I first became aware of it this morning when I received a phone call at work from Suncorp informing me that they suspected that there was fraudulent credit card transactions on my account. That was after they called home & left a message because Claire couldn’t answer the phone and then followed that up with a call to my mobile but I was driving to work. You’ve got to appreciate their persistence to call three different numbers trying to get a hold of me.

I don’t keep an eagle eye on my bank account, so I probably wouldn’t have noticed that transaction sitting on my credit card for a week or more but the Suncorp credit card protection system picked it up the day after it happened, which I think is great.

The Suncorp representative that called me at work gave me the run down on what had happened, also said they’d tried several other transactions as well but they were declined for some reason. They immediately set about cancelling my credit card and lodged a dispute about the charge for me.

Claire checked back through out past transactions to make sure nothing else was on there and it doesn’t appear as though there were. I called Suncorp back to check about what will happen next and was given case numbers for the cancellation & the transaction dispute to follow up on if required.

I’ve been really impressed with Suncorp customer service of late, like for instance sending me warning emails about large money transfers automatically. Now I’ve had them tell me about a fraudulent charge on my credit card and it’ll be resolved within the next few days and my replacement credit card will arrive mid next week.

Great to see them going out of their way to keep a customer informed about their money.

Related posts:

1. Suncorp Bank, Looking Out For Clients
2. Cheap Credit Cards, They Don’t Exist
3. ATM Fees Suck

When it came time to actually buy a digital camera though, we were going to buy it in person at a local Gold Coast retailer such as Harvey Norman, The Good Guys or similar. What we found was, while they had prices that were better than the recommended retail price by the manufacturer and some were going to be flexible on price, they were still quite expensive.

Inevitably when people start researching online for a product, they’ll start with a search engine with looking for the best compact digital cameras. The results will yield sites such as a digital camera product round up on cnet and a number of companies will be paying for advertising on Google & co. as well. While possible, it was going to take a lot of time to sift through all those sites to find the best deal and this is where the comparison shopping websites become the consumers best friend!

Comparison shopping web sites crawl over literally tens or hundreds of different ecommerce web sites, cataloging what they find and how much each product costs. Of course, the comparison shopping websites aren’t just for digital cameras – you can buy all manner of things via them from fridges to perfume, pet supplies to furniture, there aren’t a lot of things you can’t find. As a consumer, you enter the product name or product category into these sites and see dozens of different companies selling the same product, with wild variances in price.

In Australia, the three most prominent shopping comparison websites are probably:

1. Getprice
2. Shopbot
3. My Shopping

They all have a similar feel about them, however the interface and how the products are cataloged and organised differs by site – which makes some easier to use then others. In the case of the Canon Ixus 200 IS digital camera we purchased, it retails for approximately $600 for the bare camera chassis. Claire bought it via Shopping Square, a massive online store that we’d never heard of before but discovered by the comparison shopping sites. For less than half the retail price of the camera on its own, we managed to get the camera, a 16Gb memory card & prompt postage.

Next time you’re looking for a product that you can buy online, I highly recommend that you do yourself and your wallet a favour and visit one of the above sites before you spend a whole lot more money than you need to.

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1. Female Shopping Psyche
2. Australian News Websites Are Web 2.0 Compliant
3. Shopping Trolley Etiquette

It doesn’t surprise me that I haven’t received an email from Suncorp before, given the prevalence of phishing attacks these days. For those unaware, phishing is an attempt to fraudulently acquire personal information from someone by getting them to enter it into a web site that looks familiar, that is in fact just a shallow replica of a real site. Phishing attacks are one of the reasons you’ll read and hear major institutions state that they will never ask you for your username and password, ever.

Just to checkout what the latest phishing attempt looked like, I thought I’d investigate the email to see if the spammers had gotten any smarter over the years. First thing I noticed was it was from an email address that was clearly related to their online banking system and at the correct domain. Secondly, the subject had to do with BPay – so I though how fantastic that the spammers now use brands or products related to the local country to garner trust with the user.

After opening the email, I suddenly realised that the email was legitimate and I couldn’t believe it! It turns out that Claire had just paid our rates online, through the Suncorp internet banking web site using BPay. The email was a notification, to let me know that a large payment had just been processed and if I hadn’t arranged it to call them immediately.

What I love about the email though:

1. The subject was clear, it was a BPay notification
2. They sent it to both of the email addresses I’d provided Suncorp, not just my primary one in case I didn’t check it immediately.
3. It was a plain text email, so no fancy images or design – just the message. That meant that you needed to read the content of the email to see what it was about and not blindly clicking on something because it used the familiar Suncorp branding.
4. The first line stated what it was about (high value BPay transaction), the second contained what action to take (phone Suncorp) and for full details you could check the transaction on their site.
5. Suncorp include their business name, address, ABN, contact information in the footer
6. Most importantly, there isn’t a single hyperlink anywhere to be seen in the email. As such, you can’t just ‘click the obvious link’ to go to their site.

