The Cost Of Being Online

teksquisite has been around Experts Exchange -- under an assumed name or six -- since 2000. Long an Expert in computer security, her current focus is on protection against malware.

Is malware, spam and a loss of privacy the cost of being online?

I've been working with a company called Cocoon that doesn't think so.

What are the core beliefs that drive Cocoon? That everyone should have access to the Web, have a right to online privacy, and that the act of browsing the Web should not expose their computer to malicious code.

So how are they going about meeting these lofty goals? Well, the company is young so some things are still taking shape, but from a malware standpoint, they believe the key problem is the accessibility current browsers allow to your computer. Many of you reading this are likely your family's IT gal. You've seen what gets downloaded unwittingly, and the impact it has on those machines. They believe the traditional anti-virus solution of dealing with the problem after it's reached your computer is wrong. So, the core concept behind Cocoon is to keep the Net at arms distance from your hard drive and your computer.

From a privacy perspective, they believe you have a right to control what you share and how you share it, and those controls should be easy to use with the default being privacy. A quick look at the Cocoon privacy policy is all it takes to see they want to keep things simple and clear.

The way all this is done is by Cocoon providing a smart proxy service via a browser add-on, currently available for Firefox only but a version for Internet Explorer is in development. To protect from hacking and malware, Cocoon provides an encrypted proxy connection that protects your IP address and your connection to the rest of the non-local Internet. No more getting spied on by tools like Firesheep on open Wi-Fi networks; Cocoon blocks malware from being downloaded to your computer by preventing all unwanted downloads, and will soon be introducing active virus-scanning for all desired downloads.

The privacy Cocoon offers includes the ability to proxy your email address, and if you want, you can keep your personal browsing data encrypted yet accessible from different machines you use (handy for not just access to your history, but log-in credentials as well).

All of this is done regardless of your existing proxy setup, so that you can access the web even from behind firewalls that restrict access to free speech. And soon, they plan to release mobile platforms to allow greater accessibility to the Web to people around the world.

The people behind Cocoon include CTO and co-founder Brian Fox. In 1995 Brian completed the world's first Internet banking system for Wells Fargo. He was employee No. 1 at the Free Software Foundation (Project GNU), where he wrote software, including the BASH shell, widely used in all modern versions of UNIX (Linux, SunOS, and Mac OS X). The board of advisors includes Marvin Minsky, co-founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence laboratory, and Aaron Emigh, co-founder of Shopkick.

The service was just launched in January, but I have been an early user from its initial beta period. While there are still expected bugs to be worked out, I have been excited by the progress they've made and their responsiveness to user feedback. I'm glad to be able to share info about Cocoon with my fellow Experts-Exchange members -- you might find it helpful in reducing your family IT support work!

Meet-up In Phoenix

Experts Exchange, represented by WhackAMod, AnnieMod, Nata and Netminder, hosted a meet-up at the SunUp Brewing Company in Phoenix, Arizona last week. With food and drink provided by EE, the attendees ranged from relative novices to highly advanced programmers. The weather was hot (DOH!), but as AnnieMod said, the air conditioning always works in Phoenix in the summer; the conversations were lively and the company was outstanding. Thanks for coming by!

The EE Road Show continues in Seattle, Washington on Tuesday, July 26 at Pike Pub and Brewery from 4 pm to 8 pm. Come have free appetizers and beer, on us, with EE employees including Site Director Andy Alsup and Site Administrator WhackAMod. For more information and to RSVP, visit our meet-up page.

More News and Notes

Oh, Marky, we hardly knew ye: A recent blog post on CNN says that because the author has joined Facebook, the end is near. That depends on who you talk to, of course, or even when you talk to them; one day, Facebook is leaking like a sieve and the next day, things ain't so bad. It also depends on who is doing the leaving. The only way Facebook is going to be worth the $100 billion or so that all the talking heads are saying it will be worth when it has its IPO (early next year, supposedly) is if it can generate a return on the investment (people are unhappy with RIM because numbers are headed in the wrong direction), and it's going to have to do that on advertising.

And there's the rub. In today's economy, kids don't spend a lot because they don't have a lot, so if the people who are letting their Facebook pages collect dust are teenagers, who cares? They aren't buying, whether something is advertised or not (and they're going elsewhere anyway). The real key is the "more mature" users who use Facebook to do a lot of things; in North America and Europe, they're prepared to respond to advertising on websites. What remains to be seen is how well all of those nations where Facebook is growing will click on ads too.

We won't even mention Facebook's total lack of a sense of humor.

Apropos of which, we haven't lost sight of the fact that LinkedIn -- which just six weeks ago had its IPO, opening at $45 and doubling that its first day -- is now below $66, having lost over a third of its value. Pandora, the Internet radio company that -- like LinkedIn -- has never made a profit, lost nearly 25 per cent of its value on its second day. It might not be quite as bad as Bitcoin's collapse, but it's bad enough to make people question whether there is another DotCom bubble getting ready to pop.

Happy Birthday, IBM. And while we're on the subject of things that seem to have been around forever, one of the tech world's longest-running jokes came to an end last week as Duke Nukem Forever finally appeared in stores. Based on the reviews, it may still be there at Christmas.

We don't make this stuff up: Anonymous, the group whose spot in the sun has been eclipsed by LulzSec, had its network hacked.

