Overdue Reviews: 'Strange Days'

Jon Chase

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Latest Posts from Switched

A Baker's Dozen Tips for Spring Cleaning Your Mac

by Jon Chase on April 7, 2011 at 01:00 PM

Whether you're a recent convert, ambivalent veteran or one of those hardened Apple fanboys, let us remind you: a Mac, like any other computer, needs to be maintained. No, you probably don't need anti-virus software (yet), you may never have to fiddle with registry editing, and you'll likely never need to reinstall the operating system. But you may face a kernel panic, a raft of mysterious app crashes or the dreaded spinning beach ball of death. We've put together thirteen tips for keeping our Macs lean, clean computing machines. Spring has sprung, so, while you dust off your shelves and empty your closets, do some Mac maintenance, too.

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Complexity Is Killing Us: A Security State of the Union With Eugene Spafford of CERIAS

by Jon Chase on March 3, 2011 at 02:55 PM

For our second annual spotlight on cyber-security, Switched turned to a renowned expert in the field: Eugene H. Spafford, Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. Among his many professional associations and corporate and governmental advisory roles, Spafford is the Executive Director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), which supports research in information, security and communication infrastructures. A legend among those who were around for the early days of the Internet, Spaf (as he's known) is credited as one of the major contributors to the system for organizing Usenet, and analyzed one of the first known computer worms. When asked what OS he'd recommend over any others, Spaf refused to be pigeon-holed, which became understandable when he explained that he maintains seven computers of his own, with a cornucopia of OSes installed among them. He did admit, however, that since 1987 his main machine has always been a Mac -- although his current one is stuffed to the gills running OS X, Windows, Linux and BSD Unix.

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Hacked and Hijacked! What to Do if Your Identity Gets Stolen

by Jon Chase on March 1, 2011 at 02:40 PM

Symptoms:

Imagine the pit in your stomach: finding charges on your credit cards or bank statements for items you didn't buy; applying for credit or a mortgage and being denied due to delinquencies on accounts you didn't open. The amounts for the previous year's reported income on your annual Social Security statement is incorrect, and for more than you earned. Or you get a letter or call from the IRS attempting to collect on back taxes for income you never made. Or you've stopped receiving credit card statements in the mail -- even when you have a balance due. Even more frightening, you may also have recently had issues with your PC, or been unable to log into online financial accounts. Maybe you've found that your e-mail or social networking accounts have been compromised.

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Hacked and Hijacked! What's Next When Your Facebook/Twitter Is Hacked

by Jon Chase on February 28, 2011 at 02:20 PM

Symptom:

Maybe your Twitter or Facebook friends have gotten viciously spammed with fake offers for a free iPad, or a link to a fake app -- from your profile. Or, maybe you've discover posts on your profile that you never wrote, often with links leading to websites, apps or coupons. You may discover personal messages sent to friends that you didn't write, perhaps asking them to wire money. Or, worst case, you may be unable to log into your account.

Diagnosis:

Social networking sites have become immensely popular stops online, and thus the destinations du jour for criminals and black-hat hackers looking to make a buck the easy way. After all, a user's Facebook account is an incredible storehouse of personal and private information, and its very structure, expressly built for rapidly and broadly disseminating data through a complex web of connections, couldn't be better designed for quick-hit schemers. Typical users are happy to click on a link, visit a site or try out an app that they think has been vetted by a trusted friend. In a certain sense, Facebook may be the most successful virus disseminator ever created.

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Hacked and Hijacked! How to Save Data if Your Portable Device Is Stolen

by Jon Chase on February 25, 2011 at 01:20 PM

Symptom:

You reach into your pocket or bag, and, well, it's empty!

Diagnosis:

Beyond the understandable distress of losing a pricey smartphone, laptop or tablet PC, the real trauma is the sudden and unfettered access afforded to the slippery-fingered jerk who took it. The cost of a new laptop is meager compared to the personal and even financial havoc that a motivated thief can wreak with the data stored on a typical portable device.

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Hacked and Hijacked: What to Do if Your E-mail Account Gets Compromised

by Jon Chase on February 24, 2011 at 01:05 PM

Symptoms:

People listed in your e-mail contacts report being flooded with spam messages sent from your account. Or, you start receiving a bevy of "bounced" e-mails from random addresses you don't know. You aren't able to log into your account or change its settings, or you've discovered the settings have been altered. You attempt to use e-mail, and find it has been blocked by your provider.

