TT-Snippet's Vol. 2, No. 2

TT-Snippet’s Vol. 2, No. 2

This blog is a bit longer than those in the past, but it is good stuff.

1. Dumping Cable

People are getting totally fed-up with cable television costs. I know I am. Recently, my monthly Comcast cable bill went up $30 without me asking for anything to happen to it. It was a New Year’s gift from the mega-monopoly.  I was so ticked off that I wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren with a suggestion that this service needs to be regulated, and soon!  I have basic services, no premium channels and I am now paying over $100+ / month — not getting anything more for the service.

I’m not the only person complaining either. The actor, Patrick Stewart, tweeted negativity toward Time Warner last fall. He tweeted that he’d “lost the will for living” in trying to deal with the cable company in setting up an account.   And Charter Communications had to empty their corporate offices due to a disgruntled customer who threatened to “blow the place up.”

Comcast, Time Warner, Cox and Charter are in the ten lowest rated companies in the United States. No big surprise there even though Comcast is the 15th richest company in the country and Time Warner is the 27th.

At Christmas my nephew said to me, “You’re still using cable? Why?” He then said that he he was using Netflix for movies, Hulu for television, and various subscription services like NYT for news.  A basic, basic cable service that costs about $10+ bucks will give you local news and public television. This totals to about $35+/month.  So, I did that and I am now saving $65+ a month and not missing a thing. In fact I’m getting more work done and less time in front of the TV set.

BTW: I got this great device from Hammacher Schlemmer that converts my iPad directly into my TV so I see movies and shows on a big screen.  It cost about $70.00.

2. Smartphones Stats and Thefts

Smartphones are on the rise, no big surprise their, but it’s upsetting the business world. Check these stats out:

•  31% of Americans access the web ONLY from their smartphones, rarely using their laptop / desktop
•  88% of Americans have a mobile phone, and 55% of those are smartphones
•  66% of those buying mobile phones NOW are buying smartphones

For many people now, their smartphone IS the Internet. And because of this the theft rate of smartphones has gone up considerably, up 23% in Chicago, 32% in Los Angeles, 40% in New York, 43% in St. Louis and 54% in Washington D.C.  

Apple’s “Find my iPhone” app is getting a real work-out. When the police tell victims that there’s a good chance they won’t be able to find their phones, they are horrified about all of the personal information on their phones, including the direct open log-ins to Amazon and so on.  “In New York, according to the NYPD, thefts of Apple products have gone up 40% in the first nine months.”1

“On their own, local officials have little chance of finding a stolen smartphone, and there’s no shortage of people willing to quickly resell the device on the black market.”2  In Washington, D.C. they were seeing as many as 20 stolen phones a day, taken right out of the hands of their users waiting for public transportation.

So phone companies are fighting back and Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Apple, Samsung Electronics and Motorola have created a national registry for stolen phones. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303815404577334152199453024.html )

3. Building a Better E-Book

Do you want your e-book to come to life when it needs to?  So you are reading a boring account of the Revolutionary War, and you get to the point where Washington is crossing the Delaware River. Instead of reading about it you get to view a movie clip of it featuring actor, Jeff Daniels, as Washington from the movie: “The Crossing.”

The problem has been that book publishers haven’t been able to capitalize on this concept because the two biggest players (Apple and Amazon) aren’t open to supporting embedded multimedia.

Inkling is trying to change that. This San Francisco-based online publisher was created by Matt MacInnis, a former marketing manager at Apple, and they are giving publishers a way to enhance their e-book’s presentation. The company has teamed up with Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Wolters Kluwer to gain ground in the U.S. e-book market.

4. Data Security — What’s the difference between Viruses and Malware?

My last post on this got a couple of your livers in a quiver in my translation of the original article so I am doing a re-write, direct quote:

"The antivirus industry was born in the late 1980's to combat floppy-disk "viruses," and it has staying power, even in the era of sophisticated hacks from China and elsewhere. Although the word virus generally applies to all manner of computer attacks, data security pros no longer just worry about old-style viruses — program or pieces of code that replicate and spread from computer to computer, degrading their performance. The new threat is advanced forms of "malware," or malicious software, such as online banking pass-word stealers and military-grade spying software.

 Recent incidents, like the attack on the New York Times (see my last blog) by Chinese hackers, which antivirus software failed to stop, illustrate the challenge facing industry leaders such as Symantec and MacAfee.

A weakness of antivirus software is that it's designed to zero in on so-called signatures, or identifiable patterns in code... This approach was effective until more sophisticated malware arrived on the scene in the early 2000's...the most advanced malware is custom-built for specific attacks — and then never used again.(1)" Ergo the BIG difference between a virus and a malware program.

Much money is being spent — to the tune of $8-billion dollars — on consumer and corporate anti-virus software in 2013, an increase of 30%.

1 Bloomberg Businessweek, February 18-24 issue, page 34.