Computer security is often a huge game of cat and mouse – antivirus software companies are always in a race against to protect against the multitude of threats facing the public. Companies and consumers alike are constantly under siege from malware, viruses, hacking attempts, and phishing scams. If you want to be better prepared, keep a lookout for these top security trends in 2012:

Privacy was a hot issue at this year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX. During one
particularly heated panel discussion, privacy advocates squared off against advertisers about data
harvesting and browser tracking practices. Both made compelling arguments for their cases, but the
heart of the matter remains; should you be concerned for your privacy while browsing the web?

Data harvesting has been an ongoing focal point for the media in the past few years. Social media giants
are constantly pushing the envelope to see how much they can scrape by with before getting slapped
with a violation. Protests have been made and communities have logged complaints, but shockingly
enough, these companies retain the majority of their user base. Recently, Facebook and Google have
been thrust in the spotlight and criticized for their choices regarding user data, namely the choice to
cultivate information on their users for targeted advertisements and other applications that remain
a mystery. Despite the negative attention, Google ignored the opportunity to make an appearance at
the SXSW panel to address privacy concerns. But why is there so much commotion over a seemingly
harmless feature that is a minor annoyance at most?

Privacy risk or consumer’s best friend?

Current algorithms for targeted advertisements are only minimally effective. They are unable to make
distinctions between something you buy for yourself or as a gift. Amazon’s recommendations seem to
make haphazard shots in the dark based on similar products that other shoppers have recently viewed.
While it can be argued that this service is only helpful a fraction of the time for consumers, it can be
helpful when shopping around and exploring new brands and services. Of course, it is easy to opt out of
targeted advertisements, but if you do choose to allow your information to be collected, are you safe?

"One of the real potential harms [is that] big data has huge potential to do great things...cool things,"
said jay Stanley, a privacy attorney for ALCU. "But it also has the potential to invade our privacy by
revealing things we didn't choose to reveal."

When security breaches and theft occurs, it’s often messy, leaving thousands affected with little
recourse. Since there is no real precedent in place for these situations, compensation for impacted
parties is minimal at most.

How should companies be regulated?

Arguments over when and how the government should step in to regulate internet practices caused
a big stir. Berin Szoka, panelist and president of TechFreedom, argued that the government should
enforce existing laws in favor creating new ones. He suggested that the FTC “punish unfair trade
practices” when companies cross the line, and advocated government involvement when harm was
present. Currently, privacy laws are in place in 46 states but not at the federal level.

"It's not that smart yet, so it's not that scary,” Stanley said. “But as it gets smarter it will get scarier,
when you get to artificial intelligence levels that approach humans and they're still reading your mail."

So, who’s right? Is data harvesting a concern for you?

If only you could get paid to browse the web all day, am I right? Well, thanks to a new  Google project called Screenwise, that dream has become a reality — provided your online privacy isn’t worth all that much to you.

The first and more lightweight Screenwise option is currently recruiting panelists  (although it looks like they’re full up as of the time of this writing). As a Screenwise panelist, you agree to install a browser extension that tells Google all about every site you visit via Chrome. In exchange, you get a $5 Amazon gift card for signing up, plus another $5 gift card every three months you remain with the service, to a maximum of $25.

The second option is currently invite-only and will both earn you a lot more money and  lot more invasion of privacy. Participants in this program — who must be invited to join — will earn $100 up-front and an additional $20 each month. In exchange, users have to install a special Cisco router that will report all browsing data back to Google. Except when web surfers use incognito tabs or secure sessions, all browsing data will also be personally identifiable to Google. The company is also allowed to provide aggregated data to “academic institutions, advertisers, publishers, and programming networks,” they state in their user agreement.

Still, for those with nothing to hide and no qualms about feeding Google’s massive marketing machine, it could be an easy way to make a few extra dollars each month.

