 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live from the Nebraska Library Commission. My name is Michael Sowers and I am the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Commission. And it is time once again for my monthly tech talk. This is the third one, still working out the kinks, still trying to figure out how everything works, but seems to be going along so far. We've got a good number of people signed up in here. It looks like we have 12 or 13 people in the audience at the moment, so for us, quite a large crowd. Krista is out again this week, she's kind of left me on my own. I think she trusts me to run this or something. And today we're going to have an interview with George Mattson from the Webbermeyer Library in Milford, Nebraska. He's using some bit of geekery that I've heard about and actually used myself at home, but he's the first library I've heard of that's actually using it. We'll talk about why and what's involved there and the decision process behind that. And then as you can see on your screen, off to the left of me there, I've got a bunch of bookmarks and things that I will kind of also intend to talk about in the second half of the hour, but I do want to remind everybody that I am here also to answer your questions to the best of my ability. So if you have questions during the interview, just drop them in the questions area. I do have that window open on a secondary monitor here, so I'll do my best to keep track of those. When we get to the second half, if you've got something you want to ask me about that isn't on my list, you think I might be able to help you out with, I will do my best. I sometimes kind of like to play a little game called Stump the Trainer. So, you know, see what you can do. And if I can't answer it for you right here on the show live, I will do my best to get back to you with an answer. So with that here, I'm going to do a little magic here and turn on George's microphone. As I mentioned in the introduction, I should have here on the line George Mattson from the Webbermeyer Library in Milford, Nebraska. George, are you there? I'm right here. Okay, great. So I'm going to bring up your website here so people have a little bit of reference. If you could just take a moment to tell us a little about yourself, your library, your town, what sort of population you serve, that sort of thing. All right. Well, like you said, my name is George Mattson. I'm the director of the Webbermeyer Library. Milford is about, oh, a little over 2,000 people. Our library was built in 1972. It is an older community as a whole. We have a technical college here, which is actually a pretty good little school. And what else did you want to know? No, that'll do. I'm just trying to give some people some context here and generally trying to show that I tend to like to interview folks from smaller libraries and I think a population served 2,000 accounts as that. So basically what I've got you on the line is a month or two ago some coworkers of mine did a road trip with you from what I hear. And some tech kind of came up. And when they got back, they mentioned to me that you're using something called Open DNS in your library. And can you give us a little idea of first of all just what that is in general and then we'll get kind of the specific as to why you chose it? Sure. Open DNS is a filtering program. Well, that's not exactly accurate. It's a DNS server which is filtered. But you have the option of choosing what gets filtered and you can go in and whitelist stuff. It's basically like having a filtering program on your computers. But you can set this up to go through the router or go through individual computers. Obviously if you have a router and you go through that, everything gets hit. So you do it once and you're done, which is one of the real upsides. It's also free, which is one of the big reasons why I liked it. But it has worked really well for us just because we used to have, oh man, Cyber Sitter. And it has keyword filtering, which is a good idea in theory, but in practice meant that nobody could open their email because inevitably there's some kind of spam in there that the keyword filter did not like. So we have to turn it off. And of course, once you turn it off, it doesn't do a single thing. But with Open DNS, if it's set because it's all just, it's like site-based filtering. So you don't have to worry about if you say Hotmail is cool, it will let Hotmail through. But if it's not, then it's very easy to whitelist and blacklist stuff. I don't want to turn this into the should we filter, should we not filter discussion? Because that's a completely different show. But can I ask in your case, so you are filtering, but why? I guess what the question is, was this a board decision? Is this related to funding? E-rate requires it. You've got to have some kind of filter. Fair enough. This was the least obtrusive filter I could find. I've had it come up twice where anyone's even noticed it's there, the year and a half we've had it. And once it was for some social networking site that I've never heard of, the guy, I looked at what he wanted to see, I was like, yeah, OK. I unblocked it. I blocked it again later. I haven't had a single other person ask about it. So no, I mean, you can set up. There's lots of different levels. So you can say, I just want you to block pornography or whatever. And it has lots of different areas that you can do in that fashion so you don't have to worry about, well, like if you want to block gambling, you can't. But you don't have to. So it makes it very smooth to do stuff. Yeah, I'm actually. Go ahead. Right, I've had is the way that they change. It used to be different in terms of accessing stuff for your settings. And it took