How To Create Google Alerts ! A Complete guide

How To Create Google Alerts And How To Make The Most Out Of Them:- If you ask me what is the most useful Google service, I would say that it is Google alerts. Google alerts are not so popular though. But if you start using one, sure you are going to be a big fan. So what are Google alerts? Google alerts is a service using which you can get alerts on various topics of your interests. You can set Job Alerts, you can get alerts on a particular place to watch out for potential dangers, you can set Weather alerts, know whether someone is talking about your company etc. So what are you waiting for? Let’s get started, shall we?

STEP 1

• To create Google alerts, goto Google Alerts. In the alerts creation page, there will be a text box with the text hint Create an alert about. Type in your alert here. In the following screenshot, I have given the alert as site:http://merabheja.com. Thus whenever a new update is made on Merabheja, i’ll be alerted about this update by Google. Once you are done, click on the link that says More options. You can set other alerts like job alerts, place alerts etc as well.

STEP 2

• You get to choose the frequency at which you want to receive the alerts. For that, click on the drop down menu associated with the option How Often and choose the desired setting.

STEP 3

• You can choose the sources for your alert by clicking on the Sources drop down menu.

STEP 4

• Choose the language by clicking on the drop down menu associated with the Language option.

STEP 5

• The region can be selected by clicking on the Region drop down menu.

STEP 6

• Choose whether you want to recieve All Results or Only the best results by clicking on the drop down menu associated with How many.

STEP 7

• You can finally choose where you want your alerts to be delivered at. If you want the alerts to be delivered to your mail id, you can choose your mail id. Else you can choose the RSS feed option.

STEP 8

• Once you have set your preferences, click on the CREATE ALERT button. That’s it.

STEP 9

• You will be directed to the alert creation page once again. There you will be able to see the newly created alert under My Alerts section. Click on the Edit icon to edit your alert preferences and click on the Bin icon if you want to delete your alert.

STEP 10

• When you create the alert, you will be notified about the newly created alert by mail and you will have the link to Edit the alert in your mail notification.

Create alerts for your favourite feeds today itself and stay informed. Hope you found the article useful. Stay tuned for more super cool tricks, tips, and hacks.

How to connect to the Internet

Before connecting to the Internet, you must determine how you're going to connect to the Internet. Are you going to be connecting to the Internet using a modem or a broadband Internet connection? Or do you want to use your smartphone to provide Internet service to your computer? Below is additional information about each of these types of connections and how to get connected with them.

Note: If you are reading this page on a computer or computing device you are on a computer connected to the Internet.

Connecting to the Internet with a modem

Connect to the Internet with broadband

Connect to the Internet using a smartphone

Connecting to the Internet with a modem

Connecting to the Internet using a computer modem (e.g. 56K modem) is still a method of getting access to the Internet, despite the growing use of broadband Internet connections. Although connecting to the Internet with a modem can be a cheaper solution, it is a much slower connection. If you plan on doing more than the occasional web surfing and reading and sending e-mail, you should consider broadband. For example, if you want to play games over the Internet, it is recommended that you use a broadband connection instead of a modem.

Using a modem to connect to the Internet requires your computer to have an internal or external modem. You must also have a home phone line (landline).

Note: Not all new computers have a modem. If your computer has a modem, it should have an RJ-11 connection (not to be confused with an RJ-45 connection).

Note: A computer modem should not be confused with a broadband or cable modem.

• How do I find what computer modem I have?

Once you have verified your computer is compatible with connecting to the Internet, you need to find an Internet Service Provider (ISP). In most areas, you can connect to the Internet using a local ISP. Alternatively, you may want to consider a large ISP, such as AOL or MSN, which provide Internet service in many areas all over the world.

Tip: Your ISP should provide you with instructions on how to connect your modem to their Internet service, as well as troubleshooting support for connectivity issues.

Check your local listings for companies that can provide you with an Internet connection. Also, talk with your friends or family to see who they like to use as an Internet Service Provider.

Connect to the Internet with broadband

Connecting to the Internet over broadband is a popular solution for connecting to the Internet today. Broadband is a much faster solution for connecting to the Internet when compared to a standard 56k modem. Having more bandwidth allows you to do more exciting things on the Internet, such as watch movies, listen to music, and playing games, as well as much faster load times for websites.

