This is an old but still valid article from the Register-News. Enjoy.

Are you giving away your information?

Probably. Pam sent an email question that definitely needs to be covered: “…how does one go about purging all the information from an old computer so that there is no way anyone can glean information from them before they are recycled? I have heard that there are still ways to get information from them even when you think you have completely purged them?”

There are two parts to that question, and I’ll tackle the last part first. Yes, it is very easy to retrieve deleted items from a PC, especially Windows. The simplest way to retrieve these files is if you just delete it. From there, it can just be restored from the Recycle Bin.

However, even if you delete a file from the Recycle Bin, it can still be found. While Windows will let you think that the file is gone forever, that is not the case. When Windows deletes a file, it actually just deletes the ‘address’ of that file so that the space can be overwritten. This is fine as long as your computer is not stolen and you overwrite that space. Unfortunately, the space may not be overwritten for a long time, or ever. This means that the information is still available on your hard drive.

A large amount of software is available that serves the sole purpose of finding deleted files on hard drives. Some of this software is quite costly, but you can find free programs that perform the same job – finding information that you don’t want found. This software comes in very handy in police investigations of criminals, but can be dangerous if your PC is donated, trashed, or stolen.

So now we have a tool/machine that you use, that has personal information such as passwords, photos, emails, and more. That personal information can be retrieved by most anyone, and even for free. How do we solve this problem? Well, that would be the answer to Pam’s first question.

Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN.org) is the answer to this issue. I have personally used DBAN many times to clear both personal and business PCs. From the DBAN website: “DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis.” DBAN can be downloaded free, burnt to a CD and used with simple instructions.

DBAN accomplishes its ‘data wiping’ by writing across your entire hard drive with ones and zeros several times. I am no data forensics expert (the people paid big bucks to retrieve erased information), but DBAN uses Department of Defense quality data destruction. If the DoD standards are met by this software, it probably can handle deleting your emails to grandma and bank passwords.

My warning: DBAN WILL COMPLETELY ERASE YOUR HARD DRIVE. NOTHING WILL BE LEFT.

This means no operating system such as Windows, OSX, or whatever you may use will be left should you be donating or selling the old PC. People probably won’t want a PC with no operating system, but your information should be gone. I suggest including a CD with Linux for them to install if you don’t feel like reloading an operating system on the PC.

Linux is free and quite easy to use in today’s distributions. My personal preference is Kubuntu (Kubuntu.org), but there are many to choose from and they are all free. I am beginning to collect old PCs to give to disadvantaged youth as well. Not everything can be used, and I will cover recycling next week. If you have questions, please drop me an email.

This is an old article from the Register-News, but I still use Linux for my operating system and use Google Chrome as my primary browser.

I use Linux as my operating system instead of Windows, specifically Kubuntu (kubuntu.org). Deep down, it is very different from Microsoft’s offering, but in general they run a lot of the same programs. Google’s Chromium browser has been available for some time for Windows, but still is not a stable release for Linux, so I have been waiting to try it out. Finally, I decided it was time. Here are my opinions.

To begin, my reason for leaving Firefox (mozilla.org) was that Firefox has a memory leak. This is something that Mozilla has not fixed over the last few releases, and if you leave your machine running for any amount of time (as I do at work) Firefox will continue to keep expanding its hold on more and more memory. Eventually this makes Firefox and your whole system run very slow. The only way to reclaim this memory is to reboot your machine.

After having to reboot my machine at work several times, I decided that it was time to explore optional browsers. Several of my co-workers have been using Chromium for a few weeks so I gave it a shot. After installing the browser (chromium.org), I first went looking for extensions. If you don’t recall, extensions or add-ons are ‘mini-programs’ that add features to your browser.

My main requirements for Chromium to stay is that my extensions be available to make the browser useful. The short version is that I found Adblock (blocks ads in webpages), Xmarks (synchronizes bookmarks and passwords across different computers),  Google Voice (voice.google.com), Forecastfox (weather), and Chromed Bird (Twitter) all available for Chromium.

My first test was passed. Now can Chromium work without crashing, bugs, and hogging my system memory? The short answer is mostly yes.

Chromium has not crashed in the week I have been using it. It has an extremely simple interface, and is very ‘clean’ in its presentation. If you cannot survive without the File, Edit, and other drop-down menus, you might not like Chromium. It presents very few buttons – back, forward, home, and an address bar by default. To the right of the address bar is a Settings drop-down menu. Below that row is space for a bookmarks bar, which is quite nice to keep your favorite sites one click away.

A feature of Chromium that I like is the address bar is also the search bar. This makes sense as the browser IS from Google after all. Being big on privacy like I am, I worried about how much information Google would be harvesting to sell to marketers and such. After some looking around the web, I found out that they keep track of EVERYTHING you search for using the bar. Good or bad is up to you to decide, but I went into the settings and turned off that feature. It means the bar isn’t quite as good at predicting my searches now, but I’m willing to accept that.

