Yes, even tech repairmen can be creepy...

A story out of California where a Mac Repairman working for a local repair shop was arrested after it was discovered that he installed spy camera software on customers computers.  He was pretty sophisticated too.  He had it alert his phone whenever a customer was on their computer.  How he got caught was pretty ridiculous as well.  Read the story to find out how.  Simply put, as smart as he was to set it up, he was just as dumb in how he got caught. 

Use Ninite to keep all your programs up to date

One of the keys to locking down your computer from malware is to keep ALL your programs up to date, not just Windows.  I know it can be a pain cycling through all of your programs and determining which ones are up to date and which are not.  Introducing Ninite.com.  The only purpose of this site is to keep everything up to date.  Simply put a check next to every program you want updated and follow the prompts and the Ninite installer does the rest.  If you are already up to date, it simply skips the install, if not, it updates your program to the latest version.  If you find something you do not have, simply pick it and it will install it with the rest.  The best part is that it ONLY installs the program.  It will not install any typical add-on programs that you may encounter when you try to install the program yourself.  I've mentioned Ninite before but it cannot be mentioned enough.  Too many people only think of Windows when updating their system.  All your programs need your attention.

He hit "@" instead of a "D"

Yep, this is how U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner got into trouble.  In sending his colorful pictures of himself to the woman in Seattle on Twitter, he made the mistake of hitting the @ symbol instead of "D", turning what would have been a private tweet into a public one.  Before you think how something so comical could happen, check out this site: Damnyouautocorrect.com.  A site dedicated to true mistakes sent over text messages from iphones thanks to the auto correct feature.

Another reason to use Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service that allows you create a folder on your Internet accessible device and synchronize the files over multiple devices.  For example, you type up a recipe on vacation with your laptop, drop it in dropbox and now every other computing device that you installed Dropbox on (home computer, ipad, smartphone, etc.), now has that exact copy available for access.  It is a cool way to synchronize important files over multiple devices.  A pretty cool feature that is not talked about much is that Dropbox archives all previous versions of whatever documents you saved in Dropbox.  So if you accidentally erased a document or made changes that you want to reverse, you can look at previous versions of the document in your Dropbox and recover it.  Did I say it was free too? (up to 2GB, paid version allows more storage)

Happy World IPv6 Day!

If you know what that means, congratulations, for the other 98% of you, today was one big test drive.  The Internet as we use it now is based on IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4).  This is essentially the rules that govern how Internet communications works across the world.  The problem with IPv4 is that we are literally running out of unique internet addresses available for everyone to use.  Every Internet capable device is automatically assigned a unique address on the Internet, along with every website.  After all, how would the yahoo mail be able to communicate with your smartphone if it did not have a way to find it (ie. an IP address).  We are running out of those addresses.  Introducing IPv6, a new communication protocol that will provide an additional 4 billion or more unique addresses for all of us Internet consuming humans to use.  For one day (today), many of the major Internet players, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo along with many others switched over to IPv6 for today only for a test drive.  So far, so good, the Internet didn't explode....yet

The Browsers wars rage on....

Google leads the industry in the ability to update it's browser, Google Chrome.  This past week Google patched 27 vulnerabilities and paid out almost $17,000 in bounties, yes bounties.  Google actually pays researchers and developers to try to hack their browser.  If you can do it, a nice reward for you.  It's a creative way to secure your browser, hack it before the hackers do.  In other Chrome news, Google is introducing a feature that will alert you when you download a file from a dangerous website.  The hope being that you will take their advice and not open that file before it's too late.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 has continued to make big gains in the browser wars, although Microsoft's hold as a whole is down to 54.3% (It wasn't that long ago that Internet Explorer was over 95% of the market).  Although IE9's share shot up 1.8 percentage points to 4.2%, that wasn't enough to offset the declines posted by other versions. IE8, the browser bundled with Windows 7, lost 1.8 points on its own -- the third month in a row the venerable browser, and the last that will run on Windows XP, lost ground -- while the older IE7 and the ancient IE6 dropped three-tenths and five-tenths of a point, respectively.

Firefox has held steady at around 21.7%, the same number it has held since 2008. 

The war rages on...