The article mostly focuses on how the venerable are using technology to being more social, but I really like the idea of using Skype (an online telephone and video chat technology) to stay in touch. I’ve liked Skype for some time now, and have used it in a number of situations. I think that this use is the higher calling that this sort of tech has been crying out for from day one.

I also like that the article calls out caution in the use of Facebook. While hardly a luddite, I’ve had some significant concerns about Facebook and their ability to be too blithe about their users’ privacy. As a tool for connecting to lost and distant friends, I have to agree that Facebook is a great resource. But with the ability to over-share and the propensity for something that you might have thought private to be easily disseminated to Facebook’s “partners,” I still feel that caution is in order.

In all, it’s an interesting article about how Baby Boomers are readily adopting technology and, more importantly, implementing it in service of what is vital to them: their families and friends.

Grandma rocking the headphones photo courtesy of Flickr user theterrifictc.

This post isn’t about deceit, it’s about creating walled gardens of individuality.

In the social internet, you are encouraged to be you, your name, yourself. But it might benefit us to be more cautious and adopt a feeling of being two-faced. Not to lie to your friends about who you are, but more to make sure to segregate your friends from your acquaintances.

Here’s my concern, see if you don’t share it with me: privacy on the internet is becoming more and more scarce as time moves forward. Every day we hear a new security-related incident that could have implications for identity theft. There’s a break-in to Sony’s Playstation Network that steals the personal data of thousands of users of the service. There’s a young lady who posts less than enthusiastic comments about her filing job’s duties on her Facebook page and is fired for it,  making her one of several people to be fired for Facebook indiscretions. Job applicants’ names are regularly run through online search engines to see if there are any publicly facing pages that might disqualify them for the position.

New York Times Magazine reports on how privacy and starting over by putting mistakes and perceived mis-judgements may well be a thing of the past. A United States Representative, Anthony Weiner mistyped an “@” instead of a “d ” in a Twitter message and exposed a great deal of salacious private activity that eventually pushed him to resign from the House. Even former CEO of Google is reported as having suggested that there may come a day when people turning 18 may just get a new name and a new identity so that they wouldn’t be hampered by youthful indiscretions, because Google won’t forget that stuff.

I’m suggesting that it’s time to consider creating multiple personae to obfuscate our various personal identities. It’s been good enough for authors to have pseudonyms and pen names for hundreds of years. Now that we are all, to a certain extent publicly facing autobiographical authors, perhaps it’s time to do some work to manage our brand.

As a computer professional, I’m well aware that obfuscation isn’t security. But I feel that the technique that I’m outlining might offer a greater level of brand control, and for most of us, that’s what will make our personal and professional lives much more comfortable. Besides, if you know enough to call me on the “obfuscation isn’t security” line, chances are you’re already using some of these techniques to a certain extent anyway.

How Does It Work?

Here’s what I’m proposing:

1. Pick yourself a new nickname that you feel adequately represents you as a whole person. Try something that is unique and doesn’t necessarily have a lot of connotative baggage to it: Ferdelen, or Jakdaal, or Hebraid’n. Make it fun and fairly short.
2. Find yourself a free email service that you think looks and feels nice, and with a company that you trust. That can be something like Google’s Gmail, or Microsoft’s Hotmail, or Aol’s err… AOL Mail. If you don’t like those folks, check out the Wikipedia list of email providers and see if you can find one that better strikes your fancy.
3. Set up an account using your new persona name on a social media site. I’ve found that Twitter is easiest, and that service has a number of clients that will allow you quickly and easily change between multiple accounts. However, Facebook even has instructions on how to log into multiple Facebook accounts. How handy is that?
4. Once you’ve got a new account for your new persona (and I really recommend only doing one at a time), make sure one of your first stops is to the Security settings. While there, make sure to make your profile and everything that you communicate through it Private so that no one might see your output there unless you have either befriended them or you’ve approved their seeing things or something of the like.
5. Privacy settings set as tight as possible? Awesome! Now make sure to invite the people who you really care about. Invite only the people you can trust to keep in confidence the things that you are sharing through that persona.
6. Go to town with your new persona!

Now I know that this isn’t foolproof. It’s amazingly susceptible to you getting confused and making mistakes when posting one persona to the other (though to my mind much less than if you only had the one account/persona).

Plus, what’s on the internet is on the internet and is probably available to be searched. Given data mining techniques, all another persona will really do to the determined researcher is add a layer of difficulty, so it wouldn’t really have saved Rep Weiner from the consequences of his self-destructive behavior, it just would have made it more difficult to find it out.

