Hackers are now taking advantage of conscientious users who have been repeatedly warned by folks like myself to keep their software, specifically their browsers, up to date. If a user happens to surf to a website hosting this new style of attack, they will be presented with a realistic-looking warning that asserts their browser is out of date, but if they click the convenient link to update the browser, they instead be infected with a trojan that will forcibly change the browser homepage to a site that will deliver a full payload of malware. If the user is unfortunate enough to have his or her anti-malware software overrun, they will quickly have a severely compromised computer.
What this means for you:
You should only ever download updates for your software from the manufacturer’s website, as it’s extremely unlikely for manufacturers to use third-party hosts for software updates. In the above example, users were directed to download an update from a domain “securebrowserupdate” which is something Microsoft, Google, Mozilla or Apple would never do for their browsers. If you happen across a pop-up warning that an update is available for your browser, and you aren’t sure it’s legitimate, close it, then check your update status through the browser’s built into the interface, usually under the “Help” menu. Still not sure? Why not call an expert like C2?
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
A recent study by security firm NSS Labs shows that Google’s Chrome browser still has the best detection rate (94%) for spotting phishing URLs, and on average, new malware sites are reported and blocked by all browsers within 5 hours of discovery, a significant improvement over the 16+ hours that same process would have taken in 2009. Firefox showed the best response time to reporting and blocking new sites at 2.3 hours – more than twice as quick as IE10.
What this means for you:
All of the major browsers have significantly improved their ability to protect users, to the point that there is very little statistical difference in their security capabilities. Many of my clients still ask me if one is better than the other, and the answer is always, “It depends on what you need the browser to do.” I still use Chrome for most of my work, but there are still enough times when I’m working with online apps that only work with Internet Explorer. The most important factor to consider is making sure whatever browser you do use is kept up to date, and that you practice safe and cautious surfing whenever working with unfamiliar websites.
If you’ve held off buying a Surface tablet in the hopes that the new device would settle in and get its legs after a less-than-stellar showing at launch, you have probably been disappointed to find that instead of capturing the hearts and minds of the public (or the media), the Surface continues to struggle for identity in the shadow of the iPad and, to a lesser degree, Google’s Nexus tablets. Zach Epstein at BGR.com had one of the more favorable launch reviews of the tablet, and 30 days later, he updates his stance: he’s still thumbs way up on the hardware, but finds that Microsoft’s innovative hardware is limited by Windows RT, the tablet-only version of Windows 8, and its still-thin selection of apps.
What this means for you:
Mobile warriors looking to get work done via tablet alone (that aren’t already doing it via the iPad or Nexus) may still find themselves hamstrung by the limitations of the Windows RT and the lack-luster selection of apps. Even if you spend most of your time in Microsoft Office, performance of Outlook RT is still poor, and if there’s one thing people won’t suffer, its a slow email client.
Look carefully at the applications you need to exist as a tablet-capable version before chucking your laptop for any tablet (not just the Surface), and even if it does exist, make sure it meets your needs before investing. Die-hard tablet enthusiasts will be able to surmount most of the limitations of Windows RT just by virtue of their innate patience and willingness to “hack” around problems, but if you are someone who’s patience is tried even by the ultra-polished iPad, don’t even think about a Surface at least until the Windows 8 Pro versions arrive in early 2013.
In what is being the called the largest migration to cloud services so far, the Department of Veteran Affairs has just inked a deal with Microsoft and HP Enterprise Services to move its 600k users to Microsoft’s cloudbased office productivity suite Office 365. The move is seen by many as further evidence of a significant shift in corporate IT strategy away from costly infrastructure investments to cloud services for every aspect of technology. Over the past 10 years, enterprise IT departments have been gradually, but inexorably moving application platforms out of their own datacenters to providers like Oracle and SAP, but hesitated when it came to the garden-variety desktop applications that knowledge workers use daily. That reluctance may be disintegrating as services from Google and Microsoft make it hard to dismiss the tremendous efficiencies and savings that can be realized by getting rid of the real estate and overhead needed to maintain desktop-based applications.
What this means for you:
Many of you work in the cloud daily without giving it a thought. Perhaps you never thought of Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo Mail as a productivity app, but what about Salesforce, or LinkedIn, or even Facebook? Both Google and Microsoft’s cloud-based office apps are full-featured and powerful enough for everyday business tasks, and the very nature of their delivery makes deployment, security and maintenance much simpler that software installed on desktops. It’s this same strength that also proves to be a weakness, as if you lose your internet connection, you also lose your ability to work. Well that’s easy to solve, I can hear you say. Why not just move to another location where the internet is working? What if it’s the cloud itself that is unavailable? Once again, the cardinal rule compartmentalization comes into play – never base the entirety of your critical business operations in the hands of a single, monolithic platform, even if that platform is largely reliable. And this goes doubly so for a platform around whose neck you can’t comfortably get your hands, as is the case with a provider like Microsoft or Google.
