One guiding principle and sales tactic used by Mac evangelists and Apple fanboys over the years is that if you own one, it can’t get a virus. This has been purported as true for many years. The real truth is that you can and will get a virus with a Mac the same way as with Windows. The story of invulnerability did not come out of nowhere, however. There was some statistical truth to it. 

You have to look at it from a virus coder’s perspective. Some do it for money, some do it for a cause, and some do it just to cause mayhem. Whatever the driving force is, it’s about scale. Massive scale that affects as many people as possible. 

Until about 2007, Mac desktops and laptops belonged only to the most die hard of fans. To attack and have your efforts be ubiquitous, it was important to go for the Windows platform. Does that mean that a virus could not be written for a Mac? Of course not. It means it wasn’t in the best interest of those looking to cause virtual destruction. Since the launch of the iPhone, Apple as a whole has been climbing at a rapid pace and so has their Mac division of computers. Naturally, this has drawn attention from malware developers.

The Flashback Trojan virus has been ported to the OS X operating system and an estimated 600,000 people have been infected. It wasn’t long ago that finding 600,000 Mac computers was the challenge.

There are ways to be protected. Look at the list of things you can do to help ensure you don’t land in the same situation.

1. Buy a well known Anti-virus software suite like McAfee, Norton, AVG and pay for the updates and actually UPDATE it frequently. Being innoculated from all the malware made in 1997 does not help as new threats constantly emerge.
2. Do not open attachments in emails from untrusted uers. Some viruses will spread via email so use your new anti-virus software to scan attachments even from you know.
3. Run vulnerability scans looking for possible infections that may have been missed on the way in.
4. Stay away from websites that do not look credible. Go to known sources. If you are searching, stick with the first couple of pages on Google’s search results. If it can get ranked that high, it’s probably trustworthy. Unfamilar TLDs (the .com, .net, .biz, etc) are clear warning signs. Look out for .info, .cc, .ru and others that represent country codes - of countries you don’t live in.
5. Use a firewall. Whether it is part of the Anti-virus package you purchased or you get separate software, it will prevent unwanted visitors from leaving things on your network. Sometimes you bring it in by actions; other times you let it in by inaction.
6. Buy a router. Most people have them by now, but for those that don’t, they range in price, but start as low at $15. This will give you an added layer of security to keep the outsiders out.
7. Most importantly, pay attention to the computing world and news. When new viruses pop up and gain traction, the news talks about them. Keeping yourself in the loop will help you know what to expect and how to recover. It will also help you clean a virus sometimes before the anti-virus can even update.

With a little vigilance and few protective measures, anyone can surf the Internet safely and enjoy all it has to offer.

Information moves very quickly in the information age. People are reporters every snippet, quote, fact, spec sheet, and everything else they can if it deal with technology. It is super saturated. Only the biggest names get exclusives interviews, hands-on product times and invites to the announcement events going on. One thing that everyone seems to have taken to is reposting tech stories without fact-checking or even spell checking.

This morning, Apple did what Apple does best and turned an indusry on its ear. They’ve done it with computres, music, movies and phones. Education has always been in their DNA, but that became another focus today. iBooks is now also for textbooks. I wouldn’t be surprised if United Airlines putting iPads in the hands of pilots and removing the 20 pound bag of charts, maps, flight plans, etc from the cockpit didn’t help inspire Apple to further their green efforts and sell more iPads in the process.

Anyone with a Mac running OS X Lion can now download, for free, the iBooks Author app and put their textbooks in the iTunes store. From here students can download digital textbooks. The author can make them free or paid. The magic of it is that they are dynamic in more than one way. They can be updated immediately so information is never out of date (I suppose history books don’t suffer from that). Old prints, old editions, things moving to different pages, and scrambling to even find the right copy all go away immediately. 

The more important way that they are dynamic is in the content the student is viewing. It’s interactive so questions and exercises can be built right into it. Videos and keynote presentations play as part of the text. It is almost like a Harry Potter newspaper in some respects. While it may seem like it’s just flashy (no pun intended) and not useful, imagine a chemistry student looking at constant moving atoms as they exist instead of a static image on the page. 

It is not the biggest consumer announcement, but for people in education (as I am), this changes the way we reach our students and keep them engaged. Engagement is what makes this a truly special way of doing things. The ease of use is the feather in the cap.

