Cool Yule Tools: Best techie gifts for 2014

The National Santa Agency has a handle on what everyone wants.

Sonos Play:1 $199
This portable speaker lets you experience the joy of the Sonos Music system without the additional equipment (a wireless bridge, for example) needed with other parts of their gear. Control music through the wonderful Sonos app on your phone or tablet and you'll be hearing lovely music all season long.

KEF X300A Wireless Digital Hi-Fi Speaker System $799.99
When you think of wireless speakers, you think of smaller, Bluetooth-enabled devices (such as the Jambox Jawbone, or the Sonos Play:1, etc.), aimed a providing some good sound for music stored on tablets, phones, etc. These speakers are not like those systems.

The KEF X300A speakers are huge speakers – they look more like giant audio system speakers you’d have connected to your older audio system (if you still had a receiver, record player, cassette deck, etc.) They’re very heavy – when you get these, decide quickly where you want them and keep them there – portable speakers these are not.

iHome iDL100 – Triple Charging FM Clock Radio Stereo System $149.99
With the integration of alarm clock functions (clock, alarm, snooze button, etc.), you’ll most likely want to have this unit sitting on your nightstand. The Lightning Connector dock at the top lets you place your iPhone 5/5S (or the new 6 models) as well as your iPad to recharge it. If you’re so motivated, you can even set your alarm clock to wake up to a favorite song instead of an annoying buzzer or beep.

But leaving this on a bedroom nightstand isn’t the only thing you’ll want to do with the iDL100 – The system allows for three devices to be recharged (the two Lightning-based devices at the top, as well as a USB charging port in the back), and the speakers are good enough to place in a kitchen or other small room for additional audio entertainment. If you have a video that you’d like to watch on your phone or tablet, for example, the system provides excellent audio to accompany the video. An AUX in jack lets you connect any other older audio device (or an old iPod that doesn’t have the Lightning connector).

Pure Evoke F4 with Bluetooth $220
Pure continues to impress us with its Internet-radio-themed devices – this Evoke F4 is a very old-school, classic look-and-feel device that can access a variety of different music streaming sources from around the world. But also realizing that customers may already have a bunch of music either stored on computers, storage devices or even phones/tablets, they’ve added Bluetooth connectivity to play music from those devices to the Evoke F4 system.

In addition to the Internet radio services (connecting through Pure’s Connect service), the Evoke F4 can connect to Sirius XM satellite radio (a separate subscription would be required) and FM radio (hence the old-school metal antenna). Connecting to the Internet is done through Wi-Fi (interestingly, no Ethernet port on the unit). Volume control and menu control are handled through nice metal dials, but there’s also some touch-enabled buttons on the display for making other menu choices.

Star Wars Street by 50 on-ear wired headphones (SMS Audio) $199.95
If you’re a Star Wars fan and you love music, and - more importantly - you want others to know about your love of the movie, then these headphones are ones that you’ll want to sport when you’re out and about. These high-performance headphones provide pretty good sound quality for your music, movies or if you want to use when video gaming, and come in different Star Wars themes and colors (we tried the white Stormtrooper model, but there’s also some other cool colors/themes such as Rebel Alliance, Boba Fett and Galactic Empire). The on-ear wired headphones include 40mm drivers, passive noise cancellation (non-powered) and can fold up for putting into your travel bag.

Icon Q Boundless E1 Bluetooth earphones $65
These small and light earbuds/earphones will wirelessly connect you with your music device (phone, MP3 player, tablet) without a tangled cord getting in the way. This can be good if you want to use these while working out (although I prefer the Plantronics BackBeat Fit earbuds for that purpose), or if you just don’t like the extra bulk of a connection cord. The earbuds provide good, but not stellar, sound for your music or movies -you are using Bluetooth, after all. Pairing can be done via Bluetooth (an in-ear prompt helps you determine whether the earphones are powered on or off, or whether you’re in pairing mode), or NFC if you have an NFC-compatible phone or tablet.

Polk Audio Ultrafocus 8000LE noise cancelling headphones $250
For comfort and sound quality, these noise-cancelling headphones are pretty impressive. We've tried other brands and they always felt heavy and clunky on the head. They were the kind where your wife says, “You’re not really going out of the house wearing those are you?”

The Ultrafocus 800LE is Star-Wars-white plastic on the outside and chocolate brown on the inside – which means the ear cups themselves are brown along with the padding on the inside of the headband. On the outside of the left ear cup is the battery cover for the two AAA batteries you need to run the headphones. On the outside of the right is a circular control panel.

Plantronics BackBeat Fit headphones $129.99
These super comfortable, around-the-ear earbuds use Bluetooth wireless to connect to your phone/music player, and provide an outstanding listening experience for when you're jogging, running or generally working out and building up a sweat. The headphones are sweatproof and have a long-lasting battery, so the tunes won't cut out on Heartbreak Hill.

Plantronics BackBeat Pro headphones $249.99
These over-the-head headphones include active noise cancellation and a superior battery life, making it a great gift for anyone looking for great-sounding music and quiet while they’re in a noisy environment (aka planes, room full of kids, etc.) Additional features, such as multipoint connections (connecting to a phone and tablet, for example), an “OpenMic” button that reduces the volume so you can hear outside noise without removing the headphones, and a nice comfortable fit make this an excellent choice to give or receive as a gift this year.

iHome iBN26 Bluetooth speaker/speaker phone $79.99
If you're looking for a small and stylish wireless speaker for casual use around the house, iHome's iBN26 should be on your list. This compact system can connect to your mobile device using Bluetooth or NFC. After pairing, all you have to do is start playing music on your mobile device and your songs will be streamed wirelessly to the iBN26. Sound quality is good, albeit light on bass and a little muddy on higher notes. But for the price, it's more than enough to fill a room with whatever tunes you fancy.

Boom Swap headphones $69.99
Hey kids, having a hard time deciding whether you want on-ear or over-the-ear headphones? Can’t decide what color to make your headband or earcups? Then check out The Boom Swap headphones, a modular headphone system that allows you to make changes depending on your mood and situation. It’s like a “build your own headphone” system! The headphones are made out of a flexible plastic and come with several components, including two foam over-the-ear earcups that you can easily slide onto the on-ear parts. The flexible headband can be removed and replaced with a second one of a different color (ours came with black and blue headbands). On the outside of the earcups, another two options for colors. The headphones come with three color options (black/blue, white/black and mint/orange), but unfortunately you can’t buy different colored headbands or earcaps separately.

Polk Audio Hinge headphones $97 (Newegg) to $129 (Best Buy and Nordstrom)
These headphones have an old-school, over-the-ear style, but in a compact form that’s also more comfortable. The aluminum frame make them lightweight, yet still very sturdy, adding the additional comfort.

These were a lot more comfortable than most on-ear sets we’ve tried - there’s a good seal, but not a lot of tight pressure. Music quality was surprisingly good bass and treble for headphone sin this price range - it gave out some nice deep and clear tones.

REPORT 3: Office gadgets and other work gear
Why should your family members have all the cool gifts at home? Here are some picks of some great technology gift ideas that will make you more productive when you're working in your cubicle or office.

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Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

The top infosec issues of 2014

Security experts spot the trends of the year almost past

There is still time for any list of the “top information security issues of 2014” to be rendered obsolete. The holiday shopping season is just getting into high gear, after all, and everybody knows it was from late November to mid-December last year when the catastrophic Target breach occurred.

But this list is about more than attacks and breaches – it is about broader infosec issues or trends that are likely to shape the future of the industry.

Several experts offered CSO some thoughts on their top picks, what can be learned from them and whether that knowledge can help organizations improve their security posture in the coming year.

Cyber threats trump terrorism
An Associated Press story this past week on the federal government’s $10-billion annual effort to secure its multiple agencies noted, almost in passing, that, “intelligence officials say cybersecurity now trumps terrorism as the No. 1 threat to the U.S.”

That makes sense to Sarah Isaacs, managing partner at Conventus. While cyber attacks have been expanding and evolving for decades, Isaacs said there has been a qualitative change: It is not just criminals trying to steal money – it is nation states using it for espionage and even military advantage.

Be sure not to miss:

Free security tools you should try

In May, “the Department of Justice indicted five members of China’s People’s Liberation Army on felony hacking charges for stealing industrial secrets,” she said. “We’ve never seen that before.”

Then in September, “NATO agreed that a cyber-attack could trigger a military event,” she said. “This is about more than protecting credit cards. This is escalating to new levels.”
"Everyone is oversharing everything. The threats are broad and potentially catastrophic."
sarah isaacs

Sarah Isaacs, managing partner, Conventus
Author, security guru and Co3 Systems CTO Bruce Schneier, would likely agree. In a recent blog post, he wrote that increasingly sophisticated attacks, especially advanced persistent threats (APT) that are not about financial theft, are coming from, “a new sort of attacker, which requires a new threat model.”

There is evidence of that in a recent study by ISACA on APTs. CEO Rob Clyde said 92% of respondents, “feel APTs are a serious threat and have the ability to impact national security and economic stability.”

Clouds – private, public and hybrid – are not new. But the steady increase in the use of cloud storage services is posing larger risks to businesses.

Schneier, in his blog post, said the continuing migration to clouds means, “we've lost control of our computing environment. More of our data is held in the cloud by other companies …”

While experts say cloud service providers frequently provide better security, that may not be true of so-called “shadow” or “rogue” use of clouds by workers who believe that is an easier way to do their jobs than going through IT.

Internet of Everything (IoE) – a hacker frontier

The Internet of Things (IoT) is so last year. It is now the IoE. Smart, embedded devices in homes, cars, electronics, machines, and worn by individuals are now mainstream. They already number in the billions, and estimates of their growth range from 50 billion by 2020 to more than a trillion within the next decade.

And that means a growing tsunami of data flowing to the Internet, where it can be sold for marketing purposes or stolen for more malicious means.

Isaacs, who says she is among those who uses an exercise wearable, said she used “dummy data” to register it. “So nobody knows it’s my data,” she said. “It can’t be mapped directly to me.”

In general, however, she said, “everyone is oversharing everything. The threats are broad and potentially catastrophic. I’m very nervous about the smart cars I see.

There does seem to be an increasing awareness of the privacy implications of smart cars. The AP reported this week that 19 automakers that make most of the cars and trucks sold in the U.S. signed on to a set of principles, delivered to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), that seek to reassure vehicle owners that the information gathered by those vehicles, “won't be handed over to authorities without a court order, sold to insurance companies or used to bombard them with ads … without their permission.”