Diagnosis:

Start with the obvious: If your password no longer works for your e-mail account (and it's definitely the correct password), you can be almost certain that someone else has taken control of it. And if your e-mail provider has blocked you completely, it's probably because your account was spewing out spam by the millions, forcing your provider to shut it down until you regain control. This is a good thing, and you'll get it back. Likewise, learning from friends that your account has let loose a firehose of spam (which sometimes can be verified by checking the Sent messages folder in your account) pretty much confirms that some scumbag has figured out your password. Losing control of your mail and password combo can be especially calamitous if, like far too many people, you use the same ones for all the online sites and services you use, such as social networking, banking and PayPal. Even the dumbest hacker will do a quick e-mail search in your account to scrape for login info on other sites, and, in no time, will assemble a pretty good portfolio on you. Depending on the ambition and skill set of the hacker, on the time between when your account was compromised and when you discovered it, and on how secure your various online accounts are, your level of pain may fall anywhere between minor annoyance to personal and financial meltdown. Time is of the essence, and don't underestimate how deep this thing can go.

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Hacked and Hijacked: What to Do if Your PC Gets Compromised

by Jon Chase on February 23, 2011 at 03:10 PM

Symptoms:

There are a range of telltale signs that your PC has been infiltrated by a binary ne'er-do-well, but, counterintuitively, the worst case scenario is when there are no obvious symptoms at all. For starters, you may have an infection if your PC or Internet throughput has become consistently sluggish, and a restart doesn't cure it. Frequent, random pop-up windows with ads or system warnings are almost always clues to an infection. And, if you've discovered that your login credentials for any website have been hijacked -- whether for e-mail, banking or Facebook -- there's a possibility that malware is on your PC.

Diagnosis:

You're doubtless familiar with at least a few of the ever-multiplying terms for the nasties that can frustrate and even destroy your PC, such as viruses, Trojans, worms, malware, adware, spyware and rootkits. Depending on what bug your computer has caught, the ailment may just be an annoying hindrance, like those viruses that reset your browser home page or spew Viagra pop-up ads. Some varieties, however, are legitimately dangerous. Some can suck up all of the personal info from your PC and send it off to a remote hacker. Others can record your keystrokes in order to steal the password to any site. Still others can take complete control of your PC -- using it to send out spam e-mails by the millions, to host porn or illegal software, or even to attack corporations and governments. Botnets -- networks of thousands or even millions of hacked PCs that have been turned into "zombie" armies under the control of an individual or group -- are actively used by organized crime these days. It's serious stuff.

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Backups! How to Save Your Digital World From Doom

by Jon Chase on February 7, 2011 at 03:05 PM

It's a fact of life that too many of us learn the excruciatingly painful way: hard drives, like humans, have an unpredictable lifespan. Sometimes they last a long time, but sometimes, well, they die suddenly. Now think of all the physical goods we used to store in shoeboxes and drawers that in today's world exist only in digital form on our PCs: photos, music, home movies, Hollywood movies and TV shows, term papers, work projects, love letters, bank account data and financial forms. They were always perishable -- but, barring floods and natural disasters, most of those things could last a lifetime or more without worry. Not so in the digital age. While many of us have been fortunate enough to have hard drives that last years with nary a hiccup, there's simply no escaping fate. Your hard drive will die, and, if you haven't backed up your precious data, it's gone forever.

That, of course, leaves us all stuck on an eternal treadmill, having to regularly and thoroughly make digital copies of all of our stuff, over and over and over again, lest it disappear. The best we can hope for, then, is finding a system that makes the process as easy and reliable as possible. Thankfully, solutions have appeared in the past several years with a range of services and products to simplify the process. Today, beating the grim reaper before your next backup is far less painful than the days of dragging and dropping individual files, or burning stacks of DVDs or CDs of photo and music archives.

