Flashbyte: CAPTCHA: Are You Gort or Gnut?

PCMag reports on December 3, 2014 that Google has eliminate CAPTCHA, replacing it with a simple yes/no check box to the question "Are You a Robot?"  CAPTCHA is a "challenge response" test designed to detect spammers and other non-human computer automated (robotic) programs from clogging online ques.  An example would be a robotic program trying to purchase concert tickets for a ticket scalper.

This solution seems so simple it poses the question "why did it take so long" to figure it out.

So are you Gort or Gnut?  Yes ____  No _____

(Disclosure:  The author has stock in Google, but did not use a robotic program to purchase it (although the author's broker certainly may have used a computer in the transaction).)

Bitcoin and FBAR

Bitcoin may seem a bit exotic for most of us. Bitcoin is an electronic currency often associated with speculators and users interested in disguising their payment exchanged for illicit goods but it is used in legitimate commerce as faster, cheaper way to make payments across borders, skipping over currency conversions and exchange rates through commercial banks.  As such, Bitcoin represents something that we may see as increasingly useful for legitimate purposes, even in personal transactions.

The IRS seems to think Bitcoin warrants serious consideration, particularly in its efforts to track offshore funds held by U.S. taxpayers.  Now, Bloomberg BNA reports:

Taxpayers may soon have to report bitcoin and other virtual currency accounts held in foreign exchanges to the IRS as the agency's focus on foreign assets sharpens, experts tell Bloomberg BNA. They say there is a strong possibility that bitcoin accounts could fall within the scope of assets individual taxpayers must reveal to the IRS on the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR). Eventually, experts say, it is even possible that the foreign exchanges themselves may be considered foreign financial institutions that have to report the accounts to the IRS under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

FBAR and FATCA are major efforts to track accounts across borders.  Also associated with this effort is FATFA, the Financial Action Task Force on money laundering.  The United States actually lags behind much of the rest of the world in the effort to gain more transparency with respect to financial accounts and transactions.  This is partly due to the strongly imbedded American legal principle of client confidentiality.  International pressure gradually is forcing change here.

The IRS considerations are a part of this broader effort.  For more information, see:

IRS News Release 2014-68 06/02/2014.


Final Regulations Expand on FBAR Reporting for Trusts,
Charles Rubin and Jenna Rubin
Estate Planners Alert Newsletter (RIA)

FBAR and FATCA Compliance in the Age of Digital Currencies, Rajiv Prasad, J.D., LL.M., Los Angeles, Published 05/01/2014.

 

FlashByte: Getting Mircosoft 360 Into Your Life

I have written before about the changes at Microsoft since Satya Nadella took over as CEO (Changing of the Guard (Have Things Changed?).   Under Nadella, Microsoft has moved rather rapidly to reshape its relationship to mobile computing.  Earlier Microsoft announced that its most popular software (Word, Excel, etc.) now would be available as free applications for mobile platforms.  This placed Microsoft software products on many mobile devices and helped to stem migration away from Microsoft desktop software for businesses and individuals who wanted integration across desktop and mobile computing platforms.  At the same time, Microsoft has continued to improve the desktop products used by many businesses.

Now comes the announcement that mobile users will get free basic access to Microsoft 360. (Microsoft will continue to charge a subscription fee to access advanced features.) Microsoft 360 essentially is a hub through which desktop and mobile applications can share work product back and forth.  This announcement is a big step toward capturing more users on iPhones and iPads. It also is another strategic move to make Microsoft a meaningful player in computing beyond the desktop.

Microsoft products are still a fundamental part of computing in both the office and home.  While software from others plays some role, Microsoft has continues to dominate operating systems on desktops and continues refine its software suite.  Its current versions of Outlook, Word and Excel are very functional and will become much more important now that they can be used more effectively on all mobile computing devices.

Ultimately, this announcement is going to drive other companies toward greater and better integration of software.  For consumers faced the dilemma of different software in the office, at home and on mobile devices, this strengthens Microsoft's hand in trying provide one application platform that will cover the full spectrum.

(Disclosure:  The author owns stock in Microsoft, but way, way, way, way fewer shares than Steve Ballmer.)

. . . . I'll Be Watching You.