The vulnerabilities of “smart” devices to hacking have been demonstrated numerous times, prompting Phil Montgomery, senior vice president of Identiv to call for, “a more regimented standards-based security approach that relies less on outdates processes around username/password technology and more on stronger forms of authentication.”

No parties for third parties
This was the year that the risks of breaches through third-party contractors made it into mainstream consciousness. The Target breach, which exposed 70 million records, was just one of many that came through outside vendors.

Regulatory agencies are trying to maintain that awareness. Stephen Orfei, the new general manager of the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) noted in a recent interview that, “security is only as good as your weakest link – which means the security practices of your business partners should be as high a priority as the integrity of your own systems.”
"Employee negligence was at an all-time high in 2014."
christine marciano

Christine Marciano, president, Cyber Data-Risk Managers
Christine Marciano, president of Cyber Data-Risk Managers, said that in addition to vetting vendors for rigorous security standards, companies should, “require their vendors to carry and purchase cyber/data breach insurance, to indemnify them for any costs associated with a data breach caused by the vendor’s negligence.”

The porous, sometimes malicious, human OS
While third parties may be a weak link in the security chain, that is less likely due to technology and more due to the human factor.

It was former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden who brought the risks of malicious insiders to international attention in 2013, but the danger to enterprises can be just as great from loyal insiders who are simply "clueless or careless," and fall for social engineering scams.

Joseph Loomis, founder and CEO of CyberSponse, said he is, “sure there are major companies out there with little controls over their employees and their access rights. Who is watching who and what they’re doing?”

It is also about employees controlling themselves when presented with ever-more persuasive social engineering attacks.

The federal government reported earlier this year that 63 percent of the breaches of its systems in 2013 were due to human error.

According to Marciano, “employee negligence was at an all-time high in 2014,” with the problems ranging from, “failure to perform routine security procedures to lack of security awareness, routine mistakes and misconduct.”

Eldon Sprickerhoff, cofounder and chief security strategist at eSentire, noted that, “phishing emails are getting better and better. I’ve seen some that were so well targeted, so well done that I could not tell the difference.”

And it is not just the average worker who is a problem. Identity Finder CEO Todd Feinman said the problem goes all the way to the top. “Many executives don’t know where their sensitive data is so they don’t know how to protect it,” he said.

Ubiquitous BYOD
While BYOD is now mainstream in the workplace, Isaacs calls the increased focus on mobile computing, “very scary, and it’s going to get even worse.”

BYOD is now bringing, “extremely unreliable business applications inside the walls of corporations,” she said. “There are a lot of software vulnerabilities. Every app that is free or 99 cents, probably doesn’t have great level of security. And people don’t install patches either.”

According to Clyde, “there are now many times more mobile devices than PCs in the world. In fact, in many regions of the world, mobile devices are the only way most users connect to the Internet,” yet security remains a relative afterthought.

ISACA found that, “fewer than half (45%) have changed an online password or PIN code.

And now, connected wearable devices (BYOW) are becoming common in the workplace, yet, “a majority of professionals say their BYOD policy does not address wearable tech, and some do not even have a BYOD policy,” Clyde said.

The age of Incident Response (IR)
All of the above issues have led to an increased focus on IR. According to Schneier, this is not just the year but the decade of IR, following a decade of protection products and another of detection products.

In his blog post, he cited three trends: More data held in the cloud and more networks outsourced; more APTs by nation states and; a continuing lack of investment in protection and detection, leaving the bulk of the burden on response.

But IR has been more on everybody’s lips in 2014 than even a couple of years ago. The mantra of security experts is that it is not a matter of if, but when, an organization will be breached, and that an effective IR plan (combined with detection) can make attacks more of a nuisance than a disaster.

Getting IR right is crucial, but Tom Bain, vice president of CounterTack, calls it, “the hardest job in security. You can have all the technology in place to detect, prevent and analyze, but if your workflow is broken, or the team is so inundated with incident investigation, you are still vulnerable,” he said.

More regulation, please
An industry that generally decries government regulation – retail – is now singing the opposite tune when it comes to cyber security.

A Nov. 6 letter signed by 44 state and national organizations representing retailers, addressed to the leaders of both houses of Congress, called for, “a single federal law applying to all breached entities (to) ensure clear, concise and consistent notices to all affected consumers regardless of where they live or where the breach occurs.”

Sprickerhoff said such a law would be, “a good first step. There are 38 states with different definitions of what is a breach, so things are getting a bit out of hand,” he said. “If you had unifying description of what needs to be done, that’s not a bad thing.”

Richard Bejtlich, chief security strategist, FireEye
“I worry that ‘compliance with frameworks’ attracts a lot of attention,” said Richard Bejtlich, chief security strategist at FireEye. “I would prefer that organizations focus on results or outputs, like what was the time from detection to containment?

“Until organizations track those metrics, based on results, they will not really know if their security posture is improving,” he said.

What to do?
There are, of course, no magic bullets in security. Isaacs said, noting that it’s almost impossible to say what is the biggest threat. “I heard a speech where it was described as, “death by a thousand cuts,” she said.

But experts do have suggestions. Sprickerhoff said more training is crucial, not just the security awareness of employees, but the next generation of IT security experts.

“I don’t think it’s ever been harder to find good people in IT security,” he said. “There’s not much in course work at the college level.”

Eyal Firstenberg, vice president research, LightCyber, said improving security is going to take a combination of technology and training.

“There is a need for fast and accurate alerts and notifications, which ultimately determine the outcome of these cyber engagements,” he said, but added that, “organizations need more professional diagnosticians on staff who are trained to know what threats are real and need to be addressed, and which ones aren’t.”

Ashley Hernandez, an instructor for Guidance Software, calls for more communication among organizations. “Security professionals need to have a way to share intelligence about patterns or attack types to others in their industry or trusted security groups,” she said.

Clyde notes that ISACA, “has a number of programs, from risk governance frameworks like COBIT 5 to the Cybersecurity Nexus (CSX), to ensure cybersecurity professionals have the skills they need to defend enterprises from the plethora of threats.”

Finally, Loomis offers a short list:
Improve procurement processes. “It takes too long to buy new tools,” he said.
Start educating your staff on what the DHS and NIST Frameworks really are. Read the MITRE book on the 10 strategies to a world-class SOC.
Stop believing the marketing and get real-world feedback on tools. “Security has put a lot of money into marketing, but that doesn’t mean the solution is right for the organization,” he said.
Run simulations. “When was the last time a company ran a real cyber drill?” he asked.
Stop following paper policy, “Militarizing your team, running drills, making it second nature is what will help the response process, not following a check list,” he said.

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Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

Doxxing defense: Remove your personal info from data brokers

Don't want your home address or other personal info published to the world? This weekend, take an hour or two to make yourself a less visible target.

Many women gamers and developers, as well as those who support them, have lately come under attack from online trolls. A common intimidation tactic that trolls use is "doxxing," or publicly exposing their targets' personal details, including home address, phone number and even financial records.

Doxxing is often accompanied by threats of violence, sexual assault or murder. The message is clear: We're out to get you, and we know where you live. Some women in tech have left their chosen profession rather than deal with continued threats.

But anyone is susceptible to doxxing, as game developer Phil Fish discovered this summer after speaking up in defense of a female developer. As the host of a feminist podcast, I decided to take the precaution of trying to remove public records of my whereabouts.

Unfortunately, doxxers don't have to work very hard to find a victim's personal info. A number of free and paid services known as data brokers create profiles of vast numbers of individuals based on aggregated data from business directories, social media and other public records. With a specific target in mind, all a doxxer has to do is search one or more of these services to find the details he or she wants.

More bad news: There are hundreds of data brokers, not all of which offer opt-out processes. (Exceptions are made for state-mandated protected groups, such as sexual assault survivors in California.) Removing yourself from all those that do can be a Sisyphean task, but managing your data with just the following 11 can be accomplished in an hour or two.

I selected these brokers based on the following factors:
What those who have been doxxed cited as services that were used against them
Search results for my own name
Consultation with Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and author of Data Brokers and Your Privacy

Opt out of the following services, and you'll have "gotten all of the big ones," says Stephens—but pay attention to the caveat at the end of this story.

Note that some opt-out forms paradoxically require you to submit personal data in order to have it removed; be your own judge of whether this is wise. (I recommend creating a temporary email address specifically for these requests.)

Also note that with most of these services you'll receive a confirmation email shortly after you submit your removal request. If you don't see the email in your inbox, check your spam filter.

Here's what I found when I tried to opt out of each one.

Spokeo
Opt-out form: http://www.spokeo.com/opt_out/new
Verification needed: Email address
Promised turnaround time: 30 minutes
My opt-out result: Effective

Spokeo is used by many doxxers; fortunately, it has one of the easiest opt-out methods. Just search for yourself in the site's directory; when you find a record that matches your identity, copy the URL and submit it via the opt-out form. After you confirm your email address, your listing should be removed. Note that you may need to search by several criteria—name, email address, phone number(s), social media usernames—to find all your records.

Pipl
Opt-out form: https://pipl.com/directory/remove/
Verification needed: Email address
Promised turnaround time: Immediate
My opt-out result: Effective

Pipl is both a search engine and a directory. While results cannot be blocked from the former, listings in the latter can be removed. First, manually craft a URL based on your name in the format of

https://pipl.com/n/firstname_lastname/

and paste it into the opt-out form. You'll see a list of people who share your name. You can then click "Remove" on any results that match your identity. You'll receive an email with a confirmation link.

ZoomInfo
Opt-out form: http://www.zoominfo.com/lookupEmail
Verification needed: Email address
Promised turnaround time: "Within a few days"
My opt-out result: Effective

ZoomInfo is a paid service that won't show you what it knows about you for free. It will acknowledge having your information on record, but only after you provide your email address. It will then send you an email message stating whether any matches were found—so if you no longer have access to the email address in ZoomInfo's database, you're out of luck.

If you do, and a record was found, opting out is as easy as clicking the confirmation link. But if ZoomInfo doesn't have a record of you, you'll still have given it your email address—and a temporary address created for this opt-out will naturally return no results.

ZoomInfo showed no records for me, so I opted out my father, who was listed. ZoomInfo now returns no search results for his email address.

