Friendly Web Tools Blog

Backups are the buzzkill of most people who work on computers. Being organized is often tedious. But spending a few minutes on a regular basis making sure that the information on your computer is safely stored somewhere else for emergency retrieval is time well spent.

SimpleTech Signature Mini makes the job a little less tedious, because this external backup device was designed by Italian sports car designers. It’s also very handy, because it’s about the size of a deck of cards, and you can bring it with you wherever you travel.

This one includes local and online backup and comes with Fabrik Local Backup software, so you can schedule automatic backups from your computer relatively easily and store around 2 GB - quite a lot - of your important information. Not all backup drives do this.

It’s also worth noting that you can use this cute thing not just for backing up documents, but you can have a handy place to put your photos, songs, or anything else you might want to bring along for a lecture or meeting presentation.

Think about using an external tool for backing up your important data. Check out this post I wrote earlier on handy tools for saving your data from yourself.

Some scary news: US border control now has the authority to swipe your laptop, cell phone or other electronic device. Bad news no matter which way you look at it, but you could be utterly lost if you’re traveling and US agents decide to retain your laptop indefinitely.

My best advice is to travel with a stripped-down piece of equipment that contains only contact names and travel details and download information from an online storage space when you arrive at your destination.

But you might also give a shot at TrueCrypt, free open-source software that locks down the information on your laptop so that only you can get at it. Not only does TrueCrypt encrypt your files, but it hides them so snoops don’t even know they exist, a practice called steganography.

It’s worth learning a bit about how this works if you travel and can’t live without your laptop. Of course, border control can still take your iPod, so there’s a good reason to travel with a cheapy MP3/4 player.

It’s no ordinary occasion that Microsoft, Sun and Cisco engage in a project together. But this is no ordinary occasion. Hackers have discovered a potentially very dangerous ways to take people to different websites even when they think they’ve typed in the right address. For instance, you may type www.cnn.com into your webpage, but you may be redirected to a fake site that can steal your identity or money in a technique called spoofing. The BBC reported the story; an excerpt:

The flaw, discovered by accident, would allow criminals to redirect users to fake webpages, even if they typed the correct address into a browser.

Internet giants such as Microsoft are now distributing the security patch.

Security expert Dan Kaminsky said that the case was unprecedented, but added: “People should be concerned but they should not be panicking.”

Here’s a bulletin from Microsoft that details the patch and security threat. Not a bad idea to install that one.