The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. The statement, from a New York times article titled Google gets ready to rumble with Microsoft, isn’t something that should be new to anyone. While Google is the golden-boy of the 2000’s, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is familiar with the software giant, having worked for Sun Microsystems and Novell, and knows that it is anything but clear sailing for Google. With a strong core business built on their search engine and online advertising, Google is free to experiment with a varied set of offerings, but the ultimate success of Google may hinge on their ability to turn these offerings into revenues:

COUNTLESS decisions by corporate technology managers, office workers, university students and rank-and-file computer users of all kinds will ultimately determine Google’s success. How easy and inexpensive will it be to do e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and team projects on Web software? Will high-speed network connections soon become as ubiquitous and reliable as Google seems to assume? Will companies, universities and individuals trust Google to hold corporate and personal information safely?

An interesting article on HowStuffWorks.com, the leading source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works, talks about hackers and how hackers work. The message that was forwarded to me was linked to the third page, Hacker Culture, and had an interesting picture of some questionable looking characters.

Since last year’s TJX security breach, online site security and identity theft (two aspects of the Internet that have always been a concern) was suddenly pushed to surface and brought to the attention of the average user. While people were always aware of ID theft, nothing had ever occurred on this scale, or at least hadn’t been as widely published. With more and more people adopting the Internet, and more and more people trying to take advantage of security flaws that allow them to exploit the masses on the Internet, it becomes more difficult to ensure that sites and information is kept safe. Ultimately, the biggest security hole or security risk is still the average user, but carelessness by programmers and IT professionals can still result in huge data breaches and headaches. Passport Canada, a branch of the Canadian government agency, and HM Revenue and Customs and the National Audit Office, two branches of the British government, are perfect examples.

The Passport Canada website had a flaw that allowed users to see the personal information of each other by simply changing a few numbers in the URL when they were viewing their own personal information. Probably not a difficult flaw to avoid and the eventual fix came quickly, but it definitely doesn’t increase the confidence that our neighbours to the South have in the Great White North. In the case of the HMRC, the impact or concern relating to the data breach could have been avoided by stripping the unnecessary information from the file; for example, the address and bank details could have been removed as they were not needed - but this would have cost about $102,000. Probably pennies compared to the eventual cost this will have.

There are always going to be security holes that will be used by those looking to take advantage and exploit them for monetary gain, and as the potential for monetary gains increase, the number of individuals looking for them will also increase. However, by taking the proper precautionary measures, many of them can be avoided. Whether it’s your personal blog, a small E-commerce site, or government-implemented, you are a target and must make every effort to keep your site and information (yours and other peoples) safe.

Sharing photos online is one of the major reasons for being online. I remember about a year ago, one of the biggest anti-Internetters that I know was turned into a believer when, within an hour of her birth, pictures of his beautiful baby girl were in the hands of his rarely-seen relatives in England. He still questions sites like Facebook and the ability to maintain a certain level of privacy on these types of networks, which in my mind is a valid concern, but at least he is coming around to the idea.

Without thinking, I would almost always suggest Flickr for people looking to share photos, however, I know there are other popular options that may be a better choice. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I’ll link to an article that reviews 7 Alternatives to Flickr. In no particular order, the article reviews the following photo sharing sites: deviantART, Zooomr, Fotki, PBase, Photobucket, Photo.net, and SmugMug.

NOTE: This is an excerpt from an article that was originally posted here.