[this post is from our Small Business website. You can check out more articles like it there.]

Ah, those pesky passwords. If you work in the corporate world or in an office, you have one for your PC/Network and, unless there is a password synchronization application that combines them, you probably have more than one for other applications. Add those to the ones that you have for your home Internet, your banking and other websites that require passwords, and before you know it you have a nightmare on your hands in trying to manage them.

Part of the frustration has to do with the different requirements for password formatting. Some systems only require four characters, some require eight. Some need a combination of alpha and numeric characters and others do the same with the addition of a few capital letters thrown in for extra security. It can be positively maddening.

The worst thing you can do with your passwords is to place them in a text document which can be accessed on the hard drive of your computer. Your files are vulnerable – even if you think they are not. If someone is intent on finding them, they can. Even if you place them into a password protected document, those can be cracked, too.

Writing them down has its own vulnerabilities, too, and there are varying opinions on this practice. If you do write them down on a piece of paper, put the document in a locked location whether it is in your home or at work.

Here are 6 tips on how to handle your passwords:

1. Make them complex. People who use easy to remember or short passwords are inviting disaster. Use a little imagination and pick a password that is very difficult to attach to your life. Stay away from birth dates, phone numbers, house numbers, or any other number that is associated with your life.

2. Keep passwords unique. When you change your passwords, make them unique from each other. Do not use the same password on all of your sites. If you do, then you are open to having every site that you have a password to being vulnerable to hackers to log on and steal your identity, money or destroy your reputation.

3. Be obscure. Use a combination of letters, numbers, capital letters and special characters if possible. The more you do this, the more secure your passwords will become. Create an alphanumeric version of a term you can remember. Using this technique the word “Spaceship” becomes “Sp@ce5h!p”.

4. Change regularly. This is the singular tip that can save you if you do not heed any of the other tips. How often should you change your password? How secure do you want to be? The frequency with which you change your password will determine how secure you are from becoming a victim. The more often you change it, the better you are. The longer you leave it the same, the more vulnerable you become. Three months is a good cycle for a password, but certainly if you fear for the security of your identity, then a monthly change is not out of the question.

5. Password-protect your PC. Be sure to give your PC a password on power-up. This will help protect your files unrestricted access to your PC.

6. Password-protect your wireless home network. If you have a wireless home network, be sure to password protect it as well. Use the same principles above in order to secure your wireless network. This will prevent others from accessing your connection and using it maliciously to hack the personal or business PCs and laptops you and your family use at home.

Finally, there are password programs that can help with this important task, but the best advice is to start with the tips above right away. Password software can be useful as an organizational tool, but it is no match for using sound methods to manage and make your passwords difficult to crack.

[this is a post from our Small Business website.]

The days of keeping confidential business information locked in a metal filing cabinet are gone. Most businesses have most everything, from personnel files to client information and financial information, stored on their personal computers or computer network. What happens when your company runs out of storage space? Or, worse yet, what if your computer information is attacked by a virus, stolen, or damaged by a flood? Would you be able to quickly recover all of your important information and keep your company running smoothly?

Many companies find that keeping their own network running and up-to-date is expensive. In this economy, most companies are looking for ways to cut expenses in order to survive. There are many online data storage companies currently available, so if your business is looking for an online storage company, here are some questions that you need to ask:

What Features Does This Service Offer?

Look at what features the company offers in its basic package. Most online services offer online file storage, backup services, remote access that allows you to access your data from anywhere in the world, the ability to file share with other employees in your office, and the ability to upload and download files.

How Secure is This Service?

Does the service offer any type of security? Businesses will want a service that offers file encryption, authentication, and password protection in order to keep your information secure. You may also want to know if they offer any type of tracking in the event of a security breach, as well as the ability to lock out former employees after they have left or been terminated. Also, businesses should inquire as to what type of backup plan the service offers in case of any unforeseen disasters such as a virus attack or fire.

Is the Service User-Friendly?

