Nate Covington

General Strategy: Multiple "Wallets"

Your day-to-day wallet will probably be tied to a centralized bitcoin exchange, like a Coinbase account. With Coinbase, you can create multiple wallet addresses under a single account (suppose you have 3 or 4 businesses, each could have their own Wallet Address that gets used for receiving payments). I think of Coinbase as your starting point: you'll most likely be using Coinbase to convert your $USD-based checking account funds into Bitcoin (or whichever cryptocurrency you choose).

Create your free Coinbase account now!
(affiliate link)

Your second wallet should be created manually, not connected with Coinbase. 

Continue reading this article on my blog...

A client recently received this letter with CORRECT domain expiration date and no clear "SOLICITATION" warning. 

In the text I circled the only actual disclaimer stating "This notice is not a bill, it is rather an easy means of payment should you decide to switch your domain name registration to Domain Registry.  

The real scam here is they were trying to charge $50/year for domain registration!  This should be lower, more like $10-20/year depending on whether you have a dot-com or dot-org or something else.  

For anyone wondering if their Twitter feeds are doctored...

Public Service Announcement:
Beware of the latest Craigslist scam, where they attempt to gain access to your Google account by tricking you into sending them the two-factor authentication codes!

While the GDPR laws are written for EU countries, many of my enterprise-level clients have been asking me to add scripts and plugins related to addressing these basic rights:

1. The right to access.
2. The right to be forgotten.
3. The right to data portability.
4. The right to be informed.
5. The right to have information corrected.
6. The right to restrict processing.
7. The right to object.
8. The right to be notified.

(original article)

Ecommerce site’s “blind trust” makes the service a perfect place to dump data.

Hackers are abusing Google Analytics so that they can more covertly siphon stolen credit card data out of infected ecommerce sites, researchers reported on Monday.

Payment card skimming used to refer solely to the practice of infecting point-of-sale machines in brick-and-mortar stores. The malware would extract credit card numbers and other data. Attackers would then use or sell the stolen information so it could be used in payment card fraud.

ZOOM, THE video conferencing service whose use has spiked amid the Covid-19 pandemic, claims to implement end-to-end encryption, widely understood as the most private form of internet communication, protecting conversations from all outside parties. In fact, Zoom is using its own definition of the term, one that lets Zoom itself access unencrypted video and audio from meetings.

With millions of people around the world working from home in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, business is booming for Zoom, bringing more attention on the company and its privacy practices, including a policy, later updated, that seemed to give the company permission to mine messages and files shared during meetings for the purpose of ad targeting.

We are urging all clients to enable "2FA" (2 factor authentication) for any web-related dashboards:

• Domain registration (e.g. GoDaddy supports it, Network Solutions not yet)
• Hosting control panel (e.g. InMotion, SiteGround)
• CMS control panel (e.g. Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal)
• Newsletter / Subscriber (e.g. Mailchimp supports it, Constant Contact not yet)
• Google (Analytics, Adwords, Adsense, Webmaster Tools, etc.)

A few articles that I want to share:

• SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant - Plugin for Google Docs - checks your content for SEO friendliness on the go
• GDPR, Data Protection, and You: It's not just for the EU and California!  How to create a "compliance plan" when it comes to storing sensitive information, obtaining consent, and managing that data.  
• It's Not About SSL Certificates: Clarifies a common misconception that adding an SSL certificate makes your site more secure.  Incorrect!  It makes the traffic to and from your site more secure, but doesn't help with software / server / plugin vulnerabilities.  
• Multi-Column Editing in Joomla: For any clients who want to be able to edit multi-column content using a clean, responsive, browser-based content editor

Apple and Google are both rolling out significant updates to their respective "Map" apps.  Here is a quick recap: