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When I started looking for a new phone, my son was quite clear – I didn’t need a fancy new (read, expensive) phone because I had an iPad. He’s concerned that if I spend all my money on me, I won’t have any left over for him. That’s a valid concern, but that’s a whole other post.
This post is all about my compromise phone. I really wanted the HTC EVO – all those fancy features and all that cool Android powered goodness appealed to me. The price tag didn’t. Even after my substantial phone upgrade discount, it’s not a cheap phone. Fortunately, a smaller, slightly less fancy (but with a real keyboard) model came out to save the day. The EVO Shift was a bit cheaper and it had a real, slide-out keyboard. I’m not a fan of software keyboards on tiny screens, so this was a big selling point.
I’ve had the phone now for almost a week and I have to say I LOVE it. I’m in the process of searching for my next car and having Evernote (snap a pic, enter the details of a potential new Robin-mobile, save to the cloud – priceless!), the Kelly Blue Book application (check the suggested retail price and reviews of any car I look at while standing on the lot – priceless!) and a beautifully designed connection to all my Google-y information (contacts and such, especially, for saving the numbers of all those car salesmen) is priceless.
I’m still in the process of learning the phone – my Dad called me the other day and I promptly hung up on him because it was the first call I’d gotten and I automatically swiped up to answer it. That was the action needed on my Pre. That, however, dismisses the call on my EVO. Oops! Other than the small learning curve ahead of me as I shift (pun completely intended) from my Pre to my EVO, I forsee no problems with this phone. It feels well made, its battery lasts longer than 5 hours at a time and it is FAST compared to my Pre. I’m definitely in like…
The book on Library Mashups, to which I contributed a chapter on the LibraryThing API, is available on the Kindle – for .26 cents less than the paperback. If those .26 cents have been holding you back from picking up a copy of this book (or if you are like me and a couple of my co-workers and have grown to prefer books in electronic formats), head over to Amazon and get yourself a nice clean e-edition!
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This session will be about something I’m very interested in – network backups. Since a lot of this will be kind of specific, I plan to do a lot of summarizing. He started with network storage, which I don’t need. The network backup, though, I do. They have set it up so that it’s not going across the general Internet. This is nice! Beyond that, it’s all encrypted, both in transit and on the server. Dedups and compression are done before the data leaves the library. Nice! Agentless backups mean that only one backup client necessary. All major OSs are supported, databases are supported. Cost is per GB stored, client included in service. Client statistical mode-we can figure backup size precisely before committed to the service. Data is stored outside MO. Pricing info should be available in a couple of weeks.
Brian Krebs (http://www.krebsonsecurity.com/) talked about bank fraud and security. This generally starts with an email attachment (ZeuS) and ends with a company’s money in the Ukraine or Russia. Brian talked about both the computer issues and the human issues – with a fascinating discussion of the mules used to move the money.
Some of the common attacks (in Europe, at least, not seeing it in the US yet) include form field injection, session riding, balance manipulation, and attacks hitting consumers, rather than heavily secured commercial accounts.
Red flags for banks – 10-20 new employees added to payroll, IP address weirdness.
Advice – disallow batches that deviate from standard format (revise banking contract), request low-tech verification, access accounts only from non-windows machine (excellent idea-get a dedicated Netbook with Mac or Linux installed), get involved and write your lawmaker, require 2 signoffs for wire transfers.
What’s coming? more litigation between banks & victims, lots of smaller cases coming up, guidance from FFIEC on transaction monitoring/analysis guidelines, Bill from Rep. Schumer -S3898 to offer schools & consumers same protections as companies.
Online banking is not secure for small organizations. Banks need to inform customers of risks and sell risk mitigation services.
Wow – the Tech Set just won the Greenwood Publishing Group Award for the Best Book in Library Literature. This is the set of books that includes my Microblogging and Lifestreaming in Libraries!! Congrats to my fellow authors and to Elyssa Kroski for pulling this all together!