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• Alan: Speaking of other browsers born in the research lab, DARPABrowser was developed as part of a research contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. If JavaScript were disabled, do you think Chrome could offer the same level of security? Adam: The DARPABrowser has very different security goals than Chromium. For example, the DAPRABrowser aims to limit the damage a compromised rendering engine can do while displaying an honest Web page. Worrying about these threats ends up making the privileged component as complex as the rendering engine, and it's not clear how much security that buys you. Alan: Let’s move onto commercially available Web browsers. How is Internet Explorer’s “Protected Mode” different from what Chromium does? Collin: Protected Mode is designed to protect local files from being overwritten by an attacker who exploits a browser vulnerability. This is a good start--it makes it harder for the attacker to install malware. But the attacker can still read all your files. There is a lot of important stuff on the file system and that's why the Chromium architecture is designed to protect the confidentiality of files as well. Alan: Opera has made a big deal about supporting NX bit and ASLR. These are also features supported by IE8. Are they also implemented in Chromium? Adam: Yes.  Chromium uses NX, ASLR, and StackCheck. Alan: While Mac OS X Leopard offers less security features than Windows Vista or Windows 7, it offers better safety because there are fewer threats. Dino A. Dai Zovi made the analogy of leaving your front door unlocked; whether or not you are safe depends on where you live. What are the technical challenges of implementing Chromium’s sandboxing on other operating systems, such as Mac OS X or Linux? Adam: Mac OS X has a powerful built-in sandboxing mechanism that Chromium can use to sandbox its rendering engine. My understanding is that there are some challenges with drawing to the screen in a multi-process application, but I expect the team will find a clever solution. Different distributions of Linux offer different sandboxing mechanisms, including SELinux and AppArmor. The Linux team is evaluating which of these best fits Chromium's security needs.

• Now we’re getting to the real administrative meat. Notice that the Home tab of admin.microsoftonline.com shows you subscribed to Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, with both services showing as healthy and all features available. You still haven’t enabled Office Communications Online or anything else, but the first thing you should do at this point is establish a second admin account. If anything takes the admin away from the office, the business still needs someone with full privileges on hand to run BPOS services. Dig into the Users tab and select the User List subtab. Under Actions, click Add new user. Note: While writing this article, we found that this step worked fine under Internet Explorer but stalled under Google Chrome. Those software requirement specs are serious. The new user wizard asks you to input contact info, select whether to give the user admin privileges, then select an Exchange mailbox size. (The default is 5GB; the maximum is 25GB out of the 100GB allocated to a Standard subscription.) Once you click to create/finalize, you’ll find that one license has been deducted from your available license count. You’ll also see the new admin account shown on the User List, and clicking on the Display name will let you go in and make any contact or setting changes you please.

• The “Lifeline” operating system from EMC that comes with the Intel SS4200-E leaves us with mixed feelings. On one hand, the NAS device is easy to set up and use. On the other hand, it’s almost too easy—enthusiasts will be forced to sit through some of the features intended to dumb-down network storage, like automatic RAID configuration. Automatic RAID Configuration Once the Intel SS4200-E is connected to the network, the baseline configuration is done by the "Intel System Storage Manager" program, which comes on a CD included with the device. The default setup contains, for example, a step to set a password for administrative access, as well as to enter the date and time. However the user cannot directly access the hard drive configuration. If you install two hard drives, they will automatically be put into a RAID 1 configuration; if you have four hard drives, they are automatically put in a RAID 5 configuration. In spite of the automatic setup procedure, the user can manually access the configuration of the NAS device after the initial configuration. In order to do so, you log on to the Web interface using the password created during initial configuration. Here you have to be careful, because the data on the hard drives will always be lost when the RAID mode is changed. Setting up the RAID mode and formatting the hard drives can take several hours, depending on the number and capacity of the drives. As an alternative to the RAID 5 configuration, with four hard drives, you can also choose a RAID 10 configuration. Unfortunately, this cannot be done until you set up a RAID 5 array first. Web Interface Design The Web interface is well-organized, and you can access it using Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, as well as Google’s Chrome. The PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo Wii browsers are also supported. On the start page you will find frequently-used functions, like creating user profiles and folders, creating and restoring data backups, and searching. The search function lets you find files on the NAS device that are recognized by the integrated index server. Common file types are supported: .txt, .php, .doc, .xls, .pdf, .ppt, and .html. The “Dashboard” menu gives you an overview of the system’s status. It shows free and used storage space as well as the device’s RAID mode. You have access to folder and user administration through the menu’s "Shared Folders" and "Users" options, respectively, and can find the extended configuration under the menu "Settings". Extended Configuration Here you will find settings for the power saving modes of the hard drives, an event log, group administration, as well as email notification settings (used in case of hard drive failure). To be able to use group administration, NFS network protocol support, event logs, as well as further improvements to the details, you need firmware version 1.1.11.32736. Although this version contains several improvements compared to the previous firmware version, it is still missing some crucial features: online capacity extension and RAID-level migration. If you’re running out of storage space, or you decide to switch from RAID level 10 to RAID level 5, you have no choice but to back up all of your data and restore it later. When the RAID level is changed, all data is erased. Network Management With SNMP It doesn’t really make sense that the Intel SS4200-E supports a feature that private users will never use because it is primarily employed in professional environments: the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). SNMP is used to monitor and control network elements like servers, routers, switches or NAS devices from a central location. With that said, perhaps it’d work in a small office managed remotely by a VAR.