After a curious look at my privacy settings page under my account today, I made the decision that it looked way to hard and time consuming to even think about starting to understand all of that! Oh and by the way you need to do yourself a favour and check it out just to see what I am talking about. Now I consider myself pretty good when it comes to understanding things like that but geez Facebook, that page has more options than a prestige car, you guys really need to simplify that for us mere mortals a little bit. I hate to think just how many people out there are uploading personal information day to day and filling their profiles with data without realising just how many third parties have access to this stuff.

If you are interested in finding out a little more about just how much Facebooks privacy has changed since it began you might like to wander on over to a blog by Matt McKeon, the post called ‘The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook‘. There is an excellent graphical representation of just how things have changed as you can see a little bit of in the image below.

And if you are into the real nitty gritty details of the changes you may like to mosey on over to the Facebook Privacy Policy blog. Where they have all the juicy details about just what they have changed.

DNS stands for Domain Name System, and what does this mean? Well the main purpose of a domain name service is to turn domain names (the address or URL of a website) into something meaningful to humans. Essentially the internet is a massive number of computers which all connect to one another and every computer that has access to the internet has a number the usual format is something like 111.222.3.44. The way you access websites is by telling your computer to go and get information off another computer using a given number. Due to the fact that the internet would be largely unusable to us if we had to remember these numbers each time we wanted to visit a site, we have domain names. each domain name is an easy way of presenting the string of numbers the computers use to talk to each other.

Normally when you type in an internet address you’re computer speaks with your internet service provider who then gets the page your looking for. However services such as OpenDNS allow you to direct your internet traffic through their data centres rather than through that of your own internet service provider. This is achieved by either re-directing at each of the computers on your network or you can tell your router to control this allowing easy set up for all computers on your network.

If for nothing else the benefit of using a service like this enables a good speed boost to your web browsing experience. On some of my tests I noticed that sites were loading around 2 seconds quicker than they previously were through my ISP’s service.

I feel that all households should make use of a service like this in large for the security features that they offer. If you have children it may be of interest to know that you have the ability to specifically blacklist websites that you want to restrict access to. This is often more effective than the built in parental controls on the computer itself becuase it is being controlled by a third party service externally, therefore it is not possible for them to work around this. There are presets provided by OpenDNS which allow you to quickly and very easily filter your web access the presets include:

• None: no restriction to your browsing, you may select this if you’re not using the service for security
• Minimal: protects you against phishing websites and attacks
• Low: protects you against limited adult material & phishing attacks
• Moderate: protects against all adult material & illegal material & previously mentioned items
• High: restricts all adult material, illegal activity, social networking, video sharing, general time wasters plus previously mentioned items.

If you run a business you may find the high level of protection suitable to protect you and your employees from accessing unwanted websites and material. To further add to the offering, if you are so inclined down the big-brother kind of path you can enable stats. This logs all websites that are visited and makes them available for you to view, this can of course be turned on or off.

One of my favourite uses of this service is mainly because I’m lazy, and this is the shortcuts feature. Once you have set this up within the dashboard on your OpenDNS login you simply add a website to the list and give it a shortcut. For example I have it set so that when I type ‘fb’ into my address bar, it will automatically direct me to facebook.com. Pretty handy if you can remember your shortcuts. There is always bookmarks in your browser of course. To add to this is the auto correct feature, this means that if I type facebook.cmo by mistake it recognises this and redirects me to facebook.com instead of giving me a 404 page not found error.

One of the last things that I will mention here for personal users is the ability for the service to redirect when you come accross a site that either no longer exists or you have entered incorrectly and isn’t able to be auto corrected. What happens is that if I am to try and go to fabebook.com, this is obviously spelt wrong but instead of my browser giving me the very annoying 404 page not found error, OpenDNS spits up a page which politely says why you weren’t taken to the page and gives you a list of alternatives or you can do what looks to be a google search.

These are some of the reasons why I feel that this is a service that all homes should be using, and the best part is that for the basic account which gives you all of the things I have mentioned here it is all free! No theres no catches all free. If you’re a business and want some of the more advanced features that this kind of service can provide you do pay a fee. So even if for nothing else but a bit of a speed boost to your browsing head over to OpenDNS.com

I’m sure that by now you have all had the moment where you’re anti virus program spits out at you that you have a virus or some sort of infection on you’re system, now letting the anti-virus deal with it is all well and good, but adding this malicious software removal tool could save you a lot of pain.

