Jeff Marraccini

Some of us look forward to the rancor of shopping on Black Friday, and some of us avoid the crowds at all costs. With the inevitable traffic jams at our favorite locations, those of us planning on shopping on that day may be able to better plan our stops if we happened to know in advance what each store had to offer, such that we could prioritize our search. In past years, it was a family tradition for us to all devour the thick Thanksgiving newspaper, pouring over the myriad sale books weighing down the paper. As if we were in a dream or a trance, we each individually contemplated our plan for that noble day. While perusing the multitude of sale books in the Thanksgiving newspaper is still one of the pleasures of life, the necessity for that exercise in wishful thinking has diminished over recent years as a variety of “deals” websites are actively compiling so called “leaked” copies of the Black Friday sale books, often weeks before the big day.

Read more

In a recent column here, I wrote about the insecurity of many of the passwords that we commonly use. Most users still use the easy to guess passwords, with about one in seventeen still using “password”, and about the same number of users have “123456” as their passwords. According to a recent report released by the password manager “LastPass”, only about one percent of users have passwords that are properly complex and relatively secure. Usernames and passwords are often targeted by hackers when they break into the servers used by online financial service organizations, retailers, auction websites, online payment services, and other financially attractive targets. What is especially striking about personal password vulnerability is the fact that the majority of online users use the same password on multiple websites; this can create a cascading type of identity theft whereby a hacker in possession of a single password and username can access multiple online services, wreaking financial havoc on the victim.

Read more

One of the annoyances of modern telecommunications technology is its penchant for having inadequate coverage or dead spots in areas other than the major metropolitan areas. When traveling with family and friends, who in aggregate have smart phones and other devices from T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, the one constancy is that we all do not have the same level and degree of broadband wireless coverage at any given time. For example on a recent trip through the Piney Woods to a final destination in northern Louisiana, we had two of the above carriers represented in the car, and while both services each had some data connectivity during most of the trip, at different locations only one or the other had data connectivity, with several areas of dead spots for both. The data connection results from the Louisiana trip somewhat matched the varying degree of connectivity we had with multiple carriers on an earlier trip through central and southern Mississippi by way of southern Louisiana. It has become obvious to us that there are distinct qualitative gaps and coverage dead spots in each of the individual carriers’ coverage, often in contradiction to those carriers online coverage maps.

Read more

What does iTunes, Yahoo!, Gmail, Outlook, Twitter, Facebook, Bank of America, Chase, Discover, E*Trade, Vanguard, PayPal. eBay, and Etsy have in common with thousands of other secured online services? They all offer their users a secure supplementary method to prevent illicit access to their online accounts, with a level of protection much greater than the traditional password, that method known as “Two Factor Authentication”. While it may increase the time necessary to logon to websites by a few seconds, it also greatly reduces the risk of an unauthorized person gaining access to those websites, even if the users’ passwords have been compromised.

Read more

Now that smart devices, including smart phones and tablets, have arguably become the most widely used devices now in use to surf the web, it may be time for those users to consider an alternative browser, rather than the one that came factory installed on their devices. As has typically happened on desktops and laptops regardless of the operating system, the default internet browser is the one that tends to be most widely used, as many users are either unaware or reluctant to try another browser. On my former long running radio show, I was frequently asked about browsers other than those installed by the manufacturer, and my answers were always the same: Yes, you can have more than one browser installed; Yes, you can use more than one browser; No, they will not interfere with each other; and Yes, most browsers will import the bookmarks (favorites), cookies, passwords, and other pertinent information from the original browser.

Read more

For the past 14 years I have been promoting the annual National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and encouraged individuals, schools, colleges, governmental agencies, corporations, clubs, and other groups to get involved. Every year since its founding in 2001, this annual event has been recognized by bipartisan presidential proclamations declaring October as National Cyber Security Awareness Month. While many organizations around the country hold a myriad of events during the month of October promoting cyber security, locally the premier event is hosted by the City of Port Arthur and its most capable Information Technology Manager, Ms. Fay Young.

Read more

Amazon, the online marketing powerhouse best known for its general merchandise, groceries, digital books, and streaming media has now entered a somewhat new market. While Amazon has had an online app store since 2008, with hundreds of thousands of paid and free Android apps, Amazon recently announced a new Android app and a feature on its website offering a wide selection of normally paid apps for free; according to Amazon, eventually more than ten thousand normally paid apps will be available for totally free download, including free future updates. Not so strangely missing from the competing ubiquitous Google Play Store, this new app with the moniker “Amazon Underground” is available directly from Amazon by connecting to amazon.com/underground from the Android device. This new Amazon app combines features from the traditional Amazon shopping app as well as the existing Amazon App Store, but also provides the user with access to the expanding catalog of otherwise “premium” (paid) apps labeled by Amazon as “Actually Free”.

Read more