I work in technology everyday, and occasionally I like to share what I’ve found.
Computer Programming is a great career that can take you so many different places and let you do many different kinds of jobs. The two most important things to remember:
Things I mentioned:
You may have heard about Net Neutrality lately. The FCC has recently made a rule change that removes protections that kept those that carry internet traffic from charging extra fees to content providers to allow their services higher priority. You may have heard that the Net Neutrality rules were needless government intervention in the internet and that winy content companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook trying to get their way. I have to disagree with this take. In my opinion the real losers from this change will be the majority of internet users. You and me. We will suffer from the lose of new innovation, the monopolization of content, and an increase in the stranglehold that large corporations have on all that we do. All of the current large companies, whether content companies or ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T) will be the winners in losing Net Neutrality and the losers will be you and me and all of those currently not in control.
I wrote several years ago about the risks of losing Net Neutrality, and the risks have come home to roost. Net Neutrality (NN) is a term that means that ISPS (the people who bring the internet connections to your house) can not treat some data differently than other data. The term itself sounds very friendly; neutral. The lose of NN means that ISPs can charge a content provider a higher rate to give their content priority on the network. This can mean that you get your YouTube videos faster than your emails which means higher quality video and shouldn’t impact your emails. That in itself is a good thing. However, we need to be thinking beyond that short term gain. Killing NN will reduce the amount of innovation from NEW PLAYERS in the content area, the very thing that has driven the internet forward since the early days. Many have argued that we didn’t have the NN policy when the internet began and things were just fine, why do we need it now. I was there in the early days, and I can tell you that this wasn’t a policy then because there wasn’t enough money in internet traffic. All the players were ALL small and so who was winning was always changing.
The way the industry stands today, there are two opposing giants. On one hand you have the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons (the content companies); on the other hand you have Verizons, Comcasts, and AT&T (the ISPs), and not many others. It’s true that these two groups are competing and with the death of NN the content companies will likely have to pay the ISPs more money if they want their products sent to us, the consumers, faster. But let’s think about which of these two groups is most likely to face new competition.
The ISPs are in the hardware business. They have large infrastructures that have been built up over years and years. They have run last mile connections to many homes and they have peering relationships with each other that basically closes the door on new competition. They even stomp out community based efforts to stand up better internet access in places that aren’t well served by them. They are not likely to face new competitors in their current state. The content companies on the other hand, while they are definitely well entrenched and have their own infrastructures that have been built up over years, face constant competition from every person with an idea. ANYONE can create a new service and put it on the internet to be weighed and evaluated by the world. That is why places like Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, and many many others are now fading or gone; replaced by new companies and Verizon and AT&T are still here, the same as they were 25 years ago when things got started.
So, if the ISPs are the same ones that were here from the beginning and they didn’t abuse their power then, why should we be worried now? The money! The internet has become THE WAY we get most of our news, entertainment, and communication. With NN dead the barriers to entry will go way way up. Likely, Google will have to pay Verizon extra to get their YouTube videos to you. Bad for Google. But very few new companies will be able to raise the money needed to create a competitor to YouTube. We won’t get the new competitors that move things forward and the real losers in all of this will be us the consumers. We will have to pay more for less choice and less innovation.
A neutral net allows new competition, new ideas, and new voices to come through and win on their merits. A non-neutral internet means less competition and more control by those in power today.
A few weeks ago, my youngest turned 13. Our first teenager. I was discussing with a group how many teenagers we’d one day have in the house at one time (6, Lord help us). It reminded me of a tool I had built several years ago. The tool allowed me to see the ages of each of my kids on a timeline and then slide the whole group along to see what their relative ages are. I dusted it off and added some extra features to make possible for anyone to load their own children. You can load in your kids and see what combinations you’re going to be dealing with as they grow up. You can also click the “Load Demo Data” button to roughly see our situation.
There’s a nasty vulnerability out on the internet right now called Heartbleed that could be making the secured sites you go to unsecure. Normally I would say that if you see the padlock icon in your browser you are ok and can trust all the traffic you send to get to it’s destination safely. This security hole calls that into question, and worse it could mean that anyone who has been gathering and collecting encrypted traffic could now decrypt it.
There’s not much you can do yourself right now as a website consumer. There is a fix for the vulnerability, but it has to be applied at the server level. Responsible server admins will be patching this very quickly as there is an update to their software and it’s fairly easy to apply. I would give them a day or two to patch their systems and then seriously consider changing the passwords to your important things like your bank and places that have your credit card on file. Otherwise, someone who has squirreled away your old traffic could now decrypt it and find out your passwords.
A few years ago, I wrote a series of articles describing “Cloud Services” that offered some great functionality like Offsite Backups, Password Storage with LastPass, and Note taking with Evernote for little to no money and showed how you could use the Internet for more than web browsing. Today I’ll describe a service called Dropbox that was mentioned briefly in the backups article, but which deserves an article of its own.
At it’s core, Dropbox allows you to put all your commonly used files on your computer but also have them instantly and automatically copied to the dropbox website and to any of your other computers! Together, the Dropbox website and all of your computers make up your Dropbox Cloud. Let’s say you have a work laptop and a desktop at home. When you save something on your laptop, the changes will be copied to your desktop and to the Dropbox website (protected by a login and password of course), all automatically. One of the best things about Dropbox is that you don’t have to have Internet access all the time to use it. It can’t update your Dropbox Cloud until you get back online, but once you do reconnect, any changes you’ve made in the meantime are sent immediatly.
