Google Ordered To Tell Us "Quit Shouting to the World What You Are Doing on the Internet!"

Google "snooped on people's Wi-Fi networks".  Google employees out in the neighborhoods taking pictures for their Street-View, used information they took from open Wi-Fi networks in the neighborhood. As a result of a class action lawsuit, Google is being ordered to let people know that they should secure their open Wi-Fi with a password. An interesting part of this is that Google thinks what they did is perfectly legal ..... (read the entire article here)

Google has maintained in its defense against the class action that it did nothing illegal by gathering data from open Wi-Fi networks. Their argument: By leaving your Wi-Fi network open, you’re essentially shouting what you’re doing over the Internet to the world. That last line may well end up in their forthcoming educational YouTube video. Read More here

I Lost My iPad. No. Really.

I lost my iPad a couple of weeks ago. I was eating lunch with a friend and I had it out in the restaurant. When I left, I did not stick it back in my bag. I just had it in my hand (first mistake). As I was walking to my car, I noticed this little gift shop was open, so I stepped in there to talk to the salesperson about an item I had seen a few months earlier. As she showed it to me, I must have just absentmindedly set my iPad down on the display table to look at the item. I ended up making the purchase, picked up a business card from the business and headed home. I needed to hurry home because I was going to teach an iPad class in my neighborhood Center. Yes. Really. I get ready to go, and........ "Where is my iPad?" Long story short,  I had to go set up for my class without my iPad. Denny said he would call the restaurant and the gift store. Much to my embarassment, he showed up at my iPad class and handed me my iPad. Phewwww! Close one! So, what to do if you lose your iPad? Go to a computer. Log in to iCloud. Click on Find my iPad.  Make sure that you have gone into settings on your iPhone, iPad or other device and said "Find my iPad (on)".

So, as you can see, I can find my iPad NOW because it is at home and online, but in the previous scenario, it was locked and offline. So, thankfully I have a husband that would go looking.

Don't lose your iPad.

Use Excel to Keep Your Passwords Safe

A simple way to keep your passwords in a secure place is to create an Excel worksheet, enter your passwords and other important information about your web login or account. Once you have saved the file, you can lock it with a password (Now that is a password you will have to remember!). Here is how you do it in Office for Mac 2011:

Once you have created and saved your password file in Excel, go to the File drop down menu, and scroll down to Passwords:

From there, you can choose a password for your file

If you are using an older version of Office, go to Excel>Preferences>Security and go through the same steps to create a password. 

Once you have saved and secured your file, save it to either 1) Dropbox or a 2) Flash Drive that you either keep with you or store away from your computer.

What You Don't Know About Passwords Can Hurt You

This month I read a very interesting article in Macworld Magazine. After reading this article, I am changing some of my own password habits. 

Here is an exerpt from the article by Joe Kissell that alarmed me:

"Suppose you signed up for a LinkedIn account, and you used the same password you previously chose for your Gmail account. Then, in June, you were one of the unlucky people whose LinkedIn password was leaked. An enterprising hacker who knew your LinkedIn password could have easily tried it with other popular services, so getting access to your Gmail account would suddenly be trivial. That’s a problem not just because someone could read or delete your email, but because you might use your Gmail address to access or reset other passwords. If the hacker clicked the “forgot password” link on another site, he could then check your email to get access to accounts that use other passwords. Even reusing a single password in two places could, in this way, cause cascading problems."

I know enough, and I think we all do, to make a more complicated password and write it down somewhere. But then, I tend to use the same password, or a variation of the same password for all of my accounts. After reading this article, I knew I had to make some changes. So, how much do I have to change? 
A secure password is most important on your email, your bank account and any other financial information. As I read in this article, if someone gets into your email account, they can get into other accounts. 

I hope you will take the time to research this for yourself and change what you need to change.