Michael Horowitz

Any device that challenges electricity for a living is going to lose a battle sooner or later. So, what's a surge protector to do when it can no longer provide surge protection?

One possibility is to visually indicate the failure, either by turning a light on or off or by changing the color from green to red. The problem with this is that the light may not be visible because the surge protector is buried in a corner. Plus, who's going to know what the light means years after the device was put into service?

The legacy approach to email, typified by Microsoft's Outlook program, permanently mated email to one computer. Many flaws in this mode of operation are obvious, but I recently ran across a flaw that isn't so obvious.

Before getting rid of an old Windows XP laptop, I was removing data files and un-installing applications. Turns out it's fairly hard to totally scrub the details of Outlook and Outlook Express email accounts from the Windows Registry.

I used to be a big fan of Firefox, now I find myself using Chrome more and more. Here are some illustrations of what I see, from my Defensive Computing perspective, as the downward trend in Firefox and the improvements in Chrome.

One Defensive Computing advantage of Chrome over Firefox is that it asks before running Java applets.

Promoting Defensive Computing is like nagging children to eat their vegetables. So, when a story hits the news with details of the absolute worst case scenario, it's a teaching moment.

Although the case of Barry Ardolf hacking his neighbors Wi-Fi network has been known about for a while, it's being reported on again because Ardolf was just sentenced to 18 years in prison. His story should scare people into verifying that their wireless network is as secure as possible.

Back in February I wrote about a potential problem with offsite backups, that if you delete a file by accident, many providers will delete their copy of the file too, leaving you with no backup. Recently, Mathew Ingram of Gigaom described another potential problem with off-site backups, one most likely to affect Windows users.

His ISP, Rogers Communications in Canada, has a monthly bandwidth cap of 95 gigabytes. He had been over the cap before, so when he was alerted by Rogers about being over again, he thought nothing of it.

If I had a nickel for every time I've run across the advice about being wary of e-mail message from someone I don't know, I'd be richer than Bill Gates.

Mere hours after writing here about the Epsilon data breach, how it may lead to spear phishing and why spear phishing is more dangerous than normal phishing, comes the story that the Epsilon breach itself may well have been the result of . . . spear phishing.

According to iTnews:

By now, many have heard about the data breach at Epsilon, a marketing company that sends e-mail messages and claims to be "the world's largest permission-based e-mail marketing provider." According to their website, they send, on average, 109 million e-mail messages a day.

It has been reported that the only data lost by Epsilon were names and e-mail addresses.

I'll get right to it: anyone using a mature copy of Windows 7 (as opposed to a new computer or a newly installed copy) should not install Service Pack 1 (SP1).

This is not a knock on Microsoft, Windows or the service pack itself. The Defensive Computing approach is to let the curious, the un-informed and the pioneers suffer the inevitable problems with any major release of software.

My main computer is a Lenovo ThinkStation running Windows 7 Professional. Today, trying to manually take a Restore Point, I ended up instead at the Restore a Restore Point window. While there, I couldn't help but notice that there was only one available restore point.

Just one? (Yes, I did click on the "Show more restore points" checkbox).

On the heels of my writing about accidentally deleted files disappearing from backups, an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal suggested using Dropbox for accessing data files when traveling.

The topic was online storage and Dropbox certainly offers that. But, it normally offers replication rather than true backup. Replication is similar to backup, but anyone choosing an online storage company should fully understand the difference.

The big difference involves deleted files. Like the previously discussed Mozy, Carbonite and Backblaze, Dropbox deletes their copy of files you have deleted after 30 days. Plus, files in the Dropbox folder can be deleted on any computer connected to a particular Dropbox account. Trend Micro's Safe Sync also deletes the backup copy of a file 30 days after it's been deleted.

One benefit of my ending up between Scott Mueller and Richi Jennings is knowing that I'm not alone in experiencing hardware problems with Ethernet ports.

I'm basically a software guy. Coming from a mainframe background, very few of us ever got to even see the hardware let alone deal with it in the trenches. When things go wrong, my first suspect is always software. Over the years software has, indeed, been the root of the vast majority of problems I've encountered.