By Chad Henderson

A few weeks ago, I wrote a bit about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Luckily for us, congress has not passed the act yet, but will continue to debate it when they return from their winter break. There are good indications that the act will not pass as it is currently written, which is good news for anyone that likes the internet as it now exists.

Supporters of SOPA, such as notorious domain registrar and hosting company GoDaddy, continue to come under scrutiny, however. GoDaddy was recently outed as a supporter of SOPA and apparently even had a hand in guiding the creation of the act. GoDaddy is the only real 'internet' company to appear on the list of supporting businesses that was released by the House Judiciary Committee and the fact that any internet company would support the act has surprised and baffled the professional internet community. 

Since being revealed as supported of SOPA, GoDaddy has seen a mass exodus as outraged customers transfer to other domain registrars and hosting companies, losing over 37,000 domain names in the first few days. Users of the popular community news site Reddit even organized an official "Move Your Domains Day" on Dec 29th, 2011 and created a Boycott GoDaddy website to encourage others to make the move.  The total number of domains moved away from GoDaddy so far is not known, but it is thought to be as many as 80,000 or more.

The Boycott GoDaddy movement gained enough momentum and garnered enough national press that GoDaddy, which had originally reiterated their support for the act, has decided to bend before the storm and have their name officially removed from the list of supporters. On Friday the 23rd, they released an official statement reversing their course. They did not say they would oppose the act but did state that they would support the act only "when and if the Internet community supports it". 

This sudden change of course for the most powerful domain hosting company in the world speaks to the power of community sites such as Reddit to organize and empower customers to be heard at national and international levels. Because of this, involving your business in politics can be very dangerous and should be done with care and thoughtfulness, especially when you attach yourself to controversy such as SOPA. 

Will you move, or have you already moved, your domains off of GoDaddy? Let us know in the comments.

By Chad Henderson

While searching for an app that would allow my wife and I to share synced lists for things like grocery shopping, I ran across an application that looked promising called Zenbe Lists. According the description in the App Store, it would do exactly what I was looking for. It was not free, so I started looking at the reviews to determine if I would be willing to pay for the app. I only found a few reviews, mostly referencing a syncing problem the app was having. Growing concerned, I visited the company website and clicked on the support link at the top of the page. This took me to a page on Get Satisfaction devoted to this product. 

If you are not familiar with Get Satisfaction, it is a nifty web service that provides you with all the tools you need to respond to customer concerns and requests, without having to build out the system yourself. You simply set up a page for your product or service on Get Satisfaction, point customers who need support to that page, and then provide employees to spend time answering or responding to those support needs. 

The interesting part of the Get Satisfaction business model is that customers do not need to wait for you to set up a page for your service, they can do it for you simply by posting a question or a comment! Then that page will fill up with customers discussing your product without you even being aware of it. Luckily, once you become aware of it, you can then 'claim' it and start responding to the discussions that have already taken place. 

Get Satisfaction does a good job of making it clear if a company has claimed a page or not. A banner at the top of any page will let you know if that company is actively monitoring the page and responding to customer needs. 

When I visited the Zenbe Get Satisfaction page, the banner clearly stated that Zenbe had employees watching and participating in the page. Also, the fact that I was sent to this page from a link on Zenbe's own website, clearly indicated that they were aware and using this service. 

You can imagine my shock when I read down the list of problems and complaints on this page, and realized that most of them were six to nine months old with no response from any company representative. There were many posts talking about the syncing problem that was indicated in the reviews I had read, and a number of posts on many other software and server related problems customers were having. Zenbe had made a few responses to a small number of these, but nothing in recent months. 

More troubling than that, however, were the number of posts in the last few months questioning if the company was even still in business! Customers had grown so concerned about the lack of response from Zenbe that they had started assuming the company no longer existed. This is the exact opposite reaction you want customers to have when they reach out to you for customer support. 

As you can imagine, I did not purchase the app. 