me forever to find how you got into there again when they changed it. But that wasn't using enough. Right. I'll let everybody in. I actually use this myself. But without the filtering, I'm using OpenDNS at my house. I have five or six computers. There's no computers in the bathroom, but pretty much everywhere else in the house, there's a computer. And so I've set OpenDNS up on my personal network. So I've actually, for those of you looking at the screen here, I've actually logged into my account so we can actually see that the settings that are available. We can take a look at some of these. And you'll notice in my case it's set to none. And so what I did was I have a router that connects to my DSL line, and I just basically told the router, please use the following IP addresses for DNS resolution. I'll just back up a step here just to make sure everybody's on the same page. DNS is that thing where all internet sites actually work off of the numbers as opposed to the words. The words are a convenience for us. DNS, the domain name, system, or server, will convert the words that we type yahoo.com into the numbers necessary to do that. So what I've instructed my network to do is to use OpenDNS's servers to do that translation for me as opposed to the DNS servers of my ISP. George, can I assume you've pretty much done the same thing? You've just done it for the whole network in one central location? Just exactly like that. The other nice thing is it hits your, oh, if people come in using wireless, they also get filtered. So you don't have the issue of that, which I honestly wouldn't care. But there isn't a good way to not do that either, so. Yeah. Again, this is kind of an all or nothing solution. Although. You could set it up on individual computers if you don't want to get into trouble. Yeah, so if you've got, say, you wanted a different level of filtering on, say, the computers in the children's area versus the adult area or not for wireless, you could set these settings on each individual computer. But in your case, how many computers would we be talking about? We have not including the ones that we use for ourselves, like our public ones. We have five. OK, so not too bad. Omaha might. It wouldn't be crippling. It would be awful for Omaha. Yeah, in fact, I know Amy from Omaha's on the call. And I can see her cringing through the internet here of having to individually set this up on every single computer in Omaha. But so you've got, so then you've gone into your account, you've turned filtering on, which we have here on the screen, there's kind of a low, moderate, high. Did you pick one of those by default? No, mine's actually custom. I think technically speaking, I have moderate and then I modified from there. So I mean, it's pretty much, oh, let's see. Pornography, fishing sites, there's a handful of others. But it's mostly just, I mean, honestly, like the fishing one, I can't see why you don't turn that on. True. Yeah, maybe I should. I never thought about that. You know, to be honest at home, I've never actually looked at the categories in detail. I just kind of went, eh, I don't need that in my house. But I got a teenager. You know, maybe I should, I'm thinking about that. No, the fishing ones was because I actually have this on my computer at home after I found it here. And pretty much everything's turned off because, well, I can filter myself, but at the same time, not having to worry as much about accidentally going to a site that's going to screw me, I'm OK with that. That's a great way to put it. OK, and then you mentioned you can whitelist and blacklist specific sites. I got that down here. You said you've turned one on. You ended up turning it back off. Have you, do you have any examples of ones that you did whitelist specifically and you've left that way? Because it was kind of maybe a false positive. Oh, let's see. Deviantart.com. Ah, OK. Not what it sounds like necessarily. Yeah, no, it's just an art site. It's actually a really cool site. It has some stuff, which is probably not appropriate on it. But for the most part, that stuff gets removed because they have their own rules for what can and can't be posted. But it has some really cool stuff and it gets used. I think the reason it got blocked is because it's a photo sharing site, technically, but it's one of those things. So that got clipped out and it takes three or four minutes for the DNS to go through and say, oh, we can go here now. But after that, it's fine. Yeah, I've gotten wallpaper from there, so I'm familiar with the site myself. Go ahead. No, no, no, it's cool. Yeah, I'll also joke that my 16-year-old doesn't realize I can do this from work. So if I need to block a site for some unknown reason, as I've done here, I've literally just logged into my account and can block that up. One other feature that I've actually used, I don't know if you have, so I'll ask you about this. You can set up your own custom error pages so that if somebody types in misspells something, gets to a URL that doesn't actually exist, you can actually customize with your logo and your message saying, oops, that doesn't work. Do you want to try something else? Have you set that up? I have not set that up. I saw that and I just got busy and kind of forgot. Fair enough, but that is the other nice thing that OpenDNS does. It will quite often correct for letter inversion in URL. So if somebody types something in and it's like instead of typing Google, they type in Google, it will quite often say, did you mean Google maybe? Because nobody goes to this other site. But if you want to go there, it'll still let you. Sure. Yeah, I've pulled this up. You can turn on enable typo correction. And that's what that would be there. And I think that might