Zombie Awareness Month

Today is the first day of Zombie Awareness month.

As such, I’d like to talk to you about the computer type of zombies.

You see, computers can become zombies quite easily if they are not properly cared for. Unlike humans, for whom there is no known zombie virus, there are a ton of nasty infections that can turn your computer (be it a PC, or a Mac) into a zombie.  Bad folks on the internet intent on using YOUR computer to make THEM money will set up websites designed to download just such an infection to your computers which will in turn allow the attacker to take over the mind of your computer, making it a zombie (sometimes also referred to as a bot).  These zombie computers link into something called a botnet and are then controlled by the zombie master (bot herder) who set up the site that infected them in the first place.

This nasty person bent on controlling your PC to his/her advantage may then send SPAM from it, use it to attack other computers or websites on the internet, run some money making scheme involving lots of processing (like bitcoin mining) from it, log your keystrokes and use what you type to learn your passwords to your bank and other places where the attacker could steal money from you.

The thing about computer zombies is that they have to talk to their master to learn what he/she wants them to do next. A good protection against that is a firewall that can alert you to new programs trying to make outbound connections. Most paid antivirus programs come with such a firewall, newer versions of Microsoft Windows even have one like that built in, and for older Windows computers that don’t, there is always the free ZoneAlarm or Comodo firewalls.

If your home computer asks you if it’s ok to let a new program connect to the internet, that’s what I am talking about. If you see it ask about letting a program you didn’t install make connections, just say no, run a virus scan and maybe a tool like Malwarebytes to search out the source of the infection. If you are not comfortable doing this on your own, seek help from a professional. Don’t let your zombie computer continue to use the internet, nothing good can come of that.

Firefox ProTip: Group your Tabs

One nice feature of Firefox that I thought unnecessary at first, but have recently grown to love, is tab grouping.

At first Firefox doesn't obviously have this feature, you kind of have to know about it to start using it. If you are lucky you might see the tab groups icon in the tab bar (at the for right next to the + for adding a new tab, it looks like this: ) but for most of us, we have to turn it on.

To turn on tab groups, right click in an empty area on the tab bar next to your last tab. For some of you finding an empty area in the tab bar might be a challenge, but it's worth it, trust me. in the right click context menu click on customize.That will bring up a menu full of icons to add to the toolbar, like this:





Find the tab groups icon in there and drag it to the tab toolbar.


Now you can start grouping tabs by clicking that button, which will bring up a window with icons for each of your tabs. Just drag a tab icon off the window into space and it will form a new tab group. Drag other similar tabs into that tab group, and optionally give it a name. You then just click a tab to go back to the normal view and you will find you are only presented with the tabs in that group. You will be able to switch between tab groups by clicking the Tab Group icon, or pressing CTRL-SHIFT-E and then selecting a tab from the group you want.

I use this routinely to keep tabs for some topic I'm researching together and separate from social media tabs that I might also want to have open, but don't need to have staring me in the face.When Somoene comes to my desk asking me for help on something, I create a new tab, quickly hit CTRL-SHIFT-E  and make a new group for it and I am ready to work on that problem and keep it's links seperate from everything else I'm working on. This helps prevent accidentally closing other things when that problem is resolved as I can just kill that tab group and move back to whatever I was working on before.

Give it a try. If you are a tab addict it is well worth trying.

Bitcoin - Getting Started

I'm sure you've been hearing all kinds of buzz lately about Bitcoin. And coincidentally, I recently put a bitcoin tipping QR code in the right hand menu on this blog.
The bitcoin to fiat currency charts (whether that be $ USD, $ CAD, £ GBP,  or € EU or whatever other currency you use where you are from) had an interesting rise and crash this past month that brought all kinds of attention from news agencies all over the world.



 With all this new attention on bitcoin I think that it's a good topic for this blog, as there are a lot of people just starting to look at it out of curiosity now wondering what it is, how it's used and whether it is something for them.

Bit coin is the first example of what is being called a cyrpto-currency. To keep this explanation simple, bitcoins are a digital virtual form of cash that is stored ina client program called a Wallet. Bitcoin uses a publicly available (as in every machine running a Bitcoin Wallet client has a copy) ledger in which all transactions are recorded. To prevent fraud or accidental double spending of the virtual coins, it uses very complex calculations to verify all transactions in the public ledger. The ledger itself is shared between Wallet clients over a peer to peer network similar to bit torrent, where all of the wallets share new pages of the ledger, called blocks, with each other. At the time of this writing, that ledger is currently about 8GB, and always growing. The official bitcoin client (bitcoin-qt) downloads the whole ledger starting from day 1 a block at a time and re-verifies it all. This can mean that setting up a new bitcoin wallet with a fresh install of this client can take hours, or days before it is synced up with the network and ready to use. There are, of course, ways to short-cut that process, but if one wants to be very careful and trusts no one else there could be a wait of several days to get set up in bitcoin.

