Appy New Year - a few updates & reminders

With the new year well under way I thought I'd better give a few updates & reminders.

OS X Upgrades

Apple has recently announced a new operating system version that will be released later this year. If you've lost track the names, numbers and dates go like this:

Tiger	10.4	2005
Leopard	10.5	2007
Snow Leopard	10.6	2009
Lion	10.7	2011
Mountain Lion	10.8	(2012)

As you can see 10.8 is coming out a year earlier than previous history would suggest.

If your Mac is still running a version that is less than 10.7 it is time for you to have a think about upgrading. Of course if everything is currently working for you then you don't have to upgrade, but without doubt Apple is taking the attitude that the fancy new software they provide (such as iCloud) is a carrot to encourage upgrades. ie. new software is less likely to work with old versions of the operating system.

Get in touch with me if you'd like some advice or help with upgrading - there are a few things you should check first.

Mac App Store

If you're running 10.6.8 or above on your Mac then you have access to the Mac App Store - an online repository of software for your Mac. This feature was introduced as part of the free automated updates to 10.6 so many people aren't aware of it. You can generally see it on your dock as a blue circle icon with a stylized "A" in the centre. There are some real advantages to using the App Store for installing software. Firstly it's a single place to browse and it has both free and paid software. Secondly the software is "curated" by Apple so you can be far more certain that it doesn't contain nasty malware. Thirdly when you do pay, it is via Apple's secure payment servers. Fourthly once you've paid for it you get free updates and upgrades and for no further cost you can install it on other Macs in your household or small office. Finally, the install process is automatic and just as importantly updating any apps that you've bought takes just a single click.

If you haven't already browsed through the Mac App Store I suggest that you do - prices are generally quite affordable and you're bound to find software that you didn't know you needed!

Email - POP & IMAP

More and more people are accessing their emails through multiple devices. Perhaps their desktop Mac at work, an iPhone while commuting, a laptop at home, and an iPad when travelling. Most people therefore want to see a "unified" view of their mailboxes so that a message filed in a folder via their laptop is also in that folder on their desktop and when they delete a spurious email on their phone they don't have to delete it again on their desktop.

In "olden days" most ISPs offered email accounts on their servers with a small amount of space and access to those servers was via the POP protocol. The idea with POP was/is that you download the mail messages from the server to your own computer and then they are deleted from the server. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realize that if you have multiple devices accessing and deleting emails from the server there is bound to be confusion.

The modern way of managing email is for the service provider to offer multi-gigabytes of space on their server and the ability to organize that space into folders and subfolders and access to it via the IMAP protocol. This means that when each device manipulates an email (moving it to a folder, deleting it, forwarding it) that manipulation is done on the server. So when another device logs into the server it sees the messages (both received and sent) and folders as manipulated. In other words the server "in the cloud" becomes the central repository of the emails and each device browses that repository.

It is relatively painless to set up your Mac or portable device to use IMAP - as long as you have an email service provider that offers the IMAP protocol! (Some Australian ISPs still only provide POP.)

References

I'm in the process of redesigning my web site and the colleague who is advising me on that has told me that I need to collect references from my customers to help showcase myself. Generally I don't like to sing my own praises too much but.... if you'd like to type up a sentence or two about your experience with GMC that can be shared with the world I'd appreciate receiving it. It'll only be published with your first name and suburb. Thanks.

Twitter Tips

Most days I spend time browsing through the IT news with a specific focus on anything Apple related and even more specifically as it relates to Australian users. When I find relevant items I generally publish them to my twitter feed. If you're a twitter user you can see these tweets by following @GlebeMac. If you don't use twitter but would still like to browse the news and tips you can find a list of them on my web site http://glebemac.com.au/tweethistory

Backups

Here's another friendly reminder that you should have a regular backup happening for your Mac and also for your mobile devices. These days it really is quite easy to set up automatic backups to run in the background. I had one good news story recently where after a complete disk failure an iMac was back up and running in less than 24 hours with a new drive and no data lost and only a couple of hundred dollars in expense. On the other hand I frequently hear from people whose machine has crashed with no backup available and they're stuck with deciding whether to engage specialist data retrieval services which easily run into thousands of dollars. Contact me if you'd like to chat about this!

That's enough from me. I hope that your Macs and iDevices are running smoothly but please do contact me if you have any questions or concerns. I'm always happy to give a few minutes of free advice by phone.

Best regards,
Graham McKay

The ongoing saga of data security

Recently I was forced to change how I stored files on my computer because a piece of software went berserk.

I wasn't happy. It wasted some time and because I am quite security conscious, the change wasn't as simple as just moving the files.

