Backup is not a dirty word

Today's post may seem very basic to some, but ultimately that's all backing up is, it sounds like a process, a complicated process, but its not hard to do at all. I get asked a lot how to back up photos, so here it is.


Basically backing up just means that you are making a spare copy of your data, whether it be photos or documents or files. One of the most reliable ways to safely store information is on to a disc that is safely stored, but due to the amount of data that people have on their devices these days, this is a dying practice as it would require too many discs. The common method now is to save to a hard drive, USB drive, or memory card.


Memory cards are a very good option for this, because most come with a switch on them that can "lock" the card and nothing can be saved over the top of your previously saved material. The down side to cards is they are small and may be easily misplaced.


If you have photos that you want to make "safe" copies of, the easiest way is to make a folder, you might name it "photo backups", then you can "copy and paste" or "cut and paste" the photos you want  into this folder. The same principle applies for documents, files, or other folders. 


Now, there are two ways to transfer this folder: You can right click on your "backup folder" and select "cut" from the menu. You need to then open up your backup destination, this is done by clicking on "My Computer" in your Start menu, the window that opens will have pictures, or a list of all the discs or storage devices on your computer, double click on your back up device to open it and then right click and select "paste" once in this window.


The second method is to right click on your "backup folder" and select "send to" from the menu that appears, this will bring up a list of all the devices on your computer, simply click on the one you want and that's it.


Depending on your system you may get pop up messages along the way asking you if you are sure you want to perform this task, so just click OK to this message.


Now this is just a basic way of "backing up" your valuable data, most operating systems have a backup program included and are not too difficult to use, they may require a bit of experimentation by you to make sure you are doing it properly. 


There are hundreds of backup programs available on the web, both free and paid. The advantage to using a program is you can set a schedule to do a regular backups, this will keep your backed up data up to date. You can also back up to your "cloud" storage that we spoke about in the last post.


The last thing is to keep your backed up material in a cool, dry place, even better is to keep one copy at a friend or family members house. This way in the event of an unfortunate circumstance at your house, you will have a safe copy of your treasured photos or important documents and files.

iPhone Tip & Safe guard your child's Identity Online!

iPhone
For all iPhone users, we have been bombarded lately with operating system updates and a new 4S model, the operating system on the iPhone is the software that runs the phone and is known as IOS, currently we are at IOS 5.1. If you have an iPhone 3GS, 4, or 4S they are all capable of running the new IOS 5 software and should have been receiving message pop ups that advise you that new updates are available. Before you can install IOS 5 onto an iPhone 3GS or 4, you must have the latest I tunes update running on your pc, a 4S will come with IOS 5 already installed. It is common to get a message when you try to update the phone that it will take hours to update, if you get this message just cancel and try again until you get a message that says a time of around 25 minutes or so.


One handy little feature that not many are aware of when using a phone on IOS5 is that you can use the "volume up" button on the side of the phone to take a picture instead of having to tap the screen. If you are holding the phone on its side it feels like a real camera with its shutter button at the top, and If you 
have a set of  earplugs with a volume control on them, you may use that volume button as well, sort of like a remote control. My daughters actually find this feature a bit creepy!. Next time I will tell you how you can tweet via speech on your iPhone, and how to have SIRI like functions on an iPhone 3GS or 4.


Children's Identity
We are all aware of the dangers of having our personal information online and identity theft. One area that is being overlooked is our young children, Quite often proud mums and dads will post up their child's birthday celebrations and don't really think twice about listing the exact day and the age of "Kirsty Smith". 


I realize  this sounds really paranoid and over the top but the fact is: there are people out there who are known to be "warehousing" personal data, this means that they are storing all the personal information like this that they come across and when these children turn 18 this information then  becomes a valuable commodity.


During our early years there are lots of experiences that require us to give our name and date of birth, we do this in good faith that our information will be treated with the respect that it deserves. This is different to putting details "out there" in social networking, which we all know can be a minefield for privacy intrusion.


Suggestions of things you can do to help protect your child, are: always refer to them online by a nick name, you may also just mention your child is having a birthday and not state what age they are, and lastly put the post up a day either side of the birthday, or change it from year to year so that the no one can actually pin down a date. Remember "Be Alert and Beware Online"

To the Cloud!! Where? What cloud?

After a few heavy days talking about passwords, we will have a nice light day today.


So where is this "cloud" that every one talks about, "To the cloud!", "Icloud", "skydrive", does all our stuff just float around up there somewhere?. I had a friend ask me a while ago "Where is the Internet?" Its a very good question.


All the information that exists on the Internet has to be stored somewhere, information is stored on hard drives, just like the one in your computer, but usually a lot larger in capacity.
These hard drives may be located on their own, or be part of a large group of drives stored in the one place, these are known as "server farms" and maybe located anywhere throughout the world.


