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WebMaster Incorporated Newsletter
November, 2009
IN THIS ISSUE:
INTRODUCTION
It has been quite some time since our last news letter -- almost
three years. During that time we haven't been relaxing, but rather
we have laid the groundwork for some new product technologies
that we're now just rolling out. So bear with this long newsletter
as we have so much ground to cover.
Our new software will enable our customers to share files, implement
practical, safe and secure backup and directory replication, and
also to have a secure, platform-independent cryptographic file
system. And once you've used the software, we are sure you will
agree that it will change how you think about file sharing, backup
and encryption.
NEW PRODUCT RELEASES
DRIVESHARE 1.0 HAS BEEN RELEASED
DriveShare is exactly what the name implies, a product that allows
you to securely share directories on your hard drive with others.
You can have your documents directory at home available to you
at work as a drive letter or shortcut, making it easy to edit
and print documents in either location. Or you can share your
pictures directory with family and your music directory with friends.
But, perhaps most exciting is how DriveShare transforms your Internet-enabled
cell phone to a full-fledged file browser for your files, and
makes USB memory sticks or portable hard drives irrelevant.
Whether you're at home or on the go, DriveShare gives you easy
and secure access to your files through a built in web server,
and it works even if you are behind a NAT firewall by fully integrating
with our Rendezvous web service.
DriveShare, when used with Rendezvous, will give you access to
10MB of storage space on our servers using your community nickname,
and Rendezvous will enable a 30-day, two connection trial for
the server. This should allow you and an associate to try the
product and see all the benefits that true file sharing gives
you. You can, of course, just use the community web server which
is available to all of our community users. DriveShare does not
require any license to connect to the community file server.
Currently there are versions of DriveShare available for Windows
XP/Vista/7 and Linux with Mac OSX due to be released in about
a month.
Unlike other specialized file-sharing software, DriveShare is
designed for everyone and it's available at a price that everybody
can afford -- $49.00.
For more information about DriveShare please see the DriveShare
product page: http://www.webmaster.com/driveshare.htm
CONFERENCEROOM 4.0 HAS BEEN RELEASED
DriveShare is not the only product we focused on. We also focused
on releasing an update to the very successful ConferenceRoom 3.5
release. Now at version 4.0, ConferenceRoom still offers unmatched
reliability, performance and ease of use. Important upgrades include:
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Improved Proxy Checking:
Proxy checking speed has been improved. Also, some situations
that could cause the proxy scanner to malfunction have been
fixed.
Integrated Flash Policy Support:
Adobe introduced support for Flash Policies which could
cause the ConferenceRoom Flash-based chat applet to fail
to connect to ConferenceRoom. The 4.0 release of ConferenceRoom
includes fully-integrated support for serving appropriate
Flash policy files to the chat applet.
Secure Port Overload:
ConferenceRoom has supported SSL/TLS encryption to ensure
that communications between a client and the server cannot
be intercepted. With previous versions of ConferenceRoom,
a separate, dedicated port had to be used for secure connections.
With ConferenceRoom 4.0, your server can be configured to
accept unencrypted and encrypted connections on the same
port.
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The 4.0 release of ConferenceRoom will be made available free
of change for users of ConferenceRoom 3.0 and above.
Finally, the 4.0 release of ConferenceRoom will only be available
for Windows, Linux and OSX. We are deprecating the FreeBSD and
Solaris builds and those will no longer be supported. Make sure
to try 4.0 prior to asking for support assistance on ConferenceRoom
as we will only be support this version.
WEBMASTER NEWS
We are really excited to be introducing DriveShare. It's a technology
that we have been using internally for over two years to do just
about everything related with file sharing and file management,
from collaborating on documents and source code, to managing our
websites, to playing MP3s and movies on our mobile media devices.
We know from personal experience that with DriveShare, once you
start using it, you will wonder how you ever got along without
it.
We would also like to take a moment to thank our community users
who have spent many hours testing and using the product. Without
these people, their feedback and their intense dedication and
patience, we could not have produced such a robust and capable
product.
