Balky browsers tick off tablet owners

Crashes are the top complaint from iPad Air, Fire HDX owners, No. 2 annoyance on iPad Mini, says Fixya

Browser problems are the most common complaints of iPad Air and Fire HDX tablet owners, an online community of troubleshooters said Friday.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Fixya mined 10,000 user-generated reports related to Apple's iPad Air and Retina-equipped iPad Mini, Amazon's Fire HDX and Microsoft's Surface 2, the second-generation tablet that replaced the poorly-received Surface RT of 2012, to come up with its conclusions.

Browser gripes topped the charts of the iPad Air and the 8.9-in. Fire HDX, said Fixya, while the surfing app tied for second on the iPad Mini's top-five-beef list.

Nearly a third -- 30% -- of the reported problems with the Air and 25% of those with the Fire stemmed from the tablets' bundled browsers, Safari and Silk, respectively. On the Retina iPad Mini, 20% of complaints targeted Safari, the same percentage as aimed ire at the paucity of storage space on the least expensive model.

"A relatively common issue with mobile Apple devices, especially those using Safari -- the browser that comes pre-packaged with the device -- is a crashing browser," said Fixya. "Users report that opening certain Web pages (most likely those that use [Adobe's] Flash [Player]) and opening multiple tabs on the browser can cause the browser to crash and kicks users onto the home [screen]."

Famously, Apple has never supported Flash Player on iOS, the mobile operating system that drives the iPad. Before his death, co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs was adamant about banning Flash, going as far as to publicly trash the media software in a 2010 diatribe.

But Safari on iOS is not supposed to crash when it encounters a website that calls on the Adobe software.

Fire HDX owners pummeled Silk with similar laments. "Silk ... has a variety of issues, most notably choppy performance and tendency to crash," Fixya noted.

Only the Surface 2 escaped owners' disgust with their device's mobile browser. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) is bundled with Windows RT 8.1, the OS that powers the tablet.

Instead, Microsoft customers tapped a shortage of quality apps as their No. 1 complaint, with 25% of the reports focused on the issue. Users' gripes matched those of analysts who have cited the app issue as the platform's weakest link since long before Microsoft started selling Windows 8.

Fixya recommended that iPad and Fire HDX owners regularly clear their browser's history and delete cookies to keep Safari or Silk as stable as possible. But it had no answer for the Surface 2's app problem. "App support is an issue with the device that ... users can't fix on their own," Fixya pointed out.

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Anonymous engineers claim BT gives spies backdoors to customer data

Coincidence? Bruce Schneier -- outspoken opponent of NSA mass surveillance -- leaving British Telecom

Carrier BT provides the British intelligence agency GCHQ and its American counterpart the NSA with direct access to customer data through the Internet modems it supplies, claims a 50-page document posted anonymously on the Cryptome site today.

The document, titled “Full Disclosure: The Internet Dark Age,” was originally post on Dec. 4 and reposted with updates a few days later. Its anonymous authors, calling themselves “The Adversaries,” say they are engineers in a business that supplies small office and home office networking in the United Kingdom. The document they posted goes into extensive detail about their claim that modems supplied by BT have secret backdoors that can be used both to send outgoing customer data directly to the U.K. and NSA intelligence agencies, or even to give surveillance agencies a means to attack, should that be required.

+ Also on Network World: Slideshow of NSA’s weird alphabet soup of secret spy programs and hacker tools | Debate rages: Should the NSA be reformed? +

BT spokesperson Kris Kozamchak, head of BT Global Services, would not comment on the contents of the document, but simply stated: “We comply with the law wherever we operate and do not disclose customer data in any jurisdiction unless legally required to do so.”

Also on the security front at BT, Bruce Schneier, who has held the post of “security futurologist” at the company for about eight years, is leaving the telco at the end of December, according to a spokesman. Since the disclosures in June about the National Security Agency related to documents leaked to the media by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Schneier has been an outspoken opponent of the type of mass surveillance, backdoors and encryption weakening alleged to be done by the agency and its partners, which include GCHQ. Schneier’s commentary about the NSA appeared frequently online.

