Reading through the daily grind I came across a less then noted article on New Scientist blog about how the Library of Congress has a project that will be archiving and preserving early computer games, online novels and Virtual Worlds. This to me is an interesting task since I’ve worked with the delima of preserving digital media. Ten years ago a lot of things were on media like Zip drives that don’t exist anymore. At the same time books and news articles have been around for hundreds of years in the form of paper.

So, how would the future look back on our virtual worlds like Second Life and World of War Craft? Would it be possible for someone thirty or fifty years in the future to login and see what they looked like the same way I can read the New York Times online from 1958? As we build our computer systems and new technologies we forget the importance of writing about it, and keeping that writing available for generations to come. The only way the future will know how we lived fifty, a hundred or five hundred years is by what we did with our time. As the TV guys archive and preserve the latest episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI we should keep in mind of preserving our virtual worlds and online addictions for the generations to come.

Microsoft, most notably the number one reason for increase spending on System Administrators and Help Desk staff is entering your supper market. They will be providing software that will have a Smart Shopping Cart with ads that will ‘help’ a consumer to ‘buy’ more things. This technology will use up-links from home PC, RFID technology and coupons. While this is an interesting concept, it is a prototype and just the tip of the ice-berg of things to come. As we get more wireless and screens get smaller the computer will invade every square inch of our everyday mundane life.

“Blue Screen of Death in Isle 5,” I can here over the loudspeaker as a service technician is called out from behind the freezers.

About ten years ago there was a company giving scanners to people to do self check-out, they were attached to carts and as the customer put the item in the cart they would scan it. Today we have self-check out in many stores fixed at the exit. These first prototypes help our direction towards the future where, ads are displayed on carts and a customer can easily access information about the store, a product and maybe one day have Britney Spears tell them how much she loves Eggo’s and don’t fogert to buy her new Album so she can pay alimony.

However we are stuck in the year 2008 where these silly things of computerized shopping carts are the wave of the future, we’ll have to stick with our talking GPS’s and wireless digital cameras. Who knows, by the time Microsoft gets out of the Beta for the product we will have an Apple Driod doing our grocery shopping for us.

Microsoft Smart Shopping Carts – VIA: Information Week

It seems the PC world has another scam up there sleeves. To save them money they have the consumer make recovery disks. This just means the Manufacture is trying everything these days not to do their job. I always hated the concept of having a recovery partition and having to make your own disks, why can’t the machine work right out of the box? What this means is you have a choice of making the disks (an hour of your time before using the computer) or actually paying the computer company that you just bought the computer from for a CD. This of course doesn’t happen on a the Apple’s MAC computers. I also find that Dell doesn’t seem to charge anymore for the media, but I could be wrong. Are the computer companies trying to make things more difficult then they have to be? They seem to be able to package the AOL disks pretty well. This article in PC World really pissed me off — http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136496/article.html — Where it seems the large retails stores are profiting from the apparent Recovery Disk issues by forcing customers to buy the retails stores recovery disks, claiming it is the only way to recover your computer if something goes wrong.

Now I have dealt with both Apple and many PC vendors. Dell has been the only company that I haven’t seen the recovery disk issue come up with, but you have to check a box to get the disks. Why don’t do they give you the disks like Apple has for years? Why is Apple the only one that has stayed constant and gives a proper and simple restoration procces if things go wrong. For example I had two computers that the hard drives failed. An iMac and a Dell. The iMac took less then two hours to format, install the OS from recovery 1 disk and be back online with updates and all. The Dell took half the day and I had to put different disks in, plus find updates online. If I wasn’t as technical as I am, I would of given up and paid someone to figure it out.

It seems to me that the Microsoft Windows world maybe the basis of the Chaos for the recovery disk and getting back up and running quickly without spending a huge amount of money. Issues happen with computers, whether its a PC or a Mac, however what counts is how long it takes to recover and of course how much extra in time and money it takes to have those recovery disks available when that time comes. Always backup your data and if your on a Mac keep those original recovery disks in a safe place.

