Sorry...no photos this week

Sorry everyone, our computer is at the hospital this week so there are no photos, but there will be some great ones to come!!! We are just as busy as ever and Sally is still growing.....still averaging an ounce a day weight gain. Anyway, I read this on someone else's blog (thanks Jocelyn) and thought it would be good to post on mine. Sorry if it is a repeat to anyone, but I think it is good to remember to be careful. Have a great weekend.

A Reminder.....

The reason a blog is dangerous is that people tend to publish quite a few details about their personal life. Let's say that Jaime Smith operates a blog for her friends. She posts about the car they just bought and talks about how they are going on vacation. She mentions her husband's name, Bob, maybe her maiden name and details about their house. She posts pictures of their family that could be used to create spoof IDs. A potential net predator now knows that Jaime will be gone from December 1st through January 15th, will be traveling to Jamaica with her husband and her maiden name was Jones. If he knows her birthdate (birthday post or a post about how hard it was to turn 30 back in 2002) he now knows enough information to guess some passwords.The hacker runs a password script begining with terms that include her spouse and childrens' names and her birthdate (right now you are blushing because you thought you came up with a very clever password). Now he has full access to her poorly secured hotmail account and maybe even her bank accounts. At this point his access to Jaime's life is only limited by his imagination. He could lock Jaime out of her own email account and send mail to her friends and coworkers stating that they have hired a house sitter (so don't worry about the cars parked at the house). If Jaime has made this collection of mistakes she probably has vast amounts of personal info, maybe including bank statements and account numbers in her email. She also probably uses the same passwords for her online banking as her email and maybe even her blog. If Jaime's lucky all she gets is some porn posted on her blog and locked out of her email as a lesson from a benevolent (and I'm not being sarcastic there) hacker. If she's unlucky she will be stuck in Jamaica for an extra month while she figures out why their bank account is empty, as the hacker methodically cleans out their house.Hopefully that illustration will show you what the "hacker" is capable of.How much hacking did you read about in that? IP Addresses? Cookies? None. The so-called hacker took advantage of the tools that Jaime handed him. He wouldn't even have to hack her email account. He could just start surfing blogs and guessing email passwords manually until he hits the jackpot.The point of all this is that if you want a bunch of rules you can find the safety advice for blogging, emailing, surfing etc all over online. Problem is, the rules keep changing and the media is cut from the same block as our digitally-retarded government. There's some old saying (with about a dozen variations) about outrunning a tiger...you don't have to outrun the tiger, you just have to outrun the guy beside you. Welcome to the online world. Now, just be smart, make yourself a hard target and let some other sucker be the victim.PS: Thousands of people potentially know who I am online. My name is all over the online marketing materials I work on. High profile folks like Matt Cutts from Google and Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo run blogs where everyone knows who they are. Their blogs are hacked occasionally but they fix it and keep going...