Google unveiled its new privacy policy a week ago, and it has raised quite the commotion on the intertubes. Some people say that Google has gone too far. Members of Congress have sent letters to Google demanding answers. Some wonder if the FTC will get involved. Me? I’m worried in general about privacy, and I had doubts about Google before, but to be honest, Google’s new privacy policy does not bother me all that much.

First of all, nowhere else is the old adage more true than with Google: if you don’t know what the company is trying to sell you, then they are trying to sell you. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Search, and every other service provided by Google is free. They make money by collecting information about you to tailor advertising, which they sell to others. This should come as a surprise to nobody: why else would Google offer such versatile and useful products for free?

I was honestly surprised that before now, Google was not agglomerating information from all of the different services that Google offers. So for them to do so now is not terribly concerning to me: I think that more targeted YouTube searches, for example, would be useful. If I worry about my searches, I can use Chrome’s incognito mode, or maybe DuckDuckGo. I can get rid of my Google account, shutting off my Gmail, Google+, and everything else. Would it be a pain? Of course. But as a non-paying customer, what do I expect?

Two issues about Google’s collection of information have the potential to bother me. The first is whether they sell that information to third parties, and they say that they don’t. Should that change without an opt-out, that would be a different ball game. The second, and probably more important, is how well they are actually securing the data they collect. To date, Google has not had any major data breaches that I am aware of. They seem to do a pretty good job securing their data. Again, if that changes in the future, that would be concerning, but at the same time, let’s be honest: plenty of companies have a far worse record when it comes to securing personally identifiable information. Zappos lost my data, and I’m not severing ties with them.

I can understand why people would be concerned about what Google is doing. However, let’s keep things in perspective. Google’s unified privacy policy has probably spurred more debate on the subject than anything else in recent memory, which has probably done more for the cause of privacy awareness than anything even the most ardent supporters could hope for. In addition, Google isn’t doing anything too terribly out-of-bounds with the data they are already collecting. Privacy is a very important issue, certainly. However, not every privacy policy is a terrible one.

• Current Mood: Bang
• Currently Listening To: "Purple Rain", Prince

I’ve had a problem with my computer lately with the clock being consistently slow, even though it is set to sync to an internet time server every day. Whenever I would manually sync it to an internet time server, the time would be correct for an hour or so, then suddenly lose time. Before, it was about 5 minutes, but lately, it was 17 minutes. This would cause all sorts of problems, especially when I was working on a file when the time jumped back: suddenly, the latest version of a file had a timestamp 10 minutes earlier than a previous version. Not good! But after extensive testing, I’ve determined the bug.

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It’s been a while since I did a tech update, but nothing like doing OS installs on a Friday night. My nearly 5 year old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1501, is on its last legs. The only thing I use it for is BOINC, so I figured that installing Ubuntu would give it a bit more breathing room than Windows. However, when I tried to run the install, I got a screen full of crazy colored vertical lines. Doing a BIOS update did not help. However, a forum thread did lead me to the right solution: setting the nomodeset option before install.

So if you want to install Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop and you keep running into the crazy colored vertical lines, during the install, hit F6, then select “nomodeset”. Presto!

As I’ve said before, I like using open source software whenever I can. So what close-sourced software do I use? Here’s the list below the jump:

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• Current Mood: Tired

I’ve said several times on this blog that I am a strong believer in open source software. I’ve found that it’s pretty easy to find open source replacements for most of the things you need to do on a computer on a daily basis. Then past year has shown that this applies just as much to students as anybody else, as I went the entire year using Open Office as my suite of choice for schoolwork. Overall, I found it to be much better than Microsoft Office for just about everything.

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• Current Mood: Stuffed
• Currently Listening To: "Your Time Is Gonna Come", Led Zeppelin

I’ve been incommunicado for a bit due to yet another computer malfunction. This was a truly bizarre one, and the diagnosis I made, strange and unlikely as I thought it was, turned out to be correct. It’s a reminder that computers can fail in rather odd ways.

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• Current Mood: Spring
• Currently Listening To: "I Can't Quit You Baby", Led Zeppelin

In a (very popular by search engine standards) previous post, I talked about moving from Norton Ghost to Clonezilla. Part of the move from Ghost to Clonezilla was creating a method of automatically determining the computer model I was imaging, and selecting the right image. This is possible by changing the custom-ocs file, and here are the changes I made to do it.

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• Current Mood: Monday
• Currently Listening To: "Run Like Hell", Pink Floyd

I have written earlier about my displeasure with Motorola’s delay in upgrading my Cliq XT from Android OS 1.5 to 2.1. That update was in September, when the upgrade was supposed to be out by the end of the year. Fast forward to February, and in the end, Motorola gave up. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are incredibly mad, me included. As a result of this fiasco, I will never buy a Motorola device again.

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• Current Mood: Frustrated
• Currently Listening To: "Black", Pearl Jam

Some time ago I blogged about the password manager I had been using for many years: Password Safe. It’s a great program, one that I recommend wholeheartedly. However, I’ve since switched to a new manager: KeePass. Like Password Safe, it is a pretty functional password manager that allows you to automatically generate and save passwords. Also like Password Safe, KeePass is open-source.

Why did I switch? Well, essentially because I like the interface and functions better in KeePass. The UI looks a bit better, and there is a graphical representation of how strong a password is. Other than that, though, it’s almost identical to Password Safe. Password Safe is even a bit easier to use for the novice, as it doesn’t have quite as many options to fiddle with as KeePass. One issue with KeePass 2.x is that is requires the .NET architecture, which isn’t always available, especially if you plan on using it on a computer that you don’t have control over.

I’d unhesitantly recommend either of the two for your password manager needs. Play with both of them and decide which one you like better. But pick and use some kind of manager. Using strong, random passwords is an important part of security, and password managers help make doing so simpler.

• Current Mood: Cyber-educated

A while back I posted about moving from Ghost to Clonezilla. Many months have passed, and after using it to roll out a bit less than a hundred computers, I thought I’d give an update.

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• Current Mood: Friday!
• Currently Listening To: "Back in the U.S.S.R.", The Beatles