The skinny on using public Wi-Fi
 When connecting your cell phone or tablet to public Wi-Fi, be it at the library, the airport, your cable companies free everywhere Wi-Fi or any other guest Wi-Fi of which more are available every day, you are theoretically sharing your information with any semi-sophisticated user on that same Wi-Fi connection. This means that other people can be privy to your passwords, your credit card numbers and any other private password information you use to gain access to any website. Enter the VPN, Virtual Private Network. A VPN can be thought of as tunnel within which information travels from one end of the tunnel to the other and is impervious to any outside purview. Data, information that you send through the tunnel is encrypted (scrambled) before it goes in and decrypted when it come out on the other side. Basically, the information is mashed up with the VPN's own very long password or encryption key before being sent and can only be decrypted with the use of that same key which only the other end of tunnel is privy to. So email and account user names and passwords are not readable by anyone without that key.
VPNs have been in use in the corporate world for years. VPNs can be built into routers and firewalls and are used to connect two or more offices that are not geographically able to be on the same physical cabling system. The VPNs on either side of the tunnel do the heavy lifting, encrypting and decrypting. If you travel with your laptop and you need to get back into your corporate computer system then that laptop will have software to generate the encrypted VPN connection and the corporate hardware will act as the other end of the tunnel.
A firewall is hardware or software, sometimes both, that has the job of interrogating all internet data coming in and allowing only permitted traffic to pass. Normally home networks provide their own "firewall" albeit simple ones, and in addition give you more security by providing a protocol known as "Network Address Translation" obscuring further your identity and making it harder for hackers to penetrate, making VPNs in a home setting less necessary. If however, you have no router and are connected directly to your cable modem (FIOS has a combination unit), you don't run encryption on your Wi-Fi router or in fact you're using one of Optimum's provided free routers which have no firewall, then you might consider adding VPN protection to your home computers as well.
A number of providers are now bringing VPNs to everybody. Some are free and there are plenty of not so free but very inexpensive providers. All these entities have secure servers out on the internet which forward the information you've encrypted, by using their software on your device to the destination you selected, after they decrypt it. When your request is returned to their server they then encrypt the return transmission and send it back to you for decryption. All of this is transparent to you.
TunnelBear provides VPN services and offers the first 500 Meg a month of free "tunnel". 500 Meg, if you use it only for browsing that requires a secure connection should be fine for most of us. You turn on the VPN from inside the app and turn it off as easily. If you need more, then Tunnel Bear offers unlimited monthly access for a flat fee of $6.99 and if you buy annually, the price drops to $4.16 a month. Tunnel Bear works on IOS and Android as well as MAC and Windows computers.
Betternet, out of Columbia (the country, not the university) does a great job and it's free. It is supported by advertising. Betternet is also available for all platforms.
There are too many VPN providers on the market for me to list all of them here, but Google Play and the Apple store abound with choices. Finally, in addition to security, a VPN provides browsing anonymity and the ability to reach websites that might be blocked by your employer, school or internet provider because all of your VPN requests go through a server that is acting as a proxy for you.
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Microsoft Windows Marches On
 Windows 10 marches on. If you missed my emergency message burst earlier this month, then here it is again. Microsoft is automatically installing Windows 10 on any computer currently running Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 and that has automatic updates turned on. If you want to stop that from happening go to control panel and choose either to download updates but maintain control over their installation or to be notified of updates but leave installation as something that requires your approval. If you have been inadvertently upgraded you have 30 days to roll back to the previous operating system without too much ado.
Windows XP continues to march on too, but to its imminent demise. By now you know that not only are there no more updates forthcoming from Microsoft for the operating system, but more importantly Internet Explorer is no longer being upgraded and effectively inviting hackers to continue to try to breach it. You should have noticed more websites each day no longer look right in IE because their web developers aren't updating their website for the XP verison of the browser. Now, Google has announced that their Chrome browser will stop supporting XP beginning in April. Read all about it here. BTW if you want to change up to a new computer and you're reluctant to get yourself to wrap around the learning curve that comes with Windows 10, You can still order machines from Dell with Windows 7, in all shapes and sizes. If you can't find what you like through their website, connect with me, with my corporate buying power I have access to more choices than the ones you might see at their site.
