As you may have seen in the news recently, the iPhone was found to be saving your location information, which could potentially reveal where you have been. But even scarier is that so many people reveal their exact locations daily simply by snapping quick photographs with their smart phones.

Most smart phones built today have GPS technology built in. It helps make our lives easier, by allowing us to get driving directions on-the-fly, find the nearest restaurant or map our favourite cycling route. But that same GPS chip can also be giving away information about where you live, work and regularly visit.

Enabled by default on most smart phones, the GPS information is recorded as you take photographs in hidden fields called EXIF data, it is also commonly referred to as geo-tagging data. This data is certainly not malicious in its intent; it’s used to tell you the type camera that took the photo, the type of lens, the exposure and so forth.

But imagine you snapped a picture in your home, at a friend’s house, in the office, and then shared them over Facebook or Twitter. That hidden information is now publically available to the world.
This may seem nit-picky on my part, but imagine for a second you took picture of your new $5,000 ring or new Television. Then on the next post you stated you’re heading off on vacation. Well, you’ve now just given the world your address and said you won’t be home. Enter the petty thieves. It’s a scary thought. Even if it’s not a criminal/theft issue, it’s still concerning that any picture you’ve taken essentially give people your home address.

How to turn off GPS EXIF data on iPhone

1. Settings > General > Location Services
2. Select “On/Off” by “Camera” (Probably half a dozen other apps too in my opinion)

How to turn off GPS EXIF data on Blackberry

1. Open Camera > Options > Geotagging > ON/OFF

We are extremely pleased to announce that our President, Ken Dennis, has now been inducted in to the Rotary Club of Richmond.  Ken was inducted last night along with friend Linda Whitney as the two newest members of the Club.  The Rotary Club of Richmond is turning 50 years old this year and President Elect Ken Whitney Sr. has a lot of great plans for the 50th year Celebration.

Ken has also been honoured to be able to serve the Rotary Club as their PR Director for the 2011-2012 year!

KD Technical Services are proud supports of community enriching organizations such as the Rotary Club of Richmond and SOS BC Children’s Village.  We’re dedicated to making a difference in our communities by supporting organizations that give back.

Watch our blog for more information about upcoming projects and events in our community.

Twitter is a social media tool that has been embraced by millions worldwide. It’s a tool for social and political change, but for small business it’s also a great way to interact with current and potential customers.

For Twitter newbies it can be a little bit overwhelming, but there are some third party applications which make the whole process a lot easier.

Enter HootSuite.com A web based application that makes monitoring your feeds and posting messages a great deal simpler.

HootSuite comes in two versions, the free version and the paid version (currently $5.99/month). The free version does just about everything the average person would want to do, the pro edition allows a lot more tracking information and the ability to “bulk upload” up to 50 pre-written tweets at a time.

Bulk Upload

 
This feature to me is probably its strongest feature that appeals to the small business tweeter. One of the most difficult things about twitter is keeping that regular flow of information. Using the bulk upload feature you can upload 50 messages and post them at whatever time you like through the day, imagine only having to prepare your tweets every 3-5 days instead of allocating a lot of manpower to regular posting!

I think that twitter is an important supplement to most small businesses online presence. It’s also important to not only spam out marketing messages. Use a combination of bulk pre-written tweets, with the personal touch of manually interacting with your followers. Take the time to answer replies and direct messages and you will find the experience a lot more valuable.

It’s a brand new fundraising year for the BC Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) and I would ask that you consider participating in one of the many walks across Canada and British Columbia.

KD Technical Services Staff and Family will participating in the Fraser Valley Walk on June 12, 2011 and are working hard to encourage others to participate.

Check out the JDRF Walks to cure Diabetes website.

There are some really ambitious goals for BC this year, the Fraser Valley Walk hopes to raise $380,000 and Vancouver $670,000.

JDRF does great work not only directly helping those with Diabetes, but in Research and Development of treatments and cures.

Get Walking and Help JDRF reach their fundraising goals!  We have Registered and will try to Fundraise $500 towards the Cure.    We would appreciate any donations towards our fundraising efforts and hope to exceed our goals by some fantastic amount!

Ken Dennis

KDTS – President

Hello, my name is Jim and I am one of the people involved in a hot new product called TitanFile.

TitanFile is a secure, web based, document sharing and tracking solution. I was invited by KDTS to share a few details about our product.

When eMail was first developed as a service, developing a strong security model was not a priority. It was meant to connect researchers across universities and shortly afterwards – military personnel.

In Practice, what that means is that all eMail communication is by default sent over the internet in plain text form (meaning that the message can be intercepted or altered anywhere along the line.

(That is why any decent web service will never communicate your password to you over the eMail) – You can see how this does not help the global fight against identity theft that is growing at alarming rate. And if you are a business, the fact that judges generally award punitive damages to punish businesses who, due to negligence, allowed information of their clients to leak will not encourage you either.