Dropbox does all this by installing a small program on your computer. To have a file included in your Dropbox Cloud, simply save them into your Dropbox folder. This is usually inside your Documents folder, but you can put it anywhere. Anything that you put in this folder, pictures, movies, Word docs, other folders, all of these things will be automatically synced to your cloud.
One way we use this in our house is for the kids’ computer work. The kids are constantly moving between my computer, my wife’s computer, and the family machine. By creating a folder for each of the kids in Dropbox and sharing that folder between my account and my wife’s account, anything the kids save will be automatically copied to every computer in the house.
Speaking of kids, you may have experienced the heartbreak of losing changes when someone overwrites your novel or the family budget spreadsheet. Dropbox stores the last 8 versions of every file in the Dropbox folder. When you realize that your file has mysteriously changed to a bunch of gibberish, just go to the Dropbox website, right click the file and choose Previous versions. You’ll see the last 8 versions and the date they were last saved. Then you can choose the version you want. A great way to recover work you thought was gone forever! You can even restore deleted files!
I mentioned my wife and I share the kids folder between our accounts, and sharing is a great feature of Dropbox. There are two ways to go about this. Send them a link to a file, or Share with them. In the first case, you can make files and/or folders in your Dropbox downloadable by others, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account. Just right click and choose share a link to get a URL you can give to anyone who can then see those files. This allows for a simple way to let someone see a group of photos or get around email attachment issues.
When you share a folder or file, the other person will need to have a Dropbox account, or signup for one. You right click and choose Share This Folder and then add the email address you want to share with. They’ll get a message to agree to the share or create an account, and from then on you can both edit the files and changes will be synced between both accounts. Full collaboration details are on the Dropbox site.
Recently, Dropbox has been adding a bunch of Photo and Video features. They now include a central place to view all the pictures in your Dropbox Cloud, photo album creation, and you can upload pictures straight from your mobile phone or tablet. More on the mobile tools later, but selecting a few photos or folders you can add them to an album and easily share the album with anyone you choose. When it comes to letting people see the photos from your vacation or trip, this is about as easy as it gets.
If you have a smart phone, Dropbox is a great way to get to the files you’ve been working with from anywhere. Install the app and browse your files, when you need a file click it and it will download to your phone. To make sure that you can get to it even when you don’t have a connection, mark it as a favorite. A special feature of the mobile app is Camera Upload. This will allow you to automatically upload all the pictures you take on your phone to Dropbox where you can move them wherever you want. Much simpler than some of the photo management tools on smart phones.
Dropbox comes with 2 GB of free space, which you can stretch a long way, but there are ways to get more. You can purchase extra space if you want or get free space by going through their tutorial and referring others to Dropbox. You can also get extra free space if you are a student and have a “.edu” email address. In full disclosure, the links to Dropbox in this article are referral links and we get extra free space when you signup through those links. It doesn’t change our enthusiasm for Dropbox, and thanks for helping us out! Dropbox has truly become a central part of how our family works on the computer. We don’t worry about lost work, schlepping files around on thumb drives, or collaborating together on projects.
My wife and I have now been dating or married for half my life. Calculate your relationship half-life with “The Relationship Half-Life Calculator”. It seems like just a moment hon 😉
Your birthday:
Date your relationship started:
In our 3 part series on using the cloud for everyday things you need, we’ve covered backups and passwords, now we’ll cover the simple act of note taking. The service I’m talking about is a tool/service called Evernote. Evernote is both a web service and a piece of software. In brief it is a place to take notes that will automatically back them up and make them available through a website and a local client, but it’s much more than that. It can change the way you keep track of everything from Meeting notes and magazine articles to your bills.
Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 3 – Every note in the cloud”
In Part 1 of this three part series, we talked about using Cloud Services for backups. In Part 2, we’ll talk about how you can use the cloud to keep track of the myriad passwords you end up collecting and how you can start creating better passwords to protect you from attacks. All this without risking storing your passwords in the open on someone else’s server, and always giving you a secure way to download a local backup.
Most of us have accounts all over the Internet, and most of them use some kind of username and password to let us access our account. It may seem that the only way to keep track of them is to use the same password for most of the accounts. Maybe you use a different one for your bank and a few other places, but it just becomes impossible to remember a different password for each site. You could keep them all on Post-Its along your monitor, but hopefully you know that’s not a good idea. So using a tool of some sort is a great way to get around this. Several years ago I started using the password manager built into my browser to track passwords, and it was a great burden lifted. I still used the same username and password on many sites, simply because I was lazy and didn’t want to create a new one. But I used harder passwords more often and they were all remembered for me. About a year ago, I started using a free service call LastPass to keep track of my passwords, and it has changed the way I work with passwords forever.
Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 2 – Passwords”
Last year, I wrote an article about using the cloud for backups and doing it securely. There have been some big changes in the area since then, and I wanted to return to it and update some of my recommendations and add some new tools to the mix as well. This is part 1 of a three part series on using Cloud Services. Part 1 will revisit backups, Part 2 will cover storing passwords securely in the cloud, and Part 3 will show you how to keep track of every thought that crosses your mind and make it available anywhere, all through the cloud. Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 1 – Backups”
If you haven’t heard of “the cloud”, you probably haven’t been paying attention to all of the online services that are cropping up online. If you’ve used Flickr, Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, or any of the thousands of online tools available today, you’ve used the cloud. It’s a way of saying that the things you put on those sites are stored “somewhere”, but you don’t know, or need to care, where it’s stored. It’s just in the clouds. I’ve always been a little hesitant of putting things “in the cloud”. Continue reading “How I learned to love the cloud (at least for backups)”