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. Windows CardSpace, Solving The Identity Crisis
3. Queensland Department of Transport Online Services

While it sounds like a small change, the longer term plans were for search engines to not include those links when ranking a given web sites content. It was common place for spammers to comment spam thousand or millions of blogs, leaving a link to their preferred sites. Before the rel=”nofollow” attribute was introduced, the search engines had no way of knowing if a web site owner trusted that site and as such had to use other methods of measuring trustworthiness.

The intention is clear, by removing the incentive for a spammer by using rel=”nofollow” in the links – it was hoped it would have an impact on the insidious and incredibly aggressive spam ecosystem online. Unfortunately, spammers aren’t the kind of people that just roll over at the first sign of a battle and the war on spam raged on. As the rel=”nofollow’ attribute gained momentum over the years, spammers have subsequently sought out web sites which were considered dofollow – in that they have clean links that the search engines will count when ranking a web site.

As I’ve upgraded WordPress over the years, I’ve been carrying the same set of themes or templates forward through the upgrades and hadn’t bothered to upgrade to a newer base theme. Of course this meant that links from my site were dofollow links and were valuable to the spammers. So valuable in fact that my site has been listed countless times on different forums as being a dofollow blog – essentially proclaiming to the spammers of the world that they should target my site for high quality backlinks.

I’m happy to say that after a recent upgrade to WordPress 2.9.x, I ported my current theme over to a new base theme provided in the 2.9.x code base which uses rel=”nofollow” links by default. In fact, if I want to allow people to have clean links – I’ll need to specifically allow them by use of a plugin – which is fine by me.

This will no doubt upset the spammers out there that thought they’d be getting easy, free dofollow links from my site. While I understand why they want my clean links, I also hate having to deal with comment spam – so I’m going to leave my comments rel=”nofollow” from now on.

Related posts:

1. Rel=”nofollow”
2. Combating Website Spam
3. Rel=”nofollow” Follow Up

Last week our family took the next logical step in preparing for the arrival of our second child toward the end of May – we bought a family car.

Claire bought her 2003 Mazda 323 SP20 in 2004 with less than 10,000km on the clock when the original owner decided that she wanted a Mazda 6 instead. In that time, Claire and I have clocked up about 120,000km on the Mazda and it hasn’t missed a beat.

The downside of the Mazda 323 hatchback from a family standpoint is that the mount point for the child restraints are at the rear of the boot, just in front of the latch for the hatch boot lid. The engineers who designed that component clearly don’t have kids, as for the life of me I have no idea why a car manufacturer would put a child restraint point in that position as the straps severely interfere with the storage space in the boot. It’d have made much more sense to me to have them on the back of the rear seats, that way the boot space in the hatchback is maintained.

Claire and I toyed with the idea of keeping the Mazda for a little while longer but after more discussion amongst ourselves and with family, it seemed as though it was really going to be a major pain – especially once we added in a second set of restraints.

With that in mind, we went on the hunt for a replacement vehicle in the fourth quarter of 2009 but were unable to find something we were interested in at the time. Fortunately we weren’t in any particular rush at the time, so were happy to bide our time to wait for something to pop up and as they say, patience is a virtue.

Claire stumbled onto a 2004 Ford Falcon XR6 on Car Sales and thought it looked fantastic, even with the little rear spoiler! We submitted an inquiry to the Car Sales web site to get in contact with the dealership and when I drove down to Hinterland Toyota at Burleigh to have a look at the car and was completely impressed. The exterior of the car was absolutely pristine, hadn’t been in an accident, no dints, no marks and only a few light grazes on one of the mag wheels. The interior of the car was the same, no wear anywhere in the car or pulled threads in the fabric – it was if the car hadn’t really been used in the last six years. On top of that, with about 95,000km on the odometre – it really hasn’t seen a lot of driving for a car of that age either.

Dealing with Hinterland Toyota was a very easy experience as well, the sales staff were happy, polite, efficient and weren’t pressuring me into a decision. It took about two hours to have Claire’s car valued, which they were happy to do without any real notice when I arrived and were transparent with costs as well which I think is great too. An added bonus of Hinterland Toyota which I didn’t expect was that they offer 175,000km warranty on their vehicles, fixed price servicing in either their Nerang or Burleigh locations and their service centres are open until 11:30PM!

After everything was sorted, handover of the vehicles took less than 30 minutes and I was on my way in our new family car. I provided our personal particulars the day before we took delivery, which meant all of the paper work was ready for me when I arrived – simple but great time saver. I was really surprised it was such a short change over process, I recall spending literally hours at Eagers Mazda in Brisbane when we bought Claire’s car initially – so this was a welcome change.

