Tech as a hassle … at least for today …

I’ve been a big fan of the program AI Roboform since I had my ID stolen about 2 years ago. What happened? I made several stupid mistakes.

a) I used a word for my Yahoo! email password. Not a common word, but a word.

b) I used the same password for all my store accounts.

c) I happened to have an Amazon.com receipt in my email.

So, what happened? Someone hacked into my email, and used the same password on Amazon. They also put filters into the email account so I couldn’t see the email responses from Amazon when an order was made.

Oops. What they didn’t expect is that I’d make an order at Amazon and notice the order I HADN’T made. A little digging (thankfully, I’m very tech-savvy … or I wouldn’t be writing this blog, right?) and I figured out all he had done.

Order was cancelled, cops called, etc. etc. Now, after that I created a STRONG email password and a DIFFERENT STRONG financial password.

I also discovered the program AI Roboform. Or Roboform for short.

Essentially, you create a master password for the program, and it has all the other web passwords stored in encrypted form. Now, some things are great. It notices when you login at a site for the first time and asks you if you want to store the password. It also installs a toolbar into (most) browsers that allows you to select a site to login to and it will go there and login without you typing a thing … assuming you have already logged in with the master password, of course. The master password “expires” after a set amount of time (user-configurable) so you can walk away … you can also manually logout.

Great stuff. But I have more than one Gmail account (one for my wife, which, of course, I know the password to, one personal and one for sites I don’t really trust). Usually when I go to gmail.google.com my login is the default … but for some reason it was choosing the “not trusted” login by default instead, despite the fact that I had set MY account as default.

Found out from tech support that it was due to a setting that had the program override the default selection if the URL was more closely matched by a different passcard than default.

Figured … OK, new behavior, new feature. Turned it off … at ALL 4 of my PCs … and YES, I have a license for each one, OK? Now the Gmail login worked fine … but something else did not (too complex to go into). What happened? Racked my brain.

Finally, it hit me. I had just set up the “not trusted” account TODAY. The URL for the account, in the passcard, must be slightly different than the other passcards. The option had been set correctly and was NOT in fact new. What had happened was Google had SLIGHTLY changed their URL. Not enough to make a difference when I used one of the older passcards, but enough to screw up the program.

I also noticed it really happened when I logged out of ONE account and tried to login to another. So I had probably set up the new account using this URL, which must be different than the normal login URL.

So, I changed all PCs back again, and setup new Gmail passcards using gmail.google.com (carefully) as the URL. And now it works. Of course, I had to sync the Roboform passcards between the PCs.

Tech is great. But today it was a big hassle.

Cell Phones that walk the walk?

Cell phones are lost all the time. New technology will make it difficult, if not impossible to use them if they are found. The VTT Technical Research Center of Finland has developed the “gaitcode” sensor that records a person’s gait when it’s first used.

“A device is equipped with sensors that measure certain characteristics of the user’s gait. When the device is used for the first time, these measurements are saved in its memory. It records walking style in the first few hours and constructs what we call the ‘gaitcode. It is better in the sense it is unobtrusive and implicit. People are lazy about using passwords, fingerprint sensors, anything which requires explicit action,” said researcher Heikki Ailisto of VTT, the Technical Research Center of Finland, which has developed the ‘gaitcode’ sensor.

More details at Earthtimes.org.

On the other hand, I can see this would be a real problem for bad skiers … break your leg, use crutches … oops, you can’t. OK, OK, you can, if you enter a password, but still. Hard enough limping around without problems using your phone.

Microsoft, Nigeria fight email scammers

LONDON (Reuters) – Microsoft has announced an anti-fraud partnership with Nigeria, the country of origin for some of the Internet’s most notorious email scams.

Microsoft, which has been working to improve security and reliability amid an onslaught of malicious software targeting weakness in Windows and other Microsoft software, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on Friday.

The agreement is designed to foster cooperation to combat issues such as spam, phishing, spyware, viruses and counterfeiting.

The email scam, known as a 419 scheme after the relevant section of the Nigerian Criminal Code, is a computer age version of a con game that goes back hundreds of years and is sometimes called “The Spanish Prisoner.”

More details at SBC Yahoo! News.

What gets me is less than an hour after this was posted I got one of those Nigerian emails myself. I’m also amazed that anyone still falls for this.

On the other hand, this particular comic is hilarious.

MySpace user gets "really friendly"

I may not agree with this, since it IS hacking, and I can only imagine the extra hit on the servers from this, but it IS clever.

With the advent of social networking sites, becoming more popular is as easy as crafting a few lines of JavaScript code, it seems.

One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, “Samy” had amassed over 1 million friends on the popular online community.

How did Samy transcend his humble beginnings of only 73 friends to become a veritable global celebrity? The answer is a combination of XSS tricks and lax security in certain Web browsers.

More details at BetaNews.

Now if only there were some way to get the AdSense links on this blog hit automatically.

DISH to Sell Portable Media Centers

Now this is actually quite cool … especially considering that I have DISH … though I will admit I have NOT been 100% satisfied with it … although I am much more satisfied than I was with ComCast.

EchoStar, parent company of the DISH Network, announced on Tuesday it would begin offering handheld media devices that enable satellite TV subscribers to take content recorded from the DISH service with them in a portable manner.

The PocketDISH player will be available in three models: two that have recording capabilities and one that is playback-only. The two recorders will have HD-capable LCD screens in sizes of 4 and 7 inches with 30GB and 40GB capacities, respectively. The player will come in a size of 2.2 inches and a capacity of 20GB.

More details at BetaNews.

Since the RIAA is considering going after Sirius and XM for their portable satellite radio players, how long before they go after DISH? I haven’t heard anything on this; perhaps because it’s not the BIG satellite player (DirecTV) they simply don’t consider it important enough. Or maybe it’s because they got a look at DISH’s PVRs and realized the execution on tech by DISH isn’t really all that it’s cracked up to be.

‘UnGoogleables’ Hide From Search

Actually, I don’t think these people REALLY hide from Google. Some combination of luck and not-much-tech-online means they’re not there. But the people who are not searchable is rapidly dropping to zero.

Geri Agalia doesn’t appear to leave less of a data trail than most Americans. She has a phone in her name, a bank account, utility bills, a mortgage and a credit card. But the stay-at-home mom and part-time student is among a select and ever-shrinking group of the digitally privileged — her name does not appear on Google.

“I just value my privacy,” says Agalia, who lives in San Diego. “And I think that the government and corporations already know too much about people for the benefit of marketing.”

As the internet makes greater inroads into everyday life, more people are finding they’re leaving an accidental trail of digital bread crumbs on the web — where Google’s merciless crawlers vacuum them up and regurgitate them for anyone who cares to type in a name. Our growing Googleability has already changed the face of dating and hiring, and has become a real concern to spousal-abuse victims and others with life-and-death privacy needs.

Even those in the know can find their Google search results jarring: When, last July, a CNET News.com journalist reported information on Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s personal and financial life gleaned from search results, Google issued a retaliatory ban on employees talking to the publication, which was only lifted last week.

But despite Google’s inarguable power to dredge up information, some people have succeeded — either by luck, conscious effort or both — in avoiding the search engine’s all-seeing eye.

More details at Wired News.

When I Google myself, I find references to an actor with the same name … very little about me. NO, the actor is NOT famous, but he’s been in a lot of local stuff.