The update can be downloaded using the secret URL you get once you have signed a distribution agreement.

Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Flash Player version 10.1.53.64 and earlier. These vulnerabilities could cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

 

Adobe recommends users of Adobe Flash Player 10.1.53.64 and earlier versions update to Adobe Flash Player 10.1.82.76. Adobe recommends users of Adobe AIR 2.0.2.12610 and earlier versions update to Adobe AIR 2.0.3.

Source: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-16.html

Wave is expected to remain operational until the end of the year at minimum. However, Google points out that the core technologies used in Wave are are Open Source and this allows for other companies or communities to continue the project.

Elements of Wave may also appear in future Google products.

The web management system allows you to manage your servers anywhere with an Internet connection, and because we know that system administrators like to holiday and keep an eye on their servers, we have also introduced a mobile phone management system, that has been tested on iPhone and Android mobiles, on top of this, in case of an emergency, network monitoring emails and text messages alerts the system administrator if a server or service has gone down.

Karoshi Linux 7 is now modular which allows the system administrator to decide on the servers and modules required, instead of having a default installation, allowing them to be able to choose if they wish to have various module and server combinations, along with choosing which TCP/IP numbers, domain name and server names they wish to have for their system.

We hope that this version of Karoshi Linux will be useful and as usual will be grateful for anyone who will test the system, even if they do not plan to use it, we would also like to hear from you, if you have any ideas or suggestions, email us at: support@karoshi.org.uk

Thanks for everyone who has supported us in the past and the future.

The Karoshi Team.

Quick Guide of whats new:

• Built on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
  
• 64bit and 32bit available
  
• Modular system - you decide on the servers and modules you require
  
• Choice of number servers
  
• Choice of TCP/IP numbers
  
• Choice of server names
  
• Choice of domain name
  
• Wide range of modules available
  
• - Email, E-Learning, Website, Proxy, Home Access, Web Filtering, Printing....and much more
  
• Administrate the servers via web management
  
• Mobile phone web management
  
• Expand the system with new servers with home areas auto copied
  
• Network monitoring with E_mail/Text message alerts
  

What is Karoshi?

In the UK, the majority of schools run a system that allows school administrators to do things such as add users, create windows profiles, change passwords, and the majority of everyday network managing things that schools need within a specially made GUI.

Karoshi does this and more for schools wanting to run Linux based servers.

Karoshi Linux - Linux based OS designed for schools.

Happy Sys Admin Day from all at EduGeek.net.

What are you doing on this special day?

System Administrator Appreciation Day

Watch this space for a set of cards you will be able to download and print out.

*And yes, we really did gatecrash SmoothWall's award ceremony (they made us 'guv), because, being Yorkshiremen (and women) they told us it was free beer!, EDIT: and Scottish but I was in less of an itch for the free

The list, published here by the BBC, details a list of all BSF projects in the country and which ones have been stopped or will continue. As a general rule of thumb, a BSF project should go ahead if the Local Authority (LA) has obtained Financial Closure. Local Authorities who haven't attained this closure have a very high risk of their BSF projects being stopped.

The debate, which ran in the House of Commons between 4.30pm and 6.30pm, was also marred by the failure of Michael Gove to supply MPs with the list of schools and their status in the scope of the BSF cuts. The list itself did not make it into the Commons Library until after the debate had started and only one copy was made available forcing MPs to queue. The result was a number of MPs standing up and "begging for information on an individual basis." Typically, copies of important documents are left on the centre table for all MPs to collect and look at during a debate.

However, amidst the swathes of budget cuts some good news was announced for Senior Leadership Teams in need of funding. A statement was made that schools suffering from dilapidated grounds would receive favourable treatment in future financial decisions. No further details were given on the statement during the debate leaving questions as to how much and who will be eligible.

To join the discussion and see more resources posted by our members, check out our BSF Cuts Thread on the forum.

