Report: Obama helicopter security breached – White House- msnbc.com

Posted on March 1, 2009 by wjimenez275

What’s important to take away from this story is that the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing opened this person’s computer up to the world and basically said, “come take a look at my files, even the private ones”.

A company that monitors peer-to-peer file-sharing networks has discovered a potentially serious security breach involving President Barack Obama’s helicopter, NBC affiliate WPXI in Pittsburgh reported Saturday.

Employees of Tiversa, a Cranberry Township, Pa.-based security company that specializes in peer-to-peer technology, reportedly found engineering and communications information about Marine One at an IP address in Tehran, Iran.

Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa, told WPXI-TV: “We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One, which is the president’s helicopter.”

The company was able to trace the file back to its original source.

“What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said.

Tiversa also found sensitive financial information about the cost of the helicopter on that same computer, WPXI-TV reported.

Someone from the company most likely downloaded a file-sharing program, typically used to exchange music, not realizing the potential problems, Boback said.

“When downloading one of these file-sharing programs, you are effectively allowing others around the world to access your hard drive,” Boback said.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, an adviser to Tiversa, said the company discovered exactly which computer the information came from. “I’m sure that person is embarrassed and may even lose their job, but we know where it came from and we know where it went.”

Boback said the government was notified immediately.

Iran is not the only country that appears to be accessing this type of information through file-sharing programs, Boback told the station.

“We’ve noticed it out of Pakistan, Yemen, Qatar and China. They are actively searching for information that is disclosed in this fashion because it is a great source of intelligence,” Boback said.

Clark told WPXI that he doesn’t know how sensitive this information is, but he said other military information has been found on the Internet in the past and should be monitored more closely.

Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., said he would ask Congress to investigate how to prevent this from happening again.

via Report: Obama helicopter security breached – White House- msnbc.com.

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Internet Explorer compatibility in Firefox or Chrome

Posted on February 20, 2009 by wjimenez275

If you use Firefox or Chrome as your primary browser, you may have run into an internet page that works best under Internet Explorer, or actually requires Internet Explorer. I ran into this the other day when I was helping someone with a problem they were having in Yahoo Mail, in which the right-click copy/paste function wouldn’t work in Firefox but worked fine in IE. In researching it, I found that this problem has existed for quite a while. A day or so later, I was logging onto a site and it wouldn’t load, only to find out that Firefox wasn’t a supported browser.

The answer to these problems is a Firefox plug-in that you can find here (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab-2-ff-36/). It allows you to right-click a tab and render it as an IE tab. You can designate certain sites to open under the IE tab whenever you need to open them. Most importantly, it allows me to stay in Firefox for all of my other browsing. Really comes in handy.

In Chrome, this extension works wonderfully – http://www.ietab.net/home (ignore the link to Firefox on this page). With this tool, you right-click on the page to have it rendered in Internet Explorer. Under IE Tab Options, you can set which version of IE you want to emulate, from versions 7 to 9.

Filed under: Instructional, Internet Items, PC Tips and Tools, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Have you heard of UPromise? The easy way to save for College.

Posted on February 16, 2009 by wjimenez275

Turn everyday spending into money for college.

Nearly a decade ago, Upromise was launched based on the philosophy that everyone should be able to afford a college education. Today, with more than 10 million members, Upromise is making that a reality for many Americans.

Simple Idea:

  • Create a college savings service that harnesses the purchasing power of parents, extended family, family, and students to make it easier to pay for college.
  • Members direct their spending to Upromise partners—including more than 600 online stores, 8,000+ restaurants, thousands of grocery and drugstore items—and earn money for college.

Powerful Results:

  • Everyone can earn money for college—parents with young children; family and friends that want to contribute; students and graduates with eligible student loans to pay.
  • Many members have earned hundreds even thousands of dollars for college with their everyday spending, and have been able to use those earnings to contribute toward college tuition, expenses, or loans–quicker and easier.

