It seems like there is always something new out there that wants to hurt or take over your computer. I don’t usually give virus warnings, but I am going to mention a virus named “peachy” because it’s the first time a virus has been found in a PDF file. If you get an email with a PDF file attached, be sure you know who sent it to you AND make sure they actually sent it intentionally, because peachy sends itself out from an infected computer without the user knowing it. The attachments can have many random names. Right now you have to have Adobe Acrobat installed, not just the free Reader, for your computer to become infected. I’m sure that will eventually change, too.
Virus experts say the risk is low right now, but it’s just one more new thing to worry about. You can learn more about it here:
PDF Virus Factoid
I found an article called “15 Free Security Programs That Work” by Preston Gralla. He covers some good basic tools like virus protection, firewalls, spyware tools, and clean-up tools. They are all free and he reviews them all.
I subscribe to Matt Cutts’ blog and so I wasn’t surprised to read this morning that it was hacked and replaced by a group called “Dark SEO Team”. I’m not sure if all of his pages are gone or not, but it got me to thinking about security and information backup issues. Then just by coincidence I got an e-mail from someone who had almost hired me, but went with someone else. They told me that their webmaster had quit and was “not sure” if he could remember all of their passwords to give them.
Imagine that, your web person leaves you and no one in your organization has a backup of the data or a copy of your passwords! How to fix that is quite the question, but the best solution is not to allow yourself to be put in that position in the first place. Many web designers and developers will offer or insist on doing everything for you. That can be a big problem if they decide to leave and you don’t know what they have done.
Rule 1 – Keep control of your domain name yourself.
In the end it’s all you have. Your domain name host tells the nameservers on the web where to point to when people look for your site. So in the worst case scenario if you can’t get into the host who has your website files you can always buy a new web host put up a new site and have your name servers point there instead.
Rule 2 – Make sure that there is more than one person who knows all of your passwords.
Getting passwords changed without knowing your current one can be a big hassle. Maybe even keep them with your backup information in a secure location.
Rule 3 – Backup, backup, backup
It can be some trouble to backup on a regular basis so if you don’t do this now you should look into one of the many automated solutions that are available. Also you should keep at least one copy in a different location.
Here are some good tips for backing up your data for everyone, not just business owners, from Leo Notenboom on his AskLeo site.
I recently ran into the “Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki” which lists the blogs of the biggest companies on the planet. I thought that I would have a look at them and see what I could learn from “The Big Boys”. McDonalds had some good posts on ethical/animal rights issues that I read, Kodak had some interesting photo tours and MTV didn’t even load (I tried Firefox and IE7 perhaps it’s something in my security settings). Some of them don’t even seem like a blog, just a brochure page on their site.
Overall there doesn’t seem to be much there. Even though my interests are pretty wide, I didn’t find one that I will subscribe to. I have not looked at them all yet, but I’ll keep going and let you know what I find.
What I am getting out of this so far is that this is why individuals and smaller companies can have an advantage in this arena. They are not necessarily constrained by political correctness or layers of legal staff who tell the blogger how to think which makes their blogs very bland. I’m not saying that you should go out and slander someone, what I’m saying that smaller companies have the flexibility to say what they really mean, say it while it’s still relevant and can take the immediate response from their readers that the Internet offers and make good use of it on their blogs.
There are many small companies blogs that just may as well be another static page on their site, but the best are the ones that invite interaction and comments from their visitors.
So the answer is yes, your business should have a blog, but only if you are willing to maintain it on a (semi) regular basis. Of course you have to be willing to say what’s on your mind in your blog and listen to your readers even if you don’t like what they have to say (maybe especially if you don’t like what they have to say).
Provide your readers with some interesting content and you can beat the “Big Boys” at their own blog. Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think.
