WordPress offers free accounts, but for those who have their own domains, and want to design their own site (and don’t necessarily know HTML), WordPress offers great looking templates that are FREE, fully cusomizable, and easy to maintain and update!

BENEFITS: You don’t have to know HTML or write code! Shopping carts (even Real Estate site plug-ins), stats, built-in search engine indexing, plus THOUSANDS of free templates, plug-ins, blogs, and features! All done within your own WordPress control panel online!

Setup time? We can set up an acccount for you (including domain name registration) in about an hour!

Need help? We offer a “getting you started” package that is about an hour remote session that’s only $75!

Have a web designer (or you do web design) but want ONE part of your site to have dynamic content? We can do that too! We set the database to point to a directory within your site, and you are good to go!

Still have questions? Give us a call 707-297-6789 or reply to this email for a prompt response!

Software vendors aren’t dumb, and to gain a competitive edge, some are offering server and workstation monitoring along with their application. The tools to monitor systems are ubiquitous, and relatively easy to deploy. But monitoring systems is not the same as maintaining and managing them, and that takes a skillset most software vendors won’t bother to acquire.

Your network infrastructure is made up of both hardware and software, and while you may buy hardware and operating systems to match your LOB applications’ requirements and recommendations, there are other considerations that go way beyond a software developer’s purview.

A good IT support company will look at your total business, within the context of your location, market, growth plans and existing infrastructure to make recommendations to create and maintain an IT infrastructure that will suit your needs now, and be ready to scale to meet your future needs too. Moreover, a good IT Support company will also be glad to work with your LOB application provider to ensure the deployment is done correctly, and that every user of the application will be able to do exactly what they need to do.

Application Development is a specific technical expertise, requiring skills that are completely different from the skills your IT provider uses to guide your company’s technical strategy. While there may be some overlaps when it comes to project management, or hardware deployment, it is unlikely the implementation team for a software vendor will be in a position to take care of your overall technical needs over the long haul.

Your business needs IT support from a provider whose focus is just that – business class IT support services.

The first part of this is for the consumer: This means everyone including myself. You have a choice on where you shop, eat, and get service. A simple solution (for example) is to always shop locally first. The biggest argument that I keep hearing is this: ‘The big box mart has everything under one roof for cheap. I can get tires, SCUBA gear, and groceries all in one trip. The local store is too expensive and want to gouge me and don’t have what I need”. The easy answer is this: The reason why local is more expensive is because they have to compete with this mentality. Prices will lower with local if the demand is there. But only consumers can make this demand happen. If they don’t have what you need, ASK and they will order it and keep it in stock for you

This part is for the small businesses:  Keep your prices low! Word will get out, and soon (read above) your customers will come. Treat your customer as if they were your only customer: The biggest service complaint is folks having to dial a call center with a rep who doesn’t care, know the product, or even have a mastery of their language. They WANT to shop local and get that personalized service that we all love. Give them that and they will remain as loyal to you as you are to them. Listen to them: They will always tell you what they need, and being small, you have flexibility to make things happen quickly for them. Not so in a big corporation…ever.

Other considerations: Your dollars stay local! Local businesses pay local taxes for your community and your money stays here where it needs to be. When you shop globally, you lose the uniqueness that your local shops provide for your community. Independent local businesses employ a wide array of supporting services. They hire architects, designers, cabinet shops, sign makers and contractors for construction. Opportunities grow for local accountants, insurance brokers, computer consultants, attorneys, advertising agencies and others to help run it. Local retailers and distributors also carry a higher percentage of locally-made goods than the chains, creating more jobs for local producers.

In the larger picture, sales of the 500 largest corporations grew 700% in the past 20 years, yet those corporations are now net dis-employers, firing more people than they hire despite record profits. That our economy is still in decent health is testimony to the employment generated by small business during this time. We need to recognize the impact of our dollars and support institutions that benefit our common interests.

Looking for a place to invest? Think how FAR your investment would go to a small company to get them kick-started into becoming a stable community responsible business in this economy! The possibilities are staggering.

So remember one easy step: **ger King or Mc*****…or the local hamburger stand down the block? Does the local hardware store have a hammer? or am I going to drive to the big home de*** for it? It’s a simple solution that with a little re-training we can do. Big corporations spend billions to condition us through advertising. It’s up to us to reverse that with a little word of mouth

If everyone stopped going to chain stores for just one month, we would all start seeing the trend reverse itself and watch our economy bloom like we all need it to

You need to clean up your Facebook account so you won’t be spamming the same message that tricked you to your friends. Do this by removing the post from your Newsfeed and marking the post as Spam.  Do this by clicking the “x” in the top right hand corner of the post.