The negative that I have found while using this browser is that some buttons on a few sites do not operate properly. In the rare case where a site doesn’t work properly, I fire up dependable Firefox and do whatever I need to do. From what I understand, this is not an issue in Windows or Mac versions, so most of you reading this should not have the button problem.

Overall, Chromium does take a little getting used to, but it has extensions, imports your settings from Firefox or Internet Explorer, and does not eat your memory. I think it is definitely something to check out if it sounds interesting to you. Also, neither Firefox nor Chromium seem to be as vulnerable to attack as Internet Explorer. Go give an alternate browser a chance, you might like it!

This is an old post, and Charter no longer uses Twitter as a support method. Many other companies do still use Twitter however.

For those of you who are not aware, Twitter (http://twitter.com) is a site and service that lets you post messages or your thoughts up to 140 characters. This size was chosen because Twitter was originally updated primarily using text message, and that is their limit.

Twitter has evolved from just thoughts and messages, however. Twitter is used to provide news, weather, comedy (jokes), gossip (kinda news), and many other types of information that its founders say they never expected. Put simply, if it can be put into words, Twitter can be used to relay the information.

On Twitter you choose whom to follow rather than being forced to watch everyone’s updates. This makes it easy to pick just a few people or friends you like to keep up with, or follow everyone under the sun if you want to try to keep track of their updates. Many people choose to follow a few celebrities that they like, some local and international news feeds, and of course their friends.

One way that I have found very convenient to use Twitter is for customer service. I know it seems hard to believe, but several companies have service departments that do nothing but monitor social media (Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc.) for customers with problems, needs, and praise.

Personally I discovered that Charter Communications has a Twitter team by accident. I ranted about some problem I had at that time using @Charter, and got a surprising reply from Eric Ketzer who is now Charter Communications’ Social Media Communications Manager. (the @ symbol is a way of mentioning another user so that they are notified) Eric actually has a whole team of people who help monitor social media (SM) outlets and assist Charter customers as needed.

Recently, Eric agreed to answer some questions from me for this article, and here are the questions and answers.

1. Why/how did you get started using Twitter as a support avenue?

We started taking a serious interest in Social Media in mid 2008. We monitored traffic on various Forums, Consumer Advocate sites, Blogs, and Social Networking sites. When we decided to start proactively engaging in January of 2009, Twitter was our top priority. The site is pretty open and has a really good search engine which allows us to find and engage our customers in real-time. We have since moved into all the areas mentioned above, but Twitter still accounts for over 70% of our traffic.

2. What are some advantages/disadvantages to support via 140 chars?

There are definitely tone limitations when trying to operate within 140 characters, really when using any written communication, but Seesmic and TweetDeck have both incorporated TwitLonger functionality, so if we feel it would be best to not break-up the communication between multiple tweets we can do that. Still, for the most part, we stay to 140. If we can reduce the dialogue to 140 we are more efficient and can get more accomplished to help our customers.

3. How do you measure success of your interactions?

Like any business organization we have key metrics that we have put in place to determine how successful we are as a team. We are particularly focused on how we are perceived in the Social Media spaces, how efficient we are, and how much SM traffic we are actually able to work. But the real measure for us is the thanks we get from our customers after we have been able to help them.

4. Oddest request?

Ya know, I started my career as a Sales Agent on the phones over 11 years ago. While I have definitely seen much more creative language used from folks in the SM world, the oddest requests that I can think of have all come from customers on the phone. Our SM customers are pretty no-nonsense. They may have used the full creative potential of their 140 in their initial post about us, but they usually have really great questions or legitimate concerns, and we are happy to be able to take care of them.

5. Additional thoughts from you or your team?

The one piece of advice that I think will help organizations that are considering engaging in Social Media the most is it is about Customer Service not Social Media. I see a lot of companies jump in these spaces, and they seem to spend more time tweeting about the power of tweeting than actually taking care of their customers. The companies that are the most successful are focused on taking care of their customers not becoming the next Social Media Guru. If you jump in fully prepared to resolve customer concerns in real-time, you cannot fail.

As you can guess, Charter is not the only company with a team dedicated to social media, however my experiences with them have always been positive, and they are an active company in our community. Should you have need of Charter’s help on Twitter, use @Charter and they will respond – quickly from my experience.

If you need assistance from another company, it may be to your advantage to ‘@’ whatever their company’s Twitter account is using for an account name. Twitter is busy, but usually not as busy as a call center where many, many other people are calling in to address an issue. Generally, they will be more concise and direct since they only have 140 characters to use in communication.

Hopefully this has been informative for you, and if you would like to follow me on Twitter, I use the account ‘danvoyles’. Happy Tweeting!