Malware is FREE on Wireless Networks

I love that when I travel I can get online from just about anywhere. High speed WiFi networks are now available in most hotels and airports of the world. This is a big change from when I used to bring wire strippers, electrical tape and a screw driver when traveling. In my old Q-Link days hotels didn’t even have modular jacks so I used to unscrew the phone jack to wire up my 300 baud modem.

Unfortunately, WiFi public networks can be a real danger to your privacy and the security of your computer. If you’re connecting to an unsecured WiFi network your data is up for grabs to anyone with the right tools. Keystrokes, Emails and passwords on unsecure web pages can be grabbed out of the air.

What you also need to watch for is bogus WiFi networks that phish for your connection. One of the guys at VirusList.com recently blogged, while sitting at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, that his computer found suspicious networks with names like “Free Public WiFi” and “US Airways Free WiFi”.

Just driving around my neighborhood I was able to find a number of wireless networks open to the public. At a hotel or airport you’ll see many others including some with the word “FREE” in their name. Beware!

According to VirusList.com

“It's easy to spot rogue WiFi links - you just need to look for the following signs:

- an enticing name like 'Free Wifi' or 'Free Internet'
- an AD-Hoc type connection, rather than an access point”

If it’s an AD-Hoc network you should see the words, “Computer-to-Computer” under the network name. The ones shown in my example are Access Point networks.

They also recommend the following…

“- use a VPN link over any public WiFi internet access link to dial back home and access the internet using a secure proxy over the VPN link
- use only encrypted IMAP e-mail connections to read mail, TLS or SSL
- beware of fake certificates
- use a firewall and IPS or a combined security solution such as KIS7”

Most of you don’t have or probably don’t know what a VPN is so I’ll offer you an alternative. I use a service from GoToMyPC.com.

Using GoToMyPC when I travel, I connect to my home/office PC. I open up my Outlook Email as if I was sitting in my chair at home. It also means I don’t have to sync up stuff I’m working on when I leave and return. I even sign on AOL from that computer via GoToMyPC. Essentially my laptop acts as a dump terminal and the entire session is done using 128–bit AES encryption. The service is $20 a month but you can click here for a free trial.

If you’re a regular reader you’ll remember I recently changed from Time Warner Road Runner to Verizon FIOS which provides much greater upload speed. Many broadband providers give you lots of download bandwidth but a small slice for upload. Having more bandwidth allocated to upload is especially helpful for using GoToMyPC.

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Spamhaus Blocks Google Bloggers

Like many others, I’ve always included a link to my Blog in my Email signature. Apparently, it’s not always a good idea. If you’re a Blogger who uses BlogSpot (and you include a link in your signature) some folks may never see your Email.

I recently tried to respond to a friend at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society only to have my Email bounce back. Apparently, my blog is listed on the Spamhaus Block List.
When I checked the link included in the bounce I read the following…

“Google's blogspot.com - seeming endless abuse (HerbalKing)”

I wrote to Spamhaus and received the following reply.

Harvard is trying to protect their users from the tens of thousands of blogspot.com URL's set up by spammers in just the past month.

We advise all users to consider emails with blogspot.com links in them as probably spam. Your emails include your non-spam blogspot URL. Sadly, on the same IP address is the tens of thousands of spammer URLs.

Until Blogspot (Google) can come up with a solution to the abuse, we'd advise you to use tinyurl.com or easyurl.com to "mask" your blogspot.com link when included in emails.

--
Regards,

John Reid
The Spamhaus Project
http://www.spamhaus.org/

I personally think Spamhaus is being a little heavy handed but that’s why I don’t use any auto spam filter. By the time I publish this, HerbalKing and other spammers may be including Tinyurl links in their spam. This could potentially kill Tinyurl.

Luckily, I recently registered “BitsFromBill.com” and can use that domain to redirect folks to my Blog. This may not be an option for other BlogSpot/Blogger.com users so you may want to review how you sign your Email.

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Don't Give In to Charity Spam

Don't forget to Give but when you do, Give Wisely.

