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What're you, simple? Five great reasons to be extra picky with your passwords.

by Jimmy Marks

Recently, our COO Rob (Banker, who's written a number of swell posts for us) came to town and got me going on our office network. He set me up and then asked me to enter my password. He said anything would do, so long as:

-It was eight (8) characters or more
-It had a capital letter
-There was a punctuation mark
-There was a number
-It was the same thing forwards and backwards
-You couldn't say the combo while holding a cracker in your mouth
-It had to have the name of at least one (1) person who was a regular cast member on the Carol Burnett show.

Okay, so I made up the last three. But he likes his passwords strict, and with good reason: many passwords are very easy to crack.

WHAT?!?, you're thinking to yourself. Not MY password! After all, it's pumpkinfluff34! No one would ever guess...drat! I've given it away!

The truth is, your password is probably pretty easy to guess. And you're probably making it easy for hackers to get hold of it.

You Could Be Breaking the Law And Never Know it

by Ron Daly

You get an e-mail from your local pizza parlor offering you some coupons for a free pizza. You use that e-mail's coupons, you get your pizza, you're happy.

Then they send you another e-mail with coupons for half-off a sandwich.
And another about their football hotwings.
And another about their delivery sodas and desserts.
And you suddenly realize you don't care that much about pizza. So you click the unsubscribe link and...

Nothing happens. They keep sending you e-mail! Can they really do that?

No, they can't.

e(vil)Commerce: When People Attack You Online

by Greg Crandell
When you begin to increase your online presence - as a business, as a person, or as a business person - you begin to get the best of the Internet. You can keep in touch with people, you can promote your business in a more effective way, and you can share ideas. But at some point you can begin to see the dark side of the Internet.

The Internet Delivered to Your Door

by Jimmy Marks

In my day-to-day computer/internet use, I rely on a lot of tools to help me make sense of the information I have to read my way through and, usually with these blogs, put into motion. One big tool that helps is the Google News RSS feeds...

...Let me stop myself here. Yes, I know, we've done a lot of poking (all good natured, to be sure) at Google as of late. And YES, they ARE indexing everything you could/would know. But that doesn't mean they're not helpful! Back to the news...

The Boys and Their Toys: Our web authors share their dream machines

Each of our regular authors has selected an Internet appliance he fancies, or a trend to which he's paying attention.

From Ron Daly:

"This picture (above) threw me at first, but this is actually a whole PC in a keyboard. All you need is a monitor and you have everything you want. Save space, cut down on 'desk traffic'."

From Rob Banker:

"The Consumer PC As we know it is dead. Mainstream gaming moved to the consoles (XBox, Playstation, Wii). Most home users don't do high end image manipulation with Photoshop or music production with ProTools The average consumer wants web browsing and email, the occasional Word or Excel document. Even the low-end laptops from Best Buy and Dell are too much.

Web 2.0 Makes a Difference in Disaster

by Greg Crandell

When the Virginia Tech shooting occurred on April 16, 2007, the news was hard to follow. At least, at first. CNN responded with scant reports and hard-to-follow coverage. Numbers were varied, details were scarce. But then something happened that changed the face of news forever: the witnesses started making the news itself (click here).

Cut to today, where Web 2.0 is a crucial ingredient in a disaster preparedness package. How do you quickly reach your customer base/ employees and let them know what's happening and what they can expect?

Just Browsing: Google debuts its browser and becomes the Internet's Big Box Store.

by Greg Crandell

The year was 1998. Titanic was winning all the Oscars it could manage, Windows 98 had just come along to teach us all what a computer could REALLY do, and a little-known company called "Google" had just arrived with a funny-looking logo and a really simple site design: an image, a text-field, and two buttons.

Google went from clever idea to Internet juggernaut in a few short years. Searches were quick, easy, and surprisingly thorough. After that came things like Google news, Google sports and GMail. Everyone was thrilled, because suddenly the Internet made sense.

And then something strange happened. Google became the "big box chain" of the Web.