The company has made an announcement that the signal bar is incorrect and showing "2 more bars then it should for a given signal strength." This means in low reception areas, the phone reports good reception even if it is barely hanging on to a signal.

The iPhone 4 has been released in a storm of controversy after Apple told it's users they are holding the phone the wrong way and interfering with the itnegrated aerial. The fix will be applied to the previous 3G and 3GS models too even though they haven't been as badly affected by the glitch.

The attack occurred at 8.45am on the 2nd July at Park Campus school in West Norwood. A gang of youths waiting in a car chased the schoolboys into nearby Gipsy Road, killing one and stabbing the other in the arm as he tried to get back to school grounds. Staff came to assist but the murdered pupil was declared dead after arriving at hospital.

Police have made three arrests and the attackers are not believed to be related to the school.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/10488819.stm

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/local/streathamnews/8251904.Schoolboy_stabbed_to_death_after_fight/

I arrived at about 3:15pm by which point where already at least ten people had assembled and conversation had already turned to the Home Use Program that allows for registered staff to download a copy of Office 2010 Professional Plus to install on their home computers for only $10 while the school is covered under a Volume License. Under this agreement staff are not limited to solely work related use of the software and as their agreement is with Microsoft directly the school no longer has to worry about being required to remove the software from staff computers if they leave. The best bits of this are that this is free to the school to setup, easy for teachers to use and does not require any technician time to implement.

Over the hour and a half long presentation a lot of ground was covered by the presenter Paul Conroy all of which was in the form of live demonstrations using the actual software. It was a quick overview of a selection of the features that makes Office 2010 a great step forward, the presentation also covered some of the extensions available for both 2010 and 2007. For the purposes of clarity in this write up I have re-ordered some of the features to group them all together by the product that they relate to.

General Features

Some of the improved features are universal and available and useful across all of the Office suite. The first of these is the new graphics handling engine, this has the ability to easily grab screenshots by active window or by cutout selection using the screen clipping feature. There are also live art effects available throughout enabling you to reshape using auto shapes, colorize using filtering effects, and apply transforms like tilts and 3D buttoning effects along with automatic background removal. This allows for users to do lots of the cleanup and editing on graphics that would previously need a separate application from inside the document with live previews. Integration of these features throughout means that all of this processing is accessible from Word, PowerPoint or even Outlook.

Printing has also had a major overhaul, the print dialogue is now replaced with a full screen view that includes a print preview to show you how your document will look when printed. Simply forcing this has got to save reams of paper a year. This page also includes many of the printing features that can be customized including paper size, margins, zoom options and even stapling and duplexing options if your printer supports these. This further integration removes most of the need for digging into the printer properties which are organized differently between different types of printers.

Document handling has also gained a few usability updates, from the File ribbon option you can now select the recent tab which allows you to pin both files and folders allowing you to quickly get to the places you need to get to often. Coupled with the separate ability to pin recent documents within the Windows 7 ribbon this makes for a very efficient way to just right to documents that you use all of the time.

Outlook

Outlook 2010 has also benefitted from a large number of improvements most of which are geared for dealing with correspondence as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is especially useful for those who deal with a large amount of emails daily but also benefit those with smaller inboxes by allowing them to clear them more quickly. The conversation view is now the default grouping emails by sender and allowing for a more coherent view of correspondence with each person or group of people. There is a new conversation cleanup feature that will take a large group of replied to emails from one or many people and compress them down to two email, one with the entire back history of the conversation and the other with just the latest reply. There is also a related feature which lets you ignore a conversation entirely which will automatically move any new replies to the deleted items folder.

Quicksteps are a new feature that allows you to create little automated tasks that can be triggered right from the ribbon like forwarding the selected email to a group of people with a single click. Templates are now better supported with the Quick Pass feature located under the Insert tab, this allows you to store and use multiple email templates quickly.