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you

     - Gordon Sumner  

In 1984, George Orwell depicted a repressive, totalitarian society under constant surveillance by the government.  We now live in an age in which there is much concern about government surveillance.  In the wake of the revelations of Edward Snowden, no doubt there are fundamental questions for any free society on where the boundaries lie between the right to privacy and the government's responsibility to protect its people.

In the Orwellian world, people expected Big Brother to be watching.  In fear of this, they repressed expression.  It was a world in which secrecy was operative down to the most common elements of daily life.  People lived in fear of reprisal if they freely expressed themselves.  In modern free societies today, the opposite is far more often the norm.  Although the government is watching and listening to us, we seemingly have little restrain in, and only moderately more concern over, what we reveal publicly about ourselves.

There are considerations which may give us pause about such openness of expression.

Some years ago, Great Britain launched a community surveillance system through a closed circuit cable network know as CCTV.  The idea was to place a greater police presence in neighborhoods by using technology to replace manpower.  Instead of more policeman walking the streets, the ever-present cameras would keep watch over public safety.  This prompted cries of "Big Brother" and debate over the scope of government power to watch over what, after all, were public activities.

In 2013, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that there now was one CCTV camera for every 11 people in the UK.  The Telegraph went on to quote Nick Pickles, the director of the privacy campaign Big Brother Watch, as saying: “This report is another stark reminder of how out of control our surveillance culture has become."

By comparison, the British newspaper The Guardian reported in 2011 that the ratio of surveillance network of closed circuit camera to people was one camera for every 32 people.

In the United States, we may not have reached such ratios yet (if anyone really knows), but we are under surveillance.  An example is a Reality Byte article (Big Brother Part I) from 2013 about cameras and voice recorders on the Baltimore MTA buses.  Baltimore City is also known for the "blue light cameras" that populate corners in some of its neighborhoods.  The closed circuit cameras serve the same purpose as those in the UK, keeping an eye on the streets.  Let's not forget the infamous "speed cameras" that keep watch over intersections for travelers exceeding the speed limit.

When the Chicago police let loose on demonstrators in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the protesters chanted "the whole world is watching" as short-hand means for saying that the "police riot" would not go unnoticed.   Indeed, Mayor Daly was less than happy that his brutal heavy-handed police state tactics were captured on national television.  Hubert Humphrey may have been even less pleased.

Are we becoming a society that wants to share everything? There is the seemingly endless social media barrage of Facebook check-ins, selfies and photographs, Twitter and Tumblr posts, Instagram photographs and Pinterest boards.  The Internet has become the scrapbook of our modern lives.

Harmless you might think, just social interaction on the web.  Are we really thinking at all about how much information about our lives these ubiquitous postings contain?  Locations, associations, random thoughts, opinions, political views.  Photographs of conduct that more reflective thought might suggest we not share, even with our "friends," as they may slip out into wider circulation.

Pause to consider where the legal and societal boundaries should be drawn when we so freely share our lives.  Start with a somewhat more well defined example from recent headline news.  You may recall that "hackers" recently spread across the Internet intimate photographs of actress Jennifer Lawrence.  Reports said that the hackers targeted as many as 101 celebrities. These were not images that Lawrence had shared publicly, but private images stored on a personal device or on the Internet, in the "cloud" (some thought "iCloud"), which the hackers had accessed and made public. Without permission.  Illegally.  That is, the hackers stole them.

Hackers, for lack of a better term, often may seem like, and may often be in many situations, Internet whistleblowers -- revealing information on wrong-doing, violations of rights, including our human rights and rights to privacy.  Fundamentally, they are appropriating information over which they do not have rights.  This may seems useful socially or politically, but it still breaking the rules.

The societal balance here is an uneasy one. Some may applaud Edward Snowden for the revelations that he made, deeming his motive as serving the greater good, but fundamentally, what he did broke the code of secrecy.  Do we feel that same about the hackers that have made off with individual financial information from the computer of Target or Home Depot?  Would we feel the same with regard to someone accused of espionage for a foreign government who stole important government information?  Consider Julius and Ethel Rosenberg or Kim Philby.

And what of corporate espionage?  Do we think that it is noble to undermine legitimate research and corporate business practices by letting trade secrets be stolen or sold without permission?  It may be a stretch far beyond legal fiction to say that corporations are people, but established laws of copyright, patent and trademark protection are designed to preserve the rights of those who develop intellectual property.

