MISCELLANY- June,2012

Here are some brief notes about various happenings in the technological world we live in:

DVDs

Blu-ray discs have been around for about six years now, DVDs remain a pretty big presence in the entertainment and storage markets. But that may be changing: Microsoft recently announced that its newest operating system, Windows 8, will drop default DVD playback support. Users who want DVD support must pay for Windows Media Center, find an alternative player, or hope that manufacturers bundle DVD software with computers.

Best Buy

Are brick-and-mortar retailers finally being beaten down by online merchants? It looks that way. In March, big-box retailer Best Buy announced that it will close 50 of its retail stores in an attempt to "think small." Best Buy plans to open 100 smaller mobile stores that will focus on phones, tablets, and e-readers--further proof that the world is becoming increasingly mobile (and that brick-and-mortar stores' days may face additional hard times ahead).

Employers Request Facebook Logins

If you've been in the job market in the past few years, you probably know that many employers check up on the social networking profiles of both potential hires and current employees. But in March we learned that some employers weren't just looking at employees' public profiles--they were actually asking for log-in information, including passwords, so they could snoop even deeper. This controversial policy piqued the interest of lawmakers, and several states have since passed legislation forbidding employers to make such requests.

SOPA

The controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that would have allowed courts to order ISPs to block access to entire Internet domains accused of infringing on copyrighted content, was all the rage in January 2012. The bill rankled the tech community, in particular, and even prompted such websites as Wikipedia and Reddit to black out their services for a day in protest. On January 20, the House Judiciary Committee postponed consideration of the bill--in effect, tabling it Indefinitely.

MAC Flashback

Mac users have finally been knocked off their malware-free pedestal, thanks to Flashback, a Trojan horse that has infected more than 600,000 Apple

computers. The malware exploits a Java vulnerability; and though Apple responded with Java updates and removal tools, the virus still plagues more than 140,000 Macs.

Google Privacy Policy Update

Privacy is always a flop when the tech industry is involved. After all, we can't have an open, sharey Internet without, well, we give up our privacy. The most notable privacy flop so far has been Google's restructuring of its privacy guidelines so that it could unify its users' data across all Google-related services. The company claimed that it was just making things simpler, but the revamp was actually a way for Google to prepare the world for its cloud-based service, Google Drive.

Facebook IPO

Facebook went public on May 18, 2012, with the price of a share initially set at $38. The company was valued at $104 billion--quite a bit for a company whose 2011 revenue just topped $3.7 billion--so it might not be surprising that the Facebook IPO sort of...flopped. At this writing, a little more than two weeks later, Facebook shares were trading at $26.90, down $11.10 from the opening price.

Based on info from Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, PC World, June 05, 2012

HAPPY FOURTH of JULY!

227 years ago...on July 4th, 1776

This great nation, the United States of America,

In a struggle for what was right and free,

Was proudly born...

May we celebrate that precious freedom

For which our forbears fought so bravely...

The freedom that is inherent

In the Stars and Stripes, our revered flag...

Celebrate Freedom

This Fourth of July!

10 Rules to Protect Yourself from Scams

Here are just a few "golden rules" that would pretty much guarantee you won't get caught in a scam?  it's important to point out that sometimes, by following these rules, you may end up rejecting perfectly honest approaches and opportunities. But the aim is to keep out of trouble. And, if you observe these rules to protect yourself from scams, adding just a dash of common sense, you'll almost certainly do that. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Don't buy or invest in something that seems too good to be true.

It's one of the oldest tricks in the book -- offering a bogus bargain that seems irresistible. Sadly, these days, you can't even trust someone you believe you should -- whether that's a "friend," a relative or an investment adviser.  They may be up to no good or they may have been hoodwinked themselves. Exception: A seller you know well.

2. Don't accept that someone is who they say they are.

Don't allow someone, whom you didn't request or invite, to come into your home. Even if someone phones to arrange a visit, always find or check their number independently. Or if someone on our doorstep says it's an emergency -- like the need for a bathroom visit or to make an urgent call -- don't let them in. Wherever you encounter them, remember that an introduction, or a business or identity card proves nothing. Nor does a vehicle with a name on it. Or a phone call that sounds like it comes from someone you know.

3. Don't spend money upfront to get or earn money.

This applies, for example, to lotteries, other supposed competition wins or inheritances, and people claiming they want to share money they won or found.  Don't pay in advance for debt restructuring, job "opportunities" or promises of tax savings. Don't pay upfront for training "kits" or supplies for work-from-home programs unless you know, absolutely that they work.