All your earnings are automatically saved securely into your Upromise account. Then, you decide if you’d like the potential to grow them tax-free in a 529 plan 1 to pay for college, use them to pay down a Sallie Mae student loan, or receive a check for college expenses.

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How do you know if you got the best price on an item?

Posted on February 16, 2009 by wjimenez275

Have you ever purchased something only to wonder if you could have gotten it cheaper if you’d only waited a little longer? There is a great tool called PriceWatch that can be used to monitor the price of an item you’re shopping for through Amazon and notify you when it reaches a price you want to purchase it at. If you use Internet Explorer, PriceWatch has hooked up with Price Protectr to track prices of things you’re thinking about buying, and save money even after you buy at over 150 stores. PriceProtectr will warn you if the price of a product that you recently bought online is reduced, so you can claim a partial refund under the store’s price guarantee policy.

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Have you ever needed to share someone’s computer?

Posted on February 3, 2009 by wjimenez275

Have you ever been speaking with  someone and they describe what’s going on their computer but you’re just not understanding what they’re saying, or they’re running a program and have a question about something but can’t really express in words what they need?

There’s a great program that I use that allows me, with the permission of the other user, to gain access to their computer to see what’s going on. I gain control of the mouse and keyboard, or let them keep control so they can show me what’s going on. Did I mention that it’s free?

Crossloop is a free remote assistance program that allows you to run programs, open documents, download drivers, alter settings and even delete files on the remote computer.

The program works by connecting via the CrossLoop server. The server has 128bit Blowfish encryption, making it  safe from hackers and other ne’er-do-wells.

It’s easy to setup and run and it has saved a lot of time in troubleshooting issues. You can download the program from here (http://www.crossloop.com/ipage.htm?id=download).

They also have a service with support people online from all over the world to assist you when you have a problem. The helpers set their own rates and if the Helper was unable to solve your problem or your problem continued after the session and within 48 hours of your final payment, CrossLoop will refund the payment you made. The rates for Helpers vary by many factors depending on the type of issue and experience of the Helper you choose.

A nice program worth looking into if you’re constantly called on to help others, or if you need help yourself and don’t know who to turn to. – Crossloop

Filed under: Instructional, PC Maintenance, PC Tips and Tools, Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Beware of Valentine’s Day Emails

Posted on January 30, 2009 by wjimenez275

Multiple security vendors, including MX Logic Inc. , Trend Micro Inc. and Panda Security, have issued alerts about new Valentine’s Day-themed spam campaigns that try to dupe users into installing the Waledec bot.

Subject lines for the spam, said Sam Masiello , vice president of information security at MX Logic, are “short and sweet,” and include “Me and You,” “In Your Arms” and “With all my love.” From the spam, users who browse to the embedded link reach a site with a dozen hearts, any one of which download an executable file when clicked.

“Clearly the old Storm folks are working as hard as they can to build up their new botnet, and are following the old tried-and-true methods of centering their social engineering tactics around holiday themes,” said Masiello in a post to the MX Logic blog .

“But it still impresses me that tactics like this continue to work and be so effective, despite how many times it gets recycled,” Masiello said in an interview today.

Storm used Valentine’s Day spam in both 2007 and 2008 to hijack PCs.

via New botnet resurrects Storm’s Valentine’s Day ruse – Network World.

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Great Tool for Sending Notes to Yourself – JOTT

Posted on January 23, 2009 by wjimenez275

A couple of months back I recommended a great online service that allows you to call a toll free number to send a message to yourself or a contact. The service transcribes your message and sends the text and the sound file to your email or your contact’s email. You can read more about the service here – JOTT.

Beginning February 2nd, they are doing away with the free, basic version and going with annual plans. They’re still low cost and very much worth the price, but what I like is that they have a pay as you go plan. If you don’t use the service a lot, though once you start using it, you’ll use it more often, you can purchase a chunk of minutes and your usage will deduct from those minutes. This is very reasonable. Also, they don’t round up minutes. If your message is 23 seconds, they just deduct 23 seconds, not 25, not 30.

Still a great product for a very reasonable price.  You can get to the site here.

