Wireless AutoSwitch, had a record breaking year in 2011 selling over one hundred and fifty thousand licenses. That's more than double the previous year. Revenue in 2011 alone was responsible for over half the total revenue since 2007 (the first year of public sale). As a matter of fact for the last four years each year's sales and revenue has been double the previous year. And the success continues as over twenty thousand licenses have already been sold in just the first half of January 2012.
In 2011 there were eleven Enterprise Unlimited Usage licenses sold, representing 30% of total revenue, and there are already three sold in 2012. For clients with over 4000 laptops there is the Enterprise Unlimited Usage license. It allows unlimited usage of Wireless AutoSwitch XPV in the enterprise regardless of the number of installations. The majority of companies buying this license have well over 4000 laptops.
We just wrote a variant of Wireless AutoSwitch that some may like and find useful. It is called Wireless AutoOff. The function of the application is to disable all wireless by default regardless of LAN connection and only allow the user to manually request the wireless to be turned on, and this is only allowed it if there is no LAN.
- There is only one mode (what would be Mode 2 in Wireless AutoSwitch).
- The application starts and finds all wireless cards and disables them, regardless of the machine being on LAN or not.
- There is a shortcut created under "Start Menu - Wireless AutoOff" called "Wireless On-Off" (during installation you can choose to have the shortcut created on the desktop as well).
- If the user is on the LAN and clicks this shortcut they get a message displayed that this is not allowed while on the LAN.
- If the user disconnects the LAN and clicks this shortcut then the wireless is enabled.
- The moment the LAN is reconnected the wireless is disabled.
- If the user is not on the LAN and wireless is enabled, clicking the shortcut will disable all wireless.
The unique thing is that the user doesn't have to be an admin of the machine. The application is installed as a service and runs under the local system account. Clicking the shortcut sends a signal to the service to do a particular action and the shortcut app can be run by a non-admin user.
Try it out and let us know if there is any interest: http://www.wirelessautoswitch.com/Public/Wireless_AutoOff.zip
There is no manual yet but will be available soon. If there is interest or questions please email us at sase@wirelessautoswitch.com.
I can't tell you how many times I had people tell me this product wasn't needed. You can do it this way or that way. Or my favorite from an IT Manager: "any IT person worth his ‘salt’ can do it in a couple of minutes". If I listened to these people I would never have created the product, never put it to market and many many companies would be wasting time and money having technicians running around manually configuring wireless cards, when there are more important things for them to do.
These days it is very easy to answer the nay-sayers, I simply tell them how many licenses I have sold and to how many companies across the globe. The proof is in the numbers. They change their tune right away. These are unimaginative people that do not understand innovation and efficiency. In this day and age there are very few things that should be done manually.
They are not all bad people, just people that need to be convinced and shown the proof (beware there ...
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Ever have someone say this to you? The fact is if we didn't keep reinventing the wheel we wouldn't be where we are today. Can you imagine driving a car with wooden wheels? Progress requires reinvention as well as new inventions.
I understand the saying really means don't recreate the exact same thing that already exist, but most of the time people are just trying to make something better or cheaper not recreate the same thing that already exist. Then there are some cases where someone doesn't know that the same thing exists and believe they are just creating something anew. Is there anything wrong with either of these cases?
Creation and recreation is always valuable and should be encouraged, if nothing else you gain experience or come up with a different way to do something; it only becomes an issue if it wastes time and money (someone else's). But if you believe in something and can do it without costing someone else time and money then go for it.
Today wi ...
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Competition is good for both a business and its customers, especially for the customer. Competition drives a business to innovate and work harder to get and keep customers. Competition allows customers to get the best price and product for their money. So for the customer it can be great, but not always for the business that cannot compete. A business that does not innovate and continue to compete will soon go out of business and well this is not good for them or the customers (it removes a choice).
Then there is the price war. This is where companies drop prices as a method of competing; this is designed to draw customers away from the competitor. Sometimes a company makes a drastic drop in price to try to corner the market or just get back in the game. This only works if both companies are on similar ground with similar products. If the product was not competing well before because it just didn’t fill the customer’s needs, then no amou ...
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We have just released Wireless AutoSwitch XPV 1.5.4.9. We have added two new feature in this release:
1. DHCP Release - Now, just before the wireless card is disabled a command is sent to release the DHCP address of that card. This will help reclaim IP addresses when the user is going from an internal wireless to the LAN. This only happens when going from wireless to wired. We cannot know when the LAN will be disconnected so this is not possible when going from wired to wireless.
