Mon Apr 30, 2007 11:58PM EDT
Gina Hughes The Techie Diva
There are many articles on Yahoo! Tech regarding password security, but no matter what advice we get or receive, we're all most likely to choose a password we can remember. Unfortunately, cyberthieves know this weakness all too well, and try to hack into accounts just by using the most common passwords online first.
PCMagazine says these are the most commonly used passwords, so if yours is on the list, I recommend you change it immediately.
password
123456
qwerty
abc123
letmein
monkey
myspace 1
password 1
blink182
(your first name)
I admit, I've used at least two of these passwords on my low-security accounts (newsites mainly), because as a rule of thumb, I don't ever give up important passwords even on these sites.
Becky Worley put together this password makeover post full of tips to help you choose a memorable password that will also keep the bad guys out of your accounts. She recommends sorting all your online accounts into three security levels (high, medium, low) then assigning appropriate passwords to each group. Obviously, the high-security password should be the hardest to crack since it gives you access to financial accounts. Remember to always avoid using your social security number or home address as a password. It may be easy to remember, but that also means it's easy for thieves to crack.
Chris Null gives us more good advise on how to pick a genuinely secure password on this post, and has a link to a database of more common passwords. Again, if your password is on the list, it's time for a password makeover.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Privacy under attack, but does anybody care?
It's vanishing, but there's no consensus on what it is or what should be done
By Bob Sullivan
Technology correspondent
Updated: 3:14 p.m. CT Oct 17, 2006
Someday a stranger will read your e-mail, rummage through your instant messages without your permission or scan the Web sites you’ve visited — maybe even find out that you read this story.
You might be spied in a lingerie store by a secret camera or traced using a computer chip in your car, your clothes or your skin.
Perhaps someone will casually glance through your credit card purchases or cell phone bills, or a political consultant might select you for special attention based on personal data purchased from a vendor.
In fact, it’s likely some of these things have already happened to you.
Who would watch you without your permission? It might be a spouse, a girlfriend, a marketing company, a boss, a cop or a criminal. Whoever it is, they will see you in a way you never intended to be seen — the 21st century equivalent of being caught naked.
Psychologists tell us boundaries are healthy, that it’s important to reveal yourself to friends, family and lovers in stages, at appropriate times. But few boundaries remain. The digital bread crumbs you leave everywhere make it easy for strangers to reconstruct who you are, where you are and what you like. In some cases, a simple Google search can reveal what you think. Like it or not, increasingly we live in a world where you simply cannot keep a secret.
The key question is: Does that matter?
For many Americans, the answer apparently is “no.”
When pollsters ask Americans about privacy, most say they are concerned about losing it. An MSNBC.com survey, which will be covered in detail on Tuesday, found an overwhelming pessimism about privacy, with 60 percent of respondents saying they feel their privacy is “slipping away, and that bothers me.”
People do and don't careBut people say one thing and do another.
Only a tiny fraction of Americans – 7 percent, according to a recent survey by The Ponemon Institute – change any behaviors in an effort to preserve their privacy. Few people turn down a discount at toll booths to avoid using the EZ-Pass system that can track automobile movements.
And few turn down supermarket loyalty cards. Carnegie Mellon privacy economist Alessandro Acquisti has run a series of tests that reveal people will surrender personal information like Social Security numbers just to get their hands on a measly 50-cents-off coupon.
But woe to the organization that loses a laptop computer containing personal information.
When the Veterans Administration lost a laptop with 26.5 million Social Security numbers on it, the agency felt the lash of righteous indignation from the public and lawmakers alike. So, too, did ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, Bank of America, and other firms that reported in the preceding months that millions of identities had been placed at risk by the loss or theft of personal data
So privacy does matter – at least sometimes. But it’s like health: When you have it, you don’t notice it. Only when it’s gone do you wish you’d done more to protect it.
But protect what? Privacy is an elusive concept. One person’s privacy is another person’s suppression of free speech and another person’s attack on free enterprise and marketing – distinctions we will explore in detail on Wednesday, when comparing privacy in Europe and the United States.
Still, privacy is much more than an academic free speech debate. The word does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, yet the topic spawns endless constitutional arguments. And it is a wide-ranging subject, as much about terrorism as it is about junk mail. Consider the recent headlines that have dealt with just a few of its many aspects:
Hewlett Packard executives hiring private investigators to spy on employees and journalists.
Rep. Mark Foley sending innuendo-laden instant messages – a reminder that digital communication lasts forever and that anonymous sources can be unmasked by clever bloggers from just a few electronic clues.
The federal government allegedly compiling a database of telephone numbers dialed by Americans, and eavesdropping on U.S. callers dialing international calls without obtaining court orders.
Privacy will remain in the headlines in the months to come, as states implement the federal government’s Real ID Act, which will effectively create a national identification program by requiring new high-tech standards for driver’s licenses and ID cards. We'll examine the implications of this new technological pressure point on privacy on Thursday.
What is privacy?
Most Americans struggle when asked to define privacy. More than 6,500 MSNBC readers tried to do it in our survey. The nearest thing to consensus was this sentiment, appropriately offered by an anonymous reader: “Privacy is to be left alone.”
The phrase echoes a famous line penned in 1890 by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice William Brandeis, the father of the American privacy movement and author of “The Right to Privacy.” At the time, however, Brandeis’ concern was tabloid journalism rather than Internet cookies, surveillance cameras, no-fly lists and Amazon book suggestions.
As privacy threats multiply, defending this right to be left alone becomes more challenging. How do you know when you are left alone enough? How do you say when it’s been taken? How do you measure what’s lost? What is the real cost to a person whose Social Security number is in a data-storage device left in the back seat of a taxi?
Perhaps a more important question, Acquisti says, is how do consumers measure the consequences of their privacy choices?
In a standard business transaction, consumers trade money for goods or services. The costs and the benefits are clear. But add privacy to the transaction, and there is really no way to perform a cost-benefit analysis.
If a company offers $1 off a gallon of milk in exchange for a name, address, and phone number, how is the privacy equation calculated? The benefit of surrendering the data is clear, but what is the cost? It might be nothing. It might be an increase in junk mail. It might be identity theft if a hacker steals the data. Or it might end up being the turning point in a divorce case. Did you buy milk for your lactose-intolerant child? Perhaps you’re an unfit mother or father.
Unassessable costs“People can't make intelligent (privacy) choices,” Acquisti said. “People realize there could be future costs, but they decide not to focus on those costs.
The simple act of surrendering a telephone number to a store clerk may seem innocuous — so much so that many consumers do it with no questions asked. Yet that one action can set in motion a cascade of silent events, as that data point is acquired, analyzed, categorized, stored and sold over and over again. Future attacks on your privacy may come from anywhere, from anyone with money to purchase that phone number you surrendered.
If you doubt the multiplier effect, consider your e-mail inbox. If it's loaded with spam, it's undoubtedly because at some point in time you unknowingly surrendered your e-mail to the wrong Web site.
Do you think your telephone number or address are handled differently? A cottage industry of small companies with names you've probably never heard of — like Acxiom or Merlin — buy and sell your personal information the way other commodities like corn or cattle futures are bartered.
You may think your cell phone is unlisted, but if you've ever ordered a pizza, it might not be. Merlin is one of many commercial data brokers that advertises sale of unlisted phone numbers compiled from various sources -- including pizza delivery companies.
These unintended, unpredictable consequences that flow from simple actions make privacy issues difficult to grasp, and grapple with.
Privacy’s nebulous nature is never more evident than when Congress attempts to legislate solutions to various perceived problems.
Marc Rotenberg, who runs the Electronic Privacy Information Center and is called to testify whenever the House or Senate debates privacy legislation, is often cast as a liberal attacking free markets and free marketing and standing opposite data collection capitalists like ChoicePoint or the security experts at the Department of Homeland Security. He once whimsically referred to privacy advocates like himself as a “data huggers.”
Yet the “right to be left alone” is a decidedly conservative -- even Libertarian -- principle. Many Americans would argue their right to be left alone while holding a gun on their doorstep.
In a larger sense, privacy also is often cast as a tale of “Big Brother” -- the government is watching you or a big corporation is watching you. But privacy issues don’t necessarily involve large faceless institutions: A spouse takes a casual glance at her husband’s Blackberry, a co-worker looks at e-mail over your shoulder or a friend glances at a cell phone text message from the next seat on the bus.
‘Nothing to hide’While very little of this is news to anyone – people are now well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere – there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant of the monitoring, assuming a mythical level of privacy. People write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails were a cornerstone of the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Microsoft.
It took barely a day for a blogger to track down the identity of the congressional page at the center of the Foley controversy. The blogger didn’t just find the page’s name and e-mail address; he found a series of photographs of the page that had been left online.
Nor do college students heed warnings that their MySpace pages laden with fraternity party photos might one day cost them a job. The roster of people who can’t be Googled shrinks every day.
And polls and studies have repeatedly shown that Americans are indifferent to privacy concerns.
The general defense for such indifference is summed up a single phrase: “I have nothing to hide.” If you have nothing to hide, why shouldn’t the government be able to peek at your phone records, your wife see your e-mail or a company send you junk mail? It’s a powerful argument, one that privacy advocates spend considerable time discussing and strategizing over.
It is hard to deny, however, that people behave different when they’re being watched. And it is also impossible to deny that Americans are now being watched more than at any time in history.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Without an instant message evidence trail, would anyone believe a congressional page accusing Rep. Foley of making online advances? And perhaps cameras really do cut down on crime.
