Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Facebook is about more than what you ate for lunch – BEACON – April 2017

Do you know the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web? Many people don’t.

READ COLUMN AS IT APPEARED IN THE BEACON

The internet is the massive network of computers that allows you to use email, send pictures via your phone, and see who’s at the door from all the way across town, using that new video doorbell you keep seeing on the home shopping channel.

The World Wide Web is the collection of websites that you access by typing an address into the web browser of your device.

It’s acceptable to say, “I went on the internet to find out if giraffes can see in color.” But it’s more accurate to say that you did your research on the web.

Everything you do on the web is done via the internet, but not everything on the internet is done using the web.

Where does social media fit in?

Sometimes you’ll hear the argument that social media is the new World Wide Web, suggesting that Facebook is the preferred channel for information. Rather than visiting www.beaconseniornews.com to read the news, for example, many people simply follow the BEACON Senior Newspaper on Facebook and let the news come to them. This is a totally acceptable way to get the news, but you don’t want to use social media as your only source for gathering information online.

Don’t limit yourself

The biggest downside of using social media sites exclusively is that they only show you what they think you should see. If you follow The BEACON on Facebook, you won’t get all of the paper’s updates. You’ll only see updates that Facebook thinks you will interact with.

It’s also important to remember that there are great sources for news, information and shopping that you’ll never find if you don’t go directly to sites like news.google.com or www.cnn.com.

But there are some things social media does better by design than the web ever could.

Social media’s advantages

If you lose a pet and don’t post about it on a Facebook page designed to help find lost animals in your area, you miss out on the best possibility of reuniting with your furry friend.

The reason it’s so effective is because when you post your lost pet update, everyone in the group shares the post on their own Facebook pages, connecting with their friends. Suddenly you have a whole network of pet sleuths helping you.

Social media is also becoming the best place to sell your used items. Unlike sites like Craigslist, Facebook shows you the first and last name—and usually the face—of the person with whom you are dealing. It’s also becoming the best place on the web for job searches, business recommendations and even product reviews.

So the next time you hear someone say, “I don’t use social media because I don’t want to see what my friends ate for lunch,” explain to them that social media has as many practical uses—like videos of cats getting scared by cucumbers.

24

04 2017

Pokemon Go: Fact, fiction, myths, and observations

An example of container for geocaching game, C...

An example of a container for geocaching game, Czech Republic. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Instead of reading news articles about Pokemon Go, I decided to download it myself.

Here’s what I have to say about it.
 

1. First of all, it’s only a game if you decide to play it. I think that a large percentage of people don’t do much with the game aspect. It is more like augmented reality geocaching (treasure hunting via GPS).

 
2. The game aspect is virtually an afterthought. It is so simple that a 4-year-old (maybe younger) can handle the mechanics and the concept. You flick your finger across the screen. Sometimes there’s a small strategy to it, but mostly it’s just a spin of a coin to see what treasures pop-up.
 
3. This is where people usually ask me, why? If there’s no complexity and little strategy, why is it so popular. The reason is simple, it gives people a reason to get outside and discover stuff. True, you can go outside and discover stuff anytime you want. The difference here is that there is a thrill in the hunt. It’s exactly the same as a taking a Saturday to go shopping for a nice pair of shoes or a nice dress or a bull elk.
 
4. As a long-time citizen of the Internet and cyberculture, I have learned that there will always be trolls. People who are determined to ruin anything fun or uplifting or beneficial. Here we have a game that essentially is an anti-game. It forces people to go outside, it doesn’t really have an addictive element other than you can “catch them all”, and it is most fun when you get a group of people working together socially (again, out of the house).
Anyone who has tried to lose weight, get out of debt, or start a new business knows that as soon as you share your plans, there are trolls who try to discourage you.
 
Murder of Adam Walsh

Murder of Adam Walsh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

5. Substantiated myths can reach mythical proportions. Yes, someone found a body while playing Pokemon Go. Also, some people were using the locations to stock victims to mug. Also, there was a kid once named Adam Walsh who was kidnapped from a Sears once and the entire country stopped letting their kids peruse the in the toy aisle by themselves for almost 20 years. There was also once a kid who got hit by a car while riding his bike. And this one time a kid went to school and got bullied by a teacher ever day.

My point is, don’t be a troll. If you hate the game because you don’t like that other people are having a good time, you can read books and work in the garden, and do crafts in your house and the Pokemon Go people will not hurt you. I promise. You can take joy and rant on Facebook when you read that one of them got hit by a car. Or you can scoff when you hear that someone vandalized a monument while playing the game.
 
