Prey helps you track stolen computers, phones and tablets

This is not an insignificant question. Even simple security measures on computing devices require a level of discipline, training and understanding that some folks are just not willing to put up with. For instance, when we install a password manager like 1Password on client machines, it takes five minutes. Training and education for you and your employees might take hours or days depending on the size of deployment. But if people refuse to use the system and continue to choose “abc123″ as their password for every service they use, then we’ve failed.

Fortunately, the software solutions to enable secure and safe computing are getting so good that inconvenience is being minimized. Forward thinking companies are able to empower their employees with the tools to protect themselves online, as well as the data on their devices should they be lost or stolen.

However, ever one to complicate a good thing, and go the extra mile for my clients, when it comes to data on physical devices, I ask them to consider something else to trade off: Recoverability.

Now that our computing devices are connected to the Internet pretty much all the time, there are a variety of software solutions you can install on your computer to assist you and law enforcement to track down lost and stolen devices. For example, I detailed a recent case where the Apple Find my iPhone service was an absolute lifesaver in helping me recover my wife’s lost iPhone.

But what if your device is stolen? Software such as Prey works by using your hardware against the thief. So if a thief is using your laptop for example, Prey operates in the background and uses the webcam to snap a picture, take a screenshot of what the thief is looking at, and uses wifi data to report the laptop’s location. It uploads all of that data to Prey on a regular basis. There are some great stories they publish of happy users who have recovered their stuff.

“Great!” say the clients. “Let’s set that up!”

So here’s the catch: The thief needs to be able to use your computer for Prey to do its thing. So: Do you want a shot at recovering your computer, or would you rather have your computer completely inaccessible to thieves. Remember, there could be sensitive data on your computer that opens you up to identity theft. Depending on the client, we usually recommend data security over recoverability. Back up your data with discipline, kiss your computer goodbye, file an insurance claim and we’ll get you up and running as quickly as we can with a new device.

A client of mine put it succinctly. The instructions he gave about how his devices were to be secured in case of theft were music to my ears: “I want these things to be doorstops. Completely useless.”

However, we’ve recently implemented some options with Apple Macbooks that allow us to secure the devices, while still allowing for the possibility that we can help you recover the computer. This is a Mac specific solution, but the theory can be applied to other machines, and we’re investigating a method to implement on PCs as well. I won’t go into all the nitty gritty details about this here, but here are the basics of the method.

Back up your data:

This should go without saying, but hey, we’re saying it. Did you back up your data? Do it. Now.

Firmware Password:

Your Mac’s firmware is basically equivalent to your PCs BIOS. A tiny bit of software that governs how the computer boots and operates before the Operating System even loads from the hard drive. Apple provides a tool allowing you to set a password on the firmware. For every day use, this actually does nothing. Restart your computer and it will boot as usual. However, if a thief attempted to use a key combination during startup to do something like boot from a DVD or USB drive, he would need to enter your password. A thief might do this in preparation for reinstalling the operating system to prepare your computer for resale. In this case, he would not be able to do that.

Find out more about the Firmware Password Utility at the Apple Knowledge Base. CNet also has some practical tips on how to access the utility if you are having some trouble with your machine.

Decoy Operating System:

We create a small partition on your existing hard drive, and here we install a clean copy of the Mac’s operating system. Using some configuration options, we make this version of the operating system boot and log a default user in automatically. This user is a “non-privileged” user who can’t change configuration options or access certain areas of the operating system. Put some non-sensitive files in this account to make it look like a real account.

This is where we install Prey. We can even set Prey up to automatically report the computer as stolen (Provided it is connected to the Internet) as soon as the computer starts.

There’s a pretty good how-to over at Spider Labs. This is where we got the idea in the first place .

Encrypt your “real” Operating System

Your Mac has a built in option for encrypting your entire disk. It’s called FileVault and what it means is that a thief is going to have lot of trouble reading the data on your hard drive without a password or a recovery key that Apple provides you in case you forget your password.

In this particular case, you are not encrypting the “entire” disk, as your “decoy” operating system remains on an unencrypted partition of your disk, but you are encrypting all the data on your “real” operating system, and that should be all that matters.

Apple provides a good review of enabling FileVault in their Knowledge Base. Or try this guide at About.com.

The final result:

While all of this takes a bit of time and some careful planning, this is how your Macbook works now:

When you boot your machine, hold down the “Option” key on your keyboard. A screen will come up with a password entry screen. This is the firmware password. Your computer is asking for this because you are using a key to choose which hard drive partition to boot from. Type in the password and choose your original hard drive partition; The one with your “real” or original operating system and information. You’ll then be asked for your user account and password. This should be one of the accounts you chose when encrypting your drive with FileVault. You’ll then have access to the encrypted drive and be able to use the computer normally.

If a thief starts your computer, it will boot into the decoy operating system and automatically log in under the “non-privileged” user you set up. Since your other hard drive partition is encrypted, the user can’t access it. And they cannot change options in the existing operating system very easily, as they don’t have privileges to do so.

Prey will start tracking the computer as soon as it boots, and as soon as it connects to the Internet, it will begin sending reports. Provide these reports to law enforcement and enlist their assistance in getting back your property.

This might all sound a bit complicated and time consuming, but isn’t your data and your gear worth it? All it takes is some planning and forethought. And of course, we’re happy to talk about rolling something like this out to track your gear, but keep your data secure.

The post A secure, but recoverable laptop appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Apple’s phone locator is built into iOS. But you need to turn it on!

Last Friday, a snowstorm hit Toronto and dumped about a foot of snow on the city. My wife had a consulting engagement that involved a day-long facilitation session at a hotel. People had flown in to attend and there was no question of it being cancelled no matter how much snow was falling. My wife hit the streets before 7am to try to find a cab and get to the hotel. She texted me around 7:30 from a cab letting me know she had successfully hailed a cab and that the roads were a nightmare. She then called after 8am from a strange number. She had lost her phone, but would be locked in the facilitation for the whole day.

One of the safety measures we employ on our devices is relatively simple: List an emergency contact and email address on your lock screen. She was letting me know, in case I got a call about the device.

Fortunately, all our devices are tracked using a family Apple account, so I was able to track her phone after she called. The phone was responding (hooray!). That was a big relief, as it meant that it was probably safe. It hadn’t been dropped in the snow, or been run over by a car. It also appeared as if it was stationary. I had to drop the kids at school (in a snowstorm!), but I had a free morning, so I had a chance to play detective.

After getting the kids to school (in a snowstorm!), I tracked the phone. It was still in the same place, reporting its location in downtown Toronto. I drove to the location, parked and visited a few retail establishments and asked if someone had turned in a phone. I phoned the phone in each place I visited. No luck.

The Find my iPhone app allows you to sound a chime on a lost device. It’s actually pretty loud. To this point, I have only used it to recover my iPhone when I lose it in the couch cushions around the house. I was starting to think that the reason the phone was reporting as stationary was that someone had taken it home or to work. I would have to wait and see if they turned the phone on and saw my number on the lockscreen and did the right thing.

As a last resort, I went back outside into the snow. I pulled out my phone and tracked my wife’s phone one more time. It was still reporting. It was still in the same place. I pressed the button to sound the chime and hoped for the best. I closed my eyes and listened. Fortunately, the snow had kept a good deal of traffic off the streets and it was relatively quiet.