Never complete surveys to unlock videos or other content on Facebook. Scammers use these tricks to either spread malware, obtain personal identification or earn commissions from marketing companies. Don’t pad their pocket and possibly open yourself up to harm!

Some of the surveys require you to download files to your computer. Never do this! If you did so in error, then run a complete system scan with a good anti-virus software program. The I.Q. Quiz scam has been around for a while, and it typically requires you to enter your cell phone number to receive the results. The scammers then bill you  for premium services. Keep an eye on your phone bill for bogus charges.

If you or your Facebook friends are falling for tricks like this, it’s time to get yourself informed of the latest threats.

Stay tuned! We’ll keep you informed!

 

Students at Georgia Tech’s School of Computing conducted a proof-of-concept hack to demonstrate how, by tapping into a smartphone’s accelerometer, which measures the vibrations of the device, they were able to infer what a target was typing on a keyboard placed near the phone with up to 80 percent accuracy.

The team used an iPhone for their experiment, but the same attack is possible using “any smartphone from the past two years with an accelerometer,” Michael Terrazas, assistant director of communications for Georgia Tech’s College of Computing told Security News Daily.

The hack works by detecting pairs of keystrokes, rather than individual keys. The researchers used the word “Canoe” as an example. Typed, the word canoe can be broken down into four pairs of keystrokes, C-A, A-N, N-O and O-E.

“Those pairs then translate into the detection system’s code as follows: Left-Left-Near, Left-Right-Far, Right-Right-Far and Right-Left, Far…This code is then compared to the preloaded dictionary and yields ‘canoe’ as the statistically probable typed word,” the researchers said.

The method takes some work, and would require the targeted phone to download a specific application to allow the attackers to turn on the keylogger. But, as seen in millions of Internet scams everyday, it isn’t difficult to convince someone on the Internet to click a link. And once the keylogger is activated, the technology hidden inside the new generation of smartphones makes the attack that much easier.

“We first tried our experiments with an iPhone 3GS, and the results were difficult to read,” Patrick Traynor, an assistant professor and member of the research team said. “But then we tried an iPhone 4, which has an added gyroscope to clean up the accelerometer noise, and the results were much better. We believe that most smartphones made in the past two years are sophisticated enough to launch this attack.”

The research team also includes Georgia Tech graduate student Arunabh Verma, Georgia Tech Ph.D. student Henry Carter and Philip Marquardt of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The researchers presented their paper, “(sp)iPhone: Decoding Vibrations From Nearby Keyboards Using Mobile Phone Accelerometers” at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security yesterday (Oct. 20) in Chicago.

So how worried should you be that the phone sitting near your desktop is conspiring against you? The chances of becoming a victim of this type of advanced attack are slim, at least right now.

“This was really hard to do,” Traynor said. “But could people do it if they really wanted to? We think yes.”

 

Who is correct?  What kind of information is really traveling between Chrome and Google?  What data about you is being sent to the web?  Is it true that Google’s browser sends details about everything you do?  Is it an unsafe browser?  What happens behind Incognito mode?

The first thing we want to know is “What information does Chrome send about visited sites to Google”? Many different opinions can be found on the web, and some are really alarming.  One person says that toolbarqueries.google.com collects everything the browser sends to it.  This is indeed true, and you can see in metrics_service.cc [chromium.org], what information about visited websites is being sent.  Although this only happens if you selected it in Chromes ‘Under the Hood’ (Options -> “Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google”) this option is not selected by default, you have to specifically select it during the Chrome installation.  Using SpyStudio you can be 100% certain about this by checking and un-checking the option, and watching all the ‘send’ function calls.  So, does Google Chrome send information about every website you visit to toolbarqueries.google.com?  The answer is no, it does it only if you request it to.  This doesn’t mean that other information, like the one send to google-analytics, is not being sent anymore.

However it is interesting to notice that this behavior is exactly the same under Incognito mode.  This means that if the option of sending usage statistics is checked, it doesn’t matter what mode Chrome is running, the statistics are sent anyway.  We know that the only differences between normal and Incognito modes are the logging of websites visited, files downloaded, download histories and cookies.  So this feature is local to the machine, and nobody has said that statistics are not sent under this mode.  Although I think for many of us, we implicitly assume to be anonymous while running Chrome under Incognito mode.  So we better keep the limitations of this feature in mind!  Again, this only applies when sending statistics option is selected.