Unfortunately, broadband service is not available in all areas. Therefore, before getting this service, you must first determine if it is available in your area. Most broadband services are provided by your local phone companies or cable companies. Contact your local phone or cable service providers to see if they have broadband service available in your area.

If broadband service is available in your area, the company provides you with the hardware (e.g. cable modem) required to connect to their service. This hardware typically connects to a Network card (RJ-45 connector) or USB connection. If your provider does not offer a wireless router you can purchase and connect a wireless router (shown above) to connect any Wi-Fi to the Internet.

Note: Your ISP should provide you with instructions on connecting your computer to their service, as well as support if you have trouble connecting to or using their Internet service. Some broadband ISP companies will even send a technician to your home and set up Internet service to your computer for you.

Connect to the Internet using a smartphone

You may also be able to use your smartphone as an Internet connection for your computer. Doing so requires you to use tethering software, which allows the smartphone to act as a modem or wireless access point for the computer to use for Internet access.

Configuring the tethering software and the computer to use your smartphone for Internet service differs depending on which tethering software you use, as well as the type of phone you have. Check online for specific instructions for the tethering software and smartphone you are using.

However, not all smartphones are capable of tethering, and not all cell phone carriers allow smartphones on their network to be used for tethering. Cell phone carriers that allow tethering may not provide support for tethering. These carriers may also charge an additional fee to tether their smartphone.

Tip: Before tethering your smartphone, we recommend contacting the phone carrier to see if it supported and how much they charge.

How to find information on the Internet

Most information is found on the Internet by utilizing search engines. A search engine is a web service that uses web robots to query millions of pages on the Internet and creates an index of those web pages. Internet users can then use these services to find information on the Internet. When searching for information on the Internet, keep the below things in mind.

Surround searches in quotes

If you are searching for multiple common words, such as computer and help, it is a good idea to place quotes around the full search to get better results. For example, type "computer help" as your search criteria. This trick can also be used in parts of your search query. For example, Microsoft "computer help" would search for anything containing 'Microsoft' and that also has "computer help" together. Finally, you can also do multiple words surrounded in quotes. For example, "Microsoft Windows" and "computer help" would refine your results even more.

Be aware of stop words

Many search engines will strip out common words they refer to as stop words for each search that is performed. For example, instead of searching for why does my computer not boot, the search engine would search for computer and boot. To help prevent these stop words from being stripped out, surround the search with quotes.

Tip: If stop words are not important, don't enter them into your search.

Familiarize yourself with Booleans

Many search engines allow Booleans, which can help filter out bad results. Although common Booleans include "and", "or", and "not", most search engines have replaced these keywords with symbols. For example, to find computer help without results containing Linux, you would type computer help -linux. The "-linux" tells the search engine to exclude any results containing the word Linux.

Know what features are available

Many search engines allow for additional syntax to help limit your search strings. For example, Google enables users to search for links to a particular page by typing "link:" and other keywords at the beginning of the search query. For example, to see who is linked to Computer Ethic, you'd type: .

• See the Google tips section for further tips and features.

Try alternative search engines

Finally, if you continue to not find what you are looking for, try a different search engine. A listing of search engines can be found on our Internet search engine page.

How Does Encryption Work?

Hey, everyone! in last week’s episode, I talked about how to take your data with you on the go, and to keep it secure. As I mentioned then, one of the best ways to keep your data secure is to encrypt it.

I got a ton of emails asking how exactly encryption keeps data safe. So in this week’s episode, I’m going to dig into the world of encryption. Don’t worry, because I’m going to make it easy!.

The Basics

Let’s take a look at how at base encryption works. Basically, you are taking something that makes sense to people- such as a sentence - and manipulating it in such a way that only you know how to reverse what you did with it.

For example, say you had a secret message. You could substitute every letter for the next one in the alphabet. So every "A" would become a "B," and "B" would be a "C," and so on for every letter. The word ‘cat’ would then be ‘dbu.’ Everyone knows what a cat is, but it may not be obvious what "dbu" means - unless you know the trick to convert is back to "cat."

