This post follows up on the two-minute tech tip I recorded for Episode 252 of the Just the Books podcast. This is the first post in series that covers digital credibility and phishing.

Domain Names
A website is known by its domain name. This is the friendly version of its internet address. There are a few parts to the name, however, for this tip, I am focusing on the end.

At the end is the TLD, the top level domain name. Generically this is the .com, .net, .org, etc. Registration of some of these is restricted, for example .mil, .gov, and edu. Each country has its own TLD, these are known as ccTLDs and are two letters. This is why there is .co.uk exists.

In general there are two more parts to domain names, working from the right, the next part is what you get when you purchase a domain name. For the Just the Books podcast, it’s the just-the-books part. The last part is the part that the domain holder can generally set themselves. It’s often the www but could be anything; if desired we could make a name directly to the show notes as shownotes.just-the-books.com (note: I’ve not done this).

How can you check a link in a webpage?
Below, I explain one quick way to test. Please note that while I made these screen shots on my Mac, it’s worded similarly on Windows.

For simplicity, let’s use a page from The New York Times. We want to make sure that links to the full articles are still within The New York Times website, nytimes.com.

Right click on the link and select “Copy Link Address”. If you have a one-button mouse, hold down control as you click to bring up the menu.

Next, paste into a plain text editor. For Macs, the default is TextEdit, Windows machines have Note Pad. You want to use a plain text editor and not your word processing program of choice because plain text strips away the webpage programming (“HTML”) and will display the actual URL.

It should look something like this.

Let’s evaluate what you see:

1. Ignore the http:// It’s mostly for the computer, not humans.
2. The www. isn’t important for this either.
3. nytimes. looks right. So far so good.
4. .com Great!
5. Now we see the most important part. Next comes a /. For the computer, and for you, that means the domain name is done and we get to the webpage specific parts.

Congratulations, it is a link that looks right.

Using this method to test from the results you get from a search engine is trickier because the search engines what to know what websites are successfully clicked and they do this by passing you through their domain first. If we searched Google for the New York Times and copy-and-pasted the resulting link, it will by default in most web browsers return this massive block of … stuff:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CI8 BEBYwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F&ei=uV62T4XnC8bM6QGAuZzFCg& usg=AFQjCNEtLodOdxWZSGdJpL7WJaEeUJVlnw&sig2=B5xbatumCielOdBT8trDNA

How do you parse that?

Start with the chunk http://www.google.com/ This is helpful because it’s google’s domain and because we see the / we know we’re now going to some webpage specific stuff.

Next we find the geeky bits. Let’s take it slow and scan through what we see. We know that we want to find nytimes.com in there, so take it slow… do you see it?

Great! But there’s lots of weirdness around it and no slash, so you aren’t sure if it’s done and going onto the website stuff. The www.nytimes.com is surrounded by encoding of special characters. Computers don’t really like spaces and different characters might also have special meaning for programs, so they are often encoded. %2F means a /. We see that surrounding the text we’re looking for: %2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F which really means //www.nytimes.com/. That’s a good sign.

In this case we shouldn’t ignore http://, which we find to the left of URL. How? the %3A means a : so now we have all the parts. I don’t expect you to remember that but please note the similarity in length and format for each of the chunks of special encoding. So we see &url=http://www.nytimes.com/ Congrats! That’s what we’re looking for and this link so going where we expect.

You are probably wondering how to prevent this and just get directly to your links without your search engine tracking extra information about what you clicked. Don’t worry, personal privacy will be covered in the future. If you are concerned now, please ask and let me know you want to know sooner. Next week I plan to continue with digital credibility and phishing by discussing security certificates and SSL.

This post follows up on the two-minute tech tip I recorded for Episode 251 of the Just the Books podcast.

Viruses differ from bugs because they can spread. They copy themselves and then move on to infect a new computer, while they once spread through physical media such as floppy disks, they now tend to piggy-back on emails and hide in website links.

There are a few more terms you should know:

• Malware is the generic term for all malicious software.
• A Trojan horse pretends to be a nice program while really it is malicious. Those popup ads that say “Your computer may be infected, click here to install our security check now!” are often Trojan horses.
• A worm is different from a virus because it doesn’t need the user to do something to infect others, such as forward an email. Worms most often take advantage of known bugs in computers to spread.

There are more, but this is only an introduction!

The Flashback virus that recently infected lots of Macs came from WordPress sites that were themselves not updated. There are two layers to this problem:

1. Self-hosted WordPress sites (not wordpress.com sites) were running out-dated versions of WordPress. There are many reasons why this happens that I’ll cover in future posts, but by not having the most secure and up-to-date installation it allowed the virus to pretend to be an Adobe software update (it was a Trojan).
2. A vulnerability (a bug) in Java on Macs allowed the virus to run. Apple released a software update to fix Java.

