From your GMail account you can go to settings.  Select the Buzz tab, then click on the link for “Disable Google Buzz”.  This will take you to a page to confirm that you really want to do it.  Once you confirm it, that’s it, it’s all gone.

While some I know have initially been favorable towards Buzz, I find myself looking at it in a different light.  Of course I have to admit that I am not much fun of “social media” or most of the things with the “Web 2.0″ label.  My involvement with them is mostly limited – checking and posting occasionally merely because a great many people I know use them frequently, and in some cases short of calling them is the only way I have to contact them.  With Twitter I never go to the website if I can avoid it.  It’s hideous, and has already had incidents of being compromised.  I use a Twitter client that is nice, uncluttered, and sits in the background until I’m bored enough to skim it.  Facebook, another site with history of compromises, seemingly changes their layout, privacy controls, and way you interact with it on a weekly basis.  I look at it once or twice a week, but damn I wish it’s popularity amongst the people I knew would wain.  All of this basically goes to say that Google Buzz, from the get go, is not likely to be my cup of tea.  It also should be pointed out that I haven’t touched it at all yet.  I’ve never liked webmail (I find it handy to have at some times), so I deal with all my e-mail via a client.  I can’t remember the last time I logged in to my GMail account via the web.  To be fair I probably should try it, but I’m not one to falsely claim that anything I write here is “Fair and Balanced”.  Generally it’s more “Biased and Obscene”.

Somehow what was meant to be a skeptical look at the idea of Google Buzz turned more in to a rant of my loathing of social media.  I like long rambling posts.  I like actually taking the time to read things.  The short form “thought bursts” or more colloquially “tweets” or “status updates” are fine and well but there is no substance and often times I find myself yearning for me.  Perhaps it’s my background in English literature, but I prefer substance to form, rambling to quips, and long diatribes to a simple pronouncement like: “Social Media Sucks”.

This is the reason that the US is lagging behind the rest of the modern world in home network infrastructure.  The so-called “gate keepers” of the internet have no real desire nor incentive to fix the ever growing list of network problems.  Because there is a severe lack of provider options in this country, and little to no regulation, companies use rebranding tactics in an attempt to dazzle people in to forgetting their internet sucks.

Nice try, but your 90’s edgy naming attitude ain’t going to cut it Com… er XFINITY.

Remember people, privacy isn’t ever going to be a valued commodity until we say enough is enough and make it one.  Exercise your power and your freedom of speech whilst it’s still available to you.

The news has recently talked about these so-called “cyber attacks” by China on various governments and companies around the globe.  While these are the more publicized attacks, the majority of them appear to be coming from highly technical criminal enterprises.  The motive is the same as it always has been with these types of organizations: money.

Companies don’t want to talk about it when these things happen.  Even if they are successful in fending off would-be black mailers or corporate data hijackers, they don’t want to report the attempts.  Fear of a decline in stock prices, giving off the appearance of being weak or vulnerable, or just the all to common veil of corporate secrecy are some of the reasons that these situations are never made public.

What’s even more frightening is that in this time of recession, companies are cutting their security budgets.  They are trying to make due with less.  Meanwhile those who would plunder them are increasing their resources and finding new ways to infiltrate protected networks.  When there are threats on someones physical well-being the typical response isn’t to slash the number of security personnel protecting them, it’s to increase it.  Yet when it comes to data, the life blood of corporate America, this is exactly what they are doing – cutting back security in an attempt to save a couple of bucks.  It’s another striking example of short-sightedness that can end up costing companies more in the long run.

Protecting our networks against these threats is a monumental task.  The internet is a global entity, policing it is near impossible as all governments work under their own set of laws, seldom working well with others.  Attempts at working together often lead to tangled, and slow moving bureaucracies.  Governments are not designed to be quick and responsive, however the internet is an ever changing rapidly evolving place.  It requires a quickness of response.

