A Helpful Guide Through Our New Digital Age

Just like China we all need a little more security to keep those unwanted individuals from seeing important data. The Internet is filled with important information that needs to be secured, whether it is located on your computer or somewhere on the net. Sensitive information like passwords to our online bank accounts or paypal and information dealing with freedom or Tiananmen Square are kept securely away from the eyes of others.

One important application type is called a firewall, which watches traffic going in and out of your system and managing what applications have the right to communicate with the web on your computer. Most firewalls create what are called Trusted zones. These zones are either computers or networks deamed safe for the particular program to communicate with. Some network services should be kept in your local network while other like your web browser should be able to access sites outside of your local network.

There are quite a few different companies that provide firewall applications. Some of the more successful are: Norton Personal Firewall, McAfee Personal Firewallplus, and ZoneAlarm from Zone Labs. Norton and McAfee will usually sell their firewall with their suite edition that includes their antivirus software and a few other extra features. Both are very good choices becauase they’re very simple to use and generate their own rules for trusted zones without your interaction. ZoneAlarm is a very nice freeware firewall application. It has a nice interface and will allow for users to manually set up and manage the firewall rules. Zone Labs also has ZoneAlarm Pro that you can purchase which is similar to both Norton and McAfees and easier to use than their basic firewall.

For any users of Yahoo’s Chat site you’ll find yourself overloaded with chatroom SPAM. Not just spam but you’ll find yourself confronted with individuals wanting to give you a good “deal”, which is just a “fisher” looking for his next target or you might be the target of boot codes or text floods that will get increasingly annoying as the night goes on.

Well never fear for our good friend, David J. Binette, has a wonderful tool called YahElite, which incorporates a client for both Yahoo Messanger and Yahoo Chat. It provides “boot code”, “text floods”, “unwanted PMs”, “sound bombs” and spam. Most of these you’ll know and understand if you’ve ever logged into Yahoo Chat for an hour. It’s fairly straight forward with a very little learning curve. It uses a lot of colors to mark different types of messages and has all the options you’ve used, and might not even know about, all in one client.

I’d recommend this program to anyone who has a lot of free time to spend in a chat room. You’ll hear a lot about this program because it’s increasing popularity. It also allows for avatars, which helps identify other YahElite users.

I don’t know a single person who hasn’t complained about “malware“. It comes in many forms and is probably on your system now. The most popular being in the form of tracking cookies. They can slow your computer down, lock it up and, for all those who know about them, they can make us feel insecure about our computers.

There is hope however. There are programs for your PC that will protect and prevent malware from taking over your pc. You can go out and purchase Antivirus programs like Norton Antivirus or McAffee. They work very well and protect from the latests and greatest in viruses but there are also applications free on the web to download that can protect your computer such as AntiVir which is free and will provide nearly if not the same protection. Sites such as Bitdefender Online Scanner and Tend Mirco’s House Call will scan your computer for viruses and report back if your infected with a virus.

There are also small bits of code/applications out there called “spyware” which a good partion target usually your web browser and others run in the background and monitor and/or record certain actions, your user name and passowrd or even grab your credit card information and report it to a server or web forum. They have many forms and their are other applications that you may want to download to detect these. I would recommend Ad-Aware and Spybot - Search & Destroy.

Protecting your computer is the first step in protecting yourself from the evil that lives in the sites and software you download.

Gmail is not just a mail client, it’s a storage drive! With the use of file extensions you can expand your current storage and keep files, such as: music, videos, setup applications, and your homework, stored remotely. Keep in mind that your drive can only be accessed by any machines with the file extensions installed. These file extensions can be found at viksoe’s site or at allscoop’s site . To install them simply unzip the file and run the setup application. This will allow you to make better use of your 2 gigabyte limit.

I feel my blog’s topic is going to get narrowed from just posts about latest technology to the latest in technology and software to make a computer geeks daily life a little easier and illuminate the vagueness of our digital age for those unaccustomed to it.

The goals of this blog will be to bring new content to the reader. There are plenty of useful programs and resources on the web and not everyone knows about them. I’ll make it my job to find these valuable trinkets by scouring the web and produce an article that will be easy for the not-so-technically inclined and yet informative as to be quite useful to those who are. I find joy in finding useful application and hopefully you as a reader will to.