So, it is right to judge these "piracies" based on motive?  White hats and black hats?

Let's return to those who hacked and distributed pictures of Jennifer Lawrence.  These pictures were most likely held in storage on a cellphone or in the "cloud".  Apple has flatly stated that its iCloud storage was not hacked.  Clearly, they were not "public," however, and Lawrence had a reasonable expectation that they would remain stored and protected -- in a word "private."

The debate, if there is one here, has nothing to do with why these photographs were taken.  It has everything to do with the expectation of privacy and the violation of that right.  To use a more conventional example, if you put your money in a bank, you have reasonable expectation that it will stay there until you take it out.  We have laws that regulate banks and insure deposits.  If someone robs the bank (or hacks your account) they are stealing your money.

Because we recently have come to look at financial institutions with great skepticism, perhaps there is a better analogy.  Your home is filled tangible items like pictures.  If someone breaks into your home, invades your privacy, and steals your pictures, they have stolen something from you.  The value of the pictures does not matter.  Whether the thief ever profited from the theft does not matter.  Someone has taken something from you.

So too, hackers have stolen what belonged to Jennifer Lawrence, not to them.

How do we draw the lines in this debate, in an open society in which we seem most often to be giving away so much information for free?  In the September 22, 2014 issue of The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten wrote an insightful article entitled "We Are The Camera," a profile of the Go-Pro phenomena.  

A Go-Pro is a small portable camera used most frequently by athletes and sportspersons to capture their own physical endeavors. Video from these cameras has become ubiquitous in the sporting world and extremely popular on Internet video sharing sites and social media like Facebook.  Go-Pro footage also has made its way into documentary films.

Paumgarten's article is partly a business saga of Go-Pro's rise from a start-up with humble beginnings, its development of the iPhone of first-person video cameras, and its initial public offering on Wall Street.  Wrapped around this business story, however, is another more fascinating examination of extreme self-documentation and self-promotion.

Because of their first-person perspective, Go-Pro cameras are purchased and used to record the user's personal experiences:  a ski or snowboard run, a mountain bike descent, a kayak trip, undersea experiences, skydiving, etc.  Although these cameras can document amateur attempts, the first experiences of novices, etc., the footage most eagerly being sought and shared may be best described as "extreme sport."

The Go-Pro phenomena illustrates several interesting points.  Some footage no doubt ends up only on home computers and private family viewings.  What is driving Go-Pro's business success, however, is not the home video library, but the desire of many users to share their exploits on social networks and beyond.  What emerges is content, which Go-Pro is mining as part of its business model.  As of September 30, 2014, Go-Pro seems to be doing rather well.

As Paumgarten's article pointedly illustrates, athletes who once pursued the personal achievement of their sport now are becoming filmmakers -- on a quest to capture themselves in action with the best, most exciting footage.  We, the armchair spectators are the audience.  It may begin by watching a snowboarding run by a relative or boyfriend, but the Internet is filling up with ever more adventurous footage.

Go-Pro and others are using this Internet video traffic to make money.  Yes, Go-Pro pays some people to be "ambassadors," but largely to promote others to buy cameras and share experiences.  As with much of the social sharing on the Internet, the material being shared (pictures, videos, music, etc.) is largely produced for little or no compensation and the sharing sites are making money off of advertising or subscription fees.  This exhibitionism (in some cases extreme) is being mined to make money.

This is not necessarily new.  This summer I read Bill Bryson's One Summer, a snapshot of the summer of 1927.  A recurring sub-theme is how the events of that summer (Lindbergh's triumphant reception after flying from America to Paris, Babe Ruth setting his home run record, notorious murder trials, flag pole sitting, gangsters, even the prolonged vacation of the seemingly uncharismatic President Coolidge) were constant sources of content for the reigning media (newspapers from The New York Times to the tabloids of the day) and the infant radio and talking picture industries.  We love to devour glimpses of worlds beyond our own.  Since the earliest cave paintings and hieroglyphs we have recorded large and small pieces of our activities.  Mass media simply carries this to broader audiences.

So where does this leave us?  The photographs on our cellphones should have a reasonable expectation of privacy.  (The current SCOTUS may think otherwise, of course.) What we openly share with the world (or a part of it) likely is a different story.