I heard the faint, but distinctive sound of the Find my iPhone chime in the distance. I raced around on Queen Street to figure out where it was coming from. I ran across the street and it got louder. It was…. in a good old Canada Post mailbox!!

Luckily for me, I actually found the phone. The sound stopped about 5 seconds after I pinpointed the actual location of the phone. It turns out that despite a full battery, sounding the chime actually crashed the phone. So I got lucky in that I managed to get to the phone before it went silent. I don’t know if this is normal, but it is pretty disconcerting.

Now recovering something from a mailbox isn’t trivial. I’d probably be arrested if I tried to break into it. Customer service at Canada Post isn’t exactly equipped to handle a situation like this. After several explanations to a phone rep, they said the only thing they could do was hope it turned up along side other undelivered mail, at which point, I could file a report and attempt to recover it. Needless to say, this was somewhat frustrating. The phone wasn’t exactly lost anymore. I knew exactly where it was.

As a last resort I went into the Shoppers Drug Mart located there and asked if there was a post office inside. The postal worker there told me they couldn’t open the mailbox, but that a driver would probably be there within an hour or two to empty the box. I decided to wait it out (in a snowstorm!).

Sure enough, within an hour, I spotted a Canada Post truck across the street. The driver was emptying another box, but I managed to get to him before he got back in the truck. I quickly explained the situation to him. It didn’t seem to faze him a bit. He said people threw all kinds of things in mailboxes, treating them like a national “Lost and Found.” He said that mailbox was his next stop and to meet him there.

He asked me to identify the phone before he opened the box. I described it. The phone was dead, but after booting it, I showed him my number on the lockscreen, and he handed it over. Mystery solved and Happy Endings!

The lessons here though:

• Make sure you have an unique, identifying feature on your phone’s lockscreen. In my wife’s case, There is a simple graphic with my phone number and email address on it.
• Use the geo-location feature of your phone! Make sure you test it and know how it works. It can be a lifesaver.
• Talk to people! Despite my dark thoughts about someone taking the phone and keeping it, the truth is most people will be helpful. I am forever in the debt of a Canada Post driver I will call K (in case he didn’t follow some protocol about property found in mailboxes). He was calm. He verified my story, handed over the phone and went on his way.

The post Why you activate Find my iPhone appeared first on Nerd.ca.

UPDATE: The first workshop we’re running is going to be rescheduled. Sorry for any inconvenience.

We who work in the field of technology are usually thrilled and fascinated by the pace of change. It helps us think and dream about the next big thing. We willingly sign on to learn about the latest technologies and services to help us do our jobs better: The latest programming languages, the latest online marketing techniques, new and exciting devices and gadgets.

In the midst of all this change, we can sometimes forget that others we work and live with aren’t as excited by technology and change. We express our surprise at people who don’t have the latest smartphones, don’t know or care about Instagram or Pinterest, or even have a GMail account. But in their careers and personal lives, the need to immerse themselves in the technology they live with isn’t as important as it is to us.

Beyond this lack of mutual understanding about technology being slightly (and often comically) annoying to us, we at Nerd.ca also think it is a huge problem. Regardless of what industry you work in, do you think you and your employees will be doing more or less of their jobs online in the next 2 years? Do you think you will be using the same software? Isn’t technology going to change many aspects of the way you and your employees live and work?

Whether you’re as obsessed and excited by technology as we are, you can’t escape it. And a solid grounding in some technology basics makes people better managers, better employees and better all around people. OK, maybe that last bit is pushing it, but better technology knowledge among non-geeks will at least help everyone understand each other just that much more. And that’s a good thing for you, and your company.

So we decided to do something to address the issue.

The Concept

Nerd Night School is a series of workshops delivering technology learning in a relatively casual environment during off work hours.

The focus here is on practical learning taught by industry professionals. There may be some presentations, but if folks want to get the most out of the sessions, they should be prepared with their laptop and/or smartphone to follow along. By the end of the night, people should learn a few things, but also accomplish something relatively practical that improves their work or personal lives in some tangible way. That practical learning can be fairly diverse, ranging from linux commands to Search Engine Optimization to digital video production.

Who’s doing this?

Nerd Night School is being co-hosted by INcubes, a Toronto startup accelerator and by Nerd.ca. Several technical experts will be on hand to help participants follow along get through any practical activities.

What’s the first topic going to be?

One that is near and dear to our hearts – A workshop to help you improve your personal digital security, and protect yourself against fraud, identity theft and other digital dangers.

Most of us convince ourselves that the relatively careless way we conduct ourselves online is excusable. Excusable ultimately because we feel there is no possible way we can be targets. We’re just ordinary people. We don’t have tons of money or any state secrets that a hacker would want. Whenever people tell us that, we point them to the story of Mat Honan.

Mat Honan is a journalist for Wired. In 2012 he fell victim to what he describes as an “epic hack.” Hackers targeted him, compromised his Gmail account and his Apple ID. Then they proceeded to delete his Gmail account and remote-wipe the iPhone, iPad and MacBook connected to his Apple ID. They targeted his Gmail account in order to intercept a password reset request for his Twitter account. Once they had his Twitter account, his Gmail and his Apple devices were deleted, partly for fun, and partly to slow him down in his attempts to recover the Twitter account.

Why? Honan was an early Twitter user and had a 3-character handle (@mat). The hackers apparently thought that was cool and thought it would be entertaining and challenging to take over the account and start sending offensive Tweets. You can (and should!) read the whole story at Wired.

Much like a locked door and an alarm is not going to stop a determined thief, if you are targeted by people determined to compromise your digital life (email, social media, online banking), it may just be a matter of time before they succeed. HOWEVER, there are relatively simple, practical measures you can take to encourage more casual hackers to move on to another target.

We are going to detail the dangers, run through some practical suggestions and implement at least one of them in real time with whomever wants to follow along

2-step or 2-factor authentication is one of the best ways to protect online accounts. It combines something you know (a password) with something you physically have (in this case your phone). Even if an intruder has your password, systems that have 2-step sign in processes will challenge you for an additional bit of info that your phone either generates or receives by text or voice.

While you should enable it anywhere it’s offered, your online email is the most important place to start and it’s currently offered by Google and Yahoo and is in the works for Hotmal/Outlook.com. Our goal and mission is to have it up and running before you leave and improve your digital security immensely.

The post Digital Literacy for non-technical Employees appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Site Speed Tools like Pingdom, YSlow and Google PageSpeed help you find out why your web site is sluggish.

Why should you care?

If you haven’t noticed your web site is particularly slow, that’s great. But you might want to ask friends, colleagues and customers how they experience using your web site. Their experience may be quite different than yours. You may be accustomed to the way your site works and not be bothered by it. But if even one person you ask notices the site seems sluggish, pay attention. If they mention it, unprompted, before they talk about the content or the design, listen closely.

Speed Matters

You should know 2 things about site speed even if it doesn’t seem to bother you.