Whitepages
Opt-out form: http://www.whitepagescustomers.com/how-do-i-remove-my-people-search-profile/
Verification needed: Email address and phone number
Promised turnaround time: Immediate
My opt-out result: Effective (but see note)

Up until recently, I had a listed landline. I now pay my phone company a monthly fee for an unlisted number, but it still showed up in places like Whitepages.

To find out if yours does, too, enter your name and address in the search box on the Whitepages home page. If you appear in the results, click the "Claim/Edit" button. Create an account and verify your email address. Whitepages will then ring the number listed in your profile. Just answer the phone and press "1." You can then choose to unlist specific numbers in your profile, or hide the entire profile, via your profile's Privacy settings.

Note: While Whitepages did honor my opt-out request, my record continued to show up in its search results via sponsored partners, such as BeenVerified.com, PeopleSmart.com and InstantCheckmate.com. Many of these sites have opt-out forms similar to the ones I've shared here; if you're truly committed to delisting yourself as completely as possible, you'll need to chase down these rabbit holes as you encounter them.

PeopleSmart
Opt-out form: https://www.peoplesmart.com/optout-go
Verification needed: Email address
Promised turnaround time: Up to 72 hours
My opt-out result: Effective

PeopleSmart is one of only two services on this list that requires you create an account in order to opt out. Once you find your record via the search box on the opt-out page, click "This is Me," create your account and confirm that you want to opt out; the service will send you a confirmation email.

If you do not have a record with PeopleSmart, you can request a manual opt-out by providing your contact information. Note that the company says, "It can take up to 7 days for us to process this type of request."

While PeopleSmart did remove its listing for Ken Gagne, it retained three additional listings for Kenneth Gagne. Once I'd created an account for Ken, I had to find and use a separate opt-out form for these variations on my name.

After you've done your opting out, be sure to adjust your account settings to not receive promotional emails.

CheckPeople
Opt-out form: http://www.checkpeople.com/optout
Verification needed: None
Promised turnaround time: Up to 10 days
My opt-out result: Ineffective

CheckPeople.com is a paid service, but its search engine gives you a free glimpse of what it knows about you. In my case, it's an address I lived at 20 years ago and the names of everyone in my immediate family—including someone a relative was briefly married to more than a decade ago.

To opt out of CheckPeople.com, go to the opt-out form and submit your contact details. Despite the lengthy turnaround period, my first request was not effective. I've submitted a second one and have also taken advantage of the option of mailing a hard copy of my request, with which I included a printout of my result in the CheckPeople.com search engine.

BeenVerified
Opt-out form: http://www.beenverified.com/optout
Verification needed: Email address
Promised turnaround time: 24 hours "in most cases"
My opt-out result: Effective

Opting out of BeenVerified is pretty painless. Submit your name and state to its opt-out form; if you find a matching profile, you can have it removed by verifying your email address.

Intelius and subsidiaries
Opt-out form: https://www.intelius.com/optout.php for Intelius; others below
Verification needed: Government-issued ID
Promised turnaround time: 7−14 days for Intelius; see others below

My opt-out result: Effective
Intelius is the parent company of many data brokers including PublicRecords360 and ZabaSearch, each of which must be opted out of individually. Fortunately, the process for each is similar. Unfortunately, it's the most onerous and aggressive process of any broker on this list, requiring a copy of your government-issued ID. You can block out your photo and driver's license number—only your name, address and birthdate are needed. But this means you can opt out using only the address on your current license; if your license is outdated, or if you want to remove an older address from the Intelius database, you're out of luck.

For Intelius itself, search for your public profile and, if you find it, go to the opt-out form and submit a scan of your ID.

PublicRecords360 also has an online opt-out form, but note that the form is powered by Google Docs. If you don't want corporate behemoths (including Google) to know your identity, then I recommend faxing your ID to 425-974-6194. (The opt-out form also says you can email your request to optout@publicrecords360.com—but the fine print states, "Requests for opt out will not be processed over the phone or via email.") PublicRecords360 says it will take 7 to 14 days to process the opt-out request.

Finally, ZabaSearch—a formerly independent service that has been acquired by Intelius—accepts requests only by fax, after which they take 4 to 6 weeks to process. There is no form or template to fill out for these requests, but again, a copy of your state ID is needed. I suggest finding your profile and including the URL with your request.

I didn't have a listing at ZabaSearch, nor did my father, so I can't report on the effectiveness of opt-out requests.

Intelius owns other data brokers, but these are the three that my sources referenced most often as likely to have my contact information.

US Search
Opt-out form: http://www.ussearch.com/privacylock
Verification needed: Government-issued ID
Promised turnaround time: Within 7−14 days of receipt of proof of identity
My opt-out result: N/A

US Search's database includes "addresses and phone numbers, social networking profiles, plus detailed background information available through public records." It used to charge for its opt-out service, which it calls PrivacyLock; now this service is free. But like ZabaSearch, it requires the offline submission of a copy of a government-issued ID.

After you enter your name, city, state and age in the initial PrivacyLock form and find your name in the results, click "This Is the Record I Would Like to Block." Then you must print a cover sheet with your record number on it, and fax or snail-mail it along with a copy of your ID.

Neither my father nor I had a listing at US Search, so I can't report on the effectiveness of opt-out requests.

PeopleFinders.com
Opt-out form: http://www.peoplefinders.com/manage/
Verification needed: None
Promised turnaround time: 1 hour
My opt-out result: Effective

To opt out of PeopleFinders, go to its opt-out page and search for your name, city and state. There may be multiple matches—for example, PeopleFinders found one record for me, but four for my father. Even though its privacy policy says the site "will only accept opt-out requests directly from the individual whose information is being opted-out," no verification is required, so for each match, I clicked "This is me" then "Opt out my info."

But that's not all: On the next screen you must enter a Recaptcha code, check a couple of disclaimer boxes and click Continue. And PeopleFinders.com isn't above upselling you during this free process. On the final opt-out screen, don't let the service gouge you $49.95 for a copy of your background report.

PeekYou
Opt-out form: http://www.peekyou.com/about/contact/optout/index.php
Verification needed: Email address
Promised turnaround time: Typically 48 hours; some take up to 10 business days
My opt-out result: Effective

PeekYou relies more on social media networks than on phone directories for its information, but it still helps tie together one's discrete identities into a single profile. You'll need to use the site's main search to find your profile's URL, such as http://www.peekyou.com/ken_gagne/352169778, and copy its numerical string (352169778) into the opt-out form, along with your name and email address. You'll have the choice to delist your age or your entire profile. A reason for removal is also required, though this can be as vague as "other."

Final words
Unfortunately, opting out is not a one-time process. "Even though you've opted out, these sites may refresh their data from new information that comes in," says Stephens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Anytime your phone number or address changes or your information becomes available from a new broker, your details may propagate to services you've previously opted out of. One need look no further than the fine print at Whitepages.com for an example, as the site warns: "Whitepages continuously discovers new information, so please check back regularly to make sure your information is shown correctly."

But such vigilance can help avoid even worse outcomes. Few people are more familiar with the consequences of being doxxed than independent game developer Zoe Quinn, who was doxxed in August and has since tolerated months of threats and harassment. Her recent Tumblr post "What To Expect When You're Expecting (the internet to ruin your life)" offers additional advice for obscuring private data, including removing your WHOIS info, checking your Facebook privacy settings, changing your security questions and enabling two-factor authentication.

See our three-part series, "The paranoid's survival guide," for more steps you can take to protect your personal information:

Part 1: How to protect your personal data
Part 2: Protect your privacy on social, mobile and more
Part 3: Opting out, and how to protect your personal data offline

It's almost impossible to remove all traces of your existence from the Internet—but with these steps, you can at least feel safer in your own home.

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20 great productivity apps for Android, iOS, and the Web

20 great productivity apps for Android, iOS, and the Web

These 20 essential apps work on all three platforms, helping you stay productive no matter what device you or your co-workers use

Android, iOS, and Web: 20 multiplatform apps for maximum productivity

Man, the days of "Mac or PC" sure were simple.

It wasn't long ago that the only question you had to consider with compatibility was whether something would run on those two types of computers. These days, most of us interact with a multitude of devices and platforms, either on our own or as a result of our colleagues' choices, and finding productivity tools that work across them all isn't always easy.

When you stop and think about it, it's nothing short of a miracle that any service can provide a consistent experience on an iPhone, an Android phone, an iPad, an Android tablet, and any computer with a modern Web browser. Amazingly enough, though, such tools do exist.

We've tracked down 20 useful options to help you stay productive and in sync from one device to the next. Install them on your various computers and gadgets -- and get your co-workers to do the same -- and you'll be living in multiplatform harmony.

(Quick tip: If you don't have time to read all of this right now, skip to item 15. You're welcome.)


Google Docs
Google's free cloud-based office suite has come into its own over the past several months, with the recent addition of offline access across all platforms along with the ability to edit standard Word documents in their native format. Editing from the mobile apps is also now fairly full-featured, thanks to Google's integration of Quickoffice, a former third-party app the company acquired. Functions like find and replace, undo, and table creation are all available, as are a range of font, paragraph, and table formatting tools. Docs may not be the most robust standalone word processor on any given platform -- you won't find a way to measure word count on the mobile apps, for instance -- but if you’re juggling devices, it’s a solid option for getting the basics done.

App: Google Docs
Developer: Google
Category: Word Processing
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Microsoft Office 365/Office Mobile
For those who still rely on the traditional Microsoft Office ecosystem, the company's Office 365 service provides cloud-based access to documents on the Web and via its Office Mobile Android and iOS apps. The mobile apps are significantly less full-featured than Google's, and they're rather restricted, with no offline access unless you opt to pay a $7- to $10-per-month subscription fee. Access to the iPad app requires a subscription as well, and there is no app for Android tablets as of now. All in all, it's not the greatest suite of services, but it's at least something for folks stuck under Microsoft's umbrella.

App: Microsoft Office 365 / Office Mobile
Developer: Microsoft
Category: Word Processing
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Google Drive
Google's cloud-storage service comes with 15GB of free space (shared with Gmail and Google+ Photos) and the option to upgrade to various higher tiers -- anywhere from 100GB to 30TB -- for $2 to $300 a month. Drive offers seamless integration with Google Docs, as you'd expect. It also excels in search, allowing you to search for objects shown in stored images and text present in scanned documents. Beyond that, Drive is able to display numerous file types -- even Photoshop and Illustrator files, if you're using Android or the Web -- and it provides offline access to your files via both its Web and mobile apps.