The other feature we want to inspect is the suggestion made by the address bar: “When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for.”  This is highly controversial, we want to know about this feature when using Incognito mode (in which the suggest feature seems to be automatically disabled). Again we can use SpyStudio to make sure.  You can see that Chrome does not send any information to Google about your key strokes when using Incognito mode.  You can also watch calls to GetAddrInfoW function, which provides protocol-independent translation from a Unicode host name to an address.

When you are not running on Incognito, you can turn this off by right clicking on the address bar and selecting “Edit search engines…” Then uncheck the check box at the bottom labeled “Use a suggestion service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar”.

We can now safely stop all the paranoia about Chrome.  We can see the information that Google Chrome sends to Google using SpyStudio and we know that this depends on the options you choose.  So Chrome is not spyware that sends everything you do to Google.   I also believe it is important to understand what features the Incognito mode provides and not assume things about it.

Watch Google Chrome

See for yourself the information that Google Chrome sends to Google.  Use Nektra’s SpyStudio to monitor Chrome’s behavior.  It is very easy:

1. Download SpyStudio from Nektra’s website free of charge and install it. www.nektra.com/products/spystudio-api-monitor/download
2. Replace the database ‘deviare.fdb‘ with a new version.  You will find ‘deviare.fdb’ in the path you installed SpyStudio: \SpyStudio\bin
3. Download the script chromewatcher and then add the path where you saved it to SpyStudio.  Edit -> Preferences -> Python
4. Run SpyStudio and import the module chromeWatcher by typing “import chromeWatcher” in the Python console.  Then start monitoring by calling the Begin() function by typing “chromeWatcher.Begin()”.
5. Now watch SpyStudio while using Google Chrome to find out what information is sent by Chrome.

 What does the ChromeWatcher script do?

The ChromeWatcher module was specially made to capture calls to the Winsock functions ‘send‘ and ‘WSASend‘. To know where the information is going, a socket connections track must be kept.  So it is necessary to hook ‘connect’ and ‘select’ functions too.  The idea behind ChromeWatcher is to hook ‘send’ and ‘WSASend’ calls that are made to Google and show them to you.

To understand better this script you can see SpyStudio documentation on: \SpyStudio\doc

 

1. Ruggedized Laptops

If your budget allows, purchase or lease a ruggedized laptop if you will be outside in cold temperatures for extended periods of time. Ruggedized laptops have been designed to work under extreme weather conditions. When you rely on your laptop and can’t count on the weather to co-operate – a ruggedized laptop is worth considering. Most ruggedized laptops have been tested according to MIL-STD-810F standards.

2. Careful Storage

Never leave a laptop, even in a well-padded and insulated laptop case in the trunk of vehicle in cold weather. The laptop could freeze and you lose all data contained in it.

3. Let It Warm Up

Once you bring a laptop in from the cold – allow it to warm up to room temperature before booting. The same is true when you go outdoors – allow the laptop to acclimatize to the outside temperature before booting up.

4. Incorrect Warming Methods

Do not use devices such as mug warmers or pocket warmers to heat or keep a laptop warm. They are not designed for this purpose and can create problems as they will not heat or keep a laptop warm in the right way. They could heat the wrong parts of a laptop or cause it to generate too much heat and melt internal components.

5. Laptop Warmers

There are laptop warmers designed specifically for the purpose of keeping a laptop warm and these are what you should use. Laptop warmers have been tested to ensure they will safely protect your laptop and are a wise investment.

6. Excessive Heat Build-Up

Do not use your laptop while it is still inside a laptop bag. There is no room for air to circulate and you will get heat build-up. You can create your own “box” for your laptop which will allow air to circulate and provide an enclosed area for you to use your laptop. Having the laptop on a raised platform for your laptop within the box will aid in airflow. This laptop box will help keep the laptop warmer as cold air is blocked and the heat generated from the laptop is kept in the box.

7. Protecting Your Display

Don’t use heating pads or other external sources of heat to warm up or thaw a laptop display. Allow the display to warm on its own and do not boot up a laptop if you suspect the display is frozen.

8. Stay Out of the Cold

Whenever possible stay out of direct exposure to cold weather conditions by staying in a vehicle, inside a building or other type of shelter. Protecting your laptop from excessive dampness or wet from snow will keep your keyboard from freezing and other problems from developing.

 

ARPANET was based upon the design concepts of Larry Roberts (MIT) and was fleshed out at the first ACM symposium, held in Gaithersburg, TN in 1966, although RFPs weren’t sent out until mid 1968.

The Department of Defense in 1969 commissioned ARPANET, and the first node was created at the University of California in Los Angeles, running on a Honeywell DDP-516 mini-computer. The second node was established at Standford University and launched on October first of the same year.

