Have fun with spam?

Have you bought Viagra on the Net lately? A bride from Ushbekistan? The Russian edition of PhotoShop at 10% of the sticker price (if so, good luck with the menus)? American porn with ladies so full of silicon who have heads so full of air that they would be unsinkable even stuffed in buckets of cement? Cheap stocks in the emerging oil industry of Botswana?

Have you helped the son-in-law of Nigerias deceased Secretary of Defense transfer his inheritance to an US bank account, and are expecting your 7.8 mill dollar fee to arrive any day now?

Of course not. I don't know who these dimwitted morons who buy stuff from a spammer is, as I have never met anyone who would admit to doing so. But since the garbage keeps filling our inboxes, someone must be buying. If they didn't, the spam would slowly cease, as even this particularly unsavory dish costs something to serve. Time, after all, is money. So is bandwith. However, by some measures, 90% of all mail sent is spam. Clearly, the last sucker is not born yet, and plenty of live ones can still be found on the Net.

Let's agree on something right here and now, shall we? It's a simple thing: That we never, ever buy anything at all from a spammer. If you find a must-have product in an unsolicited email (fat chance), do yourself and the world the favor of spending two minutes finding it somewhere else.

Zero response to any spam is the only thing that will eventually kill this menace. That's cold comfort to those already battling an overflowing inbox. And make no mistake, it can get so bad that people simply give in. It's not long since I sent an important email to a friend. Not getting the expected response, I called him some time later to ask why. The reply: "Eh...no...that particular account is so full of spam I haven't checked it for weeks". Which is maybe OK if it is an Hotmail account, but considerably worse if it is your.name@yourownserver.com!

The good news is that there are solutions available even for the most spaminfested of us. Granted, you may ask if it is worth the effort if you get 200 spams and 3 relevant emails per day. But 80% spam and 20% real email, that can definitely be overcome.

So what does it take? A 75 dollar program, a dedicated hardware firewall and two hours per day of tracing the spammers and their ISPs? Well, yeah, if you subscribe to Mr Bush's "fool me once, fool me twice" doctrine. For the rest of us, an hour spent downloading and getting acquainted with the best free antispam programs will suffice - plus ten minutes per day to separate shit from shinola.

And now for le piece de resistance: There are ways to hit back at the spammers, to deliver a nutcracking kick with minimal effort and maximum result. They'll soon learn to leave you alone. How? Let the blue frog do your kicking!

Hollywood Encrypted

We love encryption. It allows you to store any data anywhere without anyone getting to know anything. Until they have the password, that is, and then it all becomes clear in an instant.

The funny thing about encryption is that while it uses some very advanced technology - understanding it really is dream material for the nerdiest of nerds - it is normally very easy to use. So much so that most of the time we are not aware of encryption being used. Cable TV is encrypted. Access to your Internet bank account also. Amazon and most sites using either shopping cart technology or online payments are encrypted.

Who else uses encryption? Why, thieves and thugs and mobsters and crooks and foreign spies and terrorists, of course! Just take a peek at any half decent Hollywood movie or series these days. Case in point: The new thriller "Hostage" featuring Bruce Willis certainly fits the description (it is only half decent), and also features a bent accountant that stores encrypted files of shady transactions on a DVD masked as a movie. All well thus far. But why can the movie director never resist the urge to fill the computer screen with random numbers to illustrate encryption? For anyone in the know, it immediately breaks the illusion - the suspension of disbelief - and makes you aware that you are just watching another dime-a-dozen product from the Hollywood machine, made by another director who didn't bother to teach himself the first thing about a central premise to his movie.

The same thing is illustrated time and again when the crooks manage to encrypt files so miserably that the Jack Bauer team on "24" can access them in 7 minutes after barking something like "C'mon! Free the overlay server and plug in socket 13 on the ripple system. Do it now!". It's a cool show, but jeeeeez!

Here are a few sorry facts for Hollywood directors and other lost souls: 1) No encryption software fills your screen with random data (unless it features a specific Hollywood function, that is). 2) Any grandmother that can access the Internet should need only 10 minutes to learn to encrypt files in such a way that neither Jack Bauer's team, the CIA or a fourteen year old with glasses can break it open. Not in ten thousand years. Not in ten million years!

