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You might be breaking the law with your computer: UPDATED | 10 Things | TechRepublic.com

wjimenez275 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:10:15 +0000

Twice this week I’ve had people ask me that if they connect to a neighbor’s unsecured wi-fi if it is possible that their neighbor could gain access to their files or information. I told them that since they were actually joining that neighbor’s network, than under certain circumstances, yes their information could be accessed. I was reminded of the other reason you may not want to ride your neighbor’s wi-fi in this article of 10 ways you might be breaking the law with your computer. The item pertaining to this topic follows.

State and federal laws regarding access to networks

Many states have criminal laws that prohibit accessing any computer or network without the owner’s permission. For example, in Texas, the statute is Penal Code section 33.02, Breach of Computer Security. It says, “A person commits an offense if the person knowingly accesses a computer, computer network or computer system without the effective consent of the owner.” The penalty grade ranges from misdemeanor to first degree felony (which is the same grade as murder), depending on whether the person obtains benefit, harms or defrauds someone, or alters, damages, or deletes files.

The wording of most such laws encompass connecting to a wireless network without explicit permission, even if the Wi-Fi network is unsecured. The inclusion of the culpable mental state of “knowing” as an element of the offense means that if your computer automatically connects to your neighbor’s wireless network instead of your own and you aren’t aware of it, you haven’t committed a crime. But if you decide to hop onto the nearest unencrypted Wi-Fi network to surf the Internet, knowing full well that it doesn’t belong to you and no one has given you permission, you could be prosecuted under these laws.

A Michigan man was arrested for using a café’s Wi-Fi network (which was reserved for customers) from his car in 2007. Similar arrests have been made in Florida, Illinois, Washington, and Alaska.

The federal law that covers unauthorized access is Title 18 U.S.C. Section 1030, which prohibits intentionally accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access. But it applies to “protected computers,” which are defined as those used by the U.S. government, by a financial institution, or used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce. In addition to fines and imprisonment, penalties include forfeiture of any personal property used to commit the crime or derived from proceeds traceable to any violation. You can read the text of that section here.

In a recent case regarding unauthorized access, a high profile lawsuit was filed against a school district in Pennsylvania by students who alleged that district personnel activated their school-issued laptops in their homes and spied on them with the laptops’ webcams. The FBI is investigating to determine whether any criminal laws were broken. Because the school district owned the computers, there is controversy over whether they had the right to remotely access them without the permission of the users.

via 10 ways you might be breaking the law with your computer: UPDATED | 10 Things | TechRepublic.com.

Realtime Updates On Your Google Search Results

wjimenez275 — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:26:29 +0000

Cool Google Search Tip: Google has a feature that brings your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, Google ranks these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill or world event. Whether it’s an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it’s published on the web.

Click on “Latest results” or select “Latest” from the search options menu (see the following tip to access this menu) to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only “Updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others.

An example: I did a Google search for “Chile earthquake”. From the search results page, I scrolled down until I found “Latest results for Chile earthquake”. Once I clicked on that link, I was taken to a page that continually updated with links to the most recent web entries from all over that dealt with the earthquake in Chile.

Another Cool Google Tip: Kind of a hidden feature on the Google search results page is the light blue bar just above the search results. If you look at the left side of the bar, you’ll see an option to “Show Options”. When you click on this, Google opens a column on the left that allows you to further refine your search. One of the most useful sections of this column is the time frame filter. You can click “Latest” to see what I discussed in the first section, or find results that occurred in the past 24 hours, week, or year.

Those Green Doublelined Words on a Web Page

wjimenez275 — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 02:29:55 +0000

When you surf, do you see random words or phrases with double underlines? When you move your mouse over them, they display an advertisement related to the underlined words.

This feature, called in-text advertising, turns appropriate words in the browser window into links to the advertiser’s website. These sites work with various companies to link to its advertisers. The browsers support these types of ads and they are created in such a way that most ad-blockers won’t block them. You can try to ignore them by not moving your mouse over them and if you happen to click on one, it will take you away from the current page. Some advertisors will allow you to disable the ads but you’ll have to go company-by-company. To do so, follow these steps.

Step 1

Point to the double-underlined words, but **don’t click**! You’ll see an advertisement open in a small window near your cursor.

Step 2

If the advertisement is from Vibrant, in the upper right corner of the box, click the question mark button. A new browser window will open pointing to the Vibrant in-text advertising page. If you’re using WOT (Web Of Trust), you’ll get a warning about the site. Continue anyway.