So at the base of it, that’s all encryption is. You’re taking something that is known, such as the word "cat," and transforming it into a ciphertext, which is just the fancy word for the encrypted form of the word or data.

Now, the substitution I made is a pretty easy one to break; it may take a person a little bit to figure out,s a lot of work to crack a password.

Without going to deep into the world of the math behind cryptography (trust me, there is a ton of high level abstract math that goes into the subject.), cryptography requires a lot of randomness to make guessing harder to do. Let's look at my earlier example of the word "cat."

If I wrote an entire letter using that type of encryption, it would most likely include a few 1 letter words, such as ‘I’ and ‘a." With a few guesses, a code buster could probably begin substituting ‘I’ and ‘a’ into the letter, and start to crack the formula pretty quickly. This is because the pattern used to scramble the letter isn’t very random.

Symmetric Encryption

Symmetric Cryptography is where the message you’re encrypting is secured with a passphrase. This passphrase is used by both the sender of the message and the receiver.

There are primarily two different ways cryptography is used with computers: symmetric encryption and asymmetric encryption. It may sound complicated, but don’t worry - it’s really not!

Symmetric Cryptography is where the message you’re encrypting is secured with a passphrase. This passphrase is used by both the sender of the message and the receiver.

It’s one of the easier methods, because there’s an agreed upon password. However, there is one flaw with symmetric cryptography - and that is when  you’re trying to send a message to someone who doesn't know what the password is!

An example of symmetric cryptography is where you might encrypt a file on your hard drive. You would use the same password to encrypt it as you would use to decrypt the file. There’s only one password or key.

But say you were going to send your friend an encrypted message, but they don't know what the password is. How would you send them the password so that they could decode your message?

If someone saw you send the password before the message, then they would know the secret to decoding the message - which would defeat the purpose of encrypting the message in the first place!

Asymmetric Encryption

Another way to think of a password is to think of them in terms of keys - like a key used to unlock a door. That’s where asymmetric encryption comes in. This is also the same thing as public/private key encryption, if you’ve ever heard that term before.

What happens in this type of encryption is that one key (or password) is used to encrypt data, but a different password is used to decrypt the password. This means you can have one key that everyone can know. This key is used to encrypt data, but when data is encrypted using this key, it can only be decrypted using a private key.

This would be the equivalent to sending someone a box with a lock: when they receive the box, they can put whatever they want in it, and then lock it. However, once the box is locked, only you can unlock it with your key. Now I just glossed over a few years of graduate level math, but that’s essentially how a large portion of the internet operates with this public private key system.

This has the name "public private key cryptography" because everyone can use your public key to lock or encrypt their data. But from there, only you can unlock that data with your private key. What’s great about this is that you can securely communicate with someone without them needing to know your password.

If you’ve ever used a secure website protected with SSL (Secure Socket Layer), then you’ve used this type of cryptography without ever knowing it. When you visit websites such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, your computer and the website use this method of exchanging keys back and forth without you ever realizing it, to keep you data safe from snooping!

Breaking the Code

Okay, well that may be all well and good, but how the heck is encryption broken then? Well the first way is if the website’s private key is found. This could be done by carelessness, a computer vulnerability, or just some other way a private password is found.

The second and much harder way to break encryption is to find weaknesses in how a computer encrypts the data. There are many different ciphers that a computer can choose from to encrypt data. Some of these ciphers are decades old, and there have been issues found in some of them.

If a website uses an old cipher with some known holes, it can be like finding an ‘I’ or an ‘a’ in a letter- it’s a point where the computer says "Hey, I think I know how this message was encrypted!" (Again, it's way more complicated than that, but you get the idea). Web browsers take care of this exchange of information and keys without you having to get involved, which is extremely handy.

Well, that’s it for today! Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at computerethic.com And if you have further questions about this podcast or want to make a suggestion for a future episode, post them on Facebook.com/QDTtechtalker.

Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!

Why We Need Encryption

Some horrible things have been happening in the world. From terrorist attacks, to mass shootings, the world seems like a much smaller and scarier place to live. How do we as a society prevent tragedies like this from occurring?  How should we balance privacy and security going forward? Let's talk about encryption, the role it is playing in the political arena, and what it means to you.

What Is Encryption?