App: Google Drive
Developer: Google
Category: Storage
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Microsoft OneDrive
Microsoft's storage offering comes with 15GB of free space and the option to various higher tiers -- 100GB, 200GB, or 1TB -- for $2 to $4 a month (with the 1TB plan requiring a one-year commitment). OneDrive is unique in its tight integration with both Microsoft's Office suite and Windows itself: You can store and access files in OneDrive from the various Office applications, and you can share files to OneDrive directly from Windows File Explorer.

App: OneDrive
Developer: Microsoft
Category: Storage
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Dropbox
Dropbox gives you 2GB of free cloud storage, and you can bump that up to 1TB for $10 a month. While its starting level may be lower than what Google and Microsoft offer, Dropbox provides a wide range of features, including shared folders synced across multiple users and devices, nicely formatted photo galleries that are simple to share, the option to automatically back up photos as they're taken on mobile devices, and the option to remotely wipe a lost device (available only to paying customers). Dropbox’s powerful API has also made it a popular storage integration choice for many mobile apps.

App: Dropbox
Developer: Dropbox
Category: Storage
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Box
Box provides 10GB of free space with the option to upgrade to 100GB for $10 a month; unlimited storage plans are also available for businesswide accounts with at least three users for $15 per user per month. Box is working hard to set itself apart with enterprise-targeted features like an integrated file-commenting system and granular controls over permissions, allowing you to control what people can do with a file once you share it. Box also offers a powerful API that enables developers to use Box as an integrated file system for their mobile apps.

App: Box
Developer: Box
Category: Storage
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Google Hangouts
Google's free Hangouts service makes it easy to have one-on-one or group conversations as well as individual and group voice calls and video calls from whichever platform you prefer. The quality is typically quite good, so long as you're on a reliable and reasonably fast Internet connection. Video calls between Google users are free and unlimited, and voice calls to regular phone numbers within the United States and Canada are free. (You can call outside of those countries, too, but you'll have to pay a per-minute fee for the talk-time.)

App: Google Hangouts
Developer: Google
Category: Communication
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Skype
Skype may not be as robust or user-friendly as Hangouts, but it's still a popular communication platform that can't be ignored. It provides free voice and video calls between users, but voice calls to regular phone numbers require either a monthly subscription or a per-minute fee. While there's (rather astonishingly) still no stand-alone Web app for the service, you can get to it from a desktop computer by signing into Microsoft's Outlook.com.

App: Skype
Developer: Skype Communications
Category: Communication
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Trello
Whether you're working alone or as part of a team, Trello offers an easy yet powerful way to organize tasks, lists, and projects. No matter which platform you access it from, your data remains synced and looks the same to every user who sees it. Trello uses an intuitive whiteboard and notecard interface for task management, offering checklists, commenting, labels, attachments, notifications, and activity logs, as well as the ability to assign tasks to team members.

App: Trello
Developer: Fog Creek Software
Category: Project Management
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Basecamp
When it comes to project management, Basecamp is one of the biggest names around. The service provides a centralized place for organizing and coordinating projects, allowing teams to create notes, lists, and schedules; upload files and plans; assign and manage tasks; and communicate with colleagues about progress on each individual element. With the company's multiplatform approach, you can view and edit anything you need from any device you have handy. (You'll need a Basecamp subscription, which is free for 60 days, then runs anywhere from $20 to $150 a month.)

App: Basecamp
Developer: Basecamp
Category: Project Management
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Wunderlist
For simple lists, you want a simple app, and Wunderlist is one of the best around. Its clean and minimalist interface puts your tasks front and center, organized into topic-oriented lists, and it looks just as good whether you're on Android, iOS, or the Web. Wunderlist offers the ability to share lists, comment, delegate tasks, set reminders, and attach and share photos and files to your to-dos.

App: Wunderlist
Developer: 6 Wunderkinder
Category: Task Management
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Any.do
Another excellent list-centric option, Any.do offers a solid all-around experience, and Android users get bonus features like the ability to turn a missed call directly into a reminder. Regardless of your platform, the service provides all the basic organizational tools you'd expect, including shared lists, folder-based organization, and calendar-like alerts for important tasks. It syncs with Google's Tasks system, too, so you can access it from Gmail as well as from Any.do's own Web interface.

App: Any.do
Developer: Any.do
Category: Task Management
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Evernote
Evernote offers a robust notebook-like service that features regular to-do lists along with the ability to store and manage photos, handwritten notes, and articles from the Web. In addition to its standard free suite of services, the company has a business-focused platform designed for larger-scale company-wide collaboration. Evernote is also blessed with a rich ecosystem of integrated apps and services, thereby extending the power of an already powerful productivity tool.

App: Evernote
Developer: Evernote
Category: Notebook
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

OneNote
Microsoft's note-taking solution provides plenty of tools for keeping yourself and/or your team organized. You can create regular notes and lists, organize your stuff into notebooks or with tags, and add audio or video files into your notes. You can even take photos of receipts, memos, or whiteboards, then later search for the text shown in those images. OneNote also syncs with a stand-alone Windows app for those who prefer a more traditional desktop-based approach.

App: OneNote
Developer: Microsoft
Category: Notebook
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Pocket
If you find yourself stumbling onto more interesting content than you have time to read, Pocket is exactly what you need. Pocket integrates into all the major platforms and allows you to save an article for later with a couple quick taps. Once it's been saved, you can get to it from any device and view it online or offline within the app's own excellent reading utility. Pocket also allows you to save videos and images for later viewing, share what you’ve saved with other Pocket users, and file away your Pocket favorites to Evernote.

App: Pocket
Developer: Read It Later
Category: Notebook
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

QuickBooks
QuickBooks is the de facto standard for small-business accounting for a reason: The service is jam-packed with functionality, and it works well regardless of what platform or type of device you're using. QuickBooks has all the accounting tools you'd expect, ranging from budget management to expense tracking and invoice creation and fulfillment. It all comes at a cost, though: The various apps require an active QuickBooks account, which runs $13 a month or $125 a year.

App: QuickBooks
Developer: Intuit
Category: Accounting
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Expensify
If logging and managing expenses is all you need, a simple app like Expensify can get the job done without costing you a dime. From your Android or iOS device, Expensify makes it easy to snap photos of a receipt, which it then quickly analyzes in order to extract the relevant details and put them (along with an actual image of the receipt) into your records. It has other handy features, too, like the ability to track and log mileage using your phone's GPS, and the data is always available on any device you sign into as well as via its Web-based application.

App: Expensify
Developer: Expensify
Category: Accounting
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

Google Calendar
When it comes to maintaining a cross-platform calendar, Google Calendar stands in a league of its own. The free service provides a simple interface for managing meetings and personal appointments as well as sharing both individual events and full calendars with friends, family, and colleagues.

While Google doesn't yet offer its own official Calendar app for iOS, you can sync your Google Calendar data with Apple's native Calendar app or use third-party programs like Sunrise Calendar and Cal to tap into the info. On Android, meanwhile, an official Google app is available in addition to a variety of third-party contenders, allowing you to pick the setup that best suits your needs.

App: Google Calendar
Developer: Google
Category: Calendar
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

TripIt
TripIt is a must-have app for anyone who travels. Once you sign up for the free service, all you do is forward any travel-related emails -- airline confirmations, hotel reservations, even concert ticket receipts or dinner reservation confirmations -- to a special email address, and TripIt automatically organizes them into trip-based itineraries.

For $49 a year, you can upgrade to TripIt Pro and get advanced features like real-time flight monitoring and alerts and a one-tap way to find alternate flight plans from your phone midtrip. TripIt also has an enterprise-level plan for organizations that want to implement its services company-wide.

App: TripIt
Developer: Concur Technologies
Category: Travel Management
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

LastPass
We all have a billion passwords to keep track of these days -- and if you're using the same password for every website you sign into, well, you're doing it wrong. LastPass, which topped InfoWorld's recent review of the best password managers for PCs, Macs, and mobile devices, helps you create unique and strong passwords as you surf the Web, then keep track of them securely.

With AES 256-bit encryption, local-only decryption, and multifactor authentication, LastPass keeps your data under lock and key, giving you one fewer worry in your digital life.

The full version of the service, which you'll need for mobile-based access, costs $12 a year.

App: LastPass
Developer: Joseph Siegrist
Category: Password Management
Availability: Android | iOS | Web

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HP blade chassis is dense and intense

If you’re looking for the ultimate in computational density, consider the HP C7000 Platinum Blade Server Chassis. The C7000 packs an enormous amount of power into just 10U of rack space, with modular components that can be almost instantly changed out.


Inside the blade chassis, HP has inserted a mezzanine backplane that moves at 7.1Tbps in aggregate. In turn, HP’s FlexFabric connects to backplane components that fan out data in connections of up to 40Gbps per channel, and can be aggregated as control units of four blade servers—conveniently the number that will fit in a 42U rack, provided you’ve pleased the power company and your data center has the correct load bearing floors.

At $122,000, the unit we tested was a monster, sporting two blades plus the FlexFabric connectivity gear.

One point to keep in mind. Once you go the blade chassis route, you’re locked in to HP as your vendor. We could find no one else that sells products for this chassis, so a purchase means a marriage with HP. Of course, the same applies to nearly all blade system designs. HP offers a three-year, across the board warranty once you say the vows.

Testing HP’s C7000 blade chassis was an exercise in both server geometries, and also in hunting down strange configuration data. The base software management options to configure the beast that is the C7000 chassis require enormous amounts of sophistication.

Rather then use the default options, we recommend buying the OneView 1.1 management app. In fact, beg for it if you’re managing several HP blade server chasses.

We like the C7000 chassis and especially the blades, BL-660 Gen8s with a lot of computational power, but it’s the back side of the chassis that packs the most punch with HP’s flexible Virtual Connect option.

Network operations center personnel will enjoy the rapid deployment of the hardware, but there were a few things missing in our opinion when we compared standard and optional administration software packages for the chassis. What’s there works, and well. What’s missing is mildly frustrating.

What We Tested
We tested the C7000 “Platinum Chassis” which, in and of itself, is comparatively inexpensive. The chassis is powered via 208-240v 30amp+ connections, and there are six power supplies; HP sent a Power Distribution Unit (PDU) and we recommend using one for fast power supply change-out should something go awry.

