Технический перевод (английский язык). Учебное пособие

Text 8. Get a Security Suite for All-Around Protection

From PC games to project management apps, we use our computers for everything from wasting time to making money. Most of us spend more and more time connected to computers, but all too few of us spare much thought for PC security. And yet, without the protection of a security suite you might find your most important documents imprisoned by encrypting ransomware. A Trojan could force your poor PCs to labor at tasks like attacking websites, or sending spam propaganda. You could find your very identity stolen. If you don’t have the protection of a security suite, now’s the time to enlist one. We’ve evaluated almost four dozen, so you can make an informed choice.

The top security vendors offer security suites that integrate a variety of features. Some stick to the basics, while others pile on tons of useful extras. Just read through PCMag’s reviews of security suites and select one that has the features you need. I’ve reviewed almost four dozen security suites and identified a collection of the best ones, of all types from simple entry-level suites to cross-platform multi-device extravaganzas.

This article briefly mentions the many tests we use to evaluate security suites and determine which ones are best. If you want more details on the torture tests we perform on every product, we review, please read the full explanation of how we test security software.

Basic and Advanced Security Suites

Most security vendors offer at least three levels of security products, a standalone antivirus utility, an entry-level security suite, and an advanced suite with additional features. Most entry-level suites include antivirus, firewall, antispam, parental control, and some sort of additional privacy protection such as protection against phishing sites, those frauds that try to steal your passwords. The advanced ‘mega-suite’ typically adds a backup component and some form of system tune-up utility, and some also add password managers and other security extras.

When a new product line comes out, I start by reviewing the antivirus. In my review of the entry-level suite, I summarize results from the antivirus review and dig deeper into the suite-specific features. And for a mega-suite review, I focus on the advanced features, referring back to the entry-level suite review for features shared by both. Your choice of a basic or advanced security suite depends entirely on what features matter to you.

Symantec is an exception to this pattern. Previously the company offered various antivirus and suite products for PC, Mac, and Mobile. All the standalone Norton products you may remember were retired a couple years ago, rolled

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into Symantec Norton Security. However, Symantec recently brought back a standalone antivirus product, Norton AntiVirus Basic.

One more thing: The suites we’ve rounded up here are aimed at protecting consumers, for the most part. You can definitely use any of them in a small business, but as your company grows, you may need to switch to a SaaS endpoint protection system. This type of service lets an administrator monitor and manage security for all your company’s computers.

Fighting Malware, Adware, and Spyware

Malware protection is the heart of a security suite; without an antivirus component, there’s no suite. Naturally you want a suite whose antivirus is effective. When evaluating an antivirus, I look for high marks from the independent antivirus testing labs. The fact that the labs consider a product important enough to test is a vote of confidence in itself. The very best antivirus products get high ratings from many labs.

I also perform my own hands-on testing. For one test I use a relatively static set of malware samples that’s replaced once per year. I note how the antivirus reacts when I try to launch those samples and score it on how well it protects the test system. For another, I try to download very new malicious files from URLs no more than a few days old. Lab test results, my own test results, and other aspects like ease of use go into my antivirus rating.

Firewall Choices

A typical personal firewall offers protection in two main areas. On the one hand, it monitors all network traffic to prevent inappropriate access from outside the network. On the other, it keeps a watchful eye on running applications to make sure they don’t misuse your network connection. The built-in Windows Firewall handles monitoring traffic, but doesn’t include program control. A few security suites skip the firewall component, figuring that Windows Firewall already does the most essential firewall tasks.

The last thing you want is a firewall that bombards you with incomprehensible queries about online activity. Should OhSnap32.exe be allowed to connect with 111.222.3.4 on port 8080? Allow or Block? Once, or always? Modern firewalls cut down the need for these queries by automatically configuring permissions for known programs. The very best ones also handle unknown programs by monitoring them closely for signs of improper network activity and other suspicious behaviors.

Squelch Some Spam

These days, most of us hardly ever see spam messages in our inboxes because your email provider filters them out. If you don’t get this service from your

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provider, it can be hard to even find your valid mail amid all the offers of male enhancements, Russian brides, and quick-money schemes.

If your provider doesn’t squelch spam, it’s smart to choose a suite that has spam filtering built in. Look for one that integrates with your email client. Client integration lets it divert spam into its own folder, and sometimes let you train the spam filter by flagging any spam messages that get through or, worse, valid messages that wound up in the spam pile.

