Interview: Noel from Fort Technologies www.forttechnologies.com

Review: Netbook Reviews & why they are so good for a business user. Asus Eee PC 1005PE-PU17-BK.

Tip of the Week: Sign up for basic free drop box account www.dropbox.com

Comments & Question: podcast@iping.org

iPing_Tech_Podcast_EP001_2010.07.18.Sun.mp3

Segment: News

• Apple’s issue of the rubber covers (bumper) for people who are buying the iPhone 4
• Who’s selling the iPhone 4 in Ireland?
• Internal Dell study that found a 97 percent failure rate in hardware over a three year period.

Segment: Review

• Nokia E72 Review
• What do you want us to review? How to get us to review something for you.

Segment: Lab/Trial/Discussion

• SaaS (Software as a service) What is it, do i need it and what will it do for my business

Segment: Tip of the Week

• Send us in your Tip of the Week! E-mail us your comments and queries podcast@iping.org. Send in your comment/query via audio and we’ll play it on the show!

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It all started so well.

They had the audience: Facebook had that demographic that just seemed to span everyone from those old enough to push keys on a keyboard to the insomniac old age pensioners looking to liven up their bleak later years in life.

They had the features: What started to most people as a way to either vent publicly or just share media online evolved into a complete social experience, one that we often felt (and still do) obliged to keep up to date constantly, lest we miss out on the next big thing. You could tag pictures, see pictures of yourself taken by others, comment on status, vent about your work, share your likes and dislikes with others – and more.

They added value: What started out as just indicating hobbies, grew into fan-clubs and groups you could participate into. They added the logic to the server backend that detected trends such as large numbers of people registering the same interests and then auto-creating groups with those names into which you could participate and contribute

Sidenote: You can try this for yourself – with the help of a few friends create a completely impossible hobby/interest and just watch as Facebook auto-creates a new ‘Group’ for that hobby/interest, although advertising an interest in “making hamburgers from dead people” might not be the smartest thing you ever did.

They had the niche: Often overlooked is one of the real reasons behind Facebook’s success – the curiosity of the average person. By nature – we’re just curious (or nosey as some prefer) – we love to know and see things we shouldn’t. Sure – Facebook had all these awsome features and a fast growing user-base but under all those numbers what was really at play were that more and more people were tapping into that quiet thrill of discovering things that kept us at the top of the gossip ladder.

And then they went too far…

It started with expanding the level of information exposed to your ‘Friends’ that was published in neat little News Feeds presented to each user on login.

You no longer had to check each of your ‘Friends’ mini-profiles to see what they were up to – it was presented to you on a plate on login. You could downrank (or even ignore) ‘News’ from individual ‘Friends’ if it wasn’t interesting enough – and lets face it – everyone has/had at least one ‘Friend’ who seemed to exist solely on Facebook 24/7.

We know what you want…

Facebook then took things one step further and with several updates iterated over the course of 3-4 months the control over what information from your own profile that was being published became less and less accessible. Sure – you could still reconfigure your privacy settings – if you could understand the differences between the different levels.

New accounts created had the more public ‘default’ privacy settings, new features added came with their own ‘default’ privacy settings too so that it became such an ordeal to keep a private profile that most just ignored the issue.

Facebook were laughing all the way to the bank all the while; their numbers were ever increasing, the service was becoming more popular and the amount of information being shared boggles the mind – the large portion of which Facebook was entitled to share with ‘limited 3rd parties’ (aka Advertising & Marketing companies)

Private. Really?

It was only a matter of time before someone started leveraging all of that lovely public information to show the true potential of having such a wealth of private information publicly available.

The API used to query the Facebook repository provided more and more features and the smart few took advantage of that information.

Are you a parent worried about your teenage daughter’s antics when she goes out at night? – Why not check if she’s ever posted if she lost her virginity – or better still – why not check if someone else claims to have been the other participant?

Want to know if your child has claimed that they cheated on a test?

All courtesy of Facebook. Read more about it here: http://youropenbook.org/about.html (The original GitHub repo is no longer available but is referenced here: http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/TWiT_248/Transcript)

O’ Mother Where Art Thou?

One of the interesting trends of late is the recent drop in Facebook users due to their parents signing up. What’s the fun in updating your status to say “lost my virginity last night!” if you arrive home to find your parents waiting for you with a lecture on the risks of unprotected sex.

Word of Advice

My advice to those who do use Facebook is simply to be aware that it’s information you are posting on the internet, whether you think it private or not – someone is logging that information. Think of Facebook like your diary that you leave in the library – What you put in there is entirely up to you but anyone can read it if they find it

So where now?

After Facebook’s recent debacle with privacy settings the more tech savvy of folks are starting to look for an alternative. Diaspora spawned, attempting to be a more privacy conscious social network (http://www.joindiaspora.com/index.html) and there’s rumors-abound about Google’s new social network called Google-Me.

Food for thought: What’s the point of social networking though if nobody shares any information…?

I use this for keeping device drivers and the like in that are meant to be on that USB key that I always leave in the back of a customer’s PC. It also works excellent for keeping important documents that you never know when you will need them. 

You can sign up for 2GB of free space here https://www.dropbox.com/downloading?os=win. It works on Windows 7, Apple and Linux so all the major operating systems are covered. 

I also have it up and running on my Nokia phone so I can copy photos from my phone into the drop box and then they appear on my dropbox that I have configured on my PC in the office. 

All in all a very handy app and it gets the iPing approval. Let me know what you think.