A lot of the things above seem pretty small things to a lot of people, however I’m really impressed that they’ve chosen a lot of those options – especially the plain text email. Nefarious individuals and companies that use phishing attacks prey on people reacting to a familiar company and brand, such as from their bank to take an action. By providing it in plain text, it removes the familiarity aspect away to make you read the email. By not providing any hyperlinks, you need to open your browser yourself and go to their web site.

All round, a great email from Suncorp and they should be congratulated for doing their part in helping keep their clients information private and their money safe. If I were to make a single change to it, it’d be to remove the phone number and direct the user to their web site (no hyperlink) to get the phone number if they don’t already have it on hand. That way, all of the contact information needs to be entered by the user on their own behalf, which would all but remove the risk of a phishing attack.

Related posts:

1. Suncorp Bank Anti-Fraud Department Saved Me $686.73

The majority of people wouldn’t be aware but Google have had a mantra from their early roots as a company of don’t be evil. That mantra was placed on a pedestal and at every meeting or business event – it was used to challenge the decision to see if that particular action contravened their mantra. If their proposed action was deemed evil, they would take a different tact or bin that decision or change all together. Throughout the video, Hungry Beast make a lot of statements and none of them are qualified with fact and come with a large number of assumptions and a lot of personal opinion. Following are a few points that I thought were worth addressing, there are more but I don’t have the time to retort every statement:

1. Google wants to own you in the digital world
   Looking through the video, all 2m46s of it – it is easy to come to that conclusion given the vast array of products that Google provide the public. From an outsiders view, it could be seen that it was a calculated activity from Google to release the slew of products they have and to some degree, I’m sure it was. What wasn’t mentioned within the video, is that a large number of the products Google offer were born out of the 20% time system that they provides their employees. The 20% time system allows a Google employee to spend 20% of their work time (if they want to), working on things that interest them which may not necessarily be work that Google have specifically tasked them to do. As it turns out, a number of their biggest products such as GMail were conceptualised and developed in this manner. While Google do have an impressive number of products and services they offer, they also believe in a user being able to easily put their data into and out of various Google products. To that end, Google have a data liberation team within the company who has the sole job of making sure you can get as much of your data in and out of Google if you so desire.
2. Google wants your health care data
   The United States of America are undergoing a health reform. Amongst that reform, the government opened up the option for people to access their own health records digitally. Google released an aptly named product, Google Health, that tapped into the health care network and allowed people to view and control their own health care records. This isn’t Google wanting to control your health data, you could choose to hook into your records using any number of service providers and the information is controlled and governed by the highest level of security and scrutiny.
3. Google wants your DNA
   In the last 10 years, Google have purchased over 30 different companies and invested into a number as well. Among those investments was a company named 23andMe, founded by the Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. 23andMe provides a DNA profiling service, where you can provide a sample of your DNA (cheek swab) and pay a relatively small amount of money for them to profile your DNA and let you know what medical conditions you may or may not be susceptible to. It isn’t Google that provides the service, it is 23andMe – so this was an unfair comment.
4. Google wants to control the power grid
   Since Google was founded, they have been relentlessly seeking ways to make their business more efficient – whether it be improving the speed of a simple Google search to optimising every element on a search results page. Along the way, power consumption was identified as a major cost to Google because of its massive computing infrastructure spread around the world. To reduce their costs and impact on the environment, Google have developed a slew of new technology, soft and hard – such as data centres that don’t require active cooling and high efficiency computer power supplies. The next step was optimising the supply of power to their infrastructure, as they think they can do it better than it is currently being done. This recent development has nothing to do with providing power to consumers and everything to do with Google controlling its own destiny.
5. Google have invested into different markets
   Hungry Beast are criticising Google for their choice in investments, such as software, green technology, bio technology and more. Unfortunately for Google, their business is all capital and they have very few assets outside of their staff and computing infrastructure. As such, when you have a market capitalisation of over USD$200 billion dollars and you post nearly USD$2 billion dollars in profit in the fourth quarter of 2009 alone – you really do need an outlet for that money.

While I am ever mindful of lumping all your eggs in one basket, however I also find it hard to resist the temptation of doing so with Google because they provide so many quality products. Not only is their range of products excellent, but their continued improvement on sharing data from one application to another in a seamless manner is making them easier and easier to use.

Do you care and to what extent, about using various products or services from the same company? For instance, do you care about using a lot of different products provided by Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft? Which one of those three or others that you can think of might be better or worst in your eyes?

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The overwhelming majority of internet users have no idea at all about the steps required to help protect their personal information online. This can be seen by the massive surge in identity theft in the last five years, which is happening online and offline.