4. Don't buy (or rent) from someone you don't know or haven't checked out.

This may seem harsh but it's especially important when making an online purchase.  There are so many phony websites, door-to-door traders, contractors, directories, home rentals, etc. It's a simple matter to check them out in the phone book or by doing a Google, Yahoo! or Bing online search on the company name.  Seek references. What do others say about them?

5. Protect your confidential information.

Don't give it out in response to an inquiry you didn't initiate.  Use services like PayPal, one-off credit card numbers (from your card provider) and prepaid debit cards to limit your exposure to card fraud.  When buying online, check for "https" in the address line. If that "s" is not there, don't give any information and don't buy.  And leave your Social Security card and unneeded credit/store cards at home.

6. Don't make hasty decisions.

No matter how persuasive an offer seems or how much a rep insists you need to agree on a deal now to get a discount, don't do it!  Never agree to buy something on the spot, especially at your front door or in response to a telemarketing call.  An honest person would allow you time to think over an offer. An exception might be an advertised limited-time offer, but even some of these are phony.

7. Only donate to charities you know or have checked out.

Don't give money to panhandlers or doorstep collectors. Don't donate to store collection boxes or "tin-rattlers" unless you know for sure their cause is genuine. We encourage you to donate to charities but send your money directly to them, and then only after checking them out.

8. Use reputable security software on your PC and keep it up to date.

Opt for products with "Internet Security" or similar wording rather than straight anti-virus programs -- and preferably ones that integrate with your web browser. Regularly check that you're using the latest version and that it automatically updates its malware definitions.  Ignore pop-ups and other warnings that your machine is infected that don't come from this program. And never pay more money in response to such warnings.

9. Don't click on links and attachments in unsolicited, unchecked messages or social networks.

You can't trust the sender or poster, even if you know them. We're sure you'll be tempted to do so sometimes but if you absolutely want to avoid all risks, just don't.  Otherwise, if you really must, or it's something like an e-card greeting, write to the sender and confirm they sent it before doing anything else.

10. Don't wire cash.

Unless you're sending money to someone you know, don't use electronic cash transfer services. And never send partial refunds from "overpayment" or "secret shopper" checks you received.

Two final points:

Oftentimes scammers target children, seniors or other vulnerable people. If you have such people in your family, do everything you can to make them aware of the risks, and to protect them.

Second, you can avoid most scams just by being a natural skeptic. Start from the position that what you're being told or offered, or the web page you landed on, might be a scam; that way, you'll actually spot most of them. Then, assume that the more a person tries to convince you it's a great deal, the more likely it is a scam!

As was said, some of these rules might seem a little harsh and you might want to temper them with a little bit of common sense. But be warned: The more you do, the more likely you are to become a scam victim.

To truly protect yourself from scams, play it safe!

Adapted from Scambusters.org article #492 5/16/12 

Facebook Stores Closed

Last April, Gamestop Corp. opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered. Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney Co. and Nordstrom (JWN) Inc. have all opened and closed storefronts on social networking site. Facebook, which filed for an initial public offering in February, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores’ quick failure shows that the Menlo Park, CA-based social network doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A year ago, investors hailed so-called F-commerce as the next big thing, speculating that the company had potential to threaten Amazon.com Inc. and PayPal Inc. Facebook is the most-visited website in the world. Some people thought that persuading visitors to shop would be easy, Mulpuru said. David Fisch, Facebook’s director of business development, said in June that the site would make shopping online, previously a solitary experience, more social.

Facebook planned to profit from retailers buying ads to drive traffic to their on-site stores. Business consultant Booz& Co. predicted in January 2011 that physical goods sold through social commerce would balloon to $30 billion from $5 billion by 2015, with Facebook contributing a majority of sales. Even as some businesses shut storefronts, many companies continue to devote advertising dollars to the social network. Facebook’s sales surged 55 percent to $1.13 billion in the fourth quarter. The company aims to use e-commerce more as a way of getting users to stay longer than as a way to boost revenue, said Krista Garcia, an analyst at EMarketer Inc. in New York.

Customers had no incentive to shop at Gamestop ’s Facebook store rather than the company’s regular website because purchasing online is already convenient, said Ashley Sheetz, who is the Grapevine, Texas-based company’s vice president of marketing and strategy. “We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,”Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.” Gap , which has 5.6 million Facebook fans from its namesake, Banana Republic and Old Navy pages, opened and discontinued a storefront last year, said a company spokeswoman. The San Francisco-based company also discovered customers preferred shopping on its own sites, she said. “We will continue to evaluate if this is something we want to bring back in the future,” Nunan said in an emailed statement. Nordstrom tested ways to make shopping “seamless through Facebook” and decided on a broader social media focus, Colin Johnson, a spokesman, said. J.C. Penney featured assortments in a Facebook “shop” tab beginning in 2010, and took it down in December 2011, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