1. Quick sites are rewarded in Google’s search engine rankings. While speed doesn’t factor as much as site content and links, Google is paying attention to how fast your pages load. Quick pages mean a better experience for the user and Google likes that. Is Google an important source of traffic for you? We thought so.
2. Research from Google also indicates that quicker pages convert better. In their experiments, very small slowdowns in speed resulted consistently in users conducting fewer searches. In the context of your site, whatever action you are hoping your visitors to take after visting your site is aided by making your site faster. And on the flip side, your reputation can be damaged irreparably by having the site slow to a crawl after your business is mentioned on a popular web site or on the local news.

Even if your site performs well, how would you even check HOW slow it can be for other people?

Run your site through testing tools like Google’s PageSpeed, YSlow by Yahoo, Pingdom or Web Page Test. You may not understand many of the recommendations (heck, even we don’t understand them some of the time!), but these reports provide you a great starting point for discussing things with whomever is responsible for managing your web presence.

Here’s an example from a site I analyzed relatively quickly for a acquaintance recently (that I’ll do my best to keep anonymous):

Some inefficient results from Pingdom tools. Notice all the javascript files and recommendation they be combined.

One thing that jumped out at me was the sheer number of requests the web page was making. Dozens of images, scripts and style sheets all being loaded separately when they could be combined, reducing load on the server and speeding up the user experience. This is a relatively simple insight and suggestion, but to me, it indicated a deeper issue. I’m careful about throwing shade on other people’s work, but I asked the site owner if she was happy with the company that built her site. She said she had fired them, so I felt OK about telling her that they didn’t know what they were doing. It seemed like such a basic optimization, that if they weren’t doing that, there were probably a bunch of other areas they may have been sloppy in as well.

So if you are sitting down with your web service provider, or the employee you’ve tasked with managing your web presence, and you’re armed with this report, here’s some points for discussion:

Do we really need all this stuff? (Too many doohickeys!)

The example above is a good example of a client who thinks they need everything and a site designer who can’t say no, and then doesn’t really know what they’re doing. So the client says he needs an image slider, a social media toolbar and fancy menus. The designer uses separate add-ons within the publishing system (WordPress in this case) to accomplish every detail. The result is dozens of unnecessary files. Every file represents a trip back to the network to load it. And while this may represent milliseconds for each file, those milliseconds add up. A single hiccup in delivering one of those files can slow down your site a good deal.

Now we’re nerds, so we love a good doohickey. In fact the slideshows we feature on the web site are good examples of us falling in love with something shiny rather than using something more simple. But when we realized how much these things slowed down the site, we tried to optimize them as much as we could.

The Pingdom report above recommends that these files be combined to reduce the sheer number of trips back to the network. But if your designer isn’t knowledgeable enough to develop a site that uses less than 18 javascript files, maybe you, as the client should ask what all those files do and why they are needed in the first place. Don’t get mad at your designer or developer. There’s a million ways to do something on the web and they found something that works. But if it’s slow, and turns off potential customers, ask yourself whether you need it in the first place.

Where is my site?

Many small businesses and personal sites run on professional hosting and publishing systems. The fees you pay go toward dealing with performance issues on a large scale. But if you are dealing with a smaller service provider, who hosts your site on a self-managed server, you might want to ask a few questions. Ultimately, they are in charge of tuning your server and your site for performance.

And like I’ve mentioned before regarding security, lots of designers and developers are extremely talented at making your site look great, and do things you didn’t even know they could do. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they know much about what can cause your web site to slow down.

How is my site built?

Many smaller service providers will use existing Content Management and blogging platforms like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal to build your site. These platforms are free, widely used, well supported and provide incredible functionality to build and manage your web site. However, depending on what your site does, they can also be pretty inefficient and tax your server unnecessarily.

If much of your site doesn’t change very often, then you may be asking your server to do a lot of work just to serve a simple page that is largely static. The systems I mentioned use a programming language (PHP) to process the request and pull content from other parts of your server, including a database, requests to which put even more load on your server.

All this can happen in under a second, but it can take surprisingly few visits at the SAME TIME to bring your site to its knees. And if your site is hosted along with other client sites on a private server, one of these other sites seeing a spike in traffic will affect you too.

Cache is King

So should you convert your site to manually managed HTML files, throw on some Smashing Pumpkins and rock out like it’s 1996? Of course not, but if your service provider has designed your site in one of these systems, ask what they’ve done to manage performance issues and protect you against slowdowns and traffic spikes.

One of the things you should ask about or listen for is that your service provider has implemented some solutions to cache elements of your site to reduce load on the publishing system itself. While caching solutions can get quite complicated, at its simplest level, caching is the practice of storing pre-rendered versions of your pages and site elements so they can be retrieved more quickly, and without stressing your server unnecessarily.

For example, if your home page does not change very often, it will be more efficient to have a copy of the page stored on the hard drive of your server (or in memory) than to generate the page using PHP and your database every time it is requested.

At Nerd.ca, we built the site in WordPress and implemented a system within WordPress called W3 Total Cache, which beyond simple file caching actually includes a management console for a variety of performance improvements that you should ask your service provider about, such as:

• Caching logic and and common database queries so they execute much more quickly when they are called upon.
• A Content Delivery Network (CDN) – You can offload storage delivery of things on your site that don’t change very often, such as images, scripts and style sheets to a CDN like MaxCDN, Amazon Cloudfront or Rackspace CloudFiles. These systems are designed and optimized to get your files to their destination as quickly as possible and are surprisingly affordable. If your service provider is charging you a monthly fee to be hosted on their server, it’s reasonable to ask why this can’t include storage and bandwidth on a popular CDN. The static files on your web site might cost pennies a month to host and deliver.
• Combining and Compressing files – The example I cited above has dozens of scripts and style sheets being called to render your page. These files can be combined and compressed in order to reduce the number of requests, the load on your server and the total time it takes to get to a web visitor.
• A reverse proxy like Cloudflare – Cloudflare and other systems like it actually sit in front of your site and serve it for you. They cache commonly used files like images and scripts on their servers so you don’t need to. And they also provide some security mechanisms which can block spammers and robots from visiting your site and bogging down your server even further with valueless traffic. A basic service from Cloudflare is free.

All of these techniques should be fairly simple to implement by even the smallest web service provider, and they can result in tremendous improvements in performance for your site. On our own site, we’ve improved page load speeds by over 80% by using some of these techniques on a fairly underpowered server. My current iPhone has more RAM than our server!

If you’re looking for some help with a site audit, or asking the right questions of your service provider, contact us at Nerd.ca and we can get you started on moving your site into the passing lane.

The post Why is your web site slow? appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Geoffrey Goetz at Gigaom wrote a while back about how to juggle your IDs, and for the average consumer, it can be pretty overwhelming (which of course is where Nerd.ca household services come in, but no sales pitches here ). With the release of iOS 6, there are even more services and considerations.

For us, the issue stems from the fact that Apple has grafted so many services on to the account known as your Apple ID that it’s difficult to keep track of them all, and what they mean. Goetz has a chart to describe all the services. It’s below, but I’ll describe the major groups of services and our recommended management methods.

Your Apple ID and all its services – Geoffrey Goetz

Content
All content downloaded from any Apple Store, be it apps, music, movies or books, free or paid, is tied to an Apple ID. If you are single, this doesn’t mean much. You have one ID, you buy and download from one account. You don’t share with anyone. As soon as another person in your household starts downloading their own stuff, you need to think about how to manage this process. It affects many things.

