Understanding the Digital Landscape

What is it?
How do you find it?
How do you use it effectively?

Computers save us time in everything from information storage and retrieval, calculation, graphic design, and report preparation. E-commerce allows our websites to keep our businesses running 24/7.

A failure at any point, from our office records to our online presence, can quickly snowball into a technological disaster, especially for a small business that doesn’t have an IT (information technology) staff in-house.

Seminar leader Curt Middlebrook, The Computer Whisperer, provides insights into the equipment, computer programs, and office and internet support services out there, and the people who provide them. You’ll learn how to maximize your online efficiency, and how to track the success of your online marketing.
This is a Lunch & Learn program, part of the Pinellas Park/Gateway Chamber of Commerce Success in Business Series. Your registration includes detailed information for evaluating every aspect of your company’s digital landscape, as well as a light lunch.

When : Tuesday, November 16; 11:30 am to 1:30 pm
Where : Park Station, 5851 Park Blvd., Pinellas Park, Room 202

Cost : $19.95 Pinellas Park/Gateway Chamber Members
$24.95 Non-members

Call Chamber Manager Larry Steinlauf at 544-4777 to register.
You must be registered to attend.

History lesson below, for the interested. For those who are ready and need to donate and move on: Click here.

If you’re looking to help an old Sailor out, then “push” the button for Navy. Know this: It all goes into the same pot, but, the need to poke at our fellow military members doesn’t go away easily, so…resist the urge to help any service team other than Navy…..

Now to some background:

Barely 5 years ago, a “MilBlogger,” and Army Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss, ended up on the wrong end of an IED when on patrol in Iraq and subsequently in Walter Reed Medical Center. Having been a fairly active poster, when a Soldier’s Angels representative asked if he needed anything, he asked for a laptop so he could blog from the hospital, since he’d be there a while. They bought one off of eBay.

He had injuries to both arms, leaving him with one in a cast, and the other in a halo. Typing, as you may surmise, was pretty tough. He posted indicating he sure could use some help…maybe so he could talk to his computer.

Some people helped him out getting Dragon Naturally Speaking. As a result, Chuck’s Blog came back to life.

As a result of that, the idea that this mashup of existing tech would be able to help others. The conception of the idea came from one of Chuck’s reader’s, Beth (FuzzyBear Lioness in the comments section), who thought if it worked for Chuck, who else might it help?

So, the first use of the Project’s Name happened 8/18/2005.

Now we are but 5 years and a few months later, over $600K collected, about 50 bloggers on the teams, and begging for air time on the big websites (and getting some!), with close to 6000 laptops delivered. They are new. They are good ones, and they are provided at the Major military medical facilities, and, they can be requested, if someone has slipped by the system unnoticed.

I believe it was last year, they added the purchasing and providing of Nintendo Wiis, which has helped with physcial therapy for the injured warriors. GPS units are now also provided to those who are getting out and about, to compensate for the short term memory loss issues as a result of TBI and severe PTSD injuries.

The “gateway” to the many pages of information and the project blog is here.

One particularly descriptive post titled “Laptops Save Lives?!” has the words of the real “end users” of the charity of the donors of this work. It may be from 2007, but the truth is right there. This is a great project, which really “gives back” to those who entered the services and gave much of themselves.

Besides just the close to the problem connection, from a problem solving standpoint, I see this as a job training program for the majority of these wounded troops, as they will be medically retired/discharged. If they have used a computer to get and stay in contact with their families, friends and “Battle Buddies,” they sure will be able to draft up a business letter, surf the net to do research and learn to crunch numbers with Excel for the employer who wants a person who looks forward into life and works to achieve their potential.

I could go on for many pages, having personally met Chuck and Beth, and Patti, the Founder of Soldier’s Angels via these campaigns over the 5 years. The stories are real, the ideas amazing, and the unselfish acts to take an idea from one person to many is a lesson in building relationships.

Once more: Donate here to Team Navy!

The irony? as I was removing a virus off a “real” PC this morning, my client indicated they might buy a Mac, so they wouldn’t viruses. I began with a little business analogy: One day, it will happen. When? When the Macs in the market reach some magical %, the “bad guys” will then take the time to study the Mac OS in detail, to try and exploit it. I also went on to discuss how a business decision, when done right, always looks for the most impact, for the least expenditure of resources. And, as of that moment, it must haven’t arrived (little did I know)…yet. I potulated, that when it did, it would be like a very big tidal wave, particulalry accentuated by the fact that it’s “well known” Macs are invulnerable from attack. Yeah, right.

