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Show of 4-27-2013

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Lynn: Dear Doc and Jim. Is anti-virus for my smartphone required? I have an Android. My husband has an iPhone. Sometimes we go to sites that could be considered dangerous. J We have antivirus on our desktop, but do not have any protection on our cell phone. I love to listen to the show streamed live over the Internet. Lynn in Ohio
  • Tech Talk Responds: iPhone has not been with virus yet. So the iPhone is safe for now without any antivirus. That is not the case for the Android. There are many Android attacks that have been successful. You need anti-virus on your Android phone immediately. I would recommend the AVG Antivirus FREE for Android. You can pay for additional features that protect you if you cell phone is stolen, but the free version has the AV basics.
  • Email from Margaret: Dear Doc Shurtz,  It would be so great if you can help me/others navigate Google Groups. I am looking for work as a Business Analyst in DC Metro. I did a general G search and landed on this (see attachment) –exactly what I’m looking for though a bit dated…Anyway,   I want to join this group and cannot determine from this post what G Group it is. If you can decipher and educate me on how best to use g groups I’d be most thankful.  Best, Margaret
  • Tech Talk Responds: The attachment was a search result that included a Google Group’s posting. The name of the group is written in small font above the title of the post. If you click on that name, which in this case is Dot Less, you will be taken the main group page. The main group page has a blue button to join the group. By the way, there is a business analysts group. Just search Google groups to find it. Go to http://groups.google.com and use the search function. You can join using your Gmail user name and password.
  • Email from Lauren: Dr. Shurtz, I am grateful U answered this on 4/20/13, but, you said I didn’t give U enough info, so, I am sending the document (that is in an unfinished state and won’t make sense) and I tried to reduce the Paragraph size down to 1 but that didn’t help. Only issue is Page 11–removing it. If you accomplish this, Please Tell Me what you did!!!! Most appreciated!! Lauren
  • Tech Talk Responds: I got rid of the extra page by highlighting the page and deleting. The highlighted section ha to include the end of the previous page and the beginning of the following page. I added black paragraphs to each page prior to deletion. Lauren wrote back and told me that it worked and told me I am worderful!
  • Email from Led by Brain: Dear Dr. Shurtz. Last January, I bought an iMac for use at home. However, I use MS Office at work and sometimes I need to work in the evening on Word or Excel. I was looking for an inexpensive way to access MS docs on my iMac. Seems like SkyDrive is my answer.  It is appearing I now have access to WORD in the cloud. Screenshot below. WORD that works on my iMac, sweet. Now, am I able to import/open a doc I’ve sent to myself from work that is an email attachment??  I don’t see how that is done yet. Hope you might help. Show is so helpful :  ) All the best, Led by Brain
  • Tech Talk Responds: You could install open office on your computer and work on the documents directly. It supports most of the functions. Some companies have VPN and you can log onto your computer at work from home to work on your documents. It is a thin client application.  I would recommend that you use the company SharePoint portal for group editing of documents.  If your company does not have a SharePoint portal, you can use MS SkyDrive to share documents with the group. If you can’t VPN to your work computer, you can MS Office 365, the cloud-based MS Office. You will need to get a subscription ($60 per year or $6/month). MS has a 30-day free trial. SkyDrive is free for 7GB, but you must pay to add additional storage. MS is putting this suite together to compete with Google Docs.
  • Email from Patricia: Dear Doc and Jim. I have the Bank of American banking app on my iPhone. Is it safe to use this application at an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot like McDonalds or Starbucks? Thanks, Patricia.
  • Tech Talk Responds: How do you know whether your app is using https or not? Banks should use an encrypted connection, but you are really never sure. I did check of the Bank of America application. This applications delivers mobile banking encrypted and with the added security of SiteKey and optional SafePass.
  • The SiteKey is displayed only when BoA recognizes the device you’re signing in from. If you don’t sign in from the device you told they recognize, we’ll ask a challenge question only you can answer. The correct SiteKey assures that you are logging into a legitimate BoA site.
  • SafePass is additional layer of security that lets you authorize transactions using one-time, 6-digit Passcodes sent by text message directly to your mobile phone or tablet.
  • This application has excellent built-in security. That being said, I still will not do any online banking at a hotspot. This is especially true when travelling overseas.
  • If I want to bank using my cell phone and I am at McDonald’s, I will turn off my Wi-Fi and do the banking over the cellular connection, a much safer bet.
  • Email from Alice: Dear Tech Talk, I periodically clean my hard drive using CCleaner. After running the program, my bank does not recognize me and I have to through an authentication process. How can I avoid this? Thanks, Alice.
  • Tech Talk Responds: Many banks that have a good level of security will actually have two stages of verification. On a computer that is unrecognized (in other words, that doesn’t have some extended cookie set by the site to indicate that it has been recognized), the login process may involve asking you for one or more of your security questions before it actually allows you to complete the login. Once the login is complete, then you’re given the opportunity to declare this machine is a safe computer. If you say yes, then the service, the bank, the site, will actually save a cookie on the machine. If this cookie is deleted, you have to start all over.
  • CCleaner gives you the opportunity to identify the cookies and to actually specify exceptions. Look for the BoA cookie and make it an exception.
  • Email from June in Reston: Dear Tech Talk, I am installing a surveillance camera in my basement and want the camera to send emails to my Gmail account. I have to provide the SMTP server, user name, and password. What does this mean? Love the show, June.
  • Tech Talk Responds: In order to send an email through an email service you have to use POP (Post Office Protocol). The incoming mail is forwarded through the POP server. The outgoing mail is forwarded through the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server. You need the name of the SMTP server and if authentication is used (user name and password).
  • Your ISP has provided you with a pop email account and you could use that account. In my case, I have Verizon and my SMPT server is outgoing.verizon.net.
  • If you want to Gmail for outgoing mail, you must configure your Gmail properly. You must first enable POP or IMAP in Gmail. Sign in to the Gmail web interface. Open the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab on your ‘Settings’ page, and configure IMAP or POP. After enabling this in Gmail, make sure you click ‘Save Changes’ so Gmail can communicate with your mail client.
  • Make sure SSL is active for SMTP in your mail client. Check that ‘allow authentication’ is active for the SMTP server in your mail client.
  • Verify that you’ve entered username@gmail.com.  Google Apps customers should enter their entire email address including the domain name. The password is the same as you Gmail password.
  • The Gmail SMTP server is at smtp.gmail.com.
  • If you tried configuring your SMTP server on port 465 (with SSL) and port 587 (with Transport Layer Security –TLS), but are still having trouble sending mail, try configuring your SMTP to use port 25 (with SSL).