To avoid the long delays you can set up an online wallet through a service like My Wallet by Blockchain, or WalletBit. Or if you have an account at Reddit Just send a message to /u/bitcointip and the tip bot on that site will set one up for you, and will even let you use your Karma points on that site to obtain a small amount of bitcoin currency to play around with. With online wallets they are available to use almost immediately, but you are trusting the site owners to protect your money for you.

So, you have some fiat currency (lets say it's $USD) and you want to convert that to bitcoins,  how do you go about doing that? Well, for the average user you set up an account at an exchange like Mt.Gox
or one of the other exchanges listed here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Currency_exchanges or, if you are lucky you might find someone willing to do an exchange in person (I hear Craig's List is a place you might look for that)

Once you have some bitcoin money in your wallet sending money is cheaper, easier and more reliable than PayPal. Unlike PayPal though, you cannot complain to a company to get your money back if a transaction goes south. In that way, it's more like cash. once it leaves your hands, you can't get it back through a charge back, you would have to get the police involved if you were scammed. On the flip side of this is that for a seller you don't have to worry about scammers posing as buyers then asking PayPal for their money back claiming that they never got what they paid for.

Where it also acts more like cash (and I think one reason why the client is called a wallet) Like a real life physical wallet, if you lose your bitcoin wallet your money is gone, unless you can find it again.
You can and should backup your wallet, and don't wander around with all of your money in the wallet on your cellphone, only carry what you plan to spend that day. You can have as many wallets as you want.

With a wallet on a mobile phone, transferring money is as simple as scanning the other person's QR code (AKA "3D" barcode) and clicking send.

The nice advantage of bitcoin is that it has low (or even no) transaction fees and you can send an amount that is worth only a fraction of a cent. This enables micropayments in much smaller amounts than PayPal or anyother service has ever been able to do. This can be good for small fundraising efforts on the internet.

Dreamhost.com My New Favorite Web Hosting Company

Ok, so many years ago (10+) I first bought my own domain name, and for the first little while I hopped around from hosting ISP to hosting ISP, and finally settled on Media Temple about 8 years ago and stuck with them all that time mostly out of inertia.

Recently (around xmas time) I decided it was time to start shopping around for a better host. One that had cPanel (which is the industry standard control panel these days) and maybe offered better rates or more space, or more database instances.... then around January I noticed a limitation in Media Temple's MySQL setup. Namely I could grant access to my databases to any IP I wanted to use a management tool from, but there could only be 10 addresses at any given time granted access, and those same 10 addresses had access to ALL my databases. This doesn't seem like much of a limitation to most folks, but I had a database I wanted to set up that would be accessed directly by desktop applications being run from my home and a couple of friends' homes, all of which are on dynamic IPs and I didn't want to be constantly adjusting that approved IP list. So I quickly started hunting for a new host.

Along comes Dreamhost, with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space (actually just a high amount of each that is ever increasing, kind of like the disk space limit in Gmail), and unlimited number of domains hosted, unlimited MySQL instances, that each can be managed individually from their own list of approved addresses (including wildcards) and unlimited user accounts so each domain or database could be managed from a different user account if I wanted.

Add to all of that Google Authenticator based 2 factor authentication on the Cpanel interface, and easy checkbox config for domain level Google Analytics so you don't have to drop Javascript into all your pages. Plus the ability to use Ruby and Django (Python) for some of my sites.

They have one click installs of all kinds of popular web software like mediawiki, Wordpress, Joomla, Moodle, phpBB, OpenVBX, ZenCart, and more!

On top of all that, the security guy in my has to remind you 2-factor auth!!! and encrypted FTP, E-mail and web based FTP.  Yes, IronGeek, Adrian Crenshaw also uses Dreamhost.

All of that and it was 1/2 the price I was paying for MediaTemple. They gave a free trial to start off so I could get set up on their servers and play around until I was familiar enough with it to commit with money paid.

If you decide you want to switch to DreamHost use this promo code and you'll save $10 off a 1 or 2 year pre-paid account. RODSAVEDME10

Secunia Launches Cloud Based Patch Management For SMB

For all my Small Business friends:

Secunia, one of the big names in Patch Management (software that makes sure your computer is up to date) has just launched a cloud based service for small businesses with fewer than 50 PCs.

