Online Home of Derek Meister
Two topics dominated tech news last week, with the new Heartbleed security vulnerability hitting web servers and the end of consumer Windows XP support by Microsoft.
I spoke to Bill Wills of Cleveland’s WTAM 1100 Newsradio about what regular users can do to protect themselves.
WTAM 1100 – Geek Squad – January 23rd, 2012
With all the data available about you online, consumers are starting to look to ways to help reduce the amount of information companies can gather from their web browsing habits.
I had a chance to speak to Bill Wills on Cleveland’s WTAM 1100 Newsradio about how websites can track you, what cookie files are and why some are good and some not so much, as well as a few free “do-not-track” programs to help reduce the information about your online behavior that is available.
WTAM 1100 – Geek Squad – September 12th, 2011
There seems to be a rise in the number of phone or email scams falsely using the Microsoft name going around lately. I had a chance to speak to the Wills & Snyder show on Cleveland’s WTAM 1100 Newsradio this morning.
For more information on these scams, and how to protect yourself, visit the Microsoft Safety & Security Center.
Amazon updated their MP3 download offerings this week with the introduction of their Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player service. The service provides 5GB of free online storage through their existing S3 cloud storage, but if you purchase an MP3 album from Amazon’s digital download store, you’ll get 20GB of space for 12 months free. Any music you purchase and have automatically saved to your Cloud Drive won’t count towards your space limit.
You aren’t limited to Amazon music, however, as you can upload your existing library with the downloadable import tool. Your complete collection can then be played through the Cloud Player website or the Android app that’s now available. No word on when or if there will be an Apple iOS app in the future.
It’s an interesting play in a world of digital downloads, and certainly one that will help draw users of iTunes and other online music stores to Amazon. On the other hand, it’s not quite the death of streaming services like Napster or Rdio.
If you find yourself buying more than one album per month, the pure streaming option these services provide may end up being cheaper, at least if you always have access to the Internet. Even in situations where your access may be limited or intermittent, such as with your smartphone, these services are now offering offline caches that allow you to store and play music while your device loses its signal.
Still, there will always be though who value owning their music outright versus streaming, even if that ownership consists of what is essentially a license to play a file downloaded from an online store.
While my Macbook downloads and installs it’s updates, I’m spending time on my other system updating the blog here to the recently released WordPress 2.7 update.
While there shouldn’t be much difference from the outside, other than some performance enhancements, the back end looks to have a completely updated interface, which should make bloggers happy. Or angry. Or both.
This may be the motivation to start looking at a new layout for the site, since I’ve used the current design for nearly 5 years.