TECH World..: BACKUP YOUR SOCIAL LIFE

It’s prudent to take a backup of your personal data shared on social networking sites.

With social networking sites so deeply entrenched in our lives, little do we realize that we share a massive amount of personal information with the world, be it in the form of images, blogs, tweets, or status updates. These sites mirror our lives, they reveal our thoughts, whims, and memories that are closest to our heart. Imagine what would happen if you were to forget the password or, due to a technical glitch, were unable to log in to your account. It’s important to take a back up of your online data just like you take a back up of your offline data. There are many websites that allow you to do that.

It’s like the whole world is on Facebook and we practically lead our lives on it. It’s therefore good to know that Facebook itself offers a backup option. You can back up your profile information, wall posts, photos, videos, friends list, notes, events, messages and even comments posted on your wall. However, you do not have a option of selecting only particular data. You will have to download it all. You can do so by going to account settings. There, you will see the option to ‘Download Your Information’. Click to begin the download. This process takes some time and you will be notified via email when it’s completed. Before downloading, you will have to pass the security test.

SOME SITES ALLOW TO YOU TO BACK UP ALL YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK ACCOUNTS.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter does not provide a backup option. However, there are many third party websites that allow you to backup your Twitter data. One of them is ‘tweetstreamapp.com’, which allows you to take a backup of your tweets, contacts, lists, followers, photos etc. It even allows you to save the data on your desktop. Its free account allows you to sync up to three accounts, provides 500 MB of storage and will sync weekly. Next up is ‘tweetscan.com’, which downloads your last 1,000 messages. It allows you take either a full archive of your account or you can choose the items you want to back up, like your tweets, replies, followers, direct messages, etc. Another website you can look at is ‘backupmytweets.com’, which takes daily backups of your tweets and allows you to easily search through tweets.

Wordpress, like Facebook, makes taking a backup quite easy. You can backup your Wordpress blogs by going to ‘Tools’ and selecting the export option. You can choose the kind of data you would like to export. If you want to take a backup of your entire Wordpress database, you can do so with the help of the WP-DB-Backup plugin, which allows you to schedule a backup of your database at regular intervals. You can also opt for an email of the backup file. Similarly, Tumblr also has its own backup app.

There are also sites that allow to you to backup all your social network accounts. The most popular is ‘backupify.com’ that allows you to take backups of your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa, Flickr, Blogger, and many more. Its free account provides 2 GB of storage space per social media account, which is backed up weekly.

COMPUTER PRIVACY & SECURITY..

The Computer Privacy protection is a very serious issue to be ignored these days."Everything you do online and offline is monitored by someone.", say many people out there and they are right not because of their paranoia but because the Private Information is too valued for its owner. But is it possible to protect our Computer Privacy without plugging the cable?

See how somebody could steal your Private Information. Reveal what is the difference between Computer Privacy and Internet Privacy. Read how to generate Secure Passwords that hackers can not break.

1. What is Computer Privacy?

This is the power to control what computer information you reveal about yourself and to control who can access this personal information.

2. What is Internet Privacy?

It is a part of the computer privacy. It is the power to control what information you reveal about yourself in Internet, the power to control which web sites, remote scripts and web applications can access this personal information, and the power to know if these web sites, scripts, and web applications are enough trustworthy.

3. What is Private Information?

No doubt, your computer keeps tons of information about:

* all web sites you have visited

* all documents, folders, pictures, videos, files you have opened and created

* all e-mail, forum names and passwords you have

* all bank and credit card information you have saved

* all Skype-to-Skype calls and ICQ chats you have made

* all technology, writing or art you have invented

* your online shopping activities: when you visit the online store order page of some web site

* your shared photos, videos, age data, hobbies, preferences, even thoughts with everyone out there

* generally all your computer habits and things-to-do

All computer and web data you consider to private is your private information.

4. How to Generate Secure Passwords that Hackers can not break?

We use passwords every day to access our computer accounts, e-mail accounts, bank accounts, Facebook and Twitter accounts and hundreds of other services. There is great temptation to use one password for all accounts and to make it short and easy to remember. However, this has devastating effect on our security and privacy. If you think that you have nothing to hide, think again.

In most cases the passwords are hacked to use your computer as spam bot, to steal your money and private information, to infect your computer with computer viruses and spyware and so on.

Learn to avoid the following weak and easy to crack passwords:

* Generic passwords and default passwords. Examples: admin, administrator, user, guest, pass, password, iloveyou, 2010, etc. These are the first passwords that are tried by the password cracking software.

* Meaningful words or names. Examples: sandbox, NY, lion, john, mary, USA, love, myspouse, dragon, etc. Easily cracked by the dictionary-assisted cracking tools.

* Words or names with added numbers. Examples: john123, pass123, 123456, number1, abc123, 654321, etc. Easily cracked by the automated cracking tools.

* Personal names, birthdates or similar information. These are used a lot as passwords and are very easily cracked. For example, if the password is a birthday, there are only hundreds or few thousands (if the year is included) possible combinations, which is very weak for a password.

Learn to generate strong random passwords through these rules:

* Choosing "randomly" letters and numbers. It appears random but only at first sight. Numerous research studies have proven that humans are not very good at random picks - they always try to spread the things too evenly, which is not random behavior.

* "Random" typing on the keyboard with closed eyes. This is slightly better than random choosing but still nowhere random enough.

* Online random password generators. Much better than the previous two alternatives but have 2 major drawbacks. The first is the possibility that the generated password may be saved on the website with malicious purposes or someone may eavesdrop on your connection and intercept the generated passwords. The second major problem is the quality of the random number generators, which very often is not up to the task. Many of them are naively implemented and provide a lot fewer combinations than theoretically possible (no more that tens or hundreds of millions, which is not strong password by any means - see the table in the previous chapter).

* Specialized random password generator programs. The best option as long as they are implemented properly and come from trusted source.

Download one of the best Random Password Generator out there

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BACKUP YOUR SOCIAL LIFE

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