leaving behind your old email address can be a very distressing and painful experience.  Many have been using the same email account given to them by their ISP for years and the address is known to all their friends and family.  The fear of missing messages sent to that address is a strong incentive to put up with the lousy service provided by their ISP.  Now, there are many better solutions for email but making the change can still be daunting.

Google’s GMail is a particularly good replacement for the old ISP email .  It’s free, has a lot of features including some pretty good anti-spam filtering.  GMail also gives an constantly increasing amount of storage.  Right now, it’s past 7GB which is easily twice the storage that your ISP might offer.

Please note, The following tip will only work for email accounts using POP3. It will not work for a lot of webmail accounts.

Set up Gmail to check mail on your old ISP account:

1. login to gmail and click “Settings” on the top right corner of the page.
2. Select the “Accounts and Import”” tab
3. Click the “Add POP3 email account” button from the Check mail using POP3 section.

Next type in the email address that you would like GMail to check.

Lastly all you need to do is type in the setting for the email account using the username/password and ports given by your ISP or email provider.

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Microsoft’s new anti-malware software which is to intended to replace the discontinued Windows OneCare will be released tomorrow, Sept. 29th.  Microsoft Security Essentials, codenamed Morro, was offered earlier this year as a beta to 75,000 users and now it will be made available as a free download to the public.  From my use during the beta I found MSE to be a very capable  AV software. It offers a much lighter footprint than the massive AV suites and along with Windows Defender, bundled with Windows Vista and Windows 7 and a free download for XP users, it is a great antivirus/antispyware solution.

Additional Info:

Story from pcadvisor.co.uk
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=3202792

Story From zdnet
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4091

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The Onion Beats Investigative Journalism On Google News
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/03/the-onion-beats-investigative-journalism-on-google-news/

Avoiding Apple’s Ivory Tower
You don’t have to shell out big bucks for a back-to-school computer.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/26/apple-dell-fujitsu-technology-college-money-builder-09-laptops.html?feed=rss_technology

Photos: How the Wright brothers landed an Army deal
http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10001413-1.html?tag=mncol

NFL bans tweeting before, during, after games
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10322904-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

How to Use Windows XP’s Computer Management Tool
http://pcsplace.com/windows-xp/how-to-use-windows-xps-computer-management-tool/

America, a nation obsessed with tech
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10332910-235.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars

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I spent some time today with my newly upgraded Mac Mini.  I installed Snow Leopard and as I was setting up file sharing with my Windows PCs, I saw something that I found quite amusing.  Showing that people at Apple have a wicked sense of humor, the Icon representing a “PC Server” (in this case it was my Laptop running the Windows 7 RC) showed a distinctive and quite familiar sight for a a PC user.  You can see for yourself below.

Now apparently this has been around for quite some time, but since I’m a relatively new Mac user (having left Apple for Windows 95 and being an exclusive PC user until a little less than a year ago. And using Windows 95 I certainly encountered my fair share of blue screens.) this was the first time I had noticed it and I’m surprised how many times I pulled up this screen and never noticed it.  It made me smile and shake my head a little.

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Apple announced today that the newest version of it’s Operating system, 10.6 Snow Leopard will be released Friday August 28th 2009. It will come out almost a month before Microsoft’s October 22nd Windows 7 launch. Snow Leopard does not add many new features,  Native support for Microsoft Exchange is one, but most of the changes are under the hood designed to optimize and improve the overall performance.  The upgrade price for those who have the previous version of OS X (Leopard) is only $29 which is dramatically cheaper than the previous Apple OS upgrades. The upgrade for 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard was $129.  Although for those who are still running 10.4 Tiger the upgrade will be higher ($169 and includes Snow Leopard, iWork 09 and iLife 09) and those with PowerPC processors will not be able to upgrade at all.   Still Snow Leopard seems to be a great addition for your Mac at a very good price.

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The difficulty with choosing a strong, secure password is remembering that password in the future. Many people overcome the difficulty and inconvenience of remembering by choosing short and easy passwords.  It’s not all that surprising that the most commonly used passwords are ‘123456’ and ‘password’.  Other bad passwords include simple patterns ‘qwerty’, names ‘michael’, common words ‘monkey’ and sports team names ‘redskins’. Before choosing a password you may want to consider checking the list linked below to make sure your password is not one of the “500 worst passwords”. Note: some people think they are very clever when picking crude and inappropriate words as their bad passwords, so don’t follow the link if you are offended by that kind of language.

http://www.whatsmypass.com/category/password-info

The second thing people do to overcome the inconvenience of remembering long passwords is to reuse the password for multiple sites. If your password is compromised on one site, then it is compromised on every other site the password is used.  One of the key vulnerablilties in the recent twitter hack was a actually not a “hack” but a Twitter employee who reused their password.

