Lenovo drops Yoga 11 hybrid with Windows RT from its online sales

Lenovo has discontinued sales on its website of the Yoga 11 convertible PC with the Windows RT operating system. Analysts say this is a sign of PC makers moving away from their commitment to the struggling OS.
A page on Lenovo’s website stated the Yoga 11 is no longer being sold through its website, but said consumers “may still buy this product from a Lenovo retailer or reseller.”

The Yoga 11 (shown above) is still for sale by a few retailers such as TigerDirect, which is selling the device for $495. The device is not being sold by Best Buy, which instead sells the Yoga 11S, a hybrid released earlier this year that uses the Windows 8 operating system powered by an Intel Core processor.

The Yoga 11 hybrid was one of the handful of computers running Microsoft’s Windows RT, which is designed for tablets. The Yoga 11’s dual functionality allowed it to serve as a laptop, and also a tablet when the screen was folded up.

Lenovo did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but the company is now selling ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops running Windows 8 and 7. Prices of other Windows RT tablets have also been dropping. Microsoft this week lowered the starting price of Surface RT to $349 from the original $499, while prices of RT tablets from Dell and Asus have also dropped to under $300.

Microsoft released Windows RT for ARM-based devices and Windows 8 for Intel-based devices in October last year. The price drops appear to be an acknowledgement that Windows RT has failed, according to analysts. Some PC makers like Hewlett-Packard have shied away from RT, adopting Android or Windows 8 for their tablets instead.

The Yoga 11 being pulled from the website shows Windows RT is not a priority for Lenovo, said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.

“They will serve a need if there is one. But I don’t think it is a focus,” Milanesi said.
Devices such as the Yoga 11 will be replaced with fully functional Windows 8 tablets, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates in an email.

“I think you’ll see most vendors of RT tablets move in the same direction as Lenovo. RT tablets have not been selling well at all,” Gold said.

Lenovo is now promoting Yoga 11S with Windows 8, and the trick for such tablets and hybrids will be to meet the price points that RT allowed, Gold said.

“New Intel chips should help get the battery/power down so vendors can achieve parity with iPads and other ARM tablets,” Gold said.

Any momentum Windows RT had in the past is gone, and the lack of Windows backward compatibility hurt its position with consumers and potential business users alike, said Tim Bajarin, president at Creative Strategies, in an email.

“We are also seeing less commitment to RT from the OEMs, who realize that there is little demand for this OS,” Bajarin said. “While RT may live on, it will never realize the success Microsoft, ARM and those that supported it had hoped for.”


IDC in April said that Windows RT tablet shipments have been poor, and hardware makers have voiced concerns about the operating system’s fate. Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang also said he was disappointed with the poor response to Windows RT, while Acer’s president Jim Wong said the company will make a final decision on whether to release an RT tablet after the release of Windows RT 8.1 OS later this year. 

Ad networks agree to take steps against online piracy

A group of U.S. companies operating Internet advertising networks has pledged to bar websites trafficking in pirated goods from using their services and to take other steps to fight online copyright infringement.

Eight companies operating online ad networks, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL, have agreed to best practices for fighting Internet piracy, they announced Monday.

The ad networks will prohibit websites “principally dedicated to selling counterfeit goods or engaging in copyright piracy” from advertising with them, according to the best practices. The networks will also allow copyright owners to file complaints about piracy websites running ads, in a process reminiscent of copyright takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

However, the ad networks may consider “any credible evidence” provided by the accused website in deciding whether stop running its advertising.

Victoria Espinel

President Barack Obama’s administration “strongly supports voluntary efforts by the private sector to reduce infringement and we welcome the initiative brought forward by the companies to establish industry-wide standards to combat online piracy and counterfeiting by reducing financial incentives associated with infringement,” Victoria Espinel, the U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator, wrote in a blog post. “We believe that this is a positive step and that such efforts can have a significant impact on reducing online piracy and counterfeiting.” Ad networks and copyright owners must also protect privacy, free speech and fair process in their antipiracy efforts, Espinel wrote. “We encourage the companies participating to continue to work with all interested stakeholders, including creators, rightholders, and public interest groups, to ensure that their practices are transparent and fully consistent with the democratic values that have helped the Internet to flourish,” she wrote. The agreement will help prevent copyright infringement, participants said. “Ultimately, we want to create and maintain a healthy online space, promote innovation, and protect intellectual property,” Laura Covington, Yahoo’s vice president for intellectual property policy, wrote in a blog post. “The best practices we have committed to will help all of us get there.”

