So, you like your iPhone, but need something bigger? The Apple iPad may well be the answer for you. Steve Jobs introduced it today. And it is something!
I have to admit "iPad" wouldn't have been my first choice in names, but for what it does, it's a great little piece of personal entertainment technology!
It has a keyboard on the screen, like the iPhone. But that screen is much bigger. So, the keyboard will be much closer to full-size. And it can run all of the iPhone's apps. It even zooms them to fit the iPad's screen so you can enjoy iPhone programs MUCH bigger at 9.7 inches!
It's about the same size as many of the netbooks (minus the keyboard) and new eReader devices but it doesn't just do written material like an eReader.
The iPad starts at $499IS with 16 gigabytes of flash memory.
With 32GB, it’s $599US or $699US for 64GB.
Is this a big deal? Well, sortof, the thing is it's Apple throwing their hat into an existing ring (namely eReaders and netbooks) but at the same time changing it up a little as apple is so well known for (Remember what they did to the cell phone market a few years ago!
As the Wall Street Journal said, "Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it."
Click here for a basic overview, from Reuters.
Click here for the official Apple website.
Steve Job's intro video.
So will I rush out and get one? Probably not, I just got a new Netbook and it's doing everything I need (and running windows) and cost me less than half what the iPad goes for (and with 10x the storage capacity!)
That being said I do see a LOT of reasons why this would be ideal for many small business owners, think it might be right for you? Drop me a line I'd be happy to discuss!
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Figuring Out How Spammers Get E-Mail Addresses
Spammers employ a variety of methods to acquire e-mail addresses. Some methods take advantage of the e-mail addresses readily available on the Internet, whereas others employ different levels of trickery, from harvesting to outright stealing.
Harvesting from the Internet
Spammers (and their assistants) utilize a technique called harvesting to acquire e-mail addresses. While harvesting requires a lot of bandwidth, it is ingeniously simple: Simply download the right pages from select Web sites and extract the e-mail addresses that are there for the picking. Some of the tools and sources employed in harvesting e-mail addresses from the Web include the following:
•Web spiders: Spammers employ Web crawlers and spiders that harvest e-mail addresses from Web sites. It's common for Web sites to include mailto: URLs as well as unlinked user@domain addresses. Put your e-mail address on a Web site, and you're spam bait.
Harvesting from the Internet
Spammers (and their assistants) utilize a technique called harvesting to acquire e-mail addresses. While harvesting requires a lot of bandwidth, it is ingeniously simple: Simply download the right pages from select Web sites and extract the e-mail addresses that are there for the picking. Some of the tools and sources employed in harvesting e-mail addresses from the Web include the following:
•Web spiders: Spammers employ Web crawlers and spiders that harvest e-mail addresses from Web sites. It's common for Web sites to include mailto: URLs as well as unlinked user@domain addresses. Put your e-mail address on a Web site, and you're spam bait.
These spiders are not unlike the spiders and Web crawlers used by Yahoo, Google, and others that scan the Internet's Web sites in order to keep Web search indexes fresh. Except that e-mail address harvesting spiders are up to no good. And where do these spiders get domain names? With over 90 million .com domains in existence, it's easy enough to just guess domain names in order to come up with quite a few.
•Newsgroups: It's a straightforward task to harvest e-mail addresses from Usenet newsgroups: Just pull in a big newsfeed and extract the e-mail addresses with a simple shell or Perl script. Newsgroup volumes are still increasing exponentially — at a rate of at least several gigabytes per day. This means lots of e-mail addresses are there for the taking. Any spammer with enough bandwidth can slurp up all those bits and just sift out the e-mail addresses.
•Groups, blogs, and discussion boards: Yahoo! and Google have their groups and mailing lists, many of which make their members' e-mail addresses available. There are thousands of blogs and discussion boards out there, too, that contain easily acquired e-mail addresses.
•Test messages: In this method, spammers send test e-mails to recipients whose addresses they simply guess — so-called test e-mail messages sent to addresses like service@, info@, test@, marketing@, security@.
Spammers at one time could reliably conclude that, if they receive no "bounce-o-gram" back from the domain, that the e-mail address must be legit. This is because e-mail servers used to routinely send nondelivery receipts (NDRs) back to the sender of a message sent to a nonexistent address. But that ain't necessarily so any more: More servers are opting to stop sending NDRs.
•Unsubscribe links: Many spam messages include an opt-out or unsubscribe link so that the recipient can request not to receive more spam. However, often the real purpose of unsubscribe links is to confirm a valid, active e-mail address.