For instance, a couple that manages its purchases individually may find it very difficult and clunky to consolidate apps and music they both purchase on their phones. They won’t be able to take advantage of Apple services that download purchases from one device to all others automatically. Movies and some music are still restricted to computers that need to be manually authorized (to a limit of 5 computers per account). You may find it necessary to authorize your computer to several accounts to get all the content you have already paid for. And you may need to log in and out of several accounts on iTunes and your iPhone.

We recommend any family facing this issue consolidate purchasing in one account. Take a look at all the accounts that have made purchases, decide which has made the most, or the most important, content purchases and downloads, and make this the family iTunes account. Consider making it entirely separate from any personal account by changing the email address associated with it. Consolidate all purchasing and downloading here. Authorize your computers and log in all your devices and iTunes instances to this account. Set up automatic downloading to your liking. Also set up iTunes home sharing on all of these devices.

The privacy issues this brings up within your family is something you need to address and manage on your own. I for one want to have access to the music and apps my wife buys. Your kids may want to keep their purchases of casual games and in-game add-ons to themselves however.

All of this might be easier if Apple allowed you to merge multiple IDs into one, but according to the AppleID FAQ, this is not possible. We would think that the issues around transferring ownership of content within iTunes is not something that Apple wants to take on, so for now, you are stuck managing this on your own.

Communication
If you don’t have an iPhone or iPad, this isn’t much of an issue. But to use services like iMessage (instant message and texting) and FaceTime (video calling), every individual in your household needs an Apple ID. Managing this is relatively straightforward though. Everyone gets an account. iPhones, iPads and Macs get signed in to this account. If you have privacy concerns about having your email address findable on the iMessage network, you can add a single purpose email address to your AppleID for the purposes of sharing your iMessage account with trusted people.

iCloud

The highlighted services are only available once per device, in what Apple calls your “main” iCloud account

Our current recommendation for families depends on your needs and your adoption of the services which can only be used once. Services like Mail, Contacts, Calendars and Notes can actually be set up per individual in a secondary iCloud account, as it’s unlikely your family wants to share emails and a single calendar or address book.

Other services within iCloud make sense to share within the family. Adding all your devices to the Find my Iphone/iPad/Mac services make them easier to manage and track if one goes missing. You can also add all your devices to one backup account. If you exceed the 5GB that Apple provides to you for free, you only need to top up one account to back up all your devices.

Fortunately, at this point, 2 of the services which can only be tied to one account are relatively niche offerings. Documents and Data syncs documents and data via iCloud to multiple devices. However, its primary use at the moment is to sync documents used by Apple’s iWork suite across devices. If you don’t use iWork, or are already using a sync solution like Dropbox or Google Drive, you can skip this one. Apple’s Passbook service for storing loyalty cards and tickets is so new it’s too soon to tell if it will have widespread adoption. It might be an easy one to skip at this point too.

This leaves your Photo Stream, which in a multi-iPhone family is a great service to share on your family account. It means all photos taken with any device are shared with all the others automatically. Again, within some families, you might not want this, but in my family, it means my wife’s pictures of my kids wind up on my phone and vice versa. And all devices get synced to iPhoto on my Mac. It means we only need to plug in our phones to get video off the device. While iOS 6 allows for sharing individual photo streams, this is a manual process that involves everyone manually sharing photos to a shared Photo Stream. We prefer the automated approach that a shared main Photo Stream allows for.

Once you have more than one device, and more than one account to consider, you need to give thought to how best to manage all your options in the Apple ecosystem. This is a summary of our current best practices and recommendations. Let us know if you have any questions or recommendations of your own. As always, get in touch with us if you want us to guide you through your particular setup.

The post Managing your Apple ID and Services at Home appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Configure your iOS devices for CardDAV

For years, the recommended method of syncing the iPhone and other iOS devices with GMail and the Google Apps web productivity suite, was, oddly, to sandwich a Microsoft standard in the middle of them. Your mail, contacts and calendar were synced from Google to the device via the Exchange ActiveSync protocol, the protocol created as the name suggests, to sync Microsoft Exchange servers with mobile and remote devices.

Google Calendar could be synced separately from this method by individually configuring Google as a CalDAV server. Similarly, Gmail could be set up as a separate IMAP server. But Google contacts had no sync method other than the ActiveSync protocol.

Recently, according to this support note, Google has implemented the CardDAV standard as a method of syncing with Google. As CardDAV is the standard that Apple has used to implement its iCloud syncing service, it means that Google Contacts now has better interoperation with iOS and the Contacts App on the Mac.

Practically, the difference is not huge, but ActiveSync was showing its age. Fields implemented by Apple on the iPhone (such as Relationship fields, and fields created for Twitter and Facebook) would not be available for users syncing via ActiveSync. ActiveSync also had issues syncing more than 3 emails or phone numbers per contact. We’ve done some initial testing and found that there appear to be some issues syncing the Apple specific contact fields (such as Twitter and Facebook created when using the built in integration with iOS and OSX) back to Google, but that between iOS and Mac devices, the sync is working well.

Your devices are a bit more of a pain to set up now (3 configurations instead of one), but the end result is better if you happen to be using Google as the back end for your core productivity suite (Mail, Contacts, Calendars).

The post Google Contacts and CardDAV appeared first on Nerd.ca.

How secure is your web site? You would be surprised at who is targeting you.

Recently, I looked at server logs for our web site after reading yet another scary article on web site security. While we’re fairly security conscious, we’re not professional system administrators. The results were somewhat frightening, but enlightening. Here are some things we found, and some things you may want to consider.

We are the subject of regular “brute force” attempts to log in to our server

If your web site has never been compromised, you may feel that you are not in danger because you are too small to be a target. We were vaguely aware that this probably wasn’t true. But looking at the logs was a real eye opener. We are the subject of several attempts a day from unauthorized visitors to log in to a secure shell on our server. In layman’s terms, depending on the account they use, successfully logging in to a secure shell means an attacker can do anything: Deface or delete your web site, render your server inoperable, access customer databases. Anything.

Here’s what a sample attack looked like:


Sep 9 18:17:36 guitarserver sshd[6040]: Failed password for invalid user newstest from 221.132.37.40 port 52011 ssh2
Sep 9 18:17:38 guitarserver sshd[6042]: Address 221.132.37.40 maps to vbp.vn, but this does not map back to the address - POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!
Sep 9 18:17:38 guitarserver sshd[6042]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=221.132.37.40 user=news
Sep 9 18:17:40 guitarserver sshd[6042]: Failed password for news from 221.132.37.40 port 52205 ssh2
Sep 9 18:17:42 guitarserver sshd[6044]: Address 221.132.37.40 maps to vbp.vn, but this does not map back to the address - POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!
Sep 9 18:17:42 guitarserver sshd[6044]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=221.132.37.40 user=news
Sep 9 18:17:44 guitarserver sshd[6044]: Failed password for news from 221.132.37.40 port 52410 ssh2
Sep 9 18:17:46 guitarserver sshd[6046]: Address 221.132.37.40 maps to vbp.vn, but this does not map back to the address - POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!
Sep 9 18:17:46 guitarserver sshd[6046]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=221.132.37.40 user=news
Sep 9 18:17:47 guitarserver sshd[6046]: Failed password for news from 221.132.37.40 port 52622 ssh2
Sep 9 18:17:49 guitarserver sshd[6048]: Address 221.132.37.40 maps to vbp.vn, but this does not map back to the address - POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!
Sep 9 18:17:50 guitarserver sshd[6048]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=221.132.37.40 user=news


… and it goes on for hundreds of lines. It seems like gibberish, but basically, some machine in Vietnam was attempting to access our server. Who knows why. The machine trying to access ours may have been compromised itself, and is being used to generate further automated attacks. The attacker may be doing it for fun or curiosity. You may have something they want, like your domain name or a list of email addresses. They may want to take over your machine to attack others, or send spam.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. The reality is this: Your site’s very presence on the Internet makes it a target. Now ask yourself some questions.