The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America both praised the agreement.

“The presence of advertisements by well-known brands on rogue websites that illegally distribute movies and television shows creates the false impression that such sites are legitimate, fostering consumer confusion and harm,” Chris Dodd, the MPAA’s chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “The announcement today is recognition by online advertising networks of the important role they play to help ensure a safe and secure Internet for all.”

Online Productivity Tool IFTTT Goes Mobile, Gets iPhone-Specific Channels

IFTTT, which stands for “If This Then That,” is a terrific tool for automating personal notifications and social media actions online. The service lets you set up recipes like “If I post a photo to Instagram, add the file to my Dropbox,” or “If there’s a birthday reminder, send me a text message,” or “Text me the weather for my ZIP code at 7:00 a.m. every weekday.” There are 67 different services you can tap into (IFTTT calls them “channels”), mixing them to build and curate actions that link normally disparate web services.

It’s an incredible productivity tool — and now it’s an iPhone app, too.

The new IFTTT app, released today, takes what it does so well on the web and gives it a touch-friendly spin. You can create your own recipes, or select from existing ones. And as an app, it can also tap into your iPhone’s Contacts, Reminders, and Calendar in recipes. It can differentiate between whether you’re using the front or rear-facing camera or taking a screenshot, which can be useful if you want to lump specific types of images into folders on Flickr or DropBox, for example. As someone who meets a lot of new people week to week, the ability to automatically send newly added contacts an automated greeting over email seems particularly useful. You can personalize push notification settings recipe by recipe.

Another app-specific feature is a unique feed view of your IFTTT alerts, allowing you to browse both time-based actions and immediate events in one place like a timeline. The app also has a discovery feature that suggests new recipes you may like.

You can grab the free iPhone app here. An Android app is currently in the works, the company says.

To Sell Stuff Online, Make It Easy to Buy in the Bathroom

Thanks to the Apple iPad and other tablets, people are now shopping on the couch, in the bed, and in the kitchen, not to mention the most comfortable of “lean-back” environments: the bathroom.

In a soon-to-be-published survey, Boston-based SeeWhy asked more than 1,000 U.S. tablet owners where they used their devices to make purchases. Ten percent of respondents admitted that they had bought something while on the john, or at least in its vicinity. The bathroom actually placed last out of all locations in the home, after the living room (44 percent), bedroom (23 percent), kitchen (19 percent), and outside (14 percent), but this WC stat still shows just how powerful tablets are becoming as a virtual storefront.

If you can get people to buy in the bathroom, you can get them to buy anywhere.

SeeWhy makes marketing software aimed at bringing potential customers back to online shopping sites if they’ve left without buying anything. Along with its survey, the company also analyzed more than 21 million transactions from thousands of clients on its platform. Their study found that when shopping on a mobile device, customers were three times as likely to buy something when using a tablet than when using a smartphone.

Charles Nicholls, founder and chief strategy officer for SeeWhy, says that tablets are succeeding at shopping because people use them in a way — and at a time — they don’t use any other device.

“You find that you’ve got this evening pattern of recreational shopping that doesn’t happen on desktops in the same way,” Nicholls says.

If someone is at home and has a choice between a tablet and a phone, Nicholls says they’ll overwhelmingly reach for the tablet for shopping. Small screens still make the multi-step buying process painful on smartphones, he says, while tablets typically approximate the experience of shopping on a PC.

At the same time, desktops and laptops don’t lend themselves to the, ahem, same versatility of venue as tablets do. Nicholls didn’t say this, but I will: Taking your tablet into the bathroom is almost the same as taking a magazine. Even the thinnest laptops can’t do that.

