Starting New

Yeah, it's been a few years.  I decided to separate my personal stuff (gmail, google plus, Facebook, etc.) from my technical posts so I don't bore the heck out of my non-technical friends, and don't bore people interested in technical stuff with my personal and family posts.

Stand by as I will probably reformat it.  For now, I've left the old posts there, but I might choose to update them and remove the stale ones.

Smartphone Security (General)

Yeah, it's been a long time since I've posted anything. I have some time now and I thought I'd talk about my favorite things when it comes to computer security. The more I learn, the most frightening this subject becomes.

We'll cover some basics in this post, then talk about specific tools that can be used to help secure one's security and privacy. Let's first talk about smartphone security. The phone itself can be pretty secure if you lock it with a password (assuming you use a good password). Using a pattern lock instead of a password is a good idea if you don't like having to remember a strong password. Locking with facial recognition or a short PIN code is better than nothing, but if someone gets hold of your phone and is determined to try hard enough, they'll probably get in.

Once in, the E-mail you've downloaded onto your phone can be a rich source of information. It's likely that you've casually mentioned something in your mail somewhere that might be of use to a hacker or identity thief. It's best to not keep much old mail on the phone and to erase sensitive E-mails right after you read them. Some mail apps support E-mail encryption/decryption. You should use encryption for at least sensitive E-mails if you can get the people you exchange those E-mails with to use it also.

I worry about how insecure banking and brokerage firm apps are, and avoid using them. Consider using the “incognito” (memoryless) feature on your phone's browser, or switch to a browser that supports that feature. Having your browser remember your history and passwords might be convenient for you, but it's also very useful for anyone who gets a hold of your phone.

There are several privacy apps and features available for smartphones. We'll cover them separately. With Android phones, you can encrypt your micro-SD card. Later versions of Android support “Android Device Management” over the web, allowing you to locate and ring your phone if it's lost. More importantly, it allows you to immediately lock your phone remotely with a new passcode. You can even wipe it remotely, if you feel you need to. Several apps were available to do this, but it's now available for free, built into the operating system itself.

Be aware that if someone finds your phone, all they need to do is to turn the phone off and leave it off until they can get away from or shielded from cell phone service. There, they can turn the phone back on and put it in airplane more, locking you out from remote access. Even if the phone isn't really completely off, they can wrap the phone in aluminum foil or put it in a small metal box to completely block GPS and cell signals.

If you need to store sensitive information on your phone, use a password manager or file encryption tools. Don't leave anything sensitive on your phone in plain text, and trust apps with sensitive information only if they are generally accepted as being very secure. There are only a few apps I trust that much. I'll mention them later.

Android Phones

Last post for the night... I've always used the simplest free cell phone I could get. No fancy features, no data plans. But a few months ago, my wife started to bug me about getting a smart phone. Strange, because she's not a techy person, but she is always on E-mail or the web at home. Buying her a smart phone means I have to buy the same model for myself, because I'll have to teach her how to use the darn thing, and I'll be the one to have to fix things when they go wrong.

So, if I'm going to have a smart phone, it might as well get a good one. Since I'm a Sprint customer (I get a good company discount there) and their data plans are cheaper than most the other guys, I bought the two of us HTC EVOs.

Yeah, if you play too much with it, the battery life sucks. But after the novelty wore off a little, I haven't had any problem making it through the day. OK... I have a charger at work and in the car, and if I remember, I plug in.

Very clever apps! I'll list my favorites another time. Yeah, the iPhone was first and inspired the whole idea and many of the apps, but there's more than enough Android apps out there to avoid iPhone envy.

Using Calibre with a Kindle

Right... we'd spell it caliber in the US (is in size of ammo). This is an free open source multi-platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac) program that translates various formats into various E-book formats. Useful enough, I suppose, but what's really cool about it is that you can schedule it to go out and get any one of many magazines and newspapers, or your favorite blogs at a specific time, format it for your Kindle, and E-mail it to your Kindle account so when you wake up in the morning, it's already there. It works great and it has ready made canned recipes for lots of lots of different sources.