Phishing and Privacy Protection

The best antivirus in the world can’t help you if a fraudulent website tricks you into giving away your security credentials. Phishing sites masquerade as bank sites, auction sites, even online game sites. When you enter your username and password, though, your account is instantly compromised. Some clever ones will even pass along your credentials to the real site, to avoid raising suspicions.

Steering users away from phishing sites definitely helps protect privacy, but that’s not the only way suites can keep your private information out of the wrong hands. Some offer specific protection for user-defined sensitive data, credit cards, bank accounts, that sort of thing. Any attempt to transmit sensitive data from your computer sets of an alarm. Some contract with third-party vendors to offer credit protection. And some supply a hardened browser that lets you do online banking in an environment isolated from other processes.

What About Parental Control?

I don’t penalize a suite for omitting parental control. Not everyone has kids, and not every parent feels comfortable about controlling and monitoring their children’s computer use. However, if parental control is present, it has to work.

Blocking inappropriate websites and controlling how much time the child spends on the Internet (or on the computer) are the core components of a parental control system. Some suites add advanced features like instant message monitoring, limiting games based on ESRB ratings, and tracking the child’s social networking activity. Others can’t even manage the basics successfully.

Don’t Bog Me Down

One big reason to use a security suite rather than a collection of individual utilities is that the integrated suite can do its tasks using fewer processes and a smaller chunk of your system’s resources. Or at least, that’s what ought to happen. Few modern suites have an appreciable effect on performance.

For a hands-on measure of just what effect installing a particular suite has, I time three common system actions with and without the suite installed, averaging many runs of each test. One test measures system boot time, another

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moves and copies a large collection of files between drives, and a third zips and unzips that same file collection repeatedly. Suites with the very lightest touch have almost no effect on the time required.

Backup and Tune-Up Utilities

In a sense, having a backup of all your files is the ultimate security. Even if ransomware destroys your data, you can still restore from backup. Some vendors reserve backup for their mega-suite offering, while others include it in the entry-level suite. Read my reviews carefully, as backup capabilities vary wildly. At the low end, some vendors give you nothing you couldn’t get for free from Mozy, IDrive, or another online backup service. At the high end you might get 25GB of online storage hosted by the vendor, along with the ability to make local backups.

Tuning up your system performance has no direct connection with security, unless it serves to counteract the security suite’s performance drag. However, tune-up components often include privacy-related features such as clearing traces of browsing history, wiping out temporary files, and deleting lists of recently used documents. For a dedicated system-cleaning app, read our roundup of the Best Tune-Up Utilities.

What’s the Best Security Suite?

The chart at top details ten security suites that we definitely recommend, including multi-device suites, mega-suites, and entry-level suites. If you’re looking for a suite that covers the basics without getting in the way, Bitdefender Internet Security and Kaspersky Internet Security are our Editors’ Choice winners. In the mega-suite range, Editors’ Choice goes to Bitdefender Total Security and Kaspersky Total Security, with more features than you can imagine. Symantec Norton Security Premium protects up to 10 devices, and McAfee LiveSafe doesn’t put any limit on the number of devices—these two are our Editors’ Choice products for cross-platform multi-device security suite. With a powerful, integrated suite protecting your devices, you can stay protected without worrying about balancing security against performance.

Of course, the suite you like best may not be one we’ve identified as Editors’ Choice. The three dozen blurbs below include every suite that earned at least three stars in our evaluation.

Text 9. Operational Systems

The principal reason why businesses need to create Data Warehouses is that their corporate data assets are fragmented across multiple, disparate

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applications systems, running on different technical platforms in different physical locations. This situation does not enable good decision making.

When data redundancy exists in multiple databases, data quality often deteriorates. Poor business intelligence results in poor strategic and tactical decision making.

Individual business units within an enterprise are designated as ‘owners’ of operational applications and databases. These ‘organizational silos’ sometimes don’t understand the strategic importance of having well integrated, non-redundant corporate data. Consequently, they frequently purchase or build operational systems that do not integrate well with existing systems in the business.

Data Management issues have deteriorated in recent years as businesses deployed a parallel set of e-business and ecommerce applications that don’t integrate with existing ‘full service’ operational applications.

