Kelly's Tech Nexus

It’s tempting to blame the victim. In May, a twentysomething French hacker broke into several Twitter employees’ e-mail accounts and stole a trove of meeting notes, strategy documents, and other confidential scribbles. The hacker eventually gave the stash to TechCrunch, which has since published notes from meetings in which Twitter execs discussed their very lofty goals. (The company wants to be the first Web service to reach 1 billion users.) How’d the hacker get all this stuff? Like a lot of tech startups, Twitter runs without paper—much of the company’s discussions take place in e-mail and over shared Google documents. All of these corporate secrets are kept secure with a very thin wall of protection: the employees’ passwords, which the intruder managed to guess because some people at Twitter used the same passwords for many different sites. In other words, Twitter had it coming. The trouble is, so do the rest of us.

via Fix your terrible, insecure passwords in five minutes. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine .

A power outage that recently happened at a friends’ house reminded me of yet another hazard to computing- data loss caused by power failure. My friend got a call from her teenage son stating that they had a power outage at their house, and even though the computer was on a surge protector, once the power was restored it would not boot past the BIOS screen. Continue reading »

Although Mozilla Firefox is an excellent browser out-of-the-box, there are a few things you can add that makes it better. Known as extensions, they add functionality and usefulness. They can be found by going to Mozilla’s website and clicking on Add-ons, or from the Firefox menu in Tools >> Add-ons. From there, you can install add-ons (extensions) to your heart’s content.

The extension I can’t live without is Adblock Plus. This blocks those pesky ads that a lot of websites have that may not be, shall we say, work- or family-friendly. While the site content itself may be fine, some of these ads are objectionable. And if you happen to be on a slower connection, it’ll save you a little bit of bandwidth. It’s one of those extensions that if you’ve used it for a while, and happen across a Firefox without it, you’ll notice it immediately. Continue reading »

This is a rather useful tool that is included in Windows XP. Once installed from Windows Update, a new version gets downloaded and installed pretty much every month, and it will run at the next reboot, hopefully taking out any malware as it does. There may be an entry for it in the Start Menu, but it can be run manually by going to the Run dialog (either by clicking “Run” in the Start Menu, or pressing the Windows key and the R key) and typing in “mrt” minus the quotes. The MRT window will come up and give you several options for scanning. Also, it should display the date of the version installed, which shouldn’t be more than a month old. Depending on how badly you think your computer is infected, you can select from a quick scan all the way up to a complete scan. While I wouldn’t use this for my first line of defense, it could come in handy if your antivirus goes on the blink or otherwise becomes damaged. It does a fair job of removing the bad stuff, and it’s free, so it’s not all bad. It just might save your bacon sometime.

Anyone who has used Windows for very long has probably noticed that it might need to be reinstalled from time to time. Over the years, whether repairing damaged machines, or from my own mistakes, I have installed Windows more times than I care to remember. I’ve come up with a method that cuts hours off of the after-install routine of updates, installing other software, and basic system and user account configuration. Continue reading »