The third node was located at the University of California, Santa Barbara (November 1, 1969) and the fourth was opened at the University of Utah in December.

In 1970, The owner of BAIC Multimedia & IT Solutions was born

By 1971 15 nodes were linked including BBN, CMU, CWRU, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, MIT, NASA/Ames, RAND, SDC, SRI and UIU(C). In that same year, Larry Roberts creates the first email management program. As a side note, Ray Tomlinson is the person who established the “@” sign as a domain/host designator from his Model 33 Teletype.

The first international connection to ARPANET is established when the University College of London is connected in 1973, and RFC-454 “File Transfer Protocol” was published.

Also in 1971, the CFO of BAIC Multimedia & IT Solutions was born

1973 Was also the year that Dr. Robert Metcalf’s doctoral thesis outlined the specifications for Ethernet. The theory was tested on Xerox PARCs computers.

1974 saw the launch of TELNET public packet data service.

UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol) was developed at AT&T Bell Labs in 1976, and distributed with UNIX the following year.  

1978 saw the split of TCP into TCP and IP.

In 1979 the first MUD (Multi-User Domain) was created by Dr. Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw from the University of Essex, and was the foundation for multi-player games (among other things). This event marked the gradual decline of productivity ver the Internet.

In 1981 a cooperative network between CUNY (City University of New York) and Yale was established. This network was called BITNET (Because It’s There NETwork) and was designed to provide electronic mail transfer and listserve services between the two institutions. RFC-801 “NCP/TCP Transition Plan” was published that same year. It was because of the growing interconnectivity of new networks that the phrase “Internet” was coined in 1982, and the Department of Defense also declared TCP/IP to be its defacto standard.

The first name server was developed in 1983 at the University of Wisconsin, allowing users to access systems without having to know the exact path to the server. 1983 also saw the transition from NCP to TCP/IP, and it was at this same time that ARPANET was split into ARPANET and MILNET. 68 of the current 113 existing nodes were assigned to MILNET.

It was also in 1983 that a young San Francisco programmer, Tom Jennings wrote the first FidoNet Bulletin Board System, which was capable of allowing both email and message passing over the Internet between networked BBSs by 1988.

In 1984, the number of hosts on the Internet broke 1000, and DNS (Domain Name Services was introduced. Moderated Newsgroups also made their first appearance this year, although it would be almost a year and a half before NNTP (Network New Transfer Protocol) would be introduced.

In 1985, the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) was launched out of Sausalito California, allowing San Francisco Bay Area users free access to the Internet.

The Internet had grown so fast, and to such large proportions by this time that some control was needed to oversee its expansion, so in 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) came into existence under the IAB.

1988 Saw the advent of IRC (Internet Relay Chat), developed by Jarkko Oikarinen, and it can be safely assumed that the first “Hot Chat” (cyber-sex) took place very shortly afterwards.

By 1989 the number of Internet hosts had capped 100,000, and the first commercial Internet mail service was created by MCI.

In 1990, ARPANET was finally closed down and ceased to exist. Two other notable events this year include the release of ARCHIE by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill, and the first remotely controlled machine to be linked to the Internet; a toaster (controlled by SNMP).

1991 was the year what WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers), was released by Brewster Kahle, of Thinking Machines Corporation; Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill released Gopher from the University of Minnesota, and most notably, World-Wide Web was released by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN.

By 1992 the number of hosts on the Internet had exceeded 1,000,000 and the first MBONE audio multicast was made.

In 1993 InternNIC was created by the National Science Foundation (NSF). InterNIC provided a centralized organization for domain name registration, and continues to regulate that function today.

As the great, unwashed hordes began to flood into the Internet, it was only natural that vendors would soon follow. So in 1995, the first Internet based “shopping mall” was opened on the World Wide Web. It was also in this year that the World Wide Web edged out FTP as the most popular service on the Internet.

Also in 1993, The senior help desk engineer of BAIC Multimedia & IT Solutions was born

In 1995, Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy opened up Internet access portals, and hundreds of thousands of commercial users flooded into what had previously been the private domain of veteran computer users. The average IQ dropped dramatically at this point.

Since 1995, some of the new and/or emerging technologies have included Server Push, Multicasting, Streaming Media, E-Commerce, ASP and XML.

Although the Internet started out of military necessity, it is doubtful that its creators could envision its impact, not only on the American culture or the world in general, but on the future of the human race. The Internet will continue to grow and evolve in the years to come, becoming an indispensable channel of communication and a catalyst for human evolution.