To prepare for the new product releases and community services
we will be provided, we have invested heavily on our infrastructure
and completely revamped our server facility. This isn't the first
time we have done that. When we first started the company, we
needed a room full of large, unwieldy server machines. Over time,
we upgraded to newly available "slim" servers, which
took up just a fraction of the space of the older behemoths. Now,
we have upgraded again, to blade-based solutions, which will allow
us make much more efficient use of our network center and offer
many more exciting services. One such feature, that is available
now is Rendezvous.
WEBMASTER COMMUNITY
RENDEZVOUS
With Rendezvous, WebMaster helps solve the issue of dynamic IPs
and restrictive firewalls without requiring complicated network
setup procedures or employing workarounds. And, best of all, using
Rendezvous is simple.
You just register at WebMaster for the service and enter your
email address and password on the server and client. The server
will automatically detect when you need assistance to make a connection,
and use Rendezvous to establish the connection.
For DriveShare, this means that you can view and access shares
on a system whose IP you do not remember, or which is behind a
firewall and cannot accept incoming connections.
You don't even need to be on a computer that's actually using
DriveShare. After you enable Rendezvous support in DriveShare,
you can simply use any browser to go to http://rv.webmaster.com
and you just have to log in with your email address and password
to be presented with a list of all DriveShare servers that are
making shares available to you.
With DriveShare and Rendezvous you are, literally, a few mouse
clicks away from your files. You can get to your data from anywhere,
at anytime, and from any browser. With DriveShare and Rendezvous
you can get at your data on your terms.
CHAT
Chat was and continues to be in our DNA: we have a very long
history in the chat market, being the oldest company on the Internet
that provides chat servers. At the core of this, has been our
own chat network, on which the stable and high-performance servers
that we offer today were built and tested. The chat network is
run by a very dedicated group of volunteers who work hard to make
your chat experience the best it can be.
You can chat online by pointing your browser to http://chat.webmaster.com/.
If you have registered for a Community account, you can your username
and password, otherwise you can chat as a guest.
FORUMS
We also have a full set of forums available to our users to complement
the real-time time chat. On the forums you can discuss just about
anything and interact with some very opinionated people that enjoy
nothing more than a spirited discussion.
Additionally, you can get online support for all your WebMaster
products by browsing through the support forums.
Go to http://forums.webmaster.com/
to access the Community Forums from any web browser and log
on with your community account to start using the forums today.
BLOGS
Your community account also gives you access to the blog section
of our site, giving you a free and easy platform for sharing your
thoughts with your friends and family or with the world at large.
Just go to http://blogs.webmaster.com
and get your own blog started.
USERS SITE
The users site is available to everyone who registers for a free
community account and allocates 10MB of disk space to be used
in any way you want. You can use DriveShare to manage files, and
view them through any regular web browser. If you use the free
blog available to you, then you can host images, music or other
content that you want to post on your blog on the users site.
Extra space will soon be available for a small fee.
PROFILE
You can easily manage all your WebMaster Community settings from
by pointing your browser at http://community.webmaster.com/userdb
site. You can log in using the e-mail address you used when you
created your community account or the nickname you have selected.
This new centralized control panel for settings makes it easier
to configure your account exactly how you want to with point-and-click
ease.
UPCOMING PRODUCTS
REFLECTIONS
Ever wished that your data could be in more than one place at
one time? That you wouldn't have to worry about updating your
remote backups manually? That you had all the benefits of a backup
system but the convenience that comes with your data being accessible
at more than one location - and better yet, if you change it at
one location it will update all the others, no matter how many
there are? Reflections allows you to mirror or copy your data
from one system to another or several systems almost instantly.
With Reflections, you can create and maintain identical copies
of your data on one or more remote computers regardless of whether
it's on your local LAN or across the Internet. Reflections uses
the proven and secure transport mechanism of DriveShare to connect
the computers together. So you can have your data duplicated at
your office, a friend's house or your vacation home.
