Davcoh Computer Services Blog

According to the EPA, more than 4.6 million tons of electronic waste ended up in landfills in 2000. Since that time, 25 states have passed legislation mandating statewide e-waste recycling and several more states have introduced legislation. All laws except California and Utah use the Producer Responsibility approach, where the manufacturers must pay for recycling. Even with state regulations and educational programs such as reduce, reuse, and recycle, the EPA estimates that only 15-20% of e-waste is recycled and the rest of these electronics go directly into landfills and incinerators.

What comes to mind when talking about e-waste is the personal computer; however, because of this misunderstanding, individuals unknowingly throw dangerous items in the trash. To clear up any confusion, e-waste is any electronic product such as:

• Computers, Monitors, Laptops, & Tablets
• Printers, Copiers, Fax & All-in-one Machines
• Mp3 Players & Cell Phones
• TVs, DVD Players, DVRs, & VCRs,
• Stereo Equipment & Video Game Consoles

When these items are incinerated or disposed of in other unsafe ways, the hazardous materials they contain can lead to the contamination of our air, soil, and drinking water, which affects humans and animals alike. Some of these materials include

• Lead
  • Causes brain and nervous system damage, as well as reproduction and circulatory problems.
• Cadmium
  • Damages the brain and nervous system.  Amounts found in the human body increases as we age due to constant exposure.
• Barium
  • Leads to brain swelling, muscle weakness, damage to the heart, liver, and spleen.
• Chromium
  • Produces toxic effects within the cells and can irritate the eyes, skin, and mucous membranes. Chronic exposure can cause possible DNA damage.
• Mercury
  • Accumulates in the body, causing brain and liver damage if ingested or inhaled.
• Selenium
  • Causes hair loss, nail brittleness, and nerve-related neurological abnormalities.

When in the market for electronic items, be sure to give some thought to the following options. First, if you are disposing of an old item, locate a recycling center that will take your old electronics. Also, consider having your computer services technician upgrade your computer. Memory, hard drives, and operating systems are all components that can be upgraded by a professional. Another option is donation. Many non-profit organizations rely on outdated computers. In fact, many schools need old computers to teach students how to type, navigate, etc. In addition to these two great options, some PC manufacturers will accept old computers in order to reuse as much of the old system as possible in order to keep manufacturing costs down and reduce the amount of waste created.

Be aware that there are opportunities for recycling in and around your community.

• Newton will pick up in front of your house for a fee.
  • Visit: http://www.newtonma.gov
  • Wellesley has a transfer station for town residents.
    • Visit: http://www.ci.wellesley.ma.us
    • Needham offers free collection of hazardous materials on a scheduled date. This year’s date is October 20, 2012.
      • Visit: http://www.needhamma.gov
      • Brookline offers curbside ewaste collection, but you must call a week in advance.
        • Visit: http://www.brooklinema.gov
        • Weston has an ewaste collection date, and although you’ve missed this year’s April 21^stcollection date, keep the website address below for future collection dates.
          • Visit: http://weston.govoffice.com/

In addition, Staples often promotes the recycling of a printer or shredder and in return will offer $50 off a new one. There are plenty of opportunities for recycling your unwanted, unneeded, or outdated equipment

Here is the latest news about the iPhone 4 Settlement.

To be eligible for the cash payment, you must have: (a) experienced antenna or reception issues; (b) been unable to return your iPhone 4 without incurring any costs; (c) been unwilling to use a case or free bumper for your iPhone 4; and (d) completed certain troubleshooting steps or are unable to complete the troubleshooting steps because you no longer own your iPhone.

The settlement will provide a $15 cash payment if you are a United States resident who are or were the original owner of an iPhone 4, and who experienced antenna or reception issues, and satisfy other requirements explained on the below website:

You can read more about this article here

As many as 1.5 million Visa and MasterCard accounts may have been compromised in a recent security breach. Global Payments, which processes payments from credit, debit, and gift cards between merchants and banks,  did not say whether it knew of any fraudulent charges resulting from the breach.

Read more here.

Space Monkey is a blend of Dropbox, BitTorrent, and Crashplan that just might work over the long haul.

There are three key technologies making up this product:

1. Space Monkey is a synchronizing cloud storage provider similar to Dropbox. What you store on your account is automatically replicated to other computers you own. Like Dropbox, Space Monkey will also give you a way to share your files with others, as well as smartphone apps for access to your stuff.

