* LATEST SMALL BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY COLUMN:

Where the leaks are
The folks at Altiris, acquired earlier this year by Symantec, recently invited me back to their ManageFusion user conference to participate in a panel discussion about security.

The other panel members included my old friend David Strom from magazines past, Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates, and John Sawyer, part of the University of Florida IT Security Team (Sawyer wrote about our discussion here). Steve Brown from Altiris drew short straw and had to keep us all focused.

To read Gaskin's column in its entirety, please click here.

* LATEST SMB NEWS NOTES:

Good Web PR
Take a look at this nice article called Ten Ways to Generate Good Web PR from PC World. None of the ideas are brand new or secret, but writer Becky Waring did a good job organizing good tips and explaining how Web PR will help even the most local of businesses. That's always a problem for small local businesses: how to use the World Wide Web to get customers for, say, plumbers in Pittsburgh.

3Com Speeds Up
3Com finally arrived at the gigabit Ethernet party being thrown by small businesses everywhere. Although lagging behind other SMB favorites such as Linksys and Netgear and even HP, at least 3Com appeared.

Update Chaos
Microsoft, atypically, admitted here they aren't sure why their automatic update program continues to spawn weirdness in some PCs. This gives me the same feeling I get when my doctor says, "hmm, that's interesting" while looking at my test results. I don't want interesting, I want confidence.

Spotting E-mail Scams
The folks over at PCWorld have created a nice picture tutorial about scam e-mails and how to detect them. If you're a network administrator, you'll see little new, but more casual users may be fooled by some or all of the sample e-mails.

James Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area.