How important is your web site?

Your business might depend entirely on referrals. Your web site may just be an attractive brochure. But if you actually sell through your web site, or it is a major component of an image you and your business project to the world, you need to get your head out of the sand. Security through obscurity is not really a strategy. As I’ve just shown, a site’s very existence makes it a target.

Where is your web site?

If you don’t know, this is a question to ask your service provider. If your site is on a managed server, then there may be professional system administrators taking care of these issues. If your site is on a specialty service (such as a blog hosting service like WordPress.com), then part of your fees goes toward blunting these kind of attacks and keeping your site safe and up and running.

But many many sites are not on managed services or specialty hosting providers. They are on dedicated servers or cloud servers where the ultimate responsibility for managing security falls on the user. If your service provider is using this type of hosting, they are in charge of security. And while many small web service providers, programmers and designers are very talented, and well-meaning, they are not necessarily security experts.

Here’s some questions you may want to ask:

Where is my server?

Ask this for the reasons stated above. Listen to the answer. If your provider has a clear answer, you may be satisfied. But if they are vague, you should be concerned and ask further questions. If the answer is “it’s in my basement, but don’t worry, it’s totally secure,” you need another provider.

Can I see my logs?

You don’t need to interpret the logs. What you’re looking for here is that your provider actually knows what you’re talking about and sends you something. Ask for your web server logs and other system logs (such as login attempts, the mail log and the overall system log, or syslog). If your provider doesn’t actually know how to find the logs, or is dismissive of your requests, you should be worried and begin seeking other opinions or providers.

Can you describe your security measures?

Again, you don’t necessarily need to know what a good answer is (though it can’t hurt), but how someone answers the question. Hemming and hawing and vague answers are not what you want to hear. If you are dealing with a small provider, you want to hear some facts, and some honesty.

A good answer might be: “We look at server logs on a regular basis and ban problematic IP numbers. Only select users are allowed shell access to the server. All other users are banned. However, the server is going to be the subject of regular automated login attempts. All servers are. We just maintain some good practices which make it very unlikely the attacks will be successful.”

A bad answer is: “Dude, relax. You’re so small nobody’s going to try to take over your site.”

Who can I call to help me if I don’t like the answers I’m getting?

Why Nerd.ca of course! We can do basic security auditing and help you source and audition web service providers. Get in touch with us to find out how.

The post How Secure is Your Web Site? appeared first on Nerd.ca.

You can improve your iPhone security by choosing a longer passcode of just numbers.

I got this tweak from Lifehacker a while back, and it’s one of the best tradeoffs between security and convenience you can make to secure your phone. That is, it adds a tiny inconvenience for the larger security improvement it provides.

Most iPhone/iPad owners know they can add a passcode to their devices. And shame on you if you haven’t done it! Go to Settings > Passcode Lock and put one in immediately!

When you turn on the Passcode Lock, the default option is to have the Simple Passcode option set to On. A Simple Passcode is a 4-digit PIN. This is much easier to type to unlock your phone than a full alphanumeric password. But it’s far less secure, especially if you use something silly like “1-2-3-4″ for your password.

But, if you choose a passcode composed entirely of numbers, your iPhone/iPad will display only the numeric keyboard with an “OK” button to confirm the passcode. Follow the simple instructions from Lifehacker:

1. Unlock your iPhone and open Settings > General > Passcode Lock.
2. Toggle Simple Passcode to Off.
3. Tap Turn Passcode On (assuming you don’t already have it turned on) and enter your new passcode using only numbers. You’ll see the standard alphanumeric keyboard during your initial passcode creation and confirmation, but don’t worry—if you stick with numbers, you’ll get the numeric keyboard later.

What’s the big deal? Well, when you go to unlock your phone, it should look like the screenshot above. A thief, nosy co-worker or international super-spy doesn’t know if your passcode is 5 numbers, or 20 numbers, making guessing a passcode that much more difficult.

The post A favorite Security Tweak for your iPhone appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Not Nas, but NAS, Network Attached Storage

Just think of a NAS as a hard drive (or a bunch of hard drives) that is always available on your network. So you can always backup files there, access it from any device in the home or office and stream media to your laptop or game console. At the low end, that’s all a NAS is – a hard drive. Many home routers come with USB ports that allow you to plug in a hard drive. Take an old external drive, plug it in and off you go: You’ve got a NAS – Always on Storage accessible from anywhere. More elegant variations on this include Apple’s Time Capsule, an all in one device that’s also a router and a print server. Other devices are basically hard drives with network ports in the back, like the Buffalo LinkStation.

Once you start using your NAS as a repository for all your media – Music, Photos, Home Video, Movies, TV Shows – the one hard drive approach quickly runs out of space. You’re also running a risk of that drive failing. It’s then that you need to consider a higher end appliance. Recently, the team at Ars Technica ran an EXHAUSTIVE review of a higher end NAS (that I now totally want), the DroboFS.

Dedicated devices of this sort generally assemble several hard drives together in a configuration known as RAID (in the case of the Drobo, they have a patented system known as BeyondRAID… use your imagination: They think it’s better than RAID ). The details of this technology aren’t as important as the basic purpose: Put a bunch of drives together in such a way that you get two big benefits

1. You get more storage – Think up to 16TB in some cases – That’s a lot of movies!
2. The disks are redundant – Meaning – if one of them fails, you don’t lose your data. You just put another drive in and the data recovers – It’s kind of like magic really

I’ve got an older model Buffalo Terastation and the experience has been great. The thing is a tank. More than 3 years old and I haven’t really changed its configuration since I set it up. It’s the kind of set it and forget it technology that fades into the background (when it works of course). It stores photos, music, movies and backups. Since the configuration is a bit old, it’s running out of space, which is why I’m eyeing a new one.

Ask yourself this: Do you think you’re going to have more or less digital media to manage in the coming years? I thought so. We can offer advice and setup help depending on your needs.

The post Time for a NAS? appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Get religion about backing up your data!

Some clever and helpful folks have arbitrarily declared March 31st to be World Backup Day. OK. It’s not an “official” holiday. But if you lose your data, you WILL be taking the day off work and perhaps holding a memorial service for all you have lost. So this holiday is your calling to wake up and get religion about backing up your data.

Check out worldbackupday.net for a decent overview of the whys and hows of backing up, as well as some great offers from services that offer tons of options for backing up your data online.

