ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

There is an interesting question asked by David Berlind @ ZDnet Blogs that will Windows 7 be really required by 2010 ? David asks that the way Web applications are bringing us to the browser based computing, then will it matter if we will have Windows 7 or Linux or Mac in 2010 ?

This question actually makes sense to me because I find myself using more of browser based applications rather than desktop based applications each and every day. For office documents, I prefer using Zoho, for e-mails I use GMail, for music we have Last.Fm and various other services which we can rely upon and just use the browser and an internet connection for the stuff we want to do.

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Being part of communities is really helpful as it lets you know that what kind of concerns people are having. I’m part of Cnet’s community (although, I’m not an active member there but I’m trying to be one) and this week’s question from another member provoked me to write something about it and share some of my thoughts about that question. So here’s the question and here’s what I think about the situation :

My wife and I had two laptops stolen from our room in an upscale hotel in Norfolk, Virginia last Saturday night. My question is somewhat open-ended. Is a concern justified for identity theft from the info available on the machine? Having owned the laptops for 1 to 2 years and using them as the primary home/travel computer, it is safe to say that everything was on the hard drive. Not only the 20GB of pictures, nor the finance stuff, or the research database, or all the cookies, etc.; even the money for the cost of the computers is poof–gone. What is the concern that the community would have for such a loss: identity theft, system hijacking, sleepless nights, having to buy new ones, and so on. In the future, in case of another loss, what are some solid security measures I can use to prevent someone from obtaining what I have on my laptops?

First of all, I’m sorry for Dave’s loss of laptop (the member who posted the question) and I’m sorry to say that your concern is just right and equally terrifying too. However, what has happened has happened and can’t be changed. Let us look at the concerning factors first and lets find out more about them and then we’ll try to figure out possible solutions, in case something like that happens :

The concerning factors :

1. Identity theft is definitely the biggest concern over here. The person can easily portray himself as you and can create problems for you in future. Imagine that he can e-mail all sort of stupid things to your contacts and in turn harming you on a personal scale. He may make use of your identity to commit various crimes, like taking loan on your name, doing transaction on the internet using your credit card information. It all depends on the kind of information you’ve kept on the laptop’s hard hard drive, if at all you’ve saved your social security number or any document which can reveal all your information.

Identity theft mostly covers the concerning factors, the ways through which one can use your computer to steal your identity are :

1. Information stored on cookies. (already mentioned by Dave)
2. Browsing habits.
3. Emails – Just in case if you use some email client like Outlook or Thunderbird.
4. Stored passwords.
5. Downloaded bank statements or credit card statements.
6. Your finance managing software.

2. Financial loss is also possible as you may have saved password of your bank account login or kept information about other financial stuff. I think, I don’t have to further say anything on this one, as it is pretty much clear to everyone that how you can get in trouble with this thing.

The solid measures to keep these factors away in case something like this happens :

To be honest there is no guaranteed way of being safe from such a loss. However, we can always take precautions to avoid it to a certain level. Few things which we can always try are :

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Box has recently released Box Enabled Applications which are nothing but plug-ins for the applications, so that you get the convenience of uploading and sharing files directly from your favorite application and for that you don’t have to go to Box’s website.

The current plug-ins are mostly made by Box team only, but if you are a developer then you may develop plugins for your favorite applications using their API.

The plugins which are available are made for these applications and if you use box and those applications then you’ll find them pretty useful :

1. Adobe Acrobat (Professional)
2. Microsoft Office Plug-in
3. OpenOffice.org 2
4. Adobe Photoshop
5. AutoDesk 3dsMax
6. Fireuploader – plug-in for Firefox
7. mobox – application for mobile phones.

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AOL has launched Wimzi, a widget for your website or blog which allows you to chat with your website visitors.

You just require the AIM screen name and you can go ahead and configure the widget for your blog and interact with the visitors without letting them know your AIM screen name.

Currently, this space has already been captured by MeeboMe, a similar widget which was created by Meebo however, the competition will get tough for Meebo as AOL has a bigger user base and AIM being the most popular service by AOL is directly linked with this widget.

If you don’t love to put a widget like that but want to show your visitors that you are online @ AIM then you can use AIM Presence and show off your status on AIM.

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Those who know me through my blog know this that today my blog was down for about 3 hrs. time and it was because one of post got popular on digg and managed to reach the homepage of digg! A big thank you for all those who dugg the story.

The digg effect did its trick and the blog was down. With the excellent support of my web host, I managed to get it up, however, things did started to look bad when the blog was down. Things got back to normal when finally the story got removed from the homepage.

Here are some of the things which I learned with this incident :

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