Protecting Your Online Accounts and Personal Information

It is becoming extremely important to protect your online accounts as we become more dependent on doing business on the web. Here are a few tips that will help you avoid becoming a victim of identity theft.

A) Never answer emails asking for your username and password, or asking you to click on a link to validate personal information. Credit Card companies, internet based stores, and banks will never ask you to validate your information via email. If you are unsure about whether an email is fake or real, go to the company in questions website and contact their customer service.

B) Do not use the same username and passwords for entertainment accounts and financial accounts. For example, don't use the same username and password for E-Bay or Hotmail as you use for online banking. If you don't follow this advice and a identity thief guesses your username and password, then he has access to all of your accounts on the web.

C) Use numbers, symbols, and letters in your password. The more numbers and symbols you use, the harder it is for hackers to guess or use a password cracker to get into your site. Password crackers are programs that guess at passwords by using common words first, then breaking apart your password letter by letter. The more characters you use in your password, the harder it is to crack.

D) Do not use easily guessable names for your password. Many people make the mistake of using common words, the names of their pets, or the names of their kids for their password. Statistics say that identy thieves are commonly people you know or people who have easy access to your personal information. Using these types of passwords make you an easy target.

E) Do not give your password to ANYONE. I am surprised how many times I go to a complete stranger's house to work on their computer, and instead of typing in their computer's username and password they just tell it to me. I am a good person, so I make sure to tell them to be careful in the future with other people, but everyone is not as honest as I am. Also, if you take your computer to a repair shop, either disable your computer from requiring a username and password to log in or make sure you change it when you get the computer back. Make sure you also delete all your temporary internet files that may contain cookies that will automatically log you in to sites such as your bank and credit card companies.

Little things like this that we don't think of will go a long way in protecting us from the hackers and identity thieves out there. If you have any questions, drop me an email and I will try my best to help you.

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More Help for Powerpoint

My last article titled, "Converting PowerPoint to DVD" sparked a lot of questions and comments about ways to make Powerpoint presentations better. I did some research to answer some of these questions, and I found a cool tool to use. If you already have Microsoft Office 2003 or Powerpoint 2003 installed on your computer, you can download a free tool from Microsoft's website call "Microsoft Producer." It is an enhancement tool for Powerpoint 2003 that allows you to import video, HTML (the language websites use,) and special effects. It also allows you to publish your Powerpoint presentations so that they can be published on on the web. Visit this link for more information.

Shameless plug: Presario Productions in combination with Presario Domains can provide you with space to publish your presentations to the web inexpensively. Visit the Presario Domains website and take a look at the economy plans for more information.

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Converting PowerPoint to DVD

Since I speak at several small business seminars and programs, business owners often ask me it is possible to convert PowerPoint presentation to DVD format. I also received this question via email recently, so I decided to do an article on it. The answer to the question is yes, but the process is not easy without spending some money.

To complete this process the easy way, you will need at minimum three things: a DVD-R drive (which is sometimes referred to as a DVD-Writer or a DVD Burner), a PowerPoint to DVD conversion program, and a DVD Burning program such as Nero (http://ww2.nero.com/enu/index.html.)

DVD-R and DVD-RW drives can be purchased at any computer store, or even cheaper online at sites such as Amazon.com, Overstock.com, or Buy.com. For a person with average to advanced computer knowledge, they are not difficult to install. For a person that is not comfortable working on their own computer, any computer repair and upgrade shop can install these drives for a small fee.

To convert the actual PowerPoint, there are several programs out there, such as "PowerPoint2DVD" (http://www.powerpoint-to-dvd.com/), and ProDVD’s “PowerPoint DVD Maker” (http://prodvd.net/product/productinfo.asp?pid1=PDM). These programs allow you to simply import the PowerPoint into them, then they will give you a format that is ready to burn to DVD using a popular DVD writing program such as Nero. This is the simplest, fastest, and most error-proof way to convert PowerPoint presentations to DVD.

If you have a short presentation that does not have a lot of sound effects and visual effects, you can also manually convert your PowerPoint presentation to DVD by taking a series of pictures of the screen (commonly called screenshots) and burning these to DVD. This still requires the purchase of some software, and is a longer, more tedious process. There is an excellent tutorial on how to do this process available at http://www.awesomebackgrounds.com/powerpoint-to-dvd.htm.

If you have any more questions about this subject, send me an email and I will try my best to answer them.

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