Claire and I are really happy with our new family car. Claire couldn’t believe it had a slight burble, I think I mentioned it was a happy coincidence. Of course, Claire being the motor head that she is, proudly exclaimed to the world that she now feels like the typical Australian bogan mother – awesome!

I have to thank our parents for their continued advice, help and support over the years. I think if Claire and I can provide as much guidance to our children when they grow up as ours have to us – we’ll be very very proud as it has meant a tremendous amount to the both of us.

Related posts:

1. Deafening Silence
2. Compelled
3. Carnivore

Hugo loves playing with things, it nearly doesn’t matter what it is – he’ll find a way to play with it. One of his favourite things to play with is our shoes, they could be thongs, flip flops, jesus sandals or running shoes – they are all fascinating when you’re about 18 months old.

Normally Hugo picks up said pair of shoes and will carry them around the house, putting them in their rightful place – which is of course not necessarily where Claire or I might want them. However this time around, Hugo decided it was a perfect opportunity to put his feet into my running shoes.

Of course, once you’ve got your little feet into a new pair of shoes – the logical thing to do is go for a walk. Unfortunately on this particular attempt, Hugo didn’t manage to walk very far with my shoes on but he did give it a red hot go. Next time he decides to go for a casual stroll in my running shoes, I’ll try and get a little video of it!

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1. Straying The Path Of Righteousness
2. Hugo & Late Night Bottles
3. Hugo Pulling His Little Red Wagon

Normally when that happens, he has a bit of a cry and he is good as gold in a few minutes. This time around, he must have bumped his mouth and he had blood everywhere. Simply because of the fright that it would have given him and the unpleasant taste of blood, I was expecting him to be quite distressed.

Amazingly, it didn’t seem to worry him though. Within a minute or two of doing it, he was calm, still bleeding, but calm. I got a wet washer to clean him up but he was just happy to suck and chew on it for a minute. Once he’d finished, we cleaned up the remaining blood on his face and he was happy again.

Tough as old boots.

No related posts.

Due to my familiarity with what was going on, I was asked if I would be willing to provide an affidavit for the court case – which I was more than happy to do. That also meant that it was possible that I might be needed when the trial date arrived, however at the time of submitting the affidavit – that wasn’t really on my radar.

A few days before the court case was to go before the Federal Court judge in Brisbane, I was notified that I would in fact be needed during the case as a witness and would be cross examined by the party Mantra Group were up against. I’m not the sort of person that tends to get too nervous but as soon as I found out, I had butterflies in my stomach and was excited and scared by the proposition of giving evidence in a court case of this magnitude.

I arrived in Brisbane much earlier than I needed to, not that it was my intention – I simply allowed enough time in case I got hit by poor traffic from the Gold Coast to Brisbane. Just in case, I took along Always Be Testing to pass the time – turned out to be a good decision. By about 9:30AM all of the official parties started to arrive and there was lots of preparation happening within the court room – making sure the literal volumes of evidence were in order and accounted for. Legal teams have bookcases on wheels to move all of their evidence and paper work around, which they appear to prefer over builders wheelbarrow – though they carry considerably less. The first session went from around 10:00AM until 1:00PM, at which point we broke for lunch and returned just after 2:00PM. Our barrister finished off his opening statement (4.5 hours, not a bad effort) and then the opposition questioned our witness list in about an  hour and the judge called it a day. I was expecting the questioning to be quite lengthy and rigorous, attempting to disarm or discredit the evidence we had submitted against them but that didn’t appear to be their strategy on that particular day.

There were a number of things that I thought were quite interesting about the whole experience:

• The Federal Court building in Brisbane is very nice
• Apparently silence or near enough to it is a virtue, you could hear a pin drop most of the time even outside of the court room
• Barristers and other legal staff bow when entering and leaving the court room
• You can now give an oath or an affirmation to swear that you’re telling the truth. An oath can be performed over a Catholic bible, Qur’an and many others.
• Not knowing the line of questioning from a barrister is unsettling.
• Knowing the line of questioning can be unsettling as well, as you wonder why they might pursue that line of questioning in the first place and what they hope to achieve out of it further down the road.
• Court reporters can apparently hear nearly everything that happens within the court room, regardless of how softly it might be spoken. While they can record the conversation taking place are break neck pace, you still need to slow down slightly to allow them to take it down accurately.
• Instead of a barrister referring to other barristers as Mr Smith or Smith, they are referred to as ‘my learned friend’
• There are a lot of terms for various elements of a court case, evidence and processes. Due to their respective significance, barristers always use the correct name for each element to avoid confusion. However, it makes their speech patterns very different from everyday life.
• Barristers need to stand before addressing the court. When there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between each party and the judge, watching the barristers stand and sit is humorous.
• Only the barristers are permitted to address the court, other legal staff are not – regardless of how qualified they might be. I think even if the judge requires clarification, that will go from the other legal staff to the barrister to relay to the judge
• Barristers cannot provide documents to the judge directly, they must go through a court assistant and subsequently through an assistant for the judge.
• I think an assistant for a judge might be the most qualified personal assistant on the planet, having at least a legal degree under their belt.
• The pace of a court case can vary dramatically, from watching paint dry boring to short, sharp and quite snappy.
• Respect for one another and courtesy appear to be a requirement and highly regarded
• Judges appear to be very patient people

