IT-CRUISERS: Everything IT

Few weeks ago a data privacy scandal was in the news which involved Facebook and a political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. User information of over 87 million Facebook users where either exposed by Facebook to the consulting firm or the firm "inappropriately" obtained the data, beginning from year 2014. Following this incident Facebook has come up with some security settings that can help users evaluate third party apps already connected to their accounts. There are several third party apps on Facebook which by way of design accesses user information and can possibly share such information illegally. Therefore Facebook has released a statement advising users to review these settings and see exactly the apps currently connected to users accounts from the time the user joined Facebook till date. The statement reads "We understand the importance of keeping your data safe, and we are making it easier for you to control the which apps you share information wi...

Over the years Internet penetration has greatly improved across the developing countries of the world especially Nigeria which now has over 92 million internet users. Finding information online has become a common practice as people comfortably search for information using web search engines, especially Google  and get relevant search results that answers their questions and further provides them insight to related articles, events, photos, news and even map locations. Thanks to Google Map Local Guides like myself who diligently contribute to improve the map by sharing knowledge of the local environment. The mobile internet revolution has made it possible for people even in the rural areas to have access to internet on their mobile devices. During my University days, precisely in the year 2008, I carried out a questionnaire research on the topic: "How Effectively Do You Utilize Your Mobile Phones For Internet Access", the responses were amazing as people were alrea...

20 WORST PASSWORDS OF YEAR 2017 Just like the keys to your houses or cars, do you know your “online keys” are even more important? These online keys are simply your passwords and passphrases used to login to your personal or workplace accounts such as computer logons, online portals, internet banking platforms as well as the social media platforms. Image from Pixabay So how conscious are you concerning your passwords and how strong they are? Year 2017 witnessed a lot of online hack cases across the world, yet people still use passwords like '123456', “password”, “abcde”, and so on. According to a research carried out by SplashData ; They examined more than 5 million passwords that were leaked in 2017. Taking the top two spots for the fourth consecutive year are the old standbys, "123456" and "password." A number of variations of each, such as "123456789" and "passw0rd" also made the list. Here are the top 20 worst passwor...

Got home last night and tuned to CNN and here is the headline I saw "ONE BILLION YAHOO ACCOUNTS HACKED" I had to look closely to see if that was "M" as in Million but its actually "B" as in Billion! Mehn... That's huge, had to quickly snap my TV screen with my phone! ONE BILLION YAHOO ACCOUNTS HACKED Anyways here are some tips for every yahoo mail user; 1. First, if you get an email saying your Yahoo account may have been hacked and to click this link to re-secure your account, it's bogus. Yahoo's official, "you're screwed" emails have the subject line: "Important Security Information for Yahoo Users", anything else is just a phishing scam. 2. you must change your Yahoo account password on Yahoo services such as Yahoo Mail or Flickr. To do this, go to your Yahoo account page. Once there, go to Account Info and click on Account security. Then, on that page, choose Change password. While you...

Have you ever wondered where all the information you post on Facebook over the years is hosted? I know someone is thinking of cloud storage! Yes but funny enough the cloud is not an imaginary entity somewhere in the higher altitudes of the cloudy atmosphere. It is actually a physical location somewhere, which might be the next building at your workplace a remote location, usually referred to as a Data Center which hosts tens to hundreds of server machines and corresponding sophisticated computer networking and storage infrastructure. Now here is one of Facebook's Data Centers, about the size of 7 football fields. Located somewhere in Sweden. The location was chosen because of the advantage of low environmental temperature averaging -30C and plentiful power from nearby hydro electric dam. One of Facebook's Data Center  

Ubuntu Linux Mobile Phones On The Way The ever powerful and user-friendly Ubuntu Linux Distro Operating System is to storm the mobile Smart Phone arena, with the official launch of the Mobile Operating System recently, and developers already working on a variety of apps. So for Ubuntu folks like myself, it only gets better and better as open source technologies keep making the IT life more interesting, even towards the mobile platform! Cant wait to have one right in my palms!  :) 

250,000 HACKED USER ACCOUNTS: TWITTER TO INTRODUCE  TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION Following the recent attack on twitter over the weekend which resulted in compromise of over 250,000 users accounts, twitter is on the look-out for a competent software engineer to implement additional security layer for user logins to the social media cum micro-blogging website. Two-factor (multi-factor) authentication is a way of adding additional layer of security in addition to the regular username and password combination, usually in the form of additional random token generated by a hardware or software, or even a message received via SMS which is valid for a short period of time and cannot be chosen by the user or a potential hacker. It has become obvious that multi-factor authentication is the way to go in handling the simple but ever important authentication question of "who are you" we encounter on on web login forms every now and then!