No place to hideBut cameras accidentally catch innocents, too. Virginia Shelton, 46, her daughter, Shirley, 16; and a friend, Jennifer Starkey, 17, were all arrested and charged with murder in 2003 because of an out-of-synch ATM camera. Their pictures were flashed in front of a national audience and they spent three weeks in a Maryland jail before it was discovered that the camera was set to the wrong time.
“Better 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer” is a phrase made famous by British jurist William Blackstone, whose work is often cited as the base of U.S. common law, and is invoked by the U.S. Supreme Court when it wants to discuss a legal point that predates the Constitution.
It is not clear how the world of high-tech surveillance squares with Blackstone’s ratio. What would he say about a government that mines databases of telephone calls for evidence that someone might be about to commit a crime? What would an acceptable error rate be?
Rather than having “nothing to hide,” author Robert O’Harrow declared two years ago that Americans have “No Place to Hide” in his book of the same name.
“More than ever before, the details about our lives are no longer our own,” O’Harrow wrote. “They belong to the companies that collect them, and the government agencies that buy or demand them in the name of keeping us safe.”
That may be a trade-off we are willing, even wise, to make. It would be, O’Harrow said, “crazy not to use tech to keep us safer.” The terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center were on government watch lists, and their attack was successful only because technology wasn’t used efficiently.
Time to talk about itBut there is another point in the discussion about which there is little disagreement: The debate over how much privacy we are willing to give up never occurred. When did consumers consent to give their entire bill-paying histories to credit bureaus, their address histories to a company like ChoicePoint, or their face, flying habits and telephone records to the federal government? It seems our privacy has been slipping away -- 1s and 0s at a time -- while we were busy doing other things.
Our intent in this week-long series is to invite readers into such a debate.
Some might consider the invitation posthumous, delivered only after our privacy has died. Sun’s founder and CEO Scott McNealy famously said in 1999 that people “have no privacy – get over it.” But privacy is not a currency. It is much more like health or dignity or well-being; a source of anxiety when weak and a source of quiet satisfaction when strong.
Perhaps it’s naïve in these dangerous times to believe you can keep secrets anymore –your travels, your e-mail, your purchasing history is readily available to law enforcement officials and others. But everyone has secrets they don’t want everyone else to know, and it’s never too late to begin a discussion about how Americans’ right to privacy can be protected.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15221095/page/3/
By Bob Sullivan
Technology correspondent
Updated: 3:14 p.m. CT Oct 17, 2006
Someday a stranger will read your e-mail, rummage through your instant messages without your permission or scan the Web sites you’ve visited — maybe even find out that you read this story.
You might be spied in a lingerie store by a secret camera or traced using a computer chip in your car, your clothes or your skin.
Perhaps someone will casually glance through your credit card purchases or cell phone bills, or a political consultant might select you for special attention based on personal data purchased from a vendor.
In fact, it’s likely some of these things have already happened to you.
Who would watch you without your permission? It might be a spouse, a girlfriend, a marketing company, a boss, a cop or a criminal. Whoever it is, they will see you in a way you never intended to be seen — the 21st century equivalent of being caught naked.
Psychologists tell us boundaries are healthy, that it’s important to reveal yourself to friends, family and lovers in stages, at appropriate times. But few boundaries remain. The digital bread crumbs you leave everywhere make it easy for strangers to reconstruct who you are, where you are and what you like. In some cases, a simple Google search can reveal what you think. Like it or not, increasingly we live in a world where you simply cannot keep a secret.
The key question is: Does that matter?
For many Americans, the answer apparently is “no.”
When pollsters ask Americans about privacy, most say they are concerned about losing it. An MSNBC.com survey, which will be covered in detail on Tuesday, found an overwhelming pessimism about privacy, with 60 percent of respondents saying they feel their privacy is “slipping away, and that bothers me.”
People do and don't careBut people say one thing and do another.
Only a tiny fraction of Americans – 7 percent, according to a recent survey by The Ponemon Institute – change any behaviors in an effort to preserve their privacy. Few people turn down a discount at toll booths to avoid using the EZ-Pass system that can track automobile movements.
And few turn down supermarket loyalty cards. Carnegie Mellon privacy economist Alessandro Acquisti has run a series of tests that reveal people will surrender personal information like Social Security numbers just to get their hands on a measly 50-cents-off coupon.
But woe to the organization that loses a laptop computer containing personal information.
When the Veterans Administration lost a laptop with 26.5 million Social Security numbers on it, the agency felt the lash of righteous indignation from the public and lawmakers alike. So, too, did ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, Bank of America, and other firms that reported in the preceding months that millions of identities had been placed at risk by the loss or theft of personal data
So privacy does matter – at least sometimes. But it’s like health: When you have it, you don’t notice it. Only when it’s gone do you wish you’d done more to protect it.
But protect what? Privacy is an elusive concept. One person’s privacy is another person’s suppression of free speech and another person’s attack on free enterprise and marketing – distinctions we will explore in detail on Wednesday, when comparing privacy in Europe and the United States.
Still, privacy is much more than an academic free speech debate. The word does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, yet the topic spawns endless constitutional arguments. And it is a wide-ranging subject, as much about terrorism as it is about junk mail. Consider the recent headlines that have dealt with just a few of its many aspects:
Hewlett Packard executives hiring private investigators to spy on employees and journalists.
Rep. Mark Foley sending innuendo-laden instant messages – a reminder that digital communication lasts forever and that anonymous sources can be unmasked by clever bloggers from just a few electronic clues.
The federal government allegedly compiling a database of telephone numbers dialed by Americans, and eavesdropping on U.S. callers dialing international calls without obtaining court orders.
Privacy will remain in the headlines in the months to come, as states implement the federal government’s Real ID Act, which will effectively create a national identification program by requiring new high-tech standards for driver’s licenses and ID cards. We'll examine the implications of this new technological pressure point on privacy on Thursday.
What is privacy?
Most Americans struggle when asked to define privacy. More than 6,500 MSNBC readers tried to do it in our survey. The nearest thing to consensus was this sentiment, appropriately offered by an anonymous reader: “Privacy is to be left alone.”
The phrase echoes a famous line penned in 1890 by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice William Brandeis, the father of the American privacy movement and author of “The Right to Privacy.” At the time, however, Brandeis’ concern was tabloid journalism rather than Internet cookies, surveillance cameras, no-fly lists and Amazon book suggestions.
As privacy threats multiply, defending this right to be left alone becomes more challenging. How do you know when you are left alone enough? How do you say when it’s been taken? How do you measure what’s lost? What is the real cost to a person whose Social Security number is in a data-storage device left in the back seat of a taxi?
Perhaps a more important question, Acquisti says, is how do consumers measure the consequences of their privacy choices?
In a standard business transaction, consumers trade money for goods or services. The costs and the benefits are clear. But add privacy to the transaction, and there is really no way to perform a cost-benefit analysis.
If a company offers $1 off a gallon of milk in exchange for a name, address, and phone number, how is the privacy equation calculated? The benefit of surrendering the data is clear, but what is the cost? It might be nothing. It might be an increase in junk mail. It might be identity theft if a hacker steals the data. Or it might end up being the turning point in a divorce case. Did you buy milk for your lactose-intolerant child? Perhaps you’re an unfit mother or father.
Unassessable costs“People can't make intelligent (privacy) choices,” Acquisti said. “People realize there could be future costs, but they decide not to focus on those costs.
The simple act of surrendering a telephone number to a store clerk may seem innocuous — so much so that many consumers do it with no questions asked. Yet that one action can set in motion a cascade of silent events, as that data point is acquired, analyzed, categorized, stored and sold over and over again. Future attacks on your privacy may come from anywhere, from anyone with money to purchase that phone number you surrendered.
If you doubt the multiplier effect, consider your e-mail inbox. If it's loaded with spam, it's undoubtedly because at some point in time you unknowingly surrendered your e-mail to the wrong Web site.
Do you think your telephone number or address are handled differently? A cottage industry of small companies with names you've probably never heard of — like Acxiom or Merlin — buy and sell your personal information the way other commodities like corn or cattle futures are bartered.
You may think your cell phone is unlisted, but if you've ever ordered a pizza, it might not be. Merlin is one of many commercial data brokers that advertises sale of unlisted phone numbers compiled from various sources -- including pizza delivery companies.
These unintended, unpredictable consequences that flow from simple actions make privacy issues difficult to grasp, and grapple with.
Privacy’s nebulous nature is never more evident than when Congress attempts to legislate solutions to various perceived problems.
Marc Rotenberg, who runs the Electronic Privacy Information Center and is called to testify whenever the House or Senate debates privacy legislation, is often cast as a liberal attacking free markets and free marketing and standing opposite data collection capitalists like ChoicePoint or the security experts at the Department of Homeland Security. He once whimsically referred to privacy advocates like himself as a “data huggers.”
Yet the “right to be left alone” is a decidedly conservative -- even Libertarian -- principle. Many Americans would argue their right to be left alone while holding a gun on their doorstep.
In a larger sense, privacy also is often cast as a tale of “Big Brother” -- the government is watching you or a big corporation is watching you. But privacy issues don’t necessarily involve large faceless institutions: A spouse takes a casual glance at her husband’s Blackberry, a co-worker looks at e-mail over your shoulder or a friend glances at a cell phone text message from the next seat on the bus.
‘Nothing to hide’While very little of this is news to anyone – people are now well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere – there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant of the monitoring, assuming a mythical level of privacy. People write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails were a cornerstone of the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Microsoft.
It took barely a day for a blogger to track down the identity of the congressional page at the center of the Foley controversy. The blogger didn’t just find the page’s name and e-mail address; he found a series of photographs of the page that had been left online.
Nor do college students heed warnings that their MySpace pages laden with fraternity party photos might one day cost them a job. The roster of people who can’t be Googled shrinks every day.