Two full-height HP BL-660 Gen8 blades were fitted to it. The basic blades are not quite $28,000 each (memory not included). Two HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric 20/40Gb F8 modules were installed, each nearly $23,000. Eight full-height blades can be installed, or a combo of 16 half-height blades.

Blades and the Virtual Connect components together, salted with a bit of memory (256GB) made the price climb into six figures. Admittedly, what we received can also be the administrative core for up to four total chassis, which won’t be quite as expensive when the cost is amortized over subsequent chassis and blades. The density can be huge. The chassis fan count—10 of them—was also huge. This density needs to breathe.

The BL-660s Gen 8s blades came with Intel E5-4650 CPUs, 4CPU x 8-core, total 32 cores, 128GB memory (the minimum, 512G possible), and two drives each. We found we could easily boot from SAN or network resources. HP’s VC FlexFabric 20/40 F8 Module was installed into the rear of the C7000 Chassis, along with HP FlexFabric 20Gb 2-port 630FLB Series adapters.

The chassis and components that fill the C7000 are joined together into a mezzanine backplane as mentioned, and blades communicate among each other, or with network communications options installed in the rear of the chassis. The chassis monitors the front and backplanes via both external software that talks to internal chassis firmware, and can be directly controlled through a front-panel color LCD control panel or rear-mounted display.

Provisioning of the chassis components (blades, switches, and their configuration) is done remotely. There are no USB jacks on the front of the chassis and the blades have no jacks. There is one VGA port on the rear, and one USB jack that can mirror the front panel display. We jacked into the back of the chassis with our crash cart, and discovered that the crash cart KVM version of the chassis firmware-driven software doesn’t do much more than the front panel display. But you’ll need one or the other to set the chassis IP address.

Virtual Connect Manager vs OneView
The C7000 is useless without control software. There are two basic choices. HP’s Virtual Connect Manager is included in the cost of the chassis. Also included with all Gen8 servers is HP’s integrated LightsOut (iLO) management.

HP’s OneView might be a better option. It’s a broader management package for Gen8 servers, although it’s not inexpensive.

We recommend those deploying the C7000 use OneView rather than Virtual Connect Manager for several reasons: it’s archaic and requires studious prerequisite study just to install the software onto highly configured Windows 2008 R2 server, needs 6GB of user memory and therefore is notebook unfriendly, and requires much architectural forethought to deploy into an effective control plane for provisioning and managing the options of the C7000 chassis and its components.

By contrast, OneView 1.1 is a virtual machine delivered as an appliance for VMware or HyperV, installs rapidly, and after a fast tutorial, becomes instantly manageable. It’s not inexpensive. The trade-off is in installation hours spent, and manageability. OneView has the ability to discover much infrastructure and when supplied with chassis password components, is able to connect and logically associate components quickly and with surprisingly little fuss.

There is connectivity between both applications and systems management applications such as Microsoft’s SystemCenter, but these were not tested.

To summarize, the default package can be used, but HP recommended OneView, and we concur. That HP doesn’t include it with a substantial purchase of blades frustrates us. Any data center deploying many chassis can’t live without it.

Blades and FlexFabric
The twin BL 660 Gen8 blades that we were sent had 32 cores on four Xeon CPUs. We’ve seen this combination before and it’s fast and solid. Across the chassis with eight of these installed, 256 cores are possible. If a rack supports four full chassis, that’s 1,024 cores per 42U rack, yielding huge density. Old timers will remember when there was one 32bit CPU per tower server.

The connectivity options for FlexFabric are numerous and the fabric is controlled via the configurations set by Virtual Connection Manager or OneView. The HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric-20/40 F8 module we used replaces internal switches in former HP blade chassis. It supports 16- 10G/20GB downlinks to the chassis midplane bus, two 20GB cross connect links, four 40GB uplinks, eight Flexports uplinks, plus a link to the Onboard Administrator module (the chassis firmware app). The Flexports can be either Fibre Channel (2/4/8GB) or Ethernet (10/1GB).

Each blade can have logical network interface card (NIC) connections depending on the blade type, typically two NIC logical connections for a half-height and three for a full-height blade. These attach to the mezzanine plane, and it’s here that IP traffic can be separated internally from iSCSI or FCoIP disk traffic, or in another design alternative, one tenant’s traffic from another, or perhaps a Content Development Network (CDN) from the Hadoopers.

Amusingly, the extreme data rates of the FlexFabric infrastructure also mean cable length concerns—at 40GBps proximity becomes an issue when establishing boundaries between chassis—occur certainly with copper cables but even with fiber.

The density also means that the FlexFabric options chosen become/replace traditional hardware core routers and switches that once performed the tasks among what would have been the huge stack of discrete servers, or aisles of servers in racks and its network switching demarc boundaries.

FlexFabric’s options and construction mandates inter-disciplinary imaginative construction and another reason why OneView trumps Virtual Connection Manager for fabric control, as OneView integrates these at the mezzanine/midplane level more understandably.

We appreciated the multiple views of OneView fabric tracking, and how it relates each element of the infrastructure to each other. It’s not a finished product, as it has difficulty showing sophisticated logical and protocol relationships in and among the objects, and this would help systems engineers understand flows, and network engineers understand the hardware and aggregation relativity more simply.

Whether we wanted it or not, we felt as though we should get a degree from HP after going through the exercise of understanding the relationships that we were constructing.
Testing

Our initial installation went smoothly. The front panel LED provides a lot of information about the chassis, and errors that the firmware picks up, like unplugged cables, and cooling problems. It’s a fast way to get localized information on low-level problems, but it’s not as sophisticated as even a dull smartphone as a user interface. The KVM jack supplied us with a web page, but not that much more control capability. Control comes from Virtual Connect Manager and/or OneView or Insight Manager.

We have nothing that can assault this chassis at full bore. It’s in aggregate, an enormous block of computational and I/O capability. The sum of its parts when viewed discretely however, is powerful—blades whose other Gen8 cousins we’ve tested coupled to a huge L2/L3 switch backplane.

The BL-660 Gen8 blades digested our VMware licenses with glee. The speeds of digestion were comparable to the HP DL-580 Gen8 we recently tested. The flow of data through the blades with VMware’s VNICs was easily controlled via defaults in OneView, then in VMware vCenter with ESXi 5.5. Where we once had difficulty with VMware drivers finding HP hardware correctly, we had no issues this round.

Summary
The C7000 Platinum Chassis, coupled to the HP-supplied BL660 Gen8 blades supplies huge computational density. The FlexFabric approach localizes all systems I/O to a mid-plane, then logically connects multiple blades and chassis together through the fabric.

This architecture replaces discrete or 1U servers, external switch and router cabinets, separate fabric to SAN data stores, and all of the logic needed to glue these pieces together.

Going the blade chassis router, one becomes entirely captive to HP in this infrastructure, but it’s a flexible infrastructure, plays well with VMware and Hyper-V (and likely others). There are necessary options that aren’t included in the price—the most glaring example is OneView, which costs $400 to $799 per server (as much as $50 per core).

A 256-core fully loaded chassis approaches $300,000—just less than $300 per core—including all I/O fabric communications needed to connect to a communications demarc, and not counting OneView or other licenses—or hypervisors or operating systems.

How We Tested
We installed the C7000 chassis into our rack at Expedient-Indianapolis (formerly nFrame), then connected its power. After the lights dimmed and the grid twitched, we connected the FlexFabric connectors to our ExtremeNetworks Summit Switch core internal routers. The password to the C7000 chassis is hidden inside. We didn’t know this. Remember to get this password because nothing really works until you do.

We bought up a VMware “.ova” appliance version of HP’s OneView 1.1, and with help from HP, brought the chassis online, configured the chassis, and made it part of its own group; up to four chassis can be aggregated as a unit.

We used VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V Windows 2012 R2, one on each blade that was supplied, as an exercise, and checked to see if each hypervisor’s discover process found the items we would supply via changes in the FlexFabric configuration, including IP resources as well as internal Dell Compellent SAN fabric we use. We often had to bury ourselves in technical docs, which are complete but offer few real-world examples, to connect items, but met no obstacles in any of the configuration scenarios we tried.

We thank the personnel of Expedient for their tenacious support of remote-hands work needed to complete test cycles.

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thriving as an IT contractor

Companies continue to supplement their full-time technical ranks with temporary contractors. Here’s how to make it work.


When demand exceeds the supply of available IT talent, many companies are using contractors to help fill the gaps. IT contractors provide manpower when workloads spike and can bring key expertise and skills to a team. (See related story, Life as an IT contractor)

Across all fields (not just IT), independent workers are on the rise, according to MBO Partners, which provides back-office services to self-employed professionals. The number of independent workers is forecast to reach 40 million in 2019, up from 30 million today. Over the last four years, the independent workforce has grown 12.5% -- greatly outpacing the 1.1% growth in the overall U.S. labor force, MBO asserts.

If a shift towards contracting work is in your future, consider these 16 tips and warnings from experienced IT contractors and staffing experts.

1. Pursue what you like. “You should have a core competency. It should be an area of technology that you do really well (and hopefully is in demand),” says Fred Granville, who has been working as an independent networking consultant in the Kansas City, Mo., area since 2000. “You should enjoy working in your field -- your customers will notice.”




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Apple iPad Air 2 is thinner and speedier than its predecessors

Apple’s iPad Air 2 is thinner and lighter than its predecessor, and should be speedier as well, thanks to a new processor.

It also has improved camera and security features, as does the iPad Mini 3, Apple said Thursday during an event at it’s Cupertino, California, campus, unveiling the tablets at a time when the company’s dominance in that market has waned.

The iPad Air 2, which has a 9.7-inch screen, is 6.1 millimeter thick, which is 18 percent thinner than the iPad Air. The Air 2 offers 10 hours of battery life.

The tablet has the all-new A8X chip, which is a variant of the A8 chip in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The chip is 40 percent faster and provides 2.5 times better graphics than the A7 chip in the iPad Air.

“We’re able to deliver console-level graphics in your hand,” said Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing.

Other features include an 8-megapixel iSight rear camera and a FaceTime front camera. The iSight camera can take 1080p video that can be manipulated in multiple modes such as slow motion and time lapse.

Image and video manipulation tools such as Pixelmator and Replay will help users edit, repair and manipulate images, taking advantage of the faster graphics processor.

The iPad Mini 3 has a 7.9-inch screen, an A7 chip, a 5-megapixel iSight rear camera, a FaceTime camera and 802.11ac wireless.