actually be on by default. I can't quite remember on that case. It's been about three years since I set mine up. So I'm having a little trouble remembering what I've customized and what I've done. The other thing I would encourage everybody listening if you think of maybe going this route, even if you don't turn on the filtering. That's totally something I obviously want to leave up to a library to library sort of decision. But just even that kind of customized error page where you have another chance to put maybe your library's logo on the screen so that your patrons are seeing, hey, that didn't work. The library's trying to help me out as opposed to error 404 not found. What do you want to do now? It's just kind of another marketing opportunity. I would maybe encourage people to consider. You can also set up and I'm assuming you haven't done this because maybe for your staff you could do this. I'm not sure how useful it would be with patrons. You can set up shortcuts so that you can type in a keyword into your browser. The DNS looks at it and goes, oh, well, whenever you type in this, that's the page you want to go to. So at home I can type home and it gets me to my blog. You can kind of set up some interesting shortcuts through that. You haven't done that. I have not played around with that. And I was actually not honestly aware that it existed. OK, we learned from each other. OK, do we have a question that just came in? And I'll actually pass this one on to you in this case. Can you be a little more explicit or explain the difference between whitelist and blacklist? Sure, if something is neat. Let's say that there's a site which hasn't been added to their system yet that you don't want people to get to for whatever reason. Well, you blacklisted. You just enter in the web address, whatever it happens to be, Facebook. There we go. My 16-year-old, if I actually hit Add Domain, would be really upset. And if you say always block, well, then it's blacklisted. And it means that you just can't get there. It'll pull up an error message saying this site has been blocked but has been classified as something by OpenDNS. And then it has a little message for contacting the site administrator if you want to protest the fact that Facebook has been unfairly blocked. On the other hand, if you were using filtering and you come across a site, you can say never block, like Deviant Art with us, where, yeah, I want this one to get through in spite of the fact that according to the system, it should be blocked. So and then it just, well, if you hit Add Domain, you can always take it off again. Then different domains. I seem to have misspelled it. I'll do Facebook here. I don't know how you just spelled it. I think that was right. All right, there we go. It might be .org instead of .com. I'm not sure. But anyway. No, no, it's .com. Anyway. But yeah, and then it would say always block instead of never block if it was on the blacklist. And then if you want to make it so that it works again, you just delete it out and then it's fine. And actually, I find this interesting. I just tried to do the MySpace block. And it said, obviously, they know about MySpace already. So they're saying, OK, do you want to just block MySpace? Or would you want to block the whole category? Sure. So and if I confirm that. And as you mentioned earlier, it is saying, and it just disappeared there, that it would take about three minutes to kick in. Is the DNS has to re-initialize or some such thing as it learns cell? Great. So easy to set up, easy to use, easy to implement from the looks of it. Any complaints, downsides you can think of, wish it worked a little differently? Anything, any problems? I haven't had a single problem with it. Now granted, we had cybersitter before, and that was nothing but constant headaches. So I may still be just writing high on not having to constantly be walking over to the computer to turn off the filtering program. But at the same time, no, for the most part, it just doesn't come up. It's just invisible. You're filtered, so you're fulfilling other requirements for your e-rate. But unless you get really, really fidgety about what you're allowing, you'll probably never even know it's there. It just sits there in the background. It does what it's supposed to do, and you're fine. So. Great. And here's the other question I meant to ask. We get a little sidetrack there for a moment. And there might be some vague privacy issues raised with this, but it does allow you to keep statistics and logs about what is being accessed through your network. And it looks like you could turn that on or off. Have you used that at all? Well, I turned it off. OK, OK, OK. I'll agree with you on that. Yeah, we probably don't want to be keeping those sorts of logs. I notice I have mine turned on, but I'm not sure why. I'm not sure I've ever actually looked at the statistics. Let me see if I can pull up some stats here just to see. I'll also mention, as this is pulling up, that there are pay for levels in OpenDNS. Everything we've talked about is available for free. Although this is kind of interesting. This is what sort of activity during the day is getting in. And this is 6 o'clock. Everybody gets up. 6 or 7 PM. Everybody's home. This is my home network. Yeah, yeah. And my computer is actually usually running during the day, so it's doing things. But although I do tend to wonder what it was doing at 1 o'clock yesterday afternoon, 303 different domains. So there is available. But everything we've been talking about is free. There are additional features you can get, I think, mostly additional statistics if you start paying for it. I think maybe more granular ability to control who has access to what at the network level as opposed