OpenDNS

Sorry it has been such a long time since I updated the site, I’ll try to get back on track.

Well today I want to bring the topic back to protecting your family and their website access. Recently I discovered a great free service called Open DNS. They provide a great DNS server with additional features that will help you to protect your family. For those of you out there that don’t know what a DNS server is, it’s basically a phonebook. When you enter a website into your browser such as http://www.mydadsageek.com/ a DNS server converts that into a number that the computer can easily find. So the time when you enter a website to the time it connects depends a lot on the DNS server you are using. Most of you probably just us the DNS server that you internet service provider uses and that fine, but if you want more control over your web access and a bit more speed you should try OpenDNS. They provide instructions on their site on how to set you either your computer or if you have a home network your router to use their DNS servers. Some of the benefits include more speed, blocking known phising websites and name resolution, so if your type google.cmo your still get to google.com. You also have the option to sign up for s free account. With this you can block access to adult website, if you have a home network you can block access to adult on only certain or all pcs on your network. You can also see the traffic moving through your internet connection and block access to particular site you want, such as Myspace.com. So if you want an easy and inexpensive way to protect your family check out www.OpenDNS.com.

Nintendo Wii, hands on review!

Well, it finally has happened, I’ve have a hands on review of Nintendo’s Wii. First of all I have to thank my wife, for the wonderful birthday gift. So for starters it’s a lot of fun to play, even the free game that came with teh system “Wii Sports” is awsome.The console is pretty small and does look like some video game sitting in my living room which is cool. The sensor bar, that needs to be either on top of the TV or below the TV for the Wii remote to work, does stand out a little but overall not to bad.

The graphics are good but certainly not the best I’ve seen. I would say they are a slight upgrade over the PS2 or Xbox, but no where near the PS3 or the Xbox360. The menu is easy to navigate and your do have some neat extras like local weather and news headlines, if you have your Wii connected to a broad band connection. The Wii has built in wifi, but if you are still using wires you need to buy an adapter. The virtual console is pretty cool and for a small cost you can download classic games like “Super Mario Brothers” and “Mario 64”, the cost range from 500 Wii points ($5) to 1000 Wii points ($10). Of course the best part of the Wii is the cool controller, the controller(s) is comfortable and seems really natural when you use it. The only draw back so far has been trying to find and extra one in the stores. I wanted a second one so me and my wife could play “Wii sports” and had to go to eight stores before I found one. Another slight draw back is the cost of the controllers, I needed a second remote ($40), a second nunchuk controller ($20), and two classic controllers ($ 20 each) to play classic games via the virtual console. Ouch, another $100 just so my wife and I could play together without sharing one remote. The Wii did have a couple of points I thought would be useful for parents.

First the Wii “inbox” has a daily message that can not be deleted that keeps track of everything you do on the system, from what games were played and for how long to any online activities that were done through the Wii.

Secondly the Wii has built in parental controls that are password protected and does not allow certain game ratings to be played. So if you don’t want your kids to be playing mature games, they can’t, at least not at home, and if they figure out your password, you can see all of their activity in the Wii activity report.

The Wii came with “Wii Sports” for free, which is basically a collection of small sport games highlighting the Wii’s controller. Games include tennis, baseball, bowling, boxing, and golf. The games themselves are very addictive, especially the bowling, basically your swing the remote just like you’re bowling for real, it’s a lot of fun. Although I will warn you I was very sore the next day after a long night of Wii bowling.

So overall the Wii is worth the price if you are looking for a fun family game system.
The cost at $250 is a bit deceiving if everyone wants their own controllers because the additional cost will add up quick, but you could just share one remote if you really didn’t want to spend the extra money. So if you want a new game system that everyone one in the house can play and have fun together I recommend the Nintendo Wii.