Returning to Nick Paumgarten's article in The New Yorker, he concludes with an instructive story of three "jumpers" -- the extreme sport of jumping off tall structures, in this story, the new World Trade Center One in New York City.  (For some context here, in 1974 French high-wire artist Philippe Petit strung a cable at 1,350 feet above the ground between the original Twin Towers of the pre-9/11 World Trade Center and walked across it a for 45 minutes.  In so doing, he also walked into history (and fiction)).

In Paumgarten's article, in September of 2013, after by-passing security to reach the top of the new World Trade Center One, with Go-Pros mounted and rolling, two jumper leaped from the tower and parachuted to the ground (with a third as a lookout).  A bystander on the ground saw them and called 910.  In a somewhat staggering fact, Paumgarten reveals that the police reviewed video from "more than four thousand working security cameras and license-plate scanners below Canal Street" in NYC and eventually identified the get-away car.  The jumpers turned themselves in.  Only then did they put their video on the Internet.  Also somewhat astounding is that Go-Pro was not interested in the footage.

Perhaps here we have the perfect storm.  Submitted for your consideration: Three individuals clearly intent on doing something illegal, who filmed themselves doing so, although not intending to publicize their acts, only memorialize them.  A police investigation using publicly-placed surveillance camera footage to track down the suspects.  Likely there is little argument that the Go-Pro video, once posted on the Internet, has any expectation of privacy.  In between the extremes, however, there should be much to consider -- by all who "share" their experiences, either intentionally or unwittingly.  You never know who ultimately may be watching you.

Evil is Alive and Well

Here are a couple of quick items on cyber-security:

CryptoLocker:  First, here is a link to blog post about CryptoLocker, a malicious spam attack:  Appriver blog post.  The attack is fairly basic.  You get an email that wants you to click on delivered fax or file.  Once you do, the program spreads through your system and encrypts all of your files, locking you out.  To get them unlocked, you have to pay the bad guys, who like are halfway around the world and care very little about restoring your files once they have your money.

This is a big threat to businesses and professional offices, where the files are essential to carrying on business.

While spam filtering software tries to keep ahead of this kind of spam, the perpetrators generally can reconfigure quickly to keep ahead of the filters.  Thus, the best advice is common sense:  Do not open email or attachments that look suspicious, come from unknown sources, or are unexpected.  If you think it might be real, do not open it or respond to the sender; instead, check it out first by independent means: call the sender (particularly if the sender appears to be your bank or credit card company, etc.) or research the sender online and check any spam alert service you are using for warnings.  When in doubt, pass.

Online Privacy:  In the wake of Edward Snowden's disclosures about the National Security Agency, everyone should be worried about online privacy. There is a lot of discussion about the NSA's activities, their purpose and its use information gathered and the legality these efforts by the government to balance security concerns with privacy rights.

What is less well understood is just how easy it is to get information on someone from online sources.  Here an excellent report on National Public Radio,

Project Eavesdrop: An Experiment At Monitoring My Home Office

 
wherein the reporter, John Henn, with assistance Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica and Dave Porcello of Pwnie Express, explored just how much information can be gathered on someone from there travels on the web.  The results are startling, particular when you look at the representations of many major online services as to encryption of your identity.  Go listen to the full reports and consider carefully what you do online.

Mini-Byte: Cyber-Security: Spy vs. Spy.

We live in interesting times -- a dangerous age with respect to cyber-security.  Peter Lewis reminds us that some things that we think of as new revelations really trace back to an earlier era.  The song remains the same . . . China's PLA Unit 6139 and the NSA: Breaking Into the Rich Neighbor’s House.

Mircosoft: Changing of the Guard (Have Things Changed?)

"Your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards." Bob Dylan

It seems to be the time to talk about Microsoft and whether a changing of the guard really means things have changed.  The key road signs for this question that have been widely reported already.

First, after having known only two masters in its existence, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, earlier this year Microsoft named its third CEO, Satya Nadella.  From his official corporate curriculum vitae, Mr. Nadella certainly looks like a departure from his predecessor, Steve Ballmer.

Second, Microsoft officially has parted company with what one commentator has called "the last great operating system," the now aged "XP."  On April 8, 2014, Microsoft officially stopped supporting XP.  This milestone departure prompted some foreign governments to ramp up their own support operations for the beloved OS.  Security analysis are left pondering the fate of practically all of the ATMs in the US, which operate on XP.  XP also is the operating system for many commercial transaction systems used by large retailers; recently, Target had a significant loss of consumer credit card data from its aging XP based transactional network.