Secuina Personal Software Inspector (PSI) has always been free, but only for personal use. (and I highly recommend everyone install it as one of those must have bits of free software)
Corporate Software Inspector (CSI), thier main product line, has always been just out of reach for a lot of small businesses both from a price point and because it requires you to install and maintain a server for it. They recognized this limitation and put together this new Small Business solution.

Read about it here: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14476
Sign up for the free trial here: http://secunia.com/products/smb/smallbusiness/

After the beta ends the first 5 machines will still be free and additional machines less than $5/month each.

I have been a user of PSI on my home computers for years and couldn't be happier. Now with this I have something to recommend that can protect small business machines as well.

The Blackberry Z10 is a nice phone that runs the new Blackberry 10 OS.

I have had one for a few days, and there are 2 downsides I see with it. #1 terrible battery life compared to older blackberries. (the best I have achieved so far is 17 hours with Wifi and Bluetooth both on)

#2 is the lack of Apps. My old BlackBerry had Kindle, RSA SecurID, and Google Authenticator. None of these are available for my new BB10 phone.

They are available on Android though, and Blackberry 10 kind of, sort of supports Android software. What you need to do to load android software is somehow get your hands on a .bar file of it and sideload from your PC.

You would use DDPB on your PC to sideload apps.
Sideloading can only put the app in the personal side of the BB10 device.

Instructions on how to do that are here in this video from GoodEReader.com:

Once you have that program installed on your PC you can download already tested .bar files from GoodEReader.com

If you can't find the files you want you can get the .apk from any android device by installing airdroid on the android phone/tablet and connecting to it's webpage from a PC This will let you download the apps that are installed on the android device.
Once you have the .apk file you can convert it to a .bar file here.

I have converted the Google Authenticator for Gmail 2 factor authentication. The converted .bar version does not scan the QR code like it does on Android, but that's OK with me, I had to type the key code into the one on the old blackberry too. 

Internet Down :(

Right now my internet is down.

Yes, I'm blogging and my internet is down. And the sad news is because it's a phone company problem it'll probably be down for days.

My DSL modem dropped off the internet at about 6PM EST. This also means my home phone is down because I have it set up as a Voice Over IP connection. That, as you can tell, didn't keep me off the internet. Not even for a heartbeat.  As I determined that the trouble was the DSL line. (the outside line, beyond the DSL modem in my basement) I grabbed my cell phone and looked up their number in the built-in web browser, and called my ISP. As I waited on hold I switched it to the Facebook app to tell my friends that our planned movie night was off as I had no Netflix if I had no internet. Truth is I already knew how I could set up Netflix, and I may at some point this weekend if we're really bored, but it would not have be very enjoyable at the time with the on-hold music playing over the phone.

Having sent the message to my friends I continued to wait on hold, with the cell phone plugged into a charger to keep it from dying before I got through to a live body. Once I did get through to Mark at Tech Savvy (Thanks for taking me seriously Mark, the first person I spoke to wasn't willing to help me until I turned the computer off and on again. Seriously, that was what she asked me to do, and refused to help me because I insisted that the computer was not the problem as I could clearly see that the modem's DSL interface did not have sync... I didn't catch her name, did you guys hire Jen from IT Crowd?) ...anyway, once I got through to Mark and explained the situation, stepped through some troubleshooting of connecting a phone to the dry loop only to hear a bunch of static. (sounds like water in the line, it is raining out. I'm guessing a squirrel chewed the drop) We then plugged the modem into the demarcation jack outside (in the rain at night, but it proves a point to the phone company that will come to fix it... that the trouble isn't in the 6 feet of indoor wiring between the outside wall and the modem.

Once the busy work of setting up a work order for a Bell tech to come out was done, I sat down and my wife was chatting online via the "experimental" browser in her Kindle. I proceeded to plug the Blackberry back into the USB port of my laptop to charge and launched the BB Desktop to connect to the internet. Anna asked if she could borrow my computer, I asked "Why? I'll just share my internet with you." A couple of clicks later, and we were both sitting comfortably on the couch with our laptops, surfing the internet as usual.

It's amazing the connected lives we live these days. I kind of anticipated this sort of development when I was in high-school suffering from BBS withdrawal on a week-long camping trip in Algonquin Provincial Park. I could see a day coming when I'd probably always be connected. Well, at some point that just happened.

[Edit: 2:25 PM 13/01/2013 :
Bell guy came and switched us to another pair, one of the wire in our pair on te drop was broken. Damned squirrels!]