Tech and life

If you carry your data on a USB drive, I’m sure you’re always worried about losing it. Of course you should always take the necessary precautions about protecting the data on it like making sure it’s backed up somewhere safe and encrypting the data on it if necessary. But we don’t always do this and so we might end up losing some valuable information.

You could use Flash Drive Reminder which pops up a reminder when you try and log off Windows without removing your USB drive. Putting the drive on a car key ring might also help you to remember it but if you haven’t done this, what about getting the stick back? Doubtless if lost, some finders would just keep it, look at the data, or delete the encrypted data and reuse the stick, but I’m sure many with good intentions would return it if given the chance.

Well you could use LostDrive and edit the contact details. Or just put a text file in the root directory of the stick with your contact details. You could call the file ‘Read-me-if-you-find-this-USB-stick.txt’. But you mightn’t be happy about putting contact details in there in case the drive falls into the wrong hands.

Well I’ve come across a free service called whspr! which allows you to be contacted by email without giving away any personal details in the text file.

If you fill out the form there they give you a URL which you could put in the text file. Anyone who finds your USB stick hopefully will open the text file. You could put a message thanking them for opening the file and that you’d be most grateful if you could get in touch with the owner by clicking the URL. This would send them to a form at whspr where they can send you an email message. whspr forwards the message to your email address and now you can get in touch with the finder whose email is on the form. The URL lasts for up to 365 days so you have to remember to renew it before then. So set up an email or text reminder with your reminder app, for example Task.fm, to remind you say a week before the URL expires and get a new URL from whspr.

Hopefully, these tips should help you minimize the loss of a USB stick. Have you any tips? Drop a comment below.

Image credit: jatop

So how do you save your passwords? On a sheet of paper? In your head? In your browser? Or in a password safe? Given the risks of losing the sheet of paper, or forgetting memorized passwords, or someone else accessing your browser, the password safe is probably the best choice. We all know how important it is to have long passwords which are a combination of upper case and lower case letters, numbers and symbols so I won’t go into that here. But we must have a secure way of storing them.

When Lee Mathews of Download Squad wrote a post on LastPass back in August last year, I decided to give it a try. I’ve always found him to give excellent software recommendations on Download Squad. I was using KeePass at the time, another password manager which was being warmly recommended on tech blogs and tech podcasts. It’s a great password safe, but the problem is that to get passwords from KeePass to your browser, you have to launch the program, enter your password then copy and paste the stored password to wherever you need it – which all takes time. There is a plugin for KeePass called KeeForm which is designed to open and scan a website for input fields and fill them accordingly with a user name and password but it only works with Internet Explorer. I use Firefox so I decided to try LastPass. I found it really easy to install and liked the way everything was explained during installation.

LastPass keeps all your web logins securely synchronized across multiple computers. It stores your passwords in encrypted form on your PC, and there is a Firefox browser extension and Internet Explorer add-on for LastPass which recognises and fills password boxes from your encrypted password data. Not only this, but it will also fill online forms much like RoboForm.

Another feature I like is that it will store multiple usernames and passwords for a site. For example, I have personal and business usernames and passwords for Delicious. When I go to log in to Delicious, the Firefox LastPass extension gives a drop-down set of buttons one of which is AutoLogin. Clicking on this allows me to choose which of my two Delicious accounts I log in to. The buttons appear below the Firefox tabs near the top right corner of the browser window.

LastPass also syncs passwords over the net, so all your saved passwords on your work computer, for example, will always be synced to your home computer. It’s also cross-platform, so you can sync your password data to Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs. There’s also a portable version of LastPass called LastPass Pocket so you can keep your encrypted passwords and usernames on a thumbdrive. Pocket is designed to provide you with access to your passwords on any computer.

There’s actually a lot more to LastPass than I can go into here so please check out their website for all the details. Or have a look at their FAQ. The big question with all these password managers is: Are my passwords safe or can anyone else access them? Many of the security questions have actually been addressed by LastPass in the comments below a LifeHacker feature on the program in August last year and also on their website here. They assure us that the passwords are only stored on your PC. They’re encrypted locally on your PC and the result of that encryption is uploaded to LastPass. LastPass never has a way to decrypt your data so it’s important to remember just one password – your LastPass password!

So if you’re storing passwords on paper, in your browser or in your head, give LastPass a try. I’ve been using it since last September without problems. In fact, I’ve just checked though my list of essential software on my About page and LastPass would rate as my best find of 2008. Oh, and it’s free.

Added on 15th January:

Further reading: Securely Synchronize all your Browser Passwords with LastPass

Added on 20th January:

Further reading: LastPass now handles logins and form filling in any browser

I haven’t really blogged about PC security yet because there are so many sites out there doing a great job informing how to keep your machine free from viruses, spyware and bots. I’ll mention one great site later, but first just a brief outline of my favourite antimalware and security applications. Over the years, these programs have been generally highly recommended on forums and blogs and I find them all excellent.

My firewall is ZoneAlarm Free and for anti-virus I use AVG Free. Both these products have served me well for years. For antimalware, I use SUPERAntiSpyware Free edition. This has been recommended for some time by the experts on the Motley Fool forum ‘Help with this Blasted Computer’, a forum I really like and trust for tech help. More recently, the program has also been picked up and recommended on the Podnutz computer repair podcast as the product which identifies and eliminates spyware which many other antispyware programs miss.

I route all my incoming email through Gmail as I find it’s excellent at eliminating the spam emails which my ISP and web host let slip through.

I use a product called RUBotted from TrendMicro to identify behaviour associated with bots.

As a password manager, I’ve just started using LastPass and so far I’ve found it excellent for managing my online passwords. One feature I really like is that you can quickly log into different online accounts at the same site very easily. For example, I have different Delicious accounts for personal and blog bookmarks and I can move between them very easily. I’ll be doing a separate post on LastPass later.

All the programs I’ve mentioned are free and I recommend them all. However, if you want real-time antispyware protection, then check out SUPERAntiSpyware Professional edition.

As has been said many times before, the best form of PC security is the person behind the keyboard. Don’t go to dodgy sites, and don’t click on attachments in email unless you are absolutely sure you trust the sender.

But if you really want the lowdown on PC security, great advice on free apps and how to keep your system out of danger, read and subscribe to Bill Mullins’ Weblog.

I’ve been subscribing to his blog for several months now and Bill’s advice on computer security and products is second to none. Here’s just one post from his archive that will give you an idea what security software you need.

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