There are other ways in which identity can be confirmed, such as fingerprint or retina scanners. These mean that the system will only login if the user is present. This solves a lot of password cracking issues yet there is still a possibility that a hacker may be able to crack the system and get into your account. However most people are unable to afford fingerprint and retina scanners at work, let alone at home, even though they are getting much cheaper as time goes on. Personalized key cards can also be used to prove identification but the issue of what happens if it is lost or stolen makes it not worthwhile in most cases.

This is why passwords are so popular, they are cheap, secure, and hard to steal or lose as well as being very easy to change. Some of these advantages can be used more efficiently to make your details even more secure. For example passwords are easy to change, so if you have an important account it is suggested that you change your password at least every month to stop anyone who maybe specifically targeting you to steal from. Passwords are even easy to set up, much password management software is available online for nothing, and the great stuff is still a lot less than fingerprint scanners.

Due to the rise in accounts being cracked and private information being downloaded, it is important that all network administrators be very careful in monitoring the security of their network as if one account is cracked, many others could be open to attack as well. Also it is important for login providers to create limits on how many times a login can be attempted per time period. This stops people spamming logins with very many passwords. Another thing to add with the password is a question with a password like answer. The great thing about this is it helps security like a second password but the user doesn’t have to try to memorize it as the question should jog their mind to what they nominated at the answer.

Therefore it can be seen that unless you want to spend more money on security than you have to secure, a humble password is for you. Just remember to keep it complicated and not related to you in any way. Oh, and the longer the better, as always.

The study found that an amazing 63% of test subjects clicked the OK button on fake pop-up warnings even after they had been warned by researchers that they would see some fake pop-ups mixed in with real ones. Clicking OK instead of just closing the pop-up window could allow your computer to download and install a computer virus or other malware. These malicious bits of software might range from simply annoying to blatant attempts to steal your private information from your computer.

The North Carolina State University study was led by graduate student David Sharek, and co-authored by undergraduate student Cameron Swofford and Psychology Professor Dr. Michael S. Wogalter, who said, “This study demonstrates how easy it is to fool people on the Web.” Of course, if it didn’t work so well, these pop-ups wouldn’t be so common. Real pop-up warnings come from the Windows (or other) operating system to warn of error conditions on the local computer. These legitimate warnings can prevent the user from making an unintended change to system settings or even allowing a virus to be downloaded.

Fake, web-generated pop-up windows are often designed to mimic the genuine Windows pop-up warnings.
One of the most common internet malware pop-ups for example tells you it is performing a system scan of your computer. It asks if you would like to be protected from viruses and pop-up windows. If you click OK it downloads software onto your computer. Often these malicious pop-ups keep recurring so that you can’t progress from the page you’re on until you hit OK, or use the Task Manager to close down the browser application completely.

The simple solution according to Dr. Wogalter is for users to “Be suspicious when things pop up. Don’t click OK – close the box instead.” Of course, savvy internet users will use a browser setting that prevents pop-ups in the first place. Internet Explorer, for example, can be configured to provide a warning every time a website tries to open a new pop-up on the user’s computer. The user then has the option to allow or disallow that pop-up.

Source: Eurekalert. “New study highlights risk of fake popup warnings for Internet users.” Sharek, D., Swofford, C., and Wogalter, M.

1. Size and weight with keyboard: The size and weight of laptop you want depends upon how frequently you carry your laptop. More often you’ll be carrying; the lighter and smaller model will be suitable for you. If you work on an office and carry the computer from home to office and bring back daily, then obviously you’ll be choosing smaller one. The larger laptop generally consist of wide area of keyboard and reliefs you from stress on fingers or wrists that may happen to someone with typing on small keyboards. So the size of keyboard also becomes a decision making component.

2. Mouse: Before buying a laptop, it’s better to know about what mouse options are available with them and choose appropriate one. Some of them are available with built in touch pad that can be controlled by the movement of finger. But in contrast to this some users may find difficult to use this option and require of buying a mouse externally. Before purchasing laptop, the options available for mouse should be considered.

3. Wireless: Some laptops come with potential upgrade options like room for an expandable PC card or a USB port for accessing internet. Further many others come with capability of wireless internet with pre-wired configuration. To use it, you should activate your wireless Internet service. Most of the users asking for laptops seek for the wireless configuration.

4. Ports for peripherals: The peripherals like printers, scanners, digital cameras, etc will be connected to laptop through USB ports so that more services will be provided. The thing to be considered is that whether the laptop contains adequate ports and for not confusing, reading the specs for any laptop considered to be bought will ensure the sufficient of ports.