Both tablets have the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, which lets users bypass passwords when logging into a smartphone or buying things online. The fingerprint technology is used with the Apple Pay payment system.

The iPad Air 2 is priced at US$499 for 16GB and Wi-Fi storage, $599 for 64GB and $699 for 128GB. A version of the tablet with cellular connectivity is $130 more.

The iPad Mini 3 is priced at $399 for 16GB, $499 for 64GB and $599 for 128GB.

Both tablets can be ordered now, with shipping set for next week.

The tablets are hitting the market at a time when Android tablet makers Samsung, Lenovo and Asus are gaining ground on Apple. Apple’s tablet shipments declined 9.3 percent during the second quarter of 2014 compared to the same quarter last year, while overall worldwide tablet shipments went up 11 percent, according to IDC.

Apple faces further challenges as more users opt for larger-screen smartphones and hybrid devices instead of tablets. The iPhone 6 Plus, which has a 5.5-inch screen, is off to a hot start, and could hurt iPad sales. And Google’s Nexus 9, the first 64-bit Android tablet, starts shipping next month.

IDC is projecting overall worldwide tablet shipments to grow by just 6.5 percent this year.

But Apple CEO Tim Cook put a—predictably—positive spin on the situation at the event, noting that the company has sold 225 million tablets.

“We’ve sold more iPads in the first four years than any product in our history,” Cook said.

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The 10 worst people you meet working in IT

You're definitely going to meet them. Hopefull you aren't one of them.

Every human being is a unique and special person who doesn't quite fit into any category, of course. That said, if you've worked in IT long enough, you've probably learned to identify certain ... types. Call them Jungian archetypes, but for people you don't like. Once you've started to recognize them, you see them everywhere. We asked a host of IT pros to describe the type of IT pro they like least, and we got some colorful answers. Have you ever dealt with some of these worst people in IT? Or worse: do you recognize yourself in these descriptions? It's not too late to take another path.

The Consultant
Liam Kavanaugh has been upgrading Windows 2003 servers at his company, with "help" from The Consultant. "He turns up in a car far more expensive than any that the actual IT department can afford. You show him your setup and he looks confused. Any deviation from a lab environment and he can't cope. Eventually you end up doing all his work for them while he warns you that installing the software on a virtual server/physical server, a Windows/Linux server, one with no wallpaper/one with pretty wallpaper IS NOT STANDARD and he can't be held accountable."

"Eventually, you get a £2,000 bill, and the managing director sends our a message thanking the 'consulting team' for doing a good job."

The Braggy Numbers Guy
Chris Collision has had enough of The Braggy Numbers Guy, a "semi-literate 'marketing' dude. Everything that goes right is because he's great: everything that goes wrong is because nobody listens to him. (Those who have long memories may remember that he was in every meeting that led up to something going wrong, and that he had nothing to say in any of them.) Never responds to an email; never sends an email to do anything but throw somebody under the bus or take credit for someone else's work. Refuses to use the company's project managing tools. Likes to bark at people and stomp around like he's still in the army. No matter what you know, say, or have done, he's got a topper."

The Dumb Nerd
Being a nerd is the core of a lot of techies' self-image, but as Nathan E. points out, not all nerds are created equal. Dumb Nerds "thinks that because they are a nerd, they're smart. They work with computers but are actually Really Bad with computers. They don't understand their mistakes, and in fact struggle to recognize them as mistakes. They cannot follow directions and do not have the technical skills to fix any problems that come from missing a step. They are often furries or Whovians with a dim grasp of the difference between fiction and reality. Quite often they are experimenting with polyamory and cannot shut up about it. Bonus points for stupid hats and sword collections."

The Underqualified Humanities Degree Middle Manager
Is the Underqualified Humanities Degree Middle Manager your boss? Woe be unto you, explains Chris Collision: "No business background. No visible useful skills. Tends to assume that his general intelligence qualifies him as an understander of everything. No managerial experience, so he's constantly mad at his employees for not reading his mind. Bitterly resents and fights against any reduction of his responsibilities, but actually does almost no work and complains about what work he does (have to) do. Cracks jokes in meetings as his primary contribution to them. Sulks when any idea he has isn't instantly adopted/praised. Special flower who reserves the bulk of his contempt for people who act like they think they're special flowers."

The Mansplainer
Like many women in tech, Erin R. has had too many encounters with The Mansplainer. She's had to deal with her current nemesis because "I was asked to fix up the CSS on our main home page recently (since he was being slow about getting it done). He came over to explain basic concepts to me -- for example, if I change the main .css file, that will affect all the pages, not just the main page. I pointed out that I am well aware of how CSS works, and he seemed surprised. He continued explaining basic HTML and CSS concepts, all of which I knew. He also decided that he was entitled to use my keyboard to demonstrate these things."

The #Disruptor Boss
The #Disruptor Boss would not get the irony of the hashtag in this slide's title. "A smart, generally worthwhile human whose critical faculties turn right off when confronted with any/all tech-type buzzwords. Particularly vulnerable to manipulation by the Braggy Numbers Guy. Wants to run with the big, big companies, and will drop every name he can think of, because he thinks that'll be helpful. Hobbies include vaguely describing nebulous aims and demonstrating zero follow-through. Will under no circumstances actually assign any resources to support the achievement of his nebulous aims. Springs for lunch a lot, though, so there's that."

The Political Theorist
Nathan E. has had one too many arguments with The Political Theorist, who is "often blindingly smart but extremely undisciplined as a thinker. Makes the classic fallacy that because they are great at coding, their ideas about politics must be equally great. Often found saying 'If the government would just do X, then Y,' as if politics were as amenable to flow control as a Perl script. Usually Libertarian, which I find hilarious in light of the current wage theft lawsuits in Silicon Valley. Who could have foreseen that a group that thinks unions are all bad and the the market and business is always right and good would have the money colluded right out of their pockets?"

The QA Killjoy
"Okay, I get that everybody hates QA," says Chris Collision: "All they ever do is point at things that are bad and broken and wrong and why can't they ever say that something works for a change." But the QA Killjoy is in a class of their own. "There's a specific type that gravitates toward the field, a type for whom it is very, personally, important to be right. Impossible to work with or have a human interaction with. (Unless you write a detailed user story for them to follow, I guess.)"

The Technologist
You may work in technology, but even so, you might become very tired of dealing with The Technologist. "Technology is awful. I don't care about the iWatch or your mega-Tivo or how you ran Cat 6 in your house so you could stream TV to any of the possible places where you might go to the bathroom. I do this all day; I don't want to think about it when I go home and you shouldn't either."

The Impossible To Fire
Gripe as you will about these types, but many of them will outlast you wherever you work. Liam Kavanaugh says The Impossible To Fire are particularly prevalent in countries with restrictive labor laws. "In 2006 I was in charge of imaging all the new PCs ready to go out. I checked how they did it at some of the other sites, thinking that they would know more and have better methods. One place in Germany deployed all their Windows XP machines by first installing Windows 98 and then upgrading them to Windows XP. In 2006. When I asked why, I was told that the guy who did it had been with the company 15 years, and why should he change?"

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Dense server battle to heat up with Intel's Xeon D

Intel's first Broadwell server chip, Xeon D, will be in servers next year

Ahead of competition from ARM servers, Intel is putting more weight in the server space with a new Xeon D family of chips, which will be in systems next year.

Xeon D chips will be the first server chips based on the Broadwell architecture, and will go into dense servers starting next year, the chipmaker said at the Intel Developer Forum.

Intel has started shipping the Xeon D chips to customers for testing, said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, during a keynote on Wednesday.

The chips are targeted at hyperscale workloads, in which servers are consistently added to scale performance. Companies like Facebook and Google buy servers in the thousands to deal with growing workloads.

Xeon D is effectively a system-on-chip, and will combine many components to deliver power-efficient performance for Web-based, storage or networking workloads. The chip family will have I/O and controllers for networking and storage appliances.

Intel already offers the Xeon E3 and also Atom chips code-named Avoton to process online workloads. But the Xeon D chip will be faster and more power hungry than Avoton, which is based on an architecture called Silvermont used in mobile chips. The Xeon D chips will draw 15 watts of power and more, Bryant said.

The goal with Xeon D is to help customers pack more performance-per-watt in servers, Bryant said.

Intel previously projected Xeon D, code-named Broadwell DE, to ship as early as late 2014. But PC, tablet and server chips based on Broadwell have been delayed due to manufacturing glitches.

Bryant also said Intel wanted to provide chips that could be customized for specific workloads, which it already does for specific customers like eBay. During the keynote, Bryant said that Intel will allow FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) to be built into the same package as chips, though didn't point specifically to Xeon D. Intel has packaged FPGAs with server chips for years now.

Xeon D will gear up Intel for a battle with ARM, whose processor designs will be in servers next year. AppliedMicro and Advanced Micro Devices are making 64-bit ARM chips for dense servers, but the products have been delayed. Nvidia and Samsung have cancelled plans to make server chips based on ARM.

Intel's chips already go into more than 90 percent of servers, and server makers like Dell have said that the chances for success of ARM servers are diminishing due to product delays. The ARM server chips are based on the ARMv8 architecture, and have integrated networking, storage and I/O controllers. Intel also has a head-start on software development over ARM.

Xeon D will also be Intel's first server chip made using the 14-nanometer process, which will provide power-efficiency and performance benefits. The first chips made using the 14-nm process called Core M are already due to become available in tablet-laptop hybrids starting later this month.

Intel earlier this week announced the Xeon E5-2600 v3 chips, which are based on the Haswell architecture. The Xeon E5 chips have accounted for more than 80 percent of Intel's server chip shipments. Intel's Xeon E5 line will transition over to Broadwell sometime next year.

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Data centers are the new polluters

IT managers may be too cautious about managing power, and businesses are unwilling to invest in efficiency, study finds

U.S. data centers are using more electricity than they need. It takes 34 power plants, each capable of generating 500 megawatts (MW) of electricity, to power all the data centers in operation today. By 2020, the nation will need another 17 similarly sized power plants to meet projected data center energy demands as economic activity becomes increasingly digital.

Increased electrical generation from fossil fuels means release of more carbon emissions. But this added pollution doesn't have to be, according to a new report on data center energy efficiency from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental action organization.
Whatever happened to Green IT?