Obfuscate: the concealment of intended meaning in communication, making communication confusing, intentionally ambiguous, and more difficult to interpret.

Or to us normal people: Hide, and in this context: Hiding Data I really can’t stress enough how important this is. For any web-based service that allows the storage or presentation of information that could be misused – that web-service should be obfuscating it’s data.

Common Mistake

The single most common mistake is that those creating the presentation and access layer (eg. The Web Developers) for that data often don’t understand what that data represents – to the web-developer it’s just information, in a table, in rows and columns that needs to be queried, filtered and presented

When there’s a lot of information to be processed there is almost always a unique identifier that’s used to filter all that information down to only a single result – ideally the result that corresponds to that unique user/item/profile.

The mistake made is that often that unique identifier is used as the primary key for data access and manipulation – without it being obfuscated!

eg.

• Your Phone Number
• Your Mobile Number
• Your Car License Plate

Surely this information isn’t important though?

Think about the potential once it’s possible to gather enough of this data. What if someone was able to collect all the license plates for the cars in ireland? What if someone was able to collect all the mobile (cell) numbers for everyone in the country?

One word: Marketing

Or as it’s know to most of us: Spam

..and that’s just the best case…

Surely important information is protected?

It’s all down to context, or for want of a better description meta-data. If you don’t have the meta-data to process that information then there’s not much you can do with it.

And without the context for that information there’s no awareness that that data needs to be protected or obfuscated somehow.

It can’t be that easy – can it?

No?

• Lets take a very well known car manufacturer – ABC. (1 click)
• Lets have a look at their Used Cars (1 click)
• Want the chassis number of that car? No problem (1 click)
• What the chassis number of every used car in the UK from ABC? (one line command at a linux prompt)

We’ve contacted ABC cars to let them know about this and it will be interesting to see what they say…

This was a great opportunity for me to find out what it is like to have to survive without IT of any kind.

I had to hand over my laptop and my Nokia N71 smart phone. When I handed them over I was lost and it made it hard to work as almost everything that I do is based online.

All in all giving up Technology for 48 hours was an excellent opportunity but not something I will be doing again soon.

Mark

Do you think you or your company will make the big leap and get on the Windows 7 wagon?

If you are working from home for a company you will need to connect into the corporate network over a VPN connection. This is a secure connection that connects you into the office network and will let you access all of the resources on the office network.

If you are working from home only part time and you have a computer in head office, an alternative to using a VPN would be to use an application like logmein to connect to your head office computer. This would mean that you were able to work on the head office computer from home. This is something you would have to talk to your IT service department of company about as there are some security issues with this solution.

Some companies are now using Virtualization to improve the IT services that they are providing to their users. This means that you would be able to connect to a virtual computer and do your work from home with your laptop or home computer or even if you are out on the road.

If you are working from home and you have broadband in your home office, I suggest that you sign up for a VoIP telephone service.  There are many VoIP service providers and Google search will provide you with a good selection for your country. Large companies who have employees working from home provide them with VoIP phones to work from home with.

 
Another point to consider if you are using your home computer to connect to the corporate network, is that it is important to make sure that you have good Internet Security. I use Eset Nod and I would recommend this to my customers, as it provides excellent cover.

In addition, you need to have a system in place to backup your data if you are working from home. This is crucial. For people working from home, I recommend online Data Backup;if you would like some more information on this drop me an email.

E-mail has become indispensible now and if you are working from home you will need an IT service provider that will let you access your mail on your computer, online and on your mobile. If you work for yourself and are just starting up, I would suggest that you use the Software as a Service (SaaS) provided by Google Gmail for Business. This IT service will let you use Calendar, Chat, Blackberry sync etc. Your company may already use Microsoft Exchange to provide it’s e-mail service and you will need to contact your IT service provider to set your account up so as you can work from home.

For more information on working from home and the required IT services just give iPing a call.

Once they have worked out how many prints you are doing per printer, they need to find out how much you are spending on toner for each printer. This is the place where the real cost of printing sneeks into your printing budget. From my experience and from doing this research, the cheaper the printer that you buy – the more expensive the toner for this printer will cost. You may even find that some of the companies that sell you a printer will only let you use their printer toner in the printer. This is something that really grates, as they can charge what they like for this.

Another point to look at here is how much you are spending on geting your printers serviced. On completion of the print audit, having identified how much you are spending on printing and how many prints you are doing per month, in colour and black and white, the company will make a proposal to you that you will pay them an average cost of say less than 1c per black and white print and less than 6c per colour print.

• From my experience toner will generally cost you more than this alone.
  The key advantages of having a good external company provide you with a print service and the points you should be looking for are as follows:
  If a printer breaks down the company will fix it the next day or replace the printer.
• The total cost of your printing will drop by between 20% and 40%
• The company has a good print management software that lets them know when to send you toner before you know you need it and it just arrives.
• You know in advance how much your printing costs will be for the next few years so you do not get any shocks.
• The print management software provided by the company should give you the information to really streamline your printing service and help with total savings.
• By pooling printers in an office and using printers approprate for your office size you will find that the printing experience of your users improves.

There are some questions and matters to look out for when selecting a print service and they are as follows:

• What are the costs if I print above or below my monthly or yearly quota of prints. A good company will give you a rate nearly identical to what you have in your contract.
• If for some reason you need to remove some offices or printers from the contract what will the cost of this be. Again a good company will be flexible here.

If you are based in Ireland or around Dublin and you are interested in the idea of having print service, please contact someone here at iPing as we have some good companies we would like to put you in contact with.

Until next time,
Mark