But here’s the gist of the speech that I give to people when talking about this:

Your hard drive will fail
And your data will vanish in a microsecond if it isn’t backed up. If you’ve never lost a hard drive, consider yourself lucky. According to the site, 3% of NEW hard drives fail, and the likelihood your hard drive will fail goes up considerably the older your drive gets. While you may be suspicious of unsourced statistics supplied by a site with an interest in selling you backup services, a large scale study by none other than Google in its own data centres confirms fairly high failure rates. It’s not a matter of if a drive you own will fail, but when.

You will miss your data
This may sound silly or obvious, but I often encounter shrugged shoulders when I tell people that they will lose their data. This isn’t some minor inconvenience. It can range from annoying to absolutely crushing. How long have you had a digital camera? Say goodbye to years of digital memories. Do you run a business from your computer? You just lost some clients. While iCloud can help you recover iTunes purchases, ripped CDs, movies and photos? All gone. Poof!

Backing up can be easy, cheap and relatively seamless
People don’t necessarily believe this either, but for personal and small business customers, backing up data has gotten so easy that there’s no real excuse anymore. There are degrees of security and redundancy you may want to achieve, but overall, through a combination of online and local tools, you can improve your data security and peace of mind a tremendous amount by doing a few minutes of research.

Here’s some suggested resources and services:
WorldBackupDay.net
DropBox
JungleDisk
SpiderOak
Backblaze
Crashplan
MiMedia

As always, we can meet, get a sense of your needs and recommend and implement a solution for you or your company.

The post Happy Belated World Backup Day? appeared first on Nerd.ca.

1 Password is a great password manager program for Mac, Windows, Android and iPhone/iPad

UPDATE: Check out this piece by writer Mat Honan in Wired to really hammer this point home.

Like, really seriously!

Lifehacker had a great piece on the importance of password security a while back. I’m thinking about it in the wake of the recent revelation of hundreds of thousands of passwords being compromised at Yahoo and millions at LinkedIn.

It pretty much sums up the speech I give to anybody regarding passwords and personal security. It used to be that you only needed a couple of passwords. Maybe you had one to unlock your screen saver and another one to get on the corporate network. These days, even light Internet users may have many passwords for different sites, online banking, social networks, etc. Without a system to manage these passwords, you are running serious risks.

Let me deal with some of the arguments you may have against implementing password security for you and/or your company:

I don’t have that many passwords
Really? Write them down. You likely have more than you think. Personally, I have hundreds. It’s impossible to remember that many passwords, so what you wind up doing, is choosing something easy to remember. If it’s easy for you to remember, it’s easy for someone to guess. Lifehacker details a recent incursion at their parent company, Gawker, who had their password database hacked and published. The top 25 passwords in the database were used over 13,000 times. The password 123456 was used over 2500 times alone. The top password for the Yahoo! hack? You guessed it. It’s 123456.

My passwords are secure
No they’re not. You may think you’re being clever, but any password that you can remember can likely be guessed. And hackers have tools that can just crack a password through brute force. Lifehacker links to an InfoWorld article showing how a hacker can easily acquire enough computing power to attempt 400,000 passwords per second for just pennies.

I’m not a target
You’re probably right about that, but it doesn’t matter. You may not be a target, but a service you use might be. Consider this scenario, played out many times after the Gawker user database was published. Spammers took the email addresses and passwords and found they also matched users’ twitter accounts. Guess who started tweeting spam-like marketing offers shortly afterwards. If this is a personal twitter account, it’s mildly embarrassing. If it’s your company’s account, you’ve damaged your credibility and looked silly in front of clients and customers. Share your password with your Gmail account? Imagine how many email accounts were compromised in the same incursion. And incursions such as these are not uncommon. Lifehacker goes on to detail several. Imagine how many are not reported?

So, you’ve got a security problem. What do you do about it?

Use password management software
The approaches of software developed to address this thorny problem vary, but the basic fashion in which they work is:

• Choose one secure password and lock up your password database with it. A password database is encrypted in various ways so it is useless to someone who can’t unlock it if they ever get a hold of it.
• Use the software to generate ridiculously long and unguessable passwords that conform to no real pattern.
• Use a keyboard combination or hotkey to have the software log you in to websites and other services.

Our current favourite is 1Password, developed close by in Aurora, Ontario. 1Password started as a Mac only product, but currently runs on Windows, as well as Android, iPhone and iPad. It’s easy to use, syncs your database to multiple computers as well as mobile devices, and relatively cheap.

If you’re the curious type, you can also check out Keepass, a free open source solution, as well as LastPass, another multiplatform solution with a subscription feature which unlocks additional features.

Sound complicated? No, it’s not. And it’s also essential as more and more of your data is moving to the web. We can implement software and training for you and your company. It’s cheap, necessary, will improve your digital security by leaps and bounds and give you some peace of mind.

The post Why you need to take password security seriously appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Keyboard Shortcuts, such as these displayed for Google Reader, enhance a feeling of control and productivity.

Working with programmers and other geeks is a real eye opener about what you don’t know about computers. Their desire to experiment for an experiment’s sake is something I always thought I needed to rein in. But when you open yourself up to what you can actually learn by observing what they do naturally, out of sheer curiosity, you can really up your productivity game.

I had an employee once who would burn half a day on occasion training himself on keyboard shortcuts in order to save some seconds on mundane hypothetical tasks. It drove me nuts. But over the course of months, I realized it wasn’t hypothetical. He was happier, more productive and better able to keep dozens of tiny details organized as a result of his dedication to learning how to master his keyboard. I relented on hassling him and instead asked him to teach me some things. “The place you want to get to with any software” he said, “is where you can get the computer out of the way. Your mouse is in your way. Stop using it.”

When I recommend Gmail and Google Apps as a replacement for day to day personal and business communication, I usually encounter resistance. There’s some people who have lived inside their email clients for 15 years. It’s tough to give that up. Arguments about the “superiority” of the search you’ll find in Gmail, the threaded conversations, the universal access of a web based client, can all fall on deaf ears (often for decent reasons).

But sometimes a lightbulb goes off when I show people the keyboard shortcuts. I try to maintain an empty inbox, and keyboard shortcuts are crucial to being able to deal with email quickly and efficiently. Scroll through your inbox using “j” and “k”. Select email using “x”. Open a message using “o”. From there: “r” for reply, “#” for delete, “e” for archive, “s” for star (which I’ll use as “flag” for follow up. This all takes seconds per message. And it all contributes mightily to a feeling of control over your email. I feel like an assassin, ruthlessly dispatching incoming messages to their proper place on the way to “ZeroInbox”.

Same goes for news consumption. I gave up on newsreaders years ago after feeling helpless in the wake of thousands of unread stories and making me feel like I was overwhelmed. I tried Google Reader a while back and although I still try to trim the feeds I read fairly aggressively, I find the keyboard shortcuts make getting back in control and getting informed (and isn’t that the point of following feeds) so much easier. Jump from item to item using “j” and “k”, jump to the next feed with “Shift+n”, and if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the presence of hundreds of unread items from the New York Times, hit “Shift+a” and set them all to read. You’ll do better tomorrow .