The hard drive is connected to a server, the servers job is basically to serve up the information to you, when you type in a website address it goes to a particular server who finds the information on the hard drive and sends it to you.


The "cloud" as every one refers to now, is just a group of hard drives somewhere that belong to who ever the company is that is offering the service. These companies offer you a certain amount, or block of storage on one of those hard drives. Its possible to go online and get access to use these blocks of space for free up to a certain data limit, if you want more storage you can pay a fee or sign up to a service. 
Companies like google, amazon, Microsoft, apple, dropbox,and many many more have this resource available.


Cloud storage can be used in two ways, as an online backup resource or as storage where you are able to log in from any computer or smart phone and access your information. This can be a good way to share things like photos, or documents with friends and family. There are sites out there where your storage is specifically for photos, flickr, picnic, photobucket, are three of the well known ones. 


There is upsides and downsides to using cloud services, the upside is once your information is up there it is safe from being lost forever if your computer dies, or in the case of floods or fires or coffee spills!.The down side is you are relying on the security of the provider to keep your material private, for this reason and for the reason of longevity it is always better to stay to the big name providers, and never store sensitive material online.


One important point to think about when you are considering using an online storage facility is that somehow the data has to get up there as well as be retrieved. this is known as uploads when you put it up and downloads when you bring it down. You need to know your Internet plan that your'e on and how much upload and download data you are allocated every month. On a lot of plans the upload limit is smaller and the speed is often slower, so this will make it longer to put your data  up to your storage. This is changing now as online storage becomes more popular, but its best to check with your provider and always try and do your transferring of data at off peak times when it will move faster.


So now you know what the cloud is, don't hesitate to ask me any questions you may have.

The Golden Rule Pt 3

In the last post I talked about easy ways to remember secure passwords, and covered the “Password Haystacks” method, today I am going to talk about “PassPhrases”.

PassPhrases can be used in two ways, the first way is to pick a phrase that is easy to remember (not too common) and is best to include at least 1 number and a symbol eg: IwalkmyDog@6pm  this covers all the criteria and is easy to remember. I ran this passphrase through the GRC Haystacks Calculator and it would take 1.5 thousand trillion centuries to try every combination to crack this phrase. You could further personalize this to the particular site by saying IwalkmyDog2Google@6 or anything similar, these are only just examples so have a play, see what you come up with.

The other way to use a phrase for passwords is to pick a phrase or song lyric that you like and take the first letter from each word, if it’s not very long phrase you could take the first and last letter of each word. You can then do things like turn the letter o into zero or the letter i into one, s to 5, e to 3, a to @ but be aware this is a common practice so a good hacking database will be equipped with these substitutions, so don’t rely entirely on just changing those characters, don’t forget to add symbols, even if it is commas, question marks or full stops. You can make vowels capitals, like the other method you need to make a rule at the start and stick to it, that way you can easily recreate your forgotten password.

Here is an example from a current song by Adele, the lyric “never mind I’ll find someone like you, I wish nothing but the best for you” this would become   nmIfsly,Iwnbtb4y  how easy is that to come up with a 16 character password!. I applied the rule of making a vowel a capital letter, put the comma in and changed a word that sounds like a number into one (for into 4). A quick check through the GRC calculator shows this to be an ultra secure password and virtually uncrackable.

All it takes is a little imagination, you can use Rhymes, Poems, anything that sticks easily in your head, it could be a line out of a favourite movie! Maybe you could relate a song or rhyme or ad to each site to make them unique to that site. So I hope you can see it is not too hard to remember secure passwords. You can always write down memory hints and store them in a safe place, not the actual password but just something that will make you think “thats right! I remember”

This has been a timely post actually, as yesterday the top 25 most common passwords for 2011 was released, these are obtained from lists of hacked password databases.

1. password  2.123456  3.12345678  4.Qwerty  5.abc123   6. Monkey  7.1234567  
8.Letmein  9.trustno1 10. Dragon   11. Baseball  12. 111111  13. Iloveyou
14. Master   15. Sunshine  16. ashley  17. Bailey 18. passw0rd   19. Shadow
20. 123123  21. 654321  22. Superman   23. Qazwsx  24. Michael  25. Football

The other issue that you need to think about is how often you change them, this is a contentious point, with a lot of experts asking what is the point- if someone has your password they are going to use it, not wait a month, and then use it. A lot of businesses and Institutions use this as policy, so you have no choice, but you should be aware that things like email accounts and accounting applications etc, someone could be using your password to sit back and watch everything you do, so It is a good idea to change these. With bank accounts you would think that as soon as someone had them they would use them and you would now, but remember I mentioned in an earlier post about the “little” fish that steal your details and sell them on to the “big” fish. My advice is that the safest practice is to change your passwords from time to time.

