DropBox: FREE — sync files — with this iPhone app, you have access to your files on the go. And since the storage is cloud-based, and dropbox works on both Mac/Win you can have your files synced effortlessly. See my previous Dropbox article about the software versions and how to download and install on both platforms with FREE 2GB + 250MB of storage.

Evernote: FREE — sync notes — while the iPhone app isn’t as robust as some other Note applications, it will sync with their incredibly handy Mac and Windows application. So, if you’ve made notes or clipped screenshots at home for your big presentation at work, you can edit it on the way with the app, and then have it synced and ready on your work PC. See my previous Evernote articles for more details.

LastPass: FREE (requires $12/year subscription) — sync passwords — there you are visiting a favorite website at home or on your iPhone, but you can’t remember what password you used. Not any more with LastPass. LastPass works as a browser add-on that will store and sync your login information. Plus, anywhere you travel, you can log into the LastPass.com site to find those passwords. Find out more about LastPass with my previous article on it.

Skype: FREE — cheap talk — sure iChat is great on the Mac, but it’s limited to the Mac. Skype works on both platforms and even on your iPhone. With Skype, if you subscribe to one of their unlimited talk plans (US = $3, Japan = $6), you can not only talk all you want at home, at work, and on your phone. (NOTE: Skype currently requires you to use WiFi to make calls on your iPhone. To get around this limitation, you can use the FREE Fring application, which allows you to make Skype Out calls over the 3G network.)

Pandora: FREE — cheap music — if you love music, this is one app you need to have. Set up “stations” of your favorite music and let Pandora stream that music to you via this iPhone app. Pandora.com works great in Firefox and Safari also, so you can listen to those stations at work or home too.

Toodledo: ($3) — sync to-do’s — with this iPhone app you can edit/add/delete your To-dos. Toodledo’s website offers links to sync your account with both Mac and Windows, so those changes you made will be reflected wherever you go.

Photo apps: — see your photos — there are several good apps to show and upload your photos to a photo site, including Shutterfly (FREE), Flickr (FREE), Eye-fi (FREE), and Picasafoto ($.99, for Picasa) . If you take a lot of photos and want to see them on the road, these apps will help you stay connected to those images.

Yelp: FREE — great tips — Yelp’s iPhone app can help you find local businesses quickly. The “bookmark” feature is really great for keeping your favorite places’ phone numbers handy. So, you can order your favorite Thai dish in advance for quick pickup. User reviews can also give you tips what to order or avoid.

MAC ONLY:

AirMouse: ($2) — control your Mac with your iPhone. This app will work with your local WiFi network to become a trackpad to control your Mac wirelessly. Much more robust than Apple’s free Remote app, and cheaper than a Magic Mouse.

Prowl: ($3) — get PUSH notification on your iPhone from any Growl messages on your Mac. If you have Growl installed to display notifications on your Mac, Prowl allows you to send those notifications to your iPhone. You can be notified of things like disk errors, completed downloads, or whatever you want.

Well, I hope that’s helped you with some cool apps for you iPhone.

[Note: originally published on HMAUS.org ]

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In this example photo, I compared the life expectancy in India (69.9 years) to that of Japan (82.1).  While it might take a little time to learn the syntax of asking questions on WolframAlpha, there are LOTS of examples to help you.

Got a question? Get it answered at: WolframAlpha.com.   (Just don’t ask if it’s an ALIEN!)

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In fact this week there are two great sessions coming up:

1) Google Analytics – the Numbers Speak! 8/26/10 — learn how to get detailed statistics on your web site using Google’s free Analytics product,

and

2) Boot Camp #2 – Get on the Bus! 8/28/10 — get tips to iLife ’09, Apple’s suite of products for imaging and photography: iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD.

And be sure to become a member of HMAUS also to help keep great events like these coming!

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Well, that same functionality can get outdated pretty quickly. Code that was written five or six years ago probably didn’t even check the validity of requests to pages. A simple example of an attack is a site that uses ID numbers, for example www.somedomain.com/index.php?id=12 — what happens when that isn’t a number, or that ID is missing? Did the programmer check for those possibilities?

