Tech | thechannelc

In your wifi stealing your passwordz.

March 16, 2010 By Carolyn Chan View Comments

While you’re innocently checking your email at Starbucks, someone could be stealing the password to your email account with a wifi sniffer. David Hall, Consumer Product Marketing Manager, Symantec Asia Pacific, explained and demonstrated how our identity and personal information could be stolen in just four minutes online. Shocking.

David went on to tell us about phishing – the 419 scam and the Nigerian Prince scam, fake codecs, keygens, malvertisements, those horrible horrible pop up windows telling us our computer may be infected, better click on the button and run a scan now (which starts installing a virus instead of scanning for one now). I”ve learned to recognize most of them but what I haven’t seen before was SEO poison.

Within two hours after the Haiti earthquake, the digital terrorists have embedded viruses into pages that are SEO optimized to appear on the first page of your search. Norton found 19 out of 20 sites to be poisoned (that’s almost the entire first page of your search result) and David showed us a video from their lab tracking poisoned links on search pages after the Haiti earthquake, Tiger Woods scandal and a few other newsy events. Two to four hours is how fast these cyber criminals take to hit search pages to get their victim’s personal information. Thankfully, Norton has a free service online to help you check if a site is safe by copying and pasting that URL into Norton Safe Web to verify http://safeweb.norton.com.

Why are they after our info? Information is money. Credit card details are worth $0.90 each and email information is worth $10 each. Or you can be the guy that writes the program that pops up the evil window. He makes US$19K a week, more than the President of the United States.

So change your email password now and make sure to change it frequently. You know the drill, at least 6 characters long, one capital letter, one number and one symbol. Then you wonder, how the hell am I going to remember all the new passwords every time? Never mind, got an app for that. But how to come up with all these passwords? I too struggle with what password to use every time I had to change my password. David gave an example of how he comes up with them. He picks a song then uses the first word on the first line of that song as a password, the next time he changes it, he’ll go to the first word on the second line and so on. You can pick a poem too if you like.

We had an interesting time talking with David and I’ll just sum it up:

Most of the world’s viruses comes from the US followed by East Europe. Haha and we thought it was China (death penalty there perhaps).
Most popular platform – Windows (no surprize there), second is Apple (whose owners don’t believe there are Apple viruses at all) and third is linux (whose owners are aware of viruses but don’t believe it’ll hit them at all).
Viruses hitting mobile devices – Symbian (Nokia) is the most popular platform. Wait, there are mobile viruses? Apparently so. There is one that clearly invades someone’s privacy and it is marketed as an app called “Cheating Spouse”. If you have this installed into someone’s phone, you can see what number the phone has called even after the number is cleared by the owner, etc.
Viruses can also be stuffed into USBs that you buy from the shop. So scan every storage devices from now on.

Finally, we got down to Norton Antivirus. First, my personal experience. I’ve used Norton a long long time ago and stopped because it got so heavy. When it was scanning, everything just slows down to a halt. AVG was new and I switched to AVG and it also became sluggish after awhile. I moved on to Kaspersky then McAfee then Avast.

What’s with all these antivirus software starting out great then slowly suck the juice out of your processor as time goes on? I’ve learned never to buy an antivirus license for more than a year because the virus definition piles up and slows everything down.

Now why would I want to get back to Norton? I guess Symantec read my mind because here comes the benchmark reports from Dennis Technology Labs placing Norton 360 version 4.0 at the top first or second place in the fastest loading time, scanning speed and accuracy rate. They are managing virus definition files better and Norton 360 launched in September 2009 includes a reputation-based technology that crowd source from millions of users in their community to fight web-based threats.

Anyways I have been testing out Norton 360 version 4.0 antivirus for a week now and it is working very well. The UI has improved a lot from what I remember and I like how Safe Web is built in to show me what links on a search page is safe to click on. It also comes with performance improvement features such as PC Tuneup to diagnose, cleanup and optimize the PC. I ran all these first before doing a deep file scan. I have to say it’s fast, really fast. The new Norton Antivirus is worth a try if you’re not using it already. Let’s hope the performance lasts.

Where to get it:
Norton 360 v 4.0 has just been released in stores across Malaysia. You can also get it online at symantec.com. It supports Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Suggested retail price is RM229 for the standard edition for three PC license and RM119 for one PC license. It also comes with 2GB of online storage space. These are for one year only. The premium edition is RM279 and comes with 25GB of online storage. (Cloud storage is becoming a popular bundling feature, it’s just like PA insurance hey). If you just want to try before you buy, Symantec online lets you try Norton’s full standard version free for one month.