There’s not a clear cut solution to this.  Just as with any other type of crime there is no fool-proof system that can’t be cracked.  Education and ever evolving security practices can minimize the risk.  Just like you shouldn’t walk through a bad part of town with a wallet stuffed with cash, corporate networks shouldn’t leave their data out in the wind, unprotected where someone with a little technical aptitude can get at it.

I’ve watched the videos, read the reports and Steve Jobs spiel and still I am amazing overwhelmed.  Sure, it may have just been the massive amount of hype that has been surrounding this thing, but I don’t think so.  I can pin point a few of, what I consider to be, pretty glaring short comings.

1. The very first thing I noticed about it was that it’s not a widescreen device.  For something that’s only 9.7″ when I’m watching video I don’t want to have to deal with black bars when watching wide screen content.  For a media oriented device this just seems silly to me.  No, not a deal breaker, but something that rubbed me the wrong way from the get go.
2. While the iPad seems to have a more polished version of the iPhone OS, it seems like too stripped down, and too locked down to be a “great” product.  Sure, it’s still useful, and the iPhone OS is entirely serviceable.  But in a time when other companies have touch screen machines running full OS versions this just seems a bit silly.  Especially after how much he cuts on netbooks and then releases a product that is more stripped down than “a cheap laptop”.
3. Again it seems as if Apple wants nothing at all to do with Flash, as, like the iPhone/iPod Touch, the web browser lacks a Flash plugin.  A device like the iPad would be great for Hulu video, or any number of streaming content sites.  However without Flash these sites are a no go.  While some people see Flash as becoming irrelevant in the not so distant future as HTML 5 brings its own embedded streaming standards, it is however relevant now.  They are releasing this device now, not in the future, and to ignore a current dominant standard seems absolutely silly.
4. Finally, what I see as the biggest deal breaker of them all, is the lack of multitasking.  Only being able to have one app going at once is short-sighted, and something I’d expect from a device from several years ago.  On my 1st Gen iPod Touch I can understand there are hardware limitations.  On Apple’s much touted “blazing fast” A4 chip I’d expect it to handle the running of multiple applications like a champ.  Why is this feature lacking?  I wish I knew, but it sets the iPad behind devices that are less technologically impressive.  Big fail on this one Apple.

It’s true that three of these four complaints could be addressed by software updates.  I certainly hope that they are.  Currently, however, this device seems aimed at a very small niche market.  It looks to me more like a proto-type than an actual prime time ready release.  I can see the iPad, however, sparking competing devices that will force innovation in this newly emerging market.  The iPad might be a precursor, but in its current incarnation its nothing more than an overgrown iPod desperately seeking a market.

It certainly seems like there is a good chance of this happening.  While AT&T has moved a lot of iPhone’s, it has also burdened their service like no phone before it.  They’ve been getting a lot of negative press, so losing exclusivity could help relieve some of the burden and allow them to push more of other variety of phones that they see better financial returns from.  It would also be a boon to consumers who lust after the iPhone as it would give them choice, and competition, in theory, helps to lower price and give new incentives to the consumers.  Verizon’s recent price cut on unlimited plans was followed by a nearly identical price drop by AT&T.

The iPhone’s on another network rumor sound more plausible to me than a tablet announcement after so many disappointments in the past.  Still, no one said the event on the 27th has to be limited to one device.  Apple is the master of “Just one more thing…”.  Perhaps a networked tablet from Apple riding on Verizon’s airwaves?  We’ll just have to wait until the 27th to see.

First I have to say that while I use multiple machines, only one of my machines is responsible for being the “keeper of data”.  I do, however, make sure that certain commonly used files are accessible across all my machines.  Since I use multiple operating systems as well I went with Dropbox to take care of my file syncing needs for those that I need access to no matter which machine I’m on.  While I am not using is as a backup per se, it does mean if one of my drives fails, those files are still safe and accessible to me on my other machines.  Right now I’ve just been using the free 2 GB version and it’s been happily running on all three of my machines.

