RHFtech Help Desk

All digital copiers made since 2002 use a hard drive to store information including copied images. So images of confidential documents are stored unsecured on these hard drives. This problem was revealed about two weeks ago by the CBS Evening News. This only applies to office-grade copiers. Your home all-in-one printer (AIO) does not do this, I hope.

This is a large worry as businesses and governmental offices use digital copiers all the time. Ever rent a car? Did they photocopy your drivers license? You need to worry.

Office digital copiers are usually leased and replaced at the end of the lease. The hard drive is not wiped clean when the old copier is replaced. The scanned images can be retrieved from the hard drive. Old digital copiers are often sent overseas to South America or Asia. Our confidential information is going with them.

There is little we can do other than to alert businesses and governments that this is a major security concern and that they need policies and procedures to insure that the hard drives on their digital copiers are scrubbed before they replace them.

It would be a good thing if the copiers automatically deleted images immediately. We can hope that elected officials will address this privacy and security loophole forthwith.

I installed the final version of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 on my main Windows 7 rig this week. It will be released to the general public in June 2010. I had been using the beta before this. The final version installed with a bit a difficulty. I first had to uninstall the beta and then reboot before I could install it.

However, I received the above error after rebooting and trying to install it. It took some time and effort to track down the issue. DynDNS Updater, a program I run in the background, was blocking the Office 2010 installation. I exited DynDNS Updater and the installation proceeded without further issue. I restarted DynDNS when the installation was complete.

Office 2010 is quite similar to Office 2007. It tweaks the UI/UX in many small ways. These add up to an improved experience over Office 2007. I still prefer Office 2003’s menu and toolbar interface over the Ribbon. I find the Ribbon sucks productivity out of my work by requiring more mouse clicks than Office 2003 and by using up too much vertical screen real estate. The Ribbon has been added to Outlook 2010.

While working on a Word document this morning I was surprised by a new Word dialog.

Microsoft wants us to help improve Office’s dictionary and thesaurus tools. I clicked the Send Now button. If you are concerned about privacy you can find out more at http://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy-statement-highlights-for-microsoft-office-2010-HA101098558.aspx

Office 2010 has different SKUs than Office 2007. The ones in green in the image below will be available for retail purchase.

WordWeb Pro defines dido as “a ludicrous or grotesque act done for fun and amusement.”

Gizmodo is a gadget-oriented technology blog. Last week they published information, including photos, of a prototype next generation iPhone. Gizmodo said they paid someone $5,000 to get it. That person said they found it at the Gourmet Haus Staudt, a Silicon Valley bar, where Gray Powell, an Apple engineer, inadvertently lost it while celebrating his 27^th birthday on March 18. Gizmodo contacted Apple that they had it, but not before disassembling it and publishing photos of its inside.

Many tech bloggers and journalists have offered their opinions about the brouhaha created by this story. Most are disdainful of Gizmodo and Nick Denton the head of Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent. They refer to him as if he were a four letter word.

Apple’s journalist fans
Apple loves the attention it gets from the press and bloggers. It has perfected a cult of fan-journalists and control of the press, while remaining secretive about what it does. That overwhelming cult of secrecy is the underlying cause of this story.

Journalists and bloggers have furthered Apple’s PR machine’s success by avoiding their responsibilities to report. Journalists like the New York Time’s David Pogue, The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and The Chicago Sun-Time’s Andy Ihnatko regularly sign Apple non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in order to get access to pre-release versions of Apple hardware and software. They are careful not to be too critical of Apple lest Steve Jobs blacklist them from future information. This is not reporting. It is kowtowing to Jobs and Apple. It should not be acceptable to them, their newspapers or the public. But it is.

The newspapers and journalists accept this state-of-affairs because they value readers and viewers over integrity. They are in bed with Apple. They are prostituting journalism and do not admit it to us or themselves. They rationalize their behavior. They are happy to avoid their own ethics when it suits their profit motives. So why should they disparage Nick Denton and Gizmodo for doing the same things they do, which is to report what is likely to grab viewers instead of adhering to journalistic truth?