And polls and studies have repeatedly shown that Americans are indifferent to privacy concerns.
The general defense for such indifference is summed up a single phrase: “I have nothing to hide.” If you have nothing to hide, why shouldn’t the government be able to peek at your phone records, your wife see your e-mail or a company send you junk mail? It’s a powerful argument, one that privacy advocates spend considerable time discussing and strategizing over.
It is hard to deny, however, that people behave different when they’re being watched. And it is also impossible to deny that Americans are now being watched more than at any time in history.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Without an instant message evidence trail, would anyone believe a congressional page accusing Rep. Foley of making online advances? And perhaps cameras really do cut down on crime.
No place to hideBut cameras accidentally catch innocents, too. Virginia Shelton, 46, her daughter, Shirley, 16; and a friend, Jennifer Starkey, 17, were all arrested and charged with murder in 2003 because of an out-of-synch ATM camera. Their pictures were flashed in front of a national audience and they spent three weeks in a Maryland jail before it was discovered that the camera was set to the wrong time.
“Better 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer” is a phrase made famous by British jurist William Blackstone, whose work is often cited as the base of U.S. common law, and is invoked by the U.S. Supreme Court when it wants to discuss a legal point that predates the Constitution.
It is not clear how the world of high-tech surveillance squares with Blackstone’s ratio. What would he say about a government that mines databases of telephone calls for evidence that someone might be about to commit a crime? What would an acceptable error rate be?
Rather than having “nothing to hide,” author Robert O’Harrow declared two years ago that Americans have “No Place to Hide” in his book of the same name.
“More than ever before, the details about our lives are no longer our own,” O’Harrow wrote. “They belong to the companies that collect them, and the government agencies that buy or demand them in the name of keeping us safe.”
That may be a trade-off we are willing, even wise, to make. It would be, O’Harrow said, “crazy not to use tech to keep us safer.” The terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center were on government watch lists, and their attack was successful only because technology wasn’t used efficiently.
Time to talk about itBut there is another point in the discussion about which there is little disagreement: The debate over how much privacy we are willing to give up never occurred. When did consumers consent to give their entire bill-paying histories to credit bureaus, their address histories to a company like ChoicePoint, or their face, flying habits and telephone records to the federal government? It seems our privacy has been slipping away -- 1s and 0s at a time -- while we were busy doing other things.
Our intent in this week-long series is to invite readers into such a debate.
Some might consider the invitation posthumous, delivered only after our privacy has died. Sun’s founder and CEO Scott McNealy famously said in 1999 that people “have no privacy – get over it.” But privacy is not a currency. It is much more like health or dignity or well-being; a source of anxiety when weak and a source of quiet satisfaction when strong.
Perhaps it’s naïve in these dangerous times to believe you can keep secrets anymore –your travels, your e-mail, your purchasing history is readily available to law enforcement officials and others. But everyone has secrets they don’t want everyone else to know, and it’s never too late to begin a discussion about how Americans’ right to privacy can be protected.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15221095/page/3/
Friday, April 20, 2007
IS YOUR COMPUTER A CRIMINAL?
Is your computer a criminal?
Posted: Tuesday, March 27 at 04:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Kim Carney / MSNBC.com
PART 1 OF A 3-PART SERIES
Your home computer may be committing a crime at this very moment. It might be sending out spam. It might be buying stock as part of a pump-and-dump scheme. Or it might be helping attack the Internet itself, silently and invisibly, as you read this story. And the odds your computer is a criminal are quickly rising.
The Web, some say, has been turned into an operating system for criminals. Computer viruses that hijack PCs and turn them into electronic robots, or “bots,” have become the killer app. The operation of networks of hijacked computers is so lucrative that hackers are actually fighting electronic wars over them, a story we will explore next week in part two of this series.
New hacker techniques make these virus attacks so subtle that there is no way you would know your computer is a criminal. And there is a growing sense among security experts that hackers have gained the upper hand in what was once a neck-and-neck arms race.
Bots can squirm their way onto home computers in myriad ways: a virus-laden e-mail or a booby-trapped Web site are the most common. But some viruses can attack your computer in the background, silently worming their way through networks via unprotected ports and porous firewalls, using vulnerabilities that software companies don't know about.
Earlier this year, Internet founding father Vint Cerf dramatically suggested that 150 million computers worldwide may have been hijacked by criminals. Most experts think that his estimate is high, but they still count infected computers in the millions, or tens of millions. And there is general consensus that the Internet is under assault from virus writers like never before.
Listen carefully to the words of those who are trying to help us keep our computers safe from Net criminals and you’ll get a creeping sense that the boat is leaking faster than they can bail out the water. There were two-and-a-half times as many viruses released in 2006 as in 2005, and the growth rate has continued through the first quarter of 2007, said Eugene Kaspersky, chief researcher for Kaspersky Labs.
Antivirus firms "may not be able to withstand the onslaught," he said at a recent computer security conference. "This is a competition where the antivirus companies, I fear, are not in a good position."
Another antivirus executive put it more bluntly in a private conversation. “I think we’ve failed,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Computer security firms often use hyperbole to help get attention for their products, but expressing helplessness is something new.
Serious crimes for serious money
The security firms’ helplessness means more home computers than ever are being hijacked by organized criminals. Those who control the computers, known as “bot herders,” have little interest in the kinds of pranks that hackers typically played with their viruses five or 10 years ago. They commit serious crimes for serious money.
How serious? Earlier this year, a bot army sent a torrent of Internet traffic at two of the Web's 13 critical domain name servers, directing the equivalent of millions of e-mails at them within a few minutes. The mysterious onslaught would have rendered the Web useless if it had succeeded in taking the domain name servers down, but after a few hours it stopped as quickly as it started.
CLICK FOR RELATED CONTENT
PART 2: VIRUS GANG WARFARE SPILLS ONTO THE NET
PART 3: WHO'S BEHIND CRIMINAL 'BOT' NETWORKS
THE LOWDOWN ON 'BOTS'
ARE YOU INFECTED? CLICK HERE
Why would an attacker perform such a show of strength? It might have been a marketing ploy.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which helps run the domain name servers, speculated in a recent report that the attack was the work of a bot herder trying to close a sale by demonstrating the size and power of his army of hijacked computers.
These bot armies – often between 50,000 and 70,000 PCs strong -- are leased out for around $5,000 a day to spammers, said Howard Schmidt, former White House cyberczar. An attacker who might want to threaten a bank with denial of service and demand an extortion payment would probably have to pay more.
“These things are insidious,” he said.
And sometimes they are overwhelming. Ben Mayrides, a security guru for America Online, says the firm regularly sees bot armies – or “botnets” -- of 200,000 infected computers. In 2005, Dutch authorities announced they had arrested three youths who controlled a botnet of 1.5 million computers that they assembled using a single Trojan horse program.
Big money is stock scams
Individual bots operate in complete silence, but we all see their handiwork. At this point, almost every spam e-mail is sent from a hijacked computer, according to Uriel Maimon, a researcher at security firm RSA. That means every time you receive a spam, a hijacked computer is at the other end. For evidence of a bot epidemic, researchers point to the recent resurgence of spam, which has doubled in the past 12 months.
Forget Viagra sales: Spammers have largely graduated to manipulating stock markets. Most spam is image spam now, designed to pump up stock prices in thinly traded companies so someone can make a quick profit. In a recent e-mail apparently written by a stock spammer and examined by MSNBC.com, the author brags he can more than double a stock price within two to three weeks.
“We can increase the cost of your share and we can increase average day trading,” the e-mail says. “We can increase price up to 200-260 percent in 2-3 weeks and also increase range by 10 times each trading day. … Our payment for that is 10 percent.”
With increasing sophistication and deliberation, computer hackers are getting the most out of hacked computers, too. The computer crime du jour is a simple but effective stock pump-and-dump scheme that goes like this: Hackers buy a stock, then use hijacked computers and stolen brokerage accounts to buy the stock at inflated prices using other people's money. When the hackers sell their original shares, they make a killing.
In March, three Indian nationals were sued by the SEC for allegedly pocketing $121,000 after manipulating stocks and options on 14 firms, including Google and Sun Microsystems. They group managed to spend nearly $2 million in other people's money, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said. One victim had $180,000 in his brokerage account, left for a vacation, and returned to find his account had a negative $200,000 balance.
The SEC is aggressively pursuing stock spam criminals, said John Reed Stark, head of Internet enforcement for the agency. But the dangerous combination of hijacked computers and global securities trading offers riches far beyond the legitimate dreams of computer experts in developing economies. As a result, cybercrime has become wonderfully profitable, and fantastically popular.
How do you count the bots?
No one knows how many infected bots there are, but there is little argument that millions of computers have been herded. If your computer isn’t infected, security experts say, certainly someone on your block is part of a bot army.
No government agency counts bots; even law enforcement officials rely on private industry for estimates.
Here’s a few:
MessageLabs, a company that counts spam, recently stopped counting bot-infected computers because it literally could not keep up. It says it quit when the figure passed about 10 million a year ago. Symantec Corp. recently said it counted 6.7 million active bots during an Internet scan. Since all bots are not active at any given time, the number of infected computers is likely much higher. And Dave Dagon, who recently left Georgia Tech University to start a bot-fighting company named Damballa, pegs the number at closer to 30 million. The firm uses a “capture, mark, and release,” strategy borrowed from environmental science to study the movement of bot armies and estimate their size.
“It’s like asking how many people are on the planet, you are wrong the second you give the answer. … But the number is in the tens of millions,” Dagon said. “Had you told me five years ago that organized crime would control 1 out of every 10 home machines on the Internet, I would have not have believed that. And yet we are in an era where this is something that is happening.”