2. Like Crashplan, Space Monkey uses storage devices located at its users’ premises, not in data centers paid for by the company. When you sign up for Space Monkey, you get a physical networked hard disk with 1TB of storage free for you to use. It’s actually a 2TB drive; the rest gets used by other people on the system.

3. And like BitTorrent, SpaceMonkey distributes all your files into little pieces (encrypted, of course) that are sent out to other Space Monkey devices on the Internet–conceptually, that is, since Space Monkey does not use any BitTorrent protocols. So when you want to download a file from a location other than your home network, the Space Monkey setup will piece it together from your closest network neighbors. This gives data in the Space Monkey “cloud” redundancy and reliability.

Cloud storage is expensive. Dropbox, for example, is incredibly expensive compared with just buying a hard disk, and you can’t even get a standard plan that gives you more than 100GB of storage.

Read more here.

Amazon’s Kindle Singles have apparently caught on with customers.

According to PaidContent.org, 2 million kindle singles which are shorter than full-length novels but longer than magazine articles, have sold in the 14 months they’ve been available. PaidContent, a digital-media news site, analyzed pricing for each e-book and estimated that Amazon may have generated $1.12 million in revenue for itself on those sales.

The company said at the time that it would take 30 percent of the revenue generated from the Amazon-vetted titles, which range in price from 99 cents to $4.99 but mostly sell for $1.99.

Do you have your Kindle Yet?

Read the complete article here.

The group of hackers known as “LulzSec” frequently taunted government pursuers over the last year as they published sensitive data snatched from myriad public and corporate Web sites.

Tuesday, we may have learned what happens when you mock the feds for too long. Authorities announced that five men in the U.K., Ireland, New York, and Chicago had been charged with hacking-related offenses. They also said the alleged LulzSec leader, known as Sabu, had entered a guilty plea on August 15 to 12 counts of computer hacking conspiracies and other crimes. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, Hector Xavier Monsegur, 28, was arrested and released in June on $50,000 bond. One of the men charged, Jake Davis, also known as Topiary, was arrested in the United Kingdom last July.

The alleged members of LulzSec are accused in computer attacks against Fox Broadcasting, PBS, and global intelligence firm Stratfor. The group is accused of stealing confidential information–including passwords–and releasing it publicly, hijacking e-mail accounts and even secretly listening in on a conference call in which the FBI and Scotland Yard talked about trying to catch them.

But for all the media excitement generated by the arrests, their impact is likely to be minimal. LulzSec may be silenced–at least for now- but network security experts believe the LulzSec crackdown is unlikely to spell the end of the spate of high-profile, politically motivated hacks carried out by LulzSec’s brethren in the online activist collective Anonymous.

Even law enforcement officials who had been taunted for so long by their suspects were reluctant to call their news a major blow to Anonymous. Indeed, speaking with CNET on condition of anonymity, a member of Anonymous downplayed the impact of the arrests.

“People get arrested from Anonymous all the time, including 25 last week,” by Interpol, he said. “It’s not like these arrests will bring the entire group down. They were involved but they weren’t kingpins like the FBI says.”

Google Docs is becoming increasingly popular with the ease of file organization and collaboration; however, these online file systems have been a part of several security breeches. In the most recent exploitation, hackers broke into legitimate Gmail accounts and sent pharmacologic-related spam messages.  In addition to this security breech, another breech allowed document sharing between previously approved users who were no longer approved to access the files.

In 2010, Google claimed some of the complaints made by users were the result of misunderstanding Google Docs features, and they responded by saying “we treat the privacy and integrity of our users’ data with the highest priority. We quickly investigated, and we believe that these concerns do not pose a significant security risk to our users.”

In addition to the risks above, any third-party storage carries risk of data loss or theft.  For example, hackers can access vulnerabilities in the storage server to gain access, service provider mistakes can corrupt the data beyond repair, or unintended oversights can transmit data to other users.

It is believed that Google probably uses multiple database servers so they are able to pull data from another server if one server fails. While this increases reliability, it also increases the risks associated with third party storage by having database servers storing data, application servers running software, and administrative servers implementing control.

