There is one thing that continues to irritate me, especially given the day and age we live in and the technology we all have available to us, it’s the fact that so many businesses maintain ignorant to the benefits of having a presence on the web.
I come accross it all the time, a big portion of where I do my information search before making a purchase decision is on the Internet. Because of this I find it really frustrating when businesses either have absolutely no presence on the web or they have a very poor website with so little information they needn’t have bothered.
I really feel that as the younger generations such as Gen Y and the up and coming Gen Z’s become more and more prominent in the market place if businesses want to keep attracting these kind of people they will have to get their act together. I understand that to have a fully fledged website is sometimes very expensive if you don’t have the knowledge of how to build one yourself, but what about all of these great free alternatives?!? Twitter, Facebook or any free kind of blogging software, or very inexpensive solutions like Squarespace which allow you to easily build very pro looking pages with very little hassle!
It just dumbfounds me that these business owners or managers are willing to let opportunities just go past and miss out on making that extra all important dollar just because they couldn’t be bothered to spend a little time in building a place for themselves on the internet.
Posted by Luke | Posted on 22-07-2009
Category : Security
Tags: effective security, internet, password, protection
The password that we key into our email, instant messenger’s, bank websites and online accounts are often the only thing protecting our (for the most part) very personal and private data whether it is as simple as our address, or as potentially dangerous as our credit cards, tax file numbers and so on. So it is very important that we make this line of defence as hard for a hacker to crack as possible.
In this post I will have a look at a few simple things that you can do to really strengthen your passwords. A lot of the hints and tips that are put out there involve you creating passwords that are so hard to remember you just don’t worry about creating stronger passwords anymore. Now the first thing that I will state and it is pretty common knowledge, that your password shouldn’t ever be a dictionary word! In fact don’t even let it be a string of letters – these passwords that contain only letters are very easy to break.
My next tip here is something very simple but incredibly effective, something that I have put into all of my passwords and I find it an easy way to remember a rather ‘complex’ password. My thought here is to take something that you can easily remember, it may even be your current (dictionary word) password. For the purpose of this exercise lets use the word password as our password.
You can make this incredibly weak password infinitely more secure by simply replacing certain characters with symbols on your keyboard that look the same as the letters in the current word. These symbols may be as simple as ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) < > ?.
After substituting some of the letters with these symbols we may have a password that looks like this: p@s$word
Now because we have broken up the dictionary word (yes I know it still contains a dictionary word but will look at this next) by putting in symbols it would take a significantly bigger effort for the hacker to break this, while remaining easy for you to remember because it still looks and nearly reads the same as the actual word.
Now lets make this a little more secure! Don’t forget about the numbers on your keyboard either, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 are also good to be substituted or put into a password to make it harder to break. After substituting again we might have a password that looks like this: p@5$w0rd. Notice I replaced the first s with 5 and the o with a zero. To read and remember it is almost the same as the original but for someone to try and guess or use hacking software it is almost impossible.
Do yourself a favour and change your passwords to include some of these tips today! This will significantly improve your peace of mind while using the net and protect all of that important data that is out there.
Posted by Luke | Posted on 10-07-2009
Category : Internet/Tech
Tags: 3G, broadband, Gadgets, internet, price, Wireless
I think that the invention of wireless broadband dongles is one of the greatest things to come to broadband internet access in the last few years, mainly because it allows you to get online anywhere you have 3G mobile phone coverage and on top of this it allows people who only have one computer in the home the freedom of doing away with landlines and DSL at home.
I do however have a bit of an issue with the phone companies over these devices. While the plans for them are fine if this is your only method of access to the internet, I think it is a terrible ripoff if you allready have your home broadband and possibly your mobile phone with that carrier as well. If you are anything like us we already have the highest broadband plan our service provider allows which costs us over $100 a month, and we also both have our phones with the same carrier thats almost another $100 a month there as well. I feel that it is pointless paying another $50 dollars a month over two years or having an even more expensive pre-paid arrangement just to allow you to access the web anywhere you go.
What I would like to see mobile carriers do is bundle their products, what would be so wrong with us paying a little extra each month say $10-$20 to have a dongle that is linked to our home broadband account. Allowing us to utilise the data allowance we have at home, anywhere in the country. Rather than having another whole contract for a separate device giving us an extra 1-5 gig’s of data, which we allready get (and often don’t use) in our home broadband anyway.
I understand that there are probably extra costs associated with providing broadband via 3G but I think that it makes good sense, not only that but it would give the company who adopts it a good marketing and competitive advantage over the competitors in the industry.
Do you have any thoughts on this topic? If so please feel free to leave a comment below!
