Archive for the 'IT & Internet' Category
If you search with Google, you’ve no doubt seen the intrusive banner that recently began appearing at the top of the search results page:
Come Here Often? Make Google Your Homepage, and two choices: Sure or No Thanks.
The banner is so awkward looking that many users worried that it was a sign that they had been infected by a virus.
Even if you click “No Thanks”, you’ll likely see the banner again the next time you visit Google, or after your next reboot. One Google message said that the choice was stored in a cookie, so as long as you didn’t delete cookies then you wouldn’t see the banner again. That’s not correct though, as I stored a Google.com cookie and still see the banner repeatedly. If they are using a cookie, it must be a third-party cookie not identified as Google.
On-line forums show many users complaining about the banner. What makes this promotion even clumsier than it seems is that even users who already have Google set as their home page still see the banner. Some say that they have removed Google as their default search provider and changed to Bing.
Some comments copied from Google’s own forum:
“Why do you ask me if I want Google to be my homepage when it already is my home page ??????? How’s this for an algorithm: If Google is homepage then do not display banner.”
“This is most obnoxious. Ask once and then leave me alone. I do not, nor will I ever, want to make Google my homepage.”
“Will this promotion end soon? I’ll probably stop using Google if this isn’t fixed.”
“Just out of legitimate fascination, I tried answering both yes and no to the legitimate question. But the banner keeps an appearing.
Oh, by the way, Google is already my home page, but I still keep on getting the banner. Hmm …… This kind of reminds me of Groundhog Day. Whether you’re dead or alive, life just goes on.”
Google seems to have erred badly on this one. The banner is clumsy, doesn’t even look like a Google item, and is annoying users unnecessarily. My prediction: after the complaints become widespread and loud enough, Google will stop this promotion rather than risk more customer defections.
Score one for the good guys. U.S. authorities last week took action against a huge criminal botnet.
A botnet is a network in which servers run for illicit purposes control home and office computers whose owners are unaware they have been compromised. Desktop computers, often with inadequate virus and network protection, become infected with programs that allow the machines to be controlled remotely by servers.
U.S. police and prosecutors seized servers in five states, and created their own server to attack and disable the larger network.
This particular botnet, known as Coreflood, was used by criminals to steal millions of dollars from owners of hundreds of thousands of infected computers. Data were stolen to allow identify theft of the owners. At its peak, this network was thought to have attacked two million computers worldwide. Keyloggers running on infected computers passed sensitive information such as banking passwords and credit card numbers to botnet operators.
No arrests have been made yet, but it’s possible that authorities know who they are looking for. Prosecutors filed court documents naming 13 “John Doe” defendants. Those anonymous names may be place holders, so as not to alert the criminals until authorities are ready to arrest them.
Let’s hope this makes a major impact against criminal botnets. Now, if only we could get clueless computer users to update their virus protection and secure their wireless routers.
After my recent article on formatted e-mail a reader commented:
This is outdated nonsense. Use HTML for all emails (and UTF-8, for that matter).
If you can’t see it correctly, upgrade your mail client. Stop living in the 90s, and stop trying to force others to. Even the author of “Why HTML in E-Mail is a Bad Idea” has changed his mind.
Regarding that article mentioned, more recent reader comments on the author’s blog show that many people still dislike HTML mail. In any event, no one is forced to do anything, it’s a choice and I want people to be aware of the issues.
The comment: “If you can’t see it correctly, upgrade your mail client” is interesting. It’s not about me, it’s about everyone’s recipients. In fact, I use a very recent mail client.
When someone composes a formatted message, whether HTML, RTF, or something else, that user knows how it looks only on their own system. They have no way to know how it will appear on a recipient’s system.
The recipient may have a lower screen resolution, so the message lines may extend past the screen edge. The recipient may have aging or impaired vision, and be unable to see the tiny fonts. The colour choice may be difficult to read. Or, as in one of my examples, formatting may force the recipient to click on each attachment link individually to separately view each photograph, when if it were sent in plain text all images would be automatically displayed.
If you know that all your recipients can view your formatted mail comfortably, then all is well and you have no reason to change. However, many users assume that the way they see something on their screens is the same for everyone. That is not the case, as formatted messages render differently on different systems, software and screens. If we want recipients to be able to comfortably read our messages, it’s important to be aware.
I can sum up my advice on this topic in one phrase: compose and send e-mail in plain text.
When e-mail began 45 years ago, all messages were in plain text. For the technically inclined among you, it was 7-bit ASCII text. In more modern times, the explosion in the popularity of e-mail has led to more features being added. One of those features, formatted e-mail, is in my opinion of dubious value.
Most e-mail clients, whether running on a local computer such as Outlook or Eudora, or web based such as Gmail and Yahoo mail, offer a formatted mail option. For many it is HTML, the same encoding used for web pages. Some offer another formatting method, as Microsoft Outlook uses Rich Text Format.
Formatting allows the creator of a message to select font size and colour, place images in-line, embed links, italicize or boldface text, and more.