In term of national energy, data centers in total used 91 billion (kilowatts) kWh in 2013, and by 2020, will be using 139 billion kWh, a 53% increase.
NRDC Data center efficiency chartThis chart shows the estimated cost and power usage by U.S. data centers in 2013 and 2020, and the number of power plants needed to support this increased demand. The last column shows carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in millions of metric tons. (Source: NRDC)

The report argues that improved energy efficiency practices by data centers could cut energy waste by at least 40%. The problems hindering efficiency include comatose or ghost servers, which use power but don't run any workloads; overprovisioned IT resources; lack of virtualization; and procurement models that don't address energy efficiency. The typical computer server operates at no more than 12% to 18% of capacity, and as many as 30% of servers are comatose, the report states.

The paper tallies up the consequences of inattention and neglect on a national scale. It was assembled and reviewed with help from organizations including Microsoft, Google, Dell, Intel, The Green Grid, Uptime Institute and Facebook, which made "technical and substantial contributions."

The NRDC makes a sharp distinction between large data centers run by large cloud providers, which account for about 5% of the total data center energy usage. Throughout the data center industry, there are "numerous shining examples of ultra-efficient data centers," the study notes. These aren't the problem. It's the thousands of other mainstream business and government data centers, and small, corporate or multi-tenant operations, that are the problem, the paper argues.

The efficiency accomplishments of the big cloud providers, "could lead to the perception that the problem is largely solved," said Pierre Delforge, director of the NRDC's high-tech sector on energy efficiency, but it doesn't fit the reality of most data centers.

Data centers are "one of the few large industrial electricity uses which are growing," Delforge said, and they are a key factor in creating demand for new power plants in some regions.

Businesses that move to co-location, multi-tenant data center facilities don't necessarily make efficiency gains. Customers may be charged on space-based pricing, paying by the rack or square footage, with a limit on how much power they can use before additional charges kick in. But this model offers little incentive to operate equipment as efficiently as possible.

In total, the report says U.S. data centers used 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, "enough to power all of New York City's households twice over and growing." By 2020, annual data center energy consumption is expected to reach 140 billion kilowatt hours.

If companies used data center best practices, the report states, the economic benefits would be substantial. A 40% reduction in energy use, which the report says is only half of the technically possible reduction, would equal $3.8 billion in savings for businesses.

The report also finds that energy efficiency progress is slowing. Once the obvious efficiency projects, such as isolating hot and cold aisles, are accomplished, addition investment in energy efficiency becomes harder to justify because of cost or a perception that they may increase risk. IT managers are "extremely cautious," about implementing aggressive energy management because it could introduce more risk to uptime, the report notes.

There are a number of measurements used to determine the efficiency of data centers, and the report recommends development of tools for determining CPU utilization, average server utilization, and average data center utilization. It says that "broad adoption of these simple utilization metrics across the data center industry would provide visibility on the IT efficiency of data centers, thereby creating market incentives for operators to optimize the utilization of their IT assets. "

The NRDC isn't the first to look at this issue. In 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, working with a broad range of data center operators and industry groups, released a report on data center power usage that found that the energy use of the nation's servers and data centers in 2006 "is estimated to be more than double the electricity that was consumed for this purpose in 2000." It called for energy efficiency improvements.

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Twitter to remove images of deceased upon request

Twitter has some reservations in granting wishes of kin

Twitter said late Tuesday it will remove images and videos of deceased people upon the request of family members, but it put conditions on the policy.

The microblogging service made the announcement a week after the daughter of the late comedian Robin Williams said she would quit Twitter after receiving gruesome images of him from online trolls.

The move also comes as Twitter tried to delete images and video depicting the death of U.S. photojournalist James Foley, who was apparently killed by the militant group Islamic State, better known as ISIS.

"In order to respect the wishes of loved ones, Twitter will remove imagery of deceased individuals in certain circumstances," Twitter spokesman Nu Wexler said in a message about the update to its policies.

"When reviewing such media removal requests, Twitter considers public interest factors such as the newsworthiness of the content and may not be able to honor every request."

Twitter, which boasts 271 million active monthly users, posted details of the policy that require the estate or a person's family member to provide documents such as copies of a death certificate and government-issued identification.

Family members or other authorized people can request the removal of photos or video of deceased people on Twitter "from when critical injury occurs to the moments before or after death," it said.

Twitter still refuses to provide account access to anyone, even if they are related to the person who has died.

Women have been the target of threats an abuse on Twitter, and critics have urged the company to change its Twitter Rules. A year ago, it introduced an "in-tweet" abuse button to report violations.

But some have complained that it's still impossible to stop determined trolls.

"Ive endured this for two years, and so have countless others," Twitter user Imani Gandy recently wrote about the racist invective she suffers at the hands of one particular troll.

"He creates hundreds of accounts to tweet his inane ramblings to my friends, online acquaintances and even my work. He latches on to any tweet of mine and harasses anyone that I interact with."

She criticized Twitter for being slow to act and having no solutions beyond suspending accounts, adding she and other users are trying to get Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to strengthen the service's abuse policies.

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25 useful, free tools for every Windows desktop

Whatever your poison -- Windows 7 or 8, updated or not -- there's a desktop tool just begging to become part of your repertoire.

Top 25 free tools for every Windows desktop
While smartphones descend on computer cognoscenti like Mongol hordes and tablets tempt the tried and true, the good ol’ Windows desktop still reigns supreme in many corners of the modern tech world. That’s where I live, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

If you haven’t looked at free desktop programs lately, you’ll be surprised. The inexorable shift to a post-PC world hasn’t deadened the market or dulled innovation. Quite the contrary. The current crop of free-for-personal-use (and cheap for corporate use) desktop apps runs rings around the best tools we had not long ago.

Productivity, file management, media, system, security -- here are my top choices for the most useful free and almost-free desktop apps, tested on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 Update 1.

Top free desktop productivity tool: FreeCommander XE
Whether you’re using File Explorer in Windows 7 or Windows Explorer in Windows 8/8.1, you’re up against the same, lame Explorer layout we’ve known for more than a decade, plus or minus a few icons on a Ribbon. FreeCommander XE presents the obvious solution -- two side-by-side panes for independent navigating and copying -- along with an entire cookie jar full of worthwhile one-click features.

Although some of the download versions of FreeCommander XE bundle unrelenting crapware, the version available from the FreeCommander site installs without a hitch or a hitchhiker.

Top free desktop productivity tool: 7-Zip
Every desktop user needs 7-Zip. While Windows 8 (finally!) added the ability to look into ISO files -- you still need 7-Zip to see them in Win7 -- Win8’s Windows Explorer still doesn’t support RAR compressed files, which are becoming more common as Mac use continues to rise. 7-Zip also creates password-protected Zip files, as well as self-extracting Zips.

You don’t need to register or pay for 7-Zip.

Don’t fall for a website with a similar name. To get the real, original, one and only free 7-Zip, with a crapware-free installer, go to 7-zip.org. There’s support on the 7-Zip Sourceforge page.

Top free desktop productivity tool: EditPad Lite
Notepad is soooooo last century.

Even with all of the fantastic new brightly colored file formats running around today, everybody, sooner or later, needs a text editor. Let’s hear it for EditPad Lite.

With tabs, undo/redo, Unicode support, cut/copy/paste, and search and replace all in a svelte and fast package, EditPad Lite works wonders. Free for personal use, the pro/corporate package costs as little as $9 per user. Pay for the product, and you also get a spell-checker.

Top free desktop productivity tool: PicPick
If you've ever tried to use the Windows Snipping Tool to capture fleeting images on the screen -- notification boxes that go away when you click, or popover menus that disappear the minute you move your mouse -- you're in for a treat.

PicPick lets you take screenshots with the press of a key, and pressing the key doesn't make ephemeral items on the screen run for cover. Once you've taken the shot, PicPick pops your screen into an editor with tools for resizing and editing. Add automatic file naming, on-screen magnification at selectable levels, a pixel ruler, color picker, and a half-dozen other screenshooting aids, and you end up with a versatile, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink shooter. Just watch out for crapware.

Top free desktop productivity tool: Tixati
If you aren’t yet using torrents, now’s the time to start.

For years I’ve used and recommended uTorrent, but the current version’s installer includes the notorious piece of crapware known as OpenCandy. I wouldn’t touch uTorrent now with a ten foot barber pole.

Instead, try Tixati. It’s simple (no Java, no .Net), fast, easy to use, supports magnet links (which really simplify downloads), with extensive bandwidth reporting and management. Be careful when you navigate the download site. You may see an ad at the top of the page that says Download. If so, don’t click it -- horrendous crapware may lurk. Instead, follow the link to an official mirror site.

Top free desktop productivity tool: Tixati
If you aren’t yet using torrents, now’s the time to start.

For years I’ve used and recommended uTorrent, but the current version’s installer includes the notorious piece of crapware known as OpenCandy. I wouldn’t touch uTorrent now with a ten foot barber pole.

Instead, try Tixati. It’s simple (no Java, no .Net), fast, easy to use, supports magnet links (which really simplify downloads), with extensive bandwidth reporting and management. Be careful when you navigate the download site. You may see an ad at the top of the page that says Download. If so, don’t click it -- horrendous crapware may lurk. Instead, follow the link to an official mirror site.

Top free desktop file management tool: File Shredder
Even if you don’t wear a little tinfoil hat, from time to time you may want to completely delete a specific file or overwrite an entire drive before you give it away.

If you do wear a little tinfoil hat, File Shredder will help you graduate to the big leagues. Shred files, folders, free space, entire drives, you name it, using any of several shredding algorithms.

Pro tip: When you get to the download page, don’t click the Download icons -- those lead to a Zip manager and Download manager that aren’t exactly what you want. Instead, click on the link in the text that says “download File Shredder.”

Top free desktop file management tool: Auslogics Duplicate File Finder
While the cost of cloud storage is rapidly approaching zero, most of us are still tied to hard drives here on earth. If you think your hard drive might have 10 different copies of a specific photo of your last birthday party, well, it probably does.

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder’s easy-to-use interface makes it relatively easy to find and select the duplicated files you want to delete, then stick the selected files in the Recycle Bin.

A word of caution: While the Auslogic’s installer wants to put all sorts of junk on your machine, all the options are confined to one “Free Search Offer by Spigot” panel. Uncheck all of the junk, and you’ll end up with a very usable duplicate finder. Don’t install Spigot.

Top free desktop file management tool: SpaceSniffer
Want to know what’s taking up all the space on your hard drive? Run SpaceSniffer.

