I had back-to-back reminders last week of the importance of having regular backups.
On Monday, I helped a friend and occasional client restore Windows 7 to his notebook after Dell replaced his hard drive under warranty and helpfully (ha ha ha) included a spanking clean Windows XP image. Gee, thanks.
Early this year when I helped him upgrade to Windows 7, I had impressed on him the need to get an external hard drive and do regular backups. He assured me he had backing up religiously, but when we tried to restore those backups the process failed. It turned out that he wasn’t using the Windows Image Backup utility. Instead, he had installed the NTI backup program that had come with his external hard drive. Those "full backups" contained way too little data to be full images and were unrecoverable anyway.
Fortunately, he had hung on to the original hard drive, which was still readable. With the help of an external SATA-to-USB converter I was able to get all his data back with no problems. If the original drive had been dead instead of just flaky, this story would have had a much unhappier ending. Still, what should have been a 10-minute image restore turned into a two-hour wild goose chase followed by a clean install and manual file transfer. Tedious. Not fun.
Then, on Thursday, our friendly local appliance repairman came by the house to look at our misbehaving dishwasher. As he disassembled it, he mentioned in passing that he and his wife had been having a world of problems with their PC, which was now displaying error messages about the hard disk at startup and then locking up. We talked about the probable solution (get a new hard drive), and when I asked about backups he sheepishly admitted he didn’t have any. He’d been thinking about it, especially given that this drive had acted up earlier, but he hadn’t gotten around to it. His wife could retype her resumes and if they lost some music, no big deal. He was thinking about getting another iPod so he could have his music collection in two places.
I told him he’d get much better bang for his backup buck by getting an external hard drive and upgrading from Windows Vista Home Premium to the equivalent edition of Windows 7, which includes the image backup program. He was shocked when I told him how far the prices of good-sized external hard drives had dropped. We’ll see if he gets backup religion.
Anyway, the moral of these two stories is pretty straightforward: Back up. And make sure you’re actually backing up everything you think you are.
What’s your backup strategy? And have you checked your backups lately?
When I visited the ASUS website this morning to get the latest drivers for a new disk controller, I was greeted with this message:
Priceless.
Man, it’s been a long, long road for Ceton. Their four-tuner CableCARD-compatible device was announced in November 2007. Now, nearly three years later, it’s still not on the market. But it’s getting closer. The last word I heard, from the company itself and from knowledgeable outside sources, was that the cards would be shipping by the end of June. But that date came and went, and yesterday a post by a Ceton rep at The Green Button announced that the InfiniTV 4 tuners are finally in production and maybe, just maybe, they’ll get here by the end of this month:
We want to pass along some good news and let you know that the Ceton InfiniTV 4 quad-tuner cards are now in production! Ceton personnel are currently overseas supervising the final assembly and testing process. We’re sorry for the unexpected delays but many other companies were hit with parts shortages as we were, including Apple for the release of iPad and iPhone 4. Delivery of units will begin as soon as final testing and shipment from overseas have been completed. We’ll update you shortly as soon as we can confirm an actual delivery date.
I placed my order a while back and was hoping to have it in time for the season debut of Mad Men on July 25. Looks like there’s an outside chance that will happen.
Meanwhile, I’m baffled why Ceton doesn’t post stuff like this on its web site or through its Twitter account.
Your average techie probably hasn’t read Consumer Reports in years, but they’re still big in the heartland. And that’s why this is big news:
Lab tests: Why Consumer Reports can’t recommend the iPhone 4
It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.
The report also suggests that Apple is being less than candid about the problem:
Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4′s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that "mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength."
And my favorite part:
We did, however, find an affordable solution for suffering iPhone 4 users: Cover the antenna gap with a piece of duct tape or another thick, non-conductive material. It may not be pretty, but it works.
Ouch.
It took longer than expected, but Carl Siechert and I finally finished writing Office 2010 Inside Out. We’re about halfway through page proofs and looking forward to getting this book to the printer soon.
