Does It Compute?

Sony Digital Paper

I just got my new Sony Digital Paper. As Bob Ambrogi said in a review a few years ago, it is a one-trick pony, but WHAT A TRICK!! The Digital Paper is a PDF reader which also allows you to take notes and annotate documents and synch them with your main document store. What distinguishes it is size (it comes in 10" and 13" form factors) and weight. At 12 oz, it is only somewhat heavier than a smartphone and measurably lighter than even my small 9" iPad. The 13" version was on sale for $599, the 10" version $499.

This is hard to visualize, so as a first for “Does It Compute?” I am including an image of a traditional yellow pad, the Sony Digital Paper, my small (9") iPad and my smartphone. With a 1650 x 2200 pixel resolution and 16-level gray scale, the sharpness is stunning.

So, what good is it? If you need to read, review and mark up large volumes of PDF documents, then this is for you. The stylus that comes with the device feels extremely “pen-like” when marking up documents. When you mark up or annotate text, or highlight text, you can go to a list that shows you your annotations or highlights without having to scroll through the document. DP supports fill-in-the-form PDFs: Check boxes, radio buttons, text boxes, etc.

You could easily take the relevant document to, say, a real estate closing, and have everyone sign documents on the Digital Paper and then upload the signed documents to your PC (or mobile device).

What does it NOT do? There is no browser and no email. However, there IS a Digital Paper App for mobile, which allows you to install on an iPad or smartphone. You can then upload documents from your Digital Paper to the smartphone and email them. Synchronization to your main computer can be automated, but must be launched from the Sony Digital App on the computer.

What is the workflow involved? The workflow is similar to many of the cloud synchronization programs (DropBox, Box, etc.). You copy or drag a document to a specified directory, and that is then transferred to/synchronized with the Digital Paper device. The setup process is a bit clunky, but it is not intended as a full-scale backup, so this not a major issue. DP reads only PDFs, but you can send a Word document by using a send/print to Digital Paper function.

(Note: correction re: synching made on 12/7)

Microsoft Strikes Again!

I’ve been replacing all my computers, which are 5 years old and nearly out of warranty (and Dell won’t give warranties longer than 5 years, which makes sense).

So I decided to bit the bullet and get Windows 10 on the new computer. Designed for home use and gamers but certainly not for businesses (but that’s another story). I thought I’d make my life easier and get Office 2016 Business pre-installed from Dell instead of ordering from Amazon and doing it myself. WRONG!

It turns out that Microsoft dictates that for Office 2016 Home and Business orders, Dell pre-install the French version, the Spanish version and the Home and Student version, but NOT the Business edition. To add insult to injury, you have to uninstall each of the above before you can download and install the Business version. So instead of saving time I wasted several hours and phone calls to Dell support to figure this out. However, the air around me did turn a very deep shade of blue.

This is obviously costing Dell money in support time and they say they are “working” to fix it.

Way to go Microsoft!

SurfacePro 4 - Basically Flaky?

My wife loved her new SurfacePro 4 with Windows 10, bought from Dell.  Until, mysteriously, it apparently died last week, just 6 weeks after we bought it. On powerup, the screen turned sort of dull gray, but nothing happened. The screen was OK, because if I hit the sound up button, the sound thermometer displayed.

OK, I said to myself, I bought this from Dell with Pro support. I’ve used Dell’s Pro support for years and have always been extremely happy with it. I get a technician out the next day to fix whatever it is. Even on a Sunday once. So I called Dell. Not only could they not fix it, not send out a technician, but their only option was to replace the unit entirely, thus losing all her data (the machine was so new I hadn’t set up backup yet. Big mistake!!).

So I started prowling the Internet. I very quickly found a solution on the Microsoft site with a series of obscure timed keystrokes (hold down these 2 buttons for 30 seconds, then this for 5 seconds, etc.). Bingo the machine was back and all was well.

But I discovered a number of things in the process.

First, although Dell sells the SurfacePro, it has no control over it (unlike its own machines) and therefore is not in a position to do anything for the hardware except replace it. Also, if they are to be believed, it is impossible to swap the hard drive/SSD drive from one unit to another. (I find this hard to believe, but if it is true it represents an incredible design flaw. But then, it is a Microsoft product after all.)

Second, Dell has obviously not trained even its second level technicians (Pro support has always been excellent in my experience) in what little troubleshooting the can do. The fact that I could find the solution within a few minutes in the first place I looked means that this should have been part of the Dell portfolio.

