Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Password Security and Protecting Yourself Online


There is a 14 year old right now in their parents' basement on a computer. They don’t know your password, but with a little time and ingenuity they could get into your email account. Once they’re in your email account, it’s just a matter of time before they’re in your Amazon, Netflix, bank, and even Paypal. Heck, even public figures have learned the hard way that password reminder tools can hurt just as much as they can help.

That password that stands between you and chaos, can be a string of six alphanumerics or if you’re a real overachiever it might be 16 characters and substitute a $ for an S. Ohhhh, tricky.

The thing is, that pa5$w0rd helps spread a false perception that your online data is secure. These days, accounts are daisy chained together for your convenience, but it’s pretty convenient for a hacker too. How many sites are setup with your email address as your username? How many other sites are setup to login with your Facebook or Twitter account? Get one and you’ve got them all, and that’s not hard to do with some of your personal information that’s publicly available and easily found online.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

You talked. We listened.


Teachers Have Great Ideas!

We love hearing from our customers, and we use your suggestions whenever we can to improve our services. A suggestion came up recently that has made us look at our Chromebooks packages and decide to make some changes.

The story goes like this. The purchasing agent for a school district in Texas placed an order for several of the original Samsung Series-5 Chromebooks back in April 2012. During implementation, the technology instructors found them to be great devices for their students and in September, 2012 the purchasing agent called Newmind up again to order a bunch more Chromebooks as well as some charging carts.