Don't Get Phished!

Topic: Privacy Protection|Level: Beginner

What is Phishing?
More specifically what I'm referring to is "website forgery". It's a scam where you are taken to a website and asked to log in. However the website you're taken to is not the real website; rather it's a malicious group that has built a site that looks just like the original site and when you try to log in they record your username & password.

So how do you protect yourself?
If you're ever on "Site A" and click a link to "Site B" you potentially could be on a phishing site.

What you have to do is look at your browser's address bar and know the real "domain name" of the site you want.

The domain name is the shortest, simplest part of a website such as "blogger.com", "twitter.com", or "wikipedia.org". A company can prefix their domain name with any number of subdomains they wish. These subdomains will always come before, to the left of the root domain name. So en.twitter.com is still twitter.com, but twitter.somebadthing.com is not twitter.com, it's somebadthing.com which would probably have nothing to do with twitter.com. somebadthing.com would probably then make their homepage to look just like twitter.com complete with the login fields. You then log in, they record your credentials and can even then forward you through the real twitter.com login so you'd probably never even know you just got phished.
So any time you're about to log in to a website that you didn't enter the address in your browser's address bar yourself always check the address of the page before you log in.
An entire website address will start with a protocol ("http://" or "https://"), then may have any number of subdomains before the root domain.  But they all will come before any slash ("/") characters.
So...
http://www.twitter.com/  is  twitter.com; safe.
https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php is facebook.com; safe.
https://bankofamerica.com. somebadthing.com/ is somebadthing.com; not Bank Of America. Putting a legitimate name as a subdomain of a malicious name is a common way to trick people.
http://security. somebadthing.com/facebook.com/login.aspx is still somebadthing.com. Putting the legitimate domain name as a subfolder (after the "/") is another way.
http://www.myspace.net/ is myspace.net; not myspace.com Using a different root name such .net instead of .com could be used for phishing. Although most companies when they register a .com name, they also get .net and any others that are appropriate and then if you use the .net they automatically direct you back to the .com. But still to be safe always use the one you know for certain is the one you want.
http://www.wikepidia.com is not wikipedia.com. Using a misspelled domain name is another way.

Go Away IE (part 2)

As a continuation from my previous entry here's exactly what I'm talking about...
This is an custom administration screen for Frequently Asked Questions for one of my customers. This is the list of Questions in Chrome...
Listing in Chrome
Then when an item is clicked on the Edit window appears...
Edit Window in Chrome

Everything looks and works great. Then I check the page in Internet Explorer...
Listing in IE
Edit Window in IE

As you can see, IE is very bad at handling proper spacing and layout of elements and it doesn't even handle many things such as rounded corners at all (which may sound trite but rounded corners on elements is an important design aesthetic used to make it clear where one element ends and another begins).

Go Away IE!

Web developers spend time writing code to make beautiful and featureful websites. They use various codes that your web browser software (whether it FireFox, Chrome, Safari, etc) uses to make a pleasing aesthetic layouts. Until the code is viewed with Internet Explorer. IE which will not adopt modern 3.0 standards and instead struggles to implement outdated 2.1 standards and even those are implemented incorrectly, it mutilates the nice pleasing layout the developer worked so hard to create. Now the developer has to spend vast amounts of additional time plus butcher their code losing quality in all the other modern browsers to make things as similar as possible in IE. Quality is lost, time is lost, updates and improvements are more difficult, all because IE sucks! Many developers even give up on IE and simply decide if you're using IE you'll just miss out of a lot of the features. The Internet could be so much better and further along if developers didn't have to spend half their time trying to keep the dead dog limping along!

If you want a very simple and fast browser try Google Chrome http://chrome.google.com

Or if you want a very highly customizable and add-on rich browser try Firefox http://www.firefox.com

Love ya Google - Docs

Topic: Google Docs|Level: Beginner-Intermediate|Type: Informational

Another really great Google product I just recently had to start using; Google Docs.
http://docs.google.com

Google Docs is a completely free (naturally) web-based system for creating, editing, organizing, and sharing various types of documents.
Docs provide support for working with
Documents (like Wordpad or MS Office Word),
Spreadsheets (like MS Office Excel),
Presentations (like MS Office PowerPoint) and
Forms (as in data-collection Forms you can then link/email/embed for other people to fill out)

You can even Upload documents started in most other similar products and Google Docs will automatically convert them.
Documents: HTML, Plain text (.txt), MS Word (.doc, .docx), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw)
Presentations: MS PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps)
Spreadsheets: Comma Seperated Value (.csv), MS Excel (.xls, .xlsx) and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)
and PDF Files.
And you can even Export any document out of Google Docs back to the various other formats for other applications if you need.