We certainly have reason to debate what information the NSA and other governmental agencies have collection on us, but we should be equally concerned with whether the United States can keep its computer systems, governmental and private, safe from increasingly prevalent hackers.

Third, while leaving behind a significant piece of Microsoft's past, Satya Nadella has embarked on a new direction for Microsoft software.  Microsoft is still fundamentally a software company.  It has built commercial success on its widely used Windows operating systems for consumers and businesses and its suite of application software, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and it accompanying web browser Explorer and Bing search engine.  By contrast, Microsoft's most tenacious rival, Apple primarily manufactures hardware (Macs, iPads, iPods, etc.) that runs native Apple software.

From time to time, Microsoft has dabbled with the idea of moving into the hardware side of the technology world.  The results have been fitful.  In earlier columns, I have discussed that fact that Microsoft was an earlier pioneer in the field of software for tablet computing, but it drifted out of that picture and let Apple and Google realize the success of both tablet hardware and tablet software.  Microsoft tried to enter the market for portable music players that Apple created with the iPod.  Remember the Zune?  Again, Microsoft failed to stay the course.

Through the success of its hardware devices, Apple has established a significant presence for its software. Apple software like iTunes and its Safari browser now run on other devices.  iTunes has become ubiquitous on computers otherwise using Microsoft software.

Until Nadella's ascendancy, Microsoft has steadfastly resisted the idea of letting its prized office software package (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) reside on anything other than a Microsoft operating system.  Unfortunately, Microsoft is not dominant in the hardware world of portable devices made by others.

Mobile devices are the future, not only for personal computing, but for business and professional work.  Although Microsoft still has a strong presence in the business and professional world of desktop computing, the business and office workers increasingly want to take their computing outside the office and the desktop, out on the road and at home.  Once upon a time, that happened through laptop computing, with native Microsoft software.  Now, increasingly, business and consumers are  migrating to Apple and Android devices and using work-around software to access their Microsoft Word and Excel files.  I do this on my iPad with an application called QuickOffice.

Trying to contain this migration, Microsoft launched its own very promising tablet computer, the Surface, packaged with Microsoft software (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and tried to make the Surface its flagship hardware product to win back customers.  This was the right move and one which I hope Microsoft does not abandon (as it abandoned tablet computing once before in its infancy), because the competition from the Surface will cause all mobile devices to improve.  Microsoft has a fundamental advantage by putting its integrated Office software package on a mobile device, because it will retain many users whose in-office or in-home computing is done on Microsoft Office software.

Nadella's predecessor, Steve Ballmer resisted a wider distribution of Microsoft software beyond Microsoft operating systems.  Somewhere in the transition, strategists at Microsoft seemed finally to have realized that there is a much bigger market out there for software than the pure office and business core purchasers.  Within days of becoming CEO, Nadella first significant announcement was that Microsoft's Office software suite would be available on other platforms.

As I wrote this (in mid-April, 2014), I went to the iTunes App store on my iPad and downloading, for free, Microsoft Word for iPad.  It enables you to read Word documents in their native format.  Microsoft wants you to buy a full version of Word, however, if you want to edit those documents and perform other functions of Word.  It will be interesting to see how sales of the Word (and Excel and other Microsoft software) application go.  If you are an office user of Microsoft software, you may know that Microsoft has made great strides in integrating its Office software suite.  Microsoft's email and calendar program, Outlook, in particularly is now a center piece for other applications in the Microsoft suite.

 As Microsoft moves these programs onto more mobile platforms, a particularly interesting synergy to watch will be whether the Office suite becomes even more integrated.  Last year, with a new version of Outlook and the rest of the Office suite on my desktop, I experimented with a lesser known part of the Office suite, OneNote.  This is a program that allows you to take notes or otherwise save information in files, organized like a file cabinet in your office.  It is pretty easy to use and has advantages in its integration with other Office programs like Word.  In addition, OneNote was already available free on mobile devices like my iPad.