to having to install it on lots of individual machines. But it is pretty darn straightforward. OK, we have another question that came through from Gail. If you unblock an adult site for adult patron, then can kids see this site on their computer while it's unblocked? If you have done it as a network thing, then yes. It's universal. You unblock it for your usage of the OpenDNS thing. So anyone who gets it from the same source is going to be able to access it. Now, of course, they'd have to know they could access it or to actually go there. But so it just depends on what exactly you're talking about and how long you're going to be leaving it open. It'd just be up to you for whether it's an issue at the time. Yeah, at this point, I'll just repeat. If you want a little more granular control so it was only allowed on a particular computer, then actually, even if you installed it on each individual computer, you still only have one account with OpenDNS. Yeah, but there's supposed to be something you can install which lets you do some control stuff. But I never bothered with it. It just hasn't been an issue. No, no, it just hasn't been an issue. I have a relatively lax filter. I mean, it does exactly what I'm required to do. But with that being the case, I've just never run into it being an issue. And when did you start? If the adults want to access something and they run into the DNS page and they decide not to say anything, they probably didn't need to be going there anyway. Yeah, you kind of get to the psychology of this. Do I really want to ask for access to Playboy.com of the public librarian in the town of 2,000 people? Exactly. Yeah, so probably they're not going to ask. I think I forgot to ask, when did you start using this? How long has this been going in your library? Oh, wow. Year and a half ago, two years? Wow, OK. I've been using it for quite a while at this point. Yeah, I've been using it too. One of those things in the back of my mind, I think this would work well in a library. And that's really why I wanted to talk to you, because somebody said, somebody's using it in a library. And I went, huh, I thought that would be a good idea. Let's find out. And it sounds like it is. Oh, yeah, that's been great. Free and easy to implement. If you are going to do it on the network level and you're not the IT person, you'll probably want to find the IT person who runs your router and put that in. It's really easy, though. It's literally a couple of numbers. In fact, I think if I scroll down to the bottom of every page on OpenDNS, the numbers are available. Even on the home page, you can use it without having an account even. Excuse me, in some cases, people just use OpenDNS because it's actually faster than maybe their local ISP. And for those of you in smaller towns with really small ISPs, you might find that just changing this, even without the filtering options, might actually speed up your connection a little bit. So that's another reason why some people will just use it. But if you want the filtering, if you want some sort of statistics, if you want any other options that we've talked about, then you do need to sign up for at least a free account. And that will work for you. Got another question in here. Would this be a good enough filter for an LSTA grant PC? I have absolutely no idea. I will be completely honest with this one. George, I don't know if you know. I can't say for sure. But it fulfills the requirements for the CIPA, the Child Internet Protection Act. And I presume that's what they're going for. So I would guess. If it's good enough for E-Rate, it's probably good enough for LSTA. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah, that would probably make my guess also. I do not know the specifics of what LSTA requires. But I think at this point, everybody involved here could safely say this is a really great solution. And we recommend it if you find yourself in the want or need for filtering. Are there any other questions? I don't have any in the queue. If you want to ask via audio, just feel free. You can do the hand raise. And I can turn your microphone on. Or you can type that into the question and answer section of GoToWebinar. While we're giving people an opportunity maybe to ask a last minute question, George, do you have anything else you want to tell people for posterity about using OpenDNS? And anything maybe you don't think I asked you about? Well, let's see. On OpenDNS, I think that's about it. I would like to put a plug in for Microsoft Steady State. I'm going to talk about that. Awesome. So if you stay on the line, we can bring that up because I have kind of an interesting bit of news involving Steady State, Windows 7 that I need to share. So we'll definitely be covering that. So you're using Steady State also? Yes. OK. View Steves and Churian Guard. And it was a nightmare. And Steady State, on the other hand, works very slickly. So it's one of the few instances where I will say, hey, Microsoft free program that actually works well, I don't understand. Well, I have maybe some disappointing news that I'll get to it. In fact, we'll cover that next, actually. That sounds good. Because let me ask you the question that will perfectly lead into this. I'm going to go ahead and sign out of my OpenDNS account here. I don't see any other questions or hand raises. What version of Windows are you running in your library? We have Windows XP. Oh, still running XP. OK. No, no, that wasn't a criticism. Just, you know, hey, it's stable. We weren't going to go with Vista. Are you insane? Well, your patrons would have rioted. Well, OK, wait till they see 7 then. I liked Vista. I think maybe it was the only person in the universe. But OK. So I'm going to keep George's mics