Continued from Part 1
Week 3:
The following week, another familiar face joined me at Cody. Sean Lynn (DE Consultant) came with me to Detroit to teach the students something he learned to do in Iraq—make network cables.
We brought CAT 5 cable, ends, a crimping tool, scissors, and a test kit to show the kids how to make their own Ethernet cable. It is a pretty complicated process that consists of getting 8 very small wires into the plastic tip exactly how you want them before you clamp the tip onto the wire.
Cody Project: Semester in Review Part 1 of 2
Dynamic Edge has continued its outreach program this year providing weekly after school technology classes for the students at Cody High School in Detroit. I (Bryan Emmendorfer, Sales and Marketing) head out to Cody each week and bring along with me a techie, a geek, or someone smarter than me in general, for some small class size, hands-on, interactive, sandwich fueled, non-classroom style, high level learning.
We have all seen those annoying spam posts on our friend’s Facebook walls. Or gotten the apology/please don’t click on that/my account was hacked inbox message. These Facebook viruses are spread when a hacker gains control of another user’s Facebook account and starts blasting out spam to the their friend list. How does the hacker gain control? Well, they could have manually hijacked your password, or you could have clicked on a bad link. Or, you could have downloaded a “rouge app” by mistake. All finger pointing aside, if your Facebook has somehow been compromised, follow these steps to take to protect your data and stop annoying your friends:
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One of our clients was recently infected with the “FedEx Virus”. He got a fake email claiming to come from FedEx with an attachment claiming to be an invoice. When the attachment is opened, a virus is installed. Below is a screen shot of the email.
If you receive this email, do not click on the attachment. This virus is very serious and will allow the hacker to gain control of your machine.
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Dropbox.com allows registered users to share up to 2 GB of data between devices wirelessly– for free. With Dropbox, you can download music from your Smartphone, and listen to it on your computer. Edit documents on your iPad while you’re on the road, and when you get home, you’ll have the same documents already on your computer. No more thumb drives. No more emailing files back and forth to yourself.
How it works: Dropbox gives you a 2GB “Box” located in the cloud for you to store whatever you want in. Then, you control who and what devices have access to that box. For instance, you can create a folder inside the box containing your vacation photos. Once you put the photos in the box, you will automatically be able to view them on all of your devices with Dropbox installed (Smartphone, tablet, laptop).
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Sad to say, but it isn’t always a good idea to upgrade your software to the latest and greatest version. An upgrade can potentially exhaust or damage your systems in ways you hadn’t anticipated. For example, Office 2003 uses up considerably less resources than Office 2010, which is too bad because there are a number of handy new features in Office 2010, like the way the new version of Outlook organizes your email. If you are going to upgrade your software you should consider upgrading your computer and maybe even your network.
Another issue that we see out there: Some computer peripherals like printers, scanners, plotters and even mice do not work with Windows 7. Even though the switch may seem like a great decision, it could cost you a considerable amount of time and money. If you are considering an upgrade to Windows 7, we recommend you have your system evaluated to see if the new software will run sufficiently on it. Make sure you indicate if you have network devices that you print to that are not directly connected to the computer in question. In fact, we really suggest you get a full network audit before taking the plunge.
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