The tradition of making resolutions to start a new year comes from Roman times and even further back to the Babylonians. These promises include things like lose weight (the most popular purpose), start savings, improve grades, do charity work, travel, learn new things and many others.
This year, before you make your list, you might want to consider these purposes to help you improve as an online surfer or improve your habits related to technology.
1 – Make Your Passwords Stronger
These days, it is a bad idea to use the name of your pet as a password of your bank account, but otherwise it is bad idea to use such complex passwords that you cannot remember. It is also advisable to be careful with the answers to the security questions, especially if many people know ‘the name of your teacher of first grade’. Keeping the strong passwords is necessary to avoid the online fraud.
2 – Ensure Support for Documents, Photos, Videos and Music
Losing the information on a hard disk is something that happens to many people, well, not really. An unfortunate event could cause you to lose all your precious moments captured in photos or important documents, especially in an era when digital copies are more commonly used than the paper versions.
There are options for backing up your information on the internet, which has the advantage that you can access your document whenever you want with the device you want. If the Internet is not a concern, you might consider using a hard disk in the cloud to support information, which works automatically without you have to worry about anything. You can also consider using file sharing services with cloud storage such as Dropbox and Google Drive. They are free services, but you certainly need to pay a monthly fee depending on the space you need.
For music, which usually employs a lot of space, maybe you should consider a music service in the cloud as iTunes Match, which lets you take your music collection in the cloud at a very reasonable price.
3 – Pay Attention to Wi-Fi Services to Which You Connect
There is nothing nicer than to find a Wi-Fi connection for internet access when you are in a mall or a coffee shop; but you must have some care if you don’t want to be the victim of some injection of malware or identity theft. Some basic recommendations are as follows;
Avoid accessing your online bank account using unreliable connections, especially if no password is required to connect.
Try connection using HTTPS pages you visit. You can use a browser plug as HTTPS Everywhere to easily certify the pages you visit.
Make sure the files or shared disks have a password protection.
4 – Surfing the Internet with curiosity and caution
When you are researching something new, there are many links you click and a lot of information to process, but how do you know which links will not harm your computer? The threat of Drive by Download is real and it is, therefore, recommended that you have something like WOT installed in your browser. Google has its security plans which protect you from fraudulent websites but some slip, especially when there are issues or trends of the moment and the criminals take the opportunity to throw hooks.
5 – Protect Your Information on Facebook
This privacy of your information on Facebook is an issue. You can follow these seven practices to protect your privacy on Facebook.
6 – Apply the Broom
A good New Year’s resolution is to clean up the following;
Applications that you do not use on Facebook anymore.
Remove friends who you no longer want on Facebook. This is a subject that always creates some degree of doubt and anguish.
Remove duplicate songs in your iTunes collection.
Free up space on your hard drive of your Windows computer.
Delete old emails.
7 – Spend Less Time Online
Specially in times when speaking of Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as a problem that multiplies more and more, so it is important to take care not to fall into obsessive behaviors, and fall in living more in the virtual world than in the real.