But, having an extra persona (or several!) allows you to have levels of personality exploration that won’t immediately be traceable to your public-facing personality. Cumbersome? Absolutely. Will this be great for everyone? Nope, hiding things about who you are may feel like lying to some people, and that level of complexity might add a level of difficulty that reduces the value of the internet and social networking for others.

Still, this technique is worth considering, if only to understand that your children could set up similar systems of keeping some of their activities walled off from your knowledge, and as Schoolhouse Rock says, “It’s great to learn, ’cause knowledge is power!“.

Did I miss something? Is there a technique that you like to use to create a “walled garden” for your private social sharing? Let us all benefit from your experience in the comments!

White flowers in a walled garden used with Creative Commons permission by Flickr user strife.

What happened, and why does it concern anyone that isn’t just some geek that wants to share files on the internet?

What happened is that a Dropbox developer pushed changes to the software to the system yesterday that left a big, gaping security hole for four hours wherein anyone could log into any Dropbox account without passwords. Here’s the story from Dropbox’s blog. No authentication meant that files could be rifled through, including files thought secure — client files, your personal files, even a backup of your password list.

Unless you have encrypted your files yourself before uploading them to a Dropbox account, all of that data that you may have put there, regardless of place in private or public folders, was vulnerable.

What does this mean?

For me it means that Dropbox is out as a service that I can trust with secure or confidential data. As a file-sharing platform with people, I can see that it might still have some value. But as a  service that actually can be trusted to keep my private data private, I feel that they’ve misstepped too many times. And when your data is precious to you, trust should be a major factor.

So what to do?

I recommend to my clients that for security reasons they re-assess their use of Dropbox.

If your subscription is up or if you’re feeling that it is worth the money to invest in a new subscription, then move to a more secure cloud-based file storage system. My current favorite is SpiderOak, a service similar to Dropbox, but that encrypts the files on your system before uploading them to their server, so that they are never in possession of any data that could be read without your specific password. I’ve noticed that this encryption seems to slow down data transfers compared to the blue box’s service, but since most of my transfers happen in the background, I haven’t had a problem with it. SpiderOak has a free account that allows for two gigabytes of storage, which should allow you to learn whether it is an acceptable service.

If a new subscription isn’t in the cards for you now, then by all means, make sure that you’re keeping your files safe and secure by doing the encryption yourself before uploading the files to Dropbox. Lifehacker has a couple of timely posts about how you can better secure your Dropbox-uploaded files with TrueCypt and how to secure your files with an encrypted zip file that is worth checking out.

Encrypting your files can be a pain in the ass, but if your business focuses on legal, medical or financial realms where client confidentiality is a huge component of keeping your business running, it’s worth the effort. Feel free to contact me if you need some assistance in getting it all set up.

What do you think?

So what do you think? Does Dropbox’s utility still outweigh any misgivings that you might have? Am I blowing this out of proportion? Is there something that I’m not seeing here? Let us know in the comments!

Box photograph used with Creative Commons permission by kowitz.

Why? There are a whole number of reasons.

It might be because you’ve grown out of it. When you were a kid, being creative was easy, but as you’ve aged, you’ve put flights of fancy behind you and with it lost the connection to that super-easy creation.

It could be that you’ve become creative in the micro and now you have a hard time making the whole of a thing if you don’t have something to work on first. Other people may call that being a “perfectionist,” but know that you’re truly hyper-creative, only in a spiral that forever drills deeper down into things.

Because I think I’m going to return to this topic again sometime, I want to share some resources for how to create more and feel more comfortable being creative. Here are some tools that I’ve found helpful and valuable to me, perhaps you can too:

• The Idea Catalyst Kit by Megan Elisabeth Morris and Martin Whitmore at Ideaschema
• The Universal Traveler: A Soft-systems guide to creativity, problem-solving and the process of reaching goals, by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall
• Brown and Haley Almond Roca
• A big ol’ iPod Classic and a nice, long walk through the western part of Golden Gate Park. (I recommend a walk around Spreckles Lake — it’s sweet.)

What about you? What do you use to bring on a kick-ass creative fervor in yourself? What am I missing?

Brick wall used courtesy of The Art Guy via Creative Commons attribution license

These are the miracles of our age, these little ways that we can stay connected to our friends, family and news and information sources. There’s no doubt that Wi-Fi is a great convenience, but it can make your home network more vulnerable if you’re not following a few simple steps.