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 I can't tell you how often a client calls for service on a crashed computer and hearing my diagnosis, the first question is "can you recover my information?". Sometimes I can, sometimes not. If the computer is dead, but the hard drive is not, then it's a slam dunk. Not so much if the drive itself is dead where the success rate is more like 50/50. Hopefully we are all backing up our data, things like that tax return you just completed, those pictures of the kid's 3rd birthday party, those emails that you've been holding on to forever or even the music you paid for, which is sourced on your computer but played on your IPhone and not so easy to transfer back from the IPhone to the computer in the event of a disk crash. The best backups are to use a flash drive, for say up to 32 GIGs of stuff, though these drives are available today with capacities of up to 128 GIG at reasonable prices. Better yet, buy an external hard drive. External drives have also come a long way in terms of price and size. A terabyte drive from Western Digital is smaller than a cell phone and costs less than $60. It requires no outside power source, drawing all it's energy from the USB port and comes in a variety of colors for the fashion conscious.
These portable hard drives are all delivered with backup software on board which you can install on your computer and configure to backup your stuff on some sort of regular schedule. Windows also provides a backup program and you can find it in control panel if you're on Windows 7 or Vista and in settings if you're a Windows 10 user. You can also be proactive and just selectively copy and paste those items that are precious to you. This process gets a little complicated when copying entire folders as copy/paste is going to ask about replacing files that have been copied previously, so it's best to pay attention to what files are new or changed and copy only those. If you like, I can script a copy procedure for you over a remote connection that at your instruction will run automated, copying only new or changed files or you can elect to have me provide you with an icon to click and it will do the same thing.
Using your own backup will also allow you to quickly grab and restore that document you inadvertently deleted or to get a copy of it before its' last editing. If you use Windows backup or the drive manufacturer's backup, you will need to initiate a software restore via the same tool as the data is compressed in a fashion that will not allow you to view contents with just the Window's file explorer utility.
Finally, if the total size of your backup will fit in one, or even all of the free constrained cloud backup offered, or if you're willing to pay an annual fee for cloud storage, then you can add protection against hazards that might destroy both your computer and the backup device. I like belt and suspenders, making both cloud and external backups for a variety of reasons. Read my article on storing stuff in the cloud in the Fall 2015 Newsletter.
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How Old is that Backup Device?
 if you think that backup is forever, think again. Backup media has seriously limited shelf life. Here are some figures, all implying that the storage facility is optimum in temperature and is impervious to outside influence: Magnetic tape - 30 years, same for cassette (got any Michael Jackson cassette or 8-tracks?). Floppy disks will last 3 to 5 years, anybody remember 3.5" or older 5" floppies?, though I've recently recovered floppy data for a client where the disks were near 15 years old.
CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray will last 10 to 25 years per specifications, but actually might last a life time if they're not used too often. Repetitive use has a tendency to produce scratches in the outside thin silicon layer and this will make the data unreadable.
Flash memory, flash drives, SD cards found in cameras and phones, can last up to 10 years but degrade faster with constant use as these devices suffer from degradation produced by repetitive writes and re-writes. You should never format these types of storage; just deleting the data will get the flash to write to different sectors each time. Initialization and quick format theoretically just delete the VTOC, Volume Table of Contents, and should not affect the lifespan. I recommend rotating any flash and even external hard drive, using two of either and swapping off each time you backup.
BTW, the scientist at University of Southampton in England have developed a storage media made of glass, about the same physical size as a CD/DVD and capable of storing about 3,000 Blu-ray disks worth of data on the same physical space as a Blu-Ray for 13.8 billion years. That is 150,000 - 300,000 Gigabytes or 150 to 300 Terabytes.