So not only is Google Docs a really nice way to create and maintain your documents online (so you can even access them from any where with Internet access), but you can even Share them! When you Share a document you can choose to allow the people you share it with (by email address or anybody who's given a special link) to only be able to view the documents or also be able to edit them. Multiple people can even be in editing the same document and the same time! And all the document types automatically have a revision history so at any time you can go back to view the document prior to any revisions. And you can set the document to send you an email notification should anybody make changes to it.

Data Storage is pretty amazing

I just got one of these 16gb microSD cards... (they really are this tiny)


And was thinking just how much information that tiny little thing can hold.
16 gigabits of data printed on Letter size paper in Courier New 12-point font with a 0.5" margin on all sides it would take 4,214,964 pages!


That would be 843 Cases of paper!
7.65 metric tons of paper to hold the amount of data on that one 0.4 gram card!

Love ya Google - Picasa

Topic: Picasa|Level: Beginner - Intermediate|Type: Informational

Google Account
Ok, first of all if you don't already have a Google account go get one. Once you have your Google account you can use all their many products with your one account. Even if you don't use their email (even though they do web-based email by far the best) you can still use whichever other products (iGoogle custom homepage, Picasa, Orkut, calendar, documents, blogging, notebook, G Talk, etc) you want with that one account.
(But if you're still using yahoo or hotmail/msn or any other web-based email service... just do yourself a favor, leave them as your spam email account and get a gmail account. Gmail even allows you to pull email from other POP3/IMAP enabled accounts to the Gmail interface if you do want to keep them around but not check 2 accounts. If you want more info about gmail see my Love ya Google - Gmail post

Picasa Parts
http://picasa.google.com/
Picasa is a Google product for photo (and video) management and hosting. There are two parts to it; the desktop application and the Picasa Web Albums.
The Picasa desktop application allows you to sort your photos in to albums, view, edit, label, caption, delete them, etc. There is even a Mac Beta version (http://picasa.google.com/mac/).
The Picasa Web Albums allows you to upload photos from Picasa (desktop application) to online Albums that you can then share.

Picasa Desktop Software
The Picasa desktop software has lots of features for sorting photos in albums, editing them, all sorts of things. The dekstop software also makes sharing any of your photos very easy. The buttons across the bottom allow you to Upload (to Picasa Web Albums), Email, Print, Export, send to a Blog, make a Collage or Movie/slide show, or even Shop for printing services (send your photos online to be printed and picked up in a store of your choice.)

To get any of your photos or videos online all you have to do is click the "Upload" button. A simple interface then appears where you can specify what album the item is uploaded to, size settings, and visibility of the item. Items that have been uploaded to the Web Albums will show a small green Up arrow in the lower-right of the image. If you edit an image that has already been Uploaded, after making your changes and clicking Upload again Picasa will change the existing online image to reflect your changes, rather than creating another image online.

Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums part is the online image hosting part of the service. Your "Web Albums" can be completely different from your desktop software's "Albums". You can have images in desktop albums but not in web albums, or images in web albums and not in the desktop albums. You can also choose to have an album in your desktop automatically synchronize to a web album. Using this option you can even have them sync, then manage and delete images through the web interface from anywhere, and when you sync your desktop again it will even reflect those changes on your local computer.

You can also select an image through the web interface, and in the "Edit" options select "Edit in Picasa" (if you're on a computer with Picasa installed), and selecting that option will download the image to the local computer, open Picasa to edit the image, and when you close the editor it will automatically upload the changes back to the web.

Your Picasa Web Albums can have different levels of being shared. Anybody can go to your Picasa Web Albums page (i.e. http://picasaweb.google.com/nickolashook ) and see Albums you have set for "Public" visibility. "Unlisted" albums anybody can get to if they're given a special link, but they do not show up on your Web Albums page. "Sign-in required to view" albums allow you to click a "Share" button, and specify people (from your Google Contacts or manually typed email addresses) that will be emailed a link to the album and then have to be signed in to see them.

