All users. Period.

What? How?!?

• Your email address
• Your user ID
• Your birth date
• Your name & address
• Your bank accounts (credit/debit cards) used to make purchases

If you were, here are some tips I’ve seen online to protect yourself, but you must act fast.

1. Find out which of your credit/debit cards you use in the PSN network and cancel them right away.

Ask the bank to send you a card with a new number, not just a replacement card.

The bank can provide you with a temporary card so you shouldn’t fear not having a card to use.

2. Alert your bank

During that same call just ask them to be on alert for potential phony charges in your accounts.

3. Put a fraud alert on your credit

Call one of the 3 agencies and ask them to put a fraud alert on your behalf. Calling one should alert the others, but it might not hurt to check.

This will make it harder for anyone (including yourself) to get credit.

4. Email accounts & Your PSN User ID

Change the password of the email address you have on file for your PSN profile, and if you happen to use that same user ID in other services (i.e. Facebook, Twitter), change them right away.

This blog was born thanks to the now defunct site BrightFuse, which also brought to life the IT Pros group which at its peak had more than 2,000 users.

The blog was once powered by that user base and we also had many collaborators writing weekly.

After the closure of the group and the subsequent shut down of BrightFuse, it is also time to move on and do this final post.

Thank you very much for your loyalty.

Alejandro Ramirez (@alejandrormz)
Information Technology Pros

PS - Please follow me into a new journey at http://alejandro.rmzphotography.com.

Long gone are the days of Pricewatch where you had to go and check for the best deals yourself. Nowadays you can subscribe to very specif alerts and even browse and buy the deals from your smart phone.

Here’s my pick of the best new emerging sites:

1. Deals Plus (www.dealspl.us). My favorite of all, because of its ability to subscribe to specific alerts, post your own deals, and even make $ for being an active deals poster and making a good rep. It also has Coupons.
2. Cow Boom (www.cowboom.com). Brought to life by no other than Best Buy itself (yeah), and features new/used/refurbished deals, as well as auctions. By far, the prices I’ve seen her in their daily deals are among the cheapest around.
3. Slick Deals (www.slickdeal.net). Talk about mega-deals! Navigation is not as slick as the deals, but their prices are fantastic.

I am sure you have many more to share, so I invite you to do so in the comments section of this post.

Geek on!

That’s no way to treat your customers Toyota, and I am offended that it was on air for so long before having to, well, recall their own stuff once again.

But hey, on the flip side, for Black Friday it is rumored that Toyota will have a 2×1 special. Buy 1 Toyota, get a 2nd one free (just in case one gets recalled), nah, just kidding

See a fellow blogger’s take on the issue:

The first time I saw the commercial I laughed a little.  Well, I did not laugh out loud, but I did chuckle on the inside.  At first glance, the commercial appeared cute.  Frankly, it would be difficult for a commercial featuring an elementary school-aged boy with shaggy blond hair not to be cute.  Where Toyota messed up was in airing the commercial of their Highlander too many times in one ballgame.  Before Monday Night Football was over, I had s … Read More

via Just Words

A laptop priced at 1,000 can cost you almost another grand if you want a 250GB SSD drive in it.

But Seagate has created a very clever invention: a hybrid drive that has Flash Memory on a SATA drive, and thus, offering the advantages of both worlds.

Tom’s Hardware gave the first model an award for excellent performance. Here are some highlights, for a laptop 2.5″ Seagate Momentus SATA/SSD 500GB hybrid drive:

PROS

• Price: $129.99 (CompUSA), $149.99 (at your local Best Buy); the Desktop version is only $69.99 (Dell) 
• Improvement over SATA 7200-rpm: 40-% faster
• Adaptive Memory: your frequently used programs will run faster after the 3rd time of using them.
• Warranty: 5 years

CONS

• Power Consumption: 0.3-0.9W more than conventional SATA for laptops which means a decrease in battery life.
• Performance: overall Tom’s Hardware called it “impressive” but not “revolutionary”.

Bottom Line

Excellent choice for Workstation laptops, so you should probably wait and follow the news to see if Seagate releases Firmware updates or releases a revision of their entry models.

The new OS will be available in the summer of 2011, so this probably just ruined your Black Friday shopping because Jobs pretty much warned you that the Mac you buy today will be obsolete in less than 9 months.

What’s new? An App Store, a Launchpad (a-la iPad), running apps full-screen, Mission Control (think Exposé on steroids), and nothing else was leaked.

The premise is to bring the “magic” of iOS to the Computer hardware.

For more: www.apple.com/macosx/lion

What  does this mean for rightful owners could mean good news, if you have an untouched device or in other words a device that has not been hijacked or jailbroken.

If, on the other hand your device has been jailbroken could mean you may not be able to use after Apple disables the device. Using some sort of “listening” or interactive application Apple could determine if an unauthorized user has gotten a hold of a device and disable it remotely alerting the owner and even authorities of the location of such device.

This method however will disable purchased devices that had been tampered to allow applications other than those sold by Apple. Learn more HERE

Google has launched a new initiative within their Google Code site to offer free tutorials in the following topics:

• Web Programming
• Databases
• Programming Languages
• Linux

The site also allows users to submit their own courses for inclusion in the site, a discussion forum, and curriculum search to find published materials around the world.

Here’s the link: http://code.google.com/edu/

Toyota that was the best example of quality worldwide just had a major recall of the Prius because of issues with their accelerators; their response: “we did not find this issue in any of our tests”

Well, you guys did not design your tests very well, I would start by firing your testing department and restaffing it with more skilled engineers.

As a Mac fan it hurts to see Apple deliver poor quality. If you have been paying attention, they have had issues with iMacs monitors, iPod scratches and screen issues, battery recalls, iPhone AC adapter recalls, etc.

Honestly if you buy an Apple product nowadays you would be stupid if you don’t buy the Apple Care extended warranty, because it’s very likely that you will have to take your product (more than once) to the Genius Bar for repairs or replacement.

Steve Jobs: There is no wrongdoing in admitting you screwed up the antenna. Just make it good for all of  us, loyal customers.