So any how, for you MacoPhiles…gird your loins, the attainment of 20% of the PC market by Macs announced by Steve Jobs a few days ago, has had an impact on your bulletproofness. Be on your toes, and hope the good guys have anti-virus software ready for you, really, really soon.

Here’s the warning from the articles at ARSTechnica:

A new trojan horse has cropped up that affects Mac OS X (and Windows as well), primarily disguised as a video flitting around social networking sites. When users click an infected link, a Java applet is launched that downloads multiple files, including an installer that runs automatically without users’ knowledge.

While between other appointments this after noon, I saw the article (linked above) and I knew the time has come.

Note, too, you Windows based PC users, you’re a casualty of this new attack, too.

Be on the look out for any video on the social media sites….all of you computer users.

I’ll bring this history, too, because there have been Mac based viruses before. In early 1988, I contracted the “Scores” virus on my Mac II from a download off of GEnie.

That was bad news. The good news is the PC market exploded on cheap Intel based PCs and the bad guys went after them. That has left the Mac world as the untouchables for all these years…until now.

In one case it wasn’t pretty at all, with me spending three evening trying to save their family photos.

The “bad guys” figured out how to insert viruses and Trojans in the “free” files, on that peer-to-peer sharing network. Not all of them, but it certainly was a crap shoot when you tried to pick a torrent to pull down for your entertainment.

Anyhow, the full report from TechCrunch is here.

What does that mean exactly? It means the people who write and manage software are doing a pretty good job of staying ahead of the hacker crowd, but,we the users, are become our own worst enemies. Not that we purposely let spyware, malware and viruses in, but we are more easily fooled into doing just that.

The “bad guys” are becoming very good at replicating things that are legitmate, both in look and in a social context, that make us want to click it.

Next hing you know, you’ve got a “ScareWare” problem, which, if you don’t pay the ransom, it begins to dig about your files and, over time, render your PC useless.

What got me to post this? An article in a security news feed I track saying there are a crop of “Browser Updates” showing up on people’s screen, and, we do what we are told “KEEP YOUR COMPUTER UP TO DATE!”

That makes it increasingly difficult to sort the fake updates from the real ones.

Let’s be careful out there and, according to Symantec researcher Parveen Vashishtha know this:

Malware authors are employing innovative social engineering tricks to fool users — it’s as simple as that…”

You can get it here.

Support for the next version of HyperText Markup Language 5 (HTML5).

After the install, you have to reboot. I went into freak out mode when the reboot began the Windows 7 recovery mode, butthat not being bad enough, it told me my moterhboard was not the type it actually is. Two boots did the same thing.

I powered it down, then restarted, using the BIOS pull down menu to point at my RAID0 (2 x 750GB Seagates!) and crossed my fingers. It worked. Up and running in IE9 to post this (I normally use FireFox for about everything, but hey! It’s the BETA!

I will be cloning my RAID Array to the third installed drive tonight (1.5TB)…just in case….

Oh: I pulled down the FireFox 4 beat a few weeks back. I installed it and most of my plugins (and I rely on several) were “broken,” so I limped back to FF 3.6.X for the time being.

More if I have to.

Another: Is it the same as your website?

One more: If not, why not?

Don’t risk leaving your contacts out in the cold…actually, leaving you out of the loop if you need to switch your home internet service provider (ISP). If you’re not using an email that is part of the website for your business, you risk getting lost, or, at the least, not looking as professional as you might, when you show up to network with a Hotmail/GMail/Yahoo mail account.

The advantages of having your email associated with your own domain are many. The disadvantages of not doing this are also many. Which many do you choose, as having a domain based email wipes about about all the disadvantages or not having it that way.

In most all cases, you have at least a few, if not way too many email accounts you can set up as a function of the cost of your hosting service for your domain name and website package. You should check into that. If it’s not easy to figure it out, call the person who set up your website and ask them to configure an email for you.

You don’t have to even have Microsoft Outlook to get access to this type of service. Again, in all likelyhood, you have free email client software on your machine, or you can get something like ThunderBird to use.

So, avoid being disconnected from your suppliers, prospects and clients by merging your communications with your website!

The “bad guys” on the Internet have long had a habit of finding the biggest security holes with the greatest potential impact. That’s one reason why the Apple computer line has remained effectively virus free (I caught at least one in the early Mac days (Scores), so don’t tell me there never has been any Mac viruses).

