Leverage

I used to love watching "Hustle" on AMC, but alas, the powers that be pulled the plug. Granted, if you missed two seconds you could lose track of the whole deal for that week. Now we have "Leverage" on some other station, similar but slower paced, takes less concentration. If you haven't seen either, they are con-artists-gone-good, helping victims out-scam the scammer. With recent events what they have been, there has been some wishing for someone like this to intervene.

But there's more than one type of leverage, and learning to use all the tech out there to its best advantage is one. For me, minimize devices and maximize interchange is the key. This provides both time and fiscal optimization, and can be a lifesaver. Google and Android provide a lot of seamless and time saving options for busy lives and small businesses, and these options are getting better it seems by the day. Of course, with Google pulling the plug on their 411 service, makes me wonder if using some of their features like Voice to their fullest extent might not leave a person high and dry down the road if not enough users are on board to continue the service. But with the numbers of Gmail addresses out there, we can be pretty certain that isn't going anywhere.

Another form of leverage I just learned of goes along with Gmail. Everybody has heard at least once by now to always keep a "spam" address on hand that you never have to check, then just use it for stuff you know is gonna get you on lists of the junk. There's a site that now offers truly disposable, and still green whoda-thunk-it, email! 10 Minute Mail is just exactly that, email for 10 minutes, then it's gone, self destructed like a Mission Impossible cassette, and after that the messages bounce! So next time you are logging on to a site that says you have to supply an address that they are going to use to send your login stuff to, but you really don't want the junk you know is going to follow, head over and snag a toss-out address to toss them. Later, if you want a more permanent connection, go for it.

Time is money for us all, and using it wisely can be leveraged with good tools. Have fun!

Best Practices

Best Practices is a term for using your computer in the safest way, the least chance of loss to either you or it. There are so many scams and cons out there, some coming in through email and some in other forms, that adopting a safety first attitude should apply to all you do.

I am quite focused on that right now due to recent events in my own family. A family member received a phone call from someone impersonating another family member and using names and details that we can still only surmise the origin of. The caller claimed to have been arrested in Canada, and needed help being bailed out, and of course under the duress of the moment, and subsequent calls from "law enforcement" in Canada, was convinced of the authenticity of the call and wired money. Lots of money. None of which, I am sorry to say, will ever be seen again.

Or other common scams that are being seen recently like pop-ups claiming to be able to clean your computer if you pay. Guess what? You just paid to be infected. Then there's always the infected email link or attachment that nails you.

The so called "grandparent scam" has been going on for years, and my first guess is that lots of information is being harvested from social networking sites. Be ultra aware of what you post. Assume thieves are reading it and using what they find. Set it to only allow trusted others to access the information. For emergency phone calls, use a password the whole family knows. Then stick to it. The people on the other end are either family members that will understand or crooks who will move on.

For anything that seems odd, either a phone or computer attack, GOOGLE IT!!!! Like Solomon said so long ago, there truly is nothing new under the sun. Someone out there has had a similar experience and put it out there. Knowledge is a powerful defense, but gotta have it to use it. So pause before you run out to wire the money, or click the link, or open the attachment. See where the email is from, write the person and find out why they sent it. They may know nothing about it. Scan the attachment, mouse over the link and see where it is really taking you. If people are calling you asking what the attachment was for that you didn't send, get your computer cleaned up immediately if not sooner. Just be careful. If crooks want it badly enough and are willing to search enough places, imagine the kinds of information they can gather and make sure not to help them do it. Please.

World Wide Web or Wild Wild Web?

I am sometimes astounded myself at the sheer level of malevolence in the world. The scams, greed, and sheer nastiness toward others that some forms of life are capable of. I have recently witnessed complete computer meltdowns due to an attack that came through a cute little widget that some people just really enjoyed using, and heard about and personally witnessed internet scams and greed that just make my skin crawl. Remember when Charlie Brown used to say ARRRGHHH!!

What, you may say, does that matter? If you just said that, go back to what you were doing. Just leave this page and go read something else. Seriously, leave. If you were more like, right on, I remember, and poor Charlie, then read on, you have my permission ;D

See, the way I approach life and the world and work is that I want to be useful. By definition that means leave it better than you found it. When you leave the woods, take your trash and somebody else's. You KNOW there's some there, and don't pretend you didn't see it. Keep your nose in your own business, your mouth shut when it's not yours to tell, and just be generally respectful. Help when you can, say if you can't and charge a reasonable amount for the service. Is that so bad? Or, so hard?

Just For Kicks

There's a new free PC game! Steam, an online game platform, good graphics and many fans, has lots of games out there for pay. Alien Swarm is their newest release, and this one is free. From their site: "Alien Swarm is a game and Source SDK release from a group of talented designers at Valve who were hired from the Mod community. Available free of charge, the game thrusts players into an epic bug hunt featuring a unique blend of co-op play and squad-level tactics. With your friends, form a squad of four distinct IAF Marine classes."

Security

Jaunted down to a security conference in Denver and finally started hearing the things from a security provider that I have been thinking for a long time should be pretty standard. Trouble is, it just isn't. Or hasn't been if you don't have the manpower and money to monitor it 24/7, and let's face it, even the government can't keep people out, so if you get a really dedicated hacker, they will weasel in.

But what if we could actually tweak the open source option and see what we could come up with for the small business that just wants to KNOW that all is well? Sounds like a rabbit trail we might go hopping down here pretty soon. My own linux guru and I might just see what we can see and then how and if it would port over to Windows. Keep ya posted!

Firefox

Recent events have reiterated to me the greatness of Firefox. What is Firefox, you ask? Well, I am sure out there is some sort of track of the lifeline but I can't really find it anywhere. Not that I really looked all that hard, mind you. But anyway, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, there was an operating system that didn't build in a web browser. Yeah, I know, hard to believe, but it happened. And there were little programs like Pine that took care of email if you could do without the graphical interface.

Then we only had 2400 baud modems, Compuserve and AOL. 3 miles to school, uphill both ways, you know the story. One day, this guy Marc Andreeson decided there needed to be a web browser for the people, a VW for the internet. He developed and released Netscape. I actually paid for Netscape Gold many moons ago, and I'm sure lots of others did, too, 'cause old Marc (I say old, he was a kid) became the wealthy prince.

Well, the king of Computerland didn't like that so much so he made Internet Explorer, and it never worked as well as Netscape, but more important, was less popular. Internet users already had a VW, they didn't need a Corvair. The justice department hauled the king into court for antitrust over the way the king had tried to force IE into all the machines in Computerland. The prince won and the king had to make substantial changes in his plans to rule the world. The prince sold Netscape and went off to another land, a wealthy young man.

About the time it was sold, Netscape spawned Mozilla, another train of thought about how web browsers ought to work. Mozilla allowed email to be a separate function for several reasons, security and overhead being chief concerns, and Mozilla morphed into Firebird which was renamed Firefox. Fast forward to now. (sound effect, the little whirring VCR noise, ready . . . ?)

Web attacks . . . that was really the point all along. Did you know that you don't have to do anything these days to end up infected? Browse the wrong web site, that's it, go on I dare ya'. But only if you have Firefox. It is doing something against that kind of thing, building a safebrowsing system that will warn you if a site is known to have been hacked. In researching problems, infections, and the like, I inadvertently run into lurkers but I have not yet become a victim. Bottom line, even if you have only heard of it recently, don't let that fool you, it's been out there longer than IE in some form or another. And I'm really glad.