Before you recycle your old computer, cell phone or smart phone, make sure that you wipe it clean of data. If you don’t, your personal life could be laid bare. Worse, you could become a victim of identity theft.

But wiping your device clean of data may be harder than you think. Here are details about how to do it for cell phones and PCs.

Cleaning up cell phones and smart phones

With cell phones and smart phones like BlackBerries, you need to worry about more than your data — make sure that your account has been terminated. If not, others will be able to make phone calls from your device, and you’ll be footing the bill. So double-check with your carrier that the account has been terminated before you donate or sell your phone. If you’ve switched your account over to a new device and deactivated the old device on that account, check your bill carefully to make sure that the old phone isn’t somehow still using that account.

Next, erase all of your stored information, including your phone book, any stored incoming or outgoing text messages, and memory of incoming and outgoing phone numbers, e-mails and so on. You can do this manually, one by one, of course, but if you do, there’s a good chance you might miss some. And it can also be exceedingly time-consuming. So check your phone’s manual for how to do a complete reset. A reset will wipe your phone of data and restore it to its factory settings.

A superb resource for figuring out how to reset cell phone data is put together by ReCellular, which buys, recycles and refurbishes wireless devices. Its cell phone data eraser site gives detailed instructions on how to erase data from many different makes and models of cell phones. Just choose your make and model, and you’ll be able to download specific instructions for resetting it.

Wiping PCs

Just deleting files isn’t good enough when you are going to recycle your computer. It’s quite simple for anyone to restore those deleted files, even if they’re no longer in the Recycle Bin. In fact, even deleting files and reformatting your hard disk won’t completely do the trick. Someone knowledgeable enough and dedicated to the task will be able to restore your files, even from a reformatted disk.

Think there’s nothing to worry about? You couldn’t be more wrong. In 2003, two graduate students at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science bought 158 used hard disks on eBay and other places. From those hard disks, they were able to discover 5,000 credit card numbers, personal and corporate financial records, medical records and personal e-mails.

Only 12 of the 158 hard disks had been properly cleaned of their data. Approximately 60% of the hard drives had been reformatted, and about 45% of the drives had no files on them (the drives couldn’t even be mounted on a computer) — yet the students were still able to recover data from them, using a variety of special tools. For details, see the news story from MIT.

What can you do? Get a disk-wiping program, preferably one that meets the U.S. Department of Defense’s standards for disk sanitation. These programs will overwrite your entire hard disk with data multiple times, ensuring that the original data can’t be retrieved. If you use them, be patient, because it can take several hours to wipe the hard disk.

Computerworld features editor Valerie Potter vouches for the free Darik’s Boot and Nuke, which, unlike some competing programs, worked smoothly on the old Windows 98 machine that she recently put out to pasture. Download the software, which then creates a boot disk that wipes everything on the hard drive. It can be used with floppy disks (remember those?), USB flash drives, CDs and DVDs. A similar program that has gotten good reviews is Eraser.

If you’ve got a Mac, you can use Apple’s built-in Disk Utility or download a third-party application like Mireth Technology’s ShredIt X 5.8 ($25, free trial), which lets you shred single files as well as wipe your local hard drive, network hard drives and CD-RWs.

Source: ComputerWorld

December 19, 2007 (Computerworld) — Short of being handed your walking papers, there are often telltale signs that it’s time to look for a new job. You haven’t been promoted since the Clinton administration. The most exciting assignments are routinely handed to your peers or underlings. Your desk keeps moving farther and farther from where the action is.

But some indicators are less obvious, such as subtle shifts in an IT organization’s structure that can result in career stagnation. A variety of career experts, headhunters, recruiters, CIOs and IT staffers shared their takes on when it’s time to move on.

1. Your role has become marginalized.

If you’re being bypassed for promotions or interesting assignments, or they’re consistently being offered instead to IT workers in subordinate positions, “that would be an obvious sign,” says Robert Rosen, CIO at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases in Bethesda, Md., and a past president of Share, an IBM user group in Chicago.

Often, the handwriting is on the wall. You just need to stop, step back and read it. “If you feel like you’re no longer contributing, there’s a good chance you may not be,” says Frank Hood, CIO at The Quiznos Master LLC in Denver.

2. You’ve stopped growing.

“If you’re not learning every day, if you’re not doing new things, and if you’re not improving” it’s time to move on, says Sara Garrison, senior vice president of product and solutions development at Sabre Holdings Corp. in Southlake, Texas.

Red lights should be flashing if you’ve effectively been in the same role for two or three years and haven’t taken on any significant new challenges during that time, says Umesh Ramakrishnan, vice chairman of CTPartners, an executive recruiting firm in New York.