Filed Under: Apps, Reviews, Tech Tagged With: antivirus, software

How to get Kindle books for your iPhone, iPod Touch or PC

March 1, 2010 By Carolyn Chan

Want to get Kindle books on your iPhone/iPod Touch or PC? Here’s a hack, ok, call it a tip. This is not illegal, you still have to pay for the book. It’s just a way around the restrictions Amazon has in place to stop non-residents of the US from buying Kindle books. Let’s get to it.

What you need:
1. A PC (not on Mac yet) or an Apple iPhone/iPod Touch.
2. A credit card
3. An Amazon account. If you don’t have one, register for one. Some Amazon shopping experience will help too. Now who hasn’t shopped at Amazon.com these days?
4. A US address

1. INSTALL THE KINDLE READER SOFTWARE/APP

Installing for the PC:
Download and install the Kindle for PC software.

Installing for the iPhone/iPod Touch:
This is a little trickier. You can only download the Kindle for iPhone app from the US app store. Don’t mess with the account you have right now. Set up another app store account with a different email, a US address and don’t enter your credit card info.

If your app store is in the Malaysian app store, you can easily change that by clicking on the Malaysian flag icon at the bottom right and change it to “United States”.

Now, download Kindle for iPhone app and sync. You shouldn’t lose your information. Once you see the app on your phone, you can log out of the US app store and login to your usual one.

2. Set up your Amazon account to go shopping.

First, use your credit card to buy a gift card that you will send to yourself. The books I buy usually cost around $10-15 so I bought a $50 gift card which should get me 3-4 Kindle books. Don’t log out yet, wait for email. Once the email with the gift card claim code arrives, click on “Start shopping”. This will credit the amount into your Amazon account.

Remain logged in. Go into your account and remove all credit card information. This is what’s making Amazon stop you from getting into the Kindle store. Also change the region or country of origin to the US. If you’re asked to enter a US address, you can use the one above.

Now you’re all set. Click on “Kindle Store” and go shopping.

3. When you’re ready to buy.

Click on “Buy now with 1-click” and tell Amazon where you want the book sent – to your iPhone/iPod Touch or to your PC.

It will come with instructions on how to retrieve the book from the app on your PC / iPhone / iPod Touch.

Enjoy!

BTW, you can leave your second App Store account alone, it may come in handy in the future. I use mine to download other apps that are not available to Malaysians just so I can drool at what I can’t have.

Filed Under: Apps, Eco, Tech Tagged With: amazon kindle, ebooks, hack, iphone, ipod touch

Foursquare for businesses

January 28, 2010 By Carolyn Chan View Comments

Since my last article on Foursquare vs. Gowalla, I’ve been seeing more folks get on Foursquare.

I think that’s great, we could finally have a crowd big enough for mayor deals to make sense to businesses.

If you run a business, Foursquare for businesses is worth looking into. It’s a great way to get the word out and reward your loyal customers. You may not know this but here’s how folks are talking about you. They are using Foursquare to tell their friends and leaving tips on what’s great or bad at your place. Their friends most likely share the same interest or sentiments which makes their word of mouth highly effective.

Look at the conversations I’ve had over some Foursquare post to my Facebook profile.

Now think what a little reward can do. People who have been thinking about you might actually want to make a trip there. Your loyal Mayor might become your biggest fan and sing your praises. Wouldn’t that be awesome? As a customer, I find this so much more fun than being a fan of a business on Facebook. Some businesses still love to serve me spam – information with no customer benefits. Do I really care what garage band will be playing this Friday? Why don’t they give me good reasons to visit or buy more? Like watch the football game here and whatever you’re drinking, get a second one for free when your favorite football team strikes a goal. Now who wouldn’t like that?

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I’m waiting (anxiously) to see who in KL will be first to do this. Location based social networking is good for business.

If you are now wondering what this foursquare thing is all about, here’s the pitch. More info at http://foursquare.com/businesses/

Foursquare For Businesses

View more presentations from 6S Marketing.

I wish Foursquare has a directory of businesses with mayor deals by country so that I can seek them out and aim for mayor.

Filed Under: Apps, Marketing Tagged With: foursquare

Foursquare vs. Gowalla ding-ding-ding-ding

January 9, 2010 By Carolyn Chan View Comments

I like Gowalla but Foursquare seems to be doing more to engage me. First, Flickr integration with machine tagging, then superuser status and now Layar – the Augmented Reality app. I’m tired of updating both Gowalla and Foursquare every time. Can one win me over soon? Let’s see what both has got to offer.