Other research has come to similar conclusions (though not specifically about the bathroom). Market research firm eMarketer says patterns are starting to emerge around different uses for different-sized screens, especially around shopping. More consumers will shop on their smartphones than on their tablets this year (102 million versus 94 million), but only because more people own smartphones than tablets, eMarketer estimates. And the firm predicts that millions more of those shoppers will actually buy something using their tablets than their phones.

Clark Fredricksen, vice president at eMarketer, concurs that tablets have driven the concept of “recreational” online shopping. Most online shopping that takes place on PCs happens at work during the day, he says. People who would be less inclined to power up their laptops or desktops once they got home at night don’t have the same resistance to using their tablets.

And more of those people may not have PCs at home at all.

“What that means in a commerce context is we’re more likely to see people using a tablet in times when they may have previously used a desktop to shop for things or buy things,” Fredricksen says. “And in some cases, the tablet is going to offer a more intimate experience than the desktop ever did. You can touch the products you’re buying.”

Another factor beyond form factor that appears to play a role in the tablet’s shopping success is demographics.

At Overstock.com, 19 percent of the site’s traffic comes via smartphone, the company tells Wired. But the typical order size from phones is 10 percent below the site’s average, amounting to just 4 percent of total revenue. Meanwhile, tablets generate less traffic (16 percent) but result in orders 17 percent above the site average, contributing to 15 percent of Overstock’s sales.

People with tablets have higher disposable incomes, says Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, while phones “are essentially given away.” For sites like his — which, Byrne says, have optimized their design for tablets –”you’re attracting a good client base.”

“On the other hand,” he says, “as the price of tablets comes down, like everything else in consumer electronics, that discrepancy should disappear.”

In the likely event that price drop happens, even more people will probably start reaching for tablets to shop, since more people will have tablets to reach for. Nicholls says mobile devices in general still have far to go before becoming the default online shopping medium. His company’s study found that only 12 percent of online sales happen on mobile devices.

Even so, it’s increasingly clear that a new(ish) technology is once again enabling a new kind of consumerism. Much like going to the mall in the 1980s, tablets have turned retail into a way to relax, though in this case you don’t have to leave home — no matter what room you’re in. Tablets, says Nicholls, “have fundamentally changed the way we shop.”

Bits Blog: Coursera, an Online Education Company, Raises Another $43 Million

Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, at the company’s offices in Mountain View, Calif. Over the next few months, Coursera plans to double its employees to about 100.
Coursera, a year-old company offering free online courses, has raised another $43 million in venture capital from investors active in both domestic and international education.

The new investors include the International Finance Corporation, the investment arm of the World Bank, and Laureate Education, an international higher education company with dozens of profit-making universities around the world, as well as GSV Capital, Learn Capital and Yuri Milner, an individual entrepreneur.

“We hope it’s enough money to get us to profitability,’’ said Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera. “We haven’t really focused yet on when that might be.’’

Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif., previously raised $22 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; New Enterprise Associates; and the University of Pennsylvania and California Institute of Technology, two of its university partners.

Over the next few months, Coursera plans to double its employees to about 100, and expand in several areas, including mobile apps and its Signature Track offerings, which charge a fee to students who want an identity-verified certificate upon successful completion of Coursera’s free courses. Since January, when the Signature Track option was first offered in five courses, Signature Track fees have produced more than $800,000, Ms. Koller said — and in the long run, she said, such revenue may be enough to make the company sustainable.

The company also plans to invest in international expansion, through localization, translation and distribution partnerships, and techniques for blended learning, in which Coursera’s online materials are used alongside classroom sessions with a professor.

“We see great potential for using some of the Coursera materials in our universities, so there is a strategic element to this investment,’’ said Douglas L. Becker, chairman and chief executive officer of Laureate. “The I.F.C. made the largest education investment they ever made in Laureate, and they’re joining us in this investment. Coursera allows us to invest in something we see as a rising technology impacting higher education, and gives us access to their content and curriculum.”

Coursera has grown with stunning speed since it began in April 2012, with four university partners. Now, the company works with 83 educational institutions on four continents, offering about 400 free college-level courses to more than four million students from every country in the world.