I hope you can take all this in and please put it into practice, share the information with your friends, and feel free to ask me any questions, or offer you methods.

The Golden Rule Pt 2

I will try and keep this explanation as simple as I can, it is an easy topic to get all tecko and mathematical about, so I’ll do my best. 

Recent testing by cyber security experts has discovered that a long simple password is more secure than a short complicated password. The reason behind this is that every extra character that is added, multiplies the possible combinations that an attacker would have to try, and as you add more characters the multiplication increases in greater proportions. Remember what I told you before, someone trying to break the password doesn’t know when they have each letter one by one, to them it works or it doesn’t work. If a password is stored correctly in a database, you can’t even tell how many characters have been used, it is just a gibberish pattern.

Yes, I know “How am I supposed to remember a long password, let alone different long ones!”

I am not insisting that you have a different password for every single site, you can have one password that you use for all those random sites that just require you to give one so you can access something. The password for these sites doesn’t need to be too secure because all you are supplying is a user name, or email and password, no personal details are required.

For the sites where you have supplied personal information, access to financial records or funds, credit card details etc, you need to find out what the maximum number of allowed letters, numbers, or symbols are, and use a password appropriate to the allowance. Some sites will allow you to use letters and numbers but no symbols (!@$*+,etc) some will not allow you to use the same character in a row. A certain bank that I know of only allows a 16 character password with only letters and numbers, no symbols are allowed, this is very poor security for a bank. In this situation you must always make sure you use the all of the 16, and mix it up with numbers, letters, and upper and lower case.

I will show you two easy methods to come up with long passwords, it is best to pick one method and stick to it, that way it is easy to recreate your password if you forget it. Try and have at least 12 to 16 character passwords. The first method is to pick a word that you remember easy (probably the password you are using now) and simply add letters, numbers or symbols before and after it. An example of this would be if you used Womble for your word, well then this could become ******W0mble^^^^^^   

This method is known as Password Haystacks and was devised by Steve Gibson, From Gibson Research. He has a page https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm where you can type in your password and it will give you an idea how long it would take to crack that combination. The above example would take over a thousand trillion centuries to crack in a brute force attack, based on the combination and number of characters. You may have noticed I changed the letter o to a zero so that we had a number included.

One way that you can make this method unique to each site is to use the same number of “fill characters” as the number of letters in the name of the site, eg: if the site is “Google” you would add 6 characters each side of your middle word, if it was “apple” it would be 5 each side. You need to come up with your own style or plan and stick to it, that way you can always work out what your password is, if you can’t remember it. If the site has two words, you may put the number of letters in the first word in front of your word and the number of letters in the second word after. If the site has a long name, you could do something like always just use the first 6 characters. Remember, it can be any combination of characters that the site allows. 

On Wednesday I will give you another idea for remembering long passwords and wrap up our password chat.

There was a report on 60 minutes last night about cyber crime, and while the big stuff is out of our control, the experts stated that the average home computer is still mainly taken over because the user clicked on fake links, videos, or sites. So remember to stay Alert Online.

The Golden Rule Pt 1

Before I get into today’s topic, I will just do a bit of housekeeping. I want to let you all know that the contents of this blog are purely my own opinions, views and ideas, though these have come from a lot of study and research (and experience!). Secondly, I am in no way linked to, or receive money or products from any brand names or companies. 


Just to add a quick piece to the Facebook scam in the last post: The computer doesn’t need to shut down, the link may just open another page, if it is a link for a video and it opens a page, this is usually a sure sign that it is a scam. 


Okay, 
 A topic that nearly everybody I talk to who isn’t tech minded laughs off, is Passwords. That word that strikes frustration in the minds of even the most organised amongst us. I have helped a lot of family and friends where I have needed to know their password for the task, and have received the usual names of kids, dogs, husbands, wives etc, I even got the reply abc 123 once. I have learned over time to pick my battles, some people refuse to be educated on the topic, while most know they should be, but don’t bother. The funny thing is, the same people would not leave their house or car left unlocked, To be honest I would rather have my car stolen, than have my information and personal details stolen, at least our cars are insured!. 


While simple passwords may be easy to remember and quick to login with, they are an open invitation and a ticking time bomb to having your accounts compromised. Here is some figures on what is termed a “Brute Force” attack, this is when a computer has a database of 100s of 1000s of possible password combinations, and a program is run that can try every password in a matter of seconds. The average computer that we all work with today has the power to easily run up to 500000 combinations a SECOND, and no I didn’t add too many zeros. To put that into plain English Most of the passwords that you are using would be cracked in less than 1 second. 


