High Five for Week Ending 25-Oct 2009

This week saw a couple of major releases; Windows 7 and a new Facebook user interface.  On its surface, the new Facebook “Live” and “News” streams may seem innocuous, if not confusing, to most, it is an obvious reflection of their recent hiring of the FriendFeed founders and indicates their intent to leverage real time search as part of their business model.

#5: How To Build A WiFi Home Surveillance System With Your PC

Our next door neighbor’s home was broken into a couple of weeks ago and suffered significant loss.  I’ve been researching various surveillance options and found this:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-build-a-wifi-home-surveillance-system-with-your-pc/

#4: Email Being Replaced by Social Networks? Not So Fast Wall St. Journal

As someone who is just slightly obsessive compulsive, I love symmetry and this week’s #4 post provides the perfect follow up to the Wall St Journal article that was last week’s #4, “The End of the Email Era.”  This predictable response from email marketing provider Vertical Response” provides some lucid arguments against the somewhat overstated conclusions in the Wall St Journal article

http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2009/10/email-being-replaced-by-social-networks-not-so-fast-wall-st-journal.html

#3: New Views for Your Home Page

The new look of Facebook’s home page is no surprise to those of us who have used FriendFeed.  Recently, Facebook acquired the talent behind that social networking site and promptly gave it the “Friendfeed treatment.”  The thing that flabbergasts me is that Facebook did not publicize this change ahead of time, or provide users with a link to this otherwise obscure blog post that explains the how and why of the changes:

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=162536657130

#2: Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Windows 7

Those of you who have suffered through Windows Vista with me should run, not walk to upgrade to Windows 7.  I’m still waiting for my free upgrades to ship, but the reviews I’ve read are unanimous in their praise that W7 absolves the worst sins of the horror show that was Vista.

http://lifehacker.com/5386953/lifehackers-complete-guide-to-windows-7

#1: Scan of Internet Uncovers Thousands of Vulnerable Embedded Devices

This article covers a serious networking threat to many home users.  If you use a home wireless router to connect your PCs to the Internet, and you’ve never changed the default administrator account password you are in danger!  This vulnerability has been addressed in recent years by Linksys and other manufacturers by requiring a password change before the device will work, but there are still thousands of devices in use that were taken out of the box, plugged in, and never touched again.  The problem is that these routers are exposed to the Internet and all have the same factory default username and password, which allows hackers to take control of your router and, potentially, gain access to your home network.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/vulnerable-devices/

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