Nota Bene

Ok. Let’s solve – not the trickiest – but still not the most trivial of tasks.

This year for Christmas I’d like a new laptop – a better, tougher one. I’ve only had the one I’ve got now a little over a year, but with my business schedule and the computer’s constant use and abuse, it’s on its last legs already. It looks tatty, and the keyboard feels like it’s going to fall apart. So, yes: I need an upgrade…

But what device should I get? Crikey. Where to start? Ah yes – at the beginning: with my requirements…

My user requirements aren’t too convoluted, but then again – they’re not mere email/ messenger/ Instagram/ Pokemon, either. Here they are:

• Office, email, browser, different editors and messengers;
• It needs to be able to withstand an intensive workload;
• I’d like a bigger screen than the norm (13″+);
• A full-size keyboard would be good too.

Straight away that rules out smartphones and tablets, and it looks like a mid-size laptop is the way to go.

But which operating system? Well, the list of options isn’t that long these days: Windows, Mac, Linux.

Every system is good – in its own way…

Read on: It turns out there is no choice…

And now for something completely different and non-industrial. In fact just the opposite – something about both natural and man-made beauty. Why? Here’s why…

Not long ago, somewhere (I can’t recall where) I came across the phrase ‘the most beautiful country in the world’. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but the old unconscious appears to have logged it for a future revisit. Oh that subconscious.

A few weeks later, sure enough, I was compelled to revisit it, and had a look on the Internet about this, and of course I found various lists of things like ‘The Top-10/20 Most Beautiful Countries in the World’. Thing is… most of it seemed to be talking through its hat, seemingly written by folks who’ve never been to Latin America, Central China, Kamchatka or the Kuril islands.

I admit, determining which are the prettiest countries in the world is tricky: beauty is a subjective thing, and that means that the criteria you use will also be subjective. I mean, what criteria should or could you use?

But, well, I’ve got a bit of a head-start on this – with my Top-100 Must-See Places in the World. With this list you (here – I) can calculate levels of beautifulness… but taking into account the sizes of the territories! This is so we get the ‘most beautiful overall’ instead of the ‘quantity of beautiful places in a particular country’.

Privyet all!

I’m lying low in MOW at the mo, but that doesn’t mean life comes to a standstill – far from it!

While I sit here in my office looking out the window at the falling snow, over in China, in the city of Wuzhen, the annual World Internet Conference is taking place (which I was at last year). And this year the organizers have decided to give awards to the best (in their opinion) cyber-projects. And guess who featured among the winners?!

Here’s congratulating all project members! Our solution for protecting industrial installations and critical infrastructure – KICS – won the award for ‘World Leading Internet Scientific and Technological Achievements’, alongside Tesla, IBM Watson and Alibaba!

The contest was entered by 500 companies, and we were in among the 15 winners – and the only one from the IT security field.

Ok, you’ve seen how the steel gets transformed from red hot slabs into pastry-thin sheets at the Novolipetsk Steel Plant already. Next up: the cold-rolling and polymer coatings workshop…

Rolls from the hot workshop are brought here and unwound onto conveyor belts and then shuffled about here and there and subjected to various technological processes to increase the steel’s quality, among other things.

Read on: Steel is everywhere…

At last – we’ve done it!

I’ve anticipated this day for ages – the day when the first commercially available mass market hardware device based our own secure operating system landed on my desk. And here she is, the beaut.

This unassuming black box is a protected layer 3 switch powered by Kaspersky OS and designed for networks with extreme requirements for data security.

And there’s plenty more in the pipeline where this came from too, meaning the tech will be applied in other Internet-connected bits of kit, aka the Internet of Things (IoT). Why? Because this OS just so happens to be ideal for applications where a small, optimized and secure platform is required.

Read on: Distinctive features…

Despite the wholly non-sterile conditions inside the Novolipetsk Steel Plant, on the outside you’d never know there was a mammoth industrial complex nearby. For the management take the ecology of the surrounding environment veeerrryyy seriously.

The above slide says: ‘More than $1.1 billion invested in ecology in 15 years. Lipetsk – the cleanest metal-producing city in the Russian Federation’. And you can probably guess what those figures in the clouds mean: the level of air pollution, with Lipetsk having the lowest level/number – 3.4.

Indeed, several years ago they decided to take air pollution really seriously here and cut it drastically – and it looks like they’ve done a good job of it. For dotted all around (inside) the complex healthy-looking trees grow. So healthy-looking that one visiting foreign delegation asked of the cedar trees ‘how often do you replace them?!’ Turns out they were never planted and all grew themselves of their own accord.

Read on: Swan lake…

Hi Folks!

