Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had her email hacked. I frankly find the event unsurprising. It only confirms just how little most people understand security and technology and where it’s going. It reminds me that the people I follow and enjoy online and the geeks around me are a small segment of today’s society. That a large part of the people in the world today don’t fully understand the potential, the danger, or the ease by which information can be found and shared.
A website I am a regular reader of is Heal Your Church WebSite. Dean Peters actually wrote an article about password before the news broke of Gov. Palin’s misfortune. And wrote a follow-up after the news was out.
So if you are wondering how to avoid Gov. Palin’s embarassment then read the following two links. Good, sound advice:
Tags: email, Heal Your Church Website, Password, Sarah Palin, Security
Posted in Communication, Security | No Comments »
Friday, May 9th, 2008
I’ve been using OpenDNS on my router at home for just about three months now. OpenDNS is a free service that claims to be smarter, faster, and offer more protection from evil on the internet than your ISP’s typical DNS service. If you don’t know what DNS (short for Domain Name Service) then do some reading before you try OpenDNS. Be sure you know what you are doing.
Anyway, the OpenDNS features I was interested in playing with were the phishing protection and the content filtering. I have a four year old at home who is learning more and more about the many things on the internet. There are some things that I’m not ready to explain and I didn’t want her to discover an adult site or a dangerous site accidentally. OpenDNS has many categories to filter by. OpenDNS makes me feel better knowing that it is far less likely my daughter will stumble upon some of the evil and ugliness of the internet.
Filters go beyond the adult only sort of thing I am trying to protect my daughter from if you need to block other sites. Also allows for blacklists and whitelists if you need to block or allow a specific site. It all depends on how draconian and involved you wish to be.
I can’t say I noticed it being faster than other local DNS’s I’ve hit. But it was reliable. I only had one issue and I was able to explain that as not an OpenDNS issue. I had my laptop setup for a while to use the OpenDNS servers but I ran into some problems with an intranet at work. Since my laptop was only looking at OpenDNS and OpenDNS not aware of the local network then some in-house servers required additional changes for me to get to. There are ways to work around this. It was just easier to run OpenDNS only on my home router and not on my laptop
OpenDNS is not hard to setup but you do need to be comfortable editing your computers network settings or your router.
So it is a small piece of comfort for me. If you are considering filtering in your house then you should check out OpenDNS.
Tags: DNS, Domain Name Server, filtering, OpenDNS, phishing, protection, Security
Posted in Security | No Comments »
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
I’m following up my 5 links post from two weeks ago with another 5 links. I took a look at my Delicious list and found I have not bookmarked much lately. I know I’ve been busy but didn’t realize I’ve been quite so busy. So I’ll pull a couple of oldies but goodies to go with some new finds.
- Heal Your Church WebSite - Dean Peters always has good stuff about web design and good management behavior to consider. I’ve been following his articles for a couple of years now. I usually find a morsel or two of value everytime.
- OpenID - The buzz around OpenID is growing. The idea is simple. One username and password that will authenticate you onto many accounts and services across the Internet. I’ve started using it for any site that will accept it. I even have delegation setup for my website. Much more cooperation between big players is needed for this to succeed but the ground swell is well underway and it’s all good!
- Yuda Freedom - I’m not sure I will find myself using this service often. But I will definitely be suggesting it to others who need to publish a document but might not be very web-savvy or are in a hurry to display their work in an easy to use format. That’s what Yuda does. You turn your work into a PDF file and upload it to Yuda. Yuda makes the document interactive.
- Teens Today with Vanessa Van Petten - I first heard of Vanessa Van Petten on Jumping Monkeys 43. Since then I have read some of her articles and am really enjoying her work. She tries to connect parents and teens together. I’m still a long way from being the parent of a teenager. But I work with teens everyday and any advise is helpful. Listen to Jumping Monkeys and then add her to your RSS reader.
That’s all for today. What neat new place on the Internet have you discovered this week? I would love to see your link in the comments!
Tags: Dean Peters, Jumping Monkeys, links, OpenID, PDF, publish, Security, Teens, Twit, Vanessa Van Petten, webdesign, website
Posted in Link List | No Comments »
