Internet Safety

8 Steps to Keeping Your Computer Safe on the Internet

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 ~ Great summary and solid advice from my one-time Microsoft colleague Leo A. Notenboom, (© 2013) Reprinted with permission. Any typos or formatting screw-ups are mine.

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Internet Safety is difficult. yet critical. Here are the eight key steps to internet safety - steps to keep your computer safe on the internet.

Viruses & Spyware & Worms ... oh my!

The very concept of "Internet Safety" is almost an oxymoron these days.

It seems like not a day goes by where we don't hear about some new kind of threat aimed at wreaking havoc across machines connected to the internet.

Anti-Microsoft sentiment coupled with the massive installed base make Microsoft products, and particularly Microsoft Windows, an irresistible target for hackers and "script kiddies". In recent years, products like Adobe Reader, Java, Flash, Firefox and more have come under attack as their popularity has increased.

Even the Macintosh is no longer invulnerable.

Here are some things you can, and should, do to stay safe.

The End

Rewarded by the Journey?

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 ~ Perhaps you've been looking for this? Or perhaps this? Or this? Or this? Or maybe this?

Whatever you do, don't press the button and ruin it for the rest of us.

Fostering Entrepreneurship—VI

The State of Angel Investing

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 ~ Several interesting facts in the latest Halo Report on startup funding:

1. The median size for startup valuation when funded is $2.7M. Fully 3/4 of all startups receive investor funding with a valuation of $1.7M or greater. For entrepreneurs (for now) these are robust numbers, and help explain the bit of a rush to raise money we're seeing in some quarters.
2. The median size of the round shrunk to just over $500K. For a Series A round this seems a bit small, but the number is probably skewed downward because of an overweighting of those famously capital efficient Internet startups which can hit early milestones with less money, thanks to the cheap cost of electrons, energy drinks and ramen.
3. Investors remain herd creatures with the bulk of the deals and dollars going to Internet, healthcare, and mobile/telecon. (As a country, do we want to reinvigorate our industrial base? If so, we might want to start with funding industrial innovation.)
4. The Pacific Northwest doesn't have one of the top 5 most active angel groups in terms of number of deals...
5. ...but Seattle does boast The Alliance of Angels as a top 5 angel group for dollars invested. Bravo!
6. The Pacific Northwest's national share deals held steady, while dollars invested grew year-over-year.

In short, we're doing OK, not great. Deals are getting done, but there is a growing sense of froth reflected in the valuations and the narrowing sector focus. Greater diversity would be salutary to our broader economy, as well as softening the boom-bust angel cycle.

Many investors are waiting for the election to finish, hoping that the result will clarify the investment and taxation climate going forward. It won't. Still, there may be even more investing activity in the next 6 months than in the past, which will make a comparison of this to the next Halo Report interesting reading.

Squeezed

"We Don't Care; We Don't Have To"

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 ~ The "magic" of the marketplace:

• Americans pay four times as much as the French for an Internet triple-play package—phone, cable TV and Internet—at an average of $160 per month versus $38 per month.
• The French get global free calling and worldwide live television. Their Internet is also 10 times faster at downloading information and 20 times faster uploading it.
• America has gone from #1 in Internet speed (when we invented it) to 29th in the world and falling.
• Bulgaria is among the countries with faster Internet service.
• Americans pay 38 times as much as the Japanese for Internet data.

Cable has risen 2.6 times faster than the cost of living since 1995. Why do we get less and pay more?

Impressions of an Entrepreneur

All True, Somewhat

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 ~ Following the "What my friends think I do", a current Internet meme:

It's all partially accurate, but rather akin to the metaphor of blind people groping an elephant. Reality rarely matches the caricature; so too here.

Media Map

Who Reads What?

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 ~ Forbes has a really interesting interactive map that shows the primary source of news in each of the US states.

The most interesting result is that three states--Minnesota, Wisconsin and New Mexico--get their news from The Onion, a leading on-line humor and satire site. This is much like getting one's news from The Daily Show, but without the addition of any actual facts.

Also noteworthy:

Trust

Freedom Means a Free Internet

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 ~ How can we trust our government and its leaders if they don't trust us?

Eclipse

Darkening Protest Against SOPA

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 ~ I agree with the protests against SOPA and PIPA. These proposed laws that would, under the guise of combating privacy, forever change the Internet, and with it, the nature and freedom of speech, dissent, and the power of the people to serve as guardians of democracy.

Since I'm on Blogger I can't readily go dark myself, but will have no post tomorrow.

The Internet is a Toady

Confirmation Bias Confirmed

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~ What is the Internet hiding? Eli Pariser pulls back the drapes in a thought-provoking TED talk of just under 10 minutes:

The key idea: most of the web sites and services we use do not provide us an unfiltered stream from the Internet. Much is hidden from us, and the implications are disturbing for a democracy that depends for its vitality on a generously informed electorate.

The Future of Work

Geoffrey Moore Keynote at Washington Innovation Summit

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~ Geoffrey Moore, author of the seminal book Crossing the Chasm, captivated the lunchtime audience at yesterday's Washington Innovation Summit with a fast-paced and ranging, but conceptually deep exploration of the digitization of everything, globalization, the reconfiguring of how business is organized, social media and the future of work. Some of his ideas he's already put in earlier books, but perhaps some will find greater elaboration in his forthcoming book, Escape Velocity: Free Your Company from the Pull of the Past, which will be published September 6th by Harper Collins. Some of the corollaries of his remarks are very encouraging for the future competitiveness of America business and, in what would be a great relief for many locally, for Microsoft in particular.