That is why we set out to create TitanFile. TitanFile will enable you to securely share your confidential information with your clients and colleagues.

So how does TitanFile work?

Let’s presume you are a lawyer who needs to deliver a set of confidential documents to an expert witness. You will login to TitanFile and select the documents you would like to share from your computer.

Once the documents are uploaded to TitanFile servers, they are encrypted and you are given an option to share them with specified individuals or groups and then select the mode of identity verification. (For example, you can group a few expert witnesses under a case name.)

TitanFile can verify recipients via phone, password or combination of the two to maximize security. In case of phone verification, you will provide a recipients phone number to whom that system will dial and give an access PIN number.

The shared file will not be accessible without the unique PIN number.

This means that recipient will have to have both, the link to the file, and a registered phone number handy to access the file, ensuring that your sensitive document is delivered to the right person – every time.

We also go further than that. You can select to be notified via eMail once your recipient has received the document as well as set up an expiry time for each document that is shared.

We do not limit you based on the document type. You can share sound and video files as well if you wish to do so.

We are planning to release TitanFile to the general public in the upcoming weeks so stay tuned to our twitter account at http://www.twitter.com/titanfile

Yesterday I was attending a Business Networking function with the Richmond Chamber of Commerce and had the pleasure of meeting a lady by the name of Georgina Patko.  She is the Director of Fund Development and Community Relations for Touchstone Family Association.  Touchstone Family Association of Richmond is a wonderful organization that has been a long standing member of the community.

For 25 years, Touchstone has been helping families in Richmond by helping them through complex situations that arise for families.

Georgina let me know about an upcoming event they are doing from February 21-28, 2011 called “Eating Together” — it is an initiative of the Touchstone Family Association which is designed to “Celebrate Family: It’s the first community we belong to.”

5 Good Reasons to Eat Together

• Communication and Well-Being
• Model Manners and Offer Consistency and Stability
• Expand Their World… One Food at a Time
• Prevent Disruptive Behaviors
• Improve Grades

This is simply a point for summation, but their website is chalk full of great information and I hope that you check it out.  Also for more information you can follow them on Twitter.

KD Technical Services Supports the Community

As we have mentioned previously on our site, we are always interested in helping organizations that support and enrich the communities that we live and work in.  So it is our pleasure to have supported their upcoming campaign by donating three 1 hour free service coupons for their raffle!  If you are interested in supporting this cause, please check out their donation page.

Packet Sniffing or Network Sniffing is a process in which a person runs a network monitoring or analyzing software on the data that passes through a network. If you were to think of data in a network like a highway, and each car was bits of information, then a network sniffer would be a guy on the side of the road with a camera taking pictures of all the interesting things passing a single point in the road.

Is Packet Sniffing Always Bad?

Not at all. Packet sniffing is an invaluable tool for network administrators to identify problems in their networks, trace erroneous information, find malfunctioning devices and gather asset information from devices.

The problems start when people use it for malicious means. As most of us now know, e-mail communications are not secure and are send in plain text across the internet. If someone was “sniffing” your network, there is a good chance your message could be read by people other than it’s recipient.

It’s not uncommon for people to run sniffers on Free Coffee Shop wireless networks, public networks and other areas where people congregate; which makes it all the more important to make sure the information you are dealing with is encrypted or secured in some other fashion.

Another common form of bad behavior is people who “war drive” and scan for open wireless networks in residential and business networks. If a network is left open and anyone can connect, then anyone can have the ability to run a sniffing application on it.

Be Aware

Having open wireless spots and shared networks may seem like great cost savings techniques, but implemented incorrectly can leave gaping holes in your computer network which ultimately could leave you and your private information compromised.

In a world of ever changing technology a pure and simple staple in every office is the fax machine. It sends a document securely from Point A to Point B, or does it?

In the past many legal professionals believe that a direct fax to a recipient was considered a confidential and secure method of communications. This unfortunately is no longer the case for an ever increasing amount of businesses and fax users.

It has been increasingly common for businesses to adopt online faxing methods as well as in-house fax servers. This has taken our simple fax and turned it in to the monster which stores all of our faxes with varying degrees of document security.

Online Faxing – Receiving Faxes

Many people and businesses have adopted the method of porting their fax numbers to online service providers who handle your faxing requirements. The reason is largely a cost savings move, as the cost of a phone line often outweigh the cost of having your faxes received via an intermediary and then e-mailed directly to you as a PDF document.