Safe email habits

Recently a co-worker of mine brought me a copy of an email message he had supposedly received from his Bank. The email claimed that his account had some recent irregular activity. Apparently someone had tried to access his account from a different “ISP host”. The email went on to claim that he should confirm his account information by clicking on the links below. My co-worker brought me the email because he was unable to follow the links and knowing that I was good with computers, he wanted to know if I could “fix” the problem so he could verify his account information.
I took a look at the email and immediately felt like something was not right. First of all, banks, internet providers, investment brokers, etc. do not typically ask you to verify your information via the internet, especially by clicking a link through an email. Secondly, an ISP is an internet service provider, typically when someone speaks of an attempted attack they say an unknown IP (internet protocol) address, not an internet service provider. My immediate reaction was this was a phising attempt.

I quickly did a search and discovered I was right. This was an attempt by someone to steal this person’s personal account information. The fact that he couldn’t open the link probably saved him a lot of money and trouble. I told my co-worker that the email was a fake and that someone was trying to steal his information. I confirm with him that he never enter any information about his account. I then told him to call his Bank’s fraud department and I suggested he change his password just to be safe. Problem solved, but then I began to think about how awful this could have turned out if he had been able to follow that link. He could have lost money, had his identity stole all because he didn’t know some basic internet safety.

As a geek I spend a lot of my free time researching internet security issues, network security issues and digital forensic techniques. Now as you probably know if your read my “about” page I don’t necessarily work in the information technology field, this is strictly a hobby. Hey, I told you I was a geek what did you expect? Anyways, since I follow these topics pretty closely I know the do and don’t of the internet and unfortunately take for granted that others are less informed than me.
Let’s go over some simple things you can do to protect yourself. First if you get an email from someone asking for any type of personal information, user ID, passwords, Social Security numbers, etc. question the email validity. It doesn’t matter who the email is from, my co-worker’s email had a return address that looked real, even the IP address was right. It’s not hard for a professional criminal to spoof (fake) an email address. If you get an email from some one asking you to verify your information don’t click through the email, instead go to your web browser and go to the website and log in as normal. If it’s a website you don’t normally go to and you have forgotten the address call customer service, just never click through your email. Thirdly, if you think an email seems like it could be a fake or you just have funny feeling about it. Don’t shrug it off, trust your instincts, being a little paranoid can go a long way in protecting your information.

The best and easiest way to confirm your fears about an email is Google. That’s right Google; a Google search is a great tool to find out about other fake emails. That’s what I did with my co-worker, remember that “ISP host” well it was a long series of numbers and letters that was supposedly the “ISP host” number, so I type that number into Google and searched. There it was that exact combination of numbers and letters, found at Spam daily news, a website devoted to publishing spam attempts. When I clicked on the link there was the email message word for word, expect the name of the bank had changed. That’s how I knew this email was a fake.

So next time you check your email be sure to apply these safe email habits, make them part of your email checking routine and they will go a long way to protecting your personal information online.

What are you taking about?

So have you ever looked over your kids shoulder and saw some thing like this? POS, BFN, BBS. Well with the increase use of text messaging and IM (instant messaging) services a new abbreviated language has evolved. Today I’m going to give you the Rosetta stone for deciphering these messages. Most of the time the answer is pretty simple, each letter represents a word, such as BBS is short for “be back soon”. Some are even easier such as L8R, or deciphered as “later”. So which ones are important for parents to recognize? Well theses are the one I think are important to know off the top of your head.

POS – Parent over the shoulder, meaning I can’t take openly right now because my parents are around.

PRW – Parent (people) are watching, same as above.

ASL or A/S/L – Age / Sex / Location, someone is asking for to much information about your kid.

PM – Private message, lets talk in a more secure chat room, with out other around.

F2T – Free to talk, can you talk openly, refer back to number one.

FYEO – For your eyes only, don’t let anyone see this is private stuff.

It’s a scary world out there and as parents we need to be able to know what are kids are talking about. Most of the time the stuff they talk about is harmless kid stuff, or stuff that they just don’t want mom and dad to know about not because it’s bad.

Here is a list with a lot more of these abbreviations http://www.aim.com/acronyms.adp.

I deleted the wrong picture!