Normal blogging will resume shortly.
URL shorteners are becoming extraordinarily popular, thanks mostly to Twitter. The need to cram a full URL into 140 characters has spawned services like bit.ly, is.gd, and Twitter’s new t.co. URL shorteners convert the real URL to one that takes up fewer characters. So http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/office-starter-2010-drops-the-crapware-adds-ads/2220 becomes http://is.gd/cQkSS. (Both links lead to the same page.) And there are lots of shortening services, which means my original link could also be (and certainly is) translated into links from bit.ly and tinyurl.com and goo.gl and even ZDNet’s official domain, zd.net.
The problem is, the shortening process is also destructive, removing some key data points that you need to make an informed trust decision about whether to click that link. What domain is it from? Is it one I am confident will not be compromised? Does the name of the link provide any clues about its content?
With short URLs, you lose those data points. My original very long URL gives me all sorts of clues that allow me to set my expectations with confidence. I know it’s at a domain I trust, zdnet.com, and I can even divine the title of the article. The shortened URL tells me nothing.
The consequences of following a bad link can be unfortunate. After I got a couple of very suspicious links from a couple of unrecognized Twitter accounts yesterday, I passed them along to Chris Boyd (@paperghost on Twitter) who wrote about the phenomenon on The Sunbelt Blog (see "PDF exploit spam run on Twitter") and also pointed to a technical article at the Trend Micro blog: "New malicious Twitter spam."
Here’s how it works: A hostile Twitter account churns out messages that say, “Wow, a marvelous product” or "I Just Cant Believe This," accompanied by a handful of user names to make sure they get seen.
Click the link, and you might be redirected to some sort of paid movie service. […]
If you’re unlucky, however, you’ll end up at a URL such as fqsmydkvsffz(dot)com/tre/vena(dot)html, where PDF exploits await.
So how do you protect yourself? One way is to be suspicious of short URL services and check the link before you visit the page. One feature I like about TweetDeck is it shows a preview of the URL when you click a shortened URL.
I like the fact that Bit.ly has an API that allows third parties to customize their domain for short links. When I see a short URL from the zd.net domain, I am very confident that it is safe to click on and in fact I know that I am going to go to the ZDNet site.
If you’re suspicious about a short link, you can often preview its contents by pasting the link into a browser and then tacking a suffix onto it. For a link from is.gd, for example, you can add a minus sign (hyphen) to the end of the URL to visit a preview page hosted on the is.gd servers. You can preview a bit.ly link by tacking a plus sign onto the end. If you’re suspicious of a link, copy it to the Clipboard, paste it into the address bar, and add the appropriate suffix.
The URL shortening services are also reacting to complaints fairly swiftly. The hostile links I saw yesterday were disabled within 24 hours. Here’s what I saw when I visited one of those links a few minutes ago:
Bit.ly has an excellent statement of how it handles security:
bit.ly uses data from a number of independent sources in addition to its own internal classifiers to determine whether or not destination sites propogate [sic] spam, viruses, or other malware. The third party sources include Sophos, Websense, VeriSign, PhishTank, and Google Safe Browsing. For Firefox and Chrome browser users, we also have a Preview Plugin that allows you to view link details before clicking. If you are a Twitter user, similar preview features are available from Tweetdeck (see a write-up of how it works here)
The goal of the bad guys is to get you to click on their link, and they’re good enough at it to warrant some respect. Ultimately, there are a lot of links I simply don’t click, especially those that ostensibly lead to shocking or amusing videos and articles. The reward isn’t worth the risk. Links from strangers are always suspicious, but a link that appears to be from a friend might actually be from a hacked Facebook or Twitter account. And you have no idea of where it really goes.
So, seriously: Be careful what you click.
If you’re interested in this topic, it’s worth reading DeWitt Clinton’s recent "More thoughts on URL shorteners," which covers this topic in much more depth than I can do here. Highly recommended reading.