That means the Internet is becoming a very rough neighborhood. So rough that many of those who fight computer crime think, in some ways, they are fighting to save cyberspace.
“This is not just a battle between manufacturers of security software and some Internet criminals. It is a war between good and evil,” F-Secure researcher Mikko Hypponen said at a recent European security conference:
Why now? 1. More sophisticated viruses
It used to be that infected computers would eventually stall from the hard work of crime, stumbling over an e-mail blast involving thousands of messages and tipping off the rightful owners. Now, the organized criminals who do this work have remote-control crime down to a science. Instead of using your computer to send 5,000 spam messages in an evening, it might only be instructed to send out five. The bot herders reach the volume they need by repeating that technique with the tens of thousands of computers at their disposal.
AOL’s Mayrides says he’s seen bots instructed to send out only one e-mail per day.
This puts security firms at a distinct disadvantage. A few years ago, Internet service providers would notice tens of thousands of e-mails being sent from a home computer, and could easily remove it from their network. But how can an Internet provider spot five rogue e-mails sent from your machine while you sleep?
“We have a very difficult needle-haystack problem here," Dagon said.
The Storm worm, which infected more than 1 million computers in January by promising information about the deadly winter weather hitting Europe, used a variation of this tactic. A Storm-infected PC observed by Symantec researchers sent out 1,800 e-mails in a five minute span, then simply went to sleep.
Consumers are unlikely to know their computer has been hijacked because there usually are no symptoms.
“People are not going to find out about the bot because it slows down their systems,” said Hypponen. “(Hackers) take great care in making sure it doesn't do anything that the users might notice. Especially with new machines with 2 gigs of RAM, people will not notice they are sending out spam while playing World of Warcraft. The computers are just powerful enough to handle that.”
Why now? 2. China
But improved software is only one reason criminals appear to have gained the upper hand. Another is the sheer the size of their armies. Part of the deluge of new viruses can be attributed to a new generation of hackers from Asia, where broadband has proliferated, and particularly China, where hackers are learning fast, Hypponen said.
Asia is also a grand playground for hackers worldwide, because many home users run pirated copies of Windows and can't load security patches, according to a January report by Florida-based security firm Prolexic. Since China now boasts more Internet users than any other country, it also has more infected computers.
Why now? 3. Volume
The sheer volume of new viruses has become overwhelming. Hypponen says there is so much new malware -- malicious software – submitted every day to his firm that it has abandoned its long-standing practice of having each one analyzed by its researchers. The viruses are processed by computers now and ranked by severity.
“It’s getting harder and harder for us just to keep up with the amount of new malware coming in,” he said. “Right now on a typical day we receive more than two (possible new viruses) a minute. There are thousands every day. The increase in three years has been tenfold. So our lab all the other labs are rebuilding the way we handle them. You can't do it with human power.”
Why now? 4. Perpetual ‘zero day’
The onslaught isn't just about volume, however. Hacker techniques have improved markedly, says Dagon. It used to be that exploiting vulnerable software usually took weeks, as hackers probed software for security flaws. When they published their results, software makers would race to fix the flaws. Simultaneously, criminals would take those flaws and turn them into attacks, often by attaching them to specially crafted e-mails.
On rare occasions, criminals had both the security hole, or exploit, and the delivery tool before the software maker had any notion a flaw existed. Called a "zero-day" attack, these circumstances gave criminals a small window to mercilessly hack defenseless computers.
But this entire cycle of finding and exploiting flaws has been reduced to a few hours, Dagon said. Hackers find flaws, use them to attack, and erase all evidence so fast that software firms never even know there’s a flaw. Dagon has a chilling name for this: "A perpetual zero day window."
Hackers also have learned to write viruses that mutate on their own. Because antivirus software usually catches only known viruses, mutating versions pose a major challenge for security firms. The Storm worm, for example, had 5,000 different variants within a few days of being launched.
Why now? 5. Better command and control
Hackers have more sophisticated tactics to command and control their massive bot armies – another sign that true professionals are in charge. Not long ago, remote-controlled bots used the old-fashioned Internet Relay Channel to communicate. Internet filters could pick out that traffic and disrupt their networks, at times even identifying the controlling computer and cutting off the "head" bot by removing it from the network.
Now, bot networks are increasingly peer-to-peer systems, designed to look like file and music swapping systems like eDonkey. This prevents Internet service providers from picking out bot communications from regular Web traffic. And it also means there is no head bot to cut off, so networks can only be dismantled one infected computer at a time.
Why now? 6. Competition for labor with crime rings
Adding to the challenge antivirus companies face in trying to keep up with cybercriminals is the intense competition for skilled labor. There is so much money being made in the underworld that legitimate firms have trouble recruiting.
“We are dealing more and more with a worldwide industry that employs thousands of people," Kaspersky, the researcher, told the Bangkok Post earlier this month. Said another executive with the firm, “These people are paying programmers the kind of salary that I could never afford."
What now?
For years, security experts have been repeating the same formula to consumers – update antivirus software frequently and use a firewall. But experts say that consumers can no longer trust a single antivirus product to protect them. Dagon points to a Web site named VirusTotal.com that scans potential viruses using 30 top antivirus products. The results are sobering.
On March 22, 9,408 virus-laden files were submitted. Only 28 were detected by all 30 antivirus products. Every other virus was capable of slipping past at least one of the antivirus products undetected, which means that even consumers who keep their security software up to date are at risk.
America Online deals with the problem by swarming its files and e-mail with antivirus products. Everything that’s sent through AOL is scanned by 13 or 14 different products, said Mayrides, the AOL security expert.
And still, viruses get through.
“It’s rough out there,” he said. “One (antivirus product) is not good enough. … There are too many attack vectors these days.”
So should consumers stop trusting the Internet? Yes, to a point, said F-Secure’s Hypponen.
“I don’t think end users should lose their trust, but they are trusting too much,” he said. For example, consumers still fall for phishing e-mails and hand over passwords to brokerage accounts despite years of warning. “We should make people lose their trust, break that trust.”
Experts advise computer users to scan their system with multiple antivirus products. It’s not necessary to pay for all the products. A number of free Web-based security services are available to consumers. No single scan is perfect, but doing one is a worthwhile check-up.
Users also can take the energy-saving step of shutting down their computers when they aren’t in use. That way, even if your machine is infected, the computer’s resources won’t be available to criminals all night and all day while you’re at work.
COMING NEXT WEEK: BOT WARS. ONLINE CROOKS ENGAGE IN TURF BATTLES
Posted: Tuesday, March 27 at 04:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Kim Carney / MSNBC.com
PART 1 OF A 3-PART SERIES
Your home computer may be committing a crime at this very moment. It might be sending out spam. It might be buying stock as part of a pump-and-dump scheme. Or it might be helping attack the Internet itself, silently and invisibly, as you read this story. And the odds your computer is a criminal are quickly rising.
The Web, some say, has been turned into an operating system for criminals. Computer viruses that hijack PCs and turn them into electronic robots, or “bots,” have become the killer app. The operation of networks of hijacked computers is so lucrative that hackers are actually fighting electronic wars over them, a story we will explore next week in part two of this series.
New hacker techniques make these virus attacks so subtle that there is no way you would know your computer is a criminal. And there is a growing sense among security experts that hackers have gained the upper hand in what was once a neck-and-neck arms race.
Bots can squirm their way onto home computers in myriad ways: a virus-laden e-mail or a booby-trapped Web site are the most common. But some viruses can attack your computer in the background, silently worming their way through networks via unprotected ports and porous firewalls, using vulnerabilities that software companies don't know about.
Earlier this year, Internet founding father Vint Cerf dramatically suggested that 150 million computers worldwide may have been hijacked by criminals. Most experts think that his estimate is high, but they still count infected computers in the millions, or tens of millions. And there is general consensus that the Internet is under assault from virus writers like never before.
Listen carefully to the words of those who are trying to help us keep our computers safe from Net criminals and you’ll get a creeping sense that the boat is leaking faster than they can bail out the water. There were two-and-a-half times as many viruses released in 2006 as in 2005, and the growth rate has continued through the first quarter of 2007, said Eugene Kaspersky, chief researcher for Kaspersky Labs.
Antivirus firms "may not be able to withstand the onslaught," he said at a recent computer security conference. "This is a competition where the antivirus companies, I fear, are not in a good position."
Another antivirus executive put it more bluntly in a private conversation. “I think we’ve failed,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Computer security firms often use hyperbole to help get attention for their products, but expressing helplessness is something new.
Serious crimes for serious money
The security firms’ helplessness means more home computers than ever are being hijacked by organized criminals. Those who control the computers, known as “bot herders,” have little interest in the kinds of pranks that hackers typically played with their viruses five or 10 years ago. They commit serious crimes for serious money.
How serious? Earlier this year, a bot army sent a torrent of Internet traffic at two of the Web's 13 critical domain name servers, directing the equivalent of millions of e-mails at them within a few minutes. The mysterious onslaught would have rendered the Web useless if it had succeeded in taking the domain name servers down, but after a few hours it stopped as quickly as it started.
CLICK FOR RELATED CONTENT
PART 2: VIRUS GANG WARFARE SPILLS ONTO THE NET
PART 3: WHO'S BEHIND CRIMINAL 'BOT' NETWORKS
THE LOWDOWN ON 'BOTS'
ARE YOU INFECTED? CLICK HERE
Why would an attacker perform such a show of strength? It might have been a marketing ploy.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which helps run the domain name servers, speculated in a recent report that the attack was the work of a bot herder trying to close a sale by demonstrating the size and power of his army of hijacked computers.
