Google street view is in Hungary!

 Google Street View first launched in 2007 in Los Angeles now Hungary has been added to the long list of counties in Europe which are featured on street view. Google Maps can now take you 'virtually' through the streets of Budapest. But at this point I need to stop and share my thought about Budapest.

Budapest is the most beautiful city in Europe! It isn’t just the capital of Hungary which has been located in the middle of the country but more than that it is also heart of Europe as well.

 

Danube, one of the largest rivers in Europe, flows between the two parts of the city. The east side called Pest, is a rapidly growing modern city while Buda the west side is on the highlands. Buda’s is the old castle’s districts which became a UNESCO World Heritage Committee site.

Yes, we are surrounded by treasures!

Tourists think about Budapest based on our famous tourist spot such as the Gellért Hill with our Statue of Liberty and the Citadel, and the Castle of Buda.

 

 

 

What about Pest side? You can visit the House of Parliament, the famous Andrássy Avenue and Heroes Square or St. Stephen's Basilica and Vajdahunyad Castle and many great parks too.

 

What do we as Hungarians think about Budapest? 

For us we think that the Millennium underground is still part of Budapest's transport system, but did you know that it was the first underground in the continent of Europe?

Do you know the legend of the stone Lions who guard the chain bridge on either side of Buda, and Pest? The historical fact is that in 1842 Pest and Buda was connected together but, a fun fact is that what most Hungarians want to know is whether the Lions have got tongues*? And What about the shoes on the Danube’s embankment?

 

Hungary has lots of great history, and lot’s of great things you can find here, from the latest supermarket to a thousands of years Roman ruins. So if you have no plan for your summer vacation, come to Budapest.

Visit the most amazing city ever!

 

 

*I think they do have tongues :), but this can stay a Hungarian disagreement forever!

Locked up in the cloud!

 

How safe is the cloud? I think I can say yes (most of the time) but security in the cloud is not that simple. In the old days if you’ve locked something up in a safe place there was only one way in and out. Placing your files in the cloud gives you two points of protection, one on the server side and one on the user side.

 

 

 

See most cloud storage sites use the same level of security that most banks use and it’s a high quality protection from most hacker.

http://www.web2andmore.net/2013/04/19/considerations-when-choosing-a-cloud-storage-provider/

 

But what about the user side?…What can I do for my own protection? Well, as long as my password habits concern, I think a lot! Let’s see how can I be a smart user!

 First off you have to choose a good password. The more complicate password you use the safer data you’ll get. For that you need to combine password which contains letters, symbols and numbers in unusual way.  And what’s if you create a real good password? Change it frequently!

Free password generator:

 

http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/passwords-create.aspx

 

 

Secondly, don’t share your password! Even if you trust to someone never tell them your password. Another important thing is use different password for different sites. Make sure you don’t use the same password for your e-mail account as you use at banking site.

 I know it’s annoying to create and change password for each site we use and we easily get confused how we will remember all of them?

 

 

 

Well LastPass can solve this problem easily. It’s a smart solution for those who only want to memorize one password and let LastPass remember the rest of them for you…. And it’s free to start using it!.

Finally, be careful when you logged into a site from a different devices. Make sure you log out and don’t save your passport in public computers.

Considering these easy steps you can create a real secure life on your cloud.

Security in Hungary

Today I noticed that Microsoft released a report on security issues. What’s interesting about this report is that they have information about what’s happening in Hungary. I would never look at a report like this before, but since they actually looked at Hungary I thought it would be interesting to look at what the report says about us.

 The report can be downloaded at the Microsoft site here www.microsoft.com/sir and the Hungarian report.

 Based on the report the overall good news, is that virus and malware in Hungary is lower than the rest of the world. The report talks about computers infected in Hungary at 4700 computers for every 1000 computers. Worldwide the number is 6000 computers infected. I guess that’s good news for us Hungarians!.

 Looks like the number one malware in Hungary is something called Keygen.

If you’re interested in the report, you should check it out.

 

Personal Cloud

 

Personal or Private Cloud?

Good question!  As far as my personal devices of organization concerns... it is personal cloud.

Just as many of you -  these days - I use all my new devices as well, but tell you the truth I find difficult to synchronize them or it takes time think it over where should I look for what I need. Is it on my laptop, or my desktop, or my tablet? What about my latest music downloads? And I haven’t mentioned my photos yet. Until now my best option was to email my stuff to myself and use my USB driver to bring data from one to the other.  Therefore I’d rather look for some secure and reliable option …with lots of flexibility of course.

The good news is that many companies are already offering web-based data center services. Which means you keep your files in one place also share your files with your friends no matter its location.

This kind of services has been around for a while, but the idea about collecting it together in one user experience is relatively new, this new idea is Personal Cloud. The challenge is to make sure that your Personal Cloud integrates to all the services you care about such as Microsoft App, Mac icloud, or Android devices and apps.

Market leaders such as Amazon Cloud Drive or Microsoft Sky Driver are great cloud services, but they are based their own cloud services, and you still need to use a browser most of the time to use these services. Google Drive is a newer provider that also provides storage, and cloud based apps. Apple iCloud meanwhile is only a media storage service and the final one to mention would be DropBox which seems to be a great solution and can providers great offline access to files.

The only piece missing is a way to get to all these services, easily.

Now there are guides that help you become better at setting up your own personal cloud such as Lifehack How to set up your own private cloud storage service in five minutes with owncloud. Basic idea is use owncloud.org or a something new like the start up zeropc.com to collect all the cloud services into one cloud capability. This is a great way to start to take advantage of the ideas of a personal cloud. Clever.

 

zeropc.com	owncloud.org

Cloud computing used by all devices

I’ve spent too much time on hi-tech devices and I found myself influenced that so many things out there what I willing know. I got excited about this and this made me think that I should dig into deep in real technologies of the future. I’m hunger for new challenges and I’m interested in new things even if it still tough for me…so I've decided to spread my wings and fly..

 

 

Cloud…So it is must be in the air right? Seems to me that my first impression about cloud computing is access to…space..(cloud storage) plenty of space which brings plenty of possibilities which would be great since space is limited here physically. Think about data center, storage, power, networking, service and technical team who these service setting up a data center is expensive. Looking at the providers that provide space we see that capacity, and speed becomes important to making a decision. It’s interesting that the fastest provider, SugarSync is hardly known around the Hungarian market.

 

 

So, what is cloud?  The answer is simple.  Networks both private and public connected to each other that provide a service… is essentially cloud much like what we call services on the internet today. The terms used for cloud computing are important to know such as SaaS is software as a service, Sugarsync provides a SaaS service. Then Platform which is a service..they give you application programing interfaces (API’s) which let you build software on their software. For instance Farmville this software was built as a SaaS (Software as a Service) it is built on the Facebook environment.

So let’s find out more…

What’s the power on using it? Is it secure? How much it cost? Is it reliable? How many application it has??? Who can use it? How would it make you change of think of your business? Or your home?