Let’s first cover what encryption actually is. I’ve done a full episode on what exactly encryption is which you can find here. But for a quick refresher, encryption is a way of scrambling data, so that the only way to unscramble it is if you know the password. Let's say you are passing notes in class (kids, before texting this is how your parents communicated in the classroom). If the teacher were to catch you passing notes in class, she could easily read the note. However, if you would have encrypted it, she would just see random letters unless she knew the code.

Encryption is used to keep communication private. Typically encryption is used to protect all sorts of communication, but it’s used very heavily across the Internet for several reasons.

Why Is Encryption in the News?

Due to recent terrorist activities and mass shootings, governments and law enforcement are calling for a ban on “strong encryption.” This is because the criminals in some of these attacks used apps or software that encrypted data or communications. This encryption in some circumstances was too difficult for law enforcement to break, and thus aided the criminals.

This has led to many politicians and high ranking law enforcement officials to call for an end to encryption. It may seem like the most reasonable argument: if criminals are going to use encryption, then we should ban it altogether. However, in my opinion, this is a very slippery slope. Encryption protects the communications of whoever is using it, and there is no way to mandate that only law abiding citizens can use encryption.

The catch here is that by eliminating encryption for criminals, we eliminate encryption for everyone, which may leave us much more vulnerable than we were before.

Why Do We All Need It?

This naturally leads to the next question. Why does everyone need encryption? Well let's start with the extreme end of the spectrum. There are journalists, spies, and various other types of people that rely on encryption to communicate securely with the rest of the world. In circumstances where a country, political party, or group of criminals are intercepting communications encrypting a message could quite literally mean the difference between life and death.

Oftentimes the argument here is, “Well then let them have encryption if people are in those situations.” If only it were that easy! After all, if only really important communications were encrypted, they would then be much more easily identifiable. It would be the equivalent to mailing a letter in a read envelope. It would stick out like a sore thumb amongst every other white letter. This would draw attention, and even if the person intercepting the letter couldn’t read it. It would most certainly paint a target on the person sending and receiving it.

How to Securely Browse the Internet

Computers, phones, and tablets can connect you to billions of other devices all around the world, and even in space, and not all of them are friendly.

Surfing the web is kind of like walking through town: as long as you don’t go down any dark allies or to any sketchy corners, you’ll do just fine. Now let’s talk about just what a dark ally of the Internet looks like.

Your Web Browser

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to discuss safe web browsing from your computer. If you want to know more about safe phone browsing we can discuss that in a later episode, just be sure to let me know by commenting on the Computer Ethic Facebook Page!

No matter what operating system you’re using, my go-to web browser is Google Chrome. It is fast, updates automatically, and is one of the most secure web browsers. Plus, it’s completely free. I like Google chrome for many reasons, but its best feature is that it works on every operating system.

This is important because that means, as a Mac user, you can easily use Google Chrome on a Windows computer without having to learn a completely new web browser. What does this mean? Safari, which comes with Mac computers, and Internet Explorer, which comes with Windows computers, are unique to each operating system. But Chrome is universal.

Google is also extremely responsive to fixing bugs and vulnerabilities. In some cases, Chrome will prevent you going to websites it knows to have viruses or malware. This is definitely good thing: it’s kind of like having airbags, and anti lock brakes on your car.

HTTPS (Secured websites)

One other important step is to make sure that websites you are putting information into are encrypted with HTTPS. HTTPS often shows up as a lock on the URL of your web browser in green. For example if you visit Google.com, Facebook.com, or PayPal.com, you will see a green lock in the URL at the top of this page. This lock is then typically followed by an https://—this means that the website you are going to is encrypted.

What does this actually mean? Check out my episode on encryption. What’s happening is that any information you submit or receive from the website can’t be seen by anybody else. This keeps information like passwords, credit card numbers, and social security numbers secret.

If a website is not using this information, then do not submit any passwords or private information to them. If you do, it’s possible for someone else to see that information. You should never have to enable https, it should just work seamlessly in the background. Most large websites have encryption on them, so it's not something you have to worry about. However, even today there are websites that ask you to submit really private information insecurely. For example, my utility bill asks me to submit my credit card information without https. No way! That’s when I go old school and mail in a check!