Our good friend and colleague, Jim Calloway, entered a blog post about his “discovery” of a shared wireless data connection. Jim apparently has a Sprint data plan and was all excited about the mobile hotspot device that they offered. This technology has existed for a couple of years now, but we thought that it would be appropriate to mention some of the wireless capabilities that exist today.

First off, there are the femtocell devices, which extend the cellular voice network to those areas where the cell towers can’t reach. Essentially, they are mini cell towers to allow voice access in remote and desolate areas. We have had personal experience where our Verizon network wasn’t available at the lake house of Sharon’s parents in N.H. We connect up a Verizon femtocell device to our Internet connection and we can have up to 5 Verizon phones access the cellular network. The other cellular vendors have similar equipment to “extend” their cellular coverage to any place that has an Internet connection. Effectively, this looks to the phone as a mini cellular tower. Cost of these devices is around $200 to $300 and this offers a great way to have cellular voice access while in a fringe coverage area. Perhaps if every AT&T customer plugged in a femtocell, there would be acceptable coverage for the iPhone.

The other option is to extend the data coverage. This is the type of device that Jim spoke about in his blog post. You buy a WiFi (also known as MiFi) hot spot device that connects to your cellular provider’s data network and shares up to 5 WiFi connected devices. They share this data “cell” by creating a WiFi hotspot that uses an EVDO, 3G or 4G broadband data connection to the network, depending on the carrier. These WiFi deices typically cost $300 plus and share the subscriber’s wireless data connection. Check out the carrier’s promotions and you may be able to get the hardware for free.

These devices and services are a cost effective alternative to dedicated services, but may not be for everybody. Thanks Jim for reminding us that we can share our cellular voice and data connections if we elect to do so. It just takes another piece of hardware and a few more bucks.

- John and Mike

(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Almost everyone now has a cell phone, with an increasing number of users also subscribing to a Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) account of some kind (think Skype). With these accounts come monthly service charges and the need to painstakingly monitor your “minutes,” to make sure you don’t go over your monthly limits.

Google first entered the voice arena with Google Voice, which provided Google users with the ability to get a local phone number of their choice, and to integrate the service with their Gmail account. As of yesterday, Google has added the ability of Gmail users to place calls directly from their Gmail account, using your computer’s microphone and speakers, or a headset. To say the service took off might be an understatement.

Google, offering free calls in both the U.S. and Canada, made over 1 million calls in the first 24 hours the service was offered. To put the numbers in perspective, it’s like 1 out of every 3000 phone calls made yesterday in the U.S. were made using Google.

That’s amazing. It will be interesting to see if volume of calls made through Google stay at this level or even increase.

- John and Mike

(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

So what happens when we take some time off for vacation? You don’t get any blog posts. That should be pretty obvious by now, but we’re back to work for the near term.

The Georgia Institute of Technology just published a report that indicates we should all be considering 12-character passwords for the future. CNN commented on the report, which cracked 8-character passwords with ease using a PC graphics processing unit (GPU) that costs just a few hundred dollars. If you have ever purchased a computer with multi-core graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD’s ATI division, then you have the horsepower to brute-force passwords in a relatively short period of time.

Why are 12-characters recommended? It’s all about the mathematics. Clusters of graphics cards can crack an 8-character password in less than two hours, but using the same processing power would take 17,134 years to crack a 12-character one.

We’ve been using 10 and 12-character passwords for some time. It looks like it will be 12 from now on.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Microsoft has announced an October availability of Office 2011 for the Mac, although we wonder why Redmond even bothers to produce products for the Apple crowd. It seems that most Mac fans generally bash Microsoft so we’re not sure where the anticipated revenue stream is coming from.

Office 2011 for Mac will only be available as a 32-bit version. Too bad there will be a limit as to how much you can use the sinfully overpriced RAM from Apple. [tongue in cheek]  Microsoft is even recommending the 32-bit version for Windows users unless you have very high data requirements. Outlook (instead of Entourage) will be available in the new version along with support for .PST files. Prices start at $99 for the academic version up to $279 depending on the edition purchased. Buy Office 2008 for Mac today and you’ll get a free upgrade to 2011 when it is available.

- John and Mike

(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

As a Windows user, you are probably familiar with shortcuts. Those icons that have a little square with an arrow that actually point to the location of the original data. You can have shortcuts for images, applications, data or just about anything else. Shortcuts are actually known as link (LNK) files in the computer forensics world since they carry the .lnk file extension.

Microsoft has disclosed a vulnerability, where Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts when a user clicks the icon of a specially crafted .lnk file. There is a huge concern that a malicious .lnk file installed on a USB flash drive could be set to run a DLL and infect the user’s computer. Certainly, disabling the AutoRun and AutoPlay features of Windows would prevent this, but most users like to have things run automatically, especially when inserting a USB device.

Symantec reports that the malware installs two drivers, which serve as rootkits to hide the actual malware, making it extremely difficult to detect. The threat is particularly scary since it impacts a large number of Windows operating systems including Windows Server 2003, XP with SP 3, Vista, Windows 7 and even XP with SP2, which ended patch support on July 13.

For now, be careful inserting any USB device and certainly disable those AutoRun features.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

We absolutely LOVE SimplyFile. We’ve been using it for some time now and it speeds up handling of our e-mail (filing in folders, converting to tasks, adding to calendar, etc.) saving us tons of time each day. The good just got better. TechHit has just announced SimplyFile 3.0, which is fully compatible with Outlook 2010. You’ll need Outlook 2010 to take advantage of the additional features. The cost is $49.95 with special pricing for upgrades.

If you are a prior user, you should have received an e-mail upgrade announcement by now so check your spam filter. We just purchased our upgrades.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Doesn’t it just frost your backside with all the picky charges from the airlines? There are supplemental fees for baggage, blankets, food (sometimes it's even recognizable), headsets, extra leg space and a host of other nickel and dime charges. Well, now the government is getting into the game of aggravating travelers. The cost of a passport and renewals are going up this coming Tuesday. Starting July 13th (could they have picked a better date?) the cost of a first passport goes up 35% to $135. Right now extra pages for your current passport are free, but it will go to $82 under the new plan. The renewal fee will rise to $110 from the current $75.

Want to save a few bucks? Get or renew your passport before Tuesday.

- John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Most attorneys have a hard time understanding exactly what the size of a hard drive or USB flash drive really means. To most, it’s just a number. The larger the number, the more data the device can store. Well that number just got larger.

Seagate, a manufacturer of hard drives and removable storage media, has just announced the release of their first 3 TB removable storage device, the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external drive. The largest available single hard drive size previously available was 2 TB. The USB/FireWire removable storage device is priced at $250 and can be purchased directly from Seagate (www.seagate.com). The drive comes with the necessary hardware to be USB 3.0 compatible when the standard is finally implemented in future computer systems, and may be a great storage option for solo and small firm backup solutions.

- John and Mike
(703)359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com

Adobe has announced that it will release updates to its flagship Reader and Acrobat products on Tuesday, June 29th. The updates are coming earlier than originally scheduled and contains fixes for several critical “holes” and zero-day vulnerabilities that are currently being exploited. So mark your calendars and make sure you get the updates on Tuesday.

-John and Mike

(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com