Who is right?
This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Ihnatko and others are no better than Denton and Gizmodo. I bet they secretly wish they could have broken the story but that would have ended their cozy relationship with Apple. Thus for them, it is better to be critical of Gizmodo and Denton and to deflect questions about their journalistic chops by castigating Gizmodo for “illegal” actions. Who besides Apple and California law enforcement cares at this juncture? I don’t. I bet most of you don’t either. I wanted to see the prototype and learn what is new and different.

Gizmodo’s story was fun and amusing. It was grotesque in exposing what news organizations will do in order to satisfy our craving for information and gossip.

I am glad that Gizmodo published this. It was informative. I enjoyed reading about the next generation iPhone. I bet Ihnatko and Mossberg did too. It is what the press should do but often avoids doing because of conflicts-of-interest.

Have you read about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)? How about the Supreme Court’s Bilski case? You know of Intel and maybe of AMD, their chief rival in computer CPUs. Have you ever heard of ARM Holdings? Did you know that Apple is rumored to be thinking of acquiring them? Do you know why this matters to you? You couldn’t escape all the news stories about Apple’s launch of the iPad but do you know why this is important?

There is lots of news that grabs our attention but has little impact on our lives. Celebrity-related gossip or irrelevant high-profile stories like Apple customers downloaded over a billion apps on their iPhones may appeal to you. There are many stories that get reported but fly under our radar because they do not have celebrities in their headlines. This does not mean these stories are unimportant. Many of them are crucial because they will impact our lives now or in the near future.

The draft ACTA treaty is important. It is a pact that has been negotiated in secret by countries including the US, Canada, Japan, and others and the European Commission. It addresses cross-border intellectual property (IP) law. The big content companies, such as FOX, Viacom and SONY, are rumored to be behind this treaty and to have had overbroad influence on its provisions. Treaty law may trump national and state law. Thus it matters. Internet service provider (ISP) safe harbor law may change. Our right to due process as delineated in the Constitution may be curtailed or eliminated when accused of IP-related crimes. Current illegal government searches may become legal and mandatory because of the treaty. If you want a good summary analysis of the state of the ACTA negotiation go to http://j.mp/bfRiLE. You may read the draft treaty at http://j.mp/d4dgrS.

Patent law has been around in the US since 1790 when Congress enacted the first Patent Act. In the early 1990s software patents became a reality. Many people and the EU believe they should not be allowed because software is an abstraction, a form of language which is not patentable. The Bilski case is now before the Supreme Court awaiting its ruling. Thus far, Federal Courts have denied the patent, which involves a business method for hedging risks in commodities trading. If the Supreme Court upholds the lower courts, tens of thousands of software patents granted to companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple and others may be invalidated. The consequence of that would be significant to companies who don’t have large patent portfolios to trade can do when “infringing” on another company’s software patent. If software patents fall, so will the costs of many technology products. Innovation may rise.

I recently researched chips used in mobile devices to educate myself. All roads led to ARM Holdings, which designs the chips used in most cell phones and many other mobile devices. An ARM chip powers the Apple iPhone. An ARM chip powers the Motorola Droid phone and every BlackBerry phone. An ARM chip also runs the iPad. Apple’s profits are skewing towards ARM-based devices and away from Intel-based computers like iMacs and MacBooks. Tech blogs have been abuzz with the rumor that Apple is going to buy ARM Holdings. If this happens it will have a major impact on the largest worldwide technology growth market. Apple could stifle competition.

How the Mets, Yankees or Red Sox are doing may be important to you. Whether Tiger Woods has reformed may interest you. The above technology news items are probably more significant to our lives.

If you get the following pop-up dialog in Firefox go ahead and disable the plug-in and restart your browser. Palemoon is a custom-built and optimized for Windows Firefox derivative that I am testing.

If you do not want to wait for the popup, you can find out if this is installed in Firefox by going to the Firefox menu Tools —> Add-ons, and selecting the Plugins tab. Disable by clicking on the Disable button it is in the Plugins list.

You can find out more about this vulnerability at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558584

PDF files are increasingly used to spread malware like viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, and ransomware. Adobe Reader and its big brother Adobe Acrobat are found on almost every Windows machine and many Macs too. This makes PDFs a favorite vector of infection for the black hats (AKA the bad guys).