This leaves us with several problems:

• Email communications are not secure
• Your Fax is now a PDF and is almost certainly saved on the Fax Providers Website
• Your Fax is now an electronic document stored on your computer

In-House Fax Servers – Sending and Receiving Faxes

Companies with high fax volumes often decide to implement a computer based solution for their faxing needs. Often the last thought during the implementation is the security of the faxes as they are digitalized, sent or received.
A fax server is hooked to phone lines which receives your e-mails, converts them in to PDF or TIFF (A Graphic File) and either stores them on the server or e-mails them directly to the user, often via a secretary or assistant.

Faxing outbound can be done by sending a document directly from your computer to the server and telling it the destination, or by using a traditional fax machine.

The problem once again presents itself in these areas:

• The use of Non Secure Email Communications
• Having stored copies of your in and outbound e-mails on the server
• Having stored copies of your faxes in your e-mail and on your PC

Each of these presents challenges that need strong consideration to ensure that due diligence is shown to ensure attorney-client privilege and confidentiality is maintained.

The Internet age is upon us and the communications mediums presented to us are extraordinary, and though lawyers are free to select the method of communication they use, it’s incumbent upon them to understand how to use these technologies effectively and the risks that may be involved. It’s important to understand the communications in order to protect client confidentiality.

E-Mail Communications

It is a misconception that many people have that e-mail is a secure medium for private conversations. Emails are sent in a clear text format and pass through a number of servers as they route themselves to their final destinations. Theoretically anyone could “sniff” (intercept/read) that e-mail as moves towards its final destination.

What about the Little Lock Icon?

Some people believe when they login to their Web Based e-mail that the little “lock” icon by the web address implies that it is secure, unfortunately it’s misleading and in-fact your session between your computer and your e-mail server is secure, but the moment you hit send the e-mail is off and on its way without any form of security.
The Lock icon itself indicates that your link to the server is established with a “Secure Socket Layer” or SSL connection – an encrypted protocol used for website security.

What is Email Encryption?

E-Mail encryption is the act of securing your e-mails with a cryptographic cipher. Basically it is a mathematical algorithm that takes your original message in Plain Text (PT), runs it through this cipher and outputs an encrypted version of your original text; this is called your CT or Cipher Text.

Your Cipher Text can be freely sent over e-mail because without the key to decode the message it is nearly impossible to decode — The same algorithms you can use are used by Governments for classified information and literally could take years to crack the password if implemented correctly.

Desktop Email Encryption

There are numerous desktop applications which work in conjunction with your e-mail software to automatically encrypt and decrypt your e-mails. Probably the most common is PGP or Pretty Good Privacy, but don’t let the name fool you, it’s one of the best on the Market!

The problems that exist today are there are so many different e-mail servers and client applications, not to mention the more recent embrace of web based e-mail solutions. It’s extremely important to find a solution that it simple, because if it’s too complex or annoying to use – you probably won’t.

Web Based Email Encryption

There are a few web based e-mail providers like HushMail (A Vancouver Based Company) which have built an e-mail service which has an inherently secure design, with security and encryption in mind. Depending on the needs of your organization it can be a good fit.

Gateway Based Email Encryption

There are servers and software which can at the server level take all e-mails and encrypts them prior to being sent. This is often a convenient solution because there is little done at the end-user level however it has a lot more overhead and startup cost.

Summary

As you can see, there a large number of variables involved in selecting a solution that meets your requirements. It’s a good idea to consult with a professional who deals with these different implementations regularly because the market is constantly evolving and providing better and more robust secure e-mail solutions.

As an Attorney, it’s extremely important to understand the implications of these communication methods and how they can affect Client-Attorney Privilege and Confidentiality.

I have been in the technical field for a long time and though I’m not personally a strong web developer, I have dealt with them and done basic coding my entire career.  But despite my lack of specific web design knowledge, I do know a lot about problems and challenges that come with developing and owning a website.

Don’t Be a Hostage

From a business owners perspective, one frustration I have experienced is having a website held hostage by a developer who made the structure or code so ridiculously complex that only he can modify it for you.  No one likes to get trapped in this position but it happens far too frequently.

This problem is not unique only to the Web Development world but is a constant problem.  A lot of coders are not commenters when they write their code for software, tools and plugins — if you are paying someone to develop you a product, make sure it is well documented, you never know when you’re relationship will end and you don’t want to be begging them to fix your problem or be unable to hire someone to manipulate your non-commented code.

An Open Source Solution

WordPress is a common open source platform which runs on PHP and SQL and is my personal favourite platform for running websites.  The reason it’s such a power content management system is because it uses a common platform that many people can modify slightly to make very unique websites, but it is all based on the same framework.

The biggest single benefit to a good CMS (Content Management System) is the fact it’s easily editable by anyone, ensuring that you will not get locked in with some proprietary mess where you get extorted by your developer to make changes.

Express Yourself

It’s important to talk to your web developer and ensure that his format of your new website is on a platform which can be easily modified.  By identifying your requirements early and expressing them you can avoid a lot of problems in the future.