Speaking of engagement, it would seem that reporters are so engaged in getting the news out that they don’t care if it is correct. Many of them just repost, reblog, reuse the original source story. That happened today. Everyone was commenting on and quoting Apple’s Peter Schiller. Here’s the rub. Peter Schiller doesn’t work at Apple. At least not in an executive position that announces new products. However, Phillip W. Schiller does. He is the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Apple and prominent enough at all the events that people know him by face. You know what he does. You know what kind of talk will happen when he comes out on stage. But the tech news community doesn’t know his name. They probably do but what may be even worse. It is not important enough to check it and get it right. I bet Phil Schiller would disagree.

The source story was wrong. The reporter made a mistake. That happens. None of the people out there that reblogged the story managed to find it either. That is a problem. In this world of technology news, where things can be so technical and difficult to understand for the average consumer, having mistakes pop up and then propagate across the web will only make it more difficult for the consumer to keep up and understand. And this happened with brands people have come to trust, Mashable being the very first one I saw it on this morning.

As more journalism tools arise, the art and craft of journalism is dying. It’s easy to write, but not everyone is a journalist. Mistakes like this prove it. Blogging helped enable it. We will see if this announcement from Apple today doesn’t make everyone a textbook author and turns the educational book into a Wikipedia like repository for bad information. It is an excellent idea, if the ideas are vetted somehow or students don’t download free (wrong) versions of a similar book to save a few bucks. If it stays professional and high quality, this will be an amazing advance for education.

SOPA is all over the place, as is its twin sister PIPA (not the Middleton kind). What most people don’t know is that this bill, PIPA, sailed easily passed the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year. PIPA is in the Senate and SOPA is in the House. All of a sudden, everyone has heard about it and, rightfully, has freaked out.

Without getting too technical, here is the purpose. The Internet and free sharing has allowed the bad apples to spoil the bunch. People share photos, music, thoughts and everything else that isn’t digitally nailed down. They take them for their own use and they share them. SOPA and PIPA aim to stop that. The problem is that the bill is so overarching to the point that it is now unilaterally aimed at piracy. It gives the government carte blanche to stop anything they think is piracy. So does that mean that a Facebook post that resembles someone else Facebook post encroaches on the intellectual property of the first user? According to the verbiage of SOPA and PIPA? Yes, it could be. If we both complain about the same thing, but I do it first, then you stole my thought.

While some people use the Internet to share things created and owned by someone else, that is far the majority. The Internet connectes people and allows them to communicate in a way this world has never seen before. The changes we see happen every day are unprecedented and on a global scale. They become sweeping changes because of the speed at which information moves. SOPA and PIPA are attempting to stop these widespread sweeping changes by doing the exact same thing in the opposite direction.

Think about innovation and how it is spurred on my some of the piracy. Napster, the popular patriarch of peer-to-peer file sharing, showed up in the late 1990s and enabled people to illegally share music files. And what was the response to the music industry? iTunes. And how did the music industry handle it? Not well initially. They balked at the idea. And why? They didn’t want to sell their music for $0.99 per song. They were angry at losing money due to sharing and didn’t want to protect themselves by not making enough money. There is the logic.

Then came DRM, which is Digital Rights Management. One example of using DRM is the encoding of access control information into the bits on a CD. This controls can access the information. DRM is used throughout the corporate enterprise as well.

Microsoft basically gave away Microsoft Office through the Office ‘97 release. Through to that point, the CD-key/Product key was any number divisible by 1. That was the algorithm. That means if you filled the boxes with 1’s, you could unlock the product without paying for it. Microsoft answered back by upping the ante on the algorithm used to protect their software.

When we started banking online we developed security. When it got broken, engineers developed tougher algorithms and longer keys. When those got broken, they went back to the drawing board. Piracy spurs innovation. And no level of censorship will completely block it out.

It is not up to the government to dictate what we can and cannot say - not here in the United States. We are a free people and this gives the government free reign to stop anything. Look around the internet today. Check Google, Wikipedia, DefectiveByDesign, VigTheGeek, Tech-City, JayVigMedia and others. Many sites have turned out the lights - in part or in full - in defiance of this piece of legislation and to also give people a taste of what the Internet may look like after SOPA/PIPA is enacted.

I am not endorsing piracy, but it exists. We have to get better at protecting it without destroying our freedoms and the ability to communicate. There are thieves, so we lock our doors and build better locksa nd better security. The government doesn’t regulate how many nice things we can own and say it’s to protect us from the temptation of burglars.

A certain level of piracy is healthy and to be expected. It sparks innovation, design and creation. It advances technology. It is the technological battle between good and evil, light and dark. Waving a government-sized, godlike arm that shuts everything down and calls it protection is nothing more than an Orwellian overseer. Do your part. Stop SOPA and PIPA.

Go to:

• http://protestsopa.com/
• http://www.wikipedia.com
• http://downagainstsopa.com/
  
• http://americancensorship.org/
  

It’s 2012 so that means it is time to post my predictions for the year.