on for a minute, because if nothing else, I kind of want to hear his reaction to this. About two weeks ago, I got a call, a voicemail from a librarian here in Nebraska. And those of you who know me, who have listened to my sessions before, I've done security sessions. I did the Wi-Fi grant. I helped set up the last round of Gates PCs here. I highly recommended Windows Study State. I will completely agree with George on the fact that it's free. It's for Microsoft. It actually works as much as we'd like to pick on Microsoft. And basically, it's a software version of the Centurion Guard, whether it was the hardware version of the software version. They don't make the hardware one anymore. Or Veronica's Deep Freeze, which is another program I have familiarity with, which is basically you set up the machine the way you want. You get the software. You turn it on. You lock everything down. The patrons can now do anything they want to your machine. And all you've got to do is reboot it, and everything's back to the way it was. And that, I think, in general, is my recommendation for Windows-based security on public access PCs. Let them do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't stick. Well, I got this voicemail from a Nebraska librarian that said, well, we're buying new computers. And we're going to get Windows 7 on them, which I do highly recommend. It's a wonderful operating system. And she said, but I'm reading that Study State doesn't work in Windows 7. What should I use instead? And I kind of mentally went, huh? And this is true. Did a whole bunch of research. I do have one article up here on the screen. Windows Study State is not supported, will not install in Windows 7. Now, what they did do early on in the beta process of Windows 7 was they actually integrated Study State into Windows 7, and they called it guest mode. In other words, they thought, hey, lots of people are using this product. It's really useful. Let's just build it into the operating system. Well, when they finally released Windows 7, they had taken it back out again. That was pretty much my reaction, George. I hate to be the bringer of bad news. But if you go to Windows 7, Study State is not an option. That's the best. And it's like they want people to use Linux. It's weird. Although I don't think we have any libraries in Nebraska using Linux. Anybody, if you want to volunteer, I will happily interview you after a couple of months of doing that. I use Linux myself. But for the public, I think it could be done, but it would be a very interesting experiment. We have one computer that's like a super old one that is just our catalog computer. We use Apollo. So it just has to be able to access the internet. That's all it really has to do. So we have a Ubuntu Linux loaded on there. Works slick as can be. And to be honest, after having used it for a while, it does everything instantly out of the box that 90% of people need. You can do your word processing. You can access the internet. You can get your email. You can chat. Pretty much everything that people do, it does without any issue. It's just if you want to change it in any way that it starts to become a problem. Yeah. And I have an Ubuntu box at home. I use it all the time. But you start putting people into open office because they want to write their resume. And they kind of freak out because they're used to work. We actually use that on our computers. Oh, do you? We did not pay for the Microsoft Office. We went with that. And people were like, but where's Word? Where's Word? And we use this instead. But we can't open it. I'm like, well, you have to click in the little thing and say, save as a doc file. Oh. So I can take it home then. Yeah, then you can take it home. Works just fine. Wow. I've got to come visit your library. You are always welcome. Oh, well thank you. You guys are way ahead of the curve. So anyways, OK, so we're going to have libraries going to Windows 7. What's now my new line on what you should do security-wise? Basically, there's a not great free option, and there's the pay for options. And I did put this in a blog post on the commissions blog if you want to go, anybody wants to go look at it in a little more detail. Your pay for options are, again, back to deep freeze or centurion. That's basically it. This is now like, do you like Word or Word Perfect? Although Word Perfect is pretty much dead. But you get the analogy. I found in my experience, they both work just as well as the other, deep freeze tends to cost less. What pricing I could find a week or two ago on their website, covering 10 computers should run you about 300 bucks. It's really not very expensive. It's more expensive than free, obviously. Pricing for centurion, you actually have to call them up and talk to somebody. So I don't have actual numbers from now. So from a cost perspective, I say go with deep freeze. However, I think I got a comment a couple days ago on the blog saying, no, no, no, centurion's a way better product, and it's worth the cost. So I don't know what else to say there. If you really have to go with the free, free, free, you've got no money option, and you want to lock things down in Windows 7, you still have what's called the guest account, which is not guest mode. It's the guest accounts. You have to go into your control panel and users and turn it on. And then when people see the login screen, they have staff and guest. Guest will not let them do anything permanent. It won't let them change any settings. It will not let them, I think they might be able to save documents, but I'm not even sure with that, even though we don't want them saving documents to our computers anyways. The only downside to using the guest account is you cannot change how the