Keep in mind:

1. Services used are at your own risk, as Google provides the services on an “as is” and “as available” basis.
2. Google delegates control and responsibility to the user. It is your responsibility to determine with whom data is shared, leaving it open to falling in the hands of the wrong people.
3. Data can be lost and irretrievable. If an account is deleted, all of the user’s data is also deleted. There is no central file server available for restoration.
4. Service interruptions due to maintenance or errors can occur, preventing the user from completing needed work in a timely manner.
5. Material downloaded or obtained through the use of Google Docs is not screened for viruses or any other potential hazards, leaving your computer vulnerable.

While security could be improved, Google Docs is free to use and offers users a quick way to upload and share, as well as allow multiple people to edit the same document, working in a virtual office. Most of the risks above are due to human error or malicious attacks that could be prevented had the user backed up such data.

What Precautions to Take?

• Make sure the address bar reads https://docs.google.com with the “s” being included after the http. If it is not included, you can add the “s” manually.
• When using Gmail, enable the “always use HTTPS” in Gmail’s settings. This encrypts the connection between your browser and remote servers, protecting sensitive data being transmitted when receiving Google Docs data and other content.
• Avoid sharing critically sensitive documents through Google Docs.
• When distributing important documents, using PDFs to distribute copies can prevent unauthorized viewing of revisions or removed information.
• Identify and document users with access to sensitive data. This helps keep data secure in a collaborative environment, but allows management to adhere to regulations, preventing misuse by users and administrators.
• Inspect data records and back up to prevent deletions by either malicious actions or human error.
• Choose a password that contains upper and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers. Do not choose birthdates, anniversaries, or pet names, because if they are able to get into your system they will look for information such as this to use against you to gain access to programs like Google Docs. In addition, do not use the same password for Google Docs as your other password protected programs, because if a hacker is able to find out one password, they may try this password to access other programs.

Lastly, be aware that Section 11.1 of Google’s Terms of Service states, “…Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

So, while Google states it respects user’s privacy, it remains within its legal rights to take ownership of anything that is placed on the internet through their free Services.

Spending on technology around the world managed to rise last year, despite economic woes in Europe and a severe hard-drive shortage, research firm IDC said yesterday.

Overall, IT spending rose just 5 percent in 2011, but that proved to be a healthy gain in the face of worldwide challenges.

The 5 percent figure was calculated using constant currency, a method that does not take into account fluctuations in the exchange rate. In U.S. dollars, the picture was even rosier, with tech spending rising by almost 9 percent last year.

A surge in demand for smartphones, tablets, and software kicked in for the year, counteracting damage to the PC sector as a result of the hard-drive shortage. Emerging markets also boosted spending, with double-digit gains seen in Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Read this article in its entirety here.

We have all seen the “Warning – Intrusion Attempt – Your Computer is being hacked” alerts. Many people believe this means someone is attempting to access their computer; however, what it probably means is that an infected computer that is configured to access any vulnerable computer is trying to invade yours. A computer virus spreads just like a regular virus. The more computers it can access, the better. The above warning that you have seen is your firewall doing its job – protecting your computer!

There are two kinds of firewalls: software firewalls and hardware firewalls. A firewall protects your computer from network-based threats. Almost all computers connected to the internet are under constant attack.

Some symptoms of an attack are

• a sluggish and slow computer response.
• the computer screen or mouse pointer flickering.
• the occurrence of extra installed programs that you yourself did not install.
• that your homepage has changed, and you yourself did not change it.
• when shortcuts appear on your desktop or system tray that you yourself did not place there.
• automatically disabled security tools that are unable to be restarted.

Software firewalls usually come standard on a computer but even with software firewalls, these attacks can occur. There are additional steps you can take to protect your computer further. Consider a NAT router with hardware firewall. The router’s job is to “route” data between computers. NAT routers allow you to share a Network Address Translation connection. What this means is that when your computer initiates a connection on the internet, the router keeps track so that when a response is returned to your connection, it knows where to send it. Without your computer initiating the connection, the router will not recognize an inbound attempt; therefore, it doesn’t know where to send the connection, thereby being forced to ignore the attempt and block all inbound attempts that you did not initiate.

Software firewalls can provide additional protection from computers on your own local network, and together, hardware and software firewalls can perform complimentary functions that when used together will give you a greater degree of protection than either one alone. Be advised that a firewall of any kind will not protect you from threats that you invite onto your machine yourself, such as in email, attachments, downloads, and removable hard drives.

Many broadband internet connections have a NAT router, but it’s important to be sure yours does. Contact your computer services specialist to determine if you are behind a NAT firewall, or if you need additional protection.