My suggestion would be to let you’re anti-virus do it’s job and attempt to delete the infection, but after this is done add in another step. Due to the fact that virus authors are becoming more and more switched on to ways to exploit your system it makes it harder and harder to actually get a virus off your system.

The next step that I’m speaking of is to run the Malicious Software Removal Tool. Now for all Windows users this is actually something that is sitting right there on your computer, in fact Microsoft updates this on the 2nd Tuesday of every month (the same way it does with software updates). To find this program, go to your start menu. There is a ‘run’ selection, press on this. In the window that pops up search for ‘MRT’. This will launch a program, one this has loaded it will prompt you with a few selections – these are ‘quick scan’, ‘full scan’ and ‘custom scan’. For the purpose of locating and removing malicious software you will want to do a full scan. Note that this may take several hours depending on the size and speed of you’re computer.

This will locate and hopefully remove any malicious software that is on you’re computer, and may in fact save you from the need to do a complete system re-store. Now what if you can’t find this on you’re system, well the MRT is available from Microsoft’s website for download, follow the few quick prompts. This is a fairly small download and is under 9Mb in size so there really isn’t any excuse for not using it.

Well I hope that this helps out in determining if you’re anti-virus really is doing its job, while giving you a little extra piece of mind in knowing that you’re system is safe!

This is so convenient and has spread so quickly on the net I think that a lot of people may not be aware of the issues that this technology could cause. Why do I say this? Well with a shortened URL you never know exactly where it is going to take you. In a way it masks the destination that you would end up at. For example if I want to create a short url for this blog’s homepage, the actual URL is www.lukeandmelissah.com but a URL shortener would make it http://bit.ly/xOUfy or something similar. My reason for concern is that if the actual destination that you navigate to has malicious code or something similar on it, you could very easily and possibly without even knowing end up with an infection on your computer!

Take for example the amount of spam email you get, often the links included in the spam appear legitimate, but if you were to click on them or expose what the actual URL is you would see that it isn’t exactly what it claims to be. For this reason I think we all need to be cautious when clicking on these shortened links, in the same way we are cautious about clicking on links in emails. Don’t click on things from unknown sources!!!

The palm device has been gathering data such as GPS information from throughout the day, apps being used, time the apps are used for and what apps are actually on the device. This information has been sent back from the device to Palm over the mobile internet capabilities of the phone.

For a lot of the time this information may already be known by the phone company as they could presumably figure out your location based on what mobile towers your phone is using, but the negative thing about the whole situation is that the actual manufacturer of your device knows all of this information as well. Information like where you live, places you regularly visit, where you work thats scary stuff considering the manufacturers of other items you use don’t have access to this – imagine your fridge telling its maker where it lives!?!?

On the plus side, there have been no reports of any activity like this on smart-phones such as the iPhone, Blackberry or Google phones here in Australia. So for the time being we can rest assured that our info is still safe as the new Palm device isn’t available here yet.

All consumers of tech products should be quietly thanking all of the smart ‘geeks’ out there who notice things like this, they are the ones with the knowledge to notice these activities and make it known to the wider community. Lets hope they keep up the good work – for our sake

Mac’s are not immune to viruses, they can get them! The thing is that Mac’s make up such a small segment of the overall computer footprint in the world that from a virus authors point of view – why would we bother spending all that time writing a virus for mac when we can write one for windows and have such a bigger effect. At this point in time there is essentially no reason to run anti-virus software on a mac, in fact the anti-virus software that is out there only scans for windows viruses anyway!

One of the other reasons Mac’s are less vulnerable to these attacks is due to the way viruses and other malware works. In order to get onto your system in the first place viruses and malware need to ‘trick’ you, they are like a mini program that has to install itself on your system to run. Now one of the great things about the Mac OS is that whenever any program try’s to gain access to change or install something on your system the Mac will request you enter the administrators username and password. This not only stops a hacker from taking over your computer and installing at free will but it makes you actually think twice about what you are installing. Now having said all of this, Windows is (finally) learning this and thats the reason Vista always asks you allow or deny, and why windows 7 will take a similar route as Mac OS for your approval before installing.