Face Recognition
Another really cool feature of the Picasa Web Albums is it can detect faces in your photos and group the faces it detects to be of the same person. You can then specify who that person is (even pick them from your Google Contacts if you have them set up there) and then you can easily find all the photos of a particular person by simply clicking their name.

G1 > iPhone * 2

Topic: G1 & Android Cell Phones|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

Ok, I'm not an iPhone hater... Quite contrary, I very much wanted one for quite awhile. But fortunately I could never get one in my area. And I say fortunately because I've found one that I love far more than iPhone.
iPhone set a new standard for smart phones and because of it's enormous market penetration any new apps are generally developed first for it. Given that, iPhone is amazing.

But if you're not an apple-head, or can't get AT&T or Cingular or w/e the "exclusive" service provider is calling itself now, or don't use a Mac/iTunes, I strongly recommend you check out Android (operating system) and the G1 (phone). Android OS (open source, developed by Google) will be coming to other devices (not just phones) and other carriers very soon, but is currently only available on the G1 from Tmobile.

But the G1 is very close and in many ways superior to the iPhone! Better camera resolution, removable micro-SD card for media, full QWERTY on-screen keyboard And slide out keyboard. And especially if you use gmail as your main email or google calendar because your email, contact list, and calendar are all completely integrated and synchronized to the phone, with 'push' email and updates to the device. Edit anything on the phone or computer, it automatically syncs to the other. You can also configure any POP3/IMAP mail clients to be received to your gmail account and thus sync'ed to your phone too. Or if for some reason the phone fails (though I know of nobody who has had any failed hardware short of dropping it in water or off a ledge to hard concrete), once you get it fixed/replaced all you have to do is sign in to your gmail account and all your email, contacts, and calendar are automatically resync'ed.
Also has full integration to Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and Windows Live; full HTML & Java web browser; 3.2mp camera & camcorder

Or if you like Google Maps (regular maps, satellite maps, or even street view maps!!), they're completely integrated as well and with the phone's GPS and open source development there are some pretty amazing maps & location applications available for it too. ("Find me the nearest movie theater, give me show times, and now give me turn by turn directions to it")
And the phone even has a YouTube application built right in with very impressive quality!

As for media, the G1 is integrated with Amazon MP3 and Google Checkout for payment processing of songs or applications purchased in the Market. But you also don't have to have a particular application (iTunes) to get media in your phone. Sync via WiFi, USB cable, or load directly to the removable media card! And items purchased through Amazon MP3 are generally a bit less expensive than Apple Store and don't have DRM on them so you can transfer to PC, Zune, or any other device.

Another really cool thing, the Android OS also has something called "intents". Which allows an application with any piece of information to basically "announce" that is has some piece of info and any other application on the phone that can do something with that kind of info may take it and make use of it... For example, the Shazam application most people are familiar with can tell you what a song is and then "announce" that it has a song artist & title. Then the Amazon MP3 app can take that and take you to buy the song. Or you might use the "Places" application which uses your GPS information and online data to find places of interest (banks, gas stations, restaurants, theaters, etc) near you. You can see how far the places are or read reviews on them. But then you could click the Address of the place, the application "announces" it has an address, then the Google Maps might pick it up and give you turn-by-turn directions to it or allow you to see the Street View image of the place, or click the phone number and the phone application will pick it up and call them.

And as far as cost (again Tmobile is only carrier at the moment, but Android is being implemented on new devices by other carriers right now), I got a deal on the phone but I think it's $180 with 2-year contract regularly. Then I have the smallest minutes plan, 300 anytime minutes for $30/mo, and unlimited texting & data for another $35/mo (or they have a $25/mo with unlimited data only option too). So $65/mo total even cheaper per month than the iPhone would be even if I lived in a main service area!

The only things I still think the iPhone wins on is it's a more aesthetic device (but new Android devices are coming), it has multi-touch, screen is a little bit larger, and the software catalog is bigger (though again as more and more Android devices get to the market, their penetration is just going to keep growing and since it's even cheaper for developers to get registered to post & sell their apps it's almost guaranteed apps will start getting developed with Android as the standard then ported to iPhone)