'Look, we just need to get our content there, and it's mainly in the media space like broadcasting, and we want to put it on the iPhone.'"

Microsoft issues takedown notices over spilled COFEE

Microsoft has been issuing takedown notices for publicly hosting its leaked Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE) tool. The company sent off "Demand for Immediate Take-Down: Notice of Infringing Activity" to companies hosting websites that offered the tool. The e-mails all start with the following standard statement: "Microsoft has received information that the domain listed above, which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted works published by Microsoft."

Microsoft-Yahoo search/ad deal approved in Australia, Canada

Australia and Canada have both approved the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo search and advertising deal, making them the first regulators in the world to sign off on it, giving Microhoo two fewer antitrust authority groups to worry about. "Microsoft and Yahoo! have been notified that Australian and Canadian authorities have separately concluded their reviews and have no objections to our proposed search agreement," the two companies said in a joint statement. "We continue to believe that this deal will create a true, competitive alternative in the marketplace that will benefit consumers, advertisers and publishers. We remain hopeful that the agreement will close in early 2010." The United States and Europe are still evaluating the proposal and have not yet reached any final decisions.

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