Step 3

Point to the Disable tab. Click “Click here to disable.” It will let you know that to disable, you’ll need to have cookies activated and if you ever clean out your browser cookies, you’ll have to redo these steps.

Step 4

The page should update to now say “Click here to enable.”

Step 5

Close the browser window.

I’ve looked at other advertisors to see how to disable their ads and haven’t found any thing yet. I’ll continue to search though, short of installing a 3rd party program to block these ads.

Setting up your browser to open multiple home page tabs

wjimenez275 — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:33:01 +0000

If there are more than one site that you like to visit when you open your browser, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome allow you to specify multiple startup tabs to have open with each of the pages you want when you start the browser. The downside to having multiple home pages is that when you hit the “Home” button, if you’ve moved off of your home page in one of the tabs, your browser will reopen all of the home pages.

In Internet Explorer, click on Tools and then Internet Options. Under the General tab, there is a Home Page box. Enter each of the website addresses you want to open in this box, each on their own line. Click OK to save and close.

In Firefox, click on Tools, Options, Main. Enter the addresses of sites separated by a pipe | (a key usually above the enter key on the keyboard). Or, you can open up all the sites in tabs and hit the “Use Current Pages” button. Click OK to save and close.

In Chrome, Click the Tools (wrench) button, Select “Options”. When the “Google Chrome Options” dialog box appears, click the “Basics” tab. In the “On startup” section, click the “Open the following pages” radio button. To startup Google Chrome with a webpage or multiple pages: Click the “Add” button, then when the “Add page” dialog appears, enter the URL to add to your startup pages or select a recently-viewed page. Click “Add” in the “Add page” dialog box. Repeat as desired to open multiple pages when starting Google Chrome. With Chrome, even though you can have multiple pages open at startup, you can only have one true home page.

Is Microsoft Finally Getting It Right with IE 8?

wjimenez275 — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:14:47 +0000

http://nsslabs.blogspot.com/

Two separate tests performed by NSS Labs measured protection against phishing and socially engineered malware across 5 browsers: Apple Safari 4, Google Chrome 2, Mozilla Firefox 3, Opera 10 Beta and Windows Internet Explorer 8.

One of the key things to note is that while the other browsers maintained or decreased protection between the two tests, Internet Explorer continued to improve its protection against cybercriminals.

“Socially engineered malware is the most common and impactful threat on the Internet today, with browser protection averaging between 1% and 81%. Internet Explorer 8 caught 81% of the socially engineered malware sites over time, leading other browsers by a 54% margin. Safari 4 and Firefox 3 caught 21% and 27% respectively, while Chrome 2 blocked 7% and Opera 10 Beta blocked 1%.

Phishing protection over time varied greatly between 2% and 83% among the browsers. Statistically, Internet Explorer 8 at 83% and Firefox 3 at 80% had a two-way tie for first, given the margin of error of 3.6%. Opera 10 Beta, exhibited more extreme variances during testing and averaged 54% protection. Chrome 2 consistently blocked 26% of phishing sites, and Safari 4 offered just 2% overall protection. Firefox 3.5 crashing issues prevented it from being tested reliably.”

Making a Web Page Link Do What You Want It To Do

wjimenez275 — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:16:54 +0000

Most people happily go about their web page surfing, left clicking on links as they go, just accepting that the link will either open in a new window, a new tab, or replace the page they are currently on, but never knowing what it will do until it’s clicked. If the last one occurs, and you weren’t ready to leave that page, you’re stuck hitting the back button to return to the page you were on but then you lose the page you linked to. A vicious cycle occurs.

Did you know that if you right click on the link, instead of left clicking, you can choose to open it in a new tab or new window yourself? That comes in real handy if you are doing research and want to keep different pages/tabs open.

Additionally, depending on which browser you are using, you will find other options under the right click menu. For example, you can copy the link, bookmark it, save it, WOT it, email it, etc.

How Can I Shorten Long Website Addresses?

wjimenez275 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:45:11 +0000

On occasion, you will need to copy a website address into an email, or even worse, into Twitter. I say worse because Twitter only allows 140 characters and some website addresses that you want to share can take up most of that. As for pasting a website address into an email, depending on where you put it, it could wrap onto a second line and then when the recipient clicks on the shared link, it doesn’t pick up the entire link and they don’t get to benefit from the fantastic page you wanted to share.

When those situations arise, there are a couple of sites that will take the long address (URL) and shorten them. The one I use is called TinyURL. Just paste the website address in the top box, click on the make tinyurl button, and then copy the resulting short url into Twitter or your email. SnipURL is another site that does the same thing.