For the recipient, formatted mail has drawbacks. If the recipient’s mail software is incapable of rendering the chosen format, then the message will not appear as desired. This is especially the case when a sender use Microsoft’s Rich Text Format (RTF) in such software as Outlook. As far as I know, it may be only Microsoft products that can properly read RTF formatted mail.
HTML formatted mail can be read by most mail clients, but is often not welcome. If the sender chose a specific font size, that size may be too small for the recipient to read comfortably. Or, it may be unnecessarily large. Lines may wrap awkwardly. My friend’s messages, sent from his Mac using Apple Mail, are formatted such that they do not wrap in my e-mail software. The lines of text extend far past the right-hand edge of my mail reader, requiring me to scroll horizontally to read the message.
My sister often sends photos, composing her messages with Gmail’s “Rich formatting”. The result is that many of us can’t immediately see the photos. We must click individually on each photo file to view it, then close it and repeat the process to see the next photo. It’s tedious. Had she sent those messages in plain text, all the attached photos would display automatically in my mail software.
For most e-mail, send in plain text. Don’t use HTML or rich text unless you have a specific need for formatting. Plain text is viewable by all e-mail clients. If you send in plain text, you guarantee that all recipients will be able to read your message, and will see it in their own preferred font and font size.
Each mail software has its own method of changing the default to plain text. Check the help files or Google for the specific steps needed by your software.
Do you ever send a message to multiple recipients? Sure you do. Whether it’s a forwarded joke, the URL to the latest YouTube sensation, or some personal news to friends and family, we all do it. It’s one of the efficient benefits of e-mail.
While the standard way to address multiple recipients is to add them to the “To” field, that may not be the best way. When you list all recipients in “To” or “CC”, every recipient sees the list of recipients. This leaves that list at risk.
Computers infected with viruses and other malware is a growing problem. Many of those computers are infected with programs that search e-mail for addresses. Those addresses are used as targets for spam and other malware, and forged as senders of such illicit mail. When you create a long “To” or “CC” list, you potentially expose your contacts to this abuse.
The alternative is “BCC”, short for Blind Carbon Copy. Addresses in “BCC” cannot be seen by other recipients, and are therefore not exposed.
There may be times, such as planning a business meeting, when you want all recipients to see who else received a message. Some people have mail services that block incoming mail if their address is in “BCC”. If so, adjust accordingly. Otherwise, consider using “BCC” for long lists to protect those addresses.
Yes, today is tne annual recurrence of that one morning when it’s somewhat sanctioned to play tricks on your friends, family and co-workers.
Sorry if you couldn’t read the earlier April Fools’ post. It was in binary, that single-minded yes-or-no off-or-on one-or-zero language underpinning our digital lives. To those of you who figured it out, well done! A quick Google for binary to text converter would have translated the article for you.
While most of us associate binary code with computers, it was actually introduced in the 17th century by a mathematician. Binary has long been used in mathematics and logic, and was perfect for the later computing boom.
These days most of us are far removed from dealing with binary code. Our computers, music players and phones all have lovely graphic interfaces, shielding us from the confusing simplicity of binary code.
My first exposure to computing was as a kid, in a progressive high school. Unusual in its day, that high school had a couple of courses in computer programming. We first had to write simple programs in binary code. Later we used pencil cards.
Ah, the days of pencil cards. These were oblong cards containing 80 columns, each column a series of small oval spaces, similar to a lottery form. These spaces represented binary code: an unfilled space is a zero, a filled space is one. Spaces were filled using a pencil. Each brief program or instruction required many cards, and a stack of cards was fed into a machine that used IBM’s Optical Mark Recognition system.
The cards were finicky. If you didn’t entirely fill in a space, or if the pencil mark was too light, it would not be read. I used to buy special 4B pencils (much softer than a standard HB), as they made a lovely opaque mark with ease.
If you left a stray pencil tick anywhere on the card, it might cause a mis-read and an error. If your cards became rearranged out of sequence, woe betide you if you had neglected to number the cards in order to reestablish the order.
I well remember special days when we were permitted to go to the Board of Education offices to work on our assignments. They had a punch card reader! Wow, I thought I was really living in the technological age. I sat myself at the huge combination keyboard and card puncher, and entered my code. Instead of pencil marks, a card was physically punched out to create a series of punched and unpunched areas, again representing binary.
When I edit photos on my laptop computer or download music to my iPod, I’m amazed at how far we’ve come in such a short time. I’m also reminded at how disconnected most of us are from what’s really going on underneath our fancy devices.
S0, how many of you figured out that yesterday’s posts was in binary, and then translated it to read the article?
punch card from my past
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This is the first episode in a vast infograhic series WebHostingBuzz plans to release every other week, aimed to inform & entertain developers, designers, geeks and infographic addicts alike. In this piece we’re taking a look at the history of the Internet usage, observing how much has the game changed in the last few years, who are the biggest players, where are the most users from, who’s speedier and so on. Click here to see the full size version. Enjoy and let us know what you think!
640 pixels wide version
800 pixels wide version
Many studies have found that one of the most common passwords is “password”. This is likely because it is the default in many systems. A very bad default, in my opinion.