Schneier could not immediately be reached for comment.

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10 top tests of 2013

Network World tested hundreds of products in 2013, but here are our top 10 tests of the year. In order to make the list, the product review had to be a comparative test of multiple products in a single category and it had to break new ground or deliver fresh insight into an important product area.

Here’s the list:

1. WAN OPTIMIZATION – JOEL SNYDER
We invited every major network optimization vendor, and ended up with seven contenders: Blue Coat, Cisco, Citrix, Exinda, Ipanema, Riverbed and Silver Peak.

Our Clear Choice Test winner is Riverbed, which excels at the core WAN optimization functions of compression and de-duplication. If you’re looking for innovation, you’ll be as impressed, as we were, with Ipanema Technologies ip|engines and Exinda Networks x800-series.

For great performance, we were again impressed with Silver Peak. And if you’re running all Cisco at the network edge, Cisco’s WAAS is a no-brainer with big benefits at moderate cost.
wan optimization

2. MOBILE DEVICE MANAGEMENT – DAVID STROM
We looked at six products: AirWatch, Apperian EASE, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10 (BES10), Divide, Fixmo, and Good Technology's Good for Enterprise. Each has a somewhat different perspective and different strengths in terms of what it can control best.

AirWatch had the widest phone/tablet/desktop support. But it also requires a collection of different downloaded apps that could be confusing to use. If you’re going the secure container route, Fixmo is a strong contender.

BlackBerry should be on your short list if your primary goal is protecting your messaging infrastructure. Good Technology is a mature product that features solid email security, fast device enrollment, extensive security policies and wide device support.

Divide had the most appealing management console and overall simplest setup routine. It features the best overall approach to MDM and is the easiest to operate, but has the most limited device OS version support. Apperian does a great job with setting up a protected app portal, but falls down on some basic MDM issues.

3. MIDRANGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS – BARRY NANCE
If your network has between 1,000 and 10,000 devices and computers, you have a midsized network. Your servers, connections and other resources suffer the same problems as larger networks, but your budget for keeping the network healthy is less than what large enterprises enjoy.

We tested six products that provide a management suite for mid-range networks: Paessler PRTG v12.4, Heroix Longitude v8.1, HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC) Standard and Enterprise v5.2, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold (WUG) v16, SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) v10.4 and Server & Application Monitor (SAM) v5.2 and Argent Software Advanced Technology (AT) v3.1, including Argent Commander 2.0 and Argent Reports 2.0.
Argent Advanced Technology earns itself the Network World Clear Choice award, edging Heroix Longitude, which came in second. Advanced Technology gave us sophisticated thresholds, a responsive user interface, accurate device discovery, time-saving root cause analysis, helpful corrective actions and meaningful reports.

4. HOSTED VDI – TOM HENDERSON
We compared hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) products from Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware and came to many conclusions, but the most important one is this: Setting up hosted desktop sessions in a BYOD world is a complex undertaking.

Our Clear Choice Test winner is Citrix's VDI-in-a-Box for its ease of integration, flexibility of both hosted operating systems and variety of clients, and its end-user experience.

VMware's Horizon View 5.2 is also very capable and can scale dramatically, but it’s more limited in both hosts (Windows) and clients served. Windows 2012 Server is good, yet requires a buy-in to Microsoft's Windows System Center Configuration Manager, and has less client flexibility.

5. PERSONAL CLOUDS – WAYNE RASH
cloud computing

A personal cloud service lets you share photos, music and documents among all your devices easily and quickly.The good news is that these cloud services are normally free for a limited amount of data. Most vendors also offer premium or enterprise versions, which allow you to store more data and to share data, which is useful in a workgroup scenario, for example.