3. You’re missing from the big picture.

Most CIOs assemble a road map of where they intend to take their organizations over the next 12 to 60 months, including the top IT/business projects they plan to work on, notes Joe Trentacosta, CIO at the Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative Inc. in Hughesville, Md. So, if there are a lot of upcoming projects that don’t include your area of expertise or in which you figure to play a minor role at best, “that’s a warning sign,” he says.

Further, if you’ve been relegated to a commodity-type IT function that offers little value to the organization or can easily be outsourced, “it’s time to move on to a new opportunity,” says Hans Keller, chief technology officer at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

4. You’re being excluded.

If you’re a CIO or other senior IT manager, the warning signs can include not being asked to participate in new business decisions or being excluded from formal or informal executive committee meetings, says Craig Urrizola, CIO at Saladino’s Inc., a Fresno, Calif.-based food distributor.

The view is equally bleak if you’re an IT staffer whose input on new projects is no longer requested or is sought out on just a limited basis.

5. Your level of influence is waning.

A CIO certainly has more clout within an organization than a network engineer. But all IT professionals possess some level of influence within their work teams or at least among their own peer groups. If you see your powers of persuasion shrinking, it’s time to move on, Keller suggests.

6. You no longer enjoy the work.

“Someone once told me that we’re not here for a long time; we’re here for a good time,” says Michael Nieset, managing partner for the technology practice at the Cleveland office of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles International Inc. “Sometimes people stay in suboptimal situations because it’s comfortable for them. You have to take control.

“If you’re not excited about the projects you’re working on, fix it,” he says. “If you are wholly engaged, passionate about what you’re doing and doing what you’re good at, you’ll be fulfilled and rewarded accordingly. “

7. Continuous improvement isn’t part of the mantra.

Sometimes there are organizational changes — or lack thereof — that you should regard as career alerts. These include stagnation within a corporation or an IT department. If your IT organization has been using the same application-development techniques for 15 years and has made no effort to update its approach, “then something’s wrong,” says David Van De Voort, principal consultant at Mercer LLC in Chicago. If your company is unwilling to invest in continuous improvement processes such as CMMI, ITIL or Six Sigma, it may be time to seek a company that is, he adds.

8. Greener pastures truly are greener.

If you’ve reached a crossroads where you’ve become disenchanted with your employer for one reason or another (long hours, infrequent promotions, career malaise, etc.), and you’ve received a job offer from another company, it may be the right time to jump ship. “In situations where things don’t fix themselves — if you hate what you’re doing, or you’re not proud of what you’re doing, or there’s an issue you need to talk to your boss about but you don’t because you know it won’t do any good — that’s when it’s time to look for a new job,” says Joel Reiter, an application analyst at U.S. Bancorp in St. Paul, Minn.

In this situation, however, be certain that you’re not jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Make sure you’re moving toward a good opportunity and not just moving away from one that has gone bad.

What good is a browser unless you can tweak it, hack it and bend it to your will? No good at all. The more you can hack it, the better it is.

And that means that Firefox must be a great browser. It’s infinitely customizable, via editing a text file called userChrome.css, making changes via a command called about:config, and using free add-ons to extend the features of the browser.

In this article, with those techniques and others, Preston Gralla will show you 15 great Firefox tricks, including how to build your own Firefox search engine, how to speed up your browsing, how to hack the interface and plenty more. So launch your favorite browser, and get ready for some great tricks.

Read 15 must-have Firefox tricks by Preston Gralla

We are proud to announce opening of our new website – Mobile Toys. The site is aimed to provide its users recent up to date news about cell phone/gadget releases and give full access to directory of the cell phones available on the market. All users are free to leave any comments about phones they like/use.

Currently we are gathering affiliate information to provide more details and information about best prices available for the corresponding phones. If you want us to become your affiliate - please contact us via email/skype. Your link will be placed next to each phone in our database as buy here.

I hope you like our initiative and will let us know what else you’d consider to obtain for Mobile Toys

Not matter you are iPhone owner or not, you may probably know its camera cannot record motion video. iPhone’s 2.0 Mega Pixel can only capture still images. But, iPhone’s native applications power seems can go for no limit. Monster and Friends develop a very amazing program that adds video recording function to iPhone. Right now you can capture 5 seconds video at 10 frames per second. The developer said the final version should be able to record 30+ frames per second with unlimited length.

The beta is available here, here or here. The first link is from winandmac.com  which does not require any registration. The other 2 is from the source website which provides you more detail.

