Shelly Palmer’s Daily Radio Report

I’ve had Verizon FiOS service for about a week now and I immediately started sharing my experience in a blog series called, the FiOS Chronicles which you can find at shellypalmer.com.  I live in midtown Manhattan and I waited over 18 months for FiOS to wire my apartment building. It was worth the wait.  After a relatively painless 7-hour conversion process I was able to say goodbye Time Warner Cable, so long old-fashioned Verizon landlines, adiós cable modem, hasta la vista backup DSL modem – hello 150 Mbps down, 62 Mbps up – awesome! The first thing I noticed was that nothing, and I do mean nothing, prepares you for browsing the web at 152/62 (Verizon’s published specification is 150 Mpbs down and 35 Mbps up).  You may wonder if you need that much speed.  Time is money – you do! The next thing I noticed was the FiOS user interface, it’s feature-laden and completely intuitive. Visit shellypalmer.com the rest of my FiOS Chronicles.

Samsung has unveiled the much anticipated, Samsung Galaxy S3.  This new smartphone has a simple mission, be the best Android smartphone you can buy – and, although it won’t hit the States until this summer, it may be just that.  The Samsung Galaxy S3 features a big, bright 4.8 inch HD screen, an 8 MP camera, a removable battery, a super fast quad-core processor and it runs the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.  In non-Geek-speak that means, a beautiful big screen, excellent pictures, long battery life and the best and latest version of Google’s Android operating system.  It also comes in two colors, kind of blue and white and, it will have lots of internal memory and a micro-sd card slot for more storage. The Samsung Galaxy S3 has no price and the company is not saying anything about phone companies just yet.  However, we do know that when it arrives in the States it will be 4G capable.

Do you think you have a great idea for a hit sitcom?  If you do, Amazon wants you to upload it to studios.amazon.com.  If they think you’ve got a hit idea, they may slate it for development, if they do, you’ll get $10,000.  If your new hit sitcom idea really turns out to be a hit, there’s pretty big money in your future.  All you need to go is go to studios.amazon.com and upload your big idea.  The rest is, pretty much out of your hands.  Why is Amazon getting into the sitcom production business?  The short answer Amazon Instant Video needs great content, and Amazon thinks that one great place to look for it is in your head.  So, if you’re feeling creative and you think you’ve got what it takes, start writing, because – as you know, the only thing you need to make a great sitcom is great characters and a great idea.  Thank that sounds easy?

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced a new addition to the Facebook’s life event button – you can now designate yourself as an organ donor.  And, if you haven’t registered with the appropriate agency, there’s a link you can use to begin the process there as well.  People immediately started asking me about privacy and how health officials will actually get the information.  Both are good questions.  For the 800 million Facebook users, just click the life event icon and follow the instructions.  For everyone else, this is a great time to start thinking about what it means to make this kind of personal information public.  Should everyone be able to see that you’re an organ donor, or just your family and the appropriate medical professionals?  What if you want to do it, but you don’t have time to change the status on your driver’s license?  The answer is, congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg and his team for using the power of Facebook to bring this important life-saving topic front and center.

Internet Service Providers in the United Kingdom must block access to the world’s most notorious file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay.  Why?  Because, Britain’s High Court believes that requiring ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay will reduce illegal file-sharing in the UK.  Will it work? Of course not! When asked if the High Court’s order was going to hurt its business, a Pirate Bay spokesperson told TorrentFreak that circumventing any blockade will be easy.  The spokesperson went on to say, and I quote: “This will just give us more traffic, as always. Thanks for the free advertising.”  Why is The Pirate Bay so nonchalant about the new anti-piracy law in the United Kingdom?  Because it was built by and for pirates.  They break the law for a living and they know that no matter how hard you try to stop piracy at the ISP level, pirates will navigate around it.  Is there anyway to stop illegal file-sharing? Visit shellypalmer.com to learn the secrets of The Pirate Bay.

Want to know what your Government is doing about cyber-security?  Well, this past Thursday the House amended, then passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, also known as CISPA.  The Bill was written to help private businesses share cyber-threat information with the Federal Government and each other.  How would this work?  The authors of the bill imagine Google discovering a cybersecurity threat and sharing it with Microsoft.  (Obviously, very few congresspeople know much about Google and Microsoft, but that’s not the point.)  The point is that several privacy groups think there are two really bad aspects of the bill: the national security clause which allows the protections of the bill to be use in any case where national security is deemed to be at risk, and the second clause protects any business that shares cybersecurity information from lawsuits from users who think their privacy has been violated. What’s next? CISPA goes to the Senate.

Google Drive, Google’s version of Dropbox was announced the other day and there are already geeks grumbling about Google’s privacy policy.  As it’s written, it could be interpreted in a way that would make you think that Google would not only have access to, but also have some ownership of the files you store and share on Google Drive.  As it turns out, that’s not what the privacy policy says at all.  It says that Google needs your permission (which you automatically grant) to take possession of your files to transfer them or help you share them and, of course, index them for your convenience.  Google promises that it will never share your data with anyone or ever own any of your personal information.  If you’re wondering how this is going to play out, you’re not alone.  The idea of storing your personal information and files on someone else’s computer comes with a new set of problems.

If you’re into social media, you’ve probably heard of Klout.  That’s K-lout.  According to Klout’s website, your Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others.  So, your Klout score is supposed to measure how influential you are in the world of social media.  Mostly that means Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.  My Klout score was 60 out of a hundred a few weeks ago, but I haven’t been tweeting as much as usual this month so it dropped to 52.  I guess I’m not as influential as I was a month ago.  Of course, it’s easy to mock a score that ranks media mogul Rupert Murdoch as the 8^th most influential person on the subject of cloth diapers, but I’ll resist the temptation.  Even if you haven’t signed up, you have a Klout score.  Just visit klout.com to see what it is.

Move over Dropbox, get out of the way Microsoft SkyDrive, there’s a new kid on the block – GoogleDrive is here and, at first glance, it looks like an outstanding service.  GoogleDrive is fully integrated with Google Apps and, with 5GB of free storage, and competitively priced options up to 16TB, yep, you heard me Terebytes of storage, GoogleDrive is serious about business users.  When you open it up, GoogleDrive looks alot like Dropbox. Your files are stored locally on all of your connected devices as well as in the cloud.  But that’s where the similarity ends. GoogleDrive is also the new face of Google Docs and it now serves as the file manager for Google’s suite of cloud-based productivity apps.  So you can mix and match your Google docs and spreadsheets with all of your other files in one simple interface.  GoogleDrive also features text extraction, optical character recognition and a host of other awesome features that truly set it apart.

The FBI wants you to know about a computer virus called DNS Changer.  On July 9, the bureau is going to literally shut off the Internet for computers that are infected.  How can you tell if your computer has the virus?  Go to dcwg.org, that’s dcwg.org and follow the instructions.  Once again, that’s dcwg.org.  When you get there, just follow the instructions.  Even if you are currently using name brand virus checking software, you still need to go to dcwg.org and make sure that your computer is not infected.  If it is, dcwg.org has a one-click fix for your computer.  It is safe and it is easy.  This malware has been around for a couple of years and the FBI was going to shut down the infected DNS server back in March, but a Federal judge ordered an extension until July 9^th so that the FBI would have more time to warn people about the shut down.