guest account looks. You can't change the wallpaper. You can't change what icons are on the desktop. The guest account is the guest account end of story. So it accomplishes the same thing Steady State did, but without being able to customize anything and make it look the way you want. But it's free. It's built in. It works. So until Microsoft figures out what happens to Steady State, I'm going to keep my eyes on it. But at this point, if you go to Windows 7, Steady State is no longer an option. That's the bad news. So. So does this also mean that everybody should be emailing Microsoft and saying, what the heck? Yes, actually, I would probably recommend that. And I haven't written my email yet, but that threw me for a loop. I just assumed it would continue to work until somebody pointed out that it doesn't. So, yep, complain to Microsoft. I'm sure that will get us somewhere. OK, sorry. I mean, I've been accused of picking up Microsoft too much. I do it in all fun and jest. I mean, I use Windows. I love Windows. I have nothing against Macs. I've just never had one. But sometimes it's just kind of fun to pick up Microsoft because they're the dominant player. So, all right. Well, George, I want to say thank you once again. If I'm going to go ahead and mute your mic again. If you don't mind, you're welcome to stay on the call. And I'm going to go into some other news. While I'm doing that, again, if you have any questions, something's come up in your library. You want me to attempt to address it kind of on the fly. More than happy to do that. But I have a few other stories that I would like to talk about. And I'm going to kind of start down at the bottom of my list here. So these are in no necessarily particular order. Something from Twitter. Now, this is from Twitter, but this is not necessarily it's relevant to everybody, whether you have a Twitter account or not. And their blog post here is called reason number 4132 for changing your password. And if you read the ITAR blog or the commission blog or my blog, I wrote a post about this issue because I think it's really, really important. So I want to share it here again. Basically, most Twitter users woke up one morning a couple of weeks ago and found that they had to change their Twitter password. Now, Twitter's been hacked in the past. People have given up their passwords. People have had their passwords stolen. But what happened here in this case was actually, I found very interesting. The person who was trying to get people's passwords actually set up a completely different website to Twitter, saying, hey, this is a cool new service. Please create an account with us. And thousands of people did. Well, the problem is that a very high percentage of those thousands of people use the same password for everything. And so what the bad guys did with the other site was they collected all those passwords and they said, I wonder how many of them will work at Twitter? And it turns out a lot of them worked in Twitter. So I won't ask for a show of hands. You know who you are, but how many of you are using the same password for everything, even if it's a really good password, using it over and over and over again is not going to do any good. Let me give you an analogy that just popped into my head. Would you want the same key to start your car and open the front door of your house? I'm guessing no. Because if somebody steals your car keys, you don't want them to be able to get in the house. Although most of us will probably keep the same car key and the same key ring. So maybe that analogy doesn't hold. But I think you get my point. So at a minimum, please, if you're using the same password over and over again, use a different password for your bank account. Don't use the same password for Twitter or Amazon as you do for your banking. Go back, listen to one of my security sessions in the recordings. We can talk about how to create good passwords, that sort of thing. I don't want to get into this too far. But I just want to warn everybody once again that if you are going to use passwords on different sites, please use different passwords on different sites and not the same password over and over and over again. If you've got a question about that, feel free to type it in or raise your hand. But I think that one's pretty self-explanatory. Oops, excuse me. Got to keep my hand on my mute button a little more often. Got to jump around a little bit. I'm speaking of filtering. We've been talking about that a little bit. YouTube has announced a new feature called Safety Mode. And this was kind of talked about on the Google blog. And I've seen some videos floating around about this. And this link that I've got here in the bookmarks will link you to a little video as to how it works. What I'm going to try here is going to go ahead and go into YouTube real quick. And now I'll see if I can remember how to do this. And if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you should have kind of hiding down here in the bottom left-hand corner. It says Safety Mode is off. And if you want to turn that on, you click on Safety Mode is off. We say yes. We want to turn that on. And we click Save. Now, at the moment, you'll see at the top of the page coming up that it says Safety Mode has been enabled. And I'm going to actually scroll down off of this just a little bit so that little video on the side stops playing. Basically, this is YouTube's built-in filter. Generally, YouTube does not allow certain sorts of contents anyways, graphic, sexuality, things like that. But they're the girls in the bikinis and sexually suggestive materials and things that maybe you don't want shown or coming up in search results, things like that. Turning on Safety Mode will do that. It's