But after the initial burst of enthusiasm last year about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, and their potential for democratizing higher education worldwide, this year has brought some pushback. Faculty members at several institutions have expressed concern about how the courses may change higher education, how quickly university administrators signed on to work with MOOC providers, and whether the aim is more to save money than improve the quality of education.

So far, most of the students who have completed Coursera MOOCs have been college graduates, and it is still unclear how well the format will work to help students without degrees earn college credit for their online work. Coursera has recently started to market its materials for use by public universities in blended on-campus classes. Universities that use the materials will pay licensing fees, which Coursera will share with the universities that produce the courses.

Square's New Online Stores Could Make Twitter Where You Shop

Image: Square

 

 

“Synergy” is one of the most abused clichés in the corporate lexicon. But when you’re both the chairman of Twitter and the CEO of one of the most-watched commerce startups around, synergy isn’t a bad place to aim.

 

Jack Dorsey may have hit the target with the launch today of Square Market, Square’s first big foray into online shopping.

 

Since launching in 2010, Square has mainly been known for its eponymous credit card reader that plugs into the headphone jack of a smartphone or tablet. And Dorsey has often spoken of the business opportunity presented by the 95 percent of commerce that happens offline.

 

Square Market not only acknowledges the reality that small retailers can no longer afford to remain offline-only; it gives them a tool to obliterate the distinction. Now any shopkeeper using Square as a cash register can simply flip a switch in the app to create an instant online store.

 

“Our mission is to make commerce easy,” Dorsey said while demo-ing the new product for Wired at Square’s San Francisco headquarters. “That doesn’t mean ‘make offline commerce easy’ or ‘make online commerce easy.’ It’s commerce in general.”

 

Square’s register works by letting store owners input their inventory—description, price, picture—into the app. When someone comes to the counter to make an offline purchase, the cashier taps the item to add it to the total. In the latest version of the app, a switch to the input screen that lets stores choose the option of selling online. Toggling the switch to “yes” instantly (at least during the demo) posts the product to that business’ Square-hosted online storefront.

 

In keeping with Square’s insistence on design that “gets out of the way,” these storefronts are stripped down to nearly the bare minimum needed to shop online—a picture, a price, a button to buy. But this isn’t just an aesthetic preference. It’s Square making a statement that the online storefront itself isn’t what’s most important. The product for sale is. This is where Twitter enters the picture.

 

You may not know that Twitter has something called a “product card” that turns a link to a product online into what amounts to a catalog listing embedded in a tweet. The product listings on Square Market don’t look much different than these cards, which is no accident. When a store owner—or anyone—tweets a link to a Square Market listing, the product card will include a buy button that flips right back over to Square. In effect, Twitter becomes the storefront.

 

Though not just Twitter. Sharing on Pinterest or Facebook accomplishes much the same thing. Square Market in that context isn’t so much a destination—though Square does hope it will become one—but a platform-agnostic backend for social selling. A product listed in Square Market becomes what Dorsey calls an “atomic unit” of commerce. The point is to highlight what’s being sold, he says, not to emphasize that it’s Square doing the selling.

 

“We don’t have to brand it explicitly. It’s all about the people using it,” Dorsey says. “Both Twitter and Square have been really great at diminishing their brands in favor of the people using them.”

 

Whether Square will need to market itself more for Square Market to catch on is a question the next several months will answer. Though Square says it handles billions of dollars in transactions annually, it’s not a ubiquitous presence on the retail landscape—with one major exception.

 

As the processor of all Starbucks credit and debit transactions in the U.S., Square has shown it can operate on the scale of a national chain, not just a farmer’s market. Dorsey is confident that the digital infrastructure that powers those transactions can handle however many online stores open in Square’s new marketplace.

 

On the front end, meanwhile, Twitter provides a massive digital marketing infrastructure capable of driving not just awareness but also commerce straight to Square, now that Square now has an online destination for that commerce to take place. “Synergy” is a word that might seem better suited to Jack Donaghy. But for Jack Dorsey, it’s looking like an increasingly good fit.