I’ll admit, I haven’t been a big fan of Foursquare.

I used to like Foursquare until I found out how easy it was to game the system and check-in to places without having to be there physically. In less than an hour I could get 300+ points to put me on top of the leaderboard. The game turned me off instantly.

Another thing that turned me off Foursquare was how long it took to check-in or create a new place as compared to Gowalla which picks up your location automatically so you don’t need to enter the venue’s address. People don’t always give a friend the address to a restaurant, we say it’s behind KLCC or between this place and that place. Who remembers the address anyways. So you take more time creating places in Foursquare than in Gowalla. Foursquare is also quite new in KL so a LOT of places are not on the map.

Talking about map – here’s another problem I have with Foursquare. Even with the address entered, the map can go wrong – placing the pin in an area you haven’t even heard of or a place you’ll never go to like in the middle of a lake. Unlike Gowalla, you cannot edit the map at all in Foursquare which is really frustrating. I thought the Superuser status would let me fix the map but I still couldn’t do it. Gee, how hard is it to implement this feature? What I can do as a Level 1 Superuser is limited to merging duplicates and closing rubbish venues like “I hate my boss”.

Duplicate venues was the other reason why I found Foursquare messed up. This is also another way to game the system, you can create 5 different Mid Valleys, spelling it slightly different, check-in to all 5 and get extra points to get you closer to the lead in the game. Some guys love that and would often proudly announce on twitter when they become a mayor and what new badges they got. Maybe some of them deserve it.

It’s actually not all bad, there are cool things about Foursquare like its community of people who take the time to leave tips that pop-up when you’re near a venue. The number of people who are doing this to help others however, are still very small. When I see a really useful tip pop up from someone in Foursquare, I always say a silent thank you to the person who left it. This is what makes Foursquare useful. I hope this community of tip contributors will grow.

flickr machine tag

The integration of Foursquare into other services is something I find very exciting. It is integrated into Flickr so you can add machine tags to pictures taken at venues listed in Foursquare. Folks looking at your flickr picture can click on it and be taken to the venue page to read your review/tip or get the address to visit the place themselves. The map can’t be trusted yet and I would also sometimes add “Don’t trust the map” into my Foursquare tips. Foursquare venues and tips are also integrated into Layar as an AR layer. When you pan your phone around you’ll see venues and tips popping into your screen which is pretty cool. I can see my own tips and other people’s tips on what’s interesting nearby. Again, please note that the location map in Foursquare cannot be trusted which means that the locations in Layar are also dodgy. The integration (idea) into other services that I use regularly is what’s making Foursquare engaging to me. So I am taking a second look and going to use it a bit more, together with Gowalla.

I’m not about to forget Gowalla yet but Foursquare is close to making me give it up. Foursquare just needs to improve the venue creation process and make the map editable, not just for superusers but for everyone. The game is fun for awhile (pretend you’re not hacking it) so it’s nice but not important. Game-wise, I like Gowalla’s better because it’s harder to exploit. The idea of picking up items and leaving something behind for others to pick up is a nice touch. In Gowalla, when you create a spot, you can become a founder by dropping an item. But it also gets very frustrating when you have run out of items to drop, it is a total killjoy. I want to like Gowalla and I’ve given a lot of feedback but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears. I’m now hoping Foursquare can improve further and make it the one and only location based check-in game on my iPhone.

Add me:

On Foursquare: http://foursquare.com/user/thechannelc
On Gowalla: http://gowalla.com/users/thechannelc

9 out of 10 location maps of places I create in Foursquare are off. Here's one example.

Jan 10 Update: There was apparently a January 8 update at the Foursquare blog that I missed. The location finder has improved and I tested it with a location I created this evening and I left the address field empty just to see if the app can track down my GPS location. It did, yay. But it still won’t let me edit the map and fix all the previous venues that have their pins someplace other than where it should be. Give us editable maps, Foursquare.

Filed Under: Feature, Tech Tagged With: AR, augmented reality, foursquare, gowalla, LBS, mobile, mobile app

Stop restricting ebook sales.

December 31, 2009 By Carolyn Chan View Comments

Even though I don’t have a kindle, I have been reading ebooks since 2003. I get the pdf versions from ereader.com and back then I was reading them on a Palm V. One of the first apps I installed on my new iPhone 3Gs recently was Barnes and Nobles ebook reader – for the fun of it. B&N’s weird, they won’t sell me the ebooks like Amazon but they won’t stop me from downloading the reader unlike Amazon.