It’s the time of year when you’ll start to see some real and some illegitimate organizations asking for donations. While we’re all in the holiday spirit and the credit card is close at hand it’s a good time for fund raising. I knew it was time as soon as I started to receive bogus invitations for have letters from Santa sent to my kids. Yea, like I want to give anyone a kids Email address.

In general, I reject any requests that come via my phone or in my Email. I often give to those in need, both organized and personal but I don’t need to be reminded. I certainly don’t want unrequested Emails added to all my spam. Chances are high that charity Emails you get this month are not to be opened.

I hate to say but even some seeming reputable charities may not be spending your donation in a way you’d want. There are a number of web sites including “Charity Navigator” that will rate charities and provide details on how funds are utilized.

I was pleased to see that the “Marine Toys for Tots Foundation” received a 4 star rating. Only 2.5% is used for non-program expenses. Our local “Animal Protection Foundation” in Scotia, NY also received fours stars. Unfortunately, I noticed the Northeast Animal Shelter only received one star and only 52% of the funds go to programs. About 8% goes to administration and 40% is spent on fund raising expenses like advertising on Google.

Charity Navigator also includes compensation for CEO’s, historical data and my favorite is their privacy policy. Many well known charities will share your personal information unless you explicity Opt-Out. I found some real surprises but I’d rather not pick on anyone specific. Visit and see for yourself.

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Commodore 64: 25th Anniversary Celebration

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA is having a special celebration on Monday, December 10th. Invited speakers include former CBM president Jack Tremial, Apple pioneer Steve Wozniack, Amiga developer Adam Chowaniec and William C Lowe, father of the IBM PC. I’m sure my invitation was lost in the mail.

Let me just say that the C64 changed my life like no other device. It was like a drug that addicted me with its charm and personality. It helped me find new love, friendship, travel and a completely fun new career. Call me sentimental but it allowed me to find confidence and purpose in my life.

I had become quite the advocate of the C64/128 when I met up with a guy named Steve Case and his friend Marc Seriff. We shared a vision that personal telecommunications could be so much easier. I won’t bore you with sorted details of my C64 history but I’ll share some of my favorite tricks and memories that might be interesting to other C64 users.

Click for Video of my 1985 Q-Link Demo

I used to bring my Commodore Vic-20 with me into my chemistry lab in college. Instead of spending one hour studying the lab work the night before, I would spend three hours writing a program to input and process my lab results. I thought my professor would be impressed but he was more excited that I could make the computer duplicate the sound of a phone ringing.

Unlike other computers of the time, the Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive had a processor and memory which allowed it to be programmed as well. While this was typically used for copy protection, someone actually wrote a program that made the disk drive play the tune “Bicycle Built for Two” by moving the drive head back and forth at different frequencies. It was a cute trick but not one I demo’d very often.

My favorite trick was created by programmer, Michael J Henry. It was easy to customize the text in programs by editing characters on the floppy disk so you could make the screen say anything. Well, Michael’s trick discouraged people from removing his name on the screen. The “L” in his first name was represented as “4C” which in the machine language of the C64 was also the code for the instruction JMP or Jump to the address of the next two bytes. At startup, his program would jump to the physical screen address where the “L” was visible and it would cause the program execution to jump to the address “204A” which was represented by the “space J” in his name. If anyone changed his name, the program stopped working. If you were able to follow that you can claim geek status.

One person missing from Mondays’ event will be my old friend and mentor Jim Butterfield. In doing research for today’s post I discovered that Jim passed away peacefully June 29th of this year.

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Visit Skywalker Ranch with CNet

I ran into a great article on CNet today that was nostalgic for me but might be of interest many of you as well. Many years ago I worked on a project called Habitat in a partnership with Lucasfilm LTD. One of the benefits of the project included visits to Skywalker Ranch, just north of the San Francisco. It was a quiet year for the ranch. No new Star War movies were planned and the most recent feature film had been Howard the Duck.

Click to view video promo

CNet’s Daniel Terdiman reported on his recent trip to Skywalker Ranch and was allowed to take and publish a number of photos.