No installation required -- it runs from a simple EXE -- no malware, no funny stuff. You end up with a patchwork quilt of files and folders. Click on a folder or file to get more details. Double-click on a folder to see all of the components.

There’s even a filtering capability so you can look at all of your MP4 files or JPGs. Great way to zoom in on the big space hogs.

Top free desktop file management tool: Comodo Backup
Windows 7 has a decent -- but not perfect -- backup and restore function. Windows 8 basically throws it all away. Yes, you can find vestiges of Win7 backup buried in the dregs of Windows 8, but it’s a pain. Microsoft wants you to use its new backup method, stick everything on OneDrive, and use Refresh/Restore should the proverbial hit the fan. Comodo Backup runs rings around all of them.

Comodo wants to back you up to the cloud, give you 10 GB of free online storage, then sell you the rest. But even if you choose to backup the old-fashioned way, Comodo Backup is free and works like a champ.

Top free desktop media tool: VLC Media Player
Another poster child for open source software, VLC Media Player plays just about anything -- including YouTube Flash FLV files -- with no additional software, no downloads, no headaches. I use it exclusively for videos.

Unlike other media players, VLC sports simple, Spartan controls, built-in codecs for almost every file type imaginable, and a large and vocal online support community. VLC plays Internet streaming media with a click, records played media, converts between file types, and even supports individual frame screen shots. Yes, there’s a Metro version. No, I don’t recommend it.

VLC is well-known for tolerating incomplete or damaged media files. It will even start to play downloaded media before the download’s finished.

Top free desktop media tool: Image Resizer
Once upon a time, the Windows XP PowerToys included a fabulous, simple, fast image resizer. Right-click on a photo, choose Resize Pictures, and the photo is reduced in size to a fraction of the original. With options for Small, Medium, Large, Mobile, and Custom, you can make the resized file as small as you like, and maintain a lot of image fidelity in the process.

But XP came and went, and Microsoft didn’t keep the PowerToys updated. Enter Brice Lambson, a Microsoft employee with a heart of gold -- and a mission to bring the free Image Resizer to the latest versions of Windows. Microsoft still doesn’t support Image Resizer. But Brice does.

Top free desktop media tool: Paint.net
With dozens of good -- even great -- free image editors around, it’s hard to pick one above the others. Irfanview, for example, has tremendous viewing, organizing, and resizing capabilities.

For powerful, easy-to-use photo editing, with layers, plug-ins, and all sorts of special effects, along with a compact and easily understood interface, I’ll stick with Paint.Net. Although it requires Windows’ hard-to-keep-updated .Net Framework, the program puts all of the editing tools a non-professional might reasonably expect into a remarkably intuitive package.

Watch out for bogus “Download” ads on the site.

Top free desktop media tool: VirtualDub
I know many people who swear at Windows Live Movie Maker, but don’t want to shell out the money for an expensive Windows video editor, and refuse to switch to Apple’s iMovie. For those people, VirtualDub is a good compromise -- and the price is right.

It’s almost entirely AVI-based, although it can handle screen captures, MPEG-1, and BMP files. If you’re working with AVI or your camera cranks out files in AVI (mine does), the restriction may not hurt. The program itself runs easily, fast, and very simply, with no installation required.

Top free desktop media tool: HandBrake

Windows doesn’t rip DVDs. Period.
While you’re bound to get a hundred different opinions from any collection of a dozen different RIAA lawyers, ripping DVDs for your own use (say, to play them from a computer that doesn’t have a DVD player, or to keep your three-year-old’s fingers off the shiny side) is a common, debatably illegal, activity. Ask your lawyer how she rips DVDs.

I rip DVDs all the time (so sue me), and when I do, I use Handbrake. Open source software at its finest, HandBrake has an enormous number of options that should cover even the most convoluted cases.

Top free desktop system tool: Secunia PSI
A key component in keeping your system up-to-date, Secunia Personal Software Inspector scans every program on your computer and tells you in no uncertain terms if you have any wayward programs that haven’t been patched. PSI knows about more than 3,000 different programs.You can tell Secunia PSI to automatically keep your programs updated, and unless there’s some sort of odd manual intervention required, everything gets patched behind the scenes.

I particularly appreciate the fact that PSI respects my Windows Update settings -- so while I have everything else updated automatically, it lets me install Microsoft patches on my own schedule. Free PSI is for personal use; CSI corporate editions available.

Top free desktop system tool: Autoruns
Microsoft’s venerable and free-as-a-breeze Autoruns finds more auto-starting programs (add-ins, drivers, codecs, gadgets, shell extensions, whatever) in more obscure places than any other program, anywhere. AutoRuns not only lists the auto-running programs, it lets you turn individual programs off.

There are many minor features, including the ability to filter out Microsoft-signed programs, a quick way to jump to folders holding auto-starting programs, and a command-line version that lets you display file hashes. AutoRuns doesn’t require installation. It’s a program that runs and collects its information, displays it (with a rather rudimentary user interface), lets you wrangle with your system, then fades away.

Top free desktop system tool: HWiNFO
If you’re curious about the hardware that beats inside your system, have I got a utility for you. HWiNFO delves into every nook and cranny. From the summary (shown here) to detailed Device Manager-style trees of information -- entire forests of information -- HWiNFO can tell you everything anyone could want to know about your machine.

There’s a separate real-time monitoring panel that tells you the current status of everything under the sun: Temperatures, speeds, usage, clocks, voltages, wattages, hard drive SMART stats, read rates, write rates, GPU load, network throughput, and on and on.

Top free desktop system tool: PDF-XChange Viewer
For years, I recommended Foxit Reader as my favorite PDF viewer. Then the folks at Foxit started piling crapware into the installer, and I finally gave up. Now, I recommend a better product -- not only with more features (including text overlay, which works for form filling, and OCR conversion), but also with fewer, uh, unintended installer hitchhikers.

PDF-XChange Viewer offers all the PDF functions that most desktop users need. For Windows 8 users it also keeps you from that awful Metro viewer. The Viewer is free for businesses, too.

Top free desktop system tool: Revo Uninstaller
Revo Uninstaller well and truly uninstalls programs, and it does so in an unexpected way. When you use Revo, it runs the program’s uninstaller and watches while the uninstaller works, looking for the location of program files and for Registry keys that the uninstaller zaps. It then goes in and removes leftover pieces, based on the locations and keys that the program’s uninstaller took out. Revo also consults its own internal database for commonly-left-behind bits, and roots those out as well.

The not-free “Pro” version monitors your system when you install a program, making removal easier and more complete. Pro will also uninstall remnants of programs that have already been uninstalled.

Top free desktop system tool: Process Explorer
Process Explorer tells you which files are currently open by what program. That feature alone has saved me half a head of hair because once it's identified by Process Explorer, the process that has locked up your file can be killed. Process Explorer also gives you full information on all of the svchost processes running on your PC. That accounts for the other half a head.

Mouse over a process, even a generic svchost, and you can see the command line that launched the process, the path to the executable file, and all of the Windows services being used. Right-click and you can go online to get more information about the executable.

Another must-have product from, yes, Microsoft.

Top free desktop system tool: Recuva
File undelete has been a mainstay of the PC utility market since the days of DOS. Far as I’m concerned, there’s never been an undelete tool better than Piriform’s Recuva (pronounced “recover”): fast, thorough, and free.

When you throw out the Windows Recycle Bin trash, the files aren’t destroyed; rather the space they occupy is earmarked for new data. Undelete routines scan the flotsam and jetsam and put the pieces back together. As long as you haven’t added new data to a drive, undelete (almost) always works; and even if you’ve added some data, there’s a good chance you can get most of the deleted stuff back.

Recuva does all of that and more, for your hard drive, USB drives, even memory cards.

Top free desktop security tool: LastPass
LastPass keeps track of your user ids, passwords, and some other settings, stores them in the cloud, and offers them to you with just a click. LastPass does its AES-256 encrypting and decrypting on your PC, using a master password that you have to remember. The data that gets stored in the cloud is encrypted, and without the key, the stored passwords can’t be broken, unless you know somebody who can crack AES-256 encryption.

LastPass works as a browser add-on for IE, Firefox or Chrome, so all of your passwords are stored in one place, accessible to any PC you happen to be using -- if you have the master password.

Top free desktop security tool: EMET
Microsoft’s EMET (Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit) forces Windows to use two specific malware-busting defense systems. ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) relocates pieces of programs randomly, making it much harder for malware to hook into specific locations; DEP (Data Execution Protection) makes it much harder for malware to lurk in parts of memory that should contain data.

EMET breaks some -- even many -- programs. While it would be nice if all Windows applications would submit to EMET, they don’t. That said, there’s very little downside to installing EMET and telling the installer that you want to protect Java, Internet Explorer, and the Office programs.

Top free desktop security tool: Kaspersky TDSSKiller
The name may lead you to believe that TDSSKiller kills the TDSS rootkit, but the product does much more simply because so many common rootkits are based on, or derived from, TDSS. The current version detects and removes SST, Pihar, ZeroAccess, Sinowal, Whistler, Phanta, Trup, Stoned, RLoader, Cmoser, and Cidox. Unlike most rootkit killers, this one runs in Windows.

To run the program, fill out the form on the TDSSKiller page, wait for Kaspersky to send you a download link. Download the program and run it -- no installer, just an EXE. If any rootkits are found, you’ll be given the opportunity to Delete/Cure, Copy to quarantine, or Skip each identified interloper.

Top free desktop security tool: Malwarebytes
No doubt you already have an antivirus program. I use, and recommend, Microsoft Security Essentials (or Windows Defender in Win8, which is basically the same thing), but there are many good alternatives.

Malwarebytes is different. The free version is designed to run manually -- I run mine once a week. Malwarebytes picks up all sorts of creepy crawlies that get past AV programs. When combined with the support on the Malwarebytes forum, Malwarebytes is the ultimate fallback for infected systems -- whether you know they’re infected or not.

A word of warning
It’s never been easy to download freeware, but with the proliferation of sites (even well-known sites!) that bundle their own loads of crap in the installer make finding the real, clean product harder than ever.

While coming up with these recommendations, I was impressed by the number of “Download” icons like the one shown here. If you look at the very tiny print, you’ll notice that the Download link appears on an advertisement. In this case, if you click on the green box just above the phrase “Download Tixati v1.96,” and unleash the installer, your system will get a big shot of junk.

Now, more than ever, you have to be very careful where you click.

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