Your business needs to have a plan at the very beginning on how you will deal with customer support issues and then make sure it is implemented. Nothing will kill your business faster than losing your customer's faith. Be prepared to devote time and resources to staying in contact with customers and making sure that they have their concerns addressed. If you put it aside, thinking you will come back to it later, you will lose business. Just ask Zenbe. 

Here is a great article from InfoStor.com about the trends in 2012 in the areas of data storage. The cloud will continue to dominate. RACK59 offers off-site data storage for companies big and small.

By Drew Robb

2011 seemed to be all about Big Data, cloud computing, solid state drives (SSDs), unified storage and integrated storage appliances. So what will 2012 bring? InfoStor talked to several veterans in the storage networking field about what they expect to see.

1. Cloud, Cloud, Cloud

Unlike other data storage fads that come and go within a few months, cloud mania will continue unabated in the year ahead. It has gone way beyond storage and is now very much part of the popular culture, even if few in the general public actually understand it.

My wife's hairdresser Arnaud, for example, is convinced that his iPhone has a wireless connection to an actual physical cloud that hovers above him as he moves around the city. But regardless of a multitude of misconceptions, expect to hear a whole lot more about cloud computing.

"Storage continues to move into the cloud at a steady rate, as more IT managers begin to understand the value of letting somebody else worry about hardware purchases," said Mike Karp, an analyst with Ptak-Noel & Associates. "This is going to have a profound impact on a number of things, not the least of which is the bookkeeping that goes on in data centers because the shift to cloud-based services means a shift from CAPEX-based accounting to OPEX-based accounting."

Read the entire article here: http://www.infostor.com/storage-management/6-storage-networking-trends-to-watch-in-2012.html

Chad Henderson is a new blogger for RACK59.com. He will be writing about local and national technology issues, the internet and the innovative community in Oklahoma. 

About Chad: Chad Henderson is a UX/UI designer and front end website developer, podcaster, twitterfiend and general purpose web geek. After teaching himself HTML by using Lynx, he started his first company, Dreamchasers Web Services, in 1994. Chad is also a founding partner of the Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative, and can be found there often.

Today, Chad blogs about the Stop Online Piracy Act. 

* * *

In the next few days, Congress is going to be voting on what may be the biggest threat to the Internet, as a medium for the exchange of information, that we have seen since the DMCA reared it's nasty head back in 1996.  H.R. 3261, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, may unintentionally (or possibly intentionally) neuter the world wide web as a place of free speech and force websites such as Wikipedia to disappear from our browsers.

If you are not familiar with the bill that was introduced by Texas Republican Lamar Smith earlier this fall, SOPA is intended as another tool for copyright holders looking to stop the illegal use of copyrighted materials on the internet, especially by those websites and servers that are hosted outside the US.  SOPA gives the Department of Justice the ability to force ISP's to block any website that is suspected of having infringing content.  Pay particular attention to the word 'suspected' in that last statement. The action the DOJ can take, can occur before a website has been proven to break any laws. It must only be suspected by a copyright holder to become a target.  SOPA would also allow the DOJ to force payment services such as Paypal and ad networks such as Google AdWords to stop doing any business with the suspected site. The bill could even prevent the website from appearing in search engine results. These steps would effectively vanish the site from the internet.  And not just the infringing content, but the entire site. The effect on a website could be financially devastating.

Imagine YouTube or Facebook suddenly vanishing from the web, simply because a user posted a video that contained a copyrighted song in the background. This scenario seems unlikely (and I will admit that it is) but is nonetheless a possibility within the vague wording of this bill.

Wikipedia is so worried about the possible ramifications of this bill, that founder Jimmy Wales is contemplating a site-wide Wikipedia blackout in protest of it. Sites such as I Work For The Internet have also appeared to garner grass roots support among internet professionals hoping to get the word out.

Learn more about this legislation and contact your representative to make sure they understand what is about to happen, too.

Related sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/i-work-for-the-internet-tell-congress-how-you-really-feel-about-sopa/
http://iworkfortheinternet.org/
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show