 

 

Jordan Accused Of Targeting Online Dissent

A Jordanian woman surfs the Web at an office in the Amman, Jordan, on Sept. 30, 2009. The country's government is under fire from media activists for blocking hundreds of websites across the kingdom.
A Jordanian woman surfs the Web at an office in the Amman, Jordan, on Sept. 30, 2009. The country's government is under fire from media activists for blocking hundreds of websites across the kingdom.

Jordan's King Abdullah vowed to make the desert kingdom a "free Internet" country as he began his rule more than a decade ago. On June 2, when local Internet providers were ordered to block hundreds of news websites across the kingdom, Web publishers protested the broken promise and international media watchdog organizations charged censorship.

The protests are getting louder in Amman, as websites go dark across the kingdom, more than 300 in all. Government officials say the new law protects citizens against slander and blackmail on unregulated websites. The controversial new requirements include a government license; a member of Jordan's press council on staff, a group that excludes electronic media journalists; and site owners being responsible for all content, including commentary posted in open discussions.

"The Internet is one of the only places that people have a voice that is outside of the gatekeepers of the government," said Daoud Kuttab, the founder of Amman.net, one of the blocked sites.

'Where Is Independent Media?"

He is a pioneer in Jordan's independent news culture, overseeing an electronic newsroom for more than a decade. He has joined other web publishers in an act of "electronic civil disobedience" by refusing to apply for a license.

"Freedom of the press is something that Jordan and the king are trying to sell to the rest of the world," he says, but points out the country's major newspapers are owned by the government.

The major private newspapers are "owned by businessmen who are totally in bed with the government, so where is independent media?" he asks.

Kuttab charges that the new law is political, targeting online dissent.

The government imposed the new regulations amid rising dissent. The list of complaints includes high-level corruption and a faltering economy as electricity prices are set to rise. Jordan has been on the frontlines of the Syrian conflict, hosting more than a half million refugees, straining the country's meager resources.

The latest protests focus on the U.S. deployment of Patriot missile batteries, a squadron of F-16 fighter jets and more than 700 U.S. military personnel now based in Jordan. The White House described the deployment as protection against violent spillover from the war in Syria. The Web was one place where Jordanians could have a freewheeling discussion, much of it critical of government policy.

Self-Censorship

The new regulations don't include Internet giants like Google and Facebook. They also don't touch Jordanian bloggers like Nassem Tarawnah. His website, 7iber.com, is a platform for open discussion and debate. He escaped the ban, but joined the protest against a government regulation he believes sets a dangerous precedent.

"There is nothing to say that, a year from now, or two years from now, this is not going to affect a larger segment of the Internet," he says.

We meet in a café where young customers pay for frothy cappuccinos and logon to the Web for free. Jordan leads the region in Internet penetration with more than half the country online. The Facebook generation, more than a million Jordanians are Facebook users, is young, well-educated and Web savvy. They bypass the country's traditional media and read news and commentary online, Tarawnah says. He believes the intricate laws and regulations aim to create a culture of self-censorship.

"It's about pushing the offline culture of fear online," he says.

He's already seen online opinion dry up on his site since the government imposed the block on specific sites.

"It makes it even more difficult and challenging to get average people to say, speak up you can post it, it's safe, because that safety has kind of eroded," he says.

Eroding Press Freedom

Jordan's record on media freedom has been slipping for years, according to Freedom House, a U.S.-based organization that monitors media freedom around the world. The 2013 report card labels Jordan's media "not free" with a lower rating that Egypt, Tunisian and Libya.

But government officials insist the new law protects citizens from dubious journalism. Some sites in Jordan have published damaging allegations about individuals or groups, and then offer to remove the charge for cash. Web editor Kuttab acknowledges there have been online abuses.

"That's true – but that's the price of openness," he says. "You know, and if someone has actually broken the law and blackmailed people, put them in jail. Don't kill all the messengers using a machine gun just to get rid of a fly."

Kuttab has joined a law suit against the government. Other Web publishers have called for a national campaign to break the blackout through technology. Young Jordanians are creating all kinds of software, said Kuttab, to get around the blackouts.

"They are sending it around for free," he said, "people have reacted by trying to beat the system."