Once you start using these programs to shorten your website addresses, you’ll find other reasons to use them besides sharing email links and Twitter.

Google fixes severe Chrome security hole | Webware – CNET

wjimenez275 — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:57:52 +0000

Google released a new version of its Chrome browser Thursday to fix a high-severity security problem.

The problem affects Google’s mainstream stable version of Chrome and is fixed in the new version 1.0.154.59 (download). Google has built Chrome so it updates itself automatically with no user intervention, though the software must be restarted for the new version to run.

The security problem, reported April 8 by Roi Saltzman of the IBM Rational Application Security Research Group, allowed cross-site scripting attacks. Such methods can make a Web browser process unauthorized code such as JavaScript, enabling a variety of attacks, including impersonation or phishing.

Mark Larson, Google Chrome program manager, described the problem this way in a blog posting Thursday:

An error in handling URLs with a chromehtml: protocol could allow an attacker to run scripts of his choosing on any page or enumerate files on the local disk under certain conditions.

If a user has Google Chrome installed, visiting an attacker-controlled Web page in Internet Explorer could have caused Google Chrome to launch, open multiple tabs, and load scripts that run after navigating to a URL of the attacker’s choice. Such an attack only works if Chrome is not already running.

via Google fixes severe Chrome security hole | Webware – CNET.

Safe Surfing with WOT

wjimenez275 — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:35:02 +0000

WOT (Web of Trust) is a plugin I use to make sure that the websites I visit are safe. If you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, this is one plugin that you have to install.

Cloudeight Internet recently did a comparison of four different programs that rate the safety of websites, including Norton Safe Web, SiteAdvisor, Link Scanner and Web of Trust. You can see the results here. WOT would have protected you from every one of those sites. Those are sites which they felt are scams or which offer free downloads which they consider to be adware, spyware or malware. (Thank you Free PC Security)

WOT just release it’s latest version 3.5. From WOT’s website, “Our new version adds protection levels to suit your every need – at every time in your life. Single adults can enjoy “Light” protection while surfing anywhere on the web. You get only a simple alert if you surf to a page with a poor reputation. Parents with young children can choose the “Parental Control” mode which blocks access to dangerous sites like pornography or hate sites.

WOT provides four convenient one-click protection options that can be changed instantly depending on the situation:

Light protection suits experienced Web users
Basic protection guides the user by giving warnings
Maximum Safety stops dangerous Web sites from loading
Parental Control blocks access to Web sites with a poor child safety rating and no rating at all”

Firefox users have a new shortcut to the WOT scorecard. Right click on any link and the menu includes the option to see the WOT scorecard. This is especially useful when you are surfing in a site with links but no WOT ratings.

After installing WOT, when you perform a search, the list of links will have a green, yellow, red or clear circle after them. Green means safe, yellow is warning, red is stay out and clear means it hasn’t been rated so you’re on your own. If you hover your cursor over the circle, it’ll further breakdown the ratings. At this time when seemingly innocent websites can wreak havoc on your computer, it’s critically important to have a way of knowing what’s safe and what’s not. With Web Of Trust, you have the knowledge.

You can download the Internet Explorer Plugin here and the Firefox plugin here

Goldstar – 1/2 Price Tickets to Some Great Events

wjimenez275 — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:16:57 +0000

If you live in or near, or are planning on visiting one of the following cities – Boston, Chicago, D.C. Metro, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco – and would like to attend an event for 1/2 price, check out Goldstar.

Goldstar works with more than 3,200 venues and producers across the country, and offers the world’s largest selection of half price tickets. Some of the items they offer tickets to are: theater, comedy, sports, music, performing arts and even things like wine tastings, sushi making classes and rodeos. Since not every event sells out, instead of letting seats go empty, venues list them with Goldstar to sell to their members.

Some of the Venues Goldstar Works With:

STAPLES Center – Los Angeles
Madison Square Garden -New York
Cirque du Soleil – National Tour Dodger Stadium Los Angeles
Nokia Theatre Times Square -New York
Ahmanson Theatre -Los Angeles
AT&T Park -San Francisco
Verizon Center – Washington, D.C.
Arena Stage -Washington, D.C.
Steppenwolf Theatre -Chicago
Boston Symphony Hall -Boston

If you find an event you are interested in, you’ll have to sign up for a free membership in order to purchase. By being a member, you get emails with events coming up in your area, events you may not have even been aware of. We’ve seen a couple of plays, and though the seats weren’t front row, they were still very nice seats and the plays were top notch.

https://www.goldstar.com/signup