The service should be easy to learn and use, easy to access for the average employee, and not require a computer science degree. If the service is too difficult or complicated to use, look for another service.

How Much Does This Service Cost?

Is the service reasonably priced and does it fit into your company’s budget? Find out how much storage you get for the price.

Does the Service Offer Technical Support?

Even with the easiest to use service, you may one day have a question or a problem that you may not be able to resolve on your own. Does the service offer a customer service hotline, or chat support? Is it available 24/7, if needed?

Additionally, it is important to look for a well-established online storage service that has a stellar reputation. Online storage has many benefits for your company. A good service can be cost effective, offer better security, up-to-date software, and unlimited storage space.

In a recent podcast episode of Security Now, Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson covered many of the most popular cloud storage and syncing solutions, like Dropbox, Box.net, Carbonite, Crashplan, and others. They described each service, their costs, and compared the value and how people can use each of them, or in some cases, why people shouldn’t use them.

Here is the video of the podcast.

An issue exists with Adobe Reader X version 10.1.2 where the program may crash when attempting to print to a network printer. The error is shown on the left. There is a forum page on Adobe’s website that talks about how to troubleshoot it at length and various methods to try.

That said, we have simply upgraded systems to the latest version of Adobe Reader (will vary depending on your operating system. It worked successfully for us on a few Windows 7 workstations with version 10.1.3). You can get 10.1.3 here.

There is a patch that Adobe claims will resolve the issue. It can be found here.

As a temporary workaround, Protected Mode can be disabled, which some users claim resolved the issue for them.

You can turn off protected mode using following steps:

 1. Launch Reader X and select Edit->Preferences

2. Select General from left navigation

3. Under application startup uncheck “Enable Protected Mode at Startup”

Alternatively, you can remove Adobe Reader and install a free alternative such as FoxIt PDF Reader, which we find is more lightweight and has many of the most common features.

[this post is from Trever Hollihan, a Nerd in Lethbridge, Alberta]

We just uploaded new photos to the Facebook fan page about our FREE Public WiFi Project with Alberta SouthWest. You can see the map below, which shows the region and how many towns are involved (Current and not installed). You an also see the Splash Page that Chris Rose (a Nerd in St. Johns, Newfoundland) created.

Everyone is very excited about this project! Here is a video interview with the Town of nanton talking about this project featured on Alberta Primetime.

I’ve already quoted the Arena, Pool and Curling Rink for the Town of Nanton.

These radios have been very, very popular, and used very often!

You can see the Meraki WiFi unit on the side of the building (Town of Stavely)

I’ve had multiple towns starting to contact me about putting this in by themselves without having Alberta SouthWest involved, and I’m hoping they want to move forward soon. Some have already stated when the funding is there, it’s off to the races!

We will be moving forward with signage and spreading the word as soon as the last few towns are ready to go to the next step in the plan that we have devised with Alberta SouthWest.

I’m just itching to share more good news with you and it’s HUGE GOOD NEWS but, alas, it must wait. Rest assured,  we’ll share it the moment we can!

Battery life has always been a concern with laptops, and it’s important to utilize the limited hours between charges as efficiently as possible. Choosing which programs you use on your laptop can influence how long the battery will last.

The more resources a program uses, the harder the laptop needs to work, which determines how much power is in demand from the battery. Here are some applications that use up less resources.

OpenOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. It’s been around for a while, and uses significantly less resources. Some may argue it’s not as fully featured.

Keep in mind that most people use less than 10% of Microsoft Office’s capabilities, so you shouldn’t notice much (if anything) lacking.

The only thing OpenOffice doesn’t include is an e-mail application, but there are plenty of options out there.

Foxit PDF Reader is a great replacement for Adobe’s Acrobat PDF Reader – at least the free one. It’s much smaller in size, and creates less of a resource footprint. If you’re only looking to view PDF files, it has everything you’re looking for, and is arguably easier to use.