Operational databases are normally ‘relational’ – not ‘dimensional’. They are designed for operational, data entry purposes and are not well suited for online queries and analytics.

Due to globalization, mergers and outsourcing trends, the need to integrate operational data from external organizations has arisen. The sharing of customer and sales data among business partners can, for example, increase business intelligence for all business partners.

The challenge for Data Warehousing is to be able to quickly consolidate, cleanse and integrate data from multiple, disparate databases that run on different technical platforms in different geographical locations.

Text 10. LINUX

Linux is the best-known and most-used open source operating system. As an operating system, Linux is software that sits underneath all of the other software on a computer, receiving requests from those programs and relaying these requests to the computer’s hardware.

For the purposes of this page, we use the term “Linux” to refer to the Linux kernel, but also the set of programs, tools, and services that are typically bundled together with the Linux kernel to provide all of the necessary components of a fully functional operating system. Some people, particularly members of the Free Software Foundation, refer to this collection as GNU/Linux, because many of the tools included are GNU components. However, not all Linux installations use GNU components as a part of their operating system. Android, for example, uses a Linux kernel but relies very little on GNU tools.

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How does Linux differ from other operating systems?

In many ways, Linux is similar to other operating systems you may have used before, such as Windows, OS X, or iOS. Like other operating systems, Linux has a graphical interface, and types of software you are accustomed to using on other operating systems, such as word processing applications, have Linux equivalents. In many cases, the software’s creator may have made a Linux version of the same program you use on other systems. If you can use a computer or other electronic device, you can use Linux.

But Linux also is different from other operating systems in many important ways. First, and perhaps most importantly, Linux is open source software. The code used to create Linux is free and available to the public to view, edit, and—for users with the appropriate skills—to contribute to.

Linux is also different in that, although the core pieces of the Linux operating system are generally common, there are many distributions of Linux, which include different software options. This means that Linux is incredibly customizable, because not just applications, such as word processors and web browsers, can be swapped out. Linux users also can choose core components, such as which system displays graphics, and other user-interface components.

What is the difference between Unix and Linux?

You may have heard of Unix, which is an operating system developed in the 1970s at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Unix and Linux are similar in many ways, and in fact, Linux was originally created to be similar to Unix. Both have similar tools for interfacing with the systems, programming tools, filesystem layouts, and other key components. However, Unix is not free. Over the years, a number of different operating systems have been created that attempted to be “unix-like” or “unix-compatible,” but Linux has been the most successful, far surpassing its predecessors in popularity.

Who uses Linux?

You’re probably already using Linux, whether you know it or not. Depending on which user survey you look at, between oneand two-thirds of the webpages on the Internet are generated by servers running Linux.

Companies and individuals choose Linux for their servers because it is secure, and you can receive excellent support from a large community of users, in addition to companies like Canonical, SUSE, and Red Hat, which offer commercial support.

Many of the devices you own probably, such as Android phones, digital storage devices, personal video recorders, cameras, wearables, and more, also run Linux. Even your car has Linux running under the hood.

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Who “owns” Linux?

By virtue of its open source licensing, Linux is freely available to anyone. However, the trademark on the name “Linux” rests with its creator, Linus Torvalds. The source code for Linux is under copyright by its many individual authors, and licensed under the GPLv2 license. Because Linux has such a large number of contributors from across multiple decades of development, contacting each individual author and getting them to agree to a new license is virtually impossible, so that Linux remaining licensed under the GPLv2 in perpetuity is all but assured.

How was Linux created?

Linux was created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, a then-student at the University of Helsinki. Torvalds built Linux as a free and open source alternative to Minix, another Unix clone that was predominantly used in academic settings. He originally intended to name it “Freax,” but the administrator of the server Torvalds used to distribute the original code named his directory “Linux” after a combination of Torvalds’ first name and the word Unix, and the name stuck.

How can I contribute to Linux?

Most of the Linux kernel is written in the C programming language, with a little bit of assembly and other languages sprinkled in. If you’re interested in writing code for the Linux kernel itself, a good place to get started is in the Kernel Newbies FAQ, which will explain some of the concepts and processes you’ll want to be familiar with.

But the Linux community is much more than the kernel, and needs contributions from lots of other people besides programmers. Every distribution contains hundreds or thousands of programs that can be distributed along with it, and each of these programs, as well as the distribution itself, need a variety of people and skill sets to make them successful, including:

•Testers to make sure everything works on different configurations of hardware and software, and to report the bugs when it does not.

