TECHdodo

The network breach of Zappos should be a lesson for consumers everywhere. The reason I say this is because Zappos isn’t any fly by night flash in the pan Internet retailer. They are owned by none other than THE Internet retailer Amazon.com. Therefore, you would hope their security would be about as good as it gets. Even so, they were infiltrated and the names, emails, phone numbers, addresses and partial credit card numbers of their 24 million customers were compromised.

What lesson can you take from this? The lesson is that you can’t trust ANYONE to keep your data secure. You can’t trust Zappos, you can’t trust Amazon, you can’t trust Google, and you can’t trust Facebook. Just because they say they won’t release your information does not mean that it won’t get released. This doesn’t mean you can’t protect yourself to some extent, it just means you can’t rely on them to protect you.

There are some steps you can take to make yourself more secure online.

The first thing you can do is use a disposable email account for web shopping. You should do this anyway because of all the spam online retailers, even legitimate ones, will send you. Buying a $3 item from an online retailer subjects you to their spam for life unless you navigate their website to find out how to turn it off. By using a separate email account for this type of activity, it keeps your primary account clean, even if something like this Zappos breach occurs.

The second thing you can do is use disposable credit card numbers. Bank of America, for example, has shop safe. I am sure by now most credit card companies have a similar service. If you buy something online, you can go to their website and request a temporary disposable credit card number for the amount of the transaction. You use this number to make your purchase and that’s it. That is all that card is good for. If someone hacks into a retailer’s website and steals all the information contained there, including your credit card number, you don’t really care, because they number isn’t valid anymore anyway.

The third thing you can do is use unique passwords at any website you use. Ideally they should be totally unique, in which case you can keep track of them with a program used for such a purpose. Personally, I use KeePass. I have used it for years and years. It works well, keeps your passwords in a secure encrypted file, and they even have a version for Android, so if you have an Android device, you can just use that. If you simply can’t be bothered with that, then use some kind of formula that you can remember the 1st , 3rd, and fifth 5th characters of the domain name of the website, a # character, your birthdate, and your grandmothers initials. You can use such a formula, whatever you come up with, on any website you visit so you will always know your password even though you will have a different password for every site. It isn’t as secure as having a totally unique unrelated password for every website, but it is a lot more secure than using the same password on every site.

The fourth thing you can do is use a virtual phone number. Keep your real phone number private and use a Google Voice number, or something similar, for everything else. The number is free. If it gets compromised, you can either get a new one, or simply let all calls to that number go to voicemail.

By taking some simple preventative measures such as these, you can make the possibility that you will become a victim in the case of a security breach by an online retailer less likely.

Windows Security Suite 2012 is a nasty piece of Malware. This is just its latest iteration, it has been around for awhile and I have probably even written about it before, but it has been rearing its ugly head with a vengence since the new year. My son got infected with it about a week ago. In its current form it is a real pain in the next to get rid of. It prevents you from being able to run any applications on your system, even task manager. It also prevents you from even being able to boot into safe mode. I had never seen malware do that before. It was a new one for me.

When he got it, the way I was finally able to clean it out was using a mix of directions I found in other locations.
The first thing I did was pretend to register it with a fake license key. 1147-175591-6550, 2233-298080-3424 or 3425-814615-3990

Once you have done this you can fix your registry with the FixNCR.reg file about halfway down this page

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-xp-security-2012

Then you can run the rkill.exe program you can also find on that page to kill the malware that is running.

When I had the infection a week or so ago that was all I did and then I ran a system restore to the day before and once that was finished I no longer had an infection. I ran Windows update to make sure all security patches were installed and I made sure Microsoft Security Essentials had the latest updates, so I thought I was safe.

Then a couple of days ago a coworker mentioned that their spouse got infected by a virus and it turned out it was the exact same virus. I told them how I had cleaned it out of my system and then the next day they said they had been able to clean it out the same way.

Then today, my son got infected again. I was sitting right there when it happened. He was just at some random website. He didn’t download of install anything.

