General

I am coming into another season of Community Education Classes, and the first offering will be Deep Web Search Secrets.  The class description is below.  Please register for the class at the Community Education Program link below.  I cannot take walk-in students, so please pre-register.

Tired of searching Google, Bing or Yahoo, and getting thousands of results but not the information you want? Search the Internet using advanced techniques. Explore the public websites and visit parts of the vast realm of ...

Companies like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) and other organizations that are trying to enforce copyrights on songs, movies, and television shows are actively scanning the BitTorrent swarms for popular content that is being traded on these platforms.  They are logging the IP addresses of those they believe to be infringing on their copyrights in violation of the law, in order to pursue those individuals through their Internet Service Providers, ...

If there is one product that seems to call for updates on a daily basis, it is Adobe Flash.  No wonder Steve Jobs banned it form the iPad.  There is a new threat for a security vulnerability know as a Remote Code Execution.  This is when you visit a website, and get a “drive-by download” or malware installation that happens just from being there.  This update closes that security hole.  You can read more on Sophos.

So when Adobe ...

Members of the Anti-Sec hacktivist group have released 1 million Apple devices IDs that were stolen from the laptop of FBI agent Christopher Stangl, a member of the FBI’s Regional Cyber Action Team.  This is only part of a 12 million ID trove that was acquired from Agent Stangl’s laptop.  The full article is on Wired.

The file, according to the hackers, contained a list of more than 12 million Apple iOS devices, including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user ...

I read a great article on PCWorld about using SEO (search engine optimization) strategies to help keep you web site on top of Google rankings.  If you are serious about maintaining your page rank or improving it, this would be worth a read. 

Some of the ideas he shared included:

• How to disavow incoming links from spammy sites that may be negatively impacting your site’s reputation.
• Incoming links should avoid keyword stuffing, so if you are getting links from ...

I have already posted the truly frightening story about how Mat Honan had his identity stolen and the criminals used his accounts to wipe his Apple laptop, iPad, and iPhone and hack his Twitter account for spamming.

PCWorld has a terrific article on how to harden your own security environment to prevent the same thing from happening to you.  Some of the great ideas are summarized below, but I recommend that you take a minute to read ...

This is a great and very funny video featuring two puppets who explain Spam in a way anyone can understand…and enjoy!.

I read a disturbing article on Tech Republic about how the advent of polymorphous and encrypted malware programs are making traditional signature based anti-virus products ineffective.  Basically, malware writers are using sophisticated encryption techniques to keep their products from being detected, and are writing them in such a way that the encryption key is unique for every computer that it installs itself on.

Traditional anti-virus programs rely on something called signatures.  A signature is basically a uniquely identifying ...

So if you are wondering if Windows 8 is for you, or if you want to know what is different in Windows 8, take 30 minutes to watch this video from Tek Syndicate on YouTube.

I am still trying to figure out if Windows 8 is the “next big thing” or if it will suffer the fate of Windows Vista.  It is a major change in the user experience.  Not more start button and task bar.

On the plus side, ...