We’re overwhelmed by passwords, so it’s not surprising that many people choose highly insecure, but easy to type and remember, passwords. They’re creating a large risk for themselves by doing that.
When creating a password, do a threat assessment, judging the risk to you if someone guesses or hacks the password. An on-line forum is not a great risk, as likely all that could happen is that someone could make postings or send internal messages in your name. Your web hosting account or on-line bank are much more serious, and require very strong passwords.
Create a password that mixes upper and lower-case letters, numbers and, if the system allows it (many don’t) symbols such as hyphen, #, @, or %. If you find strong passwords difficult to remember, create a mnemonic or a phrase in which you enter the first character of each letter, substituting 1 for i, 3 for e, etc. Not all systems allow you to include special characters, which in my view is a foolish limitation.
Do not use only words found in the dictionary, as password cracking software quickly tries all of those. Do not use your birthday, or spouse’s name, or your city, or any other personal data that could be easily guessed by someone who knows a few of your details.
Do not write your password on something you leave accessible. Don’t, as too many people do, keep a written copy of your ATM banking password in your wallet. I recall a boss whose office computer and network password was “tigger”. This was poor in three ways:
- It is too short.
- It’s the name of a popular Winnie the Pooh character.
- He wrote it on a yellow post-it note stuck to his office workstation for all to see.
Also, according to one study, Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time, it’s the 34th most common password. Another common password is “ncc1701″, the registration number of the USS Enterprise from the original Star Trek. One of my clients uses this as his cPanel web hosting password (no, I do not host his sites).
That 500 Worst Passwords list makes for interesting reading. I found many themes. Cars are a common choice: mustang, porsche, firebird, camaro, corvette, toyota, ferrari, bronco, jaguar, viper, saturn, mercedes, sierra, blazer, ford, falcon, scorpion, dakota, ranger.
Sports teams are another favourite: flyers, giants, eagles, yankees, rangers, packers, redsox, gators, cowboys, braves, dolphins, redwings, broncos, redskins, raiders, angels, arsenal, united, chelsea. Sports also make the most common list: baseball, football, fishing, golfer, tennis, nascar, swimming, soccer, hockey.
Within the top 500 are many place names: austin, japan, canada, boston, newyork, brazil, phoenix, dallas, brandon, chicago, victoria, london, paris, sydney, russia, florida.
Many common first names are used: jennifer, michael, eric, jack, michelle, daniel, william, george, thomas, robert, kevin.
There are colours: black, orange, purple, white, yellow, blue.
Surprisingly, there is a large number of sex related words. You can check for yourself, I won’t repeat them here.
Even when people try to be clever by using numbers instead of common words, they use obvious string that are used by thousands of other people: 123456, 1234, 1111, 12345, 12345678, 2222, 7777, 5555, 6666, 666666, 1212, 0, abc123.
If you have trouble coming up with good passwords, you can use a random password generator such as this one. If you’re working on your cPanel web hosting account, you’ll find a password generator built into cPanel, to use when creating mail accounts and FTP accounts, and for reseller and VPS accounts there is one in WHM when creating new cPanel accounts.
Choose a method that works for you, but be sure to protect yourself with strong, uncommon passwords.
Today I received a phone call offering to fix my PC. Instead of thinking “wow, how kind of someone to offer to help me”, my suspicious mind naturally contemplated other motives.
It turns out that this is indeed a telemarketing scam, and a widespread one. My caller identified his company as On-line PC Care, but they apparently do business also as On-line PC Doctors, and perhaps other names. They do business from India.
This scam has targeted people in the UK, Ireland, Australia, U.S., and Canada. Today was at least the second time they called me this year. Apparently the routine goes something like this:
- The caller asks if your computer is running slowly. In some cases they may tell you that they have detected that it is.
- The caller asks you to sit at your computer, and execute some commands to see the Windows event viewer for applications. Naturally there are errors in the log, as applications often have various minor errors, especially web browsers hitting errors trying to load downloaded scripts or site data. Most of this is normal, harmless stuff, but of course the caller doesn’t tell you that.
- The caller then gives you instructions to follow, in order to allow them to download software to remotely control your PC. This is supposedly to allow for diagnostic and repair, but who knows what they are installing? It could be a trojan horse, or keylogger, to find financial records or use your PC for nefarious purposes.
- The caller also asks you for your credit card details, so they can bill you for their technical assistance.
Even if this company does provide a useful service, which is doubtful, their business practices are shoddy. They ignore the fact that in some jurisdictions their calls are illegal. Here in Canada there is a government operated Do Not Call registry. The public may register their phone numbers to avoid telemarketing calls and companies, with a few exceptions, are legally required to honour this list and not contact those people. I am registered on that list, so this company contravenes Canadian law whenever they phone me. There are similar registries in the U.S. and UK, which this company ignores.
If your computer is running slowly, and this does happen as stuff accumulates over time, there are good tools available to fix that. Many of those tools are free. If you need personal assistance, do yourself and your local economy a favour and find a local service person. I guarantee that the experience will be more positive than dealing with this underhanded telemarketer.