It’s even amazing how much your web browser gets in your way. One of the most useful features of your browser is setting a keyboard shortcut for sites you like to search often. So when I go to Google Maps, I can actually just search it from my browser’s address bar by typing “gm ‘address I am searching’”. In Firefox, you can just do this by setting a bookmark for a search URL, replacing your search term with “%s” (for example: http://maps.google.com/?q=%s) and setting the keyword for this shortcut to “gm”). In Chrome, just look for the setting to “Manage Search Engines.” This may only save a few seconds, but think how much you search dozens of resources every day. Get that web browser out of your way and get it to give you the answer you need sooner.

All that’s required to start mastering your keyboard is some desire, a bit of time and some practice. As always, we’re happy to teach you some tricks one on one to help you up your productivity game.

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Your phone doesn’t work like email you manage and control. It works more like your ISP-supplied email address. You get one number and it’s somewhat tied to the carrier that’s given it to you. While it’s certainly more portable than it used to be (you can move the number from one carrier to another for example), it’s not as flexible as email. Without some forethought, work and paying for additional services, you can’t set up extensions on your carrier supplied phone number, get it to ring multiple phones or take certain actions based on who’s calling. One day this will change and your identity on a voice network will no longer be tied to a 10 digit number supplied by your carrier. You will just be me@mycompany.com and you’ll be in total control of what happens when someone tries to call you, or what happens when you move from one carrier to another.

But that day isn’t here. Until it comes, you need to think about what technologies you can use to make your phone more like email and give you more control. In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t use many of these methods myself, as I run a small company and am comfortable just giving people my cell phone number. But that’s not a sufficient solution for many companies once they get beyond a certain size, and your company needs to think about how to leverage technology to improve your flexibility, your image, and using your phone as a communication and collaboration tool, rather than just a handset.

Here are some things you may want to do with your phone number:

• Ring multiple phones
• Ring different phones based on rules such as your physical location, or time of day
• Transcribe voicemails
• Forward voicemails to your inbox
• Assign voice mails to different people in your company

A simple method to accomplish these things, especially if you are a one person operation, is to pay your carrier for Single Number Reach service. Most have a service like this, even if it’s not promoted. It basically provides you a virtual local line for your business, and you can set up how it’s used. You can forward it to your cell, a temporary office number, or funnel it straight to voice mail. You can screen the call and direct it to voice mail. You can even accept faxes on the number and have them forwarded via email. I’ve used the single number reach service from Bell. It’s nothing fancy, but it works and makes your life a bit easier.

The web equivalent of a service like this is Google Voice. Frustratingly however, while voice calling IS available within Google Mail, the full Google Voice service is not available in Canada. A similar service which can provide Canadian area codes however is TellFi. You can even port your existing phone number to the service so there’s no need to inform anyone that your number has changed (Just like retaining and forwarding your email address!). The way you would do this is to call your carrier to ask a few questions about how to accomplish this, since you’re not cancelling your account, you just want a new number attached to it. Once this is set up and you’ve ported an existing number to TellFi, you would just include your new land or cell number as one of the numbers you forward calls to.

TellFi can provide extensions for the number they provide for you, play a message for incoming calls just like an auto-attendant, and then route calls accordingly. If no one picks up, users can leave a voicemail, which can be transcribed and sent to your email. You pay for incoming minutes on the TellFi phone number, but if you don’t have a lot of call volume, it’s a fantastic way to provide a layer of professionalism (as well as filtering of robo-calls and telemarketers) on top of your existing phone numbers. If you have partners located in remote locations, it’s ideal.

OPENvbx – Basic Call Flow

When you add virtual services such as the ones described above to more feature rich, but still self managed/installed solutions such as Asterisk and Blue.Box and you are well on your way to saving money on your voice communication, while improving features and your image to the outside world. We can help you get started by describing your options.

The post Your phone Needs to be More Like Email appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Firesheep allowed for easy hijacking of user sessions on Facebook and other sites

While the exploit Butler used was well known, nobody had really made it so easy to use before. So don’t kid yourself. Getting your personal info doesn’t require elite skills. It just requires some curiosity and bad intentions.

Don’t believe me? Gary LosHuertos is a programmer in New York City. After the launch of Firesheep, he went down to his local Starbucks, grabbed a coffee, and proceeded to steal about 20 users’ Facebook sessions in the space of half an hour. He then sent people messages from their own Facebook accounts letting them know that they should be more careful and what they can do about it. About 25% of the users did absolutely nothing, even after Gary sent them a second message with more proof that he was observing exactly what they were doing.

There’s a fair amount of things you may do on the Internet which is protected by virtue of the fact that the traffic is encrypted, which means that even if someone is “listening” on an insecure connection, all they may see is gibberish. Even Facebook, Twitter and others have provided additional security options in the wake of Firesheep. Start by enabling these settings and learning about them by clicking the links above.

What else do you need to do?

Educate yourself
Sticking your head in the sand won’t make this issue go away. A good deal more of your information is more portable, and hence, more vulnerable than ever before. As with most things, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. After doing a bit of reading, it’s likely you can start with evaluating how much Internet activity needs to be performed over public networks to begin with. If you like working from your local coffee shop, or you’re on the road a lot and tend to connect in airports and hotels, you probably need a Virtual Private Network, or VPN for short.

You need a VPN
A VPN routes all your Internet traffic through a secure point on the Internet and encrypts all the traffic that passes between you and that point. That point on the Internet could be a device in your home or office, or it could be a third party service that you connect to. The thing you need to know is that VPNs are cheap, relatively easy to use, and fairly seamless once you set them up. And they are essential to your security if you do any connecting in any public place.

The service you set up depends on your speed, convenience and security needs. Personally, I have set up a VPN in my home. This provides me the convenience of being able to connect to any machine inside my home network from anywhere and do it securely. However, if I’m on the road or at the local coffee shop, my download speed is constrained, as all traffic is being passed through my home Internet connection. This means that my download speed at the coffee shop is limited to the upload speed I have at home. Home Internet connections in Canada restrict upload speeds fairly severely, since most home users have little need for high upload speeds. But for everyday tasks, the connection performs quite well. This solution is fairly cheap as well. In my case, it involves modifying my existing router with the DD-WRT router software which features build in VPN configuration options.

Commercial VPN options for home and small business use are fairly reasonable and easy to use as well. They also have some added benefits. Your speeds should be much better than what you would get with a home solution. Some services will also give you the ability to choose which country your connection point will appear to be from, which means if you’re travelling you will be able to access sites back home which may block you based on geography. Some other services allow you to set up virtual networks with friends and co-workers on the same services. Here’s some good places to check out:

VyprVPN
LogMeIn Hamachi
WiTopia
StrongVPN
Ipredator
proXPN

We’ve got our own favourites based on specific needs. We can get you set up, and improve your security and peace of mind relatively quickly. Take it seriously. Not all people sitting in your local Starbucks are as friendly and helpful as Gary LosHuertos and Eric Butler.

The post Wireless Security – Make Yourself a Harder Target appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Yes, you can – Get started setting up your media server with the guide at Maximum PC

The breadth of information here seems daunting, but really, it’s not that hard, and it’s well worth it. You need to get all your digital media (Music, Movies, Photos) all in one place and accessible by multiple computers and devices. If your media collection isn’t already out of control, think about it: Do you think you’ll have less music, movie and image files in the next few years. It’s more likely that the amount of digital media you have to organize is about to explode.