You may be thinking: well this is all Hollywood Russian spy type stuff, Wrong!!! The age of technology we are in, has produced its own generation of “script Kiddies” young kids that do this kind of stuff just because!. There are also groups that “harvest” personal information and then sell it on to the bigger fish who then do the damage. Massive Databases of passwords and the programs to run them are easily found via a Google search and easily downloaded. Once someone has retrieved one of your passwords, they will then try it on other accounts that they’ve discovered you have, hence the reason to have different passwords for different accounts.

I know what you are all thinking, what a massive pain, how would I ever manage that? Well don’t panic, there are ways where it is quite easy to make hard to crack passwords for each account you have.


 Another myth that Hollywood has taught us, is that passwords are cracked 1 letter at a time, and they get closer and closer the more letters that are discovered. This is not true at all, the only information a hacker knows is “it worked” or “it didn’t work”. You will see why this matters over the next few posts where I will be discussing what makes a secure password and how to easily make them unique for each account.

Things aren't always what they seem

It’s a difficult choice as to what to talk about and share with you first, I have decided that the easiest way, is to deal with topics or items that are most relevant at the time. As discuss items and topics it will naturally teach you habits that will help you become a proficient tech user.


A behaviour that is gathering momentum at the moment on face book is: Somebody posing a question or a challenge, something like, “98% of people can’t see this for more than 15secs....” or something very similar. These are often accompanied by a video link (a picture that you click on, 
which will open a video for you). Once you click on this link, your computer may shutdown and restart on its own, at this point no damage is done. What happens next is where they get you, when you open up your web browser and log onto your Facebook page again, the page will look exactly the same, but is not actually the real Facebook. If you look up in the address bar (where you type in the web page address) you will find that the address is actually in some way different to the real Facebook address, it may be something as small as a spelling change. Once you enter you log details the owners of the page capture these details and have access to your account and all your information.


This behaviour is known as “Phishing”, it is when someone makes an email or a webpage look like an original one from the appropriate source, but in fact it is placed there to lead you to a fake one provided by criminals and hackers.


The biggest danger to your security online believe it or not, is yourself, it is your own behaviour online that can lead to danger, you need to be on your guard and always assume that something is suspicious (guilty until proven innocent). For example A link is not always as it appears to be, and can be set up to take you to anywhere the author chooses, no matter what the link looks like. In this example www.Computers&Technology.com.au looks like it will take you straight to technology site, try clicking on it (it’s safe) and you will see that where you end up has nothing at all to do with technology. 


An easy way to get around this problem is, if the link is in the form of an address; you can copy the address and paste it into the address bar, then click “enter” or “go”. If the link is a symbol or a picture you need to check the address that appears in the address bar once the page has loaded. The last option is to use the link as an idea only, and to search for the same site via a search application like “google” or 
“bing”. 
This type of threat can fool the most experienced web users, the lesson that I would like you to take away from this is to always be 
“alert”.

My First Blog

Hello, welcome to my very first post. I have decided to start this blog to try and give people who are not so technical minded or who aren’t up on latest internet events and issues, a guide as to how to have an easier, Safer experience online and to keep up with the latest issues with phones, Tech devices, and social media.


Although technology and IT (Information Technology) is now my passion, I have come from a totally non IT background. I have had to change my career and have spent the last 3 years studying IT and Network administration (controlling large numbers of computers so they can communicate 
to each other.) In one of my first lessons at College I had to ask the person beside me how to copy and paste, so I was definitely a newbie.


I listen to quite a lot of online audio shows which are known as podcasts, and on these shows people phone or write in with issues, I listen to their issues and think “Wow” that is a really unsecure practice or, that is actually quite simple to fix.
I will be providing a lot of tips on how to keep your Computer safe from online and offline unwanted intrusion, and keeping your home network secure. I will try and provide advice on latest phone updates, and things like guides to making your battery last longer and handy apps, mostly these will be iphone related. I will try and provide up to date news and security issues from the major social network platforms 
(Facebook, Twitter, Google +).


As time goes by I will explain a lot of “why you need to do this” things and will be open to hearing your questions and problems, I can’t guarantee I will be able to solve them, but will definitely endeavour to find out what I can.


I will end this first post with one tip that is very important and is an issue that is causing grief for people at the moment. 
People Will Never call you to help you with your computer or tell you that you have virus issues. The only people that might have an inkling as to what issues your system may have is your IP (Internet Provider) and they usually send you an email about an issue. If you are unsure, tell them that you will call them back and ring them on a number from the phone book or the internet, don’t let the person who has called you provide the number to call back on. I will go into more detail about this at a later date but for now 
I just wanted to get this important message across.