•Designers to create user interfaces and graphics distributed with various programs.

•Writers who can create documentation, how-tos, and other important text distributed with software.

•Translators to take programs and documentation from their native languages and make them accessible to people around the world.

•Packagers to take software programs and put all the parts together to make sure they run flawlessly in different distributions.

•Evangelists to spread the word about Linux and open source in general.

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• And of course developers to write the software itself. How can I get started using Linux?

There’s some chance you’re using Linux already and don’t know it, but if you’d like to install Linux on your home computer to try it out, the easiest way is to pick a popular distribution that is designed for your platform (for example, laptop or tablet device) and give it a shot. Although there are numerous distributions available, most of the older, well-known distributions are good choices for beginners because they have large user communities that can help answer questions if you get stuck or can’t figure things out.

Text 11. GUI

Short for Graphical User Interface, a GUI (pronounced as either G-U-I or gooey) allows the use of icons or other visual indicators to interact with electronic devices, rather than using only text via the command line. For example, all versions of Microsoft Windows utilize a GUI, whereas Ms-DOs does not. The GUI was first developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, and a group of other researchers in 1981. Later, Apple introduced the Lisa computer, the first commercially available computer, on January 19, 1983. Below is a picture of the Windows 7 Desktop and an example of a GUI.

How does a GUI work?

A GUI uses windows, icons, and menus to carry out commands, such as opening, deleting, and moving files. Although many GUI operating systems are navigated through the use of a mouse, the keyboard can also be utilized by using keyboard shortcuts or arrow keys.

What are the benefits of GUI?

Unlike a command line operating system or CUI, like Unix or MS-DOS, GUI operating systems are much easier to learn and use because commands do not need to be memorized. Additionally, users do not need to know any programming languages. Because of their ease of use, GUI operating systems have become the dominant operating system used by today’s end-users.

What are examples of a GUI operating system?

Microsoft Windows, Apple System 7 and macOS, Chrome OS, Linux variants like Ubuntu.

Are all operating systems GUI?

No. Early command line operating systems like MS-DOS and even some versions of Linux today have no GUI interface.

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Text 12. EXCEL

View, edit, or create spreadsheets from anywhere. Get up and running quickly with familiar navigation and formulas, while maintaining the same formatting across all your devices. With the Excel mobile app, your Office moves with you.

Lay out your data

Organize your numeric or text data in spreadsheets or workbooks. Viewing it in context helps you make more informed decisions.

Reformat and rearrange it

As you look at different configurations, Excel learns and recognizes your pattern and auto-completes the remaining data for you. No formulas or macros required. The Tell Me search feature guides you to the feature commands you need to get the results you are looking for.

Do your analysis

Excel will perform complex analyses for you. And it summarizes your data with previews of pivot-table options, so you can compare them and select the one that tells your story best.

Get a better picture of your data

Flow into charts and graphs

Excel can recommend the charts and graphs that best illustrate your data patterns. Quickly preview your options and pick those that present your insights most clearly.

Find your best storyline

Discover and compare different ways to represent your data and your intents visually. When you see the one that shows your data best, apply formatting, sparklines, charts, and tables with a single click. A set of new modern charts and graphs in Excel 2016 help you to present your data in fresh ways.

Highlight trends and patterns

Make it easy to spot trends and patterns in your data by using bars, colors and icons to visually highlight important values. The new one-click forecasting feature in Excel 2016 creates forecasts on your data series with one click to future trends.

Add another set of eyes

Share from the cloud

Make sure everyone has the latest version by sharing your workbooks in the cloud with OneDrive or SharePoint, so others can view, edit, and collaborate. Or simply email or instant message as an attachment.

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Collaborate in real time

Once you’ve saved your spreadsheet to OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint you and your team can work together in real-time with Excel Online. As you and your team make edits and changes to your documents, the improved version history in Excel 2016 allows you to view or go back to earlier drafts.

Collaborate on shared projects

Office Online combines commonly used Office features and real-time coauthoring capabilities so teams at work and school can collaborate on shared documents, presentations and spreadsheets.

Jumpstart your design

Show your style and professionalism with templates, plus save time. Browse Excel templates in over 40 categories.

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