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Beyond Passwords: Online Identity Standards
Virtually everyone’s been stuck one time or another trying to remember a online password and thought, “There has to be a better way.” A recent article in our newsletter talks about the problem and suggests tricks to make it a little easier to deal with. But although a lot of smart people have tried to figure out a safe, reliable, and more convenient system, nobody’s come up with one yet. Now, however, the US Government has decided to gently encourage efforts. In the spring of last year, the Obama Administration announced the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, NSTIC. Like the National Broadband Plan, it’s not legislation or even regulation. Instead, NSTIC is a hopeful collection of idealistic principles and goals to promote development rather than a concrete plan with real funding and hard, measurable results. Nevertheless, many agencies and corporations are very interested. It’s easy to see why. Identity theft has become a major problem, costing millions each year, and passwords remain the weakest link in cybersecurity. Commerce might also be helped if you could buy books on Amazon with your Google account or download tax forms from iTunes. And public safety would benefit if your child could be automatically denied entrance to adult websites, or doctors could check in online to help provide medical services after a disaster. The dream is to build a safe method of sharing relevant sensitive information about users with online entities while … Continue reading
15 Reasons Why SWCP BUS Is Your Best Backup Option for the New Year
The end of the year provides an excellent occasion to review your backup strategy. Consider how your life would be affected next year if all the files you worked on this past year suddenly vanished. As anyone who has suffered such an event knows, a dead hard drive, stolen laptop, or stepped-on flash drive can turn your world upside-down. Because once that data is gone, it’s gone for good. A New Year’s resolution of “Never lose a file again” suddenly makes a whole lot of sense. Granted, there are plenty of backup options available, online along with tape and hard drives, CDs, and so forth. Some are cheap, others expensive, but for maximum security, most methods require that you discipline yourself to remember to copy the files or change out the tape or disk and physically take them someplace else every time you time you work on them. This is both inconvenient and because it’s so easy to forget, risky as well. Uploads online to distant data storage centers may solve some problems, but remote, big box service providers don’t have options a local service does such as using removable drives, technician setups, and in-office help. A combination of both is needed. In trying to make surviving such disasters as data loss easier, Southwest Cyberport has developed SWCP BUS, an online backup system which is combined with our famous neighborly, local service. We are confident that this gives the SWCP … Continue reading
Posted in News, Resources, Security
Tagged Albuquerque, backup, broadband, BUS, encryption, security, seed loading
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Risks and Rewards of File Sharing
Often when people hear the term “peer-to-peer file sharing”, they think of torrents, illegal swapping of the latest movies and music, and resulting lawsuits by the record or movie industries for piracy. That does happen; however, file sharing encompasses much more than ripping off the latest hits. Peer-to-Peer, or P2P, is the most widely used form of file sharing. It has become a big and growing part of the Internet, already accounting for 50-70% of consumer network traffic, with millions of P2P clients downloaded and in use. In 2004, an estimated 70 million people were busily sharing files, and doubtless many more now. But P2P is not the only means to share files over the Net. It should not be confused with file hosting, which uses the more familiar client-server architecture of the Internet to stream files to users from big, centralized Web servers. In its purest form, Peer-to-Peer is strictly that: users’ computers directly linked across the Net to their peers; that is, other users’ computers. They join in a network of equals, each machine devoting some fraction of its computing power, bandwidth, and memory to the network, ideally without any need for a central coordinator. In fact, P2P works pretty much the way the Web was originally intended to function. Collaborative computing Civilization is the story of how ever-larger tasks can be done, and done much more efficiently, with cooperation. As a form of collaborative computing between users, … Continue reading
Posted in How the Net Works, News, Security, Tips and Tricks
Tagged chat, DMCA, file sharing, instant messaging, peer-to-peer, Protect IP Act, security, SOPA, torrent, Wi-Fi
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