I’m a frequent reader of such websites as lifehacker.com, 43folders.com, etc.  These websites, many times, will feature articles about being more efficient.

Recently I stumbled across an article, featured on lifehacker.com, that talks about time management and productivity.  A must for any techie…like me .

Great job Obama!

I stumbled across a great website…mostly due to my own curiosity…that has a great graphic showing where your money goes when you buy gas at the pump.  I’d really like to bitch about this, but I’m a slave to that pump until I get a better car…

It’s just simply amazing!  I’ve linked the graphic to the original post regarding this.

There are times that I wish I would have invested massive amounts of money into Apple computer. I guess that’s the way things are with many people who invest–they wish that they could have done something in the past now knowing the future. The stock has grown so much in the past few months and confidence still remains high with the company.

Apple computer did their quarterly thing today with new updates to product lines and removal of old trinkets. A lot of the removal, which subjected the Powerbook line to a name change and product line change, I don’t agree with. Many people like the past Apple products. Take the eBay/iPod Mini inflation on ebay (story)–many of these older products are selling for almost $75.00 more than their original list price (of $199.00)…insane! Back to the name change, the new laptop line from Apple is now called MacBook Pro — a change from the original name of Powerbook. This product change now, though, is a definite step in the right direction. These new laptops are rigged with the best in hardware (*whisper* they’re now supporting two processors!).

So, even though Apple is one to quickly change their product line up, I’m fully confident that they know what they’re doing. In fact, I have no doubts–I just miss some of the old hardware they had. Hey, maybe my current laptop (a 12″ Powerbook) will sell for much higher than it was originally purchased (~$1500.00).

So let me talk about the present state of things. I’m sitting and surfing away at my usual hangout…Crazy Mocha (of South Side). It’s a great place to get coffee, listen to music….and surf packets of information going across the network. What do I mean by packets…well packets are those little small bits of information which are passed between computers. They can contain almost anything–from this text to your passwords. So how do I know what is being sent from my computer. Well, Unix (*nix, Linux, etc) has the great ability to do many things, including the sniffing of packets. The best software title for this is Ethereal. Ethereal acts like a network sniffer, picking up all information on a network in real-time. It lets you analyze the information, see who’s doing what, etc.

So recently I decided to turn it on myself to see what I could find. I specifically wanted to see what was being sent from my computer, over the internet, while checking e-mail. What I found kinda made me feel like I had no security. I’ve heard many times over that some packets (specifically those in POP and IMAP e-mail protocols) were being sent from computers in clear text. That means that I can read them without any special software to decipher what the packet has stored in it.

So here’s what I did; I turned on the packet sniffer (setting it to specifically sniff my own computers packets). I watched what it was sending while checking my e-mail. After picking up the packets, I scanned them to see what was being sent. Low and behold, there was my login and password being sent in clear text. I couldn’t believe it! Following up on my fears of having my e-mail login information hijacked, I dropped an e-mail to my web-hosting provider. I explained my fears of having the password hi-jacked and asked what I could do. A person by the name of Joseph responded:

…please know that in all of our years of Internet work, we have never-even-once known of or heard about an email password snooped and stolen in transit. This would need to come by way of a MITM (man in the middle) attack which is technically extremely difficult when compared to all the other common ways that email passwords and access to email facilities are stolen. In other words, hackers these days are not very motivated to snoop your password on the wire because these hackers all over the world are receiving gigabytes of passwords on a daily basis from keystroke recording viruses which are very pervasive throughout the Internet right now.

These viruses usually come in by way of an Outlook email attachment, or are delivered via the web (usually via porn sites), or come in via a shareware installation. Once installed in the PC, the virus runs in the background recording keystrokes, then sends out the keystroke records to the hacker via email when the computer is on but not actively being used. The real trick with this is that no amount of encryption will help. The passwords are compromised right off the keyboard before any encryption can take place.

So what has this done to my actions in the coffee bar environment. Well, I found out how to access my e-mail over a web-based interface with SSL encryption support. This prevents my password from being sent in clear-text format…so there’s no worries there now. But the underlying question is, what can you do to prevent your e-mail login information from beiing hijacked. The best bet is to remain on a wired network, this cuts down on people being able to read you information. If you need to send e-mail, try to do it from a web-based interface with encryption. With encryption set, your password will be scambled.

That is it…I obviously will be doing more research to figure out different ways of protecting such information.