Wade Gerten, chief executive officer of social media developer 8thBridge, previously known as Alvenda, opened a Facebook store for the florist 1-800-FLOWERS. Minneapolis-based Gerten went on to develop commerce strategies for Delta Air Lines Inc. Diane Von Furstenberg Studio LP and denim-maker Seven for all Mankind. Cracks in the model showed quickly, Gerten said in a telephone interview. Clients “have taken a different approach,” shutting stores or scaling back their offerings. “It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said.“I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”

adapted from Bloomberg article by Ashley Lutz - Feb 22, 2012

Tips for Designing Visually Appealing Websites

Here are some tips and tricks for designing the most visually appealing website:

1) Plan Your Site: Before turning on your computer, consider the layout, page structure and how users will move from one page to another (navigation). Then, sketch out your site on paper.

2) Understand Your Audience: Knowing your audience will help set the tone for your content and layout, as you identify what visitors will be looking for on your site. It's also important to consider popular web browsers and your visitor's screen resolution size so that they see your site the way you intended; you can find this data in most site analytics tools. If you're not sure how wide to make your site, 960px is a great place to start.

3) Allow for Easy Navigation: Since people often read from left to right and top to bottom, the upper left-hand corner of your site is the first place your visitors will look. Place your navigation buttons here and keep them consistent, along with font and color choices, for easy reading and fluid movement from page to page.

4) Choose a Color Scheme: If you're designing your site around an image, try uploading it to a color palette tool, like DeGraeve.com's, for example, for complementary color suggestions. Be sure to remain consistent with your design patterns, and stick to no more than three font types and colors.

5) Use High Quality Photos: In order to give your site a more professional appearance, all images should be clear, focused, and of high resolution. An alternative to taking your own photos is buying them from istockphoto.com; at about five-dollars an image it's an inexpensive way to visually take your website to the next level.

6) Test Your Site, Then Test Again: When you've created or redesigned your site, ask friends and family to test it for you. They may find things you've missed, or point out areas of confusion.

When paired with quality content, executing these tips appropriately will help retain first-time visitors and transform them into youe website regulars.

Based on a Dot5Hosting newsletter 3-9-12

LIFE IN THE CLOUD

I’m sure that you have seen the term “cloud computing” in the news a lot lately. Maybe you’ve heard of Apple’s newly launched iCloud service, which stores your digital photos, music, videos, and documents on Web-connected computers. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google offer cloud-based services, too. And upstart providers including Box, Carbonite, and Dropbox provide file-sharing and backup services in the mysterious world of the cloud.

So what is “the cloud,” exactly? And can you trust online storage providers with gigabytes (GB) of your personal contacts, health and financial records, and maybe even your collection of unfinished Elizabethan love sonnets?

A little background is necessary to answer that question. First, the cloud isn’t literally up in the sky. Instead, it consists of a massive farm of “servers,” or computers. The name derives from the fact that data and software are all delivered as a service over the Internet rather than as a product that sits in your hard drive. Cloud technology isn’t new. Businesses and governments have warehoused information on Internet-connected servers for years. The big shift taking place now is that consumers are getting our heads in the clouds as well.
This change is possible because of the exponential increase in Internet speed. With the high-speed broadband to the home via cable, DSL, and fiber optic services, as well as speedy 3G and 4G cellular for mobile phones and tablets; you no longer need files to be near you to access them.
The beauty of this technological advance is that you can get stuff down from the cloud from anywhere. Want to hear a song that’s not in your phone’s meager storage? Punch in your password and there it is. Same with your tax information, email, and those Elizabethan-style poems. Another benefit—your files are easy to recover, even if your phone, tablet, or laptop is lost or stolen. And some cloud services automatically transfer, or sync, files between your various digital devices including phones and PCs.

Take iCloud, for instance. It not only backs up your files to Apple’s massive farm of servers, the service also directs digital media to other Apple devices you own, provided they’re running either OS X Lion (on a Mac) or iOS 5 (iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch) software. For example, let’s say you own an iPhone and an iPad. When you buy an ebook from Apple, iCloud automatically sends a copy of the book to each device.
As you would imagine, there’s a price tag for such benefits. Apple users start with 5 GB of free storage. That could fill up quickly. Extra capacity costs $20 for 10 GB, $40 for 20 GB, or $100 for 50 GB per year. Other cloud providers offer free storage, too. Online retailer Amazon provides 5 GB, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive offers a more generous 25 GB. Dropbox, a popular cloud service that automatically syncs files between digital devices—including Mac and Windows PCs as well as many smartphones and tablets—offers 2 GB. Box, a Dropbox competitor, gives you 5 GB. Of course, you can always buy more storage if you need it. And Carbonite, an online backup service, warehouses an unlimited amount of your data for a flat fee of $59 per year.