not perfect, they say, but it can be a start. Maybe you want to turn this on, say, on the public computers if you have one specifically set up for kids. Now, at the moment, because I'm not signed in, this only stays for this session. If I was to shut down my computer, turn it back on. Safety Mode would be back off again. If you want to make it somewhat permanent, what you need to do is sign into your YouTube account, turn it on, and then sign out, and then that will be on permanently until you log back in and turn it off again. So set yourself up, maybe a dummy YouTube account, use a personal one if the library has an account, go to maybe the kids' machines, the adult machines if you think that's appropriate. Log in, turn on Safety Mode, log back out again, and that Safety Mode will be on in YouTube indefinitely until you turn it back off. So this kind of seems to be turning into the filtering episode, I'm not sure why, but a lot of announcements lately and a lot of things happening in that area. This message, I'm not honestly sure if I've mentioned this forum before, but I've been promoting Blogger for the better part of 10 years now, I've been promoting it in libraries in Nebraska for three years now, and there is some news going on with Blogger that some of you may need to be familiar with. Now, if you are using Blogger to write a blog and your blog is hosted by blogspot.com, this doesn't apply to you, you're fine. However, if you're using Blogger to write your blog but you're publishing it to your own domain via FTP, I was actually doing that with my blog where I would use Blogger to write it, but I would host it on my own website. And it would transfer the information from Blogger to my website via FTP, or File Transfer Protocol. They are turning that off. It was going to be the middle of March where they turned that off. They have extended that deadline to May 1. There are some alternatives, including moving to another platform, moving to something they call custom domains. I don't want to get into a lot of detail about this, but I wanted to make sure I got this news bit out. If it applies to you, what I would suggest is going to this Blogger FTP Info website. That's their blog where they have all the news about what your options are, when they're shutting things down, why they're shutting things down. And so if this sounds like it applies to you, this is something you definitely want to look into, because you have until May 1 to move your blog. OK. We're going to jump down here to something called Tweet My PC. This is something I've been playing with for a little while, wasn't working. They've released a new version. I've kind of got it working at home. I more or less find this just cool and interesting. I don't know if it's necessarily got a direct library application. But what I've done is I have basically set up a separate Twitter account for my computer at my house, my main computer that kind of controls everything. Then I have installed a small piece of software on that computer that once every minute will check that Twitter account. And then what I can do via Twitter is issue commands to my computer at home. I can query to see if it's up and running. I can query it to see what software is running. I can ask its IP address. I can tell it to download a file for me. So let's say I'm surfing around. I'm out of the house. I'm on the road. And I find a neat piece of software. And I'm thinking, you know what? I want to play with that. Or I want to download that PDF. But I don't need it till I get home. I can tell my computer via Twitter to go download that file for me. It'll be waiting for me when I get home. I can issue print commands across Twitter. There is a whole list of commands that you can do. And I'll bring that up real quick just so you can see some of the options. I can reboot my computer. I can lock my computer. I can ask it to take a screenshot. I kind of just show this as I think it's kind of an interesting use of Twitter. If you're looking for some basic remote control of a particular computer, this could be an option for you. Say maybe if your library server runs Windows, maybe you can set it up. And you can check things via Twitter about your server. See if it's up. See if it's running properly, that sort of thing. Kill processes, get screenshots from it, that sort of thing. Just find that interesting. Hopefully a couple of you kind of look at that, at least kind of go cool. All right, we've got a few other links here. Google Buzz. I don't know how many of you have heard of Google Buzz? Buzz was announced about a week and a half, two weeks ago. It was a new feature in Gmail. It was trying to integrate social features into Gmail. Kind of a simplistic explanation would be if you were to put Twitter into Gmail. The idea being that you could share things through Gmail. Your contacts in Gmail can automatically know what you're doing. It was very, very, it's an interesting concept. This kind of a catch, though, in the last week and a half or two, people have noticed that there are some serious, serious, serious privacy issues with using Google Buzz. And in fact, one of the other pages I've linked to was an article that I just found this morning where basically Google has said, our bad, this isn't what we thought it was. Basically what it boiled down to was they tested it with Google staff and then released it to the world. And the world went, wait a minute, this is too much sharing, there are privacy concerns here, this isn't working the way it's supposed to work, or you think that it's supposed to work. So what I guess I would say at this point is if you are a Gmail user, this might be something you'd want to look into, maybe play around with it a little bit, but be