Not that sort of crypt

I had been storing my files inside Truecrypt volumes. I was using them as pseudo disk drives so that files could be synchronised to them and as a result, automatically encrypted and secured in the event of the computer being stolen.

I store some sensitive information, some mine, some not. In the scheme of things it is fairly benign information but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I decided to use the built in file encryption in Windows 7 Professional to hide my files from people who don't know my password.

This seemed fine at first - built in, transparent, secure...but then I started getting performance issues with my machine.

I first noticed it using a web site editor. It hated my web site files all of a sudden and at times crashed because it couldn't load them.

It made no sense and I eventually tracked the problem back to the encryption by un-encrypting the folder where the files lived. Boom! Performance was back, all issues gone...with that program.

As time went by things were mostly OK but every now and then the computer would grind to a halt in place where it never used to.

As much as I didn't want to waste more time, I decided to remove the Windows 7 native file encryption and voila them machine is going like a rocket all the time now.

Of course I had expected some performance hit from encryption but nowhere near the level I was experiencing.

Of course, now I had my pants down. If my computer was stolen or otherwise compromised my files were there for all to see.

I looked into "remote-kill" systems that allowed me to flag my computer as stolen and, when it was next connected to the internet, would result in the automatic deletion of my private data.

The problem I saw with these systems was that

1. the pc may not be connected to the internet right away during which time my files are still there for the pillaging, 
2. the deletion process takes time and must include a "wipe" function otherwise the deleted files can easily be recovered. 
3. these systems are subscription based and cost money for as long as you use them.

So I revisited Truecrypt to see if there was an alternate way to protect my data.

Sure enough Truecrypt is actually able to encrypt my entire hard disk (operating system partition or the whole physical thing) and protect my system from the time the PC boots up.

Truecrypt is free and  doesn't suffer from the problems that a remote-kill system has.

I'd known about this but had stayed away from options that affected my "whole computer" in the past. Obviously if it went wrong the ramifications were larger than with my previous set up.

Being backed into a corner I decided that I'd give Truecrypt's System Drive Encryption a bash...not before backing everything up several times over.

It is not a fast process and it is best to leave your computer on over night to complete the initial conversion process, but it is simple and it works. NB: The process can be paused and resumed at will if you require.

Truecrypt itself takes you through the process steps by step. This includes check points and tests to ensure that the things that need to work, in the event of a disaster, are actually working (for example creating and testing a bootable CD ROM that, with your password, gives you access to your files if the operating system fails).

Once complete the use of the encrypted system is all but transparent. All I have to do now is enter a an extra password at the very start of my PC's boot process. That is it.

My performance is fine i.e. no noticeable degradation at all so far, and best of all, if someone doesn't know my password they don't have a chance in hell of cracking Truecrypt's military strength encryption.

I am actually using some encrypted virtual drives as well this time around too. I figure I'd used them to store synchronised backup data on various network and physically separate drives. That way everywhere that my data lives it is encrypted and accessible through the one tool using two different encryption strategies. So if the main disk fails irretrievably I can still get to my encrypted volumes using any other functional PC and the volume password.

NOTE: The synchronised volumes (virtual drives) are quite large so copying them from place to place is time consuming (I know, I used to do it a lot). Now I keep duplicates of the volumes in various locations and only synchronise changed files to them. Much faster.


I must say I am feeling kind of happy with it and just a little smug :-)

I'll keep you posted on how life goes with this strategy.

David

See what is sending stuff out of your computer

Have you ever felt powerless about which programs and entities are sending things from your computer?

You've no doubt heard about spyware and malware sending things to mysterious evildoers elsewhere on the web.

You computer may have even been used as a "zombie" at some point in time.

You've probably even heard bad stories about the so-called good guys tracking your computer use and sending off information without your permission perse.

Generally speaking running your favourite trusted anti-spyware tool (Malwarebytes or Spybot Search and Destroy) will eradicate nearly all but the most persistent of the baddies. If we are talking about a virus infection that you can't get rid of then that is an entirely different story.

Still, this leaves the "good guys" and the bad guys which haven't been detected by the anti-malware providers yet.

If you want to see what is going on at a deeper level then have a bang of this number...

...Current Ports from NirSoft is like a magic window to the soul of your PC.

"CurrPorts is network monitoring software that displays the list of all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer. For each port in the list, information about the process that opened the port is also displayed, including the process name, full path of the process, version information of the process (product name, file description, and so on), the time that the process was created, and the user that created it. 