These bot armies – often between 50,000 and 70,000 PCs strong -- are leased out for around $5,000 a day to spammers, said Howard Schmidt, former White House cyberczar. An attacker who might want to threaten a bank with denial of service and demand an extortion payment would probably have to pay more.
“These things are insidious,” he said.
And sometimes they are overwhelming. Ben Mayrides, a security guru for America Online, says the firm regularly sees bot armies – or “botnets” -- of 200,000 infected computers. In 2005, Dutch authorities announced they had arrested three youths who controlled a botnet of 1.5 million computers that they assembled using a single Trojan horse program.
Big money is stock scams
Individual bots operate in complete silence, but we all see their handiwork. At this point, almost every spam e-mail is sent from a hijacked computer, according to Uriel Maimon, a researcher at security firm RSA. That means every time you receive a spam, a hijacked computer is at the other end. For evidence of a bot epidemic, researchers point to the recent resurgence of spam, which has doubled in the past 12 months.
Forget Viagra sales: Spammers have largely graduated to manipulating stock markets. Most spam is image spam now, designed to pump up stock prices in thinly traded companies so someone can make a quick profit. In a recent e-mail apparently written by a stock spammer and examined by MSNBC.com, the author brags he can more than double a stock price within two to three weeks.
“We can increase the cost of your share and we can increase average day trading,” the e-mail says. “We can increase price up to 200-260 percent in 2-3 weeks and also increase range by 10 times each trading day. … Our payment for that is 10 percent.”
With increasing sophistication and deliberation, computer hackers are getting the most out of hacked computers, too. The computer crime du jour is a simple but effective stock pump-and-dump scheme that goes like this: Hackers buy a stock, then use hijacked computers and stolen brokerage accounts to buy the stock at inflated prices using other people's money. When the hackers sell their original shares, they make a killing.
In March, three Indian nationals were sued by the SEC for allegedly pocketing $121,000 after manipulating stocks and options on 14 firms, including Google and Sun Microsystems. They group managed to spend nearly $2 million in other people's money, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said. One victim had $180,000 in his brokerage account, left for a vacation, and returned to find his account had a negative $200,000 balance.
The SEC is aggressively pursuing stock spam criminals, said John Reed Stark, head of Internet enforcement for the agency. But the dangerous combination of hijacked computers and global securities trading offers riches far beyond the legitimate dreams of computer experts in developing economies. As a result, cybercrime has become wonderfully profitable, and fantastically popular.
How do you count the bots?
No one knows how many infected bots there are, but there is little argument that millions of computers have been herded. If your computer isn’t infected, security experts say, certainly someone on your block is part of a bot army.
No government agency counts bots; even law enforcement officials rely on private industry for estimates.
Here’s a few:
MessageLabs, a company that counts spam, recently stopped counting bot-infected computers because it literally could not keep up. It says it quit when the figure passed about 10 million a year ago. Symantec Corp. recently said it counted 6.7 million active bots during an Internet scan. Since all bots are not active at any given time, the number of infected computers is likely much higher. And Dave Dagon, who recently left Georgia Tech University to start a bot-fighting company named Damballa, pegs the number at closer to 30 million. The firm uses a “capture, mark, and release,” strategy borrowed from environmental science to study the movement of bot armies and estimate their size.
“It’s like asking how many people are on the planet, you are wrong the second you give the answer. … But the number is in the tens of millions,” Dagon said. “Had you told me five years ago that organized crime would control 1 out of every 10 home machines on the Internet, I would have not have believed that. And yet we are in an era where this is something that is happening.”
That means the Internet is becoming a very rough neighborhood. So rough that many of those who fight computer crime think, in some ways, they are fighting to save cyberspace.
“This is not just a battle between manufacturers of security software and some Internet criminals. It is a war between good and evil,” F-Secure researcher Mikko Hypponen said at a recent European security conference:
Why now? 1. More sophisticated viruses
It used to be that infected computers would eventually stall from the hard work of crime, stumbling over an e-mail blast involving thousands of messages and tipping off the rightful owners. Now, the organized criminals who do this work have remote-control crime down to a science. Instead of using your computer to send 5,000 spam messages in an evening, it might only be instructed to send out five. The bot herders reach the volume they need by repeating that technique with the tens of thousands of computers at their disposal.
AOL’s Mayrides says he’s seen bots instructed to send out only one e-mail per day.
This puts security firms at a distinct disadvantage. A few years ago, Internet service providers would notice tens of thousands of e-mails being sent from a home computer, and could easily remove it from their network. But how can an Internet provider spot five rogue e-mails sent from your machine while you sleep?
“We have a very difficult needle-haystack problem here," Dagon said.
The Storm worm, which infected more than 1 million computers in January by promising information about the deadly winter weather hitting Europe, used a variation of this tactic. A Storm-infected PC observed by Symantec researchers sent out 1,800 e-mails in a five minute span, then simply went to sleep.
Consumers are unlikely to know their computer has been hijacked because there usually are no symptoms.
“People are not going to find out about the bot because it slows down their systems,” said Hypponen. “(Hackers) take great care in making sure it doesn't do anything that the users might notice. Especially with new machines with 2 gigs of RAM, people will not notice they are sending out spam while playing World of Warcraft. The computers are just powerful enough to handle that.”
Why now? 2. China
But improved software is only one reason criminals appear to have gained the upper hand. Another is the sheer the size of their armies. Part of the deluge of new viruses can be attributed to a new generation of hackers from Asia, where broadband has proliferated, and particularly China, where hackers are learning fast, Hypponen said.
Asia is also a grand playground for hackers worldwide, because many home users run pirated copies of Windows and can't load security patches, according to a January report by Florida-based security firm Prolexic. Since China now boasts more Internet users than any other country, it also has more infected computers.
Why now? 3. Volume
The sheer volume of new viruses has become overwhelming. Hypponen says there is so much new malware -- malicious software – submitted every day to his firm that it has abandoned its long-standing practice of having each one analyzed by its researchers. The viruses are processed by computers now and ranked by severity.
“It’s getting harder and harder for us just to keep up with the amount of new malware coming in,” he said. “Right now on a typical day we receive more than two (possible new viruses) a minute. There are thousands every day. The increase in three years has been tenfold. So our lab all the other labs are rebuilding the way we handle them. You can't do it with human power.”
Why now? 4. Perpetual ‘zero day’
The onslaught isn't just about volume, however. Hacker techniques have improved markedly, says Dagon. It used to be that exploiting vulnerable software usually took weeks, as hackers probed software for security flaws. When they published their results, software makers would race to fix the flaws. Simultaneously, criminals would take those flaws and turn them into attacks, often by attaching them to specially crafted e-mails.
On rare occasions, criminals had both the security hole, or exploit, and the delivery tool before the software maker had any notion a flaw existed. Called a "zero-day" attack, these circumstances gave criminals a small window to mercilessly hack defenseless computers.
But this entire cycle of finding and exploiting flaws has been reduced to a few hours, Dagon said. Hackers find flaws, use them to attack, and erase all evidence so fast that software firms never even know there’s a flaw. Dagon has a chilling name for this: "A perpetual zero day window."
Hackers also have learned to write viruses that mutate on their own. Because antivirus software usually catches only known viruses, mutating versions pose a major challenge for security firms. The Storm worm, for example, had 5,000 different variants within a few days of being launched.
Why now? 5. Better command and control
Hackers have more sophisticated tactics to command and control their massive bot armies – another sign that true professionals are in charge. Not long ago, remote-controlled bots used the old-fashioned Internet Relay Channel to communicate. Internet filters could pick out that traffic and disrupt their networks, at times even identifying the controlling computer and cutting off the "head" bot by removing it from the network.
Now, bot networks are increasingly peer-to-peer systems, designed to look like file and music swapping systems like eDonkey. This prevents Internet service providers from picking out bot communications from regular Web traffic. And it also means there is no head bot to cut off, so networks can only be dismantled one infected computer at a time.
Why now? 6. Competition for labor with crime rings
Adding to the challenge antivirus companies face in trying to keep up with cybercriminals is the intense competition for skilled labor. There is so much money being made in the underworld that legitimate firms have trouble recruiting.
“We are dealing more and more with a worldwide industry that employs thousands of people," Kaspersky, the researcher, told the Bangkok Post earlier this month. Said another executive with the firm, “These people are paying programmers the kind of salary that I could never afford."
What now?
For years, security experts have been repeating the same formula to consumers – update antivirus software frequently and use a firewall. But experts say that consumers can no longer trust a single antivirus product to protect them. Dagon points to a Web site named VirusTotal.com that scans potential viruses using 30 top antivirus products. The results are sobering.
On March 22, 9,408 virus-laden files were submitted. Only 28 were detected by all 30 antivirus products. Every other virus was capable of slipping past at least one of the antivirus products undetected, which means that even consumers who keep their security software up to date are at risk.
America Online deals with the problem by swarming its files and e-mail with antivirus products. Everything that’s sent through AOL is scanned by 13 or 14 different products, said Mayrides, the AOL security expert.
And still, viruses get through.
“It’s rough out there,” he said. “One (antivirus product) is not good enough. … There are too many attack vectors these days.”
So should consumers stop trusting the Internet? Yes, to a point, said F-Secure’s Hypponen.
“I don’t think end users should lose their trust, but they are trusting too much,” he said. For example, consumers still fall for phishing e-mails and hand over passwords to brokerage accounts despite years of warning. “We should make people lose their trust, break that trust.”
Experts advise computer users to scan their system with multiple antivirus products. It’s not necessary to pay for all the products. A number of free Web-based security services are available to consumers. No single scan is perfect, but doing one is a worthwhile check-up.