1. Facebook meets its match. However, Facebook will not die in 2012. This is a planning phase prediction. Whoever will ultimately oust Facebook from the throne of social networking will spring up today and prey on FB’s on vulnerabilities.
2. Google+ finds its niche. Clearly, G+ does not fit the description to be the victor in the above scenario. However, Google has stuck gold with its Google+ network. The granular control and closed ecosystem blended with the open ability to follow and make connections with “circles” means it has it’s place in the social media world. It will focus on business and niche hobbies/interests for like-minded people to meet each other, where Facebook focuses on people who already know each other.
3. SOPA changes our life. It goes through in a version not too dissimilar from its current iteration and shuts down a large enough portion of the Internet that people actually notice. Law gets repealed by Summer of 2013 if another Democrat takes office - March, if a Republican steps in.
4. Microsoft is the Apple of 1997. Windows 7 didn’t do as well as they hoped since it became little more than a huge Vista service pack/patch. Windows 8 on the desktop looks like the phone. People want a desktop to act like a desktop. Windows gains no market share, but actually loses some. 
5. Sony takes a bath and tries to not become Sega. Xbox is the clear winner here. The next generation consoles make a difference. Sony needs to announce something specific and huge THIS year or Xbox takes the console market for heavy gamers and average gamers. Nintendo keeps the kids.
6. The shift in TV begins. Linear programming becomes less relevant as more things go online and on demand. Items like Roku, Boxee and AppleTV proliferate this year as prices come down and bandwidth goes up.
7. Apple settles into life after Steve, and it’s not awesome. The culture won’t change. Cool systems, devices and tons of innovation will prevail. However, without Steve at the helm, things will be different. Just as dedicated, not as magical. Keynotes are less attended/watched. Sales, while high, aren’t as high as before and the mania slips a little. Hopefully they stop the downward trend before it’s too late.
8. Oh… and JavVig Media, LLC blows up, gets funded, finds a 6x-8x valuation and gets bought. That last one is wishful thinking.

Louie discusses the Motorola Droid 4 and HP hanging onto WebOS

Squashing the rumors about PROOF that people know what is coming next for iOS devices

Adobe killed Flash for mobile devices beginning with the next version. FINALLY!

By now, almost everyone has heard of Sir, the new virtual assistant Apple has included on the iPhone 4S. I’ve been getting to know her for the last 45 minutes or so and I have to say that it’s amazing. Siri was initially the company that developed the artificial intelligence and launched an app with it. Apple snatched them up and integrated Siri into the new version of iOS and made her available only on the iPhone 4S so far. I refer to Siri as a woman because it is a female voice that interacts with you.

The magic of Siri is that she is conceptual. You do not need to say “What is the weather report for zip code xxxxx?” You can simply say, “Siri, will I need an umbrella on Tuesday.” You can say “Siri, can you send Ty an iMessage?” You speak to Siri exactly the way you would to a human personal assistant. She is able to follow the flow of a conversation. As Scott Forstall showed us at the keynote, you can text me with something like “When can we go to lunch?” When that comes in, I can ask Siri, “what is my schedule like for Friday?” If she responds that I am free all day, I can simply tell her to reply. Even though she left the messages app and went to the calendar app, she understands that it was all to get to a response to your request for lunch.

I found an issue in the much talked about Facebook for iPad app and show it here. It’s small, but exists nonetheless.

If you have an iPhone and you’re looking to upgrade, there are several options. You can visit a store, call AT&T or log into ATT.com and check your account. With over 500,000 apps on the app store, and a long relationship with Apple, it stands to reason that AT&T has made it easier still. The ATT Upgrader app allows you to input your number, last 4 of social security number and billing zip code to get an immediate look at your status.

Whether or not you are eligible for an upgrade, you can purchase a new phone from within the app. Even if you are ineligible you are greeted with a message that says,

You are not eligible at this time for an upgrade at a discounted price. However, you can take advantage of our no commitment pricing

On October 7 when the iPhone 4S launched, this was the easiest way to complete the purchase. Apple’s website was overloaded making a connection to each carrier. The phone number to Apple was not letting anyone through. Anyone with special pricing such as AT&T government or premier accounts was told that the transaction could not be completed online. If the Apple site let the customer in, a carrier would have to be selected, which was the common choke point. Using the AT&T Upgrader obviously connects only to AT&T which alleviates part of the processing problems during high volume upgrades. Of course, it is only built for iPhone customers upgrading to new iPhones. However, if you fall into that category, download the free app and give it a try. You’ll have your new phone on the way in no time.