BUT, can cloud providers prevent data-stealing hackers and other ne’er-do-wells from accessing your files?  All of these services use strong, industry-standard encryption to encode your data, a security measure that makes your files incomprehensible to any snoops trying to access them. Of course, your account is password-protected, too.

Cloud company workers can’t access your data. As you might expect (and hope), cloud vendors take privacy very seriously. If they suffer a major security breach, their customers will flee. The bottom line: Yes, cloud storage is safe, provided you warehouse your sensitive information with a reputable firm.

The future is indeed cloudy — and that’s good news.

Adapted from an article by J. Bertolucci in the Saturday Evening Post 1-2/2012

Creating Strong Passwords

To create a strong password, you should use a string of text that mixes numbers, letters that are both lowercase and uppercase, and special characters. It should be eight characters, preferably many more. A lot more. The characters should be random, and not follow from words, alphabetically, or from your keyboard layout.

So how do you make such a password?

1) Spell a word backwards. (Example: Turn "New York" into "kroywen.") 2) Use l33t speak: Substitute numbers for certain letters. (Example: Turn "kroywen" into "kr0yw3n.") 3) Randomly throw in some capital letters. (Example: Turn "kr0yw3n" into "Kr0yw3n.") 4) Don't forget the special character. (Example: Turn "Kr0yw3n" into "Kr0yw3^.")

You don't have to go for the obvious and use "0" for "o," or "@" for "a," or "3" for "e," either. As long as your replacement makes sense to you, that's all that matters. A "^" for an "n" makes sense to me.

Other Tips
Choose something simple to remember as a password, but whenever you type it, put your fingers on the wrong keys—maybe one key to the left or right. Then a password like "kroywen" becomes "jeitqwb" or "ltpuerm." This is only going to work for non-perfectionist touch-typists. And skip this tip if you type passwords on your phone; you'll only sprain a thumb trying to be inaccurate instead of letting the inaccuracy flow naturally.

Another option is to pick a pattern on the keyboard and type based on that. For example, a counter-clockwise spin around the letter d could result in "rewsxcvf." Throw in some random caps and numbers to really lock it down.

Perhaps the easiest thing to remember is an acronym from a phrase of your choice. "We didn't start the fire, it was always burning" becomes "wdstfiwab" based on the first letters of each word.

Remember, the longer the password, the stronger it is. Always. Something more than 15 characters is very difficult to remember, but it'll be a breeze with a mnemonic.

Third-Party Passwords
If you don't trust yourself to create an unbreakable password, there are plenty of tools that will make one for you. The PC Tools Secure Password Generator, for example, makes one based on your criteria: how long, include (or don't) mixed case, numbers, punctuation, similar character replacement, etc. It even provides a phonetic pronunciation guide that you use as your mantra while typing the password, for example:

MA7ApUp# is MIKE - ALPHA - seven - ALPHA - papa - UNIFORM - papa – hash

Password Testing
If you're worried that your password of choice isn't strong enough, check it at How Secure is My Password?. The site will even tell you how long the average PC would take to crack it. For example, cracking "kroywen" would take 13 minutes, "kr0yw3n" would take about 2 hours, "Kr0yw3^" 15 days, and "MA7ApUp#" about 3 years.

You can tell from these results that mixing capital and small letters are better for strength and more characters (eight instead of seven) also make a huge difference. Adding a single capital letter to the end of "Kr0yw3^," such as "Kr0yw3nZ," boosts the crack time to 3 years. Throw another special character in ("Kr0yw3^Z!") and it jumps to 237 years.

The Right Advice is Wrong
Some experts will tell you to do a couple of things that go against conventional password wisdom. And the reasons are simple: productivity.

For example, I read a treatise on why you should write down your passwords, especially if you actually go the distance and use a unique string of characters for every log in. The amount of time you could lose trying to remember each password whenever you have to type it in may not be worth it. Just try to keep the list somewhere that's not readily accessible, such as in your wallet. A desk drawer at work is not optimal for keeping out snooping co-workers.

Related advice from a Microsoft researcher says that having multiple passwords is also not worth the effort. Or, more specifically, the indirect costs of the effort of tracking them all. That's right, that big list of passwords I just said to put in your pocket? Maybe it's not worth it.

Of course, all such worries are moot if you follow the advice above and create super-seekrit-strong passwords that you can easily remember.

Inspired by article in PCMAG by Eric Griffith 11/29/11