Bet you all didn’t think that talk about What Is An IP Address wasn’t leading to a post about how to make sure no one else has been on your Gmail account, did ya?

This is a rare occassion where we’re going to send you to another site for a story on how to do somethine, but MakeUseOf.com did an excellent write up on how to see if someone else has been on your Gmail account.  You can see where the last person logged in from, and you also can see if someone is logged in from another location at the same time as you.  If there is someone on you don’t know, you can even terminate their session.  Logged in from work and forgot to sign out before you went home?  You can also terminate that.  It’s an excellent article, and one we wish we had gotten to first, but they did a bang up job, and it’s well worth you reading.

Very early on here on StarterTech, we told you How To Pick A Password, and with recent events in the upcoming elections, we have a real world lesson about why choosing a strong password is so important.

With the story of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email account being reportedly hacked, some information about how it was said to of been done, and it teaches everyone some valuable lessons.  According to Valleywag, the person who hacked the account is said to have used the password recovery system by using some very simple searches of the Web to find the needed information.

On systems that offer password recoveries that ask you things like a security question, always write your own question if you can, if you can’t, reverse the answer if you can.  A popular security question is “What was your high school mascot?”  Well, lets say yours was “Bears”, how about entering your answer as “Sreab”?  What about “earsb”?  Find a system that works for you and stick to it, but you have to remember that a lot of people who may try to hack your account are co-workers, friends and family, all people that may very well know the answers to the most common questions, so you need to exercise caution with your security questions as much as you do with your passwords.

This is an unfortunate reality of the modern Internet world, but you have to safeguard everything as much as you can.  Always think of the worst case scenario and then make it even worse.

The news that the International Space Station (ISS) has been infected witha c omputer virus pretty much tells you that no one is safe from these annoyances.

Luckily the virus that made it to the space station this past July, Gammima.AG, is directed at only stealing login information for popular online games, and poses no threat to the operation of the station.  The laptops that are infected are not networked to the station, but unfrotunately that is no Internet connection for them to be sent to the station, so they will have to wait until the next mission in November.

This just goes to show that any one has the potential of catching a virus, no matter how many safeguards they have in place.  Apparently these laptops had been cleared before they left for the station, but it seems the virus may have gotten on them via an infected flash drive.  No matter how much you may trust a source, you should always be aware that everything is potentially a virus and handle it with care until you are sure.

A new security flaw has popped up in the popular GMail system, but there is an easy fix that will only take a few seconds of your time to fix if you know where to go.

Thanks to Stan Schroeder over at Mashable for pointing this out, it appears that hackers can grab information about your GMail session if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi connection, but there is a pretty easy fix for this that we will guide you through, and it only takes 3 steps to do it!

The first step is to go to the top right corner of your main GMail inbox, and locate where it says “Settigns” and click on that.

Once on the Settings page, the default tab is “General”, but if by some chance you are in the wrong tab, just click on General in the top of the yellow settings box.

Scroll all the way to the bottom of the General tab and you will see the information in this last picture that says “Browser connection”, you’ll click the circle next to”Always use https”, and then click the “Save Changes” button and… you’re done!

It will only take you three steps, a few seconds, and your connection will be much more secure when using an unknown Wi-Fi connection.

Better known as “Phishing”, scam emails are ones that are made to fool you into think they are official correspondence, but in reality they are an effort to steal your personal information.

Macworld is reporting on a new MobileMe phishing scam that is startiling in just how good it is.  Pictured to the right here, this scam provides legitimate links that take you to official pages if you click on any but the “clicking here” one at the bottom that wiil take you to a page owned by someone in Romania.  As you can see, these scam emails can be amazingly realistic in their attempts to get your information, but they almost always go with the tact that something has gone wrong with your account and they try to panic you that you may lose service.

My easy rule of thumb at any time I am the least bit suspicious is to just go to the website of the service in question, log in on the page I know is real, and check out my account via the official page.  If all else fails, I call the company service number and check on it that way.  The rule you should always follow is that you should never click on links in emails, but especially if they are asking for any sort of information related to your finances or your identity.

If you have the least bit of doubt, never click a link, and never, ever give out your personal information if you have the slightest bit of worry.

Nothing makes all of us at StarterTech angrier than ads on the Internet that are out to trick you, and boy did I run in to a doozy today.

Pictured to the right is what ended up showing up in my Firefox window when I ran into the ad.  You can click the image to see a full screen view of how it appeared.  It gave the apperance of Windows Explorerer, acted like it was scanning my hard drives, and that it found some very nasty security breaches.  After it raced through this scan, it gave me a window to click in and download their virus scanner.  Being experienced in these types of ads, I knew if I clicked even on the “cancel” button I would end up with a nasty download that would corrupt my system.

I couldn’t close the browser tab, I couldn’t close Firefox as it had locked me out, it had fully locked me so that I would have no choice but to download their, more than likely, dangerous program.  I determined the safest thing to do was an ALT-CTRL-DEL and end the Firefox process all together and restart my browser with a clean session.

So how did I know this was all false?  Lets go over some of the key evidence that told me.

1. It happened inside the browser window – Again, click on the image above to see the full-sized image and you can see it was inside of a Firefox tab.  Microsoft doesn’t make Firefox, so there was no way this would have happened.

2. Bad grammer and spelling – These types of ads almost always have messed up spellings and grammer.  I have highlighted the two sections of this one that were messed up.  Microsoft, for all their faults, does tend to make sure things like this don’t crop up in their products.

This does require you to pay close attention, but you really should at all times when something like this pops up during web surfing.

3. Common data – For someone like me who lives and works on the web, this portion was almost insulting, but for someone like an every day mother surfing the web, this would look scary.  The “stolen” personal information pictured here is data that is recorded by every website you visit.  Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns you an Internet Protocol (IP) Address whenever you are on the Web.  Since each ISP has their own set, it is easy for a program to look it up and determine your location, who your ISP is and display your IP Address.  This is not “stolen” data, it is just simply your identifying data on the web.

Basically, any time you are on the web, unless it is a site you know well, never download a program.  This is the quickest way to install spyware, adware, malware, trojans, viruses and so on.  The Internet is a fun and useful place, but just like any city, it has its “bad neighborhoods” and you must always be vigilant of what may be around you.