Anyone who spends their time working with Google search on a daily basis will appreciate the Watson-like approach Google is taking with search. While some feel this may threaten they way SEO is done, I tend to believe that “going with the flow” of information is what is most important. People need to keep up with what Big Brother (this time it is Google and we tell it where we are going and gladly) wants us to do. Check this out:

Calling customers by name isn’t always the norm but we wanted to shout out to Luke Frazier, host of NeoTropolis. This episode focuses on how technology affect rituals in everyday life. Mazels Luke!

Watch Rituals and Reasons on PBS. See more from NEOtropolis.

Does anyone remember what it was like surfing the net on a phone pre data plan? I can remember getting stuck with these overrages for checking my mail on my flip phone. Nightmare right? Luckily, like a handfull of people, are grandfathered with unlimited data plans with Verizon depending on how long you’ve been rocking a smartphone. I have had a data plan since the used Treo I bought on Ebay.

Now of course, there are lots of people who want to roam about on the 4G to watch movies while sitting in the park or whatever you wish. And those people have limited data plans. So, it is no wonder that the early adopters of Verizon’s IPad 3 are getting bills that should overrages on their monthly plans. Keep in mind, if you watched 1 movie a day on your IPad you will exceed a 5GB data limit in about 2 days!!

This excellent article comes from Jason Perlow and ZDNET. For your convenience I have copied an excerpt here but feel free to visit the author’s site for the full version:

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that less than a week after being delivered to customers, Verizon iPad 3 users are already getting hit with large overage charges to the tune of $10 per gigabyte.

This is a result of Apple’s new HD+ tablet’s ability to download data at broadband-like speeds (10Mbps+) and thus enabling bandwidth-intensive applications such as Netflix, Hulu+ and even large app downloads themselves to quickly consume a 5GB or 10GB monthly data plan allotment in a matter of days.

You know, it’s funny, I could swear I heard this someplace before.

Oh yeah! I predicted this scenario almost exactly back in December of 2010. Over two years ago.

• Also Read: When Netflix, iPhone meets 4G, wireless hell breaks loose (December 2010)

If you don’t feel like reading the original piece, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version:

If you’re looking to become a Verizon LTE subscriber, keep in mind that at the $50.00 a month data plan, it will will buy you 5GB of data.  For the business user that emails a bunch of PowerPoints and does a ton of email and needs to use Web, Intranet and thin client applications over VPNs, this should be more than sufficient.

But I’ve now learned the entire thing comes to a screeching halt — or results in a big-ass AMEX bill in service overages if you start trying to do more ambitious stuff with it, such as suck down Netflixes or large iTunes movies.

Sascha Segan determined in his tests that when watching Netflix in Standard Definition, with a 1500Kbps stream, you’ll burn through your entire monthly allotment in under seven and a half hours. With 720p Netflix movies, at 3800Kbps, that’s just under three hours.

That’s roughly equivalent to the same amount of HD iTunes films, about one and a half movies.

Now, what I could not predict back in 2010 was that the iPad would eventually end up with a Retina screen which would also cause an App Obesity epidemic.

A great old friend sent a video related to gratitude and time lapsed photography. Think about this: To a child, every day is an adventure. To an older person (like the rest of us) everyday is a gift. Ti be more clear, my good friend Mike Libby says that when wishing Julian Lennon regards for John and Yoko’s anniversary, this video was posted in return as a hard lesson about gratitude.

Unlike a lot of people, PC Handyman finds the civil disobedience of hacking to be fascinating. We do not advocate people trying to crash or steal other people’s virtual property but it has become a truly interesting display of unrest with reality based consequences. In a direct sense, we get to do a bit of cleanup work for people who have been infected as well as performing penetration tests for people’s websites.

The group Anonymous has targeted lots of big entities over the years and it seems its attack on the Vatican has left behind a road map for the White Hat Justice League to follow. The Silicon Valley company Imperva is putting together a report on what Anonymous did in its failed attempt that might lead to better protection against them in the future. This article was taken from the NY Times website and copied here in its entirety for your convenience:

The New York Times

February 26, 2012
In Attack on Vatican Web Site, a Glimpse of Hackers’ Tactics
By NICOLE PERLROTH and JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO – The elusive hacker movement known as Anonymous has carried
out Internet attacks on well-known organizations like Sony and PBS. In
August, the group went after its most prominent target yet: the Vatican.

The campaign against the Vatican, which did not receive wide attention at
the time, involved hundreds of people, some with hacking skills and some
without. A core group of participants openly drummed up support for the
attack using YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Others searched for
vulnerabilities on a Vatican Web site and, when that failed, enlisted
amateur recruits to flood the site with traffic, hoping it would crash,
according to a computer security firm’s report to be released this week.

The attack, albeit an unsuccessful one, provides a rare glimpse into the
recruiting, reconnaissance and warfare tactics used by the shadowy hacking
collective.

Anonymous, which first gained widespread notice with an attack on the Church
of Scientology in 2008, has since carried out hundreds of increasingly bold
strikes, taking aim at perceived enemies including law enforcement agencies,
Internet security companies and opponents of the whistle-blower site
WikiLeaks.