Tonight it seemed even harder to clean because the rkill utility wasn’t killing the malware. I ran it a dozen times, but it wouldn’t go away so I couldn’t run restore or malware bytes to clean the infection. Then I read about someone else who was having the same problem and they said they had gotten around it by rebooting their computer and running the rkill utility before the malware had a chance to run. I tried that and rkill and the malware seemed to have a bit of a duel. The rkill ran, then the malware dialog appeared for a short time, but then rkill seemed to be able to kill it.

If you get this infection, sorry, but it is a real pain in the butt. It does seem to be possible to clean it though, but it sure isn’t easy.

One other thing. This is a Windows only virus. It targets Windows PCs. If you were using a Linux machine you wouldn’t have to worry about getting infected. As an alternative, you can run your web browser in a virtual Linux machine within Windows and you still won’t be able to get infected. Just something to consider since having all of the Windows updates and security updates installed and not downloading or installing any software, my computer still got infected, it might be something you want to consider after cleaning it your second or third time.

As I discussed here previously, I wasn’t too pleased with Ubuntu’s attempt to copy Apple with their Unity interface. I have been using Ubuntu for a long time and I was comfortable with it the way it was. I am not going to count out Unity just yet. I think it has some potential, but even the Apple interface takes some getting used to and I myself personally don’t really care for it. I use a Macbook pro from time to time and it is just hard for me to get used to the menu for an active app to not be on the top of the dialog for that app but instead being on the menu bar and going to an app desktop to run apps instead of a start button and menus. I am not saying the menu method is better than an app launcher method, it is just the method I am most familiar with in a desktop environment. On my phone, I like the app launcher method. One of the greatest things about Linux though is variety. If you don’t like something use something else. I hadn’t really looked at many other Linux distributions, other than Puppy, in quite some time. I tried KDE and Gnome on Ubuntu. I also tried Fedora with the latest Gnome interface and KDE. I also tried out Mint with their interpretation of the latest Gnome interface. What I found myself using though, going back to again and again, was the same version of Linux I was  using before I switched to Ubuntu all those year ago, and that is Mepis.

I had always liked Mepis because I didn’t usually have to do much to get it working on whatever hardware I wanted to run it on. Now for the last few months, this is what I have been using. It looks good. The windowing environment is familiar and comfortable. It works well. It does seem to require more memory than other distributions I have used in the past. When I ran it in a virtualbox it was very sluggish and almost unusable until I bumped the memory up to over 800MB. After that it ran well. I have also had a few problems in installing apps from synaptic package manager. When this has happened, I have jumped to the command line and installed them using apt. Also, I got really used to using sudo for everything when I was using Ubuntu and even though I added myself to sudoers, something still isn’t right and I have to log in as root to do some things. Right now though, it works well for what I want to use it for. Does it mean I will stick with it forever? Once I start using something, unless I find something it doesn’t let me do that I want to do, or it greatly changes how it works, looks or feels, I don’t tend to jump around much.

I just wrote a post the other day about how the Netflix DVD service wasn’t worth it for me any more, simply because of the way I personally happen to consume media. I was only able to watch about 4 movies a month with the service, despite the fact the turn around time was quite good and if I watched and returned movies as quickly as I could I could have probably watched twice as many movies.

The postal service has announced that due to cutbacks, mail that used to be delivered in 1-3 days will now be delivered in 2-3 days and one of the things that will impact is Netflix delivery.

In the way I used Netflix, this change would probably have had no effect on me at all. I would still be able to watch about 4 movies a month. For people who really did watch as many as they could though, this has the potential to significantly impact how many movies they can watch in a month.

When I watched movies, I would put a movie in the mail Monday, it would arrive at Netflix Tuesday, and they would ship me a new one which I would get Wednesday or Thursday. Now, add another day each way.

Put it in the mail Monday, it gets to Netflix on Wednesday. They ship it and it comes on Friday, maybe even Saturday. Now no one will be able to watch more than four or five movies a month if they have the one disc at a time plan.