I was comparing OneNote to a non-Microsoft application that I was already using on my iPad, Evernote.  I like Evernote because it allows you to do a wide variety of things in the office or on the road:  take notes at meetings and conferences, receive email as a note (whether to save the text of the email for future reference or to attach documents that you wanted to send to your mobile device), and handle both work and personal chores.  As a web-based program, the app on my iPad and my desktop at work could access the same files, allowing for editing and revision back and forth, inside or outside the office.

I found OneNote very competitive with Evernote in many ways, but lacking a true advantage that would lead me to replace Evernote.  Now, with the availability of other Microsoft applications on mobile devices, Microsoft does have a potential advantage that it can exploit:  if it can develop true integration among it desktop software applications and their mobile counterparts, that synergy may bring together many users who want such integration.  Instead of looking for Microsoft work-around applications like QuickOffice on mobile devices, as users, whether for professional purposes, we can have a more seamless option.

Nadella's initiative in make in making the Microsoft Office suite available on all mobile platforms is groundbreaking and hopefully a signal the Microsoft intends to develop, improve, and market its software for mobile consumers.  This too will be good for all consumers, because it will bring more competition to the mobile device market.  Another key indication that Microsoft is going to take mobile devices more seriously can be seen in its acquisition of mobile phone maker Nokia.  This seems to foreshadow an announcement that Microsoft software soon will have a native cellular device to compete with the iPhone and Android cellphones.

Only time will tell, but these may be a clear signals that things have changed at Microsoft.

Postscript:  As I finish this post and work on another about the Heartbleed vulnerability, Microsoft announced a major vulnerability in its Explorer browser that could result in hackers gaining access to your computer, a so-called zero-day bug.  The wide spread use of Explorer makes this a major issue.  Microsoft even goes so far as to suggest that Explorer users may want to use another browser until a patch for Explorer closes this vulnerability.

This news also is significant to anyone still using the XP operating system, as Microsoft's discontinuation of support for its XP operating system means that there will be not a fix for this bug for those who continue to use XP.

Googling Google - MSBA Tech Talk

As some readers know, Reality Bytes originates from blog posts online at http://technobytesmd.blogspot.com.

It takes a while for these posts to reach print readers in the Maryland State Bar Association ("MSBA") Section of Estate and Trust Law Newsletter, which can be found online at the MSBA website at this link: http://www.msba.org/sec_comm/sections/estate/default.asp, under the section labeled "Media."  You can also find a link the Reality Bytes blog there if you want to sign up.

If you have gotten this far, what I really wanted to tell you is that the MSBA also has a wonderful technology resource called Tech Talk, which appears periodically in the MSBA's electronic newsletter Bar Brief, found at this URL:  http://www.msba.org/departments/commpubl/barbrief/.  Look for the link to Tech Talk at the bottom of each issue of Bar Brief.

As I write this post, the current edition of Tech Talk (http://www.msba.org/publications/barbrief/14march_tech.asp) (March, 2014) features a very informative and practical guide to certain more obscure features of Google.  For example:

Google Public Data Explorer - The Google Public Data Explorer allows users to upload their own data sets for visualization and exploration. It makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.

 and

 Undo a Sent Message – (One of the Experiments) You can set Gmail to wait 10 seconds before sending a message in case you want to stop it. Go to Settings, Labs and scroll down to Undo Send and click on Enable.

There are other tips on using Google. Google is an important part of our lives, perhaps in more ways that we realize.  Whether we are using it or not, we likely have a digital presence and others use Google to find out things about us.  So, go to Tech Talk and see other Google Tips for yourself.  Then, go Google yourself and see what you find!

If you are an MSBA member and like Tech Talk, you should be getting a periodic email each month from the MSBA alerting you to new editions of Tech Talk (unless you opt out of receiving the email).  If you would rather check out new Tech Talk posts on your own, it comes out every fourth Tuesday of the month.  Go to the links above for the Bar Brief and check it out.

And, if you are tired of trying to write down all these long URLs, consider reading this column as a blog online (http://technobytesmd.blogspot.com), where you can find hyperlinks. 
 .

Nano-Byte: Words

Even in cyberspace, words are still important and cyberspace is contributing to our language every day.  So check out an interesting post from Peter Lewis, who covers this point and more much better than I could:  The 2013 Word of the Year.

Notice how language is being expanded by technology.  Please be warned of sensitive material when you get to "twerkette", a word my spellchecker does not recognize yet.