The group’s attack on the Vatican was confirmed by the hackers and is
detailed in a report that Imperva, a computer security company based in
Redwood City, Calif., plans to release ahead of a computer security
conference here this week. It may be the first end-to-end record of a full
Anonymous attack.

Though Imperva declined to identify the target of the attack and kept any
mention of the Vatican out of its report, two people briefed on the
investigation confirmed that it had been the target. Imperva had a unique
window into the situation because it had been hired by the Vatican’s
security team as a subcontractor to block and record the assault.

“We have seen the tools and the techniques that were used in this attack
used by other criminal groups on the Web,” said Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s
chief technology officer. “What set this attack apart from others is it had
a clear timeline and evolution, starting from an announcement and
recruitment phase that was very public.”

The Vatican declined to comment on the attack. In an e-mail intended for a
colleague but accidentally sent to a reporter, a church official wrote: “I
do not think it is convenient to respond to journalists on real or potential
attacks,” adding, “The more we are silent in this area the better.”

The attack was called Operation Pharisee in a reference to the sect that
Jesus called hypocrites. It was initially organized by hackers in South
America and Mexico before spreading to other countries, and it was timed to
coincide with Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Madrid in August 2011 for World
Youth Day, an international event held every other year that regularly
attracts more than a million Catholic youths.

Hackers initially tried to take down a Web site set up by the church to
promote the event, handle registrations and sell merchandise. Their goal -
according to YouTube messages delivered by an Anonymous figure in a Guy
Fawkes mask – was to disrupt the event and draw attention to child sexual
abuse by priests, among other issues.

The videos, which have been viewed more than 77,000 times, include a verbal
attack on the pope and the young people who “have forgotten the abominations
of the Catholic Church.” One calls on volunteers to “prepare your weapons,
my dear brother, for this August 17th to Sunday August 21st, we will drop
anger over the Vatican.”

Much as in a grass-roots lobbying campaign, the hackers spent weeks
spreading their message through their own Web site and social sites like
Twitter and Flickr. Their Facebook page called on volunteers to download
free attack software and implored them to “stop child abuse” by joining the
cause. It featured split-screen images of the pope seated on a gilded throne
on one side and starving African children on the other. And it linked to
articles about sexual abuse cases and blog posts itemizing the church’s
assets.

It took the hackers 18 days to recruit enough people, the report says. Then
the reconnaissance began. A core group of roughly a dozen skilled hackers
spent three days poking around the church’s World Youth Day site looking for
common security holes that could let them inside, the report says. Probing
for such loopholes used to be tedious and slow, but the advent of automated
tools made it possible for hackers to do this while they slept.

In this case, the scanning software failed to turn up any gaps. So the
hackers turned to a brute-force approach – a so-called distributed
denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack that involves clogging a site with data
requests until it crashes. Even unskilled supporters could take part in this
from their computers or smartphones.

“Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,” said
Cole Stryker, an author who has researched the movement. “You have four or
five guys who really know what they’re doing and are able to pull off some
of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word,
or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.”

Over the course of the campaign’s final two days, Anonymous enlisted as many
as a thousand people to download attack software, or directed them to
custom-built Web sites that let them participate using their cellphones.
Visiting a particular Web address caused the phones to instantly start
flooding the target Web site with hundreds of data requests each second,
with no special software required, the report says.

On the first day, the denial-of-service attack resulted in 28 times the
normal traffic to the church site, rising to 34 times the next day. Hackers
involved in the attack, who did not identify themselves, said through a
Twitter account associated with the campaign that the two-day effort
succeeded in slowing the site’s performance and making the page unavailable
“in several countries.” Imperva disputed that the site’s performance was
affected and said its technologies had successfully siphoned the excess data
away from the site.

Anonymous moved on to other targets, including an unofficial site about the
pope, which the hackers were briefly able to deface.

Imperva executives say the Vatican’s defenses held up because, unlike Sony
and other hacker targets, it invested in the infrastructure needed to repel
both break-ins and full-scale assaults.

Researchers who have followed Anonymous say that despite its lack of success
in this and other campaigns, recent attacks show the movement is still
evolving and, if anything, emboldened. Threatened attacks on the New York
Stock Exchange and Facebook last autumn apparently fizzled. But the hackers
appeared to regain momentum in January after federal authorities shut down
Megaupload, a popular file-sharing site.

In retaliation, hackers affiliated with Anonymous briefly knocked dozens of
Web sites offline, including those of the F.B.I., the White House and the
Justice Department. At one point, they were able to eavesdrop on a
conference call between the F.B.I. and Scotland Yard.

“Part of the reason ‘Op Megaupload’ was so successful is that they’ve
learned from their past mistakes,” said Gabriella Coleman, an associate
professor at McGill University who has studied Anonymous. Professor Coleman
said the hackers had been using a new tool to better protect their
anonymity. “Finally people felt safe using it,” she said. “That could
explain why it was so big.”

In recent weeks, Anonymous has made increasingly bold threats, at one point
promising to “shut the Internet down on March 31″ by attacking servers that
perform switchboard functions for the Internet.

