Internet

Mary has Earthlink and for the last three days, they've been down in L.A. Leo says that's terrible! She wants to know if they've been bit by heartbleed. Leo says it's probably more serious than that. Heartbleed can be fixed with a simple server upgrade, but this sounds like a cascading failure where fixing one thing impacts more things. Leo thinks it's time to get a new ISP. DSLExtreme is good. Leo advises asking them to move Mary and request an estimate of how long it will take, because it could take several days or even weeks to make that switch.

Michael has noticed that he gets a warning that some websites are suspect and it won't let him in unless he agrees to take the risk. Leo says that is a function of Google and Microsoft which searches websites and flags them as being at risk for malware. Leo says it's a good service, and helps prevent malware from poorly designed websites from infecting users, especially on the Windows platform. Forums are frequently bit because they are written in open source and rarely updated. They should fix it, because if Michael is having issues, then everyone is.

Bobby wants to know what Anti Virus he should use. Leo says that AVS software isn't as important as behavior. If he's very careful with his online behavior, then having an antivirus is a good last line of defense. But if he isn't being safe online with his behavior, AVS really won't save him from himself.

Here's what Bobby should do:

Leo says that the US hasn't "controlled" the internet for awhile. It's free, public, and open. What it did do is pull out of ICANN, the naming organization that provides all domain names and URLs. Leo doesn't think that's a big deal, though.

Steve wants to download flash based videos from the Internet and he's having trouble finding a good source. Leo says there's a number of options. Leo recommends Applian's web video downloader, called the Replay Media Catcher. It's free to try and downloads almost every format. VLC Media Player can also do this. KeepVid.com is a good web based option.

Adam is in the military and he's going to be heading to Texas while he leaves his daughter behind with her mother. He'd like to keep in contact with her via the Internet, but she doesn't have it where she's going to live. Leo says there's always the Library or a free public Wi-Fi hotspot. If her Android tablet has an SD card slot, he could send audio/video on an SD card and share it that way.

Rob wants to know the best way to share large legal documents and photos. Leo says that ShareFile is a great option for lawyers, but might not be so great for their clients. OneDrive would work. He would need an account to do it, though. There used to be a great option called DropIO, but Facebook bought it and killed the service. BitDrop is a good one. He'd have to run his own website to make it work.

Victor wants to know about IP version 6. The way IP version 6 works is like the current system of numbers, but instead of a dotted "quad", which is four 8 bit digits surrounded by dots, they've added two more to make it a dotted "sextet." This allows for a large amount of IP addresses.

IPv6 (Wikipedia)…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6