[via ModMyiFone and WinAndMac]

Brent Oxley from hostgator published result of one amazing experiment that was setup so that each day of the week a different popular homeless slogan would be advertised.

Read full story and enjoy

This is by far the coolest christmas tree I have seen so far this year. You can find the tree outside a shopping mall in Madrid, Spain and projected on the sides of the christmas tree you can see a big Pac-man game. You can’t play the game but at least it’s animated. Nice one!

Pac-man christmas tree hits madrid [technabob.com] [via fosfor gadgets]

BOSTON (Reuters) - “w00t”, an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.

It’s like saying “yay”, the dictionary said.

“It could be after a triumph or for no reason at all,” Merriam-Webster said.

Visitors to Merriam-Webster’s Web site were invited to vote for one of 20 words and phrases culled from the most frequently looked-up words on the site and submitted by readers.

Runner-up was “facebook” as a new verb meaning to add someone to a list of friends on the Web site Facebook.com or to search for people on the social networking site.

Merriam-Webster President John Morse said “w00t” reflected the growing use of numeric keyboards to type words.

“People look for self-evident numeral-letter substitutions: 0 for O; 3 for E; 7 for T; and 4 for A,” he said. “This is simply a different and more efficient way of representing the alphabetical character.”

One Web site, www.thinkgeek.com, already sells T-shirts with the word “w00t” printed on the front.

“w00t belongs to gamers the world over. It seems to have been derived from the obsolete ‘whoot’ which essentially is another way to say ‘hoot’ which itself is a shout or derisive laugh,” Think Geek said on its Web site.

“But others maintain that w00t is the sound several players make while jumping like bunnies in Quake III,” it added, referring to a popular video game.

Online gamers often replace numbers and symbols with letters to form what Merriam-Webster calls an “esoteric computer hacker language” known as “l33t speak.” This translates into “leet”, which is short for “elite”.

A separate survey of words used in the media and on the Internet by California-based Global Language Monitor produced a different set of winners on Tuesday. “Hybrid” took top honours as word of the year with “climate change” the top phrase.

Global Language Monitor, which uses an algorithm to track words and phrases in the media and on the Internet, said “hybrid” had broad connotations of “all things green from biodiesel to wearing clothes made of soy to global warming”.

Runner-up was “surge,” based on the “surge” of 30,000 extra U.S. troops deployed to Iraq since mid-June, followed by the word “Bluetooth,” a technology used to connect electronic devices via radio waves.

“The English language is becoming more and more a globalised language every year,” said Global Language Monitor president Paul Payack, noting that this year’s list included words also culled from India, Singapore, China and Australia.

Source: Yahoo! News

As CIO at Bunker Hill Community College, Bret Moeller embraces students experimenting with technology as part of their education, but he’d prefer if their independent studies didn’t involve hacking into the college’s network.

“There are some students who discover at school that their whole point in life is to hack into the college’s network to either glean information they have no right to access or to simply kill the network to prove they can do it,” said Moeller, who works to manage and secure the Boston-area college’s network.

“We can detect scanning on our network and we try to lock things down as much as possible or not allow software on workstations, but sometimes there can be a hole in our protections. We can’t control the end users to the same degree one can in a corporate environment, but we still have to do as much as possible to secure the environment from end users,” he said.

Yet, Moeller may have more in common than he realizes with corporate network and security managers.

Recent research from the Ponemon Institute revealed that a majority of users disobey company security standards — and they do so knowingly.  In addition, survey data just released by RSA shows that trusted insiders “create data exposures of extraordinary scope” through their everyday behaviors.

“End users are smarter than ever. The advent of the PC at home and not just work anymore, as well as the ability to look up and verify what the IT people are saying to you, is a different world,” said Steve Moore, technology leader at Mary Kay Inc. in Dallas.

In addition, users can easily find detailed accounts of how to sidestep corporate policies, available from countless Internet sites and even laid out clearly in publications such as The Wall Street Journal.

With compliance regulations a constant factor, IT executives are caught between a rock and a hard place.

“We’re constantly trying to balance the need for expanded access to information and the requirements to protect information from unauthorized and inappropriate use,” said James Kritcher, vice president of IT at White Electronic Designs Corp.

in Phoenix. “We now have an expanding number of accounts, passwords and other mechanisms to manage access to various resources. The resulting overhead and complexity increases the likelihood that inappropriate access may be granted.”

For instance, users can unwittingly grant inappropriate access to co-workers, friends and family if they share too much information or neglect to update passwords. One area Craig Bush finds lacking among users is password security. He said the company has policies in place to ensure passwords aren’t abused or revealed, but users consider managing passwords more of a hassle than a safeguard.