Encryption is for everybody. Your backup should be encrypted, so that it is of no use to others who get their hands on it. Your home computer should be encrypted, so that what is private is kept private - simple as that. Your wireless network should be encrypted, or it is likely to be abused by freeriders. Your laptop must be encrypted, so that information stored on it isn't stolen if the computer is. And last but not least: If you send sensitive data by email, you need to encrypt it. Here encryption is simply the "envelope" you put your letter into.

Hollywood has got it exactly backwards. Encryption is easy to use, but done correctly impossible to break. And it is used primarily by companies who are serious about their business, and by good citizens who value their privacy.

Do you?

Backed up?

You are, you say? Really? Well congratulations, then! If you are even talking about your personal self, and not your work, then you've got an even better reason to give your selv a pat on the back. I assume you have also double checked all your insurances and updated your will? Just kidding. You are an example to be followed.

Surveys show that many businesses, especially small and midsize ones, have poor backup routines for their computer systems. But at least they are usually aware they have a problem, which is a good start if nothing more. Privately, however, most of us walk the slack line without a net - unless we have already experienced falling off and eating dirt. Some even need to do this a couple of times. Bless them, because the meek shall inherit my external hard disk, once I have outgrown it yet again.

Some fool themselves into thinking they have nothing to lose. Reading this, it is likely you are not one of them. But if you are, do yourself the favor of spending ten minutes looking at the contents of your hard disk. You are likely to find letters, spreadsheets, presentations, music, bookmarks - not to mention email. Maybe some personal videos too (or other people's personal videos, come to that). And with digital photography becoming so popular, you may have stored any number of photos; memories frozen in time that if they are lost are apt to be lost forever.

Any number of bad things can happen to a hard disk. Fire, theft, water damage, magnetic disturbances, lightning, viruses, sabotage, or green martians with an appetite for bits & bites. Mostly, they just decide to no longer rotate 7200 times per minute, and quitely give in with a slow, final spin. It can happen two days after you got your new computer, or four years later. If you still have a valid guarantee, you might get a new disk. If not, you'll have to buy one. In any case it will be shiny, new...and blank.

Enough already with the horror stories! You know what to do. Anyone with a computer needs to back up their data, unless someone does it for them. Now for the good news: Backing up is easy, fast and cheap. A couple of empty DVDs or an external hard disk, and you are pretty well set. Now all there is left is to actually do something. You can easily manage without any dedicated software for this. But if you do want or need a backup program, isn't it nice that some of the very best ones are absolutely free?

Main thing: Do it!

So Here We Go, Then!

The site BeCyberSafe.com and this blog were created because we needed them. Or, to put it a bit more bluntly, because almost all of us do. That is, we all need to give some serious thought to the matters of computer security and privacy, especially in the Internet age. It is just that too few of us do. Our take on this: The information is too fragmented. We don't know the problem, only bits and pieces of it, and thus any tools we apply are unlikely to be the right ones.

Case in point: Most know enough to have an anti virus program installed. However, 80% of all office computers have spyware on them - a whopping average of 27 programs ("State of Spyware Report", Webroot). Well, which is worse, a virus or 27 spies on your system?

The Internet is a wonderful place. You can find anything and everything. Born-again Christian Republicans and Russian criminals, yet also born-again Russian Christians and Republican criminals. CNN and BBC, but also Jim's blog on the history of rabbits and Jill's astrology site. Satanism side by side with taoism, pornography along with knitting. It's a jungle out there, but also a field of flowers. Wonderful!

But amidst all this chaos that is the Internet, there was one thing we never found: A simple, sensible, comprehensible site on computer security and privacy matters. A site not made to scare people out of their money or to push a specific product, but there to give a sober overview of the dangers that do in fact lurk on the net, and offer simple, solid solutions for anyone. A site that provided both the knowledge and all the necessary tools at the price of one overhyped anti virus program. A site that did this while not being saturated with mindless advertising and irritating pop-ups.

Such a site may have excisted. But we never found it when we needed it. Thus, we created it ourselves, and named it www.BeCyberSafe.com . We hope you'll find both the Web site and this blog interesting and useful, and would appreciate your comments!