In the past few weeks I have had a couple of people ask me the question “How secure is a wireless network?” I have also seen a couple of posts on Craigslist asking about this. It turns out that most wireless networks are not very secure I just browsed my own wireless utility and found that there were five different networks (besides my own) that I could see from my computer. Two of them had no security at all. Even though I didn’t try I’ll bet that not only could I use their networks and I could probably get into their computers, too. If I had all of the tools handy to me that the bad guys have I’m sure that I could cause some real trouble just by driving down any street with my laptop on.
It turns out there are some simple steps to make your network more secure. Usually when someone asks me I just point them to this post on Daily Wireless. It answers the questions that I had and some that I didn’t even know that I had. It also tells you why these steps are necessary.
One of the things that I like most about the Firefox browser is that there are so many free plug-ins that will do almost anything that you want. Because the program itself is open source there are thousands of developers who are working on more each day. Because their work is also open source their plug-ins can be easily reviewed by the community who can pass on their reviews or security warnings. It also makes hiding spyware and other bad stuff virtually impossible. So any of them you find on the on the Firefox site should work well and safely.
Today I’m recommending a valuable tool for anyone designing websites. The Web Developer 1.1.3 plug in, by Chris Pederick for the Firefox browser. The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various very useful web developer tools. It can be used to edit text, css, tables, and much more.
It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
The official Web site of Dolphin Stadium, home of Sunday’s Super Bowl XLI, has been hacked and seeded with exploit code targeting two known Windows security flaws. Hundreds of SuperBowl visitors have been affected.
Apparently they have found this bad code in humdreds of websites. It’s a good idea to make sure that your version of Windows is updated.
I advise all of my customers to have a blog. I think it one of the best things that you can do to help yourself get better search engine rankings. There are several good reasons for having a blog:
- Having new content on your site if one of the best things that you can do to get your visitors to return on a regular basis. The search engines recognize this as well and will reward you for regularly adding new content.
- If you can get your visitors to add comments to your posts that counts as more new content. So even though your content is written by others, because it is on your site it counts as your content.
There are also some disadvantages:
- If you don’t add content on a regular (or at least semi-regular) basis your site looks stale to both your visitors and search engines.
- Anytime you allow others to add to your site you will get Spam. The scourge of the Internet and if you allow these ads for gambling, porn, or “medicine” on your site it makes you look as bad as them.
I use Word Press for this blog and it’s security settings were pretty good, in that it would hold these junk posts in a file until I could delete them. That wasn’t too bad at first because they tended to come in big blocks that could be pretty easily be tagged and deleted. Unfortunately as this blog grew in popularity so did this crap. I was well over 200 spam posts a day and it was getting very annoying. For some reason my Halloween post tends to be a real magnet for this stuff.
I went looking for help, found Spam Karma 2, tried it out and it has worked wonders. Not only has it made it easier to deal with these posts, my count has gone from over 200 a day to just 5 or 10.
Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is a free anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. It works very well, is simple to install and I recommend it highly.
Using e-mail to communicate with long distance customers can be a challenge to say the least. I wrote a small article on the subject. The trick is to convey your message as well as to understand what your customer is trying to get across without clues from body language or voice inflections. I found it’s always best to assume that you need to spell out in great detail what you want to say or ask.
There are many other issues to using e-mail to communicate with friends or customers. Etiquette, security, and just plain effectiveness can be very tricky topics. Here’s a post by itsecurity.com called “Hacking Email: 99 tips to make you more secure and productive” it covers many of these issues.
On this day to remember this countrys loss on September 11th I read this essay by Bruce Schneier about how to prevent future terrorist acts.
He reminds us that “Our best defense is intelligence and investigation. Rather than spending money on airline security, or sports stadium security.”
We should not be wasting our resources on highly visible displays of pretend security just to get people (re)elected.
Here’s a great article by my favorite security guru Bruce Schneier on Wired news about why the terrorists are winning the “War on Terror” and how to fight it better by fighting terror with antiterror.
It all is common sense, which unfortunately is not very common any more.
“The only thing we have to fear is Fear itself.”
FDR
