If your password is a word, you’ve got a problem. Yes, even if you replaced some of the letters with numbers.  Mother’s maiden name as a “secret question”?  Not so secret.  We’ve all read the stories of celebrities, politicians and simple folk that had their accounts hacked and their dirty underwear thrown all over the press.  They were all shocked to hear that someone didn’t “hack” the system, they just guessed their password.  Vindictive exes?  Snooping spouses?  Passwords on paper?  Probably the biggest threats to your accounts…not hackers.

Facebook and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft can have the best encryption and security protocols in the world, but that doesn’t mean anything if your password is “shinyobjects321″.  It may be easy for you to remember, but it’s also easy to guess.  And, chances are, you use it for every account you have.  Sound familiar?

So, please, do these three simple things and feel much safer about the security of your accounts.

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It’s fun to say that the Internet tears down walls and allows a free flow of information around the world.  In many ways, it’s true.  People can communicate and organize in ways never before possible.  But at the same time, people can be blocked and restricted from content just as easily.  Look at China, Iran, North Korea, Singapore, and many other states that prevent their citizens from free use of the Internet.
This is not a post on the freedom of the Internet.  It’s also not a grand statement about the Internet’s role in democratization.  It’s about how I can’t watch my US television shows, and how I climbed over the wall.  Listen, I can be selfish sometimes. Read more →

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know my Facebook friends.  Well, I know who they are, but I don’t “know” them…most of them, anyway.  I knew them at one point, and some I still know.  Some of them I know too well.  Still, the vast majority of my Facebook “friends” are long gone from my life, hanging around through occasional status updates or stalking sessions.  I don’t really have a problem with this – it is what it is.

I’ve long wondered if there would be some major shift in the way people operate online – away from the “share all” culture to a “share a little” mentality – or at least to “share with a few” policy.  Software code originally forced us to share with everyone and we accepted it.  Then they let us scale it down to “friend lists” but it has been slow to catch on.  Now, we’re seeing the anti-social networks emerge.  The first I’ve actually liked is Path, released today. Read more →

Allow me to geek out a bit.  This isn’t anything all that new, but I’d never seen it for myself and thought I’d share a little.

Have you ever been walking down the sidewalk or standing in a square and wondered what you were looking at?  Perhaps a bit about the architecture, the history of a particular building, or whether that restaurant with that great happy hour deal is in fact any good?

Enter Augmented Reality.  These applications for iPhone, Android and others use the phone’s camera, GPS, accelerometer and compass to overlay graphical information on the live camera view.  Hold the camera up to the building, and peer through the looking glass to reveal the dense world of information behind it.

On my way home from the gym yesterday, I stopped in Trafalgar Square to give acrossair a spin…literally.  See my photos below with Wikipedia entries floating about.  You can also display Yelp reviews, bars, subways and more.  Really incredible stuff.  I look forward  to (read: dread) wearing contact lenses that do the same thing in a few years.