Have you ever accidentally deleted a picture from your digital camera and thought, “Oh no that was like the best picture I took”. Well today I’m going to talk about a great little program that you can use to restore those accidentally deleted pictures. Unfortunately this program is only for Windows users, so sorry Mac and Linux users. It’s called PC INSPECTOR smart recovery 4.5 and can be downloaded for free from here.

First let me explain a bit about how digital media (film) in your camera works when your delete a picture. When you delete picture the camera basically is told to ignore the file on the storage card. The camera then is allowed to copy over that “space” when a new picture is taken. The original picture is still there until a new picture overwrites it, but the camera does use space in a liner sense but rather at random. Meaning that a picture that was deleted a few shots ago could still be restored.

Now even though I said that you could continue to take pictures and it would still be possible to restore them the likely hood of restoring the picture you want decreases with each new photo. The best thing to do is not to take any more using that digital media card, i.e. compact flash, SD, etc. if your camera only uses built in memory then you are out of luck depending on how important that deleted picture was. I keep a spare card in my camera bag for just such occasions.

All you have to do is plug your camera into your computer and run the program, it will then ask you to choose the media to be restored, this is your camera. A place to put the restored photos, I created a folder on my desktop and called it restored pictures, pretty simple. Hit the start button and you are off, the default setting uses a quick scan that will restore most of the pictures. You also have the option of doing a deep scan; the deep scan takes a very long time but can restore more pictures. So if the quick scan didn’t restore the picture you wanted, try this option when the quick scan is done and you might find that lost photo.

Keep in mind this program will restore all the pictures it can find on the cameras memory card, so if there is a chance of an embarrassing photo its probably best not to do this with a crowd standing around. When I used the program I was able to restore pictures from months earlier so be cautious.

So the next time you accidentally delete the wrong picture, don’t freak out, you might be able to get it back.

Anyways sorry this is only for Windows, I’ll keep my eyes open for a good one for Macs and Linux computers. If you know of one please email to let me know or better yet post a comment about it.

Research made easy with Wikipedia

I have always been a curious person, learning about many different things. However sometimes I’m not sure where to look to find the answers to my questions. In the past I would use google and then search through the thousands of websites trying to find the answers I was seeking. Well that was before I found Wikipedia. Some of you out there probably already know about Wikipedia and what a great research tool it is, but some of you probably have never heard of it, or used it.

Basically Wikipedia is on online encyclopedia, written and maintained by users of the site. The end result is a collection of knowledge spanning almost every topic that is reviewed and edited by thousands of people. I’ve researched software, music, people, just about anything, you name it, and it’s probably there. Articles are linked to one another so if you are looking a particular topic that references another topic you can go directly to the referencing topic. This is pretty useful, since sometimes the answer to one question leads to another question. Sometimes, I spend hours bouncing from one article to another; it can become additive search for knowledge. Most of the time the information is accurate, but sometimes it can be off a bit so it’s a good idea to double check some of the facts, if you plan on using the site for something other than personl knowledge, i.e. homework. Listed below most of the articles are links to related websites, which make double checking the facts a bit easier.

At one time I would spend hours doing google searches when I had to do research but now I go right to Wikipedia first and most of the time I have my answer within minutes. So if your have something you need to research or if your kid has a homework assignment due check out Wikipedia.

Cool Website

So the other day I was bouncing around the net looking for the usual geek related stuff, when I came across this website title Parents Hacks, so I decided to check it out. I thought it was going to be all techie or video games related, due to the Hack part. A lot of computer geeks call themselves Hackers, but I was wrong. In fact the site had very little to do with technology. Some of the ideas on the site where how to make socks non-slip, which I found pretty helpful. Use duck, cut it into strips and tape to the socks and viola, non-slip socks. Another post had some good ideas about home made holiday cards. One I have never heard of before used a baking sheet and paint to make some really cool looking cards, but who’ll have to check out the site to see how it’s done. So check out Parent Hacks whether you are looking for some good activities for the kids or want to know a quick meal idea.