Over the years, operating systems have been “hardened”, so the bad guys have become creative and looked towards other avenues, to the point that Mike Cox in an article “Social media attacks dominate first half of 2010 malware trends” on eChannelLive tells us what is now going as as the biggest impact by the bad guys:

“Cyber criminals are putting increasing emphasis on using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as effective ‘spread mechanisms’ for malicious software,” said Arvid Gomez, Norman vice president, OEM and Technology. “In the past, they put nearly all of their efforts into compromising PC operating systems. As social media use becomes part of the fabric of our daily life, Internet users need to make certain they are taking the necessary steps to protect their privacy and security.”

He then goes on the discuss the koobface malware that has come through FaceBook since 2007. I encountered this at a client’s site about 4 months ago.

Another method to not only frustrate you, but also get some money, or your credit card number for use in, in the least case fraud, and the worst case, identity theft, are the “scareware” or “rasomware” programs that take over your system and basically demand that you buy their removal tools, which…are pretty much garbage anyhow. Mike has this comment:

Norman security experts also note that fake antivirus programs continued to plague many home PC and business users. Rogue antimalware programs have been around for a long time. In recent years however, they have become increasingly widespread, and represent a major problem. These programs can be difficult to eradicate, as they often consist of many different malicious elements.

I spent a better part of Wednesday ripping one of these attacks out of a laptop of a client’s office machine. I’ll say this: About 6 months ago, I could find these and get around them and eliminate them in about an hour. That was thanks to having seen several in a short time frame. They all had different file names, and loaded themselves from different places on the drive, but they all used the same methods. The one I ran into Wednesday had grown far smarter. I found it pretty quickly, but it had done many things to mask itself, and had placed some more hooks in the registry than I was used to deleting. Additional, I found a browser web director trojan in there, too. It may have arrived as a package deal, but it took 6 hours to find it, delete the offending things, much of the time was spent running scans, which found more things with each delete/reboot/scan cycle. It’s gone now and they are back to work, without having to just wipe the drive and begin all over, but it was a long day, when some elements have become smart enough to even force a load, regardless of some settings you applied to keep them from coming in a boot up.

I know many people don’t want to learn about the specifics of keeping your computers free of malware and other bad things, but your choice, as I see it, is to commit to some training by your local computer support person/people/staff/support company, or you can call us up and pay by the hour to undo what was maybe a 5 second decision on what to do about the question: “XXX is requesting to run. Do you want to block or allow it?” from your firewall protection. Because of the bad guys, you must get some education in how to keep from your system from becoming unavailable for a few hours (at best) to days (worst case).

Good rule of thumb: You can unblock accidentally prohibited functions. You will lose time and money if you let something in out of “I don’t have time to deal with this, I just want to get back to work!” frustration.

Read Mike’s article and practice intelligent computing!

Today I installed FireFox 4.0 (beta), meaning the released for testing by people outside of the development place in order to get feedback.

I’m glad I can still get into my FireFox 3.6.X install, too.

Not because FF 4 is bad, but I have bvecome accustomed to using many add on functions, called “plug ins” in FireFox and with the move up to 4.0(b), most all of the plugins I had installed didn’t work. Several of those I very much rely on, so 4.0(b) is a non-starter for me. It does have a nicer look, and I’m sure some improvements “under the hood,” but I need a few of the plugins to be updated for operating in 4.0 before I completely migrate to the newer version.

If you want to join me out “on the edge,” you can download FireFox 4.0(b), you can get it at this link. Enjoy!

Recently, one of the people who does a lot of lectures on Social Media wandered off the tracks long enough to say he wasn’t a web designer, but people should have their websites done in Joomla or WordPress of they are getting ripped off.

He is sort of right. Having spent since 1996 playing with websites, I’ll say he’s right if you need a functional, right away site to just say who you are and what you do. After that, his comments need to be modified based on what you need to show/display/convey about you and your business. You may need something beyond WordPress, or not.

If you’re on a limited budget, and/or you have time to maintain all aspects of you website, and that means learning about links, setting up categories, placing privacy policy statements, setting up webforms for contact info, and keep spambots at bay, then yes…WordPress is a suitable candidate for you.

In the meantime, communicate clearly what you need to your web designer and work with them. Know that the more you have thought about the content of your website before you talk with them, you will pay them less, as they won’t be spending time tracking your content down, and making change upon change upon change. That’s a money saving tip…you can use.

The great news is WordPress 3.0 has broken through the barrier of not just being a great blogging platform, but has “grown up” to be a fully functional “CMS” (Content Management System).

Questions? Contact me and let me help you see what’s best for your diigital landscape!