Very simply, you need to:

• Rip what you have on CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs
• Store it centrally
• Access it from anywhere

We’ve got our favourite tricks for these setups, depending on budget and time, but this guide is a phenomenal start.

The post Great Intro Guide to Media Server Options appeared first on Nerd.ca.

Microsoft has finally released their answer for the cloud office suite recently Office 365. If you’ve got an existing Microsoft Exchange implementation and are deeply reliant on Outlook and MS Office, it’s certainly worth a look. When I look at the features, and the pricing, it sort of hurts my head. It just looks so complicated with the feature descriptions and 4 different pricing tiers, that one may sort of lose the benefit that is being trumpeted: Move your basic office productivity and storage to the cloud, save up front cost, stop managing hardware locally and use the same familiar tools you’ve used for years.

Fred Wilson – Tweeting about Google Apps

Depending on your own resistance to change, and how deep your company is already in with Microsoft, Google Apps is likely a great move. Here’s some benefits I usually tout:

It’s what you do, and there’s still more
Many people I speak with are resistant to moving away from a basic productivity tool they’ve used for years. They don’t want to learn something new. There’s some merit to this. There’s some work you need to do to get used to it, but the truth is, Outlook and other email clients have a TON of stuff you likely don’t use. If 95% of what you do in Outlook is send and read email, manage your schedule and manage your contacts, you can do all that within a web browser. You know how to use a web browser, right? There are lots of advanced features in Google Apps, but we may not even get to them.

It’s Cheap
Google Apps has a free edition that suits many companies just fine. After that it’s $50/year/user. Compare this to Microsoft’s tortured pricing and all their various editions

Self Managed
Some people don’t believe this, but it’s true much of the time. After setup, Google Apps can usually be managed by you or an office administrator. It just works. If you run something like Exchange or SharePoint locally in your office, you need a dreaded “IT guy”. Say goodbye to that. Really. I usually maintain an admin account for clients if they want it, but it’s rarely used.

It’s everywhere
It’s on the web. So, it’s on a shared computer, on your Mom’s laptop, your Dad’s iPad. Wherever.

It’s really everywhere
It’s a wireless world. But for some reason syncing data to your smartphone involves plugging the damn thing into your computer. Which you never do. Which means your calendar and contacts are inevitably out of sync. Which sucks. Google Apps syncs seamlessly to smartphones and has for years. This is sometimes a ridiculously simple, yet mindblowing clincher for some people. We add a contact in Google Contacts. I ask them to check their phones. The contact is there. They are speechless. It’s the way it should always work, and yet we have gotten used to tortured syncing routines. I’m sure Microsoft has a solution for this by now, but based on some of my implementation, people aren’t aware of it, or can’t get it to work.

You really owe it to yourself and your company to give the cloud office suite a good look. We can hold your hand, but you’ll soon be off and running on your own.

The post Cloud Office appeared first on Nerd.ca.

However, when it comes to the most basic productivity tool you have, I’m more likely to answer yes. I find people are reluctant to give up on their old rigs and cling to denial of an unfortunate truth: Computers aren’t furniture. They exhaust their usefulness more quickly than almost anything you buy. I recommend even a moderate user replace their rig every 3 years. If you’re someone who makes a living with computers, I recommend two years or less. It sucks, but technology moves quickly, and keeping up requires investment. While you can certainly make use of old machines, it’s rare that I have any machine in operation after 5 years. I know real geeks can always put old boxes to use for low intensity tasks (like maybe a fax server or for backups), but I usually don’t bother with such projects.

If you ask me if you need a new computer, you’ve probably already answered the question. Your gear is likely tired and hampering your productivity.

Martin Brinkmann journals building a new PC whenever he builds a new one (He builds a new PC every 12 to 18 months and blogs about the process). He’s very categorical about analyzing his needs and building accordingly. I’d encourage anyone to follow his progress to learn about what a real pro considers before purchasing.

He really goes into the guts of the decisions and tradeoffs. For me, it boils down to a few questions:

Question 0
PC or Mac? I call this question 0 because it really impacts your choices. If you’re a Mac user, your choices are more limited. To some that’s a negative. But it does remove a good deal of complication from your decisions. Once you answer a few questions, you may only have 1 or two choices.

Desktop or Laptop/Netbook
Unless you have specific need, I almost always recommend a laptop. From there, decisions about size, power and brand are limited and can usually be specced out pretty quickly. There are occasions that a desktop will be a better choice though. Desktops can age a bit better than laptops, and they tend to be cheaper. Laptop power and speed generally lag a year or so behind desktops, because of the challenges of fitting faster/hotter/higher storage parts in a small case.

What do you do?
Basic web surfing and productivity apps? Or do you find yourself pushing boundaries? My everyday work involves basic tasks, but I find my curiosity gets the best of me, and I wind up installing software for graphics and video to experiment and learn. If you never do this, you can skimp in certain areas. I know myself, and I can’t.

What can you spend?
There are areas you can skimp, but be honest about your budget and what it means. It forces you to make smarter tradeoffs and not get upsold on things that don’t matter. Forget about peripherals. They are a separate consideration. Focus on the basics. How fast a processor, how much memory, how much storage? For a laptop, also think about screen size if it’s your every day computer.

Whether you build your own rigs like Martin, or just order one from Apple or Dell, answering some basic questions will help you get the most out of your investment. But don’t kid yourself. You’ll be doing this again in 2-3 years. Unfortunately.

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1975 all over again? Not quite. The Channel Master 4228 picks up HD signals, but its design dates back decades.

Based on some recent studies, more people than ever are taking the plunge and deciding to live without cable. The Convergence Consulting Group in Toronto released its annual study of media consumption habits in the US and Canada recently. The numbers are small, but people are doing it. The study estimates about 1% of current Canadian subscribers will forego cable or satellite and get all their televised entertainment from a combination of other means (Over the Air broadcasts, Online Viewing, Streaming, etc…) in the coming year. The report estimates over 1.5 million households have already done so in the US.

Can you be a cable cutter? Based on the numbers, it’s unlikely (Are you in that 1%?). You won’t be able to live without at least SOMETHING that your current subscription provides. However, there’s a series of questions you can ask yourself that will help you figure out the answer. At the very least, going through this process may help you reduce your cable bill.

I’ve been without cable for several years. I posted about this on a personal blog a while ago. Just to summarize, these are the questions you need to ask:

1. How much do you watch and what does it cost? Do some honest analysis of how much you watch and what it costs per hour. Think hard about whether it represents real value for you.
2. What do you watch? Much of what you watch now can be replaced through a combination of other means. But some of it can’t. Live sports is a true differentiator here. If you need lots of sports, you need cable.
3. What are my options for replacement. These range and may require a bit of investment. Believe it or not, live HD broadcasts can be accessed for free with a simple antenna on your roof. You won’t get too much, but I get over a dozen HD stations, and get plenty of programming that I’m interested in for free. This stuff can be supplemented with various online options, often with little or no additional hardware investment.

Go to the original post for a more detailed analysis. In all likelihood, you won’t wind up ditching your cable, but you have some innovative options available of which you may not be aware. At the very least, this may result in a hard look at your current services and a decision to reduce your cable bill, if not eliminate it outright. I’m available to consult and guide you and your family through the process.

The post Can you Cut Cable? appeared first on Nerd.ca.