There are some wonderful open source web applications out there, including WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, to name just a few. However, every week new vulnerabilities are discovered on those platforms — security hacks, SQL injections, cross-site scripting, etc. Luckily many of those open source applications also have a robust community to write updates to protect against those attacks.

As a website owner, you should check for any updates to your website scripts regularly. This also includes to make sure your passwords are strong and safe. And, have regular backups of the site made that you can download to your computer for safe storage (as even hosting sites aren’t immune to attacks).

It’s a real pain to have your website hacked. You struggle to uncover how the attack was done. You work to get the site updated and back to where it was. You try to clear your name with any search engine that might say your site is “suspicious”. Meanwhile you lose visitors that might never come back.

If you don’t take care of your site yourself, then talk to the developers who built it and ask them to help you backup, upgrade, and lock down your site before you get hacked.

Security is an ongoing process, just like those updates on your computer…

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For site owners and stats jockeys, the ability for individuals to more easily hide visits to web sites using Analytics is a bad thing. They want to know as much as possible about everyone that visits. If more people don’t get “tracked”, they might feel that their efforts to create content to move people toward certain goals, funnels/calls-to-action, will be less effective.

For privacy nuts, they’ve probably already been blocking Analytics Javascript code using techniques like I’ve discussed in “How to Hide from Google“. But with Google publicly allowing people to opt-out of this tracking, and to make it as easy as a plugin to your browser, those less technically skilled will also be able to block Google’s tracking code.

My concern with Analytics is that while it is VERY useful for site owners (I use it myself on some sites), the fact that it is used by SO MANY sites all reporting back to GOOGLE, makes for some serious questions on privacy. I don’t mind that site owners do some SITE-LEVEL tracking — I mean, it’s built into the web server anyway — it’s just when all that information from all those different sites is sent to ONE entity — Google — it raises some serious flags.

So, I welcome whatever tools Google has that will allow users the option to opt-out of site tracking. Also included is the ability for site owners to anonymize IP address information sent to Google through Analytics — for site owners that love Analytics, but are concerned about the issues I’ve discussed above.

(Thanks Google! )

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Google Street View logs WiFi networks, Mac addresses

Protect Your Privacy Opt Out of Facebook’s New Instant Personalization – Yes You Have to Opt Out

Facebook May Not Be Skynet, but It Is Getting Smarter, and That’s Bad for Google: “Facebook has managed to succeed where Google has failed — turning your social behavior into actionable intelligence.”

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• MacBuzzer is giving away a free copy of the archival app, Rucksack, for the price of one of your Twitter tweets. Click that MacBuzzer “Get It Now” button and tweet away.

• Etude is giving away a license to their Mac music app, SimpleChord for one of your tweets. Learn more here.

MacUpdate Sofware Bundle

• MacUpdate has another great Bundle right now: 11 Mac Apps valued at over $425 for $49.99. Apps include Parallels 5 (run Windows while running Mac), MacScan (A/V), Hydra (HDR imaging), MacDVDRipper Pro, and Timeline 3D. First 10,000 buyers also get DVDRemaster Pro. Sale ends March 31st!

• If you missed the excellent MacHeist Bundle that just ended, be sure to sign up to be an “agent” for their mailing list — you’ll get tips on discount bundles, new releases, and fun games to play for free Mac software.

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HMAUS (Hawaii Mac and Apple User Society) has scheduled their annual Springfest for May 1st at Kapiolani Community College. These day-long events typically feature a variety of FREE lectures and demos covering computer use, digital photography, and social media, and are open to the public. Details are still forthcoming, but pencil in the date now.

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First, you may be wondering, WHY hide from Google. The answer is that perhaps you don’t want one entity to know all about you, your friends, and your internet activities. But, there are many people that WANT to be found by their name and activities; they don’t mind that old relationships, strangers, or advertisers know about their personal lives. If you are one of those, this article isn’t for you — go back to Twittering about your MySpace page on your Android phone.