Profiles in IT: Miguel de Icaza

  • Miguel de Icaza is a Mexican open source software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects.
  • Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City in 1972.
  • He studied at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, but never got a degree.
  • He started writing open source software in 1992 and that got in the way of graduating.
  • He first wrote the Linux Midnight Commander, a text-mode file manager.
  • He was an early contributor to the Wine project, an open-source software application that allows Linux users to run Windows programs.
  • He worked with David S. Miller on the Linux SPARC port and wrote several of the video and network drivers in the port, as well as the libc ports to the platform.
  • They both xtended Linux for MIPS processors to run on SGI’s Indy computers.
  • With Ingo Molnar he wrote the original RAID-1 and RAID-5 drivers for Linux.
  • In summer of 1997, he was interviewed by Microsoft for a job in the Internet Explorer Unix team, but lacked the degree required to obtain a work H-1B visa.
  • De Icaza started the GNOME project with Federico Mena in August 1997 to create a completely free desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like OS.
  • He also created the GNOME spreadsheet program, Gnumeric.
  • In 1999, de Icaza, co-founded Helix Code, a GNOME-oriented company.
  • In 2001, Helix Code, later renamed Ximian, announced the Mono Project, to implement Microsoft’s new .NET development platform on Linux and Unix-like OS.
  • In August 2003, Ximian was acquired by Novell. There, de Icaza was Vice President of Developer Platform.
  • In May 2011, de Icaza started Xamarin to replace MonoTouch and Mono for Android after Novell was bought by Attachmate and the projects were abandoned.
  • De Icaza endorsed Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document standard, disagreeing with a lot of the widespread criticism in the open source community.
  • He has also been a longtime advocate of using Mono – a free software implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework – in GNOME.
  • In August 2012, de Icaza criticized the Linux desktop as “killed by Apple”.
  • De Icaza specifically criticized a generally developer-focused culture, lack of backward compatibility and fragmentation among the various Linux distributions.
  • In March 2013, de Icaza announced on his personal blog that he regularly used Mac OS X instead of Linux for desktop computing.
  • Miguel de Icaza has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, the MIT Tech Review 1999 Innovator of the Year, and was one of Time magazine’s 100 innovators for the new century in 2000.
  • His blog is: http://tirania.org/blog/

