The subscription feature allows anyone to subscribe to your public posts, thankfully this feature must be turned on by you. Facebook is directing celebrities to merge their Fan Pages into their personal pages and moving fans to subscribers. This is a lot like followers on Twitter in that it is a one sided transaction, and does make it easier for people in the public spotlight to only have to post in one place.  I can see an inherent danger in this though by accidently marking something for public view that should be private.

Trying to be all things to everyone Facebook is quickly becoming the new AOL.  The Ticker resembles a twitter newsfeed, so far with very little security controls. There are varying reports on just how much information is being leaked to the Ticker feed and there doesn’t seem to be a clear cut way to control what goes in it.  Hopefully based on the outcry from users this will be fixed soon. I have seen incidents of people posting comments to friends on my Ticker that I don’t think I should be privy to. While this can be embarrassing and a stalkers dream it is in not the most worrisome of the new changes.

The new Timeline feature is a security nightmare in my opinion; you know all those security questions that your bank and websites ask you “Mother’s Maiden Name”, “Hometown”, “Favorite Pet”, “Where you met your spouse”???? Yeah guess what’s going in the Timeline? This is the cyber-criminals motherload, all your information in one place neatly laid out. Remember those public figures I mentioned above; just imagine if they have some sketchy people in their friend list that they may have selected when they first got on Facebook. Yeah it could mean serious identity theft or much worse!

So what are we to do? Well we should start thinking about making those security questions harder to guess.  If you don’t feel like making stuff up, you could treat them like passwords and use substitution characters like using the number “3” for the letter “E’ etc… Adding extra hyphens, letters and numbers helps and changing your birth year, month or day on Facebook.  While I know this messes up the birthday feature on Facebook it’s a small price to pay for your security.

I just wanted to get this basic information out there before the Timeline feature makes a grand debut, truthfully I have at least one more article on things you should be careful about posting now Facebook is more public facing.  Let me know if you agree or disagree with anything in this post or if you have any further concerns.

Thanks Mike…

On Saturday night as the storm picked up speed and intensity, our monitoring systems started picking up power fluctuations on several servers.  We shut them down just as a precaution, and tried to notify the owners via text messaging and alternative email.  This proved to be a good decision, shutting down a server in an orderly manner is always a lot better than just turning it off and as the power fluctuates it can cause serious damage. As of yesterday no servers had been damaged or suffered any data loss.

While some clients have cloud based solutions and technically weren’t down, some offices had power but no Internet,  Luckily both Virgin Mobile and TMobile offer low cost mifi devices which came in useful.  Coffee shops also were doing a great business not only for hot coffee, but free wifi access.  While the cloud is much more resilient than a self hosted system, getting access to it in this kind of situation still requires some advanced planning.

A few clients still had no power at their buildings and their servers remained idle, so the next step was to give them access to their email.  Most of our clients use our Reflexion service to protect their email from spam and servers from DOS attacks. Reflexion’s also offers RADAR which is an email archiving system that also has a webmail client, simply turning this on gave all those clients access to their email.  The next project on the list was to give them access to their data, we did this using Windows Home Server.  This is a very small server that usually just backs ups our PC’s and gives remote access, but with one of a client’s backup drives it can provide easy access to important data.  Uploading 200GB to cloud storage would be problematical, but creating a user on a Windows Home Server and restoring a clients documents was a breeze.  Windows Home Server provides a SharePoint like interface through a web browser to download and upload documents.

So while not everyone has recovered from the storm, our phones are quiet and our clients are happy, while you can’t plan for everything you can be prepared in an emergency.  If your solution provider didn’t do anything for you, please contact us for a free consultation, we won’t let you down.

http://www.2ndot.com/askit

We offer customization of many different themes that reflect your own unique vision of your company and products.  2nd Opinion Technology also offers both professional photographic and video production in our state of the art studio with 5 HD cameras and 4 channel audio. Video is becoming ever more important in a modern website, training videos, interviews and even product demonstrations can enhance your Internet presence.

Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus allow you to interact with millions of possible customers, with either paid advertisements or with social media.  All our websites include the tools to allow you to communicate with these services with very little effort.  If you are producing a newsletter or using email we can help you easily incorporate social media into any marketing campaign.