6. There is safety in numbers. There are photos all over the web of crowds of people in Central Park, wandering through public spaces, and driving around town to get to the next cache. Is it really more or less likely that people will be committing serious crimes under these conditions?
 
7. Virtually nothing about the game is random. The locations are curated and there are ways to report problems to the game developers immediately. You won’t find caches on the runway at the airport or inside the home of a pedophile. Ordinary people can’t make their own hotspots. The game developers only selected areas that were legally accessible to the public. So, don’t believe andy rumors you may hear about someone placing a cache of Pokemon fodder in the basement of their home to catch 6-year-olds. That can’t happen.
Technically, a bad guy could stock a given cache at weird times for unsuspecting victims, but that takes us back to the previous point. The same bad guy could stock a certain secluded sidewalk for kids as they walk home from school or joggers at 5am. There is nothing inherently dangerous about Pokemon Go that makes it easier for bad guys to do whatever their evil minds can dream up.
 
8. This is a fad. By this time next year, only a small percentage of people will still be playing the game. However, the game has subtly taught people and app developers that there is a new frontier in augmented reality. Expect shopping apps, travel apps, and more games to begin using these features.
Imagine driving up to a landmark and pointing your phone at it to read more information about that spot. Imaging panning your camera from an area where you can look down at your town and see the city transformed back to certain decades so that you can learn about the progress and history of the city.
Education, commerce, travel, and recreation are about to change for the better. It will mean that we are more plugged-in than ever. But, do we really want to go back to the time where we had to figure everything out from scratch?
 
9. Security glitches will happen. Something will happen with security and something will be exploited. It’s essentially a guarantee. However, ALL of your information is on the Internet. Every time you use your credit card, that information flies through the Internet. Anytime you use your Google Maps or other mobile mapping services, your location is recorded. Every time you go to the hospital, everything you are there for is recorded in a digital database, usually stored in the cloud or on servers that use the Internet to transfer and backup.
If this scares you then you should also know that every single city in the united states is planning on releasing a book that will be placed on every citizen’s front door. Inside that book will be every citizen’s phone number, address, and even their first and last name. Businesses aren’t even safe from this.
A company called Xerox has invented a device that allows you to make hard copy prints of both sides of any credit card. All bad guys have to do is find a way to get you to hand them your credit card for less than 2 minutes. They are going to allow these machines in the billing offices at restaurants and retail stores!
 
My point is, people need to stop worrying so much. If you want to be afraid of something, be afraid of bears, they can kill you. Or be afraid of saturated fats, sugar, and a sedentary lifestyle. Don’t be afraid of millennials walking around a public park or community sidewalk flicking their cellphone screens.

BONUS: If you want to know how they made the maps, how they chose the cache locations, etc. Mashable has a pretty good article explaining all that.

12

07 2016

5 Tips To Keep Your Digital Presence Encrypted

Privacy is a major concern these days because so much of who you are is now kept in digital form, and then spread all over the world because of internet access. So even though so much more is convenient and available for you, without the right security measures, all of that information is available to other people as well who get access.

So, a big solution to that problem is to make sure that your digital presence is encrypted as much as possible, and you can do that by encrypting your email, your passwords, your financial data, your phone messages, and by protecting your mobile data as well.

Encrypting Your Email

Though most people don’t think that a majority of their email is any kind of a security risk, there are still times when you communicate when privacy is necessary. Sending medical data, financial data, or even relationship talk doesn’t always need to be publicly searchable or readable. So, to that end, consider using an e-mail encryption program that does the hard work for you, without you even having to think about it, so that all of that information is sent entirely privately.

Encrypting Your Passwords

Passwords are the keys to your most personal and most important data, so it’s no surprise that the best password managers are the ones that encrypt those passwords locally so that, even though you only need your one master password, the rest of them are safely locked away in a format that hackers can’t get to. That is one of the best safety features that you can put in place on your home computers.

Encrypting Your Financial Data

Most of your financial data is going to be encrypted by your banks and credit card companies automatically. Since the very beginning of internet technology, financial institutions realized how important that kind of safety was, so they have been using military-grade encryption practices pretty much since people started being able to use electronic banking.

Encrypting Your Phone Messages

Phone messages can be a source of privacy issues as well. This is why certain phone apps give you the option to encrypt them. This means that any links, texts, photos, or attachments that you send are run through a system so that anything that’s intercepted can’t be read or looked at.

Protecting Your Mobile Data

And though it’s not necessarily encryption, protecting your data on your mobile devices falls into the same category of privacy and safety. You can set your devices up with a password, and if someone fails a certain number of times, all of your data will be erased, which means that no one can access it after a failed hack attempt.

17

01 2016