To help combat that epidemic, below are my top recommendations to lower your risk of identity theft and improve your online personal security:

1. Don’t Share Your Account Information
   Just like your PIN number on a debit card or your credit card number, don’t share your account information for with anyone. If you have in the past, regardless of how much you might trust that person – make a point of changing your password as you don’t know how lax they have been with your personal information.
2. Don’t Reuse Your Account Information
   People hate having to remember different usernames and passwords for different web sites. However, reusing your account information from one site on another puts all of your online accounts in serious jeopardy if someone tries to attack your identity online.
3. Create Different Accounts For Different Purposes
   For most people it is hard enough to not reuse your account information across literally dozens of different online accounts. However, if you can’t manage a unique set of credentials for each web site – at a minimum group the web sites by type (email, social network, banking, online shopping, ..) and use a different set of credentials for each site. At least if someone gains access to your Facebook account, they don’t automatically get access to your bank accounts.
4. Choose Strong Passwords
   Just like people hate having to remember different usernames, people hate having to remember different passwords. This leads people to using a simpler password, in the hope that they’ll be able to remember it. That mental stumbling block is the perfect attack point for an average user, as their password will probably be a dictionary word or another simple combination of characters such as ’12345′. When creating a password, regardless of whether it is for an email account, social networking or an internet banking account – it should contain lower case, upper case, numbers, special characters and be at least 8 characters long. I know that sounds like a lot of hoop jumping but there are simple ways to remember a complex password, such as using a memorable phrase and replacing a few characters within it.
5. Reduce The Number Of Online Accounts
   With the creation of the authentication protocol OpenID, web site developers now have the ability to allow clients to create a new account without having to worry about managing yet another password. Instead users can signin using an existing account such as a Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, AOL and many more. By signing up using an OpenID enabled account, you have one less password to remember and when you change your password – it is changed on all sites that are linked to it. It might seem as though using OpenID contravenes points 2, 3 and 4 above however it doesn’t because you can create one more OpenID accounts and use a strong password on each instead of something simple like your pets name.
6. Ensure You’re Using HTTPS
   If you’re logging into a site or disclosing your personal information online, make sure you’re currently viewing that web site in HTTPS. The ‘s’ in HTTPS stands for secure and it uses high strength encryption to keep your personal information private when transferred from your web browser to the web site in question. If you aren’t viewing it site in HTTPS, your personal information is transferred across the internet in clear text that anyone could potentially read.
7. Practice Minimal Disclosure
   The internet is a public medium, once you put your personal information out into the public realm – it could very well remain their for the foreseeable future. That means that anyone that might be inclined to go looking for information about you can find it with ease. With that in mind, you should make a point of only ever publishing as much information about yourself on a web site as you’d be happy to have displayed on a billboard beside a busy motorway.
8. Consider Using A Password Manager
   If you do have dozens of different accounts and you cannot keep up with it all, consider using a password manager. You can generate a strong, high complexity random password for every site you create an account on and store it within your secure password manager. If and when you need to signin to that site again, simply look it up within the password manager. If you don’t want to use a standard desktop password manager like KeePass, there are also some fantastic secure password managers which provide web browser integration such as LastPass.
9. Your Email Address Isn’t Your Username
   If a web site doesn’t support OpenID but it does allow you to create a username that isn’t your email address – you should take them up on that offer. While convenient, your email address isn’t your username and can lead to issues in the future if you lose that email account. A friend of mine signed up to Amazon using their Hotmail account and it was previously used by another person but expired. Once signed in, my friend could see all of the previous owners personal information they’d provided Amazon, including name, address, purchase history and more.
10. Shared Computer Access
    If you’re in a position where you use a computer and it is shared between a number of different people, either at home, work or elsewhere – always remember to clean up after yourself. Most web browsers have the ability to remember usernames and passwords for convenience. However if you’re using a shared computer, you could be leaving your account information laying around for someone else to pray on. An easy solution for this is to simply clear all the temporary internet files when you’re done or before logging out of the machine. If that seems like it is too much hassle, the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all provide a privacy mode or private mode which won’t keep any history of your activity while it is enabled.

While there might seem like a lot of things above to consider, those ten items certainly aren’t the only things you can do to improve your identity management process. In a future post, I’ll talk about how you might go about implementing some of my recommendations above so you can take the first step, which is often the hardest.

Related posts:

1. Personal Information, Over Disclosure & Security
2. Queensland Department of Transport Online Services
3. Suncorp Bank, Looking Out For Clients

For the majority of my time using broadband ADSL, I have been using Internode. They have been providing, what I would consider, to be near faultless ADSL service over that time. They have a comprehensive network throughout Australia, which has proved itself to be very fast, low latency and tolerant to network outages. I’ve been so impressed with their service, I have lost count of how many people I would have referred to Internode and I stand by my recommendation as well – I have moved house four times in the last 5 years and each time I have chosen to reconnect my broadband with Internode at my new address.