“It’s funny how end users just don’t think passwords are a big deal and think we are just here to make their lives miserable when we request them to change or update passwords,” said Bush, who is network administrator at Exactech Inc. in Gainesville, Fla. “General password security is an area I see lacking among most end users. They just don’t realize there is technology that can use their passwords to get information and corrupt the entire network.”

Other times, it’s the more technology-savvy users who cause the most trouble. Users have tried to deploy consumer wireless routers at work, said Martin Webb, manager of data network operations, Ministry of Labour and Citizens’ Services, Province of British Columbia, Canada.

“Consumer routers are shipped with all the security settings turned off, which makes it easier to deploy, but it also immediately creates holes with security on the network,” Webb said. “It seems to be an innocuous thing and usually they are deployed without malicious intent, but it is still something we have to stay on top of or we are at serious risk.”

Mixing business and personal life

Another common problem is when users try to take their work home with them, but wind up taking more data off corporate networks and premises than they should. For instance, thumb drives, or USB flash drives, used improperly could bring a company to its knees, according to Albert Ganzon, director of network services and engineering at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, an international law firm in San Francisco.

Being responsible for securing company and client data puts Ganzon into a state of heightened alert, considering information saved on a thumb drive is nearly impossible for him to secure.

“Thumb drives make it so easy for someone to download a copy of anything and just walk out with it. We can’t catch that before it happens; we can’t turn the USB drives off without debilitating other valid functions of the drives,” he said. “It is critical for us to keep client data confidential, and it’s a very touchy area when the potential of leaks occurs.”

Ganzon doesn’t necessarily believe users intentionally put the network, the company and its clients at risk, but when working to get their jobs done they may sidestep certain security policies without considering the potential repercussions. “If that data is lost or stolen, well, people just don’t understand the risk they pose at times,” he said.

Christ Majauckas agreed. The computer technology manager at Metrocorp Publications in Boston said users, in some cases, believe they are following the policies yet continue to pose significant risk with their actions. For instance, one of his security pet peeves is users who download e-mail attachments from personal accounts while logged onto the corporate network via their company PC.

“Downloading e-mail attachments from personal e-mail is one of the main sources for virus attack” Majauckas said. “If they use corporate mail, we check that for viruses. But they think it’s better not to use corporate e-mail for personal use, so instead they open the mail in such a way that we can’t scan for viruses. I am not going to rely on Google to check for viruses on my network.”

For Koie Smith, IT administrator at Jackson, Tenn.-based law firm Rainey, Kizer, Reviere & Bell PLC, users trolling the Internet and visiting personal sites such as MySpace or Facebook represent a big risk, so much so that he uses a Linux-based proxy server called Squid for content filtering and to shut down access to those sites.

For one, he is quite certain the sites aren’t being used for work purposes and on top of that, Smith said he finds those sites and others are ripe with spyware ready to latch onto his corporate network.

“Even though we need the Internet for productivity reasons, browsing the Web is obviously a concern because users can pull down spyware or a virus. Without adequate protections on the computer — or even in some cases when there is — viruses in the wild can still cripple your network by one user browsing to a site they shouldn’t be going to,” Smith said. He added that the content filtering also serves to protect the user and organization legally. “There are things our company can’t have happening in the workplace, and unrestricted Web browsing opens the door for that.”

More education required

Bruce Bonsall, CISO at MassMutual Financial Group in Springfield, Mass., worries most about the intertwined work and home life of most corporate employees that leaves networks open to security holes and employees vulnerable to attacks. He said he also gets concerned when a user population isn’t as educated about security policies or potential threats as they should be.

“It’s not realistic for me to think that people are going to stop mixing their personal and work lives. We have to rely on them to practice good hygiene when opening links and try to prevent all the sewage that is out there from backing up into corporate networks,” Bonsall said.

For him, targeted attacks such as phishing and whaling concern him because they could take advantage of users not keeping up with corporate education efforts. He said technologies such as network access control and security information management can help protect the network, but only to a certain degree. As attacks get more sophisticated, user education is the only option.

“The bad guys are going after high network staff and senior executives, which is very disturbing. The more information they use that relates to the target, the more likely someone will get tricked, even savvy end users,” Bonsall said.

Source: ComputerWorld

Folks, please accept new version of my old but useful wordpress plugin – Image Gallery Post Generator

New version supports:

• Add images as attachments (so they can be resued)
• Fixed some silly bugs (page/post selector)
• More image generation options (no text, exif support, etc)

General improvement is a support of image attachments whcih makes this plugin really usefull when you want to publish your own set of images withiut using third party hosting services just using wordpress.