Click for Skywalker Ranch photos

The ranch has expanded a lot since my last visit and is the home of Skywalker Sound, the recipient of 18 Oscars. If you’re into state of the art sound production this is the place to go. Daniel has all the details in his article, “The hills are alive with the sounds of Skywalker”

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Mysteries of SD Flash Cards Exposed

I used to backup my data to CDs, then DVD’s but now with the low cost of solid state memory I’m actually archiving data on postage stamp sized 2 GB cards.  Secure Digital Flash memory is also becoming the most popular storage for camera’s, PDA’s, mobile phones and Audio players.

Unfortunately, if you’ve been shopping for SD cards you’ll easily be confused about which one to purchase. For instance Kingston has Secure Digital, Secure Digital Elite Pro, Secure Digital Ultimate and Secure Digital High Capacity.  SanDisk has its standard SD memory, Ultra II, and SD Extreme III.

 Secure Digital  (  <= 2 GBs )
Below are current rates from Amazon. Read/Write are maximum speed when no fragmentation of data blocks is found. Sometimes speed is measured in 66x or 133x. x = the standard CD-Rom speed of 150kb/s.
Name                   Price        Read     Write           Warranty
San Disk 2 GB           $15            ?         ?                 5-year
Kingston 2 GB           $15          5 MB/s  1.5 MB/s        Lifetime
San Disk Ultra II        $30         10 MB/s   9 MB/s         Lifetime
Kingston Elite Pro 50x $27         8.2 MB/s  7.7 MB/s      Lifetime
San Disk Extreme III   $38        20 MB/s   20 MB/s        Lifetime

 Secure Digital High Capacity  ( > 2 GBs )
Speed is measured by class which is the minimum data rate even with fragmentation. In theory these cards could grow to 128 GBs although 8 GB is most currently available. While the higher capacity SD cards are typically formatted with the FAT32 file system that isn’t the difference between SD and SDHC. SDHC uses SD protocol 2.0 to store data blocks. 
Class   Speed
  2         2 MB/s
  4         4 MB/s
  6         6 MB/s

You might think price equals quality and speed but it’s a little more complicated. Many camera’s and other devices won’t support the larger SD cards. Many card readers don’t support the new SDHC format for cards over 2 GB. For instance, our grandson is getting a Kid-Tough Digital Camera from Fisher Price which doesn’t support “high speed” SD or cards greater than 1 GB.  The Nintendo Wii only supports up to 2 GB. Some devices may support new protocols if their firmware is updated. Not every store includes this very useful information in their product description.

One of the cool things about the SD type memory is its SDIO expandability. This allow devices to be built along with the card including wireless, cameras, GPS, fingerprint recognition and much more. I recently wrote about the Eye-Fi SD card which uses this functionality.

The big question for me is how many times can the memory be written to, and how long with it last?  This information isn’t easy to find. The industry claims this kind of memory( NAND) can be written to up to 100,000 times and operate up to 51 years.  My research concludes that SD memory should last up to 10 years when stored in a safe place.

What you really need to remember…

• When purchasing SD cards make sure it’s compatible with your device and your SD reader and vise versa.


• When writing data to your SD card, be sure the operation is complete before removing the card from the reader.

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Two "Must Have" Camera Features

Over many years the focus of digital camera improvements have been price, pixels and speed. It’s all the same technology, just bigger, better and cheaper. The popularity of the digital camera has however spawned a welcome industry evolution in solid state memory cards.

I’ve been snapping digital photos for over ten years and finally, I’m starting to see some real innovations.

• Wireless Photo Transfer
  This is a natural progression and Eye-Fi just made it simple and cheap. Instead of each camera company building it into their camera, Eye-Fi has built it into the memory card. Eye-Fi even supports automatic upload to 20 photo sharing sites with more to come. For only $99, if your camera uses SD cards you’ll want to order one of these before supplies run out.

Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card

• Global Positioning Tagging
  It may not be available for all cameras but if Sirf has its way it will be soon. Your camera currently records the date and time you take your photo. How nice would it be to know exactly where you were when the photo was taken? In my opinion this isn’t any kind of brilliant idea, it’s a natural convergence of technology. The GPS network is there and available, why shouldn’t your camera use it.

Navman 750

What would really be really cool is if they could just build GPS functionality into the Eye-Fi card.

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