Everyone I know that uses an iPhone has told me that Siri is, at best, a fun party trick, and at worst, completely useless. If you were sold on your latest iPhone by the promises Zooey Deschanel or Martin Scorsese failed to deliver, then you may find solace in a competitive offering from Google. Voice search is now embedded in Google’s recently updated and free iOS search app, allowing you to ask natural language questions and (hopefully) receive audible answers powered by Google’s vast databases.
What this means for you:
If you are one of those people who don’t mind addressing their smartphones like they were animate objects, (you know who you are!) then this app is worth a try. Android users with the Jelly Bean operating system on their devices (Nexus users and some specific late-model Android phones) have been enjoying Google’s voice-driven search capabilities for several months, with generally favorable reviews as compared to Apple’s Siri. It’s free – all you have to lose is some time (and possibly your dignity).
On October 26 of last week, a number of popular, “cloud-based” services suffered multi-hour interruptions. Among the outages was Google’s App Engine, a platform that is used by thousands of other websites and internet platforms including one of my favorites, Passpack.com. Some of your favorites may have been impacted as well: Dropbox, Tumblr and even YouTube were affected. For many, this was a non-event, particularly those who operate and compute within enterprise-based platforms, or rely solely on the desktop and storage of their own computers. C2 Technology relies heavily on cloud-based services, primarily Google products, for our core information systems, and I use Passpack to track the multitude of passwords I need to do my work. So when those outages hit on the 26th, I found myself unable to access the keys to my various digital kingdoms, and felt very much like someone who finds themselves locked out of their car, and at the mercy of another person’s timetable. In this particular case, Passpack.com wasn’t even to blame, as their own reliance on Google’s App Engine service hamstrung their ability to deliver service to their customers, and the fine engineers at Google themselves were struggling with the outage. Everyone’s brand took a hit, and yet there was no one any one of us could blame for the outage – not even a radical hackivist group looking to ruin someone’s day for political currency.
What this means for you:
Very simply, “Never put all your eggs into one basket.” This homily, however pastoral-seeming, still very much applies to how you should use technology, especially when it comes to your core business processes. As an illustration of how this can be bad: I was using Passpack to store my Gmail password, which was complicated and impossible to remember, and instead relying on a complicated, but easier-to-remember passphrase to access Passpack to retrieve that password whenever I needed it. When Passpack went down, so did my ability to access Gmail and all of my client contact information. The lesson to take away from this: if you are going to store critical information online, have a back-up plan for continuing to operate without access to that information. Either back-it up locally (fraught with its own set of risks), or compartmentalize parts of your operations so that they aren’t heavily reliant on a single service provider, or the presence of the internet.
Image courtesy of “vichie81” / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Just a week after the debut of Windows 8, Microsoft held a press event in San Francisco, CA to announce the arrival of the latest version of its smartphone platform, dubbed Windows Phone 8. Timed to coincide with (and possibly to even eclipse) Google’s canceled East-coast press event, Microsoft instead had to fight for media attention with Hurricane Sandy. As a distant fourth place competitor, Microsoft has struggled to gain a toe hold in the smartphone race, facing daunting leads from Apple and Google, and even trailing the flagging RIM Blackberry platform.
What this means for you:
Unless you are a true-blue Microsoft fanatic, you more than likely already own a smartphone that gets the job done. There is a distinct possibility for Microsoft to overtake RIM’s Blackberry platform as the corporate phone of choice, but many enterprises have already opened their iron curtains for iPhones and Android devices. Gaining RIM’s share of the pie will only put them in 3rd place, and as such, integration into corporate environments will still take a backseat to solidifying usage of the dominant platforms. Most adopters of this platform will either be disatisfied technophiles looking for something fresh and different from iOS and Android, or corporate technologists investigating the platforms ability to integrate with existing Microsoft infrastructure. Microsoft’s primary hurdle in getting people to buy Windows phone remains in the lackluster app development landscape, which continues to be dominated by iPhone. Many of the most popular apps aren’t available yet for Windows Phone 8, and their arrival (if they come at all) will likely lag iOS and Android versions by months. If your primary smartphone usage is focused on making calls, checking email, and sharing pictures with your phone, Windows Phone 8 will get the job done, but if you like apps and don’t consider yourself an “early adopter”, give the platform at least another 6 months before weighing a change in platforms.