All I have to do is to leave it running when I'm gone and my subscribed Wall Street Journal (the recipe has a place to put your username and password), Orlando Sentinel, magazines, and my favorite blogs will show up in the morning at the hotel, free while I'm away, as long as they have WiFi. That also gives me plenty to read on the airplane also.

I find that I don't read many books, because I rarely have time to finish time them in a timely fashion. But I ravenously read newspapers, magazines, and blogs all the time, so this is great! So while I'm off trying to read more books, this is a great way to stay informed on the road.

Kindle

I received a Kindle for Christmas (3G, WiFi only). I've read several E-books both on my laptop and Palm TX, but I was never happy with having to be rushed because the battery is going to be dead in a couple of hours. And, of course, I didn't have much battery left to do other things besides read. Plus, it's hard to read for a long period of time with the back lit screen shining in your face through fuzzy fonts.

The first time I saw a Kindle in the store, I thought it was a dummy model. The display looked like it was a paper overlay with the text and images on the surface, instead if behind it. I liked the idea of having a long enough battery life to not have to worry about it, but they were expensive and only had a couple GB of memory (though that probably would have been more than enough).

The latest version is smaller, lighter, with twice the memory, better contrast, longer battery life, and cheaper. Plus it's as easy to hold as a paperback for long periods of time. OK... so I put it on my Christmas list.

So far, I like it. For reading, black and white is just fine, thank you. And images render nicely in black and white, so I'm more than happy to have the e-paper display than a back lit LCD. It's nice to just leave it on, have it go to screen save, and pick it up days later, reading for hours on end without hardly making a dent in the battery charge.

The operating system, such as it is, is pretty primitive, and though it can browse the web in a pinch and does a decent enough job for casual use, you wouldn't want to surf the web much with it. But for just reading books, it's perfect. If I want to do something else, I'll drag out the laptop.

Teamviewer

Forget Hamachi (earlier blog), Teamviewer is much more refined as a remote access tool. Plus, it's portable and cross platform. I can access my Ubuntu desktop or my wife's Window machine from another Linux or Windows PC anywhere without having to reconfigure my firewall. Hell, I can even do a pretty decent job controlling either machine from my Android phone using their app. Plus, it's portable and even the full version can be put on your keychain. And to help others, you can simply send them a simple small executable via E-mail and all they have to do it is run it without having to install anything.

For the one time support user, it generates a random number each time a username, and a random number for the password. They'll have to tell you those numbers over the phone to let you access their machine. Plus, they see what you're doing (and will hopefully learn). When they exit the program, nothing's left running and there's no access.

It's free for personal use. The company seems reputable enough and the link is encrypted, but it's not open source, so who knows if there's any back doors or vulnerabilities. Needless to say, I don't leave it running unless I know I might need access.

4 Years of Ubuntu

I played around with a few Linux distributions before finally biting the bullet and loading Ubuntu 7.04 as a dual boot on my Windows XP machine at home. For those needing a secret decoder ring, the year of the version is before the decimal point, the month, after (i.e. April 2007). Before I knew it, I found myself living in that partition and rarely booting up windows. Ubuntu was great then, and has been getting gradually better since (new version every 6 months with a long term super stable version every two years).

I compare that with the battles I have at work trying to keep my XP desktop running. I'm constantly doing maintenance on it (most of which is contrary to IT policy). The antivirus and other corporate software is constantly in the way. The computer fragments easily and the registry is constantly getting corrupted. It halts, does funny things, and crashes at the worst possible times. Yes, as an engineer who writes some of my own software, I'm hard on a machine. But I have the same problem at home on my wife's computer at home, and all she does is surf the web and do E-mail.

With Ubuntu, I run Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome and other applications that I was using before in Windows, but THIS operating system keeps going and going. For every hundred strange or annoying things Windows does, Ubuntu does maybe one. I rarely reboot it, and in fact, I rarely even think about it. Isn't that the way a computer SHOULD be?