Could this have been prevented? I think by keeping every computer, including those running wordpress up-to-date would have definitely reduced the reach of the infection. Learning about how to take care and use technology would have reduced it further. Is there a possible world without virus attacks causing widespread infection? Yes, but it requires time and education.

Three steps to keep your devices healthy:

1. Keep your computer up-to-date.
2. Install virus protection software. There are some small trades-offs to doing this. To be more secure the software has to run all the time and that will mean your computer will run just a tiny bit slower. Will you notice? Probably not. Keep this virus protect up-to-date. Do not schedule these updates monthly, do them daily.
   • Microsoft has Security Essentials.
   • Macs have their own Security tools.

     
     Can these be your only line of defense? Yes, but I like a two-layered approach.

   • Choose and install your software from a reputable source. Who is a reputable source? The big names such as Norton, McAfee (note: it only has one F!), and F-Secure. There are free options too, Avira, Avast, and AVG come to mind.
     Please do not click ads while you are web surfing that say “You’re computer is infected click here for a free security scan.” I’ll cover phishing soon.
     Does installing and keeping this software updated mean you definitely will not be infected? No, but they will reduce the likelihood by a significant amount.
3. Be smart with what you do. Don’t click every link and open every attachment, especially if you aren’t expecting a file and the context doesn’t seem to indicate there should be an attachment. Do not install software from unknown sources. Who’s an unknown source? I’ll cover digital credibility and expand upon safe surfing in future posts.

   
   Here’s a bonus fourth step:

4. Backup, Backup, Backup. How? Everyway you can. I will cover data organization/backup/archiving in the future but there is a concept called LOCKSS, Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. While this concept is generally geared toward large institutions, I’ve scaled it down for individuals for years. Of course this doesn’t work if the copies themselves are infected but there are a few ways around it. I’ll cover this in more detail in the future but my quick method is:
   • Copy/Duplicate the file. Paste it right in the same spot.
   • Convert it to another format, for example, it’s a word processing document, print it to PDF.
   • Email it to a spare email account or a trusted friend. I’ve been accepting friend’s final thesis papers and dissertations for years.
   • Make CD/DVD/USB key copies of the files.
   • If it is that critical and important to your future (or past) print it out! You can always scan it and while it might not be the perfect original (in the case of a photograph, for instance), wouldn’t you rather a paper copy and a later scan of that image instead of no copy?

You can read more at the following websites:

• Microsoft what is a virus?
• Virus basics from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team
• Apple’s security guides for older versions of Mac OS X

Question: I just bought a new computer, why do I have to run software update? Why are there so many updates?

Computers are complex. They include many different components hardware (the physical computer), operating system (mac or windows, which is really just big fancy software), and programs (web browsers, word processing, games). Not only are there many different components, in general they come from many different places and companies. Since there is a desire to release new products frequently, deadlines are tight to develop and release new parts for a new computer. It’s not surprising that a bug can sneak in.

Bugs? But the computer was just turned on.. How could that happen?!

First, rest assured, while bugs can be quite problematic, a bug is not the same as a virus. I’ll cover viruses next week!

A bug occurs when there is an unexpected outcome from the software. For example, the alphabet is generally sorted as a, b, c, d, e. If there was a bug in the sort program, the result would instead be a, b, d, c, e!

Patches, or software updates are released to fix bugs.

When did the term bug come about? It’s credited back to when there were vacuum tubes running computers. A bug (moth) literally crawled into the hardware and died causing the electrical circuit not to close properly. The term is credited to Grace Hopper.

You should run software update as soon as the computer is set up and connected to the internet. Why? In the weeks and months from when the programs where installed at the factory to the moment you turned it on, there is a very good chance modern bugs were found and there are updates to fix them. Run the software update until it says “no more updates at this time”. You can schedule this to automatically check, please do this at least monthly, I prefer weekly. You should also check for software updates of the applications you use, such as word processing programs in the same way.

Why do we still get bugs?

The modern bugs are different, but because so many parts of the computer are coming from different places and there are many different variables, sometimes the programmers don’t get everything right the first time. Should they? I’ll leave that debate for some other time and place, but given the complexity it’s not surprising that bugs sneak in and cause havoc. We just hope that they are patched in a timely manner.

One more thing:

Updates and upgrades aren’t quite the same thing. An update will fix small problems in the things that are currently installed and may introduce small new features. Upgrades are bigger changes and often require paying for the new features (and their unintended bugs).

Sometimes even a small regular update can introduce new bugs. Each computer becomes different with use and different programs installed on it so it’s not easy to say if any update will work as expected. Some people wait a day or two when new updates are announced just incase they introduce problems. Understanding what the updates fix can sometimes be quite complex, so if you are wondering if you should update, please do not hesitate to ask.

Basics of running software update:

• Mac
• Windows
• If you are running Linux please contact me as there are many different ways to do it depending what flavour of Linux you have installed and how the applications were initially installed.