Google Accounts, Privacy, and Our Clients

If you maintain any Google accounts (Google Apps, Gmail, YouTube, Google+, etc). Google will be changing their privacy policy to allow them to consolidate or share your web search history among their products.

We thought our clients and friends should be made aware of the possible impacts of this change.

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google’s other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

Visit the link below to find out how to remove your existing web search history. We recommend that if you want to delete your web history, that you do it without delay.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/how-remove-your-google-search-history-googles-new-privacy-policy-takes-effect

Please get in touch if you have any questions or concerns that we can address.

Regards,

Mark & Tom at Technolutionary

iCloud, iOS 5 and Mac OS X 10.7.2

By now you’ve likely heard, Apple has released iOS 5 for mobile devices, OS X 10.7.2 for Macs, and iCloud. With the release of OS X 10.7.2, Lion appears to be ready for prime time. We have been testing iOS 5 and OS X 10.7.2 since its early beta release and we’re ready to pronounce them both “ready for primetime,” with some notable exceptions*.  While download and activation servers were under high load initially, they have settled down and you should not experience undue delays.

The upgrade to iOS 5 is free for all users of iOS, and works on the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. The iPhone 4S that is released on Friday will come with iOS 5.

The biggest feature we’ve been asked about is iCloud. iCloud is the successor to Apple’s MobileMe service.
iCloud works as a web between your iOS and Mac OS devices, to sync documents and photos, and if you’re not already using an ActiveSync account for Calendars and Contacts (like so many of our clients do with their Kerio accounts), it can work with those, as well.  In addition, it provides you with a secure backup service “in the cloud” at Apple, which means should your iPhone be stolen, provisioning a new iPhone is as simple as logging in with your Apple ID when you get your new phone.  Backups occur over WiFi only, and happen only when the iPhone or iPad is plugged in.

iCloud requires OS X 10.7.2 to work on your Mac, but works on your iOS 5 device without requiring OS X 10.7.2.
If you care currently using MobileMe to sync data from your Mac to iPhone and your Mac is still running MacOS 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) you will want to hold off upgrading your iPhone to iOS 5 until after you upgrade your Mac to MacOS 10.7.2.
If you upgrade your iPhone to iOS 5 or purchase an iPhone 4S and sign into iCloud for syncing your MobileMe account is converted to an iCloud account.  If your Mac is not running MacOS 10.7.2 you will lose the ability to sync with your Mac (you will still be syncing to iCloud)

Apple has released some documentation about what that might mean for those still running OS X 10.6:

 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4929

The highlights: Without OS X 10.7.2, you will not be able to access any Calendars or Contacts associated with your iCloud ID on your 10.6.8 Mac. This won’t affect many of our clients who are already using Calendar & Contact syncing with Kerio accounts or Google accounts.

 The upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 is a paid upgrade for those using OS X 10.6 and above, and volume licensing is available for Apple beginning at 20 users. We would be happy to help devise a migration path for your office or personal computers. 
* Current caveats include delegation of calendars for Kerio users (being fixed in Connect 7.3.0, a free maintenance release due in November) and any users of software that requires Rosetta under Snow Leopard (Office 2004, some versions of Adobe CS products, and other programs. Check http://www.roaringapps.com for any applications that are fairly old.)

tj asked: Preserving battery life: you can turn off cellular data entirely. Also, IIIRC turning off Wi-Fi's "Ask to Join Networks" will help preserve battery life. Same with Settings » Sounds » Vibrate [turn off]. (Also note: Turning off location services will help, but it will also mean that you can't use Google Maps to find your location or use "Find My iPhone".)

TJ’s got a few extra tips for you in the run up to the storm.  You *can* turn off cellular data, but dialing it back to EDGE will give you maximum utility. A text is cheaper on the battery than a phone call.  

iPhone Battery Preservation Tips for the Hurricane

Hurricane Irene is set to arrive in the DC area tomorrow afternoon, and with it possible power outages throughout the Metro DC region. Here are a few tips to keep your iPhone lasting as long as possible:

• Turn off Push Notifications. You really don’t need a message from Facebook that Janie’s dog did the cutest thing.  Settings > Notifications > Off
• Turn off Bluetooth. You’re not driving in a hurricane. Turn off Bluetooth to save a bit of extra juice. Settings > General > Bluetooth > Off
• Turn off 3G. The goal here isn’t updating Twitter or keeping up on work email, it’s preservation of the phone so you can call Pepco or BG&E when the power goes down. Moving to EDGE data will help. Settings > General > Network > 3G Off
• Turn off Location Service. If you’re hunkered down, you know where you are. You can always turn this on for a bit to see where the nearest pizza place is: Settings > General > Location Services > Off
• Turn off Push email & calendaring. Again, this is a hurricane, so you don’t need that calendar invite from your cousin right away. Same for the email from your mother in law. If they need you, they’ll call, which is what we’re saving battery for. Settings > Mail, Contacts & Calendars > Fetch New Data > Push: Off
• Turn off auto-check of email. If you’re important enough to need this, you’re important enough to be somewhere with a gen-set, a massive flywheel UPS, and redundant bandwidth. Turn it off. Settings > Mail, Contacts & Calendars > Fetch New Data > Manually
• Turn down your screen brightness. Given how dark these storms are, you can lower your brightness from blinding to dim. Settings > Brightness
• Shorten your auto-lock period. See previous statement about hunkering down. This is more to save battery than be convenient. I’ll forgive you for turning off your passcode (if you can) for this weekend, if you want. Turn it back on Monday. Settings > Auto-Lock > 1 Minute.
• Make sure to kill graphics-heavy apps like Angry Birds. From the home screen, double-press the Home Button, then press and hold on the app icon, then hit the red minus at the top of the icon in the switcher tray.
• If coverage goes out, switch to Airplane Mode. In the event of cell coverage going out, or worse, getting spotty, switch to Airplane Mode for a while. Searching for signal is very battery intensive.

Alright, that ought to do it for now. Good luck & good hunting.

Hurricane Irene

We’re currently monitoring the storm track for Hurricane Irene, which is currently down near Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The storm looks to be fairly serious, and as of this morning’s forecasts, the track would affect the greater DC Area:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at4+shtml/145015.shtml?5-daynl?large#contents

The storm is currently slated to make landfall in coastal North Carolina on Saturday, and be centered over the southern end of the Chesapeake, still at Hurricane status, on Sunday morning.  Currently, forecasters are saying that the storm reminds them a lot of Hurricane Floyd that dumped 14” of rain on the DC area, along with 70mph winds and 500,000 people without power.

We’re going to be watching this storm very carefully over the next 72 hours, and we’ll have an update for you midday on Friday.  Storms like this can be fairly disruptive to power and internet access. While we expect our colocation facility not to be affected, you may wish to contact your area service providers about redundancy in the case of power outage and storm damage. 

Watch our Tom Bridge this Sunday!

Our own Tom Bridge will be on the ABC 7 Washington Business Report this Sunday morning at 9:30am on WJLA in the Washington DC area. We’ll post the video when it gets put online.  He’ll be talking about Cloud Computing and how it affects big and small businesses.

On the release of 10.7 Lion

Late on Tuesday, as part of their earnings call, Apple announced that its new operating system, OS X 10.7 Lion, would be released on Wednesday during the day.  You may have many questions concerning the release of Lion, upgrade paths, upgrade features, group licensing, and compatibility.  We’ll be working to answer those questions on a case-by-case basis as we go forward during the next few weeks.

There are some impressive new UI features for the new upgrade, including significant support for gestures on the built-in trackpad and magic trackpad accessories. In addition, Lion Server has support for provisioning many features of your company-owned iPads and iPhones and iPods, to allow us to deploy email configurations, applications, and other settings over the air, which means less plugging in and configuring these devices.

Currently, it is our advice that you NOT upgrade to 10.7, pending the results of some compatibility testing that we’ll be doing over the new few weeks.  

As Saleh so correctly said in Raiders of the Lost Ark: ”Asps, very dangerous, you go first, Indy.”

For the last two releases prior to the version that will ship from Apple, I have been running Lion on my day to day workstation, testing various applications and configurations.  There are a few big bugs that were fixed by the Golden Master, but there are still a few bugs that remain.  For those of you working with a Kerio Connect server, we would counsel you to wait until Kerio has updated its server to adapt to the new versions of Mail and ICal that are being released with Lion.

Applications initially built for the PowerPC platform such as Office 2004, any version of QuickBooks prior to 2010 and Quicken 2007 will not run under Lion.  Your applications will need to be upgraded, in some cases incurring costs.  Rosetta, the translator that allowed these applications to run, is no longer included with Lion, and will not be supported.  If you have questions about which applications these may include, you may check the following wiki, which has good information: http://roaringapps.com/ or feel free to ask us.

To sum up: Lion is coming out on Wednesday, but please don’t upgrade right away. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have, and Apple has a good amount of information here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/