technology

Now that the spring semester is starting, it is quite obvious that almost all of my college students have and are using smart phones and other digital communications devices for much more than the traditional calling function. With the near universal use of smart phones and related devices in our daily lives, it is inevitable that crooks and other dishonest people will find a way to illicitly capitalize on the popularity of these devices. 

Early last summer in this column, I explained several of the alternative methods of purchasing factory new or refurbished smart phones at deeply discounted prices, without any long-term contracts. One of the sources mentioned was Google and its “Google phones,” which are sold directly by Google from its “Play Store” at play.google.com/store/devices.

About a year ago, I wrote about my then new favorite real-time smart phone road routing program Waze. At the time, Google had recently purchased Waze from its Israeli developer for over a billion dollars, a princely sum that the developer generously shared with his handful of employees.

I hope that you have not encountered the devious CryptoLocker malware, but sadly, I know as a fact that many of you have been victimized by it. For those of you who are not familiar with CryptoLocker, it is a vile form of sophisticated malware, “ransom ware,” where the malware encrypts data on the hard drive (and possibly USB drives and other external media), and then charges the user a sizeable fee to get the decryption key.