 

Warren Buffett's sister launches an online philanthropy course

 

Doris Buffett

FORTUNE -- The name Buffett is in the news, but the first name is Doris, not Warren. His older sister by three years -- that makes her 85, him 82 -- she is pursuing a decade-long interest by sponsoring a new, free, online course about philanthropy.

The goal of the program, called Giving With Purpose is to teach college students -- and anyone else who cares to kibitz -- how to beneficially contribute to charity. That's not necessarily easy. There are IRS rules for giving that must be learned and there is wayward, wasteful philanthropy to be avoided.

But for college students who apply themselves well in this new course, the prize at the end is real Buffett money to give away.

Doris Buffett got to this stage of philanthropy by starting with small donations about 10 years ago in North Carolina, where she then lived. (Today she is a resident of Virginia). Her usual practice in those days was to aid local people who had run into bad luck -- a sudden illness, for example, or even a broken-down car -- and needed a few thousand dollars just to struggle along.

Her gifts earned her the name "Sunshine Lady" and that led her to set up the Sunshine Lady Foundation.

MORE: Spanx founder joins Giving Pledge

When Warren Buffett announced in 2006 that he would begin giving his vast fortune to charity (and again, in 2010, when he joined with Melinda and Bill Gates to form the Giving Pledge), he was inundated with letters from people asking for help. He responded by sending the pleas along to Doris, the acknowledged philanthropy expert in the Buffett family, and by also promising her money for deserving letter-writers when she needed it. Recalling those days, she remembers that the original shipment from Warren included 410 letters.

Doris thereafter applied some skills she'd learned while working years earlier in a district attorney's office to sort out the letters between deserving and not. A small army of unpaid women -- called Sunbeams -- helped her in this job.

Gradually Doris broadened her giving and the once small Sunshine Lady Foundation grew into a large force. Over the last four years, its contributions (some of the money from Warren, but most from her) have averaged $10 million annually.

The foundation still gives money to ordinary people down on their luck, but Doris has also added some special projects: educating prisoners in such places as Sing Sing, sending battered women to college, and also giving college scholarships to North Carolinians generally.

The foundation's scholarships have some strings attached to them. Besides requiring a recipient to maintain a 3.0 grade average, they also compel the student to pledge (in a written contract) that he or she will not engage in body piercing (except ears); tattooing; the use of illegal substances, alcohol or tobacco; carrying a credit card; and sustaining an unhealthy body weight. Says Doris, "That's the grandma in me coming out."

Another project that the foundation added -- this is the forerunner of today's online course -- was sponsoring college courses about philanthropy, in which students actively investigated local causes to determine which deserved Sunshine Lady grants ranging up to a per-college total of $10,000. Among the 30 or so participants in the course have been University of North Carolina, University of Nebraska, and Georgetown.

MORE: Warren Buffett is bullish ... on women

The new online course (which starts in mid-July) will last for six weeks and provide university and college classes the same chance to give away $10,000, upon their intelligently vetting one or more local charitable causes. Doris Buffett and a second foundation she started in 2011, Learning By Giving -- which she funded with $5 million -- will be the overseers and arbiters of this work. The technology the program needs has meanwhile been supplied by Google's MOOC, which stands for Massive Open Online Course.

Two younger Buffetts are closely involved with the new online program. Doris' grandson, Alex Buffett Rozek, 34, who manages a small Boston investment partnership, is president of the Learning by Giving foundation; Warren's grandson, Howard Warren Buffett, 28, who will be teaching social value investing at Columbia this fall, is on the foundation's board. Rozek has served as a director of the Sunshine Lady Foundation, and the younger Buffett has worked with his father, Howard Graham Buffett, on the latter's eponymous foundation.

The six-week course covers all of the steps that a student requires to make informed judgments about giving away money -- for example, what impact does a charitable organization have on its community and what will be the impact of your money on the organization?  But guest speakers having a hands-on knowledge of philanthropy will also make video appearances -- among them baseball's Cal Ripken Jr. and ice cream's Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield.