Meeting requests have also had a revamp, when you receive a meeting request you are now shown a small snippet of your calendar of the time covered by the meeting request so that you can easily and instantly see whether you are free and can attend. You can also reply to an email with a meeting request directly from the ribbon cutting out a step or two from dispatching the required responses. Multiple calendars can now be viewed side by side or even overlaid on top of each other letting you quickly see when multiple people have open time.

Word

Word now has an enhanced equation editor allowing you to add properly formatted complex mathematical formulas into your document easily from the ribbon. This feature is fully integrated into the ribbon making it much more user friendly than the old method of inserting a Microsoft Equation Editor object.

The research features allow you to quickly translate selected text using the online Live translation service in addition to the usual thesaurus and dictionary tools. There is a much better find feature that can show results in context showing a small selection of the text surrounding the search term. The navigation pane has also received an upgrade and allows you to easily move large blocks of text around the document.

Formatting restrictions are another new feature allowing you to force certain fonts and styles, these restrictions can be enforced within a document or over an entire domain with Active Directory.

Publisher

Publisher has joined the future and gained the full ribbon interface, along with the enhancements bundled throughout the Office suite there are lots of new templates available. You can also upload these to Microsoft to share with others which should lead to a very large repository of templates that can be used.

One of the most interesting new features demoed was the ability to mail merge a graphically heavy publisher document to email and have it send off fully HTML compliant emails to each individual recipient.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint has some of the most visible and useful enhancements making it much more able to create modern looking presentations including all sorts of media and distribute it to your audience. The first big feature is vastly enhanced video support. This allows you to easily insert video files, crop out just the time section that you want and apply the same transforms available for images. This means that you can reshape, recolor and even apply 3D effects to videos. These are automatically embedded into the pptx file so this limits portability issues. A built in compression and compatibility option is now included that will quickly and easily shrink down the content to sensible sizes for distribution and publishing, this can also change some file formats for maximum compatibility. There is also a feature that allows you to add videos directly from the internet from sites like YouTube that allow you to embed their content. This feature just embeds the clip as it would on a web page meaning that you do need an internet connection to play it and cannot apply the same effects that you can to a natively embedded file.

The options for packaging your presentations and showing them have been expanded with the options to save the whole show to a video file including your voice annotations, save directly to live drive or SharePoint. Possibly the most interesting new way to publish your presentation is the new online broadcast feature. This lets you present live to people all over the world by broadcasting the slideshow – without video and the fancy slide transitions – in standards compliant HTML in real time. This means that anyone with a web browser can view your show as in real time as you click through it. It does not yet handle broadcasting of your voice but with something like Skype or a conference call this can be overcome.

Editing has also been improved and now allows you group slides together allowing them to be easily arranged and moved about. Copying of slides from one presentation to another has also been improved and now no longer bleeds the theme of one into the other. Other improvements allow you to deal with complicated slides easier by using the Selection and Visibility option under the Arrange ribbon to selectively show and hide elements to make working with large groups of layered elements much more simply. The animation painter allows for easier management of larger amount of animations letting you copy and paste animations between elements.

Link to part two->

It is located on his blog or available as a download from his site.

By changing the DNS settings on either the router or connected devices to point to FamilyShields servers users will benefit from protection similar to that found in schools. Filter lists are constantly updated so users are always protected.

Detailed instructions are available on their website including the details on how to update a large number of different brands of routers.

After a quick dig around my Orange Livebox it would seem they don’t allow users to modify their DNS settings so went down the route of changing the details on my laptop. 5 minutes later and I was protected.

As a quick test I typed the word porn into goggle and I must say I was impressed. From the first 5 pages only 1 site got through. Even going further down the search list and clicking random links proved fruitless as FamilyShield notified that the sites were blocked. I then tried the old favourite, web proxies and got the same blocked message.

Now add to that phishing" websites and virus-spreading malware websites and you have a service that an excellent first line of defence to keep porn and malware off your computers.

I will be recommending this to all staff and parents in the schools I support, not to mention adding it onto staff laptops and hopefully reduce the number of malware infections.