I do know a way to download the Amazon reader and buy kindle books but it’s a tedious process. This regional restriction put in place by publishers is stupid. If physical books can be shipped anywhere by Amazon why can’t ebooks be sold as well? For the first time in Amazon’s history, they sold more ebooks than physical books this Christmas. Ebooks are the future. No, ebooks are here today.

Ebooks are great, they don’t take up anymore space on shelves in homes or at the bookstores. They don’t kill more trees. They don’t contribute to carbon footprint moving around from printer to distributor to retailers and finally to a reader. They cost less and save consumers more. They can meet consumer demands faster. They weigh nothing so you can carry a small library in your pocket. More copies of a book in digital form can be sold because it’s a personal copy once it’s purchased, I can’t really share an ebook as easily as I can a physical book. More sales, more money, everyone happy. No? The one bad thing I see with ebooks though is that I can’t get an author to autograph it. I’m sure someone somewhere is working on a solution where I can have a video of me kissing the author and a digital scribble with the words “Last night was amazing. Sign” attached to the ebook.

There are so many reasons why an ebook is better than a physical book and why regional restrictions need to be tossed out the window. Who’s with me?

Check out: The Business Case for E-Readers.

Filed Under: Apps, Business, Feature, Tech

Deja-hoo: Yahoo! is finally in Malaysia.

November 26, 2009 By Carolyn Chan View Comments

The Yahoo! Youreka campaign has ended and ‘somewhat officially’ launch the Yahoo! Malaysia portal. Never mind that they are a decade later than MSN and Google. In the past few months, we’ve been seeing the folks from Yahoo! come down from their offices in Singapore to engage the community of developers and users in Malaysia. It’s great and they have no competition from the other two in winning hearts and minds by meeting Malaysians face-to-face.

But I can’t help feeling like it’s 1999.
The landscape may have changed quite a bit. This time, eyeballs are locked on sticky social media/networking sites, IM chats happen in twitter, email comes through Blackberries and news through RSS readers. If you use Netvibes, you could even get all the above into one dashboard. Why is Yahoo! using aging tech to reach new users. The segment Yahoo! is targeting is not an aging group at all – late teens to 25. Is Yahoo! being arm-twisted to do this by our aging Deputy Education Minister? Or does Malaysia have a third world classification online as well so here’s the best of Yahoo’s third world tech?

I am a paying customer of two of Yahoo!’s services. They also throw great parties, engage the community and give away awesome schwags. I love Yahoo! but they need to do more than just localize a news portal. I don’t remember the last time Yahoo! has announced a new feature or a major product improvement. Is Yahoo! going forward by going backward? Odd strategy.

Yahoo! Youreka found its winner at a party held at KL Live last night. Semi-finalists who found the elusive tag online, gathered for their final torture, I mean test, to prove their worthiness. They wiggled and pushed their way (as well as pushed JJ to the ground) in a game of musical chairs to get to the “Sumo” round. Dressed like sumo wrestlers, the pair battled each other to see who’ll be first to form the word Youreka from the jumbled letters. The worthy one went home with a Macbook Air and an iPhone. Congratulations to the winner.

Thanks for the party Yahoo! and welcome to Malaysia.

Filed Under: Events, Feature, Tech Tagged With: malaysia, Yahoo!, Youreka!

Is Malaysia finally on track towards an innovation and knowledge-based economy?

November 16, 2009 By Carolyn Chan View Comments

Innovation is a topic close to my heart. I’ve known, seen or met Malaysians who are innovators and are doing great work outside of Malaysia. I often wonder why they don’t do it here instead and I’ve been told that this country hasn’t encouraged innovation. There are no tax breaks or government support for R&D.

When I was invited to attend MSC’s 12th International Advisory Panel (IAP) Learning Symposium earlier this week, I was excited. The theme for this year was on innovation. Will we finally see the government doing something to promote innovation in Malaysia?

There were two half day tracks running simultaneously. Each track had a panel of speakers with solid track records and experience in driving innovation in education or in business. These gentlemen were also brought together by MSC to be on the advisory board to influence policies that could help the country reach its goals.

The business track, which I attended had on the panel Datuk Seri Dr. Maximus Johnity Ongkili, Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation (I only just found out that we now have a minister of innovation); Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Corporation and President of Microsoft China Research; Christopher Forbes, Vice Chairman of Forbes Publishing Co.; and Dr. John Gage, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, also formerly of Sun Microsystems.

For a detailed account on what each speaker talked about, head over to Hillary Chan’s write up on CNET Asia. Hillary highlighted an interesting observation. There wasn’t a single Malaysian on that panel. Oh wait, they are all in jail according to Datuk Ongkili. I also noticed there wasn’t a single woman on that panel. Is there no room for women in a knowledge-based economy?