Internet Explorer 9 claims to take up less resources than other browsers. It’s certainly more secure than it’s predecessors, so it’s worth mentioning. Google Chrome is great as well.

We’ve heard praise from tech enthusiasts and average users alike who love how lightweight and quick Chrome is. Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been known to use up a lot of resources, so it may not be ideal if you do a lot of web surfing on your laptop.

It’s important to protect your computer from outside threats, and having an effective antivirus is a definite must. Most laptops come with either Norton or McAfee, which are known resource hogs. Using them on a laptop makes little sense. Although we are vendor agnostic, we are very fond of ESET’s NOD32 antivirus, which has been proven to take up limited resources, while being very effective.

Which programs do you use on your laptop to extend the battery life? Is battery life something you consider when choosing a program for your needs? Please share your thoughts in the comments, or on our Facebook fan page, or send us a tweet (@nerdsonsite).

Here is an excerpt from a terrific post from InformationWeek regarding data safety and the various ways to ensure nothing happens to yours. Please don’t wait until ‘someday’ to have a backup strategy, whether you’re a home user or a business user. Once data is lost – it’s gone.

“The National Weather Service has begun testing the way it labels natural disasters. It’s hoping that the new warnings, which include words like “catastrophic,” “complete devastation likely,” and “unsurvivable,” will make people more likely to take action to save their lives. But what about their digital lives? The increasing frequency and magnitude of natural disasters made me wonder about saving individuals’ and businesses’ data from disasters. Data can’t be reminded to save itself, but we can take steps before a disaster to preserve it, and we can recover it afterward.

Here’s what Mike Cobb, the director of engineering at DriveSavers, recommends doing in case of an impending natural disaster:

– Keep all electronics out of basements and off the floor in general. Basements are naturally cool places, but are the first to flood.
– If possible, unplug your hardware–laptops, printers, and other electronic devices–from all power sources.
–Invest in a surge protector. Surge protectors and battery backups should be checked or replaced every few years to ensure the highest level of effectiveness.
–To help protect against water damage enclose any valuable devices in plastic or place in a water-tight plastic bin.

Sometimes hardware damage is inevitable, so perform backups often. This will prevent data loss even if the device itself is destroyed. Although there are reasons to be wary of online data storage, the cloud might make sense for people in disaster-prone locales who can’t afford off-site storage. You’ll be storing your files on remote servers that will be safe from whatever disaster takes down your computer.”

In addition to Carbonite, you may want to consider Nerds Backup for your off-site backup needs. That said, as we’ve stated in previous posts on the Nerds Blog, how you backup is up to you, but we strongly recommend a 3-prong strategy. The first being the original copy on your hard drive, the second an external drive or Network-Attached Storage device, the third being off-site backup. More posts on Nerds Backup can be found here, or go directly to the Nerds Backup website.

image source: iTunes app store web page.

As a small business owner, it’s easy to gain an impressive collection of business cards through networking events, business trips, and various other encounters. The trick is to find a way to organize them so you can find them at a moment’s notice for a business opportunity or referral.

By simply taking a photo of each business card, LinkedIn’s Cardmunch iOS app uses OCR (optical character recognition) and transcribes the data into an alphabetical list sorted by name on your iPhone, and to your LinkedIn account. So, if you ever need to reset your iPhone, you won’t lose all of that data.

You can tilt the phone and easy swipe through the business cards. Using the alphabetical list seems more practical, but to each their own.

Another great feature is that it will pull the contact’s photo from LinkedIn, so when you’re looking for them, you can put a face to the name.

An in-depth post on the LinkedIn blog explains the easy 3 step process.

“We’ve reduced the entire application to 3 super intuitive and easy to usescreens: (1) Card capture (2) Contact list (3) Contact details and LinkedIn profiles.”

The post goes on to emphasize the app’s necessity in today’s mobile-focused world.

“As LinkedIn Mobile has grown 400% year-over-year in page views,” the post explains. “We are continuously looking for ways to bring value to professionals and we’ve done this with the new CardMunch app.”

