Name, Rank and Social Security Number

Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the U.S. The U.S. Secret Service has estimated that consumers nationwide lose $745 million to identity theft each year. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, the average victim spends 607 hours and averages $1,000 just to clear their credit records.

Identity thieves employ a variety of methods to gain access to your personal information. They may get information from businesses or other institutions by stealing it; by bribing an employee who has access to records; hacking into records; or conning information out of employees. Once identity thieves have your personal information, they may use it to commit a fraud or theft in your name.

How can you tell if you have become a victim of identity theft? Some signs include unexplained charges or withdrawals from your financial accounts; bills or other mail stop arriving (the thief may have submitted a change of address); a credit application is denied for no apparent reason, or debt collectors begin calling about merchandise or services you didn’t buy.


Your computer can be a goldmine of personal information to an identity thief. To protect yourself and your computer against identity theft consider:

• Updating virus protection software frequently. Consider setting your virus protection software to update automatically. The Windows XP operating system also can be set to check for patches automatically and download them to your computer.
• Not opening files sent to you by strangers, clicking on hyperlinks, or downloading programs from people or companies you don’t know.
• Using a firewall program, especially if you use a high speed Internet connection like cable or DSL that leaves your computer connected to the Internet 24 hours a day.
• Providing your personal or financial information through an organization’s secured website only. While not fool proof, a lock icon on the browser’s status bar or a URL for a website that begins “https:” (the “s” stands for secure), may provide additional security.
• Not storing your financial information on your laptop, unless absolutely necessary.
• Deleting all the personal information stored on a computer before disposing of it. A wipe” utility program to overwrite the entire hard drive is recommended.
• Checking with an anti-fraud education organization such as CardCops (www.cardcops.com). Card Cops runs a web site designed to help consumers determine whether their credit card numbers may have been stolen. They monitor Internet "chat rooms" where identity thieves illicitly trade and sell stolen credit card numbers. CardCops turns the information over to law enforcement authorities, but also allows consumers to access their database to see whether individual card numbers may have been stolen. In the first two months of operation, the site identified more than 100,000 stolen credit cards.

As with any crime, you can not completely control whether you will become a victim, but you can take steps to minimize your risk by remaining diligent and by minimizing outside access to your personal information.

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About Encryption and Making Your System Secure

What does encryption do for me?

Encryption and cryptographic software has been used in many different ways to make systems more secure. This article discusses only a few ways that such software can make your system more secure, including:

1) Encrypting your email
2) Encrypting your files

To programs are mentioned that will help encrypt information. There are many more programs out there that will help, but these programs are good and a good place to start as any. They have the added benefit of both being free with source code available.

Will encryption stop people from accessing my information?

Encryption simply makes it harder for people to gain access to important information, like passwords or sensitive information in a file. The first thing you should know about encryption is that the algorithm that is used to encrypt can be simple or more complex and that affects how securely what you have encrypted is protected. Encryption systems have been broken when the method of encryption is understood by hackers and is easy to break.

Why bother to encrypt my email?

It should be noted that email is far less secure than paper mail for two very good reasons: first, electronic data can be accessed easily over an Internet and secondly, electronic data is really simple to copy. There is a very good chance that someone has snooped around in your email despite your best intentions to stop it.

How do I go about encrypting my email?

There are many programs out there that can help you encrypt your email. A very popular one is PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) or its Gnu offshoot GPG.

PGP (http://www.pgpi.org/) self-describes itself this way: This "is a program that gives your electronic mail something that it otherwise doesn't have: Privacy. It does this by encrypting your mail so that nobody but the intended person can read it. When encrypted, the message looks like a meaningless jumble of random characters. PGP has proven itself quite capable of resisting even the most sophisticated forms of analysis aimed at reading the encrypted text."

Why bother to encrypt my files?

The answer to this boils down to what you store on your computer. If you have financial data with important information like social security numbers, email addresses, account numbers and passwords, then you open yourself up to losing very valuable information. Most corporate Internet security employees will attest to the widespread theft of very valuable information. As long as you are connected to the Internet you are vulnerable.

How do I go about encrypting my files?

AxCrypt File Encryption Software (http://axcrypt.sourceforge.net/) Self-described as "Free Personal Privacy and Security for Windows 98/ME/NT/2K/XP with AES-128 File Encryption, Compression and transparent Decrypt and Open in the original application."


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How to Easily Create, View, Modify, and Print All Your Pdf Files--without Paying for Acrobat

I've noticed that you'll often have a PDF file that you need to modify, only to discover that you can't change a PDF with the ease that you can a Word or Excel file. You realize that the only way to really do anything to a PDF is to get the full version of Acrobat. Unfortunately, that costs quite a bit of money. Money you don't have.

Fortunately, I came across a site recently in some dark corner of the internet. On this site, you can take any file, and quickly turn it into a PDF file that's incredibly easy to print and modify.

Not only can you turn any file into a PDF, but you can also format the text, insert images, even insert sounds. That's something Adobe Acrobat just doesn't let you do. And when dynamic, colorful documents are crucial in just about every facet of business and study, having access to those features are essential.