Everyone talks about backing up data, but do you test recovering it on a regular basis? Are the tapes or removable hard drives being rotated and kept in a secure location? If you are transferring the data off-site is it secure and can it be readily recovered? Even on our Standard Plan we do a regularly scheduled data recovery test to insure that your data can be recovered in the event of a hard drive crash.

Most companies don’t even have a computer use policy in place to let their employees know what is allowed in the workplace, this is becoming increasingly important in the age of social media. While some people on your staff may need access to Facebook, Twitter and other sites it can cause a big productivity loss if everyone is allowed access.  2nd Opinion Technology can help you draft a policy that can be enforced on all the computers and devices owned by the company.

Malware and viruses are increasingly affecting companies even with good AV solutions due to an escalation in socially engineered attacks.  Even viewing a website that has been infected can launch fake virus warning that once the user clicks on it can disable AV and install Trojans and viruses.  We use a tiered approach that greatly cuts down on the risk of this happening and we can configure computers and user accounts to greatly reduce the risk of infection.

Recycling old equipment can also be a problem, 2nd Opinion Technology offers all our clients free pickup and secure disposal of outdated computer hardware.  All hard drives are not only erased but shredded to ensure complete erasure of all data.

These are just a few of the issues that most companies ignore or dread to deal with, so please call us for a free consultation to see how we can help you.

Cloud storage has also been gaining in popularity, but has been slow to catch on due to privacy risks.  Configuring cloud storage for secure access can be confusing and difficult and very few standards exist.  Amazon’s recent crash has shown that even with massive redundancy you still need to plan for downtime and have a localized backup copy easily available. Ultimately more and more data will be moved out to cloud storage.

The most common use of cloud storage is for offsite backups, but even this is proving challenging due to upload/download speeds and usage caps by the ISPs.  2nd Opinion can help you configure a solution that maintains privacy while providing secure access to critical data.

Applications have slowly been migrating out to the cloud, Microsoft and Google both provide a full suite of business tools that are not installed locally but live in the cloud. Again this is great unless you don’t have reliable access to the Internet, we can help you with these decisions.

Virtual desktops and servers are the next step, which provide you the same desktop experience no matter where you are.  This technology gets better every year and decreased costs are making this a reality for even the most smallest company.  Issues still need to be resolved around the applications that companies use and if they are cloud friendly.  Access to local resources such as printers, scanners and other peripherals is still a problem with most applications not built to take into account remote access solutions.

If you are considering a Cloud based solution please contact us for a 2nd Opinion.

All of our websites use a CMS backend and an enhanced feature rich template, once the look and feel of the design is finished it is easy to maintain using basic word processing skills.  A dedicated web designer is usually not needed beyond the initial design phase.  2nd Opinion Technology offers either inclusive or a low cost hosting options for all our clients.

2nd Opinion Technology is certified to develop applications for all the popular mobile platforms, such as Apple, Microsoft and Android. A feature rich application can add value to any web based service, the popularity of applications on mobile platforms continues to grow.

Contact us for a quick consultation on any project both large and small, we also specialize in converting old applications and data to the latest technologies.

Most cell phone companies are ill equipped to setup and handle a mobile infrastructure and can expose your private business data to hackers. This is especially important to consider if you are in a sensitive field such as medical, legal or financial services. Hefty fines can be imposed for the mishandling of client data.

With our extensive experience in developing secure networks and applications, we can help safeguard confidential information even on a mobile platform. 2nd Opinion Technology can help secure your business data by designing a secure network that can extend beyond your office right down to your cell phone.

2nd Opinion Technology is also certified to develop on all the major mobile platforms such as Apple, Microsoft and Android.  We are particularly excited about developing for tablets which may soon replace laptops as a way to easily view and manipulate data remotely.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions you have about mobile computing and how we can help your company extend its reach.

Social media integration provides you with an opportunity to keep in contact with your customers and attract new ones.  Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites make it easy to advertise to, converse with and attract customers.

Turn your outdated email and printed newsletter into a Blog, add video, become an expert in your field. A dynamic presence on the Internet helps promote your business wile you become an authority who’s opinion people seek out.  Stand out from the competition and be promoted in the search engines by keeping your web site active and dynamic.

All 2nd Opinion Technology’s website offer Content Management with an easy to use word processor interface lets you add to your website without a web designer.  We also offer our photography and video services to greatly enhance any content you may produce.