WebMaster will also shortly be providing offsite backup services,
giving you 10GB of data storage on our high-capacity, high-performance
RAID servers. So you can reflect your User directory to your office
or another system or have it reflect (copy) to WebMaster's servers.
For more information please visit the Reflections product page
at: http://www.webmaster.com/reflections.htm
CryptoFS
CryptoFS is a product that gives you the benefits and security
of a file encryption system with all the benefits of a full disk
encryption system. Just enter your password and your selected
partition/disk will mount onto your system. This lets you use
all the operating system tools to interact with your encrypted
files without losing security. CryptoFS is simple to use and,
better yet, platform-independent and completely portable. If you
get a new computer simply copy your CFS files to the other system
and you'll be on your way.
CryptoFS (CFS) is a cryptographically-secure and portable filesystem
designed from the ground up to meet stringent United States Federal
standards. CFS is essentially a file system that stores file data
and structural data in a secure database. The filesystem is presented
to the operating system using the operating system's native file-sharing
capabilities, essentially creating a network inside your computer.
The operating system can mount a CFS filesystem in much the same
way as it would mount a filesystem on a LAN, seeing the CFS filesystem
as if it was a Common Internet File System (CIFS). All operations
that the operating system can normally perform on CIFS can be
performed on CFS.
For more information please visit the CryptoFS product page at:
http://www.webmaster.com/cryptofs.htm
PRODUCT TIPS
DRIVESHARE 1.0
Create Groups of users by going to the Users and Groups area
in DriveShare. You can create groups that contain almost any type
of user. Friend, Work or Family: This is a very easy way to manage
access to your shares.
CONFERENCEROOM 4.0
SSL/TLS stands for Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security.
This basically means the data passing between you and the server
is encrypted. This is very similar to going to a secure website
(https://) -- where you see the lock icon appear in the status
bar.
This feature allows you to pass encrypted data between you the
server, making it more secure. Eventually encryption will most
likely be required to use operator commands for added security.
Here are the instructions to setup SSL for mIRC (version 6.14),
a very popular IRC client:
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1) You will first need to download and
install some files before attempting to use SSL on mIRC.
Here is the latest windows version: http://www.shininglightpro.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html
2) After installing that, you will need
to run mIRC (or restart it if you already had it running).
3) Go to the options in mIRC and edit the server profile
you used to connect and change the port to: "+994"
- Exactly like that. It must have the + before the 994 to
work.
4) Click connect, a security alert will popup explaining
about the certificate file. This is OK, simply click "Always
accept this certificate" and then click Accept and
you will not see it again.
5) /whois yourself after connecting and you should see YourNick
Encrypt 128 in the status window.
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GENERAL INFORMATION
You are receiving this newsletter either because you are registered
with WebMaster Community or you have specifically requested to
be added to our mailing list. Note: If you are receiving this
e-mail more than once, you have more than one email account going
to the same address. We encourage you to log into your community
account and modify the email preferences.
UNSUBSCRIBE INFORMATION
To unsubscribe you can log into your community account and set
the account to no longer send email.
CORPORATE
INFORMATION RESOURCES
Contact Information: http://www.webmaster.com/about.htm
Support: http://support.webmaster.com/
Updates: http://update.webmaster.com/
Privacy Policy: http://www.webmaster.com/legal.htm
Anti-Spam Policy: http://www.webmaster.com/antispam.htm
Comments can be emailed to newsletter@webmaster.com
LEGAL
This newsletter is for informational purposes only. WebMaster
assumes no responsibility for its accuracy, and the information
is subject to change without notice. Any use of, or actions taken
based upon, any of the information contained in this newsletter
is done entirely at your own risk.
Copyright © 1995 - 2009 WebMaster Incorporated
May not be reproduced in whole or in part without express written
consent of WebMaster Incorporated. WebMaster, ConferenceRoom(r),
Scribe, Envoy, DriveShare, CryptoFS, Reflections and FlashBack
are trademarks of WebMaster Incorporated. All trademarks are copyright
of their respective owners.
Prices and specifications are subject to change without notice.
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