Privacy and Trust

Discussion at Washington Innovation Summit

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The cartoon that started
all the discussion

~ Is privacy a quaint notion as web sites track users, aggregate data, mine it and sell it to advertisers? Should we have some kind of "Do Not Track" opt-in or other list to protect the web-surfing public? Such questions occupied part of the morning at today's Washington Innovation Summit. Several panelists, including Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna, took a swing at it.

There are 33 ways (according to Microsoft Chief Architect Sean Nolan) that web sites can track your Internet behavior and use the information to better target ads for to at you. (There was some mention of tailoring content to you as well, but—timeout for honesty!—most sites explicitly encourage you to tell them what you want by setting preferences or directly searching. When was the last time you were asked what kinds of ads you'd like to see? The surreptitious tracking is for ads, not the content you came to the site to find.) The most insidious part of this secretive data collection is that much of it is collected or quietly handed off to entities other than the one that provides the site content one went to find. There's a host of third party data collectors that are compiling information on each of us based on what we do on the web. You probably don't even know who they are.

Should we worry? Should we regulate? Are we losing our privacy?

The Information Firehose Persists

Ye Olde Problem of TMI

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A Harvard researcher reports that information overload dates back hundreds of years—to the Middle Ages:

With the spread of paper in the late middle ages, then of printing after 1453, scholarship involved ever more reading: printed books, manuscripts, and letters. Scholars relied on note taking to retain what was useful from their reading. Some collections of notes, organized with finding devices, were published as reference books, in which readers could find the best bits from many books they wouldn’t have the time or accessibility to read.

Amtrak Cascades gets WiFi

Another Reason to Go Rail

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I really enjoy taking Amtrak from Seattle, both to Portland and also to Vancouver. Now, at long last, they've added WiFi throughout all the trains, and best of all, it's free. I actually used the WiFi on the train to Portland some months back; apparently it was turned on by accident. It's unclear why it's taken so long to formally roll it out, especially since it's been on the Acela in the Northeast corridor for almost a year.

Taking the train is great, and I'm not the only one who seems to think so. The Amtrak Cascades set a 16-year high for ridership last year. Now that they're wired up, expect a new record this year.

Some people whine about Amtrak being government-subsidized or about its losing money, which is a curiously selective complaint. How many billions do we dump into our road system every year? Does the Interstate Highway system make money?

(h/t TechFlash)

More on Energy and Sputniks

ARPA-E Director Dr. Arun Majumdar

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Yesterday's post covered US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu's address on the importance of government support for energy innovation. Included on the dias at the National Press Club was Arun Majumdar, Director of ARPA-E. Below is a repost from the Hydrovolts blog of 2/20/10 with remarks made by Dr. Majumdar on the "Three Sputniks."

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Arun Majumdar, Director of ARPA-E, spoke to about 150 people in the atrium of the Paul Allen Computer Science & Engineering Building at the University of Washington on Thursday. Dr. Majumdar provided a detailed explanation of the role of his agency in building a technology "pipeline" connecting the creators of new solutions to the integrators searching for solutions to the "three Sputniks" of energy security, green house gas (GHG) emissions, and US global technological leadership. He sees these as all connected, composing three axes of the same 3-D reality. We must stop importing 60% of our oil from "places hostile to us" and then burning it, exacerbating damage from climate change. Finding other ways to create the energy we need that are clean and renewable will also power US innovation, economic prosperity, and global leadership. Tackling these Three Sputniks is the Congressional directive to ARPA-E.

The Outernet and Search Inversion

The Lobster Trap of Internet Privacy

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Internet anonymity is disappearing. I've written earlier about why I've given up on maintaining a distinction between my professional and personal selves. Not only is it impractically difficult to maintain, but attempting to do so increasingly marks one as an information age fuddy-duddy, or as someone trying to hide something indelicate. Everyone is connected all the time and everywhere by ever-more ubiquitous mobile computational power and fat-pipe bandwidth. What we do, when and why are now continuously memorialized. The GPS features of phones, along with applications such as Foursquare and Gowalla provide such a rich timeline that the future job security of forensic investigators is likely imperilled.

Ceding one's anonymity also entails abandoning quaint notions of privacy. When I Google myself some of the results include comments I have made to blog posts in the past, some of them years old. (Yes, I do periodically search on my own name. Doesn't everyone? Brand experts advise one do so. You know potential employers and business partners are searching on your name; don't you want to know what they're finding about you?)

The signs of our complete Internet outing are everywhere. Remember anonymous comments to articles and blog posts? A thing of the past--"Login to comment" is utterly standard and unremarkable to nearly everyone. The imprecations to surrender to the 'net are relentless. It doesn't matter how many times I tell Google or Twitter "No thanks" to "enabling" my location disclosure, both services continue to badger me with the question. I suppose at some point, as with a tireless toddler whining for some treat, I may, through irritation or inattention, agree to do so. And having been given their figurative ice cream I suspect they will not check back frequently to ask me if I'd like to rescind my newly granted cyber-exhibitionism.