There are two changes you should make to the Reader or Acrobat Preferences to harden the security on your computer. These changes will make your computer more secure while still allowing you to read and edit, if you have Acrobat, PDF files.

Disable JavaScript in Reader or Acrobat
1. Select Edit —> Preferences from the menu.
2. Select JavaScript from the Categories on the left side of the Preferences dialog.
3. Uncheck the box for Enable Acrobat JavaScript.
4. Click the OK button.

Disable Reader or Acrobat from running other programs
1. Select Edit —> Preferences from the menu.
2. Select Trust Manager from the Categories on the left side of the Preferences dialog.
3. Uncheck the box for Allow  opening of non-PDF file attachments with external applications.
4. Click the OK button.

It would be surprising if you answered, “No.”  Except for cable company executives, we all feel that our ever-increasing cable or satellite TV bills are too high. However, even the executives understand how customers feel about these rising rates. The content producers, like Disney or Fox, are probably the major force at work causing this inflation. Cablevision tried to hold the line, in two high profile, publicly-reported fights with content producers HGTV/Food Network and ABC/Disney/ESPN.

Before cable and satellite TV
Once upon a time, we paid nothing for TV content. If you grew up before cable and satellite TV, when television shows were only broadcast over-the-air (OTA), you understand. TV stations and networks made their money from selling advertising. OTA still exists in most places but the selection of OTA shows is a small fraction of what cable or satellite TV vendors offer. If you live in outlying parts of major metropolitan areas you may not even get OTA.

No OTA here
Here in Southwestern Connecticut we do not get OTA TV. We are too far to receive the signals from New York City or Hartford, CT and too close to these cities to justify our own TV stations. If you live here and want to watch TV you need to subscribe to cable or satellite. The subscription television alternatives in this part of Connecticut are Cablevision, Comcast or Cox cable (depending upon where you live), DirecTV, Dish TV and AT&T U-verse. Verizon FiOS is available for a small part of Greenwich, CT.

Prices for TV services are similar for these vendors. Competition is the primary reason. Cable companies, AT&T and Verizon offer triple-play package deals, bundling television, phone and Internet services. The pricing for these packages is superior to buying the services à la carte. They also offer packages of TV channels rather than selling them à la carte.

An à  la carte menu?
Many people, including me, would like to buy our TV channels one-by-one rather than having the limited menu of choices. I want premium channels like Cinemax, Showtime, TMC and HBO. I don’t want sports, foreign language or kids channels. Unfortunately, that is not an option. If my family wants to watch TBS, TCM, the History and SyFy channels, we have to pay for Disney, HGTV, ESPN, FOX Sports and many other channels we do not watch. We never watch them but we have to pay for them. It is a tax, only not a government imposed one. We pay to keep sports channel costs low enough so that our sports-loving neighbors can watch beach volleyball along with the myriad professional sports shows. I wish it were otherwise. It is not.

How much does the cable company pay?
Recently a list of 2009 wholesale TV prices was published on the web. It was eye-popping. Did you know that sports channels comprise most of what we pay for each month? In 2009, ESPN charged cable companies $4.08 per month per subscriber, $48.96 a year. FOX Sports charged $2.37 per month. C‑SPAN was a bargain at $0.05.

I used this list to calculate what Cablevision is paying for non-premium cable channels. The SNL Kagan information was incomplete. Cablevision offers non-premium channels that are not on the list. The total monthly cost for the channels I could identify was $23.95 per subscriber.

Separate from deals for new subscribers or triple-play customers, Cablevision charges $55.95 per month for Family Cable, which includes broadcast basic. About half of that subscription price goes to pay ESPN/ABC/Disney, Viacom, FOX, NBC/Universal, and the other content companies. Cable companies also have to maintain substantial plant and equipment, provide customer service at our houses and over the phone, pay employees, pay taxes and make a profit.

Perhaps a better question is, “Why do we pay so much for TV sports channels like ESPN?”

Herein I predict the future.

A friend recently asked, “Should he buy the AppleCare extended warranty for his new iPad?” I am generally opposed to spending money for extended warranties. I decided that it would be better to do an analysis this time rather than give a knee-jerk response.