 
In addition, CurrPorts allows you to close unwanted TCP connections, kill the process that opened the ports, and save the TCP/UDP ports information to HTML file , XML file, or to tab-delimited text file. 

 
CurrPorts also automatically mark with pink color suspicious TCP/UDP ports owned by unidentified applications (Applications without version information and icons)"

Current Ports also shows you where the information is being sent and by running their IP Net Info program in conjunction with Current Ports you can quickly determine whether the destination is legitimate, fraudulent or suspicious.

"IPNetInfo is a small utility that allows you to easily find all available information about an IP address: The owner of the IP address, the country/state name, IP addresses range, contact information (address, phone, fax, and email), and more.

This utility can be very useful for finding the origin of unsolicited mail. You can simply copy the message headers from your email software and paste them into IPNetInfo utility. IPNetInfo automatically extracts all IP addresses from the message headers, and displays the information about these IP addresses."

Armed with this information you can identify the programs doing things you don't like.

It is then up to you as to whether you change their settings to stop this (if you can), uninstall them or, if more persistent and badly behaved, killed and deleted with extreme prejudice (that is my favourite kind ;-).

NOTE: As an aside, NirSoft have so many great tech' tools it is hard to be across them all. I have mentioned some of their password recovery tools and other programs in the past. The bets part - they are all FREE! However, tread carefully and backup before you do any playing...seriously...

Collecting email on holidays - minimize data download while roaming...

These day many people take their laptops with them on holiday.

Email is almost critical to many people's way of life now.

However, collecting email on mobile modems is significantly more expensive than doing so at home.

Mobile data costs are a rip off pure and simple. They are designed to catch people using "too much data" and then charge them like a wounded bull for "extra" data use.

The pricing gets worse, much, much worse if you are overseas and "roaming" (using internet data carriers other than your own).

Before I outline my email data saving tip, I'll prove to you that mobile data pricing is a rip off.
Now, for a change, I am not picking on Telstra, it just happens to be the network I am on so I can compare what I get with them to what they are offering.

Picking a random phone plan with some data I found this "$2 per MB. You can add an extra 1GB Browsing Pack for an extra $10 a month."

$10 for 1GB may sound OK especially when you consider that if you "paid as you go" on the $2 per MB the same data would cost you $2000. That's right, $2000.

Considering emails can contain up to 5 or 10MB of data (if someone sends you photos or a joke or something), it is not hard to see how you could very quickly become very well ripped off.

To make it worse, I am using the Telstra mobile phone network for ALL of my internet. It is not as cheap as ADSL or Cable but I have no option. NB: This has changed lately but I've left  the article as is for historical reasons.

I am using the same network as the $2 per MB offer but instead I pay $89 for 12GB. Or, if you translate that into per MB value $24000. You read right - twenty four thousand dollars!
There is no justification for this sort of profiteering. Think about it, the same network, the same technology and a person can pay between $89 and $24000 for exactly the same thing and that is BEFORE you use data overseas!

So, let's set up your email to prevent this price shock :-)

The example and pictures I'll use are for Outlook, but pretty much all email programs have the same sort of options. Email programs on mobile phones are often set up to work this way by default but it wouldn't hurt to check to be sure.

In Outlook select Tools and then Options so you see the screen at top right.

Click on the Mail Setup tab and then the Send/Receive button - shown circled in red in the same picture.

You will then see the second screen as shown at right second from the top with the Send/Receive Groups settings.

Generally you'll only see the "All Accounts" option in the list so select that. If you have more than one item in that list you will need to revisit the setting process for all entries.

For now press the Edit button - shown circled in red.

You will see a list of Accounts down the left.

For each one check the Folder Options and select the Download Headers Only option.

This means that when you collect email for that account you will be shown the subject of the email and the, if you choose, you can download the rest. The way this happens varies from email program to email program so have a play with yours to ensure you are comfortable with the process before it accidentally downloads you big emails.

Click OK and repeat for each email account you collect from.

Close and OK the rest of the windows and test it out.

Have a great trip without the worry of having to sell your soul to pay for the data when you get back.

Sonia Loves FreeNAS

Recently Sonia has been banging on to me about FreeNAS.

FreeNAS is a Linux based operating system that turns old and apparently useless computers into Network Attached Storage - kind of like a file server.

The FreeNas people say...

"FreeNAS™ is an Open Source Storage Platform based on FreeBSD and supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems.  FreeNAS™ 8 includes ZFS, which supports high storage capacities and integrates file systems and volume management into a single piece of software."

It is a place to put you files people...backups, shared files and so on.

If you've got an old computer laying around doing nothing and you feel like having a play, give FreeNAS a go.