To me, the panelist did not tackle the challenges ahead as clearly as I thought they would. With all due respect, Dr. Zhang presented Microsoft’s roadmap and stressed on their $3 billion R&D commitment outside of the US with a list of cities where research centers are set up. Malaysia is not on that list and there are no short, medium or long term plans to include this country in that roadmap. Datuk Ongkili believes Malaysia isn’t lacking innovators and a lot of them are in prison. With that kind of statistics, we should maybe refocus on prison sourcing next year? Chris Forbes (funny guy, I like him) thinks taking a printed magazine online is innovation but it’s not, that’s evolution. The New York Times is innovating printed news delivery online. Finally we have John Gage (I like him too) who talked about innovating to bring more happiness to the world. People want to buy happy. I like where Gage was heading with that idea. Even if I’m jobless, I guess I would like to be happily jobless. Gage paints a utopia that technology can play a part to bridge the gap but again, little to hold on to as to how we can get from zero to hero.

I was hoping to hear more concrete plans or plans with more common sense. A gentleman I spoke to after the conference told me how Malaysian innovators are not being heard. Instead of an online repository for ideas like myideas.my how about a forum for innovators to post their feedback and opinions? Is the government even interested to hear and fix their pain points? How does an international advisory panel know what to fix or how to help? There is also a lack of recognition for innovation. Could the media have offered some help with a regular column or TV program highlighting innovation in Malaysia? How about an annual Innovation Award?

How about improving our broadband infrastructure? The price companies have to pay for larger pipes is incredible. Surely faster speeds can work in tandem with the government’s efforts in increasing broadband penetration in the country. Why must everyone wait for penetration to reach its target before we can see faster connections? People are increasingly mobile – John Gage also mentioned this. Can the government encourage telcos to eliminate the 2-3GB caps on mobile data plans? This cap does not help knowledge workers one bit.

So the people have been asked to innovate and pick up speed to compete with the world but is anything being done about the speed bumps all over this roadmap (or lack of one) to an innovation and knowledge-based economy?

Filed Under: Business, Events, Tech Tagged With: iap, innovation, malaysia

Can brands use twitter list?

November 2, 2009 By Carolyn Chan View Comments

Personally, I see twitter lists as another ego stroker. You know it is when people start thanking each other for adding them to a list or getting upset when they have been left out of a list and proceed to block, unfollow or both, the list curator.

I curated a list of Malaysians in Social Media for Listorious.com yesterday which I deleted today because it’s just not worth the emotional hassle. Some names are obviously left out because I don’t have every social media person on my follow list. Even if I did, I don’t count having 18K followers or someone who does not engage with others as being in or having a huge influence in social media.

Ego “twisting” aside for personal lists, there are great reasons for brands to curate their own lists.

Here’s my short list:
1. A brand can show what’s important to them with a list of tweeps they follow. It’s like Tony Hsieh’s alltop page where you’ll find blogs on customer service, lifestyle, fashion, shoes and tech. Knowing what Tony has accomplished in zappos, I want to read what he reads too.

2. I agree with point #5 on this list. Gives brands an opportunity to aggregate multiple accounts. Some brands have different names for different departments. Sometimes I wonder why. Customers want one website, one phone number and one email to reach a company.

Sometimes it works. If different twitter accounts are already established, a twitter list with all the brand’s accounts will help a lot. A great example is how AMC promotes the tv series Mad Men on twitter. Twitter accounts are set up for some of the main characters. One to check out is Betty Draper’s (a character in that show) twitter account. On her profile is a list of the other Mad Men characters which she has listed in her rolodex. It’s incredibly fun to read if you’re a fan of Mad Men like me. Betty also has a list of other people she finds interesting and she has them listed in Mad Men of the future (today’s mad men and women).

3. A brand’s staff/member list can also tell others who work or belong to that organization. Especially useful when someone in your organization deals with other people representing your company. When @xyz representing a publication asks me for an interview for example, I’d like to know if they are legit. Seeing their name listed on the staff list of the publication’s (account verified) twitter account gives me some confidence that he or she isn’t a competitor who just wants to get information on a new product I’ve released to the press that’s under embargo. Good example is the New York Times staff list.

Only three from me. There’s more from the many articles written by twitter pundits which you can do a search on. Final note, if you manage a brand or an organization on twitter, do get your list up soon.

Filed Under: Apps, Feature, Marketing, Reviews Tagged With: list, Tips, twitter