Good, now that the Google fanboys are out of the room, let’s talk. Data; yours, mine, and everyone else’s, is slowly “moving to the clouds”. More and more companies are using cloud-based applications, like Google Docs, instead of their desktop version, Microsoft Windows. As Google Europe boss, John Herlihy, said: “In three years desktops will be irrelevant” . Even Steve Ballmer, head of Microsoft has said that cloud computing is a $3.3 trillion industry, something he’s betting his company on. Once your data is in the hands of someone else, how much real control do you have with it? As Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has said in regards to Google and privacy concerns, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” .

It used to be easier to hide from Google. You could simply stop using their search engine.
Google Search Engine: everyone knows and loves this. AVOID. Try Scroogle.org for proxy searches, or use Bing or Yahoo.

Gizmodo has a good article on how to quit using Google products (such as Buzz, Gmail, Docs, etc.) — but that is only the start.

Google has invested in some very clever ways to make itself part of your everyday experience, even if you don’t realize it. This isn’t to say that Google is all evil or all good. What they do with the huge amounts of data they have isn’t entirely clear to those outside the company. They do, however, make a huge portion of their profits from targeted advertising. If you value your privacy and don’t want Google to have access to it, you’ll need to consider these other, more hidden, Google products:

Advertising: Google Adwords are the number #1 choice for many sites because they are “targeted” to the site and very easy to set up for anyone with a website. A site owner merely goes to Google’s Adwords site, signs up as a publisher and then adds Google’s Javascript code into their site. The code makes a request to Google’s servers to get the ads that will be seen on that advertiser’s site. It’s fairly simple to set up and many people make some money from Google for hosting those ads. Once those lines of code are added to a site owners website, ads come directly from Google. In other words, Google has access to some of the visitor information on THOSE sites. Since it’s so popular on so many sites, Google has access to a huge number of people and where they travel on the web. But AdWords isn’t their only advertising means. Recently they purchased AdMob, a company that positioned itself for mobile advertising. They handle your mobile-based ads; iPhone or wherever.
Google’s advertising is sophisticated enough to detect cheaters (site owners clicking their own links for example), so, they have a good handle on who is visiting which sites, along with the content that should be in those ads for those sites.

Web Analytics: Google provides a free, robust web statistics reporting for any web site owner. Once they install that Google Analytics code, all site traffic information heads back to Google. Information in the reports include; visitor IP address, web browser type, country, how long on the site, pages visited, and much more.

These first two can pretty easily be eliminated by adding in some host file changes. Most computer use a host file to do lookups of domain names. For example, if you make a request to “www.hawaiiwebconsulting.com” your computer will first check your host file, then check with your DNS server. By editing that host file, you can tell your computer to basically ignore any request to certain domains — in other words, it doesn’t go to get the code on those Google Adwords or Analytics sites. There are several ways to do this:

Windows users can download and install BlueTack’s excellent (though a bit too agressive) HostManager. This program will download bad hosts and let you add them easily to your host file.
Or you can simply edit the host file yourself. Google it!
Here’s what you’ll need to include:

adservices.google.com
feedads.googleadservices.com
google-analytics.com
googleads.g.doubleclick.net
googleadservices.com
pagead2.googlesyndication.com
partner.googleadservices.com
ssl.google-analytics.com

With those inserted into your operating system’s hosts, any request to get the codes from Google, will be ignored. If you want to drop those requests to all the computers in your home, you could use OpenDNS and add those hosts into the “block” settings. OpenDNS is a great product, easy to use, and can be set up for free.

Host blocking is great for a computer that YOU can control, but doesn’t work for Internet cafes, hotels, (non-jailbroken) iPhones, etc. — you are using someone else’s network and system. Best bet: limit the number of requests on those open-systems.

Custom Searches on other sites: Google offers sites the ability to add their excellent search engine into any web site.
Site owners set up an account, insert the Custom Search Javascript into their site, and within minutes a site search powered by Google is enabled. Again, all that information about who searched for what when, goes straight back to Google. These custom searches are supposed to be marked with Google’s logo, but I’ve seen many sites hide that fact until AFTER you’ve used their search. Bet bet: be careful what searches you do within any web site, it might just be through Google.

