Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

A lot of people think I am anti-Apple. I am not. I love the iOS. And Macs are great machines if that’s how you want to spend your money.

I am not anti-Apple. I am anti-hype. Sometimes I resonate too soundly with Dr. Carrasco of Man of La Mancha. I am anti-stupidity. I thought of this today when a tech friend of mine told me he had just removed a virus from a Mac. This friend, like all Mac guys, always teases PC users about viruses on PCs.

The reality is that in over 25 years of computing, I have only had a couple viruses. And I’ve had none since Windows 98. I know they are out there because through the years I have removed them from District Office PCs, from Life Impact Ministries PCs and the PCs of many individuals. But safe-computing practices protect against viruses.

When he was at our church, an international worker told me that he was getting a Mac because he had to deal with so many viruses in Southeast Asia. I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. Viruses don’t float through the air. They come over the net. And I am only seconds, digitally speaking, from the same servers that he is using. What would make him so much more susceptible to viruses than me?” The answer is: unsafe computing practices. Ironically, he was not back in the field for a month before an email came back regarding his computing needs as his Apple was down and he could find no one qualified to repair it.

This year at Carnegie Mellon, my son took a high-level data security course. He said words like these to me, “Dad — the Mac is the least secure platform of those widely used. It’s amazing that it hasn’t been hit with viruses. The only explanation is that it’s just not popular enough for virus writers to target.” But as Apple’s market share increases, that popularity safeguard decreases.

If you get a Mac, do it because you like the feel of the OS. Play with one for a weekend. See how well it syncs with your data.

But don’t get it because of the hype.

And whether you get a Mac or a PC, get commercial anti-virus software and keep it current.

I just turned off Facebook’s Facial Recognition software. You know what that is, right? It’s a new feature that uses facial recognition algorithms to identify users in photos and recommend those photos to other people so they can tag these images.

You may wonder, why anyone would bother to turn it off. It bugs me that facebook might see someone who looks like me doing something I might not do and tell my friends, “Hey– I think this is Steve!” I find it easy enough to get into trouble without being blamed for things that may be done by my evil twin! So I turned off the facial recognition feature.

How to turn off facebook facial recognition:

1. Select “Account settings” from the drop-down “Account” menu in the upper right.
2. Go to “Privacy” and select “Manage”.
3. Click “Custom”
4. Select “Customize settings.”
5. Go to “Things others share.”
6. Find “Suggest photos of me to friends” and click “Edit settings.”
7. Turn the feature from “Enabled” to “Disabled”.
8. Click OK and you’re done.

Facebook makes many things easy. Privacy is not one of them.

When I first got my Android phone (the Droid 2), I noticed there were some sites that loaded slowly when using the wifi in my home. For example, when I googled Yugster, then clicked on the link to go there, the status bar on the droid browser would pause and often timeout, leaving me on the google page.

This never happened on my Linux machine or on any of the PCs we have.

Due to a power outage, my router needed a hard reset, so I had to set everything back to the DD-WRT factory defaults. Upon doing so, I immediately noted that the Android wifi problems were gone. Pages loaded very quickly.

The a few days later I realized that, I had forgotten to put the OpenDNS servers in the router.  So I put them in and went to bed. For the next two days, I noted the timeouts occurring with the droid again, so today I removed the OpenDNS server specs and the phone  is loading everything without pause.

Any thoughts on why this would happen. I love OpenDNS, but can’t use it if it’s going to do this to my droid.

~Steve

UPDATE: This turned out to be a problem with Dolphin web browser. It appears they have it resolved.