Here is a short video about the app.

Forbes magazine recently put together an article detailing Jeff Bezos’s (Amazon CEO) leadership lessons. Here are the first five. The rest can be found here.

1. “Base your strategy on things that won’t change.”
Selling lipstick, tractor seats, e-book readers and data storage is all part of one big plan with three big constants: offer wider selection, lower prices and fast, reliable delivery.

2.“Obsess over customers.”
Early on Bezos brought an empty chair into meetings so lieutenants would be forced to think about the crucial participant who wasn’t in the room: the customer. Now that ­surrogate’s role is played by specially trained employees, dubbed “Customer Experience Bar Raisers.” When they frown, vice ­presidents tremble.

3. “We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”
Many of Amazon’s expansions look like money-losing distractions at first. That sometimes sends the company’s stock price skidding and evokes analysts’ scorn. Bezos shrugs. If the new initiatives make strategic sense to him, a five-to-seven-year financial payoff is okay.

4. “There are two kinds of companies: those that try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”
Lots of retailers talk about holding down costs and passing the savings to the consumer. Few do so as intently as Amazon, where “frugality” is one of eight official company values. The ­reward for putting up with cheap office ­furniture: a $90 billion stock market valuation and 35% revenue growth.

5. “Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.”
Specs for Amazon’s big new projects such as its Kindle tablets and e-book readers have been defined by customers’ desires rather than engineers’ tastes. If customers don’t want something it’s gone, even if that means breaking apart a once powerful department.

The rest of Jeff Bezos’s leadership tips can be found here.

We often see messages about updates that are available for our computer. Many simply click the ‘x’ to tell them to go away, with every intention of doing it later. Malware such as ‘Flashback’ is the reason you should do it NOW!

‘Flashback’ has infected well over 500,000 Macs around the world through an exploit in Java software. The scary thing is that it can quietly make itself at home on your system without user interaction.

That being said, applying the patch and updating Java protects against this trojan. If you’re computer isn’t already pestering you to do so, get the latest version from Apple Software Update on your Mac.

Malicious web pages are taking advantage of the exploit, relying on the fact that most Mac users are convinced that Macs are ‘invincible’ to infections, which is certainly NOT true.

“Websites [exploit] a Java flaw that let Flashback.K download itself onto Macs without warning, the PCMag article goes on to say. “It then asked users to supply an administrative password, but even without that password, the malware was already installed.”

So What Exactly Does It Do?

Flashback is a trojan designed to steal personal information and login and password details, and send them to remote servers.

Flashback relies on most users’ ignorance – they will either tell the update message to go away, unless told it is required to play an online game or perform another task. In that case, many users click ‘next, next, next’ without really paying attention to what they are installing, or the source of the file, and thus become infected.

Any piece of software that uses Java, including the web browser, or Skype, is vulnerable if using older versions of the Java software.

“Instead of simply using Java’s current public release,” says an article on CNET. “[Apple] creates and maintains its own versions. As it turns out, the malware writers exploited one particular vulnerability that Oracle patched in February. Apple didn’t get around to fixing its own Java version until last week.”

How Do I Make Sure I Don’t Have It, or Get Rid of It?

The built-in Mac malware scanner, XProtect, can now detect and remove it, as can NOD32. That said, if you’re using an older version of Mac OS X (10.5 or earlier), Apple isn’t supplying updates for that software anymore, so you’ll still be vulnerable.

CNET’s article goes on to explain how to to manually detect if your Mac is infected, but we strongly recommend having someone from Nerds On Site check and potentially remove it for you.

Malicious Software Isn’t Going Away

It’s worth noting that even if you system is patched, regardless of operating system, the ‘bad guys’ are finding ways to get around it. The only true way to not get infected is to pay attention to what you’re installing and making sure it’s from reputable companies and websites. Never trust on blind faith. Always be aware, because malicious software isn’t going away anytime soon.