OpenDNS Blog Post

FamilyShield Website

The software that provides an all in one solution goes far beyond just setting and enforcing power policies it provides a number of useful reports on what each policy is doing and what money you are projected to save.

The most useful feature of the software however is to be able to see a breakdown of when a machine was off, when it is being used and more importantly when a machine is on but not being used by anyone.

Another useful feature is the machine shutdown and startup component of the software. While there are a number of solutions that do this already one of the ‘killer’ features is the smart shutdown. This means that if a process is running or is using more than a specified percentage of memory or cpu it will halt the shutdown until that PC is ready.

The current government has already said it wants ‘to be the greenest government ever’ which means local authorities will have even more targets and consequently there will be even more pressure for schools to look at how to make sure that IT is managed in a greener way. Verismic is just one way schools can start to look at the green IT agenda.

Attached is the letter and joint release.

If you wish to get further details or comments from EduGeek.net then please use following contact details.

--*

Russell Dyas

Tel UK 020 8133 4179

Tel UK Mob: *07884071535

Tel US 240 764 47 07

SkypeID: rdyasuk

russelldyas@edugeek.net

EduGeek.net - The Front Page

Naace Press Release Joint Statement 220610 v1 0.pdf

Letter_to_Mr_Gove_Naace_22_June_2010 v1 0.pdf

The service is free to use and requires a Windows Live Passport login. Testing today did reveal LA filtering succesfully blocking the social media aspects of the Live service while still allowing the documents feature to work (though SkyDrive itself may be classed as Open Resource Sharing for some LAs).

We are primariliy there to meet up with our US visitors and counterparts to find out why, considering we are on of the largest tech support sites in the world, and certainly one of the largest and most successful online communities, we still don't get much interaction from our US visitors\members.

US traffic accounts for the second largest group visiting the site with (out of a total of 844,792 unique visitors per month) 211,395 compared with the UK's 289,099 and we are very curios to see just what we are doing wrong.

So if you are a regular lurker on the site and are going to the show please pop over and see us on booth 1484, which we are sharing with SmoothWall, and we'l see if we can give you some freebies in exchange for your comments.

We shall also have a live webcam on the stand (we'll take the Mobotix once I get it reconfigured), so you can see Shaun and I getting hot and bothered throughout the day, but please remember there is a 7 hour time difference, so it won't be going live until about 15:30 GMT from Monday to Wednesday.

However, Sophos have reported that the malware detection only works on downloads from the Internet and does not cover all the various items of Mac-oriented malware currently in circulation. The article also showed a video of malware being succesfully run from a memory stick without any of OSX's in-built protection picking it up.

So while threats from the Internet appear to be covered by Apple, steps still need to be taken to protect Apple-based computer labs from other avenues of attack.

I have to start off by thinking Ruckus for having EduGeek at their Big Dogs conference in Marbella (and even one of our members was there as a guest of another company!) and getting to meet all of their staff from Selina Lo (the CEO) David Callisch (VP of marketing and MC of the event) right over to GT Hill (who likes to be called, simply, ‘GT’) their resident wireless uber techy whose personality and presentation skills are amazing. Trust me, anyone who can make understanding wireless that simple whilst getting a huge amount of technical information across at the same time is a very valuable person indeed. Just done try and get in front of him in the lunch queue!

I originally flew out from Blackpool at about 7am on Wednesday leaving cold rainy Lancashire to land in Malaga 3 hour later in cold rainy Spain. The weather and temperature were identical to where I’d just left. A bit unnerving that. I met up with Scott from Ruckus UK and Mark Power from Net-Ctrl at the airport and from there we had a minibus waiting for us. Once we got to the hotel 45 mins later we checked in. Well, they did. My room was still being occupied, and I had to wait 2 hours before I could move in. At 6pm Ruckus hosted a cocktail party with canapés as an opportunity for us all to mingle and get to know each other. The majority of people at the event we Ruckus distributors, resellers and installers as well as a mix of people like me who’d been asked to present on a raft of topics. It was a mistake having a free bar for 5 hours mixed in with food that was either hit or miss. In fact, some of it was very miss indeed, and Mark and I spent some time playing ‘dare’ with the food to find out just which was edible and which was not. It was also nice to bump into Joe from CPL who arrived much later than everyone else, and by the end of the evening had taking in more beer than was good for me and less food than was required to keep the beer in check and went to bed.