Security experts now say that a sort of open season has begun. “Who is
Anonymous?” asked Rob Rachwald, Imperva’s director of security. “Anyone can
use the Anonymous umbrella to hack anyone at anytime.”

Indeed, in the last six months, hackers have attacked everything from
pornography sites to the Web portals of Brazilian airlines. And some hackers
have been accused of trying to extort money from corporations – all under
the banner of Anonymous.

“Anonymous is an idea, a global protest movement, by activists on the
streets and by hackers in the network,” the hackers said through the Twitter
account. “Anyone can be Anonymous, because we are an idea without leaders
who defend freedom and promote free knowledge.”

Thanks to Betsy Fallon for saying a few good words about our business

Anyone who knows me will admit that I get queazy when thinking about piracy. I hate the idea of taking other people’s intellectual property and watching it or installing it for my own satisfaction. We were at Phoenix Coffee once considering the best location for an IP Camera when we had this debate with another  coffee aficianado:

PC Handyman: So, do you think piracy is wrong?

Coffee Aficianado: H$ll no! In high school we had to watch these videos that would say things like, ” You wouldn’t pirate a sofa would you?” And I always said that if a Lazyboy was available on UTorrent I would have 1 in every room of my house.

With that said, here is a comic that best illustrates my moral debate with piracy: My apologies in advance for any inappropriate language or jargons in the comic. If you are offended please take it up with The Oatmeal

So, I have been housesitting for many months now and realize that I do not sleep throughout the night like I thought. I get up and read or do whatever and started to wonder if something was wrong with me. So many people battle over getting enough sleep. The optimal amount of sleep according to some is 8 hours. Some? That is a silly way of me saying everyone considers a normal night of sleep to consist of 8 hours.

But what i take credit for discovering is that when I am alone (not with my daughter) I sleep in shifts. I thought there was something wrong with that but that thanks to my all-time love Felicia Day and the BBC, I have been officially bolstered: Here is an excerpt for your enjoyment but you must check out the source and full article:

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists. [READ MORE]

I was at a school function for my daughter and talking to a customer about data storage. We discussed the pros and cons of Mozy versus Carbonite. Yesterday, I was hipped to a new company called BeeCloud which is giving away 512GB of cloud storage. Nowadays people have computers with at least 500 GB of hard drive space but way less being used for storage. With this, you can back up everything that matters to you and right now it is free!!!! Check out BeeCloud today.

Intuit ran a contest where our customer base had a chance to write about us. We didn’t win but were really grateful to everyone who took the 12 seconds out of their day to fill out a form. Here is what people had to say:

PC Handyman-Cleveland LLC
Cleveland Heights, OH

This is a great company.Super friendly and professional. I tell everyone I know about them and what they do.
Poppa Bass (07.29.11) Report Abuse

I think the staff is extremely knowledgeable and fabulous!
jag (05.30.11) Report Abuse

Fantastic service from a very talented group of people. I have had many reasons to use PC Handyman and never been disapointed. A very prompt and reasonable company.
11Key (05.22.11) Report Abuse

Great people!
ezdaddy (05.20.11) Report Abuse

I can not imagine a more thorough, quality, and reliable service. They are expedient and priced right. They need to go nation-wide.
Big Daddy D (05.19.11) Report Abuse

Love!!
jennifer44118 (05.19.11) Report Abuse

PC handyman has great pricing and service!!
beachbody dad (05.18.11) Report Abuse

They are the best!
Amy (05.17.11) Report Abuse

PC Handyman is a reliable resource for all of your computer needs. I have been very satisifed with the work completed on my computer and I have recommended family and friends who feel the same way. Keep up the good work!
daddyrich (05.17.11) Report Abuse

Great service, fair pricing and a pleasure to work with! Thanks PC Handyman!
John (05.17.11) Report Abuse

PCHandyman-Cleveland gets a AAA rating in my book. They are efficient, personable, and always available when I need them to get my computers going again. You’re wasting valuable time and money going to anyone else.
RevUnc (05.17.11) Report Abuse

PC Handyman – Cleveland is a great resource for your computer and website needs. They did a great job for me and I get rave reviews from everybody that views my website. Thank you, PC Handyman – Cleveland
Later Lieber (05.16.11) Report Abuse

The PC Handyman team is trustworthy, and able to fix all of my computer needs in a very timely manner. Love them!
Griest2006 (05.16.11) Report Abuse

This business is quick to serve, has the answers and if they don’t then they will help you find the answers. They fit a void in Cleveland and offer fantastic service with a smile!
Meredith26 (05.16.11) Report Abuse

Great people! Great service! Great business!
Tinaj (05.16.11) Report Abuse

Great service and always responds quickly. Very knowledgable. Easy to work with.
Slipson (05.16.11) Report Abuse

We want to be the #1 source of computer support/instruction for Cleve Hts. Ohio. With the economy like ours, quality work and fair prices have to matter more than profits. We pledge and promise this to our customers.
pchandyman (05.16.11) Report Abuse