Articles

When I travel out of the country, I usually test out new VoIP services both for calling back to the states and receiving calls while I am traveling. I consistently find that while the rates for VoIP services are very attractive, the user experience and flexibility is often lacking when I traveling, particularly with limited network connectivity. Depending on the length of my stay, I purchase a prepaid SIM to use in a spare unlocked mobile phone so that I can make and receive local calls at local rates. Since most countries outside of the US offer free inbound calls, having a local SIM is even more attractive, although navigating voicemail prompts in another language can be challenging. I often use one of the VoIP services to forward a my United States phone number to my international cell phone number so that I can let friends and family reach me without incurring international charges on their part. Rates for calling international mobile phones range from $0.15 to $0.30 a minute, so be careful who you give your forwarded number to if you try this method. ...

I regularly share links with friends and colleagues. I use several social bookmarking services, but the vast majority I share via email. Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer have a function to create a new message with an email link. The main disadvantage of sending links using the built-in browser methods is that the links they generate are prone to breaking unless the whole message is converted to HTML rather than plain text. ...

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball pointed me to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column Stop Password Masking, which resulted in a thoughtful and interesting thread of conversations and a few experimental solutions. Password masking refers to the practice of displaying an alternate character, usually a star or a bullet in place of the actual characters typed into a password field. The idea is that this prevents another party from viewing the password while it is entered. Nielsen argues that in most cases masked passwords are not needed since should surfing is not a major issue and that this is even less of an issue on mobile devices. He says masked passed passwords often reduce usability by increasing the number of errors since users cannot see what they are typing. This problem is further compounded on mobile devices where typing is more difficult and slower. Since users are less certain about what they are typing, they are much more likely to choose passwords that are simplistic or copy and paste the passwords from less secure locations. Nielsen says that high value password forms should offer an optional checkbox for masking passwords so that they can be used on an as needed basis. ...

Duping users into revealing their private data goes back decades, but it wasn’t until the late-1990s that “phishing” became the word to describe the practice. Today, phishing costs banks, service providers, and consumers billions of dollars per year, and companies are working frantically to limit the damage. A survey by Gartner estimated that more than three and a half billion dollars were lost to phishing in the United States in 2007 alone. ...

TripIt is a free service that simplifies organizing travel plans. The service has done an excellent job of making it painless to aggregate the collection of email receipts that you receive from airlines, hotels, car rental companies and travel agencies into one master itinerary. In order to use TripIt, you simply forward any email receipts to plans@tripit.com. The service extracts the reservation information from the message and assembles an attractive and very functional master itinerary from all the disparate documents. TripIt supplements the existing information with seating charts, information about local weather and events. Tripit supports a large number of travel-related vendors and regularly adds new ones based on demand. ...

It’s that time of year when our thoughts of New Year’s resolutions are just beginning to fade. So let me remind you of one resolution you should probably keep. Do have backups of your irreplaceable data? Are those backups recent enough that you would not loose anything serious? If the answer to either of these questions is yes then congratulations, you are solidly in the minority. Could you restore or work from those backups and not lose more than a couple of hours of work? If so, then you are in great shape, but hopefully I’ll still have something for you in this article. I will talk about online backup and storage services that serve as excellent complements to disk-based storage. ...