While I use the internet heavily at work and at home, I no longer download a huge amount of data – so a lighter weight plan has suited me for at least the last five years. However since Hugo arrived in September 2008, the monthly usage has steadily been creeping up and in the last six months, our monthly usage has skyrocketed. The sharp increase of late, I’m quite sure is directly related to an increase in rich content such as songs and videos that Hugo likes to watch and my increasing use of YouTube. That increase had finally resulted in hitting our monthly 10Gb data limit and subsequently the shaping of our 1500kbit ADSL connection back to about 64kbit.

Like anyone that uses the internet regularly on a broadband internet connection, using a slow internet connection is frustrating and nearly intolerable unless you really need something. To make sure that doesn’t happen again next month, I went to the Internode web site and started reviewing their plans. My current plan, which has been grandfathered is $49.95/month and provides 10Gb of data. If I could avoid it, I didn’t want to spend more than that – it feels like a sweet spot for pricing in my opinion.

Internode had a newer version of my current plan, which was $49.95/month and provided 20Gb of data but I hadn’t bothered to upgrade to it because I had no need. I was about to upgrade to that plan, when I noticed a new plan called Easy Broadband. The basic concept behind Easy Broadband is that there is just one plan option, no more confusing choices and having to guess how much data you’ll need per month and worrying about topping it up if you run out. It comes in fast or faster configurations – which equates to at least 1500kbit and if ADSL2+ is available – you’ll get that automatically as well. It costs $49.95/month and provides a whopping 50Gb of data to use anytime of the day – not a peak/off-peak plan like a lot of ISPs provide. The only real difference between it and the other ADSL plans I’ve been using is Easy Broadband counts uploads and downloads, my existing plans only counted downloads.

When you couple the price point, a very respectible 50Gb of data per month with Internode’s impressive quota free unmetered content – the Easy Broadband plan seemed like a perfect fit. After using less than 10Gb per month for a number of years, we’ve now increased that to 50Gb – or in actual download terms probably about 45Gb since it counts up and downloaded data. I think it has to be one of the best ADSL broadband plans available in the market place at the moment and when it is backed by Internode, you can be nearly guaranteed that you’re broadband ADSL will just work.

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Previously, I’ve seen domains for Australian businesses range from $15 per 2 years all the way up to hundreds of dollars per year. A lot of domain registers purport to offer the cheapest domain names, however very few actually do and most are inflating the prices quite a bit.

Last year, I came across a very simple but fantastic Australian domain comparison site named What’s In A Name. The site is run by Josh Rowe and compares the retail price of the .auDA accredited domain registrars throughout Australia.

Next time you need to buy cheap domains, check out Whats In A Name to see if the place you’re intending to buy from is selling well over the wholesale price or not.

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I’ve been blogging away since then and not so long ago Andrew & Belinda also started blogging which has been great. I set them up with a sub-domain and we kept on trucking along but it wasn’t too long before I was getting warning emails about disk space usage and the like.

A quick email conversation with the fine folks at AussieHQ about an upgraded web hosting plan and I was en route to a bigger, faster & better everything. Gone are the days of using Cpanel and I’m back in the high gloss world of Plesk – which is what I was using when I was at HostCentral many moons ago.

The migration staff at AussieHQ moved everything for me from server to server and I provided a few bits of vital information via email to smooth things over. Everything has gone smoothly, all data migrated successfully and the server configuration was spot on. All that was left for me to do was a simple change to DNS and away we went.

I hope the next few years of this hosting plans life are as pain free as the last few have been, keep up the excellent work AussieHQ!

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As you can imagine, after having competitively priced, very fast all you can eat internet for a long time – the change has been received as though it was the end of the internet and after all, a heavily restrictive 250Gb per month is outrageous!

To contrast what ComCast clients are about to receive, most broadband users in Australia pay a little more for their internet, it is 1/10th the speed and the overwhelming majority of people survive on a plan that offers less than 50Gb per month.

After having lived through the notorious 3Gb Cap from Telstra in the late 1990′s, Australian broadband users were happy when competition entered the market and provided better value plans. While we’re happy we’re not being limited to 3Gb and can get up to 50Gb at a moderate price, ComCast clients are screaming foul play that they are being pulled down to a measly 250Gb per month.

No related posts.

While all of the information that John has presented has been amazing, especially watching him diversify his income stream and the different advertising/marketing gimmicks – he recently posted a video which I think sums up what it is all about, better than anything he has written since his blog started:

John says it isn’t about the money and I absolutely agree. If I manage to become a dot com mogal, it wouldn’t be about the money really – it would be about the lifestyle that it affords myself and my family.

I can think of nothing better than not having to worry about going to work, being able to take a holiday at my leisure and not at my employers, spending more time with my family/friends; our own home and the Ferrari in the garage would just be an added bonus.

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