Meet David, the magnificent masterpiece sculpted by Michelangelo at the start of the 16^th century. A photo of his face with that curious furrowed brow featured on our very first anti-cyber-vermin security product at the beginning of the 1990s. Some thought the pic was of me! I still don’t see why; I mean, have you EVER seen my face clean-shaven… and as white as a sheet? )

The choice of David for the retail box was far from random: we found we were kindred spirits – both very much underdogs. KL was a small young company from nowhere throwing down the gauntlet to global cyber-malice in an established international security market; David was the small young guy throwing down the gauntlet to the giant Goliath.

Throughout the years the boxes have changed, but one thing that hasn’t is our… Davidness.

Fate threw plenty of obstacles in our path that could have easily seen us off, but we persevered, hurdled those obstacles – often alone – and became stronger.

To everyone’s amazement we gave users the best protection in the world and became one of the leaders in the global market. We took it on ourselves to fight patent trolls practically alone, and are still successfully fighting them. (Most others prefer to feed them instead.) And despite the rise in parasites and BS-products, we continue to increase investment in true cybersecurity technologies (including true machine learning) for the protection of users from the cyberthreat avant-garde.

Thus, with just a ‘sling and stones’ we slowly but surely keep on killing Goliath ‘saving the world’: regardless of the geopolitical situation, and from any sort of cyberattacks – regardless of their origin or purpose.

And now, fate has brought us a new challenge. And not only us: this is also a challenge for all computer users and the entire ecosystem of independent developers for Windows.

Read on: David vs. Goliath, ver. 2016…

Hi folks!

I told you the Novolipetsk Steel Plant is gargantuan, right? So it makes sense my report and pics from a visit thereto wouldn’t fit into just one post. Therefore – you guessed it – herewith, part two!…

All righty. 15 million tons of steel – that’s how much exactly? I mean, so ordinary Homo Sapiens can get their heads round it? Ok – here’s my attempt at quantification for the masses…

Now, you see the bright orange block in the following pic? It calls itself – would you believe it – a slab, and it weighs between 25 and 35 tons. Thus, 15 million tons of steel would be…

…~500,000 such slabs. Half a million. Still can’t picture that? I’ll try something else:

A cube of iron weighs 7.87 tons (steel weighs 7.85; that is, about the same. For present purposes the difference is insignificant). So, 15 million tons will be around 1.9 million cubic meters. And that will be a huge chunk of steel 100 meters across, 100 meters deep, and 200 meters high. And that would be like a 50-story skyscraper made out of solid steel. Or a square cube 125x125x125 meters. You getting a handle on the size now?

Read on: Slabs Like it hot…

So, boys and girls – how many of you have been to a steelmaking plant? A show of hands please…

Well, I’d not been to one either, but dreamed of doing so for a very long time. I wanted to have a look at the whole process, even if from a distance. To see how they load ore and coke into the blast furnace, hear it sizzle and fuse, and see the liquid metal getting poured to form red slabs of metal at thousand-degree temperatures to be rolled on the mill. I knew some of the theory and terminology, but had never seen the magic happen first-hand.

As if you couldn’t guess… finally – it came about! Our respected corporate customer Novolipetsk Steel invited us to Lipetsk for a look around!

In the early 2000s I’d get up on stage and prophesize about the cyber-landscape of the future, much as I still do today. Back then I warned that, one day, your fridge will send spam to your microwave, and together they’d DDoS the coffeemaker. No, really.

The audience would raise eyebrows, chuckle, clap, and sometimes follow up with an article on such ‘mad professor’-type utterances. But overall my ‘Cassandra-ism’ was taken as little more than a joke, since the more pressing cyberthreats of the times were deemed worth worrying about more. So much for the ‘mad professor’…

…Just open today’s papers.

Any house these days – no matter how old – can have plenty of ‘smart’ devices in it. Some have just a few (phones, TVs…), others have loads – including IP-cameras, refrigerators, microwave ovens, coffee makers, thermostats, irons, washing machines, tumble dryers, fitness bracelets, and more. Some houses are even being designed these days with smart devices already included in the specs. And all these smart devices connect to the house’s Wi-Fi to help make up the gigantic, autonomous – and very vulnerable – Internet of Things, whose size already outweighs the Traditional Internet which we’ve known so well since the early 90s.

Connecting everything and the kitchen sink to the Internet is done for a reason, of course. Being able to control all your electronic household kit remotely via your smartphone can be convenient (to some folks:). It’s also rather trendy. However, just how this Internet of Things has developed has meant my Cassandra-ism has become a reality.

Source

Read on: The phantom ransomware menace…