Internet Cafe Safety

Do you get more work done if you can get out of your house or office? Let’s say your location of preference is a coffee house with free Internet access. (Yeah, let’s just say…) It feels better to “work” when you know that there are others working around you, right? Do you sometimes procrastinate by going online to check your email, sports scores or any website that will give you 5 minutes of sugar? Me too – just not the sports scores.

Did you know how easy it is for the person “working” on the laptop next to you to see everything you’re doing online? I’m talking about every email you send or receive and every website you visit. There are free softwares available (even for Macs!) for people to “sniff” out your business. Thought you should know.

Are people doing this all the time? Who knows? Probably not. But it is a possibility…

If you’re not looking at anything earth shattering or exchanging more than banal emails with your friends, who cares, right? As long as you know there’s a risk that it could happen, you won’t send your kids’ social security numbers over an insecure connection to your husband.

But let’s say you are a very private person and can’t stand the possibility of some interloper looking at your business? There are solutions:

• You can sign up for encrypted email services, some of which are free. Try these:

http://lavabit.com/
http://www.safe-mail.net/
http://www.vfemail.net/

• If you have file sharing preferences on at home, make sure to turn them off when you go onto a public Wifi connection.

• If you’re connecting back to a home office or small business, you can get someone to install for you a VPN (Virtual Private Network), which will encrypt everything sent to and from your laptop. A VPN is a lot more affordable than it used to be. Think of it as a private tunnel on the Internet from your laptop back to your office.

• If the website you are visiting has a padlock in the corner or if the URL starts with https:// (with the ‘S” as opposed to http://), that means that you are on a secure website and your transmissions will be safe and private. Look at your bank’s website, it will have the https://

• Wait until you get to a secure network to exchange emails or to visit a website that you are intent on keeping private.

Most people who snoop, if they’re skilled enough to get through encryption, have more incentive to chase Citibank or UCLA to get bank account lists or social security numbers and not someone sitting with their laptop at Coffee Bean with their vacation photos.

Even though I know all of these things, I don’t encrypt my laptop. Why? I don’t think my transmissions are all that interesting. And I’m too busy “working.”

Where to Find a $99 iPhone

Check out this NY Times article.

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/where-to-find-a-99-iphone/?hp

Buying a refurbished piece of equipment is no big deal, especially if you have a warranty.

Happy New Year!

...And another thing about our Road Trip to San Francisco...

When we drove to San Francisco over Thanksgiving weekend with our kids, we were loathe to eat at a fast food restaurant off of Highway 5 — one of the plainest, most boring drives in this beautiful country that we live in. We wanted… an experience. But Yelp doesn’t really cover I-5.

We had our GPS set up — I know, what for? I-5 is one straight line — but we’re techy people, so we had it on, just to satisfy our curiosity. My husband suddenly clicked on “points of interest” on the GPS. One of the categories was “food.” Yeah, we clicked that, too. There was a whole mess of restaurants only 5 miles off of the highway. Near the state prison. Yay!

We got off and found that gas was sixty cents cheaper (hello!) and we ate AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS Mexican food for a very low cost. And I was able to practice my Spanish with everyone.

Hey, if you’re a traveling mom, you must take some risks. When they pay off, it’s beautiful.

RedBox Rules

We just rented 4 DVDs for our roadtrip to San Francisco for the Thanksgiving holiday for $4 — that was $1/day. Oh, you say, but if it’s $1/day, and you stay the whole weekend, that adds up, no?

NO!

Redbox is a kiosk that can be found in over 10,000 McDonalds and supermarkets around the COUNTRY so that you can take a road trip and drop off your videos in an easy location once you get there. Pick out your movies and then drop them off!

This is better than Netflix because you can exchange movies faster — even when you’re traveling!

You’re welcome.

Spam. Delicious?

Spam is not delicious. Yet, we all eat it. Every day.

When you make an online purchase, sign up for a newsletter or buy a ticket on United, your email is up for grabs. Vendors may sell your email address or use it for their other companies to solicit your business. At the very least, they will send you a monthly email with some great deal they have — or some extremely helpful newsletter. Spammers could also be trolling chat sites to gather addresses. Hence, spam. So what’s the solution?

Get a 2nd, free email address with say, Yahoo or Hotmail or Google, for all of your online purchases. (If your main email address is with Yahoo or Hotmail or Google, just get another one.) Then, keep your main email private, SACRED. NEVER purchase anything online with your main email address. Don’t even sign a petition! Use your secondary email for that. Most of your spam will now go to the secondary email. And since you never give out that email address to anyone you care about, you can just delete all of your emails at that secondary address en masse. Nice.

A few other things to think about: don’t respond to spam. Don’t YELL, don’t even ask nicely to be taken off their list. Even if they say, “to unsubscribe, press reply and type ‘remove’ in the subject line” – unless you know and trust the company. Otherwise, they will know that they have reached an active email address and they will send you more. If you have spam notification software, check it off as spam and then delete. Even better: delete spam before you open it – sometimes opening spam can trigger an alert to the spammer that your email address is active. (Insidious, eh?)

USE the spam filters! Most email programs like Outlook, Outlook Express and Entourage have them. They allow you to set different levels of protection: the highest level being that you will only allow mail from those already in your address book. Yahoo and Hotmail and Google also have spam filters in place. If you’re really not kidding around, you could buy a spam blocker like SpamArrest. It’s super easy to use, keeps the junk emails away and if you’re still interested, you could look at your daily spam, if you really wanted to.

But just know, spam is not good for you.

Mom 2.0 -- Defined

You want to know what Mom 2.0 means? It's about using technology to increase your functionality, efficiency and fun-factor as a mom. The Internet has evolved to a platform that goes beyond sending emails and searching for shopping deals. There are so many ways to enhance your role as a mom (or dad) by accessing and embracing the best of what the Internet has to offer. For example, you ask?

• using a webcam to video chat on a daily basis so that your kids can talk to your parents who live 3000 miles away
• signing up for an alert system online so that if there's an emergency at your school, all parents can be emailed/phoned/texted immediately AND simultaneously
• asking your child to create a playlist from your music subscription (iTunes, Rhapsody) account to be loaded on the MP3 player for the family road trip
  

Mom 2.0 will offer pithy tech tips in a mom-context that you can read in 5 minutes and implement immediately in order to enrich and add function to your lives. I will also point you in the right direction for something that I can't figure out myself. Know this: one person can't know everything. And that's the beauty of Mom 2.0. We're all in this together.

The smartest people I know always ask for help.