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Of Interest
 Los Angeles hospital recently had to pay $17,000 to release their files from Ransomware. A hacker had encrypted all their data and would provide the decryption key only after getting paid the huge sum of money. We are all susceptible to ransomware and if you leave that backup drive attached all the time, or you're backing up to your Dropbox account, which is also resident on your computer but mirrored offsite, then those files are also subject to this type of unwanted encryption. The advice is to back up regularly and to detach the backup device each and every time the backup is completed. If you want to read more about this type of malware refer back to my " Pay Now or Pay Later" article in the November/December 2014 newsletter.
 Hack the Pentagon? Yup, Defense secretary Ashton Carter has initiated a Hack the Pentagon program wherein select hackers will be allowed to try and breach the Pentagon's security system. Cyberattacks like these will allow the Pentagon to shore up potential holes in their computer infrastructure and as similar systems are in place in banks and other high value targets, the research will provide the rest of us with better security as well.
You are not paranoid; your internet provider is indeed watching your  every move. Now the FCC is looking to stop Optimum, Verizon FIOS and Comcast from aggregating and selling your browsing habits to advertisers. The FCC's proposed new rules would require your provider to get explicit permission before passing your data on to third parties and to provide you with their privacy policies before using any of this info themselves. What exactly is your provider privy to? Here you go!  Do you know how unsecured your saved passwords are in Firefox and Chrome. Well, in Firefox all you need to do is go to tools and options then security and saved logins and all your saved passwords are there in plain readable text. In Chrome you need to know the computer's sign in password, the one you need when you start up, if you even have one, and then too your passwords are available in plain text. Think about the next time you let someone else sit at your computer or you might reconsider storing critical passwords at all! Each browser has a method for deleting all or some of those passwords and for turning off password storage all together. Look to the settings tab or options tab in the browser.  Did you know that Safari, the default browser for IPhone (available for Android) consumes more data when browsing the web? Try switching to Chrome; the browser compresses data prior to transmitting it to you, reducing your data consumption. You need to turn the compression feature on, so read the article in the link above. Android phones all come with Chrome installed and here's a link to get it on your IPhone. Conversely, on a PC or MAC Chrome consumes more resources than Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Try bringing up the Task Manager on a PC (ALT+CTRL+DEL) and see how many items are marked as Chrome related. Still, resources are not costly in the same way as data and Chrome does load faster.  Here's the headline. Attackers who have slipped malicious advertisements onto major websites over the last month have potentially compromised large numbers of computers. Yup, these days you can go to a perfectly legitimate website, click on a link on that websites page and be redirected to some site that contains malware or worse ransomware and before you know it you're infected. The aforementioned article is just one example, there are hundreds if not thousands of websites that proliferate with malware that is either the result of paid advertising to the site or because of a breached password that has given access to the site without the providers knowledge. Be on the alert and at the very least don't click on a link that ends in php or vbs, both of which allow code to run on your ocmputer without any further action from you. Chrome and Firefox both display the link's target in the status bar at the bottom. You need to turn on the status bar display if you're using IE.  If you're on an older MAC then you might not want to upgrade to El Capitan which demands more resources from the processor and ram and might drag your older MAC down. Here's some info and potential help for solving the problem.
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Take a look at Peerio, a free service for sending secure messages, creating secure group chats and even allowing you to transfer huge files from your computer to another.
For guys only: Looking to get together with the guys in your neighborhood who share your interest in hiking, biking, bowling or poker? Try Wolfpack. If you have younger children and you want to curb their access to social media, block their access to certain websites and even limit when and for how long they can be on the web with their phone try Curbi for about $7 a month for up to 5 devices. If you're looking to connect with parents in your child's class, school community or globally try Simply Circle. It's free for up to 50 members. These people do offer more sophisticated and feature laden plans, but it looks like you could get workarounds going to generate these same functions without paying for them.
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If you're an "Angie's List" subscriber, would you add me to their list of favored service providers. Thanx.
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I make DVD, BluRay, Chromecast and Roku connections for that Netflix account or to watch web content on your TV.
I also connect your Homelink and your garage door.
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