The first of these speakers, in the opening week of the course, are Doris and Warren Buffett, who jointly discuss their philanthropic experiences -- Doris white-haired and striking, Warren looking his usual avuncular self. Doris notes that she's businesslike in her giving, but has experienced "incredible joy" in carrying it out. Warren nods understandingly, adding that "helping people achieve their potential is about as good as it gets." And as the video rolls, they peremptorily interrupt each other, just as if they were kids back in Omaha.

 

Anyone can master these top online security tips

Concerns about online privacy have reached new heights since reports revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency has been monitoring millions of phone logs and social media accounts as part of several top-secret programs. In light of the revelations, many people are wondering how they can protect themselves from snooping.
I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Santorelli, a security expert at research firm Team Cymru and a former Scotland Yard detective. I asked him to share his own measures for staying as safe as possible while using the Internet.
Several days later, he sent me his tips. First off, nothing will protect you from government surveillance if a service provider agrees to cooperate in the investigation, he said. Those providers could include your ISP or Google.
However, that doesn’t mean you should dismiss safety measures — cybercriminals are a real threat. He recommended a few simple measures to protect your privacy online.
Here are Santorelli’s top nine tips:
1. Software patches
Patch your OS and all your applications, especially your browser and plug-ins such as Java and Flash. “This one step will likely give you 90 percent protection, as infections, which lead to privacy compromise, often rely on exploiting known vulnerabilities in your operating system,” said Santorelli. Set up automatic updates whenever possible.
2. Two-factor authentication
Use two-factor authentication for as many accounts as you can. This means you must provide both a password and a second form of identification, such as a code that’s sent to your phone, to log in to an account. Most of the major free service providers, such as Twitter and Gmail, have enabled this capability.
3. Antivirus
Use antivirus software, and update it regularly. “While it’s only about 30 to 50 percent effective, it’s still well worth doing,” said Santorelli. Many ISPs will give you a license for free. And there are several free apps.
4. Web browsers
Santorelli said that you can stay safe using any of the modern browsers — Internet
Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Firefox — as long as you update them “rigorously.” You should remove plug-ins that can execute code, such as Adobe Flash and Java. This may not be practical in all cases, however. “Most people don’t do this because they find the Internet very boring without these plug-ins,” said Santorelli. You won’t miss much with Java turned off — the only widely used online applications that really need Java these days are Web-conferencing things like GoToMeeting. But many websites still use Flash for displaying video.
5. Scripts
Use a script-blocker plug-in for your browsers, such as the free No Script for Firefox or NotScripts for Chrome. These plug-ins will block many ads and many types of active content, such as pop-ups that occur when you hover over highlighted text and other elements based on JavaScript. This is a popular way for attacks to enter your computer.
6. Firewall
Use a software firewall on your system. Most modern operating systems, such as Windows and Mac OSX, include a built-in firewall, but you may have to enable it.
7. Password control
Do not use the same password for everything. Santorelli recommends using a password-management tool, such as RoboForm Everywhere, to generate different passwords for each of your accounts. At the very least, he said, have separate sets of passwords for different types of accounts: one for banking accounts, one for free email accounts, etc.
8. Mobile-app permissions
“Beware of mobile apps that ask for massive control over your device, far in excess of what could be justified for what the app apparently does,” said Santorelli. For example: Why would a game need access to your photos and contacts? “Remember, if the app is free, that sometimes means that (your information is) the product being sold,” he said.
9. Linked accounts
Beware of online accounts that link to other accounts. Many Twitter apps do this. Once you stop using these apps, they represent a forgotten route into your Twitter account, said Santorelli. “Do a quick check, and you might be surprised how many forgotten apps have access to some of your accounts,” he said. “Delete them.” To see the apps that access your Twitter account, visit twitter.com/settings/applications — the length of the list may astound you.
According to Santorelli, if you protect yourself from the traditional acquisitive criminals, who are using the same tools as folks with less traditional motives, you are going to be as safe as you can be online.
Ogden-based TopTenREVIEWS.com guides consumers by comparing products in the world of technology, including electronics, software and Web services. Have a question for TopTenREVIEWS? Email Leslie Meredith lesliemeredith@technewsdaily.com.