The new iMac is out and well every tech site has had a take on it. They will point you to the Apple iMac page and tell you about all the bells and whistles on this beauty. However something struck me while Steve Jobs strutted on stage in his designer blue jeans and black shirt, ‘is the new iMac green?’ Now Apple has gotten a lot of heat being placed bottom on the list of green tech companies and building products that are based on some of the most recycled material out there makes me wonder if this isn’t Apple’s take on recycling. Now I couldn’t find anywhere on there site that mentioned beer bottles or soda can’s being the previous incarnation of your MacBook Pro or your new iMac. This of course would have to be investigated abroad where the machines are usually made, in plants that may not have caught on to this green and recycle approach. The truth is it would just be Apple enough to Recycle and not tell since I’m sure some rumor site will be posting all the details about this soon enough. However since glass and aluminum are two very popular recycled materials, next time you clean up the tin cans and beer bottles from your party just think of how many iMacs you could make! Till then cheers.

As his mother board fried due to an accidental close encounter with Mr. Starbucks I lay back in my swirly chair and wonder if computers have souls. I mean we have souls. I believe we have a spirit inside us, a unique and powerful energy that if you put your two pointer fingers slightly together but not touching and focus on the empty part you will see your own unique energy. Whatever you call it, a spirit, soul, aura it is there and its still somewhat of a mystery. Animals have souls, you can sense there energy when they are near you.

Death in all cultures is the time when that spirit leaves its vestal and journeys to some far away world. Will we see our electronic devices in heaven in some big shopping mall? Do they meet there maker? And who would that be the guy who made the designs or the union worker who screwed the motherboard to the casing. It won’t be Bill Gates since he most likely won’t be joining P4 in heaven. I believe P4 has a soul and is in computer heaven soaking up a futuristic virus free OS, and has a full upgrade with 24TB of ram and Petabyte hard drive. I can dream that he is having a good life making someone happy as they fight a battles in WOW with Einstein, Edison and Tesla.

With the passing of P4 I have learned that true lessons of technology; Moore’s law. A dual-core processor blows the slow poke out of the water! I salute P4 and all the processing he has done for me, I raise Mr. Starbucks, lay back in my swirly chair and listen to Pandora.com. Rest in peace my old friend, thanks for the memories, you won’t be missed since Dual-Core got a sister I’ve been eying and she’s called Quad-Core.

Rules for protecting your computer from getting a virus:

• Install an anti-virus program. Then make sure you have the up to date virus definitions each month. PLEASE READ, yes that four letter word, READ, the information on the anti-virus companies website. Most anti-virus software comes with a subscription, when that subscription runs out then you are no longer protected from the latest viruses since you will not be able to install the latest definitions. I list Anti-virus programs at the end of the article.
• UPDATE, I know i mentioned it above but make sure that you are getting the updated definitions each day or at least each week. (Companies don’t always reales them each day.)
• Make sure you have a firewall on. Most Operating Systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) have built-in firewalls.
• Run an anti-virus scan at-least monthly with of course the newest definitions. You can schedule the scan. I run mine weekly.
• That Is it…. now for those resources

Resources:

• Certs home security section – CERTS is a government funded research and development institute. They are the security experts.
• http://security.getnetwise.org/ – get net wise is a great website that has information and tools about protecting yourself on the web.
• Microsoft list of Anti-Virus clients – This is a very good and always updated list of anti-virus clients. I personally like Symantec.

Many people will still question if we need internet access in our cars and the answer is still yes. Everything should be connected, the world needs to be connected and this will some day allow us to turn on our lights from our car four miles away. This will also spark on-board computers in our dashboard that will do more then just give us directions. The possibilities are endless but if you have kids in the back seat watching a movie, one day they can be also be online doing their homework. Well, that might of went too far, however, bridging the gap of the Internet in the car will change the meaning of DWI to Driving With Internet and maybe like other technologies the law may catch-up.

Today everything is on our computer. Well almost everything, we still can’t get pizza from the computer. We could order it online but what’s the fun of that. Since we work, bank, communicate and play on our computer there is a lot of information and information is as valuables as gold. This first section is concentrating on PASSWORDS. You know that little word you need to gain entrance into a private little space usually in Cyberia. Now this little guy can be used against you, can be your worst nightmare.