Users also can take the energy-saving step of shutting down their computers when they aren’t in use. That way, even if your machine is infected, the computer’s resources won’t be available to criminals all night and all day while you’re at work.
COMING NEXT WEEK: BOT WARS. ONLINE CROOKS ENGAGE IN TURF BATTLES
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Wipe Your Drive Clean of All Its Sensitive Data
Answer Line: Wipe Your Drive Clean of All Its Sensitive Data
Lincoln Spector
Wednesday, April 30, 2003 01:00 AM PDT
I'm replacing my hard drive. How do I totally obliterate sensitive data on the old drive?
To truly erase data, you need to write over it. Simply deleting files or reformatting the drive won't do. Luckily, plenty of free and inexpensive wipe programs (also known as shredders) can cover the data with zeroes or random patterns, making it unreadable by data-restoration software.
Some machines can recover data that's been written over only one or two times, however. That's where secure delete standards, such as the Department of Defense 5220.22-M, come in. According to this specification, overwriting the drive sectors three times with specific, different characters constitutes one pass. Many experts recommend seven such passes to render the data completely unrecoverable. But reading data that has been overwritten by even the simplest shredders requires expensive hardware, so unless you're worried about professional sleuths, such thorough overwriting probably isn't necessary.
Keep in mind that deleting just the sensitive files may not protect you fully. Unidentified copies of those files could exist in "unused" parts of your hard drive, or in your swap file, among other possible locations. It's a good idea to wipe these areas of your drive as well--or go the surefire route and wipe your entire hard drive. (See "Hard Drives Exposed" for more on the dangers of unwiped hard drives.)
To clean up specific files (none holding state secrets) and the drive's free space, rely on Summit Computer's free Hard Disk Scrubber 2. To be extra cautious, check Heavy Scrub to write over the disk three times (see FIGURE 1). Visit Summit to download your copy.
A more powerful option is Jetico's $40 BCWipe 3, which adds 5220.22-M support and cleans up unused space in the swap file. Visit Jetico to download the trial version.
To wipe the entire drive, I recommend LSoft Technologies' free Active@ KillDisk or its $30 sibling, Active@ KillDisk Professional. The DOS programs load from a bootable floppy and overwrite every partition on the hard drive. The free version does a basic wipe, covering the drive with zeroes in one pass. Professional adds 5220.22-M-compliant wiping, and it will make as many passes as you like. Wiping takes time, however. On my test system, KillDisk took more than 12 hours to complete one pass of a 13GB drive. The recommended seven passes could take days. You can download the freeware version from our Downloads library, or head to the vendor's site to buy the Professional version
Lincoln Spector
Wednesday, April 30, 2003 01:00 AM PDT
I'm replacing my hard drive. How do I totally obliterate sensitive data on the old drive?
To truly erase data, you need to write over it. Simply deleting files or reformatting the drive won't do. Luckily, plenty of free and inexpensive wipe programs (also known as shredders) can cover the data with zeroes or random patterns, making it unreadable by data-restoration software.
Some machines can recover data that's been written over only one or two times, however. That's where secure delete standards, such as the Department of Defense 5220.22-M, come in. According to this specification, overwriting the drive sectors three times with specific, different characters constitutes one pass. Many experts recommend seven such passes to render the data completely unrecoverable. But reading data that has been overwritten by even the simplest shredders requires expensive hardware, so unless you're worried about professional sleuths, such thorough overwriting probably isn't necessary.
Keep in mind that deleting just the sensitive files may not protect you fully. Unidentified copies of those files could exist in "unused" parts of your hard drive, or in your swap file, among other possible locations. It's a good idea to wipe these areas of your drive as well--or go the surefire route and wipe your entire hard drive. (See "Hard Drives Exposed" for more on the dangers of unwiped hard drives.)
To clean up specific files (none holding state secrets) and the drive's free space, rely on Summit Computer's free Hard Disk Scrubber 2. To be extra cautious, check Heavy Scrub to write over the disk three times (see FIGURE 1). Visit Summit to download your copy.
A more powerful option is Jetico's $40 BCWipe 3, which adds 5220.22-M support and cleans up unused space in the swap file. Visit Jetico to download the trial version.
To wipe the entire drive, I recommend LSoft Technologies' free Active@ KillDisk or its $30 sibling, Active@ KillDisk Professional. The DOS programs load from a bootable floppy and overwrite every partition on the hard drive. The free version does a basic wipe, covering the drive with zeroes in one pass. Professional adds 5220.22-M-compliant wiping, and it will make as many passes as you like. Wiping takes time, however. On my test system, KillDisk took more than 12 hours to complete one pass of a 13GB drive. The recommended seven passes could take days. You can download the freeware version from our Downloads library, or head to the vendor's site to buy the Professional version
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Google tests advertising system that requires pay only for results
Google tests advertising system that requires pay only for results
Miguel Helft, New York Times
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Google is experimenting with a new proposition for advertisers: If you don't get results, you don't pay.
The company said it will expand a test of a system that allows advertisers to pay only when an ad spurs a customer to take an action, be it purchasing a product, subscribing to a newsletter or signing up to receive a quote from a mortgage broker or car dealer.
The vast majority of advertisers now pay Google when a user clicks on ads that are displayed alongside its search results or on other Web sites, while some are billed based on how many people view the ads.
"We're optimistic that it will be something that will be very compelling for advertisers," said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google. Wojcicki said the system would also give participating Web publishers a wider choice of ads for their sites.
Under the cost-per-action system, advertisers decide what they are willing to pay for a specific action, like a purchase or a software download. Armed with that information, Web site publishers then choose whether to run a specific ad or group of ads on their sites.
Many advertisers find cost-per-action appealing, as it greatly reduces their risk because they are not charged for ads that are ineffective. The model has long been used online by affiliate-marketing companies like ValueClick, which have created networks of hundreds or thousands of Web sites that display small ads for e-commerce sites. The publishers are paid when they refer a user who makes a purchase.
But many other companies are using cost-per-action ads in different ways. They include search-engine startup Snap, which displays cost-per-action ads next to results, and Turn, a network that matches advertisers and publishers interested in cost-per-action ads.
For the time being, Google is not putting cost-per-action ads next to search results, limiting them to publishers' Web sites and essentially creating its own affiliate-marketing network. Industry insiders said Google's entry into the market is likely to accelerate its growth.
Cost-per-action ads have another advantage: They virtually eliminate the problem of click fraud, a scam in which people or computers generate clicks on ads for the sole purpose of getting a payment.
While the appeal of the cost-per-action model to advertisers is clear, some analysts believe publishers may be more reluctant to embrace it, at least for now.
"For publishers, it increases the complexity of their business," said Mark Mahaney, a Citigroup analyst.
For now, the affiliate-marketing business remains relatively small. ValueClick's affiliate-marketing unit, the industry's largest, had sales of $112 million in 2006, while Google's revenue topped $10 billion.
This article appeared on page C - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Miguel Helft, New York Times
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Google is experimenting with a new proposition for advertisers: If you don't get results, you don't pay.
The company said it will expand a test of a system that allows advertisers to pay only when an ad spurs a customer to take an action, be it purchasing a product, subscribing to a newsletter or signing up to receive a quote from a mortgage broker or car dealer.
The vast majority of advertisers now pay Google when a user clicks on ads that are displayed alongside its search results or on other Web sites, while some are billed based on how many people view the ads.
"We're optimistic that it will be something that will be very compelling for advertisers," said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google. Wojcicki said the system would also give participating Web publishers a wider choice of ads for their sites.
Under the cost-per-action system, advertisers decide what they are willing to pay for a specific action, like a purchase or a software download. Armed with that information, Web site publishers then choose whether to run a specific ad or group of ads on their sites.
Many advertisers find cost-per-action appealing, as it greatly reduces their risk because they are not charged for ads that are ineffective. The model has long been used online by affiliate-marketing companies like ValueClick, which have created networks of hundreds or thousands of Web sites that display small ads for e-commerce sites. The publishers are paid when they refer a user who makes a purchase.
But many other companies are using cost-per-action ads in different ways. They include search-engine startup Snap, which displays cost-per-action ads next to results, and Turn, a network that matches advertisers and publishers interested in cost-per-action ads.
For the time being, Google is not putting cost-per-action ads next to search results, limiting them to publishers' Web sites and essentially creating its own affiliate-marketing network. Industry insiders said Google's entry into the market is likely to accelerate its growth.
Cost-per-action ads have another advantage: They virtually eliminate the problem of click fraud, a scam in which people or computers generate clicks on ads for the sole purpose of getting a payment.
While the appeal of the cost-per-action model to advertisers is clear, some analysts believe publishers may be more reluctant to embrace it, at least for now.
"For publishers, it increases the complexity of their business," said Mark Mahaney, a Citigroup analyst.
For now, the affiliate-marketing business remains relatively small. ValueClick's affiliate-marketing unit, the industry's largest, had sales of $112 million in 2006, while Google's revenue topped $10 billion.
This article appeared on page C - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, March 23, 2007
How To Green Your Electronics
How To Green Your Electronics
by Team Treehugger, Worldwide on 03.22.07
TH Exclusives (how to green your life)
What’s the Big Deal?Yes, electronic devices are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives, especially as they get smaller and smaller. We use them as tools and toys to communicate, work, enjoy media, and be expressive. Being green with electronics doesn’t mean living in a teepee listening to truckers squalk on the old short-wave. Greening your electronics is a matter of knowing what tech to get, how to use it best, and what to do with it when its useful life is done. Many of these best practices aren’t things you’ll read in the instruction manual, either. In this guide we’ll tell you how to stop wasted energy, what gizmos are greener than others, and what to do about e-waste and electronics recycling. We’ll also show you some of the newest green gadgets coming over the horizon.