•Malware: Spammers sometimes use Trojan horses, viruses, and worms to extract e-mail addresses from individual users' computers. If mass-mailing worms can extract the contents of a user's e-mail address book for the purpose of propagating spam, then it's going to be easy to perform the same extraction and simply send the list back to the hacker's lair. This would probably be easier, in fact, because this activity is far less likely to be detected than a mass-mailing worm.
•Unsubscribe requests: A good number of spam messages contain "unsubscribe me" links that a user clicks to opt out. However, many spam operators actually continue to send spam to e-mail addresses submitted to "unsubscribe me" links. When a user submits such a request, the spammer knows that the address being sent is a valid e-mail address. Do you think they'll actually stop sending spam to a known valid address? Not on your life!
Buying and stealing addresses
Among spammers and e-mail address brokers, e-mail addresses are a traded and sold commodity. If you know where to look, you can purchase CDs and downloads containing e-mail addresses by the hundreds of thousands or millions.
And of course, everyone has heard the stories of Web sites that collect your e-mail address and promise not to sell it (ha!). But they sell, trade, or give away e-mail addresses anyway, even when their privacy policy says they won't. A few high-profile companies have been prosecuted and/or fined for this practice.
Business and service provider e-mail lists are also stolen and sold to spammers. In mid-2004, a former AOL employee was charged with stealing 90 million screen names and 30 million e-mail addresses from AOL and selling them to a spammer for $100,000. This is not an isolated case, but it is a noteworthy one because of the size of the heist. So much for privacy, eh?
Unfortunatley there really isn't anyway of getting your name off those lists, and MOST efforts you'd make to reduce the lists your on, would have the opposite effect!
But if you're looking to reduce the amount of junk mail the ends up in your mailbox, that we can help with, modern spam filtering solutions can help reduce spam either your desktop email, your web based email (gmail, hotmail, rogers or bell) or even on your blackberry!
Don't hesitate to give us a call or send us an email at The Technology Coach for some real life solutions to Spam Overload!
The Technology Coach
Small Business Technology Specialists
__________________________________
Small Business Technology Service,
Training, Coaching and Support!
http://www.thetechnologycoach.ca
scottk@thetechnologycoach.ca
Office 905.366.8234
Among spammers and e-mail address brokers, e-mail addresses are a traded and sold commodity. If you know where to look, you can purchase CDs and downloads containing e-mail addresses by the hundreds of thousands or millions.
And of course, everyone has heard the stories of Web sites that collect your e-mail address and promise not to sell it (ha!). But they sell, trade, or give away e-mail addresses anyway, even when their privacy policy says they won't. A few high-profile companies have been prosecuted and/or fined for this practice.
Business and service provider e-mail lists are also stolen and sold to spammers. In mid-2004, a former AOL employee was charged with stealing 90 million screen names and 30 million e-mail addresses from AOL and selling them to a spammer for $100,000. This is not an isolated case, but it is a noteworthy one because of the size of the heist. So much for privacy, eh?
Unfortunatley there really isn't anyway of getting your name off those lists, and MOST efforts you'd make to reduce the lists your on, would have the opposite effect!
But if you're looking to reduce the amount of junk mail the ends up in your mailbox, that we can help with, modern spam filtering solutions can help reduce spam either your desktop email, your web based email (gmail, hotmail, rogers or bell) or even on your blackberry!
Don't hesitate to give us a call or send us an email at The Technology Coach for some real life solutions to Spam Overload!
The Technology Coach
Small Business Technology Specialists
__________________________________
Small Business Technology Service,
Training, Coaching and Support!
http://www.thetechnologycoach.ca
scottk@thetechnologycoach.ca
Office 905.366.8234
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Is Your Small Business Secure?
As we depend more and more on technology to accomplish the goals of our business, our security risk exposure becomes greater. That's why the Better Business Bureau, in partnership with several other organizations, has created a website that small business owners can use to help secure their business.
Think your business isn't at risk? Think again. Consider this:
Source: National survey of cardholders, Visa Inc., February 2009
Enough to make you take action? Here's what the new BBB Data Security -- Made Simpler site has to offer.
Identify your small business data loss vulnerability points – electronic and paper-based
Develop a data security policy that both protects sensitive data, ensures its availability and restricts access
Identify and deploy the right kind of tools to protect sensitive data, based on your type of business
Communicate your data protection policies to customers as a strategy to strengthen the business - customer trust relationship and differentiate their company from their competitors
Know what do to if you believe you’ve been a victim of a data compromise
It's worth a visit to the site just to make sure you have your business as secure as it should be.