Will the service still be worth $8 a month to these users when you can stream movies from Amazon for $1-$3 or rent them from Redbox or Blockbuster for $1-$1.20. For subscribers who may have been on the edge already this could really make a difference.

Today I joined the hundreds of thousands of people who canceled their Netflix DVD service. It has been two months since their surprise price change increased what I was paying for the 1 disc at a time service from $2 per month to $8 per month. A lot of people talk about the increase in terms of the bundled price for both streaming and DVD, but I don’t really look at it that way because I am going to keep streaming. The cancellation today wasn’t made out of anger or to send Netflix a message about what I thought of their price increase, although I was not too pleased with it. What it turned out to be in the end was nothing more than a matter of practicality. Netflix DVD just doesn’t make sense for me at the new price. When it used to cost a mere $2 as an addendum to the Netflix streaming service, it was well worth it for me. Netflix DVD certainly had its benefits. The primary one for me was to get content not available from their streaming service or rental kiosks. Old episodes of TV shows or older movies that were not available on streaming or at Redbox or Blockbuster kiosks
There were some really big disadvantages to the Netflix DVD service too. Before everyone else dropped the service, I often found it difficult to get new releases I wanted to watch. Since September when they lost 600,000 subscribers I seemed to have better luck getting what I wanted. Prior to that though, sometimes I didn’t get a new release movie for weeks after we put it at our #1 position on the queue. I would often end up picking them up at Redbox even though I had Netflix.
Another big disadvantage to Netflix was the way the one disc at a time works. I am often too busy during the week to sit down and watch a movie. So this is how it worked in our home. We put a DVD in the mail on Monday to be returned to Netflix. Netflix got it on Tuesday, and we get the new DVD on Wednesday. The turn around is actually pretty quick. We almost never find time during the week to watch it, so Wednesday, Thursday and Friday go by and we can’t watch it. Finally, Saturday night or Sunday we watch it. Then, the disc goes back into the mail on Monday and the cycle repeats. This means I can usually only get four movies a month at the most. At $2 a month this is a great deal. At $8 a month, there are much better alternatives. Also, my family sometimes has a weekend where we would like to watch more than just one movie. Well, with the one disc at a time service we had that isn’t possible. If we want to make Saturday night a movie night and get a pizza and watch a couple of movies, or we want to watch one on Saturday and one on Sunday, then we have to go rent one somewhere else. If we are going to have to pick up one, we might as well get rid of Netflix entirely and then just stop and pick up two. Also, if we are only going to do this once or twice a month, then Amazon on Demand becomes a possibility. Movies generally run $3 – $4, but often times there are some we want to watch at $1 – $2.
Also, some weekends we might be busy and have no time to watch a movie. In that case, the whole cycle has to rollover for another week and that month we might only get three movies from Netflix and sometimes, maybe only two. When Netflix only cost a couple dollars extra per month if you had streaming, this was no big deal, because even if we only got to watch a couple of movies, they still didn’t cost any more than renting them at a Kiosk. Now, when the absolute best we can do is 4 movies a month, then at $7.99 a month we are paying double what it would cost to rent the same movies at a kiosk. Not only that, but on the weeks we can’t watch anything, renting from a kiosk or online doesn’t cost us anything, and on the weeks where we can watch more than one movie, we can rent as many as we like for that night. If we can watch a couple movies a couple weekends a month, our cost at a kiosk will be half what it costs to rent the same movies from the Netflix dvd service. Not only that, but if we go online and check what is available in our area and reserve the movies we want on the Redbox website, we can generally get what we want when we want it instead of having to wait, and wait, and wait.
Therein lies the problem with the Netflix DVD service for us. For many people, such as myself, the new price simply makes it no longer practical. It makes other options that already exist that much more attractive. Quite simply, for the way we happen to consume media, there are better, less expensive, more convenient options available to us. For that reason and that reason only, we canceled the Netflix DVD service. If these are the rates they must charge to make a profit from DVD in the mail service, than perhaps it is no longer a viable business model and it will simply disappear like the video rental stores that came before it.