Here are a couple of ways to keep your home network safer:

• Make sure you’re using your own password:
  • Every wireless router has a default password to get in and change the settings. If your first step in configuring the router wasn’t to change that password, you’re just making things easy for the bad guys (or your kids even, if they wanted to make sure that their network traffic got a higher priority than yours). Change that password, own your network.
• Update your router’s firmware:
  • Your Wi-Fi router, though it may just seem a piece of hardware to you, is really a hardware and software combination. And with any software, exploits are found that could allow intruders to force their way in through cracks in the software and hardware. The manufacturers find out about these vulnerabilities and update the firmware on their devices somewhat regularly. Make sure your router has the most recent firmware available. On most pieces of hardware it’s a quick and painless procedure.
• Use the strongest transmission encryption available, aim for WPA or WPA2:
  • Early on in Wi-Fi’s development, there wasn’t very advanced transmission between the router and the clients. Many networks ran in “Open” mode — that had no encryption point-to-point or at a light “WEP” encryption that could easily be cracked. Both of these modes could be easily sniffed by a malicious person with a computer set up to do so so that your data transmissions could be read and taken. Do you do banking on your home machine over the Wi-Fi in your house? If you’re using Open or WEP encryption modes, you could be exposing your passwords, bank, and account numbers.
  • While you’re in changing your password and updating your firmware anyway, won’t you use a stronger encryption method (WPA or WPA2 are best right now) with a nice, strong password to log into the network that you can share only with friends and family?

Some of these things can be a bit intimidating and technical, but by taking a look at these three points, you can go a long way towards making sure that a malicious intruder (or curious kid) aren’t going places in your home network that they shouldn’t.

If you have any questions or are curious about getting someone to help you with this, contact me. I’m happy to help you either over the phone, or if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, I make house calls.

Have you found any low-hanging fruit for Wi-Fi networks? Any places where someone could really make their network safer without a lot of extra work or bother to the people who use the network? Let us know in the comments.

Photo by Flickr user Florian and used with Creative Commons attribution, share-alike permission

It’s a plague and a problem, when you have to deal with not only the real troubles that you are going through, but also this unwanted chattering monkey in your head.

But I have found something that helps, and if it helps me, I like to think that it could help you too.

Here’s something to try: when these thoughts first start to impose themselves in your head. Reflect on them and, as best you can, remove yourself from the equation. Separate your thoughts from the monkey brain and ask yourself if the feelings and chattering that the monkey is presenting are actually going to help you in any way.

Realizing that there’s nothing that I can do about the doubts and fears that try to make me scared about either what has happened or what might happen usually allows me to put those thoughts aside and get on with my life. Sometimes things are too powerful, and then I find that some breathing-focus meditation clears things up.

If those things fail, I suppose I can suggest trying out one of my friend Jason the Fez Monger’s Monkey Brains fezzes. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?

Indian monkey photograph used through Creative Commons license by Dylan O’Donnell

This is startling, especially given the way just a couple of months ago Dropbox changed their Terms of Service and opened up a nice legal loophole for Dropbox to expose your data to cooperate “with United States law enforcement when it receives valid legal process,” which was only chilling in that the change highlighted the original wording that implied that your data was not able to be accessed by any one else.

While the new news about the Dropbox Reader tool is a concern, take some salt with the hype in that the tool-runner needs to get access to files on your personal machine (or at least a machine that runs Dropbox that you log into with your account), and that can be difficult.

How does this new development make you feel about your Dropbox account? Or have you decided to use a different cloud-based backup and storage service? Perhaps you’re a Carbonite user? Or maybe SpiderOak? What do you think of these services? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Photos by Simon Law (laptop) and by Tawheed Manzour (lock and key),  used with Creative Commons permission

Wha Happen?

Last week a small ISP in Northern California, Sonic.net,  announced that they were going to roll out an installation of fiber optic Internet access to the community of Sebastapol, California. By the end, this installation of fiber optic cable is going to reach about 700 customers, so it’s really just a trial balloon in terms of installation.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, so what? So there’s going to be more access for some people somewhere that I’m not. Or you may even have fiber access already and be gloating over that. But hold on, Tex. This isn’t big news because of the roll out, but because of the price.

Price Point Wars

So here’s the deal. This high-speed Internet access roll out is going to come with a price tag that is only $70 a month for a speed nearly 7 times faster than what Comcast users get for $40 a month! That sort of speed to cost ratio is unheard of in the United States, and that’s something to get excited about.

For more resources about the announcement and the nature of the speeds and prices involved, Nate Anderson over at ArsTechnica wrote a great article about this. I encourage you to check it out. Also, you can find more information in the Press Democrat’s article about Sonic’s move. They are both good information on the news and way more detailed than I intend to get into here.

Fine, get to the point, how does this help me?

So how does this help you? Let’s see if these things interest you:

1. Speed

Greater speed means less time-wasting, and less waiting for data to come to you. It means that you can do more things and faster. I’ll be touching more on this more specifically later, but just keep in mind what you might be able to do with about five times the speed that you’ve got now.

