The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size
rooms in India. Every night, working from lists of names and phone
numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers
and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and
insurance workers updating their files.

Then, the criminals emptied their victims’ bank accounts.

Richard Guthrie, a 92-year-old Army veteran, was one of those
victims. He ended up on scam artists’ lists because his name, like
millions of others, was sold by large companies to telemarketing
criminals, who then turned to major banks to steal his life’s savings.

Mr. Guthrie, who lives in Iowa, had entered a few sweepstakes that
caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of
the largest compilers of consumer information. InfoUSA sold his name,
and data on scores of other elderly Americans, to known lawbreakers,
regulators say.

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3
million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering
Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease.
“Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old,
for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They
want to believe that their luck can change.”

As Mr. Guthrie sat home alone - surrounded by his Purple Heart medal,
photos of eight children and mementos of a wife who was buried nine
years earlier - the telephone rang day and night. After criminals
tricked him into revealing his banking information, they went to
Wachovia, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, and raided his account,
according to banking records.

CHARLES DUHIGG
The New York Times
May 20, 2007

Be very careful with whom and where you share you’re personal information. If you have questions about internet security, ask others for their advice. One good place to do that is at Scot’s Newsletter forums, specifically in the Security & Networking forum. We’ll be glad to answer your questions, even to help you research your particular situation.

No one can promise you’ll be perfectly safe on the internet. But there are steps you can take to provide your information doesn’t wind up in the hands of criminals.

I recently attended a Microsoft for Small Business seminar, and on the whole I was impressed with the degree of interconnectedness Windows Vista provides between the operating system and applications like Outlook and Word. Seemless integration means that you aren’t switching between open windows constantly. Instead, you can do many common tasks in a single window, accessing your computer files and the web effortlessly.

One of the niftiest improvements Microsoft has made to the user interface is the Search function. Forget about opening Start/Programs and hunting for the application you want to open. In the Search window, type “fire” and the option to open Firefox will appear as you type. Click Enter and Firefox opens. Whether file or application, Search will open it in far less time than in previous versions of Windows.

For those of us holding off on installing Vista, those of us who don’t want to shell out $400+ for the ability to open apps from the Search window, there’s an application that runs on XP called Launchy.

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

Josh Karlin (Launchy)

Once Launchy has been started, it hides in the background. You bring it forward by holding the alt key and tapping the space key. You then type in a few keys of the program you are searching for and hit enter once it has been found. You can also make Launchy dissappear again by hitting escape or alt+space.

Launchy is developed to run on XP, however you can try downloading the gdiplus.dll and unzipping it into your Launchy directory to get it to run with Win2000.

For more advanced documentation, please see the readme.pdf file in your Launchy directory.

For support, please see the forums on Launchy’s SourceForge webpage.

There are skins and add-ons available from members of the Launchy community. This is a single-purpose application that exemplifies the concept of doing one thing and doing it well.

Vista provides very few advantages that cannot be added into your existing XP desktop. You can expand your productivity while still saving money. SourceForge and MajorGeeks both offer hundreds of freeware and shareware applications that bring all the usefullness of Vista to the XP platform.

Chitika is offering a free ebook, a compilation of blogging advice from 30 premier bloggers. Click here to download your free copy. (the book is in pdf format, Adobe Reader will be required to view it)

Get free eBook Now!

Another cool tool and member of the GoogleEarth family has been released. Here’s John Hanke’s explanation of Google’s Lat Long Blog,

Welcome to the Google “geo” blog. As web mapping (dare I say “the geoweb”?) matures, we’re finding that we have a lot more to communicate about new developments in Earth, Maps, Local, and our APIs. The tools are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and more interrelated — not only to each other, but also to the web at large and to things like search. Things are changing so fast we thought a blog focused on this topic would be the best way to communicate with you, both about our products and about the overall development of geo on the web.

Warning: this site has the potential to become work-unfriendly.

[tags]google, maps, blog[/tags]

Directory Aviva has posted a very informative article on “12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know”. It covers topics such as;
Whether to Disclose Paid Posts
The Legal Use of Images and Thumbnails
Handling Private Data About Your Readers

If you blog about anything, you should read and consider this article. It could save you a lot of grief in the future.

According to a recent New York Times article, the presence of laptops in the classroom is being reconsidered.

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse…

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.

Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance and lower detention and dropout rates.

But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them rigorously.

I don’t feel that it’s fair to either the schools or technology to demand instant results from such a new experiment. Schools haven’t had much time to figure out the best way to incorporate technology into the educational process. The technology can be adapted to meet the needs of students and administrators both, but that takes time as well.

Computers are here to stay, and as with many new “gadgets”. the young will often be the first-adopters. We can’t expect schools to adopt a Luddite-like attitude toward computers in general and still meet the needs of the students. While I might agree that laptops in the schools create more problems than they solve, and may never be appropriate for the classroom, desktop machines that have software to control access to the internet and that can be locked down or turned off during tests, etc., need to be included in the learning process. Further, I don’t think this issue is limited to laptops or computers. The same debate is being waged over the place of cell phones on campus. New technologies require new policies, and those take time and research before being implemented.

Schools need to determine how best to use computers in the classroom. Students need to learn how best to use the internet as part of their education. Computing is not a single solution, it needs to be integrated sensibly and practically into the current system.

I also don’t believe that technology is contributing to the decline of humanity, as some pundits have suggested. It has introduced new elements into society, and some of those deviate drastically from what we’re used to. We can’t turn back the clock and pretend that computers don’t impact our lives. It achieves nothing to be overly nostalgic for times gone by and to suggest that past lifestyles would somehow be workable in our modern times.

We are no longer a rural society. There are still remnants of that lifestyle here and there, but it’s nowhere as predominant as it once was. Change may not always be perceived as good, but it is often inevitable. We are headed into a future where technology will touch on nearly every aspect of our lives. We can either learn how best to deal with that eventuality, or we can attempt to live in denial and fall further behind the curve. Everyone will have to make their own decision.

But the schools, in order to prepare students for their futures, need to accept the presence of computers in their lives and find the best way to introduce that element into the classroom.