The next morning I had a sort of breakfast (in fact I’d got my timings wrong and was the first awake), and everyone else got a bit of a lie-in which I sorely needed. The weather had started to improve and at 9am the conference got underway. After the introductory speeches and housekeeping we were treated to Talks about large scale wireless roll outs in areas such as hospitals, the Marriot Hotel chain and other areas, followed by GT storming the stage with his presentation before lunch (you know when it’s lunch, because GT lets you know!) and break-out sessions in the afternoon. I chose ‘The ins and outs of 802.11n’ and ‘Smarter wi-fi best practices’, both of which provided me with masses of information and cleared up a lot of misunderstandings I’d had with wi-fi.

That evening we were treated to a meal at a hotel in main Marbella (our hotel was next to Puerto Banus, a millionaire’s playground, look at the pictures on Google Earth!) where they had to unfortunately cancel a planned beach BBQ at the last min because the weather still looked iffy. Still, we had a great sit down meal where I misidentified the pickled asparagus as being part of a dolphin’s anatomy. Still, with more free drinks and a coach dropping us off at Puerto Banus I had a couple of more drinks and took myself to bed by midnight. I was lucky; some were out until 5am! Whilst I do like a drink, I’m not a night-owl and like to get at least some sleep each night.

The next day was my presentation, entitled ‘Building Schools For The Future’, but considering this is now the least favoured of 3 options under the new govt I had to completely re-write it at the last minute, so whilst I kept the title (we had to really as it was on all of the agendas) I also found that my 45 min slot had been reduced to 30 mins, so some frantic last minute pulling of slides took place ,but it went down well. I explained that managed, high capacity wi-fi was the future for many UK schools, particularly primaries, and given that primaries out number secondary’s at approximately 3-1 it will be here that the UK education sector will see the take up of these technologies most. I also spent several minutes showing some slides of the types of schools most typically found in the UK and had quite a few people afterwards thanking me for that as it took them back to their school days! I actually waffled more than I should have and my 30 min session that I wanted to speed though at 20mins (+questions) took 35mins in all and was followed by a Ruckus version of ‘Ask the admins’ but with actually having all of the admins (senior management) in the room. It was quite striking how close the Ruckus event was to how we run out conferences actually, with it being very informal, lots of chances to meet and mingle and it being greased by alcohol and food. I have to admit though, the food at our conferences is better; this is no fault of Ruckus, just the hotel we were in which they had no control over. It was very fortunate Ruckus was there or else I wouldn’t have any internet connectivity at all. The hotel had 3 open wi-fi networks that sometimes allowed you to connect, but never gave any internet access. This was, apparently, down to the fact that lots of people have iPhones and Android phones and they simply run out of IPs and bandwidth constantly and have done nothing to alleviate the problem, the same goes for mobile phones and data roaming where I simply could not connect to any data services, even when they were visible. Southern Spain really needs to sort its life out!

Saturday was spent hunting for presents in Marbella’s old town and then meeting\networking in the afternoon, followed by watching the England match in the evening (it would have been nice to come home on a high!) then checking out the next day to fly back. I must take this opportunity to thank Mark Power for sharing his taxi to the airport with me (a £70 ride) and I flew back last night to Blackpool.

All in all, it was a very worthwhile trip and I got a very important message across about wi-fi in UK schools and where it is going. The entire Ruckus team, from Selina through to their UK and European teams are extremely approachable and not at all structured like the larger companies out there. In fact they work much the same way we at EduGeek do and take a lot of time to ensure they are not a faceless corporate money making machine. They listen, they make themselves available, and judging by some of their future products they showed us (which I can’t tell you about just yet) they have paid attention. So thank you Ruckus. And I’d really like to do this again next year.