I started by going to the basement and finding my copy of Robert Schlaifer’s seminal tome Analysis of Decisions Under Uncertainty. This was my textbook from a course at Harvard, many years ago. I needed to brush up on this stuff as I had not done a formal analysis in quite some time.

This type of analysis works fine for many things besides an iPad extended warranty. In essence you look at the possible outcomes and build a decision tree. You assess the individual outcome’s monetary cost or benefit and assign probabilities to the outcomes to determine an expected value for each outcome. You then choose the branch of the tree with the best expected value.

The facts:

1. 16GB WiFi-only iPad costs $499.
2. AppleCare costs $99.
3. AppleCare extends 1 year warranty by another year.
4. AppleCare extends Apple support from 90 days by 640 days (~1¾ years).
5. Probability of repair within 2 years of purchase is unknown.
6. Cost of repair for item 5 above is also unknown but no more than $499.

Let us discount the extended support as having zero value. After all, there are Google, Twitter and Facebook to help us out. And remember that by the 1 year anniversary of the iPad launch there will likely be both price reductions and newer, improved models. Let us further assume that lost use of the iPad is not catastrophic the way losing the use of a cellphone or a main computer is. Finally, we assume the probability of repair within 2 years of purchase is 5% and the cost of that repair would be $200.

There are 2 branches, either buy AppleCare or not and thus there are 4 possible outcomes. Either you purchase AppleCare or you do not and either the iPad needs repair within the second year of AppleCare window or it does not. Remember you have a 1 year warranty without AppleCare.

Outcomes

1. No AppleCare and no repair, cost is zero.

2. No AppleCare and repair, cost is $200.

3. AppleCare and no repair, cost is $99.

4. AppleCare and repair, cost is $99.

We yield a simplified expected cost of repair of $10 ($200 x .05) for branch 1 (outcome 1 and 2), the self-insurance branches. The expected cost for the second branch, buying AppleCare is $99, a fixed cost. In this case AppleCare is a bad buy because it costs us $89 more than it is worth.

Testing these assumptions to see where breakeven occurs is a good idea. If the repair cost $498 the expected value without AppleCare is $24.90, still a bad buy. If the probability of repair skyrockets to 50% and the cost of repair is $198, we break even. If the probability of repair exceeds 50% (or even nears it) the original decision to buy an iPad is flawed. If you buy one of the more expensive models, the most expensive costs $829, AppleCare is a better insurance value because repair costs can now exceed $500, but still questionable.

My response to the original question is skip AppleCare. Buy an iPad accessory instead or, better yet, I will be happy to accept a gift of some of what I just saved you!

File extensions are important and useful. These are the characters that follow the final period in the file name. They are usually 3 or 4 characters long. They tell an operating system whether or not a file is an application, like Excel.exe, or the file’s associated application. The EXE extension tells Windows that the file is a program. The Mac parallel is APP. Microsoft Word documents use extensions like DOC, DOCX, or DOT. This informs the computer that they are opened with Word.

File extensions are hidden by default on new computers. I guess the smart people at Apple and Microsoft think these important bits of information will confuse a computer user like you. I disagree. They inform us about our files. Since computers have hundreds of thousands or millions of files this extra information helps us navigate.

So how do you show extensions?

Apple OS X Finder

1. Open a Finder window.
2. Click on the Finder —> Preferences… on the menu bar.
3. The Finder Preferences dialog should open.
4. Select the Advanced tab.
5. Check the checkbox Show all filename extensions.
6. Close the dialog window.

Windows Explorer (XP)

1. Open a Windows Explorer window such as My Documents.
2. Click on the menu items Tools —> Folder Options…
3. The Folder Options dialog should open.
4. Select the View tab.
5. Uncheck the Hide extensions for known file types checkbox.
6. Click the OK button to close the dialog.

Windows Explorer (Windows 7 and Vista)

1. Open a Windows Explorer window such as Documents.
2. Click on the menu items Organize —> Folder and Search Options…
3. The Folder Options dialog should open.
4. Select the View tab.
5. Uncheck the Hide extensions for known file types checkbox.
6. Click the OK button to close the dialog.