1. Go rechargeable
Of the 15 billion batteries produced and sold each year, most of them are disposable alkaline batteries, and only a fraction of those are recycled. Look for electronics that are rechargeable. For removable batteries, lithium-ion (Li-Ion) and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) are cost-effective, green alternatives. The fastest battery chargers can juice up AAs in as little as 15 minutes, and will pay for themselves quite quickly.
2. Kill vampire power
Just because your cell phone is unplugged from the charger or your TV is off, doesn’t mean these devices aren’t drawing a current and running up your electricity bill. Many AC adapters (or “wall warts”) if left plugged in will continue to pull a current from the wall socket (you may notice they are warm to the touch). Many devices that have a standby mode do the same thing. To make sure you aren’t wasting energy, pull the plug on devices when not in use or put all of your electronics and chargers on a power strip. This way you can simply flip the power strip off when your electronics are not in use. There are also a number of “smart” power strips on the market that sense when electronics are turned off, or that turn off the strip when one main unit (like your PC) is powered down. (Note that some electronics need to be turned off via the on/off switch before cutting the power. Inkjet printers, for example, need to seal the cartridge heads to avoid clogging.)
3. Buy with energy in mind
Some types of electronics suck more than others, at least in energy terms. Doing research on different technologies and their respective energy consumption can save you a lot in the long run. For example, if you want a flat panel television, look into LCD models, which use much less energy than plasmas. The Energy Star site will help you identify energy-saving electronic devices like cordless phones, stereo systems, TVs, DVD players, battery chargers, and a whole bunch more.
4. Treat those batteries right
While battery recycling programs are increasingly common and easy to use, the process of recycling anything still takes energy and resources and should not be overused (one of the most polluted sites on the planet is a battery recycling plant in the Dominican Republic). Knowing how to best use and maintain rechargeable batteries will boost their longevity and performance. See Getting Techie below for more on the specifics.
5. Make it a short circuit
So, you just bought the newest, sleekest cell phone. It takes video, filters out calls from exes, and charts barometric pressure. What should you do with the old one? Whatever you do, don’t just throw it in the trash--this risks releasing chemicals into the ecosystem. There are plenty of organizations and charities that recycle and reuse old electronics. If you want a return on your old gadgets, sell them on an online auction site--people will often buy them even if they are broken. Bonus! A growing number of computer manufacturers are adopting take-back programs as well, under which they will accept and recycle their units when you’re done with them.
6. Buy used
Don’t want to spend a fortune on technology? You can find top quality, totally functional used electronics at sites like Ebay and Craigslist, and even at yard sales and flea markets. This not only cuts down on the amount of new resources being used for the production of more stuff, it also creates a market for sellers to safely recirculate electronics they’re no longer using. Ebay’s Easytradein.com is a good resource for the electronics you are ready to part with. You might even be surprised what comes up on Freecycle.
7. Bright idea: The solar charger
There are an increasing number of options for on-the-go solar power. From handheld to backpack power, solar chargers now come in a spectrum of types for juicing up phones, PDAs, Bluetooth headsets, iPods, and laptops. Many have an onboard battery pack that can charge while the solar cells are in the sun, and then transfer the power to your device when you need it. See “Digging Deeper into TreeHugger” below for a list of solar chargers on the market.
8. Extend use
There’s definitely a cult around replacing our electronic toys and tools every 15 minutes or so when a new model comes out. In some cases, the newest technologies are cleaner and more efficient, but often, the older ones will faithfully do their assigned task for a lot longer than the marketplace would have us believe. In some cases, the older models are even superior. Step back a few paces from the whole technophelia thing and take stock of what your real needs are. It couldn’t hurt to practice some of this in the rest of our lives, as well.
9. Look for EPEAT
EPEAT (electronic product environmental assessment tool) is a new attempt at environmental certification for computers (CPUs, monitors, and notebooks). Released in early 2006, only a limited number of products have been registered with EPEAT so far, however, look for this certification to pick up steam in the near future. (EPEAT homepage)
10. Buy a less toxic system
Europe is making huge inroads on reducing the presence of toxic chemicals in electronics such as lead, cadmium, and mercury with a directive called RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substances). Look for companies that are adhering to--and even going beyond--the RoHS compliance in Europe and around the globe. [ROHS UK Homepage, Wikipedia's ROHS page] Back To Top Λ (The Solio and FreeLoader solar chargers)
1. Demand product recycling
In a perfect world, product manufacturers would happily take back the products they sold you at the end of their useful life. Many companies do offer to recycle their old products, but plenty still lag behind. Get vocal with manufacturers and your government representatives to improve both voluntary and mandated electronics recycling, and vote with your dollars for companies that take it back.
2. The right tool for the job
Does your computer really need a 3-D graphics card for your email correspondences? Do you need 500 GB of memory for bidding on those limited edition organic cotton Vans on Ebay? A 30“ cinematic display for reading TreeHugger? Most often, the more powerful your computer and the more extra doodads it has, the more energy it will consume, the more it will cost, and the more physical mass it will take up. It’s also a uniquely sad feeling when a piece of hardware or software goes obsolete before you even got to play with it. Itemize your computing needs and then find the computer, PDA, cell phone, stereo, digital camera that is going to best fit your needs. Also keep your eyes peeled for upgradability: the ability to expand or update a device’s capabilities.
3. Offset your energy
Carbon offsets aren’t just for travel. Individual offsets that you purchase can help negate your energy usage, including time on your computer or chatting away on your cell phone. This is particularly valuable if you are a heavy user. For more carbon offsets and renewable energy credits, see How to Green Your Electricity.
4. The digital thermostat
The most energy-saving electronic device you ever buy might be a simple programmable thermostat for your home. For more, see How to Green Your Heating.
5. USB-it
Charge your phone or PDA off your computer’s USB port and never have to worry about leaving your AC adapter plugged in.
6. iPod surgery
Is your iPod’s flagging longevity starting to make you antsy? Battery replacement kits are out there if you’re ready to get hands-on. Don’t forget to recycle the old li-ion battery after you’ve removed it. Apple will also replace any out-of-warranty iPod battery that has lost its ability to hold a charge for around $65 .
7. Battery switcheroo
If you’ve bought a new battery pack for your laptop (because the old one pooped out on you—yes, that’s normal), you can keep the old, weak battery inserted when the computer is plugged in, like when working at a desk. Save the fresh battery for travel. Li-ion batteries are very sensitive to temperature and so keeping the new battery away from the laptop’s heat will prolong its life.
1. Of the $250 billion spent per year on powering computers worldwide, only about 15% of that power is spent computing-the rest is wasted idling. (link)
2. Electronics make up 70 percent of all hazardous waste. (link)
3. Making the average PC requires 10 times the weight of the product in chemicals and fossil fuels. (link)
4. 15 billion batteries are produced annually worldwide. (link)
5. 40% of the energy used for electronics in your home is used while these devices are turned off.
6. In the US, energy efficient battery chargers could save American consumers more than 1 billion kilowatt hours of power per year, which would save more than $100 million each year, and prevent the release of more than a million tons of greenhouse gasses.
How to care for your batteries
Knowing how to best maintain rechargeable batteries can help them last longer and perform better. Advice on how to best care for rechargeables does vary depending on the info source, likely because different battery formulas work best under different conditions. There are two main types of rechargeable batteries: lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride, both of which suit different applications.
Lithium Ion (Li-Ion)
Advantages: Li-ion batteries have the advantage of a higher energy density (energy/weight ratio) and higher voltages than other batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are also designed to recharge hundreds of times and hold their charge for long periods when not in use.
Disadvantages: Li-ion batteries (and their chargers) are typically more expensive than other rechargeable batteries. Li-ions also don’t come in standard battery sizes (like AA, D, etc.).
Care: If you plan to store a Li-ion battery, store it with a partial or full charge. It is also typically suggested that you “move the electrons around” every month or so, putting the battery in use. Like all batteries, Li-ions should be recycled when they’re done for.
Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH)
Advantages: NiMH batteries come in almost all standard sizes (like AA, AAA, 9 Volt, C, and D) so they’re a perfect substitute for conventional disposable batteries. These batteries can also provide power longer than alkaline batteries, especially in some power-hungry electronics like digital cameras.
Disadvantages: NiMH batteries have a relatively fast self-discharge rate and can lose up to 40% of their charge in a month when stored. The higher the temperature, the faster the self-discharge rate will be. Newer NiMH batteries, however, claim to have solved the self-discharge problem. Sanyo's Eneloop batteries, for example, claim to lose only 15% of their charge over the course of a year if unused.
Care: To avoid the risk of permanent voltage depletion, do an occasional full drain and recharge cycle for NiMH rechargeable batteries. NiMH batteries can be stored in the freezer to help retain their charge, just make sure they’re tightly sealed from moisture, and allow batteries to come back to room temperature before use. A “smart charger,” while more expensive, will control the charge of batteries via a microprocessor and will prolong battery life and improve performance. (many of these battery facts gathered from GreenBatteries.com) Back To Top Λ
by Team Treehugger, Worldwide on 03.22.07
TH Exclusives (how to green your life)
What’s the Big Deal?Yes, electronic devices are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives, especially as they get smaller and smaller. We use them as tools and toys to communicate, work, enjoy media, and be expressive. Being green with electronics doesn’t mean living in a teepee listening to truckers squalk on the old short-wave. Greening your electronics is a matter of knowing what tech to get, how to use it best, and what to do with it when its useful life is done. Many of these best practices aren’t things you’ll read in the instruction manual, either. In this guide we’ll tell you how to stop wasted energy, what gizmos are greener than others, and what to do about e-waste and electronics recycling. We’ll also show you some of the newest green gadgets coming over the horizon.