Flying the Unfriendly Skies: Had it not been for the cirucmstances, we might have found the tweets from our not-so-old buddy nexusnation, who was at the time stuck in Columbus, Ohio, vastly entertaining. But the flight originated just up the road in Dayton, which certainly didn't help. It probably also didn't help that United Airlines was recovering from a network connectivity problem that delayed hundreds of flights. And people wonder why we drive to see the grandchildren.

Why attorneys make all that money: A teenager is suing a "business partner" over a Twitter account. I wouldn't want to be the judge in this one. In other legal shenanigans, Oracle is suing Google over Android; Cisco is being sued for selling to China, Apple is being sued over the iBooks trademark, and Microsoft will pay i4i $290 million for violating patents.

Good news and bad news: We can just see the executive meeting. Big table. A bunch of people with Microsoft tablets in front of them. Not an iPhone in sight. Guy walks in and says, "The good news is that the FTC and the Justice department have okayed our being purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. The bad news... well... remember those stock options? Forget about them."

You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? Google apparently doesn't. Still, Google comes up with some great logos.

We knew someone would step up: Last issue, we told you about our new feature called The ANY Key Department, working on the theory that some body making public policy would do something that was pretty silly. We could go on and on about the soon-to-be-former-Congressman from New York who got a little too enthusiastic with social media, but everyone else is so we'll pass. We could go after Sarah Palin for not knowing American history (or pretty much any potential candidate who is trying to differentiate her/himself from the crowd). Instead, we'll stay close to home and pick on California's legislature, which has passed a bill to force out-of-state businesses to collect sales taxes. The theory is that retailers like Amazon will be cutting checks for millions of dollars and that the state will get lots of revenue when it needs it. But when California raised a bunch of money by taxing tobacco through the roof, people stopped buying it, and revenues that local governments got from the state dropped.

Help wanted: A company in Hollywood is looking for a blogger. Good pay and free tin-foil hats.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Wikipedia wants to be named to the world heritage list operated by UNESCO. We'll put our money on The Onion getting a Pulitzer first. Internet Explorer 8 is the most used browser. Somewhere, a web developer is crying. Also, Barack Obama has the third most popular Twitter account. We cannot bring ourselves to tell you who has more followers than he does. Finally, Nokia introduced a new phone that uses an operating system Nokia is going to drop.

Nata's Corner

It's been one heck of a few weeks if you're worried about your personal data. The list of companies and organizations that have been successfully breached by LulzSec (you've gotta love their website, though) is pretty astonishing, as long as your credit card information isn't part of what gets exposed: The X Factor, Fox (which televises The X Factor), a database of UK ATM machines, Sony at least twice, the Public Broadcasting System, Nintendo, an FBI affiliate, Sony BMG Greece and New York, a list of email addresses and passwords of people who, I hope, aren't reading this column, Bethesda Softworks, the US Senate and, most recently, the CIA. It's fascinating that LulzSec tweets about its exploits, and they almost beg companies to improve the security of their customers.

There are some pretty entertaining twists to the LulzSec story, though. One is that they weren't very happy about the hack of Sega over the weekend ("We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down," read a tweet). Another is that they have a telephone request line (Columbus, Ohio, in case you're curious) at which you can leave a recorded message about sites you would like to see attacked. I'm not going to advocate breaking any laws or anything like that, but AG Bank in Azerbaijan, DnB Nord Banka in Latvia and St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank in the Caribbean handle 95 per cent of the sales from spam. Just sayin'; you know they're making a ton of money doing things like spaming Amazon with phoney books, not to mention selling a lot of enhancement pills. As Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein, "Follow the money."

Nope. Instead, arrest one teenager, though LulzSec he isn't one of them.

They're back -- the nasty people who brought us Antivirus 2010 and all the other variants. Now they're out with Antivirus 2012, which, from what I hear, is even more of a bear to remove than its older brother. Also back in the controversy over how Wi-Fi-enabled devices are tracked by Google (and Microsoft, Apple and Skyhook Wireless, so don't go getting all twisted). That sure makes a mess of a bunch of CSI reruns, though; they don't have to use all that fancy triangulating to find out where a cell phone is; now they can just Google for it.

Milestones

New Geniuses: mwvisa1 has earned his third Genius certificate in the Microsoft SQL Server topic area. Picking up his second was sirbounty, this one in VB Script. Earning their first 7-digit certificates were for_yan in Java, tgerbert in C# Programming, rkworlds in ASP.NET and aburr in Math / Science respectively. Outstanding work, folks!

Milestones:

• TheLearnedOne has earned 5,000,000 points in the VB.NET topic area, but that only begins to tell his story. He is one of only two members to have more than 2,000,000 points in each of five TAs, one of three to have 3,000,000 in three TAs and 4,000,000 in two TAs.
• zorvek became the sixth member of EE to earn 12,000,000 points in a single topic area, accomplishing the feat in Microsoft Excel.
• DatabaseMX has earned over 9,000,000 points since joining Experts Exchange. He has also reached that level in the Microsoft Access topic area.
• Ray_Paseur reached the 7,000,000 point level in PHP Scripting.
• SysExpert is the 40th member of Experts Exchange to go over 8,000,000 points overall.
• sdstuber has earned 6,000,000 points overall. He also went over 3,000,000 points in the Oracle topic area, and has 2,000,000 points in each of three TAs.
• boag2000 has earned 4,000,000 points in the Microsoft Access TA. He also has three other Genius certificates.
• harfang has reached the 5,000,000 point level.