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Some Cool Technology I’ve Been Playing With

Posted on January 22, 2009 by wjimenez275

LeapFish is a multi-dimensional metadata search engine that combines the best of the web in a single search. It searches Google, Yahoo, MSN, Amazon, and Youtube. They recently released its new click free search interface that delivers search results as you type. The brand new search engine  now offers one of the world’s fastest search services with instantaneous results as each character of a search term is entered. Give it a try.

YouMail provides you with a free cell phone voicemail service that allows you to better express your personality and be more productive. YouMail users can personalize greetings based on caller ID – recording greetings themselves, or easily choosing from a large and growing library of user-generated greetings and away messages. YouMail users can also access their cell phone voicemail over the Web or in their e-mail, to easily share special voicemails and save them forever. The service is free. When someone calls and goes to voicemail, they are actually leaving a message at YouMail. The program notifies you via text that you have an an email, and/or you’ll get the message in an email with a link to the voicemail, which you can listen to online.

WatchThatPage is a service that enables you to automatically collect new information from your favorite pages on the Internet. You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. The new information is presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page. You can specify when the changes will be collected, so they are fresh when you want to read them. The service is free!*

Filed under: Instructional, Internet Items, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Recording industry to cut back on lawsuits

Posted on January 21, 2009 by wjimenez275

The Recording Industry Association of America said that it will cut back on lawsuits to combat illegal online music sharing because it has enlisted leading Internet service providers to discipline individuals it accuses of pirating copyrighted works.

The trade association said certain Internet carriers, which it did not name, have agreed in principle to impose escalating penalties on customers who ignore repeated warnings that they are breaking the law by distributing free songs. The association is negotiating for sanctions that could include the suspension or permanent termination of Internet service.

Digital rights groups rejoiced over the recording association’s announcement that it will limit its long-running campaign of legal action against individuals such as college students, who often were pressured to pay thousands of dollars to settle the lawsuits.

But the consumer groups said Internet service providers should not be cast in the role of “copyright cops” who can cut off online access based only on industry accusations that are never put to the test in court.

via Recording industry to cut back on lawsuits.

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The bell tolls for your magnetic media | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com

Posted on January 9, 2009 by wjimenez275

Don’t wait to try to retrieve the data and content from your magnetic media. Chances are, some of it may already be unrecoverable and highly degraded. Act now.

If you’ve got any kind of magnetic media (computer floppy disks or tapes), and you give a crap about anything that’s stored on them, I urge you to transition them off to a more stable digital storage medium immediately. We’re now at the cusp of which virtually any data from the 1990’s stored on floppy might be unusable, depending on the conditions in which they were kept. If you’ve got 5.25 inch floppies, you might even be completely out of luck, since it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find systems that can read them or haven’t lost their drive calibration to the point where doing a file dump is next to impossible. Many of the newer systems aren’t even capable of being cabled to a new floppy drive, but you can still buy USB-based units.

Magnetic storage degradation isn’t unique to floppy disks, either. With the HDTV transition, many people will have a renewed interest in being able to view their existing VHS libraries on the newer sets. While a number of low-cost solutions for viewing the material on the newer sets are available, there is still the issue of ongoing media degradation.

After about 15-20 years, VHS tapes will dramatically start to lose quality whether you watch them or not. So for those of you with wedding and home videos from the 1990’s, if you haven’t had them converted over to DVDs yet, you might want to think about doing so soon. If you had wedding videos done in the last 10 years and the videographer is still in business, you might even want to consider finding out if he still has the original Betacam masters and can convert it for you.

A number of companies will do a professional job on your VHS tapes with commercial equipment, particularly if you have certain videos that have special value to you, or need to have them digitally remastered. These companies will charge anywhere between $10 and $25 per tape if the source media is still relatively good. If you have a lot of videos, you might want to look into black box devices such as the ADS DVD Xpress DX2, which for about $80 will allow you to transfer directly from your VCR to your computer and burn DVDs.

via The bell tolls for your magnetic media | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com.

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