1. Go rechargeable
Of the 15 billion batteries produced and sold each year, most of them are disposable alkaline batteries, and only a fraction of those are recycled. Look for electronics that are rechargeable. For removable batteries, lithium-ion (Li-Ion) and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) are cost-effective, green alternatives. The fastest battery chargers can juice up AAs in as little as 15 minutes, and will pay for themselves quite quickly.
2. Kill vampire power
Just because your cell phone is unplugged from the charger or your TV is off, doesn’t mean these devices aren’t drawing a current and running up your electricity bill. Many AC adapters (or “wall warts”) if left plugged in will continue to pull a current from the wall socket (you may notice they are warm to the touch). Many devices that have a standby mode do the same thing. To make sure you aren’t wasting energy, pull the plug on devices when not in use or put all of your electronics and chargers on a power strip. This way you can simply flip the power strip off when your electronics are not in use. There are also a number of “smart” power strips on the market that sense when electronics are turned off, or that turn off the strip when one main unit (like your PC) is powered down. (Note that some electronics need to be turned off via the on/off switch before cutting the power. Inkjet printers, for example, need to seal the cartridge heads to avoid clogging.)
3. Buy with energy in mind
Some types of electronics suck more than others, at least in energy terms. Doing research on different technologies and their respective energy consumption can save you a lot in the long run. For example, if you want a flat panel television, look into LCD models, which use much less energy than plasmas. The Energy Star site will help you identify energy-saving electronic devices like cordless phones, stereo systems, TVs, DVD players, battery chargers, and a whole bunch more.
4. Treat those batteries right
While battery recycling programs are increasingly common and easy to use, the process of recycling anything still takes energy and resources and should not be overused (one of the most polluted sites on the planet is a battery recycling plant in the Dominican Republic). Knowing how to best use and maintain rechargeable batteries will boost their longevity and performance. See Getting Techie below for more on the specifics.
5. Make it a short circuit
So, you just bought the newest, sleekest cell phone. It takes video, filters out calls from exes, and charts barometric pressure. What should you do with the old one? Whatever you do, don’t just throw it in the trash--this risks releasing chemicals into the ecosystem. There are plenty of organizations and charities that recycle and reuse old electronics. If you want a return on your old gadgets, sell them on an online auction site--people will often buy them even if they are broken. Bonus! A growing number of computer manufacturers are adopting take-back programs as well, under which they will accept and recycle their units when you’re done with them.
6. Buy used
Don’t want to spend a fortune on technology? You can find top quality, totally functional used electronics at sites like Ebay and Craigslist, and even at yard sales and flea markets. This not only cuts down on the amount of new resources being used for the production of more stuff, it also creates a market for sellers to safely recirculate electronics they’re no longer using. Ebay’s Easytradein.com is a good resource for the electronics you are ready to part with. You might even be surprised what comes up on Freecycle.
7. Bright idea: The solar charger
There are an increasing number of options for on-the-go solar power. From handheld to backpack power, solar chargers now come in a spectrum of types for juicing up phones, PDAs, Bluetooth headsets, iPods, and laptops. Many have an onboard battery pack that can charge while the solar cells are in the sun, and then transfer the power to your device when you need it. See “Digging Deeper into TreeHugger” below for a list of solar chargers on the market.
8. Extend use
There’s definitely a cult around replacing our electronic toys and tools every 15 minutes or so when a new model comes out. In some cases, the newest technologies are cleaner and more efficient, but often, the older ones will faithfully do their assigned task for a lot longer than the marketplace would have us believe. In some cases, the older models are even superior. Step back a few paces from the whole technophelia thing and take stock of what your real needs are. It couldn’t hurt to practice some of this in the rest of our lives, as well.
9. Look for EPEAT
EPEAT (electronic product environmental assessment tool) is a new attempt at environmental certification for computers (CPUs, monitors, and notebooks). Released in early 2006, only a limited number of products have been registered with EPEAT so far, however, look for this certification to pick up steam in the near future. (EPEAT homepage)
10. Buy a less toxic system
Europe is making huge inroads on reducing the presence of toxic chemicals in electronics such as lead, cadmium, and mercury with a directive called RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substances). Look for companies that are adhering to--and even going beyond--the RoHS compliance in Europe and around the globe. [ROHS UK Homepage, Wikipedia's ROHS page] Back To Top Λ (The Solio and FreeLoader solar chargers)
1. Demand product recycling
In a perfect world, product manufacturers would happily take back the products they sold you at the end of their useful life. Many companies do offer to recycle their old products, but plenty still lag behind. Get vocal with manufacturers and your government representatives to improve both voluntary and mandated electronics recycling, and vote with your dollars for companies that take it back.
2. The right tool for the job
Does your computer really need a 3-D graphics card for your email correspondences? Do you need 500 GB of memory for bidding on those limited edition organic cotton Vans on Ebay? A 30“ cinematic display for reading TreeHugger? Most often, the more powerful your computer and the more extra doodads it has, the more energy it will consume, the more it will cost, and the more physical mass it will take up. It’s also a uniquely sad feeling when a piece of hardware or software goes obsolete before you even got to play with it. Itemize your computing needs and then find the computer, PDA, cell phone, stereo, digital camera that is going to best fit your needs. Also keep your eyes peeled for upgradability: the ability to expand or update a device’s capabilities.
3. Offset your energy
Carbon offsets aren’t just for travel. Individual offsets that you purchase can help negate your energy usage, including time on your computer or chatting away on your cell phone. This is particularly valuable if you are a heavy user. For more carbon offsets and renewable energy credits, see How to Green Your Electricity.
4. The digital thermostat
The most energy-saving electronic device you ever buy might be a simple programmable thermostat for your home. For more, see How to Green Your Heating.
5. USB-it
Charge your phone or PDA off your computer’s USB port and never have to worry about leaving your AC adapter plugged in.
6. iPod surgery
Is your iPod’s flagging longevity starting to make you antsy? Battery replacement kits are out there if you’re ready to get hands-on. Don’t forget to recycle the old li-ion battery after you’ve removed it. Apple will also replace any out-of-warranty iPod battery that has lost its ability to hold a charge for around $65 .
7. Battery switcheroo
If you’ve bought a new battery pack for your laptop (because the old one pooped out on you—yes, that’s normal), you can keep the old, weak battery inserted when the computer is plugged in, like when working at a desk. Save the fresh battery for travel. Li-ion batteries are very sensitive to temperature and so keeping the new battery away from the laptop’s heat will prolong its life.
1. Of the $250 billion spent per year on powering computers worldwide, only about 15% of that power is spent computing-the rest is wasted idling. (link)
2. Electronics make up 70 percent of all hazardous waste. (link)
3. Making the average PC requires 10 times the weight of the product in chemicals and fossil fuels. (link)
4. 15 billion batteries are produced annually worldwide. (link)
5. 40% of the energy used for electronics in your home is used while these devices are turned off.
6. In the US, energy efficient battery chargers could save American consumers more than 1 billion kilowatt hours of power per year, which would save more than $100 million each year, and prevent the release of more than a million tons of greenhouse gasses.
How to care for your batteries
Knowing how to best maintain rechargeable batteries can help them last longer and perform better. Advice on how to best care for rechargeables does vary depending on the info source, likely because different battery formulas work best under different conditions. There are two main types of rechargeable batteries: lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride, both of which suit different applications.
Lithium Ion (Li-Ion)
Advantages: Li-ion batteries have the advantage of a higher energy density (energy/weight ratio) and higher voltages than other batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are also designed to recharge hundreds of times and hold their charge for long periods when not in use.
Disadvantages: Li-ion batteries (and their chargers) are typically more expensive than other rechargeable batteries. Li-ions also don’t come in standard battery sizes (like AA, D, etc.).
Care: If you plan to store a Li-ion battery, store it with a partial or full charge. It is also typically suggested that you “move the electrons around” every month or so, putting the battery in use. Like all batteries, Li-ions should be recycled when they’re done for.
Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH)
Advantages: NiMH batteries come in almost all standard sizes (like AA, AAA, 9 Volt, C, and D) so they’re a perfect substitute for conventional disposable batteries. These batteries can also provide power longer than alkaline batteries, especially in some power-hungry electronics like digital cameras.
Disadvantages: NiMH batteries have a relatively fast self-discharge rate and can lose up to 40% of their charge in a month when stored. The higher the temperature, the faster the self-discharge rate will be. Newer NiMH batteries, however, claim to have solved the self-discharge problem. Sanyo's Eneloop batteries, for example, claim to lose only 15% of their charge over the course of a year if unused.
Care: To avoid the risk of permanent voltage depletion, do an occasional full drain and recharge cycle for NiMH rechargeable batteries. NiMH batteries can be stored in the freezer to help retain their charge, just make sure they’re tightly sealed from moisture, and allow batteries to come back to room temperature before use. A “smart charger,” while more expensive, will control the charge of batteries via a microprocessor and will prolong battery life and improve performance. (many of these battery facts gathered from GreenBatteries.com) Back To Top Λ
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
KVUE Video - DELL Earnings AND Logic Approach Laptops!
Our technician, Matt, is shown describing a DELL notebook on a KVUE special regarding recent (1Q) DELL earnings. Very fun!
http://www.kvue.com/sharedcontent/VideoPlayer/videoPlayer.php?vidId=125295
http://www.kvue.com/sharedcontent/VideoPlayer/videoPlayer.php?vidId=125295
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