More interestingly, it seems both from the extent of the Microsoft support site and the various forums on the Web that the Surface Pro is at bottom a flaky machine. The Microsoft site lists what it do for a dozen or more error screens when the machine refuses to boot. A good resource, but a dozen or more versions of the blue screen of death in Windows 10?

The web sites were more acerbic, as you might expect.  The best comment: the name means that after you return and replace the first 3 defective units, the 4th unit will work. Hence SurfacePro 4. So if you do get a Surface Pro, make sure you get the best warranty/service agreement available. You are likely to need it.

Sony Digital Paper Update

The Sony Digital Paper device has been out for about a year and a half now, and Sony is continuing to make significant improvements to it. The most recent update includes substantial increases in speed and functionality, including Stylus support for PDF forms, which makes control and data entry more precise and a lot easier. There are a number improvements in the Note function, including the ability to rename a note while it is open and specify a network drive folder where your notes can be saved.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Digital Paper now includes support for ShareFile which can greatly facilitate coordinating the documents on the Digital Paper device with files on your network that are also synched up with Sharefile.

A new screen sharing function allows you to project the Digital Paper screen to a computer screen and from there to a projector. Thus your DP device can be used for a presentation. “A better way to whiteboard,” Sony calls it. The most significant drawback is that to function the DP Display Output application has to be installed on the computer to which the projector is attached, so if you are presenting to a client, you would have to have both the DP device and a laptop with the Display Output available, so you are not really gaining very much. Theoretically you could take the Display Output with you and install it on a client computer, but it is unclear how feasible that would be. If you are just linking two computers, then the DP works well as a source for presentations.

Finally, Sony is now offering a much more convenient pricing scheme for Worldox users. For $89/month you get both the Digital Paper device and a hosted Web Mobile connection to your Worldox document management system.  This enables you to upload and download files directly from Worldox to the DP device. Word files are converted on the fly to PDF files on the Digital Paper, where they can be reviewed and annotated. Documents can be digitally signed and uploaded back into your Worldox system. If you already have Web Mobile for your firm, Digital Paper is $799 when purchased alone.

Paying for Windows 10

Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for users of Windows 7 and 8. If you have a smartphone, you know that most “free” apps come with annoying advertising headers, footers or links. It turns out that Windows 10 is no exception to this rule.  EDRi (the European Digital Rights information organization) has released an analysis of Microsoft’s new “privacy” statement.

According to EDRi’s analysis, “Microsoft basically grants itself very broad rights to collect everything you do, say and write with and on your devices in order to sell more targeted advertising or to sell your data to third parties. The company appears to be granting itself the right to share your data either with your consent ‘or as necessary’.”

Thus it captures not only your browsing history but all your passwords as well, including the BitLocker recovery key for your encrypted data. Perhaps more importantly, Microsoft captures a unique advertising ID, which it can then sell to third parties for targeted advertising. Apparently some people like targeted advertising (it helps them shop) but I am certainly not among them.

Not surprisingly, if you use Cortana, Microsoft also collects a host of data from your computer to make Cortana more efficient, including data from your email (all of it) and text messages. Making Cortana more efficient is all very well, but it is unclear how having the passwords to all your web sites and to your encrypted data makes this service “more efficient.” Similarly, it is unclear how the fact that Microsoft will be routinely examining all the email to and from your clients (most likely with automated searches to examine where you’ve been and people and companies you’ve associated with) impacts attorney-client privilege.

In short, you are paying for Windows 10 by giving Microsoft carte blanche to collect an indeterminate (but presumably very large) amount of personal information about you and your law practice and sell it to unspecified vendors/advertisers at its discretion.

Some of these features can be turned off, but presumably not nearly all of them. Bottom line: when you upgrade to Windows 10 (which I would certainly not recommend doing for 6 months or so), take a close look at your security settings. You might also want to consider using a local account, not a Microsoft Cloud account with OneDrive, which will limit the amount of data Microsoft examines.

Kaspersky Internet Security 2015 - Don't

I recently upgraded from Kaspersky Internet Security 2014 to 2015. Routine, I thought. NOT.

It turns out that 2015 has two major issue that make it unusable for me.

First, it seems to hang up Outlook files being downloaded from the server. When that happens, Kaspersky does not release the scan it is doing (using 25% of the CPU on a 4-core machine with 8GB memory). So when you start up Outlook again, it adds another 25% of CPU usage, etc.). You can’t stop the process or exit Kaspersky.  I wind up rebooting a couple of times a day.