Password Account Levels

Multiple passwords are the issue. I have at least 20 things that are Password Protected, and there is no way I’m going to remember 20 different passwords but if i loose one password then All my information can get accessed!!! So when choosing what password to use I have come up with three levels of passwords:

• Free for all - Any site that is free and not very important if someone get’s my username or password. Like Nytimes.com. I have to register to read the newspaper but that’s it! They don’t have any other information, and if someone, some how (discussed later) gets my password it’s okay. Not too much harm done, like someone stealing your wallet but you only had your friends business cards in it. The passwords in this category can be the same.
• Personal - This is your email, blog accounts and anything you keep personal items. These passwords should be different then your “Free for all” passwords but within the category can be the same password. You wouldn’t use this on too many sites though.
• Confidential – This is the motherload for your identity. Your online banking, personal information or anything that could directly damage you. Each one in this category should be different. There shouldn’t be too many but this can easily be done by a short prefix or suffix on a secure password.

So now your saying to yourself, how am I going to remember all those passwords. Stop. Were not there yet, because most passwords are too easy to remember that there also very easy for someone to find out with a simple program. So the above list divides the passwords into category levels, this next session is about creating a secure ROOT password. A root password is a simple base password that can be added to.

Root password

Let’s start with a name, I’ll pick a girls name. Elizabeth. That is a very week password for three main reasons:

1. It’s found in a dictionary. Primarily English dictionaries are used to get passwords, but other language dictionaries maybe used as well.
2. No Numbers.
3. No Special Characters like ! _ – ?

Now just adding numbers to the end or the characters to the end helps a lot, but isn’t always the best. So if you wanted to quickly make this a secure password then Elizabeth-1981 would be better. Now if Elizabeth was born or something else had happened in that year that is related to her then you would easily remember this password. But that wouldn’t be a root password. To make a root we have to make it solid. Now here is an easy way to do this by creating your own code.

• You can replace letters that look like numbers: an E to a 3; an I or L to 1; a O to a 0. These are easy to remember as long as you always do those replacements.
• Special characters with letters like ! with a L or I. A $ with an S. or a ? with a vowel.
• You can also do sound or make up your own code. an A to 8. a 2 with a T.
• Capital letters also help and you can capitalize all constants or vowels.

With the above in mind the following passwords would be a root password for Elizabeth:

• 3l1zab3th
• 3l?z?b3th
• El?z?b3th (Strongest password has capitals, special characters and numbers)
• El!z8beth (Strongest password has capitals, special characters and numbers)

Are these easy for you to remember? That is the important thing and you might want to just think about something that is strong with the above rules that you can easily use for your ROOT Password.

Level Password

Now that you have your root you can expand it to create a level password. Were going to use the last one, El!z8beth. This password is hard to crack and could be used for your “Free for all” level accounts. Then for your “Personal” Accounts you could add a number to the end. It’s not good to add just a one or two because there usually isn’t any relationship unless you put a number two because she’s the second child.

Now for your most secure passwords you have to relate them to the site your accessing and since the password is already secure you could just add a prefix to this password but I believe you want a new root account just for the “confidential accounts”. You can use the same root for all confidential but just add a number, letter and/or a dash. So if we take the name Steve and make it $T3v3 we have a short secure password and now we are going to make that usable for our American Express account and the password could be ae-$T3v3. Since we remember that we use this root password for all our main secure accounts and the initials of the company in the beginning, we could remember this password for a very long time and yet it still will be secure. This root password then could be used for our work also as w-$T3v3. If someone did quickly see some of these passwords they may not understand what it is.

The Final Push

As you can see it takes a little time to create a secure password but once it’s done the root can be used for a while and you can change prefix and suffix with letters or numbers for a while. I find four digit years easy to remember. The main importance is to find an easy to remember password with a secure backbone.

Other Methods

Passphrase – Another way is a passphrase. That is using a sentence or phrase as a password. So the phrase: I am a die hard jets fan would be iaadhjf which would be hard to crack, but with these phrases it’s usually hard to add numbers and speacil characters unless you add a year iaadhjf-89 or a favorite players numbers. This way maybe easier for your to create a password and can be used with the Password Account Levels that I stated above.

Problems with these passwords

One major issue with these passwords is that some sites do not allow some special characters. You might want one of your roots to not have a special character and you add it on with a – when needed.

Resources:

• http://www.securitystats.com/tools/password.php