We looked at nine personal cloud services: Apple’s iCloud, Bitcasa, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, MediaFire, SpiderOak and Ubuntu One. While iCloud, SkyDrive and Google Drive are optimized for their respective platforms, all of the cloud services work across multiple operating systems and different browser types.

There was no single cloud service that we considered a winner. All worked as advertised, all had their strengths, as well as peculiarities or annoyances.

6. LINUX-BASED SERVER OPERATING SYSTEMS – SUSAN PERSCHKE
The five products we tested -- SUSE Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 2, Mandriva Business Server 1.0, ClearOS 6 Professional, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS -- are all enterprise server versions offering commercial support options, either at the OS level or in the form of commercial management tools and support plans.

Our Clear Choice Test winner is Ubuntu, which delivered intuitive, uncluttered management tools, excellent hypervisor support, and transparency (commercial and open source versions are one and the same).

The remaining four contenders fell into two categories with Red Hat and SUSE representing enterprise-level offerings and Mandriva and ClearOS geared more towards small and midsize businesses. In the SMB segment ClearOS edged out Mandriva.

7. TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION – DAVID STROM
Relying on a simple user ID and password combination is fraught with peril. One alternative is to use one of the single sign-on solutions we reviewed last year, but there are less expensive options that could also be easier to install.

That’s where two-factor authentication services come into play. Years ago, vendors came out with hardware-based two-factor authentication: combining a password with a token that generates a one-time code. But toting around tokens means that they can get taken, and in a large enterprise, hard tokens are a pain to manage, provision and track.

Enter the soft token, which could mean using a smartphone app, SMS text message, or telephony to provide the extra authentication step. We reviewed eight services that support up to five kinds of soft tokens: Celestix's HOTPin, Microsoft's PhoneFactor, RSA's Authentication Manager, SafeNet Authentication Service, SecureAuth's IdP, Symantec Validation and ID Protection Service (VIP), TextPower's TextKey, and Vasco's Identikey Authentication Server.

8. ULTRABOOKS – WAYNE RASH
We tested eight ultrabooks, all with touchscreens and all running Windows 8 Professional. They are: the astonishingly thin Acer Aspire S7 and Asus Zenbook UX31A, the flip-screen Dell XPS 12, HP’s Envy 400t-12, Lenovo’s business oriented ThinkPad Carbon X1 and the flexible Yoga 13, the Samsung ATIV Tab 7 that transforms into a tablet, and the Sony Vaio T-15.

Our favorite, because it was the easiest to type on and the easiest to use overall was the Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1. This ultrabook has three ways to control the pointer, had the best keyboard by far, yet it was still thin and light.

If you need your ultrabook to convert to a tablet, then you might like the Samsung ATIV Tab 7, or the Yoga or Dell, which fold or flip to become tablets. Acer and Asus win points for being sexy, thin and stylish, so if you want to impress in the conference room, these might be for you.

9. SOFTWARE-BASED NAS – ERIC GEIER
Earlier this year we tested Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. Now we're reviewing software-based NAS that you can load onto your own equipment — whether it's a PC, server, virtual machine, or in the cloud. We looked at FreeNAS, Openfiler, Open-E DSS, NexentaStor, and SoftNAS. All offer some sort of free solution or service, with some being fully open sourced.

Going with a software solution enables you to select and customize the hardware it runs on to best fit your particular application and environment. For a small and simple network you could load the software on a spare consumer-level PC, or for bigger networks purchase a server or run on a virtual machine.

On the other hand, going with an appliance may be better if you aren't comfortable selecting the hardware, installing the software, and then maintaining both. Appliances are generally more plug-and-play, whereas with software solutions you have to spend some time building your own appliance.

10. OPEN SOURCE MANAGEMENT TOOLS – SUSAN PERSCHKE
We reviewed four popular open source products - Nagios Core 3.5, NetXMS 1.2.7, OpenNMS 1.10.9 and Zenoss Core 4.2. All four products are mature, have extensive monitoring capabilities similar to their enterprise-grade counterparts, and are currently updated with good community support.