My main work horse machine, the one on which all my important data officially resides, is my MacBook.  I use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable cloned drive of the laptop on an external USB drive.  On a weekly basis I update the changed files on the cloned drive so that worse case scenario if I have to completely replace the laptops hard drive the image I can restore it with will be at most 6 days old.  I also make sure to update the cloned drive before traveling or running a system update.  I’ve been fortunate enough to never have encountered a disaster when upgrading my system, but I’ve read enough horror stories that I’m not willing to take that chance.

As a second layer of local backup my MacBook nightly runs an rsync of my home folder.  If I accidentally delete a bunch of files, or just have some data corruption that only affects my home folder I don’t want to have to restore the entire drive.  The rsync makes a copy of my home folder to an external drive that is plugged in to my Airport Extreme.  Once upon a time I ran Time Machine back ups to that drive, but I’ve had some off and on issues with Time Machine and finally gave up on it.

Those layers of backup help me to feel safe in the event that either data is lost, or a hard drive dies on me (which has happened more times than I’d like to admit).  However is something horribly drastic such as theft, or a fire struck my home all that local backup would be pretty useless.  Any backup strategy worth its salt should have an offsite component.  Once upon a time when I had a job with an office I used to keep a cloned drive there.  That’s no longer an option for me so I’ve turn to Mozy Home Backup to provide my offsite backups.  Right now Mozy is only running on my laptop and it’s currently backing up my home folder.  While having to rebuild a machine from scratch is time consuming, only the contents of my home folder are irreplaceable.   I have it set to run nightly backups, and other than once when I had Time Machine issues because of Mozy, it’s ran wonderfully for me.

I’ve lost data in the past and its helped make me be a little more paranoid about backups.  I’ve thought long and hard about the value my data has to me and take what I feel are appropriate measures to help protect that data.  There are probably better strategies, and certainly there are people far more paranoid about backups than I am.  The only other recommendation that I’d make is that no matter what your backup strategy is, do some test runs of restoring from backup.  Nothing is worse than having a drive failure, believing you’re data is safely backed up, and then learning there are issues with the restore.  Having a multi-layered approach to backing up makes sure you don’t rely on any one backup mechanism.  It’s good to have fail safes in case one particular backup procedure fails.

I’ll be honest, I won’t really believe it until I see it.  Too many times in the past there were indicators that Apple was about to release one, and they ended up releasing something else.  So yes, I’m skeptical.

The tablet market has also been a rather niche one, more so than many other technologies.  Things like the Kindle, or the recently released Nook, have come along that are a bit of a compromise between a touch computing platform, and media enabled device.  Both are geared towards being a digital replacement to the shrinking dead tree industry.  Multi-functionality is something that we don’t see much of in these early renditions.  While this may change in the future, right now there is a window for a combination of a media device (music, movies, and books) and a device to deal with our online lives (social media, e-mail, web browsing, etc.).  If anyone can take a fledgling market and make it a must have experience it will be Apple.  The question is, is it the right time?  Is Apple even releasing this beast?  Or will the 27th leave all the Apple Tablet fan club kiddies sad little pandas?

123456
12345
123456789
Password
iloveyou
princess
rockyou
1234567
12345678
abc123

These passwords illustrate one of the fundamental security problems faced today.  While there are exploits in code to be found, sometimes the best way to break in to a place is to just waltz in through the front door.  Users often complain that remembering passwords is too difficult, and like to keep things as simple as possible.  It’s another example of people not taking their data seriously.  You don’t fully appreciate what your data is worth until someone you don’t want to have access to it manages to get a hold of it.

People need to get in to the habit of practicing better password security.  Even if you have a difficult password with letters, numbers, and special characters writing it down on a Post-It note next to your computer is the same as buying a fancy high tech lock for your front door but then leaving the key in it.  There are great password managers out there that encrypt your passwords with a single password.

But seriously, princess?