aware that there are some serious privacy concerns floating around on the internet about how it works. And what information you may end up sharing with other people through Google Buzz that you didn't necessarily intend to share. For those of you who are thinking, OK, I'm a Gmail user, but I don't even want to participate in this until they figure things out. Basically what you do is you can log in to Gmail, scroll to the bottom of the page, and there should be a link that says, turn Google Buzz off. Look for that, click that, and then that will just turn all Buzz features off in your Gmail account, and then you can decide later to turn it back on if you want to. So again, kind of another piece of news there that you probably want to be paying attention to. I think I've got one more story that I want to cover. And this I found yesterday, cell phones, Verizon Details Skype partnership. Now why should we care about this? Here's kind of my initial thinking on this, considering I've had probably 14 or 15 hours to think about this story. Basically what's going on here is Verizon is pretty much the main provider for the Android phone. I actually own one of these, the Droid. And I am a Verizon customer, but that's not necessarily why I'm sharing this story. In this case, I can make a phone call using my phone, using my minutes. But what this deal is going to allow me to do is to install Skype on my phone and then call other Skype users with my phone without using my minutes. I'm actually using the internet connection. So if any of you have ever Skyped with somebody else using a full-blown computer and a headset, kind of like we're doing now, what people will soon be able to do is Skype other people using their phones. So my thoughts here when it comes to a library is, does your library have a Skype account? Can people call you via Skype? Should they be able to call you via Skype? You know, we did the telephone. We've done the email reference questions. A lot of us are doing chat reference questions now through maybe something like Mebo or AOL Instant Messenger. Well, what about Skype? You can install Skype for free. You can call another Skype user for free. What if you were to say, hey, you know what, we've got somebody at the reference desk. They're sitting there. We'll accept Skype calls also. And like with a telephone, if we're not available, leave a message, and maybe we'll call you back via Skype. And if Skype is going to be moving onto this next platform, Amy is commenting in our Q&A session, yes, yes, yes. Amy, I'll ask you, do you offer Skype at Omaha? I think that would be really interesting. And if you have a mic, just give a hand raise. And I'll hopefully turn your mic on and let you do a little talking instead of typing. Maybe this is something you want to consider. And Amy's responding via the Q&A again that Skype, they use internally a lot. And actually, I think I knew that. I just forgot about that. And she uses Skype via her iPhone and actually has called a friend that way in London via Skype on her iPhone. So iPhones have Skype on them. The droid phones are about to have Skype on them. And that's something you might want to consider maybe a little more long-term planning in the next tech plan. Obviously staffing is going to be an issue, things like that. I know those of you with populations of 2,500 are going to have slightly different staff levels that say Omaha Public or Lincoln here. But it is maybe something you want to consider. Maybe your public is heavily into Skype. And they would call you more if that was available. So just throw that out there as food for thought, something to think about. I'm going to go back to my bookmarks here one last time and see if there's any stories I missed. It looks like I was able to get to pretty much everything here this evening or this morning, excuse me. And it looks like I have. So that's kind of the topics I wanted to talk about. And great interview with George. I want to thank him again for participating in today's call. Open it up for questions if you want to ask one via audio just go ahead and give a hand raise or else you can type it in in the Q&A. And I'll do my best to answer that. While we're looking, I just want to remind everybody that this tech talk is planned to do once a month. The next one is I believe in four weeks. I don't have that date off the top of my head. I should have been prepared for that. Apologize. I'm always looking for people to interview. If you know of somebody you think that's doing something very interesting in their library or you're doing something very interesting in your library, please give me a shout. Happy to talk to you about it. Happy to talk to pretty much anybody. We've already talked to somebody from upstate New York about their checking out of GPS devices. We had the librarian in Nebraska last month who had the photo printing service. We had George with OpenDNS this month. So always looking for other people to talk to. I've kind of got my own list, but I really want to address the issues that the folks here in Nebraska are looking for. So if you've got something interesting or you think there's just a story I should cover, please drop me an email, michael.soursatnebraska.gov. And you're welcome, Janet. Glad you enjoyed the session. Not seeing. Thank you, Amy. Amy's telling me I rock and I appreciate it. And in fact, I think it's the headset. Actually, the headset just totally makes everything look like I'm doing something special. So with that, thank you all of you for attending today. I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up and end the recording. And Krista will be back with you next Wednesday for another session of Encompass Live. Thanks a lot. Have a good day and bye-bye.