The WNY Technology Blog

“With great power comes great responsibility” (Uncle Ben to Peter Parker, Spiderman-2002).

Cheesy opening line I know, but in a sense it is very true when it comes to the world of Information Technology. Exaggerations aside, I’m quite sure most techies (or even wannabes like myself) have had numerous mind-numbing experiences when speaking to a regular human about something as basic as “what operating system is your desktop running?”, or “how big is your hard drive?”. Before I delve into some of my personal encounters with friends and family, I want to state the obvious and point out that at one time we all were noobs, or is it newbs (or even n00bs)? I also want to remind – that if everyone was as interested in this geeky stuff as we are, well then we might find ourselves less employable, right?

Most times I have to remember that if someone is asking me a question about anything I.T. related, it is because they trust and respect me enough to hear what I have to say. It is not an opportunity for me to purposefully throw out a bunch of lingo that they clearly won’t understand just for the sake of insult. I’ve been on the other end of the spectrum, and still am more frequently than I’d like, and it’s not a good feeling. I try and visually place myself in an auto garage being talked into purchasing an upgraded flux capacitor, when all I wanted to know was if the squealing noise my car makes is a good or a bad thing.

The point I’m trying to make is this: yes it can be annoying and even somewhat excruciating trying to walk your aunt through the process of scheduling an anti-virus boot scan, or showing your daughter how to change her desktop wallpaper; just don’t be a jerk about it! Instead, try encouraging them to at least attempt on their own. Most times when people call me with a question – I either don’t know the answer, or have completely forgotten. I like to see this as an opportunity to dust off the rust or even learn something new. A new tactic that I’ve been using is http://lmgtfy.com/ , exclusively reserved for people with a good sense of humor. The best method IMO, is to keep things very simple when explaining and find a suitable comparison that is understandable to common folk. An example: I was struggling with some basic networking concepts and it was described to me very simply, to look at it like roads/bridges/homes rather than IP addresses & devices; and for the first time it made much more sense to me. I’ve taken that experience and tried my best to use similar strategies whenever possible.

A few sites I use when attempting to educate the computer illiterate:
http://www.ehow.com/guide_5-computers.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/

Some years back, and I don’t know why or how I’m remembering this, but there was an interesting Star Trek episode. The crew had landed on a planet that claimed to be so advanced that they could avoid world wars. They accomplished this by using a randomly generated lottery of sorts which consigned a certain number of people to extinction. This grim lottery prevented mass destruction and only took out a small portion of nation’s populations in a “fair way” to the plant’s inhabitants.

What mystified the Enterprise crew is why they couldn’t think of something else that would not only preserve the landscape and architecture and the people themselves.

What these planet inhabitants were doing was a sort of virtualization. A similar war where people in a “civilized way” would limit their destruction to a few. If your number came up, despite how few had to die, it was bad news.

Nowadays, virtualization is all the rage. Virtual servers save lots of hardware money. Sitting at home, I can Citrix into my work server and I can virtually be at work. Everyday could be a dress-down day.

I wish.

Yet we wonder if there is a way we could virtually surf on the internet and not pick up any of the malware from bad websites and crooks who probably look, in real like, like the ancient and evil angular-faced Cardasians in Star Trek.

You already know you’ve got to have(1) Antispyware (2) Antivirus and (3) a Software Firewall running on your computer to spend time on the internet. Unfortunately, it’s gotten worse! You can go to a website (or be taken to a website by having clicked on something in an email) and unknowingly have viruses and spyware loaded on our computer. This brings us all to a new level of aggravation . It’s too bad the government can’t go after these people who are costing us all this money and time. To do so, though, they would have to track them down on the servers they use in South East Asia, China and remote parts of who knows where. The way the economy is going, they’re not likely to make the investment.

In addition to getting unwanted software from bad websites, we all have internet friends who forward us stuff that has been forwarded to them. Fact is that of all the hundreds (maybe thousands) of emails we are sent, many contain viruses, Trogan horses, Worms and other hidden destructive programs. The Buffalo Urban League uses MXLogic as its email filtering system. As of mid December 2008, of its nearly 400,000 incoming emails, 71% of them were denied. 595,082 were spams, 1,177 contained viruses, 4,771 were quarantined.

Then there are the “social engineering” emails that graciously ask us to click on something to benefit starving or homeless people. We are kind people so we want to but we get Zapped and have to reformat our hard drives.

Here’s help. It’s a great safeguard that seems well worth the $29. It’s called ForceField and it is marketed by ZoneAlarm (which happens to make one of the oldest and most robust software firewalls around). It works like this.

When you go on the Internet, it automatically creates a pretend computer that exists in the temporary memory of your computer. Instead of your computer being exposed to the Internet, it is this pretend computer (or “virtual”) PC. If you unknowingly land in a bad website that loads stuff on your (temporary) PC, you don’t have to worry. When you close your Internet session, that temporary (or virtual computer) disappears, along with all of the spyware that may have been loaded on it without your knowledge.

I’ve been using and recommending ForceField for several months and have it installed on all of the PCs in our home. You can get it from:

http://download.zonealarm.com/bin/forcefield_x/index.html

Some of you also are familiar with Tor Project (see: http://www.torproject.org/) . It is a free virtual internet browser but requires the running of companion applications Vidalia and Privoxy. The ForceField tool, however, lends itself to much wider audiences who may lack the wherewithal to venture very far into virtualization.

Philip Siddons

For a printer-friendly version of this comment, see:

http://www.flybynightpublishing.com/PDF/Protection From The Internet.pdf

Ed Tech Day 2009 is looking for IT volunteers! We will be working at 15 sites on August 18th. We usually have teams of 10 at each site. So we need your help!  We are looking for team leaders who would be incharge at each site and we are looking for volunteers to help out. This is a great way to get involved in the community. We work at elementary schools, community centers and non-profit organizations. These sites do not have any IT support thoughout the year and depend on us to come in on this day to take care of all their needs for the year. Please conside volunteering this day and bring your co-workers and friends. Its a lot of fun.

Sign up to Volunteer – http://edtechday.org/volunteer.asp

With this donation, the students in the 5th and 6th grade classes have been able to better utilize their time when doing research.  These computers have also allowed me, as an educator, to access information more readily while giving me better tools for creating tests, presentations, etc.

~ Maria Delaney, St Leo the Great School