It’s a new year, and with a new year comes those things called “resolutions.” You know, the promises you make to yourself that you eventually don’t do, or just for get about entirely. But some are slightly easier to do than others. And while I don’t want you to resolve to be more secure online in 2012, I do want you to be more secure online in 2012.
Multi-Factor Authentication
One of the easiest ways to be more secure online is to use multi-factor authentication wherever possible. If you have a Gmail account, you can turn this on with very little effort. Some banks are also utilizing this form of security for online account logins.
What is two factor authentication? Basically it means you have to authenticate yourself twice before being logged into a site. This is usually done with your password being the first form of authentication and a secondary ever-changing code that is sent to you. The most basic way this is handled is you get a text message with the secondary code.
This means that someone would have to have your password and your phone (or your secondary authentication method) to get access to the account in question. There are other forms of multi-factor authentication, such as the Yubikey, but it’s use is far more limited. Google does text messages or the Google Authenticator smartphone application for processing two factor authentications. Some sites, like LastPass, support Google’s multi-factor authentication.
If you do nothing else suggested in this post, please turn on multi-factor authentication for your email account(s). Doing this will make it more difficult for people that do manage to phish your password to log into your email account.
Passwords
Phishing is at an all time high these days. More people have more websites that hold more of their personal data than ever before. Facebook alone is a treasure trove of social engineering tidbits about you that someone could use to gain access to your stuff. The thing people phish the most for online is passwords. Why passwords? Because most people use the same password for multiple websites across the internet. There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you might have the same password for your Facebook account that you have for your email account. So if someone got your Facebook password, then they also could get into your email account and what ever other sites you use that same password on.
Once someone has your email password, they can do a lot. Like for starters change your email address password and the recovery email address associated with it so that you can’t get it back.
So, for 2012, move away from using one password for all your internet sites and move to using a password safe that uses one really secure password. Most password safes include a password generator that will randomly create passwords for the various websites you visit. This way, you can have a different password for each website, and not have to worry about remembering them as they’ll all be stored in the password safe. Most password safes also include a browser plugin that will allow you to auto enter passwords so you won’t have to do a lot of copying and pasting of passwords.
Full Disk Encryption
Finally, the last thing you should do to help be more secure is to utilize full disk encryption using something like TrueCrypt. If you don’t want to encrypt your whole hard drive, you can use TrueCrypt to create a small secure file, that then creates another “drive” on your computer that you can then copy files to. When the file is not loaded, the data is encrypted. But you should really consider utilizing full disk encryption if you can, because it will encrypt all the data on the disk, and since we store more personal documents on our computers than ever before, making sure that data is encrypted and difficult to gain access to for someone that isn’t you is important.
The downside to full disk encryption is that you can not forget the password you used to encrypt the disk, as the data is then unreachable and there’s nothing that can be easily done to undo it, so keep that in mind when deciding on whether or not to do full disk encryption.
Michael Koby 
How Smartphones are Changing Travel
You might not know this, but I’m currently in Nebraska. My son, who’s had medical issues since birth, had a surgery done here and we as a family have been here in some capacity since early December. This was my first out of state road trip in a probably a decade. And it was interesting to me to see how much smartphones have changed how road trips are done. And I don’t mean in the “keep your kids entertained” kind of way. What follows are just a few observations as to how having a smartphone has changed road trips.
On the way up to Nebraska my wife and I used my Android smartphone’s built in Google Navigation application to get us from Houston to Omaha. With only a small part of the trip spent without a cellular data connection (middle of nowhere Kansas, to the first parts of Nebraska), we had very little trouble relying on the phone as a GPS device. The only downside was I couldn’t check in on Twitter or Facebook while driving (I know, first world problem). This feature on my phone also helped us navigate around Omaha once we got in and settled.
While driving, and looking for food at times, we used Road Ninja on my wife’s iPhone to tell us what was coming up at future exits along the interstate. This app is very spiffy, and if you do any kind of traveling by car, you’ll want to have this application on your iPhone. It helped us find food and gas stations at upcoming exits and allowed us to plan stops a little better. As someone who’s done more than a few long road trips, such an app is quite helpful.
Finally, once in Omaha, Nebraska and settled in to our hotel, we ran into the problem everyone does when they’re in a new place, finding a place to eat. For this problem I simply opened up FourSquare on my phone, pressed the “Food” icon, and we were off to find food at places both new and familiar. For the places we don’t have back home in Texas, we used the FourSquare tips left by other FourSquare users to figure out what places we should try and what places to avoid. So far, we’ve had great success and haven’t been to a new place that we don’t like yet. FourSquare also helped us find the local mall(s) and movie theaters, again using the tips on FourSquare to tell us what places to avoid.
Again, this is not an exhaustive list, just a few observations from how I used to have to travel to how it can be done today if you have a smartphone. What is interesting is that kids today will not know what it means to have a road atlas in the car with you, having to guess what may or may not be at the next exit, and having to find your way around a new city by trial and error. For them, when they get older, they’ll just plug in their phones and go. Heck, they’ll probably never have to take the phone out of their purse or pocket and it’ll all just happen automatically via bluetooth (or some other wireless technology).