There are a number of other reasons as well such as the difference in file types that a mac can open and use and so on, but I think that at this stage the biggest benefit is that they just aren’t a target for the ‘bad guys’ as there isn’t a huge penetration of Macs in the over all computer market making them less of a target.

You can find the update as usual under the software update section of system preferences.

I explained all about this in one of my earlier posts, you can read about it here Java Vulnerabilities – is this putting our Mac at risk?

The first essential thing that you need to do when running a wireless network at your home is to ensure it is secured with a password. Due to the way wireless works you can’t stop the signals at the boundary of your property, this means that your neighbors, someone sitting at the bus stop down the road or in the car at the front of your property, if they have a wireless enabled device such as a laptop or smart phone have full access to your internet and private data.

For this reason the easiest thing you can do to protect yourself is to password protect your network. This can be done by accessing the wireless routers configuration panel, it will give you a number of options such as WEP & WPA, WEP is a good way to secure your network but is an older technology and because of they way it uses ‘static’ methods of encryption or in other words the same encryption keys all the time it is therefore easy to be hacked into by somebody who has the know how and a bit of time. Therefore you are doing yourself a favor by setting up your system using WPA at the very beginning. This is a newer standard of encryption and lets you use a passphrase or password to enter into all of your devices, the router and devices then constantly update the type of encryption they are using so that makes it much harder for the bad guys to hack. For further information about the differences between the types of encryption check out this link > WEP or WPA?

This is just one step, but you can go even further than this without much more effort and it will ensure you’re doing all you can to protect your network. This next step involves changing the name and password for the router itself. Lets take the brand Netgear as an example, when you plug in your new router it it will have a default name for itself and usually it is something associated with the brand i.e your router may be named “Netgear…” this will be displayed as the network name. The reason this is significant is due to the fact that routers have their own generic administrator names and passwords so if a hacker knows what brand of router you are using, chances are that most people don’t bother changing the generic user names and passwords that are used to access the routers configuration settings and hey presto the bad guys have access to your network.

This brings me to my next point: after changing the routers default name (you may choose to use a name such as ‘Lukes Network’ for example) you then need to go into your routers settings and change the user name and password. A lot of the time they will use something like username- admin, password- password as the default. Simply by changing this you are infinitely increasing the security of your network.

In return for these few simple changes you have the peace of mind in knowing that not only your neighbors won’t be able to mooch off your download limit, but that all of the important and private information and documents stored on your home network and home computers will be protected from nosy hackers.

It was while listening to one of my favourite podcasts – MacBreak Weekly (can be found at twit.tv), that I came to hear about this vulnerability which all revolves around Java. Now for us lowly computer users Java is not something that we actively use, its an architecture or software which lives on your computer and allows you to access all that cool content on the internet. If you have ever played online games, used web based chat then you have inadvertently used Java.

The issue of concern for people running a Mac is that there is a flaw within Java, this flaw basically allows a remote person or malicious tool to gain access to your computers code (all the bits and bytes that run behind the glossy dock and shiny windows that we use everyday). And the more worrying thing is that if you were to come across a site that did take advantage of this vulnerability, it would get into your computer all without your knowledge.

So at this time the recommended fix for this to protect yourself from any potential exploits is to turn off Java in your internet browsers settings/preferences area. The other good thing at this point in time is that there are no known web sites or Java ‘applets’ that actually take advantage of this flaw, however having said this once the bad guys are aware there is a problem it wouldn’t take someone long to put a script together.

What bugs me more about this is that Apple have known about this flaw in Java for 5 months now, yet just a few days ago a Software Update was released and guess what…flaw not fixed…I would’ve thought that with five months up their sleeves that would’ve been plenty of time to get a fix underway.

Moral of this story, don’t be complacent on the internet Mac users. We all get a little lax when it comes to security as we usually take for granted that there are no real risks out there in the wild that is the internet. Hopefully now that this flaw has been made public by the security company Intego Security (the ones that came across it) it will prompt Apple to push out an update so we can once again be happy knowing that we are safe to browse the internet once again.