Digital Samurai

Move Over Cell Phones and Land Lines

Almost everyone now has a cell phone, with an increasing number of users also subscribing to a Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) account of some kind (think Skype). With these accounts come monthly service charges and the need to painstakingly monitor your “minutes,” to make sure you don’t go over your monthly limits.

Google first entered the voice arena with Google Voice, which provided Google users with the ability to get a local phone number of their choice, and to integrate the service with their Gmail account. As of yesterday, Google has added the ability of Gmail users to place calls directly from their Gmail account, using your computer’s microphone and speakers, or a headset. To say the service took off might be an understatement.

Google, offering free calls in both the U.S. and Canada, made over 1 million calls in the first 24 hours the service was offered. To put the numbers in perspective, it’s like 1 out of every 3000 phone calls made yesterday in the U.S. were made using Google.

That’s amazing. It will be interesting to see if volume of calls made through Google stay at this level or even increase.

- John and Mike

(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Super Password

So what happens when we take some time off for vacation? You don’t get any blog posts. That should be pretty obvious by now, but we’re back to work for the near term.

The Georgia Institute of Technology just published a report that indicates we should all be considering 12-character passwords for the future. CNN commented on the report, which cracked 8-character passwords with ease using a PC graphics processing unit (GPU) that costs just a few hundred dollars. If you have ever purchased a computer with multi-core graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD’s ATI division, then you have the horsepower to brute-force passwords in a relatively short period of time.

Why are 12-characters recommended? It’s all about the mathematics. Clusters of graphics cards can crack an 8-character password in less than two hours, but using the same processing power would take 17,134 years to crack a 12-character one.

We’ve been using 10 and 12-character passwords for some time. It looks like it will be 12 from now on.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Office for Mac

Microsoft has announced an October availability of Office 2011 for the Mac, although we wonder why Redmond even bothers to produce products for the Apple crowd. It seems that most Mac fans generally bash Microsoft so we’re not sure where the anticipated revenue stream is coming from.

Office 2011 for Mac will only be available as a 32-bit version. Too bad there will be a limit as to how much you can use the sinfully overpriced RAM from Apple. [tongue in cheek]  Microsoft is even recommending the 32-bit version for Windows users unless you have very high data requirements. Outlook (instead of Entourage) will be available in the new version along with support for .PST files. Prices start at $99 for the academic version up to $279 depending on the edition purchased. Buy Office 2008 for Mac today and you’ll get a free upgrade to 2011 when it is available.

- John and Mike

(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Latest iPhone No Longer Safe

Now that the Library of Congress has granted an exemption from the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for jailbreaking cell phones, it didn’t take long for Apple’s latest iPhone to become the next victim.

Until recently, Apple’s iPhone 4.0 had not yet been jailbroken. Now it’s just like all of its predecessors. For added convenience, the “hackers” have set up a website called JailBreakMe (www.jailbreakme.com) that a user can visit from the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, compatible with devices running firmware 3.2 or higher, and have their device be jailbroken in a matter of a few clicks. The website exploits a vulnerability in the MobileSafari software, and installs software on your device that allows you to download, install and run third-party software previously blocked by Apple.

So, for those users who think their new iPhone is secure from jailbreaking, that’s no longer the case. It never seems to take long . . .

-John and Mike

(703)359-0700

digitalsamurai@senseient.com

www.senseient.com        

A Shortcut to Infection

As a Windows user, you are probably familiar with shortcuts. Those icons that have a little square with an arrow that actually point to the location of the original data. You can have shortcuts for images, applications, data or just about anything else. Shortcuts are actually known as link (LNK) files in the computer forensics world since they carry the .lnk file extension.

Microsoft has disclosed a vulnerability, where Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts when a user clicks the icon of a specially crafted .lnk file. There is a huge concern that a malicious .lnk file installed on a USB flash drive could be set to run a DLL and infect the user’s computer. Certainly, disabling the AutoRun and AutoPlay features of Windows would prevent this, but most users like to have things run automatically, especially when inserting a USB device.

Symantec reports that the malware installs two drivers, which serve as rootkits to hide the actual malware, making it extremely difficult to detect. The threat is particularly scary since it impacts a large number of Windows operating systems including Windows Server 2003, XP with SP 3, Vista, Windows 7 and even XP with SP2, which ended patch support on July 13.

For now, be careful inserting any USB device and certainly disable those AutoRun features.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

SimplyFile Update

We absolutely LOVE SimplyFile. We’ve been using it for some time now and it speeds up handling of our e-mail (filing in folders, converting to tasks, adding to calendar, etc.) saving us tons of time each day. The good just got better. TechHit has just announced SimplyFile 3.0, which is fully compatible with Outlook 2010. You’ll need Outlook 2010 to take advantage of the additional features. The cost is $49.95 with special pricing for upgrades.

If you are a prior user, you should have received an e-mail upgrade announcement by now so check your spam filter. We just purchased our upgrades.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Travel Expense: More than Baggage Fees

Doesn’t it just frost your backside with all the picky charges from the airlines? There are supplemental fees for baggage, blankets, food (sometimes it's even recognizable), headsets, extra leg space and a host of other nickel and dime charges. Well, now the government is getting into the game of aggravating travelers. The cost of a passport and renewals are going up this coming Tuesday. Starting July 13th (could they have picked a better date?) the cost of a first passport goes up 35% to $135. Right now extra pages for your current passport are free, but it will go to $82 under the new plan. The renewal fee will rise to $110 from the current $75.

Want to save a few bucks? Get or renew your passport before Tuesday.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Storage Capacity Keeps On Growing

Most attorneys have a hard time understanding exactly what the size of a hard drive or USB flash drive really means. To most, it’s just a number. The larger the number, the more data the device can store. Well that number just got larger.

Seagate, a manufacturer of hard drives and removable storage media, has just announced the release of their first 3 TB removable storage device, the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external drive. The largest available single hard drive size previously available was 2 TB. The USB/FireWire removable storage device is priced at $250 and can be purchased directly from Seagate (www.seagate.com). The drive comes with the necessary hardware to be USB 3.0 compatible when the standard is finally implemented in future computer systems, and may be a great storage option for solo and small firm backup solutions.

- John and Mike
(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Mark Your Calendars

Adobe has announced that it will release updates to its flagship Reader and Acrobat products on Tuesday, June 29th. The updates are coming earlier than originally scheduled and contains fixes for several critical “holes” and zero-day vulnerabilities that are currently being exploited. So mark your calendars and make sure you get the updates on Tuesday.

-John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Office 2010 is Here

By now, you probably know that Microsoft Office 2010 is available for purchase.  For those who are just catching on, here’s some basic pricing (boxed retail version) information to get you started:

Office Home and Student:  $149.95

Office Home and Business: $279.95

Office Professional:  $499.99

In an attempt to simplify licensing available to users, Microsoft has dropped the upgrade option and pricing. This will anger and upset many users, including us. It appears that they want you to pay full price, regardless of whether or not you have a previous version of Office.

For those users that don't want to upgrade at this time, at least Microsoft Office 2007 is supported for another seven years.

- John and Mike

(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com