2. A lowering tide lowers all boats

Internet access is a commodity. There’s not a lot of difference between what you get from one ISP versus what you get from another besides speed and price. This means that given competition, prices for the commodity will tend towards the lowest sustainable price to the consumer. Now, there hasn’t been much competition in Internet access in the US, thanks to a whole host of factors. And for some reason, US prices for Internet access have been fairly high, especially when one considers the price to speed ratio of other first world nations. (Here’s a great infographic illustrating this.) If the US gets competition that proves the pricing point model, the chances are that the costs will drop for similar service — first regionally, then nationally.

3. A more competitive US

If you look at the infographic I link to above, you’ll notice that the US isn’t first in something. And we’re not first in something that we’re basing our economy: information and data transfer. As more people work from home or even begin to run their own small businesses, faster, cheaper data transfer is going to become more crucial to allowing the US to compete in a global market. In essence, higher speeds and lower costs is just being patriotic.

4. Better home entertainment

One of the largest growths in terms of Internet bandwidth usage has been in the arena of home entertainment. People love the ease and convenience of streaming videos from YouTube, Netflix and Hulu and listening to Internet radio over Pandora or Live365 or SHOUTcast. This usage has started taking up a significant amount of bandwidth. Some ISPs deal with this growth by beginning to impose limits and caps on the amount of data one user can consume per month or per day. But there are no caps in Sonic.net’s plans. So not only are they looking at faster access for cheaper, they’re going to be providing that access with no limits on amount other than the bandwidth imposes. That means more movies, faster, and that could mean that your new 3D-enabled TV could get streaming 3D content that much sooner.

5. Easier and cheaper future bandwidth upgrades

Bandwidth upgrades in telecommunications are currently limited by the amount of copper wire strung around on telephone poles and underground cables around the US. But with a greater installation of fiber optic cables, innovation could begin to move faster as well. With the infrastructure upgraded, the competition to give better service and higher bandwidth for less cost could begin anew, and we’d all benefit.

6. More speed at less cost = the Internet + INTENSE-ER-ER!

So here’s where my inner geek comes out. Mostly, I just think you’d benefit from these changes because you’d get more of a good thing. The Internet, and how we use it for any number of things, has greatly changed the world in just the last 20 years. If we’ve changed that much going from modems and dial-up to high-speed cable and DSL, imagine how much more things could change, how much more the online economy could ramp up given an increased speed and ubiquity. Often, innovation follows increased access — Amazon wouldn’t be a viable business were it not for the speed and ease with which a host of people could shop there, and YouTube could hardly exist without high-speed  – so with a higher bandwidth, a whole host of as-yet unimagined (or hardly imagined) new offerings could come to pass. In short, human ingenuity could make use of that new bandwidth to make your life better, and your ingenuity could make your life better with the increased money in your pocket.

All hail cheap fiber access!

[Disclaimer: I am a Sonic.net customer (and happily so, for several years).]

If you’re getting tired of saying “go out and play” all the time and you’re looking to keep the ragamuffins from yelling at you for just twenty minutes, here are a few games that might be good for them and good for your sanity, too.

1. Portal 2
   Portal 2 is my top pick for kids this summer. It’s rated E for everyone, but has a surprisingly deep and entertaining story. If you’ve not heard of the Portal franchise before, it’s a puzzle game that takes place from a first-person perspective. The puzzles in Portal 2 are not as challenging overall as the original Portal (which you can find in Valve Software’s Orange Box), but the story is deeper and the dual player features add a great level of cooperative challenge. It’s available for PC, Xbox360, and PS3

    

2. The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
   Ocarina of Time is a classic Nintendo game freshly ported to the portable Nintendo 3DS. The Zelda games have set the benchmark for single character role-playing games and can satisfy the need for exploration and storytelling for hours. Great for long car rides, if yours can play games while in the car that is.

    

3. Terraria and Minecraft
   I’m doing a disservice to lump these two independent (and unrated) games by lumping them together, but they are somewhat similar in that you take the role of a single character who digs, digs, digs, digs, and explores and makes things from what is dug up. Terraria is a 2D side scroller that can be a little violent and gruesome for the little ones. The 3D Minecraft can also be sort of spooky — it’s got zombies, skeletons and spiders after all — but turn down the difficulty (read: monsters) and the game becomes pure creativity, where the player digs blocks from the earth and then uses them to build all sorts of things. It’s like a game of building blocks but with a to-scale perspective. Both are only available for the PC, but are relatively inexpensive compared to some of the big console games and are a tremendous value for the playtime and engagement that they encourage.

    

I hope that this helps with any of you that might be searching out something that might help keep your young charges quiet and cool and safe in the heat of the day.

Picture through the kind Creative Commons permission of Bob n Renée.