The whole experience has been a real eye opener for what is involved in a court case and doing a great job. While I think everyone appreciates what legal teams generally need to do – the effort they expend attempting to be as thorough and complete as possible is quite remarkable. Aspects of this case, which I was involved in were related to internet marketing. A colleague at Mantra Group and I were concerned we weren’t going to be able to adequately explain the intricacies of it to the legal folk, as it is a specialist field and quite in depth, such that they could explain it to a judge. Despite that, the ability for our senior counsel to comprehend what was going on and apply it to a different circumstance was quite impressive, especially given it isn’t something they deal in regularly or at all.

Now we just need to wait for the judge to deliver his ruling, pretty exciting!

Related posts:

1. Mantra Group: Stella Hospitality Group Rebrands
2. David Jones & The Global Financial Crisis

Since Hugo started walking, lots of different objects around the house have suddenly become more interesting. For instance, he now loves to drag the rubber non-slip mat out of the bath, carry around a pair of Claire’s red thongs and more importantly, tow his little red wagon around as well:

Having trouble viewing the embedded video, watch Hugo Lattimore Pulling His Little Red Wagon on YouTube.

Related posts:

1. Hugo Trying Out My Running Shoes
2. Hugo Helping With The Grocery Shopping
3. Hugo & Wobbly Walking

After struggling to hear the woman and also comprehend what she was saying through a very strong accent, the lady informed me that someone would be coming around in the following week to check the power at our house. It was hard to understand her but I did pick up Energex and Origin throughout the conversation. At that point I thought it must have been something official, which was reinforced when she said it was like the recent in person visit from a Gold Coast Water employee to check the water quality.

As indicated, someone did come around to our place and they were there to check the power. They asked to see one of our power bills to check whether we were being overcharged on our bill. The bloke went through and checked the bill against his sheets and shuffled some stuff back and forward in his folder and then confirmed that I was being overcharged. At this point I thought, fantastic – we’ll be reimbursed for whatever we have paid over the normal. At this point in time, then came the sales pitch – the guy was from Integral Energy and said he could save me 7% of my power bill by switching to them instead of Origin Energy.

It pisses me off that they were deceptive on the phone, dropping names like Energex and Origin Energy so I’d feel comfortable with what was happening. It annoys me even more that the lady said it was just like the recent Gold Coast Water check, however with one distinct difference – Gold Coast Water didn’t try and sell me something, they were legitimately here to verify that our water quality was okay. I’m frustrated that the salesman wasn’t upfront about his intentions. I think it is sly that he said he was on knocking on my door because someone else in my area requested them to come around – which apparently gives an excuse to knock on my door and sell me something I don’t need. I hate and I d mean hate, not dislike, that people selling over the phone and at the door think their best chance of getting the sale is to pressure me into it and not let me consider it on my own time and furthermore that when I say no – that they don’t stop their sales pitch and piss off.

This sort of behaviour is the exact reason why I won’t change my power provider to someone offering cheap power. Not only will I not use their cheap electricity, if someone asks me about them – I’ll now be the first to tell them not to take the up on their 7% savings on their discounted power plans.

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Whilst out doing some grocery shopping just before Christmas at Woolworths in Upper Coomera, Hugo was walking around like normal. However this time, there happened to be an unused shopping basket to one side of the isle. Of course, since he loves to help out with whatever we are doing – he proceeded to pick up the shopping basket, fiddle with it so he knew how the handles worked and went shopping.

Having trouble viewing the embedded video, watch Hugo Lattimore Helping With The Shopping on YouTube.

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1. Hugo Pulling His Little Red Wagon
2. Hugo, 14 Months & Attempting To Walk
3. Female Shopping Psyche

It is completely amazing how quickly little people learn different things from being able to flap their arms in excitement when they are only babies, learning to roll over, sit up, crawl and subsequently balance standing up. I have to admit, I find it fascinating to watch it all unfold right in front of your eyes.

With only a week of practice walking, Hugo has gone from only just being able to stand and take a few steps to being able to walk quite a distance with a pretty reasonable amount of stability, all things considered.

Having trouble viewing the embedded video, watch Hugo Lattimore Wobbly Walking on YouTube.

Related posts:

1. Hugo, 14 Months & Attempting To Walk
2. Hugo Pulling His Little Red Wagon
3. Hugo Helping With The Grocery Shopping