5. Budget you can afford: Ultimately the deciding matter of purchasing a laptop is the budget you have. After studying different laptops available and comparing the prices, don’t think of overspending for laptop. If you are excited to buy certain laptop, wait for some time to think of this and prepare for budget. Then again if you have the same excitement, then go for buying it.

Oscommerce
Oscommerce is one of the original free shopping carts systems, nevertheless this does not mean they are the best. Unfortunately oscommerce does require heavy modification especially if you are not in America. If this was a solution you wanted to go with then I would suggest hiring a free lace web designer and developer to customize the cart for you. Another problem with oscommerce is that it is rarely updated by developers. This carts has slowly become out dated and it is not user friendly.

Download oscommerce shopping cart

Presta shop
Presta shop is a newer e-commerce solution. The shopping cart responds well to traffic and out of the box comes with a nice template. Unlike oscommerce Presta shop comes with the latest and greatest gadgets from being user friendly to backend operations. With a little bit of web know-how you could have your e-commerce shop up and running in minuets.

Download prestashop shopping cart

Magento
Magento commerce was released around the same time as presta shop and out performs prestashop in features, though with all its extra features you will need super fast (expensive) web hosting for the cart not to bog down. Another problem with this shopping cart is that it uses PDO_MySQL which unfortunately most web hosts do not have.

Download Magento shopping cart

In my opinion if you were to use a shopping cart these would be the three to choose from more specifically Prestashop. All these carts handle SEO fairly well. Custom templates are not hard to find for these shopping carts and if you have a bit of know-how in coding and design you could wrap a template around it your self. Payment gateways are another big “if and “but”, you will find that paypal, google checkout and most credit card systems will adapt easily into these carts because of there popularity.

Remember one of the most important rules when starting up your online business is always have your own domain and hosting, do not run off a sub-domain this will heavily affect your business in the long term.

According to Vince Vizzaaccaro, executive VP of Net Applications, the data to this regard is abundant and very clear. The company tracked the browser usage on over 40,000 websites to conclude that the Chrome adoption rate is now of 0.77 percent, a consistent drop when compared to the 0.85 percent of the first week following its release.

Still according to Vizzaaccaro, the presence of the Mountain View browser is increasing during the non-working hours, while falling considerably once users return to their daily jobs, where apparently the Google-branded browser is still struggling to find its own space.

Although innovative under many aspects — such as that of anonymous browsing, security and astonishingly fast JavaScript engine — it should still remembered that the browser is just in its beta stage, and therefore not quite as stable as other established products in the extremely competitive market of Internet browsers.

Moreover, Google Chrome aims at being overly simple to use, offering eye-catching effects and and a good user experience, but still lacks plugins and expansions that would allow users to fully personalize their Internet browsing environment. To this regard, however, it could only be a matter of time before users will be able to accomplish the task.

In fact, the browser is based on a plugin architecture that allows users to create extensions and add new functionality to this powerful platform. This, in addition to the fact that the entire source code of the program is being released to the open source community through a license that allows anyone to view, modify and redistribute the modified versions of the software, could really help attract the attention of the open source developer community, from which Google would largely benefit.

Vizzaccaro said that both IE and Firefox are still showing a small market share decrease when compared to the period immediately preceding Chrome’s debut on Sept. 2, but both their trends are now upwards to the expense of Google’s browser. Apple’s Safari, on the other hand, didn’t show signs of crisis whatsoever and continues its upward trend.

To some, Safari’s immunity to Chrome’s threats could be attributed to the lack of a native Mac Os X edition of the browser, which is only available for Windows XP and Vista at the moment of this writing.

Another cause for the market share drop of the browser may be the relatively low efforts that are being directed towards the product promotion: after an initial, highly effective featuring on the Google home page which lasted several days and gave users all around the world a chance to know and test the platform themselves, the current marketing efforts now seem to be confined to simple search engine advertising for relevant keywords such as “browser” and similar.

Whether Google will wait for Chrome to reach a more mature development stage before going on to promote it more actively is unclear at this point: in fact, many of the popular and most widely used services provided by the company — Gmail, News, Finance and many others — are still officially in their “beta” stages. What is relatively sure, though, is that Google is now entering an entirely new array of competitive markets, from the smartphone (Android, G1) to the Internet browser industry, thus confirming once more the vitality and competitiveness of the company.