Travel Sentry™ certified locks / Zone Alarm, Version 5 warning

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Travel Sentry™ certified locks

http://www.travelsentry.org/

One of the annoyances of modern air travel in the United States is that you must leave your luggage unlocked. The two easy ways to get around this have been to take only carry-on luggage, or simply not fly. Neither of these has been entirely satisfactory.

Now there is another alternative. Some clever guys have teamed with the TSA and manufacturers to come up with locks that can be opened by you and by the TSA. At the moment Master Lock is making these locks, and locks can be purchased at Target and Brookstone. In addition, a number of manufacturers of luggage are developing lines that will use Travel Sentry™ Certified lock.

Now, if the TSA has the tools or combinations to open these, aren’t they likely to be obtained by criminals, too? Well, if the FBI and the CIA have problems from time to time, it is safe to assume that TSA will be no better. Nonetheless, we like to think that problems will be sporadic, and that locked luggage will still put you way ahead of the game in terms of the safety of your luggage.

The bottom line is that if your current luggage will allow use of a padlock, you might wish to get a Travel Sentry™ certified lock and travel with somewhat greater peace of mind.

Zone Alarm, Version 5 warning

Zone Labs, Inc.

http://www.zonelabs.com/ 1-415-633-4500

We have on several occasions recommended that readers use a firewall on their home computers, and have noted that we ourselves use Zone Alarm. Those of you who have followed our lead in using Zone Alarm, and have automatically updated the software as new versions came available, will have suffered some problems after installing Version 5.

We first noticed two problems: Chkdsk would not run on our C drive when we re-booted our computer after the upgrade, and Norton Anti-Virus stopped scanning incoming and outgoing e-mail. Others we know had other problems, including not only programs that did not function properly, but also the dreaded Blue Screen of Death!

We started by sending a message to the technical support folks at Executive Software, who make Diskeeper, the leading software for de-fragmenting hard drives. We knew their software wasn’t responsible for the problem, but guessed that they had heard every question possible regarding this kind of problem. They responded immediately with an explanation of what was happening, and a few possible causes, including the new version of ZoneAlarm.

Our next step was to look on the ZoneAlarm support forum (http://forums.zonelabs.com/zonelabs/), where we discovered a whole host of problems associated with version 5.0.590.015 and 50.590.043.

According to the online information, Zone Labs is aware of the issues, and we have every confidence that they will deal with them in a timely manner. Nonetheless, since they have chosen not to pull the upgrade pending resolution of the problems (see our article What companies can learn from Abu Ghraib in the June 2004 issue of ÆGIS), if you have just upgraded to version 5.0.590.015 or50.590.043 and are having mysterious problems, we recommend that you uninstall version 5 and re-install version 4.5.594.000. For users of the free version, this can be found at http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/information/znalm/zaReleaseHistory.html.

For those who have ZoneAlarm Pro, you can download 4.5.594.000 at http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/information/zap/releaseHistory.html.

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