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How to Score Your Dream LCD TV on the Cheap for the Super Bowl

by Jon Chase on January 31, 2011 at 11:20 AM

HDTVs have been around for a decade now, and, if you have the lucky pleasure of hosting this year's Super Bowl party and are without an HDTV, we assure you that now is the time to take the plunge. We've got the HDTV that'll score as high as your preferred team, and won't bust your bank account, either. HDTVs are a mature enough technology today that even average ones perform rather well, and all of them have the requisite connections and built-in technologies to last for a good long time. Unless, of course, this whole 3-D thing takes off... but we aren't holding our breath.

Super Bowl week happens to be a great time to buy an HDTV at a reasonable price, as long as you don't mind buying a slightly dated model. That's because CES, where everyone announced all their new models for the coming year, was a few weeks ago, and now much of the selection in stores is older stock. Before you go and spend the cash that is burning a hole in your pocket on the cheapest set you can find, we'd offer a few tips for getting the best bang for your buck, and which sale models are steals at three price points.

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Best Tablets of CES: Xoom, VIA, Tab and PlayBook Lead the Way

by Jon Chase on January 9, 2011 at 06:00 AM

We're quickly coming up on a year since the iPad was released, and while opinions may have been divided early on, there's simply no questioning now that Apple's take on the tablet PC singlehandedly made that long-failing device category suddenly viable. Apple didn't invent the tablet; it was simply the first to craft one that was compelling enough to finally win over consumers. Along the way, it has sold in the millions and become the undisputed champ, utterly crushing the few uninspired and hamfisted pretenders to the throne.

As you may have heard, this year's CES has been blandly dubbed "The Year of the Tablet" in recognition of the piles of tablets that will be crowding store shelves this year from virtually every big name company you've heard of, and many you haven't. Yet, the early word from pundits has almost resoundingly been one of mocking resignation, with the assumption that the iPad, and its presumed successor this spring, are an unstoppable juggernaut. There is some logic and appeal to that argument -- it's easy to vote for the frontrunner -- but, as Grandpa used to say, we think that's a bunch of absolute horsepucky.

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Better, Stronger, Faster: The World's Most Powerful Phones, Coming Soon

by Jon Chase on January 8, 2011 at 02:40 PM

Share Though it's accepted wisdom that 2011 is "The Year of the Tablet" (we're pretty sure it falls between the year of the Hare and the Dragon), apparently someone forgot to tell smartphone manufacturers. Tablets were as common as rollie suitcases and bad skin at CES, but what's really crushed our craniums has been the bevy of ultra-powerful cellphones. We've seen several models that will take ... Read more »

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DLNA: The Secret Sauce Behind the Best of CES

by Jon Chase on January 7, 2011 at 03:40 PM

Chief among the handful of dazzling revelations at this year's CES have been the scores of devices that can be interconnected seamlessly, finally delivering on the years-old promise of the fully connected home. So, now you can, say, hook your home network up to your TV, your gaming system, your home stereo, your laptop and desktop PCs, your Blu-ray players and DVR, as well as your audio receiver ... Read more »

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Cutting the (Other) Cord: The Best Wireless Internet Options

by Jon Chase on December 29, 2010 at 04:00 PM

A reader asks: I'm intrigued by the idea of getting rid of my DSL Internet service, and switching to one of these 4G wireless services I've seen advertised. My question is whether it's actually viable at this point. I have a desktop and a couple laptops, and two phones we use on our home Wi-Fi network, and wonder if these services can handle all that. I have no idea how to research this, so ... Read more »

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Gift Guide: All-in-One iHome iB970B Charging Station for Under $100

by Jon Chase on December 21, 2010 at 07:30 AM

We're willing to bet that you have at least one special electrical outlet that plays host to an overtaxed and exhausted power strip -- you know, the one swarmed by chargers for your cell phone, iPod, PSP or Nintendo DS, and perhaps an iPad or e-reader for good measure. (That's not even counting your roommate or significant other's contributions.) For overwhelmed sockets, we'd recommend the ... Read more »

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Gift Guide: Creative Live! Cam Socialize HD 1080 Webcam for Under $100

by Jon Chase on December 20, 2010 at 06:40 PM

If you weren't able to divine what exactly this product is from its ridiculously wonky title, we totally understand. But the awkwardly named Creative Live! Cam Socialize HD 1080 (CLCSHD1080, for short) is a webcam that captures high-definition 1080p video at 30fps, and can stream video chats at 720p (as long as your upstream Internet service provides 1 mbps or higher). Within the webcam world -- ... Read more »

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