NYC P.I. dispenses investigative advice, information, legal marketing tips, opinions, interesting stuff... Look for the Bulletin each Monday. Visit our P.I. site: www.BNIinvestigations.com.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
And There Goes The Truth As An Absolute Defense
We've moved! (Very shortly, we'll have migrated the archives to the new site but in the meanwhile; come visit, sit down for a while, enjoy some snark, take a survey....)
A curious, but not unexpected, occurrence is happening online; that of domain name abandonment. Curious in that you would think that by now someone would have created a personal domain tracking app, (much like Roboform, a personal password tracker), that maintains your domain expiration dates for you, as opposed to entrusting a registry company, such as godaddy or Network Solutions. Domain registration abandonment is expected, however, as people and companies move on, go out of business, shift focus... and simply forget to renew the domain or decide not to.
Our friend, Bill Myers, discovered a great free tool to check the availability of great domain names. This free tool searches all available combinations of any given word (and synonyms) instantly and shows what domain names are available. Suppose you have a niche market you are curious about, e.g. "learning", this search tool will even give you available domains with the word "study" in it.
Now, because it's a Monday (and we are not the only ones working this President's Day) and well, it's my sense of humor, the WSJ posted these funny law firm names and or domains:
Recently, however, we tested (and are completely sold on) a free, unique open source laptop tracking service, Adeona. Created (and with continuing research and upgrading) at the University Of Washington, Adeona is technologically miles ahead of its privately-developed rivals; primarily due to continual upgrading from UW's computer lab students, joined now by researchers from UC, San Diego and UC, Davis. Here's the best part: there is no third-party or middleman involved. Only YOU can track YOUR laptop.
This short video explains the free downloading and installation.
Also, straight from the Adeona site, for those of us that are very security conscious and carry sensitive information on our portable devices, below is a brief overview and one-line use direction:
Overview What is Adeona? Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no need to rely on a single third party. What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.
Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner's laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.
How do I use it? Using Adeona only requires downloading and installing a small software client. Adeona is free to use.
I cannot stress strongly enough how important this software is for legal and law community professionals.
This week's Bulletin comes from our IT head, Jonathan Caspian; a timely update regarding computer virus software.
Most firms have fairly good firewalls in place but that protection generally does not extend to individual laptops, home PCs, smart phones...
This week's Bulletin is a short and sweet list of free security app tips for those can't-do-without gadgets:
Tip 1 (For Windows users, any version): Free Malicious Software Removal Tool from Microsoft. This software, which should be run once a month (at least) whether you think your computer has been infected or not, scans your computer and removes the most popular and pernicious viruses and malicious software. This software is free from Microsoft:
Note: FOR THE FREE VERSIONS OF THE FOLLOWING TWO APPS, GO TO DOWNLOAD.COM. (dl.com also has many other tools, software, patches... that you can download for free and with very accurate editor and reader reviews. CNET tested.)
Tip 2 (Spyware Removal) SPYBOT. For immediate removal of those pesky cookies, spyware and malware, Spybot is the best in the business. The computer security industry gives Spybot high points for ease of use, efficiency, effectiveness and it constantly updates itself for new hacker threats.
Tip 3 (All around firewall, virus protection) AVG. There is no better security monitor and virus removal software. Again, it's free.
All three of these protection softwares will offer a report at the end of a session (which you can program on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis).
