There is a reason for information security and best practices. Ignoring things like setting strong passwords and having an account lockout policy will have perilous consequences. Just ask the 10,000 applicants to Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who had their personal information, including their social security numbers, uploaded to Bit Torrent. That data [...]
By Mark O’Neill Despite the proliferation of file storage sites on the internet such as Dropbox, I am still a bit of an old fashioned geek at heart and I always end up emailing big files to people by zipping them first. But old-fashioned as I am, I am also paranoid, so I always encrypt [...]
By Mark O’Neill Thirty-seven years ago, Ray Tomlinson sent a message of random letters from one computer to another using software called “Send Message Program”. In doing so, he unleashed e-mail upon the world. Since then, his baby has grown by leaps and bounds – 2 million emails sent per second, the transformation of global [...]
By Mark O’Neill It seems that American teenagers these days are terrified of logging onto Facebook and finding one thing. Nope, it’s not finding out that they’ve been slaughtered by a ten year old at Scrabulous but instead finding out that that Dad has sent them a friend request! Oh shock! Horror! How will you [...]
By Mark O’Neill Serge Nicaudie asks : I have a Blackberry and one thing I would love is the ability to speak into it and it would write an email for me. Like a dictation machine. I also want to use it for quick notes to remind myself about stuff. Can you see if there [...]
By Mark O’Neill I am normally rather wary of anything coming from AOL, but I have to admit that their free little music desktop widget, which runs on Adobe AIR, has impressed the hell out of me. It’s a nice little program to have running while you’re surfing away on the net. If you download [...]
By Mark O’Neill The thing about instant messaging programs such as Pidgin and Skype is that their sounds suck. Their chat services may be the best thing since pop-tarts but it doesn’t take long for their sound effects to grate on your nerves. You know, the audio notifications that you’ve got a new message, that [...]
By Mark O’Neill A recent comment by Melyvn on one of my past articles got me thinking. The article was about the built-in MP3 player in Gmail and Melyvn asked if it was possible for podcasts to be delivered directly to email. My instinctive reply was “no” but then I thought “was it actually possible?”. [...]
By Mark O’Neill For the past few years, I’ve been using AVG Anti-Virus to keep my computer safe from viruses, but deep down, I’m a pretty paranoid kind of guy. Even if AVG gives a file the all-clear, I’m often left wondering, what if AVG is wrong? What if AVG was sleeping on the job [...]
By Mark O’Neill These days, with 6GB+ Gmail accounts and unlimited Yahoo accounts, email addresses are being used for more than just email. Many people email themselves backups of many things including important documents, music, photos, video files and much more. This way, they are not screwed if the original copy is destroyed or goes missing. Plus [...]
By Patrick Biz Contributing Writer, [GAS] Geeks hate listening to commercial radio on their way to work. Hollywood gossip and local news are not the types of content computer-savvy people are raving about. What if, come Monday morning, you’re in the mood for tech news? Then on Tuesday’s commute, you want home theater reviews, and [...]
There are few people who work with the Internet who understand how truly vulnerable and weak the core infrastructure really is. Nothing demonstrates this basic weakness better than the troubles experienced by YouTube over the past weekend when Pakistan, under orders from its government, put new BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) entries in one of their [...]