2. Now when using the Wireless AutoSwitch On-Off shortcut (available only in Mode 1 and 3) to stop the Wireless AutoSwitch service all wireless cards are turned on if they are disabled. In the past using this shortcut only stopped or started the Wireless AutoSwitch service and left the wireless card in whatever state they were in.
Wireless AutoSwitch can be downloaded from any page on this site from the "Download - Latest Versions" box or www.wirelessautoswitch.com/Public/Wireless_AutoSwitch_XPV.zip.
As always you are downloading the full production version that is pre-populated with a trial license key that give 30 days of free usage. Customers that are licensed for Wireless AutoSwitch XPV can download and use this new release under the original purchase with their permanent license key.
Recently we have noticed an increase in Government and Military usage of Wireless AutoSwitch. In the last month we have been contacted by several military organizations interested in purchasing licenses and have sold 6,000 licenses to these types of organizations alone.
The US Army started using Wireless AutoSwitch back in early 2008 (they certified it for use) and we are contacted by different military and government organizations (in and out of the US) from time to time for a quote and purchase. But in the last month there has been a sharp increase in interest. I am curious to know what triggered the increase, but nonetheless we are happy to see increased adoption by military and government bodies.
Corporate espionage is a far more serious and wide spread problem than at any point in the past and with the huge storage potential of even the tiniest of media it is now vital that corporations lock down their data security with the right combination of policy, IT support and threat awareness. Both laptops and wi-fi are major points of attack which require IT policies that address these potential vulnerabilities before problems happen and fault analysis after problems to make sure any issues are correctly fixed and prevented from ever happening again.
There are a number of methods to improve laptop security, the most obvious of which is a robust password policy and to educate employees about what is a strong password and concepts of password use. This means having a minimum password length and complexity that is enforced, along with changing the passwords after a set period of time to limit the vulnerability window of any undiscovered loss of security information. Teaching workers not to reuse a password and not to use the same password for multiple tasks as this is often used to escalate the seriousness of an attack, gaining access to a peripheral system before moving into more insensitive core systems. Ensure that laptops have a strong BIOS password and that the security provided by the manufacturer is strong. As with mobile phones there are now more sophisticated technologies available for dealing with lost laptops such as GPS tracking and remote wipe.
Engrave or tag the laptop in a way that displays the company name and contact details so that any lost laptop has a far greater chance of being returned to your business if it is left on a train or at a conference for example.
Choose an operating system that provides data security and make sure it remains regularly patched to close vulnerabilities as soon as they are discovered. This can be greatly enhanced with the addition of full disk encryption which will make lost data far less of a liability as if it is properly protected it will not be possible to discover what the data says.
Wi-fi signals can often be picked up far away from where the network or laptop is placed, allowing people outside a company to snoop on transmissions and potentially intercept passwords and sensitive data if the network is not properly locked down. They can also connect to laptops with the wireless card turned on and gain access to the corporate network. Good wi-fi security requires an encrypted protocol be used along with passwords and preferably an allowed list of devices with assigned IPs to add an extra layer of security. Make sure the security is up to date as even some encrypted protocols have now fallen to decryption attacks based on the processing power of a graphics card repurposed for number crunching. Most companies ignore the risk of the wireless cards on laptops so it is also important to turn off wireless cards when they are not in use.
In an increasingly security conscious world this is becoming a vital part of any IT provision for large organisations, especially those with commercially sensitive data or databases of customer details which would be a major breach of trust to lose and result in extremely bad press for that company. Every aspect of the corporate IT infrastructure from desktops to servers to laptops and mobile phones must be carefully considered for its security implications as more of these devices become ever more interconnected to make data as available as possible within the company to its employees.
In a previous blog I talked about free software. I want to take a moment to highlight some of the free software I use and love. Both of my websites SaseShamInc.com and WirelessAutoSwitch.com are run on DotNetNuke which is absolutely great. Of course I have bought modules and skins for my sites but the core platform is free.
I have already mentioned Notepad++; I use this as my primary note taking and typing platform, and occasionally I will edit a script with it. It is very versatile and I have replaced the default notepad with Notepad++.
I do a lot of repetitive typing (typing the same thing over and over again) like answering a quote request or sending out licenses after a purchase and for this I use AutoHotKey to speed things up. I simply type 3-4 letters, hit the space bar and an entire phrase or paragraph is typed out in a second. It saves me a lot of time.
If you want to disable wireless if cable is plugged in on Linux then here is a possible solution: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=91542