As anticipated, Apple announced the much-rumoured iPad Mini in a press conference on Tuesday in San Jose, CA. Measuring 7.9″ diagonally, the new tablet is just slightly larger than Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Google’s Nexus 7 and several other Android-based models that have preceded the Mini by as much as a year. Former CEO Steve Jobs was known for his contempt of the 7″ form-factor, but as Apple’s dominance of the tablet space has eroded over the past year, the Cupertino technology company has decided to field a 7″ horse in the race in an attempt to regain some lost ground. Wall Street, however voted its ambivalence to the move by selling off Apple shares moments after the announcement, dropping shares by as much as $20 in the days trading, citing the Mini as evidence that Apple has lost sight of what people really want, which is less choices, not more. Shareholders may have also been disgruntled by the announcement of a new revision of the latest iPad model featuring the new, compact data connector and a faster processor, “obsoleting” it’s 3rd generation iPad after only 7 months.
What this means for you:
If you’ve held out this long on buying an iPad, it probably wasn’t because it was “too big.” Most folks who did think the 10″ iPad was too big have already bought a 7″ Kindle, Fire or Android-based tablet and are more than likely firmly embedded in that devices ecosystem. Many tech-heavy households are also likely to have an iPad as well, so adding another tablet to the mix is probably not in the cards for the majority of consumers. Corporate buyers who were already reluctant to invest in iPads aren’t any more likely to buy a 7″ version, and instead will be watching the arrival of Microsoft’s Surface tablet very closely, as should you if you’ve not already made your tablet investment. If, somehow, you’ve managed to not buy any sort of tablet device, and find your smartphone is just a bit too small for reading or casual video watching, the iPad Mini may be a gentle gateway into the world of tablet computing. The 7″ form-factor is very portable and bag friendly, and big enough for personal entertainment, especially in crowded places such as planes, buses and the backseats of cars. Keep in mind: if you are used to the weight of the black and white Kindles that Apple’s new Mini is heavier, not only physically, but will also weigh twice as much on your wallet.
Have you ever opened up Facebook and noticed an ad popping up on the right hand side that seems to be eerily similar to something you were looking at/shopping for on a completely different website? Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), Facebook isn’t reading your mind – instead it’s reading your browser history for behavior that aligns with one of the thousands of different ads it offers on its new Facebook Exchange (FBX) advertising platform. This particular method is called “retargeting” and is similar to technologies used by Google and Yahoo in their ubiquitous ad platforms.
Prior to the launch of FBX, Facebook sold ads based upon its extensive demographic database – advertisers could target their ads across dozens of traits including geography, age, sex, marital-status, etc. – all based upon the data that it’s 1 billion users freely share with the service in their quest to stay connected with friends and family. This method allowed Facebook to generate nearly $5 billion in ad revenue a year, but since the launch of FBX and the use of retargeting, Facebook’s new shareholders have at least one piece of good news: FBX retargeting ads are proving to be much more effective that ads sold around all the demographic data it’s been gathering for years, which means that advertisers can expect to start paying a lot more for those clicks.
What this means for you:
Let’s face it: internet advertisements are here to stay, especially since people like getting things for “free.” The savvy among you know that nothing in life is ever free, and obviously we pay for these free services with our eyeballs, and on occasion, our patronage of an advertiser. As the folks at Facebook, Google and Yahoo continue to improve the accuraccy of their advertising platforms, you can count on ads will becoming so finely tuned to their viewers, it will be like the internet was a window on our heart’s very own desires. There are add-ons you can install in Firefox and Chrome (check out the ever-popular AdBlock Plus) that will block/hide advertisements, but as websites become increasingly dependent on advertising revenue to continue delivering “free” services they will continue to find ways to make viewing advertising unavoidable. In some cases, using an adblocker will make some sites completely unusable without a lot of fiddling with settings and whitelists. If you insist on drawing a hard line in the sand about being targeted, disabling cookies will go a long way to making it impossible for sites like Facebook to track your browsing behaviors, but it will also make surfing the web a constant barrage of password prompts, preference setting and other annoyances that cookies made bearable. You can also look at services like PrivacyFix which can help you understand and control the privacy settings for the more popular sites that track your browsing history.
Numerous leaks on the internet have all but confirmed the imminent arrival of a 7-inch version of Apple’s wildly popular iPad. Expected to be announced on October 23, 2012, sightings around the internet put the new tablet starting at anywhere from $250 to $320 for a wifi-only version. Substantial rumors also point to a 3G/4G version as well, putting it an advantage over wifi-only, 7-inch Android-based tablets like Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
What this means for you:
If you are one of the few people on the planet that doesn’t already own an iPad, and don’t because of the size/weight of the current 10-inch tablet, the “iPad Mini” may be worth a look. However, 7-inch screens have many limitations when it comes to browsing the web and working in business applications – your screen real estate is literally half of what you can normally see on even the first generation iPad. Seven-inch tablets have found a very comfortable niche as e-readers, casual gaming devices, and fit remarkably well into over-stuffed carryons for frequent travelers. Expect some transition troubles for your popular iPad apps as they resize the display resolution for the 7-inch screen, and the possibility of paying for a new, “mini”-version of the same app you probably already own.