RSS Feeds: Google purchased Feedburner a while back, which means that if you want to repackage your RSS feed, or consolidate it with other metrics and advertising, Google knows all about the traffic to your feeds. For many people, RSS feeds are THE way to stay up to date with a large number of websites. Google therefore knows the statistics about who is clicking on which of those many Feedburner feeds.
This can be eliminated by not following RSS feeds which use Feedburner or Google Reader.  But, that might eliminate some of the ones you really want to subscribe to. In that case, something like Notify.me can be used as a proxy.

Gmail: They have a great mail system; fast, reliable, and customizable. People can use it for their entire domain, so you aren’t really sure who is using Gmail and who isn’t. Entire universities are using Gmail as their email service provider. If your mail goes to Gmail, Google will have access to it.
Best to avoid. Be aware of what recipients are using for mail service. Try encrypting your email where possible (PGP, Hushmail). Try your ISP email, or email through Yahoo, Hotmail, or others.

Chrome Browser: this is a very nice, fast browser that Google has created. Does it report back to Google? If you leave the default settings ON, yes, it will send information back to Google about aspects of your browsing experience.
Best to avoid. Try Firefox with Adblock Plus, TACO, and Ghostery add-ons.

Google Earth/Maps: beautiful way to learn more about your planet and surroundings.
Best to avoid. Try Microsoft’s Bing for maps.

Chrome OS: new idea from Google to have people’s entire Operating System running off a Google product.
Wow. It sounds very cool, as almost all their products do. Why use it though?!

Google DNS: By controlling DNS, you can control where people go when they resolve that domain name. By controlling your DNS lookups, they know what sites you are browsing to. If they control DNS, they can also prevent you from blocking some addresses (or redirecting it to another location). OpenDNS won’t let you block their advertising-system domain, for example.
WHY?! AVOID!

Twitter: Google bought the right to search those tweets.
Try using a fake persona, don’t do Geo-location.

Picasa: excellent free app to organize your photos and videos on Windows. Now in beta on Mac.
Best to avoid, at least Picasa Web Albums. Try ACDSEE or other media organizers on Windows, and iPhoto on Mac. Flickr works great, as does good old email for sharing.

Picnik: Yep, Google just bought that company. One of my favorites for online web editing of images.
Best bet: don’t upload anything you don’t want Google to know about. Try Adobe’s free photoshop.com instead.

Your own website: so, how do you have a SUCCESSFUL site without Google? Google does comb domain registrations for sites (SEO sites have known this for years – see mattcutts.com for more), so if you register with your own name, they will most likely know it. Your name on the site is kind of a given that Google knows it. Avoid putting your email address on your site (unless you like spam). Limit what personal information you put on the site. You want to have Google send you visitors, unless it is a personal site. If so, block access to the site for GoogleBots using robots.txt (User-agent: * Disallow: /)and metadata tags (< META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” >).

Ads on your site: well, since Google seems to be hellbent on buying up advertising companies, you’re options have shrunk. But there are other ways to support your site than putting junky ads on it. If it’s so great, perhaps people would be willing to donate or get a subscription to it. Avoid Google Ads.

So, there you have it. A lot of other fragmented sites you can use to keep your entire “you” out of the hands of just one company. Sure your friends and family may ignore it, sharing their most intimate details about you on Facebook or Buzz, but, you’ll still have a shred of control over some of it. Maybe. For now…

[Disclaimer: I started this article a while ago since I was amazed at how many websites use Google products, and how many people think nothing of sharing everything with the company. I don't love or hate Google. They make some great products that are very hard to resist.  Their rather unsophisticated release of Buzz didn't help lessen concerns about Google's policies toward privacy. I didn't want to sound like a tin-hat loony but just alert those who might be interested to how deeply their actions *could* be tracked by Google.]

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Take a look at how easy and versatile Syncplicity is:

• 3GB cloud-based web space
• Windows XP or Vista
• View files online  (download from anywhere)
• Edit your files to Google Docs, Picnik, or Scribd (no need to have those installed on the computer you are using, great for on-the-road use)
• Sync between computers
• Auto-backups
• Share files and folders with others

The cost for all those features? FREE! Need more space? Get 50GB of space, more than enough for most people’s collections for just $10 month!

So, check out Syncplicity and see how easy it is to backup and sync your computers!

—

Looking for FREE set-it-forget-it backups; check out our article on Mozy.

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