At The Technology Coach we're committed to our customers security, if you're not sure how to implement the solutions outlined in the articles above or simply want to be able to delegate your technology needs outside of your own company, call The Technology Coach today!
The Technology Coach
Small Business Technology Specialists
__________________________________
Small Business Technology Service,
Training, Coaching and Support!
http://www.thetechnologycoach.ca
scottk@thetechnologycoach.ca
Office 905.366.8234
Mobile 416.802.4424
Think your business isn't at risk? Think again. Consider this:
33 percent of small businesses lack even simple antivirus protection.
Source: Symantec Corporation, 2009
85 percent of data breaches occur at the small business level.
Source: Visa Inc. September 2009
Source: National survey of cardholders, Visa Inc., February 2009
Enough to make you take action? Here's what the new BBB Data Security -- Made Simpler site has to offer.
Identify your small business data loss vulnerability points – electronic and paper-based
Develop a data security policy that both protects sensitive data, ensures its availability and restricts access
Identify and deploy the right kind of tools to protect sensitive data, based on your type of business
Communicate your data protection policies to customers as a strategy to strengthen the business - customer trust relationship and differentiate their company from their competitors
Know what do to if you believe you’ve been a victim of a data compromise
It's worth a visit to the site just to make sure you have your business as secure as it should be.
At The Technology Coach we're committed to our customers security, if you're not sure how to implement the solutions outlined in the articles above or simply want to be able to delegate your technology needs outside of your own company, call The Technology Coach today!
The Technology Coach
Small Business Technology Specialists
__________________________________
Small Business Technology Service,
Training, Coaching and Support!
http://www.thetechnologycoach.ca
scottk@thetechnologycoach.ca
Office 905.366.8234
Mobile 416.802.4424
Amazing new video technology highlights destruction in Haiti
Most of us would have difficulty imagining life in poverty-stricken Haiti. The recent earthquake only makes it harder.
But thanks to recent technology advancements adopted by CNN, you can get an interactive look at Haiti. It features four videos that will show you reality in Haiti. The videos also will impress you for their sheer technical advancements.
They're unlike anything you've ever seen before. That's because they were shot with a new type of camera, with technology that does for images what surround sound did for audio.
As the video is playing, you can zoom in to get a closer look. You can also click and drag to pan around.
You'll get a full 360-degree view of the situation in Haiti. The zooming and panning is seamless; you won't notice any hiccups in the video.
The technology certainly is impressive. And, these videos show how the technology can be put to good use!
And don't forget that you can still give to recovery efforts in Haiti. www.charitynavigator.org
No new equipment is needed on your part Surround Video of Haiti
But thanks to recent technology advancements adopted by CNN, you can get an interactive look at Haiti. It features four videos that will show you reality in Haiti. The videos also will impress you for their sheer technical advancements.
They're unlike anything you've ever seen before. That's because they were shot with a new type of camera, with technology that does for images what surround sound did for audio.
As the video is playing, you can zoom in to get a closer look. You can also click and drag to pan around.
You'll get a full 360-degree view of the situation in Haiti. The zooming and panning is seamless; you won't notice any hiccups in the video.
The technology certainly is impressive. And, these videos show how the technology can be put to good use!
And don't forget that you can still give to recovery efforts in Haiti. www.charitynavigator.org
No new equipment is needed on your part Surround Video of Haiti
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
I thought AVG was FREE, why am I being asked to pay for version 9?
A client emailed me recently asking:
Hi Scott, it’s about my AVG Internet Security. I received a notice from them a while back saying that I had to upgrade to the AVG 9.0 and I did and now they are sending me messages saying that my trial period is over and I have to buy it now. Isn't AVG supposed to be free? Why am I being asked to pay for it now? What should I do?
It would seem you fell for the ol’ bait and switch, don’t feel bad most people do, when AVG insists that you upgrade to version 9, they make it REALLY easy to find the “trial” version and really difficult to find the “FREE” version, so most people download the trial and end up running out of time, then, if AVG gets their way, paying for the full version! Clever marketing huh? But frustrating just the same.
The solution is uninstall AVG all together and install Microsoft Security Essentials, completely free, for good, no trail, no upgrades, no annoying sales pitches. You can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/
In my testing it's proved to be JUST as secure as AVG FREE and with non of the attention seeking!
Scott Kendall
Small Business Technology Specialist
__________________________________
Small Business Technology Service,
Training, Coaching and Support!
http://www.thetechnologycoach.ca
Office 905.366.8234
Mobile 416.802.4424
Small Business Technology BLOG!
Proud winner "Best Business of 2008" Award
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