If you set your desktop background to a shared background for example of the school logo you will notice that if you change that image (keeping the same path) desktops wont be updated with the new background until you log in and out. This limitation means that you cant easily say have a image with server status or lunch time bulletin unless you accept this limitation until now.

EduGeek Refresh Desktop will actually send the simple windows api at set periods which forces windows to reload the background image which means you no longer have this problem.

It supports several switches such as time interval etc and I personally have been simply creating a hidden shortcut in our redirected start menu to launch it with the required switches.

The program itself is miniscule and also the source is available (its really just a few lines to call the api and check a couple of reg keys) if you want to augment it or just have a nosey.

For us, it cured a unique problem and I thought others may have use for it too.

If you have any problems please report them in the project forum under Forums->Projects->EduGeek Refresh Desktop.

Enjoy.

The EduGeek Logon Tracker allows you to:

• Limits concurrent logins to 1
  
• Uses MS SQL database for storage of tracking data
  
• Web based frontend for reporting and searching
  
• Web based login spy for real-time login tracking
  
• Web site securable with one line change
  
• Very easy to deploy and use
  
• Support for Windows 7 & Server 2008
  

For a more complete description please see the slideshow from the conference for now until the projects site is updated. We will be posting downloads later in this article.

Conf Presentation: http://www.edugeek.net/files/conf2010/chorley/edugeeklogontracker.pptx

Download V1.00 Beta: - <a href="http://www.edugeek.net/redirect/edugeek/1" ref="nofollow">Click Here</a> (1.2mb zip)

Instructions are inside each folder.

NOTE: some browser (chrome) have issues downloading the file, please right click->save as if your having issues.

FAQ's

Q: Does it recognise that a user has not logged off correctly?

A: Yes, if the user logs back on to the same PC a mesage is logged to the database saying the user did not log off correctly and the session is reset, however if they logoin to another PC they would still be prompted that they are logged onto the other PC do they want to log it off?

If, however, another user logs onto the first PC before the original user logs back on the sessions are reset, with messages posted to the database about the activity that has taken place.#

Q: Can it allow more than 1 concurrent logon, i.e. for staff?

A: Not at the moment but it is very easy to change this so it can, if we get enough requests for this we can get this added.

Q:Can this run on CC3 Networks?

A: We have fully tested this in live school environments running vanilla 2003 / 2008 networks and are confident in its working, as we do not have access to CC3 we have not tested and would look for feedback from users of this type of network on its ability and if required we can makes changes if there are any issues.

Q: How do we deply this to client PCs?

A: There is no deplyment to clients required as this is a zero footprint application.

Q: Can the tool be customised?

A: The website and the scripts are fully commented and broken down into blocks that allows for full customisation of message logged to the database and those that are displayed to the user. However to put thois in place requires minimal changes for it to run out of the box.

Whether you have found a good resource website, needed some help with updating your schools logo or have something to you want to share with the community then this is the forum for you.

We will be moving any current posts that relate to graphics in the coming days. We hope members will find it useful.

Thanks again for all the hard work.

Enjoy all

Now I guess that some of you think theres a catch, well there is. Firstly, you have to be a Ruckus customer/user, and secondly you have to pay for your own flight over there (circa £100 return from the UK). So if you want to meet the Ruckus guys, Net-Ctrl and EduGeek get yourself over to the Ruckus Big Dogs Conf registration site here: Big Dogs Conference and register your interest.

I shall also be asking you for some case studies to include in my presentation of how you rolled out your Ruckus wireless networks, what challenges you faced and how you overcame them, so watch out!

Edited to add, a big thank you from EduGeek to Ruckus HQ in the US for the invite to our members.

Conference2010 - Wiki