The Solution:

“It’s ok to write down your passwords”. While you can simply keep a text file with all your passwords on your computer, there is also software that can remember those super-strong passwords for you.  They range from the open source keepass (http://keepass.info/) to commercial solutions such as RoboForm (http://www.roboform.com/) and every modern browser will offer to remember passwords.

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The lack of way of checking your spelling without having to download a third party plugin has been my biggest beef with Internet Explorer for a long time now. Internet Explorer is the only major browser that does not include tools to help check your spelling.  Firefox, Chrome and Safari all offer inline spellchecking which presents a red line under each misspelled word and offers suggestions when you right click them. IE on the other hand doesn’t offer anything and it’s absence makes it very difficult to use IE7 after using other browsers such as Firefox or Sarari.

I wrote an earlier post about using a plugin called IE7Pro to add inline spellchecking to IE.  However IE7Pro offers a lot of other features such as an ad-blocker and there are some people who simply want to check their spelling and not add another toolbar to their browser.  I found anther plugin that has a much smaller footprint called ieSpell.  ieSpell does not give inline spellchecking but it adds a single button to your toolbar that will check the spelling of your text fields. You can choose between US, UK and Canadian dictionaries and you are able to look up the definitions of words using Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary or Wikipedia. ieSpell is free for commercial use and you can get it at http://www.iespell.com

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Google’s Chrome blog recently wrote a post about changes coming to Chrome. The latest beta for Google’s web browser came with tweaks to the Javescript engine, allowing it to run javascript even faster (30% improvement for the Sunspider and V8 benchmarks) and added more HTML 5 capabilities.  Also included was a way to add themes to chrome.  The new themes give Chrome’s previous no-frills Spartan look a much more visually appealing appearance.  While not available in the stable release of chrome, you can download the beta to use the new themes. The Beta can be downloaded from http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/. The easiest way to access the themes gallery is to go to https://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en/themes/index.html.  However you can also open Chrome’s options and select the “Personal Stuff” tab and click the “Get Themes” button.

Google started by releasing 29 themes and plans to add more when Themes are added to the stable version of Chrome.

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Mozilla just released the final version of Mozilla Firefox 3.5.  Here are some noteworthy changes for the newest version of Firefox.

1. Support for HTML 5 and support for Open Video.  Which does not use a plug-in like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Siverlight
2. Adds Private browsing mode.  Useful for keeping birthday presents a surprise :)
3. Adds support for location aware browsing
4. Improved performance rendering Javascript using the new TraceMonkey Javascript engine.

Here is a video released by Mozilla introducing Firefox 3.5.  You can get the video at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/video/firefox-3.5.html.  If I’m not mistaken, if you navigate to the page using Firefox 3.5 it uses HTML 5 Open Video.

As always you can get the latest Release of Mozilla Firefox at www.getfirefox.com

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Formatting emails in HTML is a very powerful tool and is often used very attractive emails.  Examples of legitmate uses of HTML email are for online promotions or newsletters.  However HTML has been heavily abused and has some very serious consequences for security.  It is very easy to hide the true destination of a link using HTML.  This is part of the nature of HTML.  Here is the code used to create a link.

<a href=”evilsite.com”> (This is the actual address of the link)

https://www.onlinebankingsite.com</a> (A fake address posing as a legitimate site)

In HTML a spammer can easily define a url and include also descriptive text which is presented to the recipient rather than the link.  The recipient does not see the url hidden behind the descriptive text and will click it, thinking it is the site referenced in the descriptive text, and is directed to whatever site the spammer wants. It is a potent tool often used in Phishing attacks to steal usernames and passwords, banking information, credit card numbers, etc.

Here is a real example

I got this suspected phishing email.  The link says www.paypal.com.  It’s also https so it’s secure right?

Here’s what what the link looks like if you look at the code.  Notice that the real address for the link is not https://www.paypal.com, but an IP address.

How to protect yourself

1. The safest way to protect yourself is to turn off the display of HTML in your email program.  This will ensure that all your messages are sent in plain text.  This is the safest way to use email.

2. If you absolutely need to follow a link in an email, copy the descriptive text of the link and paste it directly into the address bar of your browser.  This should ensure that the descriptive text is used as the address and not any hidden address.

3. Many email programs will automatically disable links in emails from unknown senders.  They also will recognize the spoofed address and warn user before enabling the links.  Although you should never rely on your email program to keep you totally safe.

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