As PDFs are the most popular as well as the most reliable and recognized international standard for viewing and managing PDF documents in the world, we all want to be able to easily create and print them for easy sharing. Now, opening, creating, writing and printing PDF files has never been easier.

Membership with this service is lifetime, and the cost is quite insignificant.

This is the greatest tool I've found in a long time. Now for all of that have wondered, here is a new way to create, view, print, and modify PDF files. See it here.

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Off the Wall Ideas for Your Plasma TV

Anyone with a plasma TV will tell you it's not small. Usually they are mounted to a wall to save space and prevent damage. With most models measuring in at over 37" across, they do take up a significant amount of wall space. Not to mention the fact that they need special mounting gear to keep them on the wall without damaging the TV or the wall. Rest assured that many have been destroyed by improper installation. This is not the ideal situation.

What can you do then? Should you get rid of the expensive TV that you've worked so hard for? That would be silly and, of course, unnecessary. Rest assured that there is an answer for your dilemma. A plasma TV lift is a device that will allow you to raise and lower your expensive set in and out of a beautiful cabinet while taking up only minimal space. Not only will you not have to worry about damaging your wall, your expensive TV will be out of the way until you want to watch it. Real artwork can adorn the walls once again.

How big a set can a plasma TV lift handle? They can handle sets up to 65". You may wonder how strong one of these lifts can really be. On one manufacturer's website they decided to put one of these lifts to an unusual and difficult test: they had one of their managers sit on the cabinet and press the button. The lift raised both the TV and the manager with seemingly little effort. There was no loud noise coming from the motor that would indicate that this was causing a strain to the equipment. This is an example of the strength of the TV lifts that you can find on the market today.

The various manufacturers of this type of product have a variety of cabinets available complete with the TV lifts already installed. There are many styles available to suit any decor, from classic to modern. There are also a wide variety of price ranges available to fit most budgets. You can also purchase a kit that can allow a lift to be placed into a cabinet of your choosing. This is especially important if you have a matching furniture suite that you don't want to distract from. You can also find a full range of accessories, from component shelves for DVD's and VCR's, to extra heavy-duty mounting brackets and anything else you might need to make this type of set-up work for you.


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5 components of an IT economic model

One of the steps identified in Real Time Enterprise Blog "9 Steps to a Virtual Oriented Utility" was the requirement to create an economic model. As we have been working with many CIO’s, we are finding that the discipline of creating and managing an economic model does not exist or is not understood.

The Economic Model for IT can be thought of as the Business & IT linkage of demand and supply. In particular, it is the interactive dynamics of consumption of IT resources by the business and the fulfillment behavior of processing by IT.


We coach CIO’s and their organizations to relate their service delivery (people, process and technology) as a digital supply chain. This supply chain must adhere and be managed against the IT economic model. Our experience in building a real time infrastructure led us to standardize 5 key components of our operational model to ensure we adhere to our economic model similar to how our business has to. Below outlines the 5 key components:

Demand Management – the continuous identification, documentation, tracking and measuring of day in the life of the business, what they expect, where there are problems today, and understand sensitivities to cost, bottlenecks, and timing constraints. In particular, service contracts defined in natural language that identify users, entitlement, expectations, geography, critical time windows, special business calendar events, and performance defined in terms of user experience.

Supply Management – the continuous identification, documentation and tracking through instrumentation to capture “objective” factual data of which users, using what applications, consume what app, server, network bandwidth, network QoS and storage resources for how long. Ensure you trend this over a period of time to accurately identify peaks, valleys and nominal growth.

Fit for Purpose Policies – It is essential that organizations trying to build a real time infrastructure or at least a more responsive IT platform and operation, incorporate an operating level of policy management of how the IT platform matches supply and demand at runtime. This should include factors of wall clock, trends, and service contract requirements matched optimally against runtime supply management trends. It is this operating level discipline that can radically reduce waste, unnecessary costs, lower capital investment WHILE improving service levels. It is here that most organizations fail to implement, execute or adopt such a granular discipline, instead firms standardize infrastructure from bottom up, use rule of thumb sizing and define service levels in terms of recovery time objectives or availability only.

Role of ITIL/ITSMF – ITIL 3.0 and the IT Service Management Framework are excellent guides for creating consistent end to end processes related to delivery IT as a service. They are not in themselves the sole answer to resolving IT service problems or quality of delivery. Firms must still resolve issues of alignment and strategy, define sound architectures, implement dynamic infrastructures BEFORE ITIL can have its ultimate impact on end to end process delivery.

Sustaining Transparency - Many IT organizations miss the mark when it comes to meeting and exceeding business expectations due to lack of transparency. The key components outlined above can contribute significantly to creating transparency with the business related to IT delivery of service on their behalf. It is critical that IT organizations institute a discipline of tooling, data capture and reporting procedures that consistently and accurately communicate to the business a complete transparent view of what, how, who related to the consumption of IT by the business and the delivery of service by IT.

We can’t emphasize how important this kind of playbook is instituted by the CIO’s office and executed by the leaders of the IT organization – if they want to enhance the collaboration with the business and become a more strategic and integral part of building the business.


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