Zenoss is our top pick due primarily to its intuitive and professional-grade admin interface. Also we were able to configure our environment and run reports easily, and when help was needed, we found the user guide to be an excellent resource, a rare find in the open source world.

Nagios is a good choice if a smaller footprint is desired and the infrastructure is limited in number of devices. Although NetXMS has a somewhat cluttered user interface, it boasts a rich toolset that provides a lot of granularity for infrastructure management and gets a plus for attention to mobile. OpenNMS is another powerful net management tool capable of running on most platforms and with the ability to manage a lot of data.

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7 service requests that make IT support folks cry

Every day, in organizations around the globe, the IT team supports requests that range from common usage requirements to the downright bizarre. When you work in IT, you move from one fire, to putting out to the next. But sometimes, those requests and emergencies just make one want to scream. CSO reached out to a few sources for stories about support incidents that made security managers and IT folks cry.

Help desk?
Tech support is there to help. But, as many help desk employees know, sometimes it's not the technology, but the user, who ends up creating the problem! Here are seven stories of how IT stepped in, bit their tongue, and stopped a bad situation from turning much worse.

Bad attachments
Forwarding us spear-phishing emails directly with the malicious document attached - this is what attackers want you to do.

One example: [An] email entitled "CIA Prism Watch List" with the message saying the attached word doc lists all the people who are on it (of course it's blank and rigged with an ms-doc CVE).

Port confusion
A customer was using our application, which, by default, uses three specified TCP ports, 9898, 8080, and 1169.

This customer did not want to use our stock port numbers for security reasons. That is just fine, our product supports using alternate ports for all three. Unfortunately, this customer selected TCP ports 1, 2, and 3.

These ports are "reserved" by the IANA for other uses and this choice was causing network instability in their environment. After more than a year of support calls, the customer changed the ports, but didn’t want to use the stock ports. He asked if he could just put “50” on the beginning of each stock port number, which, of course, is far too long.

Sticky reminders
When passwords written on a sticky note are left right on top of [the user's] monitor, or actually written on the laptop in permanent black marker.

Virtual headache
We, the vendor, instructed the customer to increase the memory allocated to a virtual machine appliance to avoid the issues the customer was seeing. After waiting at least a week, the customer’s virtualization department refused to increase the memory.

"The VM will not have the additional vRam added. This was a deployed appliance -which means that it was packaged originally as the virtual hardware configuration it should have and could ever need. Changing the vRam allocation could / will cause the device to become unstable."

Laptop lending
One of our sales reps went on vacation for two weeks and gave her younger brother her domain credentials to use her laptop in her absence.

How did we find this out? When she returned from vacation and tried to use her laptop, it was then unusable due to malware. We ended up rebuilding the laptop, and giving her one-on-one instruction on company policy and safe computing. In the end she still couldn't understand what she did wrong.

DVD deviation
A customer opened a ticket complaining that his file system rule was getting an "Access Denied" error, which concerned him because the folders being monitored were the same across several servers, and none of the other servers gave that error. I gave him a generic reply about checking ACLs and whatnot, and received the following reply:

"This was due to the fact that my VM machine had a virtual D: drive mapped to a DVD Drive. I have removed from this from the VM and now the baseline runs fine without any errors."

Just think what we would have received if he had a disk in the mapped drive.

Server slip-up
We were deep into a big-data issue with a customer and had spent enormous amounts of time troubleshooting and figuring out how to get the customer what he needed. Moving lots of data into and out of databases is always fun, right?

After days of removing data from a massive database I called to check on how everything was going. During the call the customer gave a sharp outcry and said, "The task stopped…the task stopped!"

We frantically started reverse engineering the problem until he mumbled, "Oh….the database server was rebooted."

Do you have a story to tell?
Tell us what IT support request left you shaking your fist (or banging your head!) by emailing sragan@cxo.com

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