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Separating the facts from fiction in the industry.

In the last few years, demand for digital megapixel cameras has exploded. The trend started in the late 1990s with consumer digital still cameras and started to gain traction in the surveillance industry in 2002 with megapixel IPnetwork cameras. Today, millions of consumer digital still cameras and tens of thousands of megapixel network cameras are being used every day.

Digital Convenience and More

Initially, digital cameras, both consumer and security IPnetwork cameras, were adopted because of their convenience. For the consumer market, it meant no more fumbling with film and the home PC made sharing pictures with family and friends quick and easy. With security cameras, the convenience of plugging a camera into your existing IPnetwork and viewing it from anywhere in the world within minutes was immediately compelling. Interestingly though, the evolution of the consumer and security markets differ substantially when it comes to image quality.

In the consumer market, picture quality was not a marketable advantage for digital over film because film cameras already had excellent resolution. In the security industry however, megapixel network cameras had a clear-cut image quality advantage from the start, since traditional coaxial-based CCTVcameras are limited to PAL/NTSC resolution. Continue reading…

If you don’t already use OpenDNS to protect your small-business network,  you should take a few minutes now to set it up. The security benefits are well worth the time investment: OpenDNS is free. It has contributed significantly to combat against the Conflicker worm, and it will protect you form any number of future attacks. As a bonus, it may help your network’s users experience better browsing performance.

Before I describe how to do this, let’s review what the Domain Name System is. Much as a phone book lets you look up people’s phone numbers by looking up their names, the DNS provides a unique-address registry for computers: Type in ‘google.com’, and DNS translates that name into a sequence of four numbers called an IP address (for google.com, it’s 72.14.207.99)

In the overall Internet infrastructure, various public, semi-public, and private providers maintain a series of master phone books, or DNS root servers, at strategic places around the world. The root servers talk to each other regularly to ensure that they remain in sync as users add new domains. If interested parties want to “poison” an entry or mis-direct Internet traffic to a phony domain, they can do  so with the right amount of subterfuge. Last year, for example, an Internet provider in Pakistan managed to block access to all of YouTube when it attempted to prevent Pakistani citizens from viewing a video it deemed offensive.

Here’s where OpenDNS comes into play. Normally when you set up your network, you don’t give your DNS settings another thought. If you have a cable or DSL modem, you hook it up and automatically gets its DNS settings from the cable or phone company’s DNS servers. Continue reading…