Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

April 15th is creeping up on us again, only 3 weeks to get your tax return filed.

If you are using your computer to do your taxes, which I highly recommend, here are some helpful links.

Complete your taxes with software on your computer:

Use TurboTax Software for your 2008 taxes

Use H&R Block TaxCut Software for your 2008 taxes

File your 2008 tax return online (maybe even for free):

File Online With TurboTax

File Online With TaxCut from H&R Block

Don’t procrastinate, get your taxes done, out of the way and your REFUND ON ITS WAY TO YOU!

Special note to WiFi users:

If you use a laptop with a WiFi connection and public or non-encrypted WiFi, be sure and protect your internet connection from eavesdropping and potential identity theft. A secure VPN tunnel will not only provide anonymous internet surfing, but more importantly it will protect you from WiFi sniffers capturing your personal information.

Check out a Free Trial for GoTrusted Secure VPN. It’s Fast, unlike Tor, easy to use, unlike Tor and worthy of your trust.

When it rains it pours. I recently found my dream solution for Anonymous Web Surfing and then my friend Peter Grandich had this video on his blog. (The secure tunnel I’m using is a product of GoTrusted.)

Now I’m not ordinarily aligned with the ACLU on much; unfortunately that has changed since 9/11.

The video pretty much says it all. But if that wasn’t enough, Bruce Schneier had more privacy eroding news in his monthly newsletter this month too.

For instance, do you think pressing *67 before making a phone call will hide your caller ID? Not if it’s going to an 800 number (because they pay for the call they get to know). There are many services that easily allow you to forward your calls to an 800 number of yours and voila’ – there’s the caller ID. Now a service allows you to program that in automatically.

(The same company offers a fee service that will offer up a phony caller ID to protect you.)

Anonymous Web Surfing not only protects your information when surfing over open WiFi (airport, cafe, school, etc) but also hides your real IP address (which can tell approximately where you are located) and the content of your surfing.

My previous post covers more advantages of a service such as this and why I do NOT use Tor.

Past is prologue; start today protecting the amount of data you “litter” for others to capture, store forever, and maybe use against you.

Start your GoTrusted free trial now.

VPN clients allow you to securely connect your workstation to a host network somewhere else. Typically, a firewall company (Fortinet’s Fortigate line in my case), support IPSec VPN’s to their firewall with VPN client software they supply.

Because of the tight integration between the VPN client software and Microsoft networking components in Windows, loading a VPN client from 2 or more vendors, say Fortinet and Cisco, isn’t a very good idea.

VPN client softwares have a nasty reputation of not playing well together. In fact, it has been known to happen that when you install a second VPN client on your PC, not only does neither VPN client work, but neither does the Microsoft networking to you local network.

In some cases, the only fix is a complete Windows reinstall. Ouch.

Enter the Virtual Machine. What if your need to connect to another network were limited enough that you could set up a simple Virtual Machine instance of Windows to connect to and access that other network?

Not only could you have multiple VM’s for multiple VPN clients so they don’t HAVE to play together at all, but the remote network could be less concerned about whether your PC has been compromised in some way? Yes?

So who needs multiple VPN clients? How about an accounting firm with many clients, high gasoline and other travel costs that make remote access appealing, and a typical lack of standardization between chosen firewall products among those accounting clients?

I have one such accounting firm as my client. I think I just found another use for Virtual Machines.