Police Arrest Suspect for DDoS Attack

  • The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of man suspected of taking part in a massive DDoS attack against the anti-spam group Spamhaus back in March.
  • The 35 year-old man is a Dutch national but was arrested at his home in Barcelona under a European arrest warrant.
  • His computers and a mobile phone have been seized and he will be extradited to the Netherlands on charges of aiding “unprecedentedly serious attacks on the non-profit organization Spamhaus.”
  • Spamhaus remains concerned about the way network resources are being exploited as they were in this incident due to the failure of network providers to implement best practice in security.
  • Although the identity of the man hasn’t been released it has been suggested that he’s Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker, which has been feuding with Spamhaus for years and is claimed by some to be responsible for the DDoS attack.
  • Cyberbunker is a Dutch company based in a former nuclear bunker that provides anonymous hosting of anything except terrorist or child pornography websites.
  • The firm denies being responsible for spam, but Spamhaus has listed it on its spammers blacklist.
  • Last month’s attacks on the Spamhaus servers saw 300Gbps of traffic coming from an estimated 30,000 unique DNS resolvers.

LivingSocial Hacked

  • Daily deals Web site LivingSocial has been hacked, compromising the personal information of more than 50 million people.
  • The hackers appear to have obtained the names, e-mails, birthdates, and encrypted passwords of the vast majority of LivingSocial customers.
  • The Washington, D.C.-based site, owned in part by Amazon, claims around 70 million customers worldwide. The company’s divisions in the Philippines, South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand remain unaffected because they are hosted on different servers.
  • In his e-mails, LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy wrote, “We recently experienced a cyberattack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers. We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.”
  • He advised customers to create a new password. LivingSocial has subsequently reset customer passwords, although it’s not clear if all customers’ passwords were reset or just those who were affected by the hack.
  • Merchant and customer financial data, including credit card numbers, appear to be safe.
  • Given the type of data stolen, it’s likely that the attacks used a Web app to get at the site’s SQL databases.
  • What can you do? Change your password on all accounts that use the same password.
  • Check your email accounts to make certain that forwarding has not been enabled.
  • Check if it has been accessed from a strange location. To check account activity in Gmail, scroll to the bottom of the Inbox page. In the lower right hand corner is account activity. Click on Details to see recent logins.

Texting juror tossed in jail

  • Benjamin Kohler, 26, a jury member at a trial in Oregon, was sitting through testimony.
  • You might imagine that the testimony was interesting to a 26-year-old man. For the defendant was accused of armed robbery.
  • When the lights dimmed to show a surveillance video, the dimmed lights revealed his illuminated face. Benjamin Kohler appeared to be texting.
  • The jury had been warned by Judge Dennis Graves not to use their cell phones.
  • Graves took a very dark view of Kohler’s glowing disregard. He tossed him in jail for two days, citing contempt of court.
  • Ben’s friends are laughing. They said that this is so Ben-ish.

Netflix CEO says future of TV is in apps

  • As Internet TV grows from millions to billions, Netflix, HBO, and ESPN are leading the way. Internet TV will replace broadcast TV, according to Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix.
  • Netflix has 30 million U.S. subscribers, a bit more than HBO and about 9 million more than the nation’s biggest cable company, Comcast.
  • Hastings audaciously projected Netflix’s audience to grow to as many as 90 million as it expands globally.
  • Netflix and Amazon both touted their efforts this week to create original shows.
  • Netflix’s “House of Cards” was hailed as a success by the company, helping draw more subscribers into its fold.
  • This month, Amazon launched 14 original comedy and children’s shows — and it is allowing viewers to vote on which ones should be turned into full-blown series.
  • This week, CBS announced an investment in online TV provider Syncbank, which can stream live shows on the Internet.
  • Others, such as Fox and Univision, said they are considering pulling all of their shows off public airwaves, making the content accessible only through pay models.
  • And a host of the major broadcasters last week renewed a legal fight against Aereo, which streams local broadcasts over the Internet for a small subscription fee.
  • Aereo (https://www.aereo.com/) is coming to Washington DC and many 23 cities soon. Now available only in NYC. It will cost around $8 per month.
  • Streaming Netflix videos take up one-third of all U.S. Internet bandwidth during peak traffic hours, and its average subscriber streams 87 minutes of video a day, according to BTIG Research.
  • Amazon is expected to create a television streaming device, and perhaps a mobile phone, that would prominently display its online video service.
  • Apple has been rumored to be working on a television that may bring an a-la-carte model to consumers. Both firms are expanding their array of devices that encourage people to buy individual shows and movies from their stores.
  • Although Apple and Amazon delivered mixed earnings reports this week, both companies said demand for a-la-carte content over the Web is soaring. Apple said sales of media on iTunes hit a record in the first quarter.
  • Hulu is still offering ad-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox, ABC, and many other networks and studios. It competes somewhat with Netflix. Expect a Netflix competitor to pick it up.