Three lessons were learned at Philips in the last few years that we can all benefit from too.

The lessons were learned by both Philips internal computer security staff and their account holders (customers and employees). The first 3 lessons came from a relatively new collective of digital malicious malcontents (erroneously called hackers) that calls themselves “R00tbeersec”.

There is an article on the Linux Journal about a relatively new service, bitcoin, which at first glance looks like an invitation for misuse or out right abuse. Bit coin basically pays people to avail their computers to others to break cryptographic keys. Well, what is the purpose of those keys? Are those hash passwords or credit card information?

There are several kinds of images on a computer so which one do you use? They impact the image quality and file size differently because of something called "compression". In other articles I'll discuss the other issues like transparency.

Many businesses, including "mom and pop shops" want to use this new thing called social marketing, but don't know where to start. This article will focus on the Social Media side of the issue. While the details are different with SEO or Search Engine Optimization, the general concept is still the same- great results can happen but expect to either pay thousands of dollars on a campaign or so much time that you can't get your core business done. However, even if it isn't your main push, it needs to be addressed to some degree.

The privacy we all need on the Internet isn't automatic and it takes a few steps to achieve. I go over some of those I use on my FaceBook page.

Just like you have to intentionally put curtains up on your windows so people can't look in, you have to intentionally make the Internet so others can't spy on you. I'll mention two things that pertain to the Internet as a whole and four that pertain to one of the big privacy threats on the Internet- FaceBook. By the way, I'm not saying FaceBook is evil, just that social networks can be used for evil and FaceBook is one of the biggest social networks.

This is a response to many analysis' of the Stuxnet virus/worm, especially a YouTube video about it. In a nutshell, the video over played the threat and gave the worries I had 9 months ago.

A minor problem I've had with firefox4 (4.0.1) is that I couldn't set the homepage to a blank page like the instructions at mozilla.com says to. However, I found another way.

A relatively new way to process credit card payments, Square-Up is in use now. It was created by one of the pillars in the Web2.0 world (Jack Dorsey who is the "Twitter creator"). However, will it help or hurt the merchant?

Square-up is a device you plug into a mobile device's USB port to make that mobile device a credit card scanner. But this kind of set-up comes with many security problems and it will cause even more problems with PCI-DSS compliance which anybody who takes credit card payments has to now worry about.

As mysterious as ecommerce can seem, it is just a business. Someone that runs a real store (BNM or Bricks 'N Mortar) already knows 90% of what it takes to succeed with an ecommerce store. There are some details that are different, but the concepts are the same. Just rearrange the details and a successful BNM businessman knows 100% of what it takes to succeed online.

Pizza and ecommerce have been soul-mates for over 15 years now. Other businesses that want to go online can learn from pizza shops. Their story can show you the power of social networking and how it can either destroy or build you and your business.

I'll go over the basics of social networking and use Dominos and Pizza Hut as a case-studies on how it can help a businesses P&L.