But that’s not the worst. At apparently random intervals, Remote or GoToMeeting sessions ramped the Kaspersky CPU usage to 99%, so I could do nothing on the computer. I couldn’t even reboot, I had to hit the power switch. For this to happen in the middle of a conference call with a client or vendor (which it of course did) is obviously totally unacceptable.

So I called the paid Premium Support line. They were very good (although massively overburdened). First of all, I had somehow botched the install, so they cleaned everything out totally and reinstalled. Better (allowed me to isolate the issue) but still happening.

They said that there was nothing that could be done about the Outlook issue.

Kaspersky won’t let me go back to 2014, which never had this problem. I can’t live with having to reboot my machine 2-3 times a day. This falls under the category: “we’ll make your PC very secure. So secure you won’t be able to use it.” So my only solution is to either disable the e-mail anti-virus option (not a great solution) or switch vendors.

The moral of the story is: when you get prompted to upgrade to Kaspersky Internet Security 2015, don’t.

Sony Digital Paper Firmware Update

Sony has released a system update to its Digital Paper devices, to version 1.3. When connected to Wi-Fi, the Digital Paper will notify you that an update is available.  This update contains a large number of excellent improvements and features that were lacking in the first version. These include:

•    Extending the password capacity from the easily hackable, i-Phone standard of 4 digits to 20 alpha-numeric characters. In addition, you can now encrypt the internal memory of the device.
•    Support for PDF forms, including check boxes, radio buttons, drop-down lists, list boxes and text fields.
•    Handwriting in zoom mode. Handwriting is now active within zoom mode.
•    Security for annotations/signatures, etc.  Annotations and signatures can now be configured to prevent their being erased by other users.
•    Redo-Undo capability has been added for handwriting and erasing.
•    You can now create and delete folders and duplicate or rename files.
•    Various ease of use functions. You can now position the toolbar on the left or right side of the screen. The pen button is now programmable to be either an eraser or highlighter.

And best of all, the price has come down substantially. The total price used to be $1,210 including a subscription to the Worldox-hosted cloud. The price has been dropped to $999, with no cloud support required. The device can link to cloud hosting programs such as DropBox or Box.

Update on Cloud-Based Practice Management

I am no longer actively involved with practice management programs, but I do like to keep relatively up to date, so I found Attorney at Work’s recent summary of the state of various programs useful.

If you are considering going with the cloud there are at least key factors to consider:

1.  Features. While the cloud-based programs are adding features rapidly, they generally still don’t match network-based equivalents. So make a list of the key features you use every day and make sure they are available.

2. Speed. Obviously any cloud-based program depends on your internet speed. Make sure you have a hi-speed connection. This is particularly critical if you plan to use your smart phone. Many early iterations were woefully slow over a phone.

Some other observations: If you are considering migrating from an existing program, make sure your data can be converted. If you are migrating from Amicus the obvious choice is Amicus Cloud. If you are migrating from TimeMatters, the obvious choice is Houdini, Esq., written by a former lead programmer for TimeMatters.

Constructing a Good Password

With all the talk about the Heartbleed bug and the need to change your password, it is worth talking about what is a good password and what is a bad password.

Basically, there are three things you want a password to protect you against:
– Random hackers sweeping up massive amounts of info from commercial sites. Think Target.
– Targeted hackers who what your specific data for some reason. Some form of industrial sabotage or law firms with very sensitive and large clients.
– Disgruntled employees who simply want to do some damage.
The password requirements are slightly different for each case.

Bad passwords are ones that while easy to remember are also easy to break. By far the most common passwords on the “top 25 bad passwords” lists are “password” and some combination of 1234567. Also high on the list for bad personal passwords (i.e., that a disgruntled employee would know) are the name of your significant other, your pets (I once was at a client where a user had a picture of her dog on her desk and her password was the dog’s name), your birthday, the street address of your office, any actual words, etc.

Good passwords are longer (possibly an entire phrase), have a mix of upper and lower case, include numbers and special symbols (!, ~, $, etc.). The problem is that these can be hard to remember, leading people to write them down an a yellow post-it on their monitor. I once was in an office where an attorney literally had 10 yellow post-its in his monitor with various passwords written on them. On the other hand, I once saw a paralegal whose password was “idontgiveadamm.” It might have gotten her in trouble for other reasons, but an excellent password.

The basic trick to creating complex passwords that are also easy to remember is substitutions and variations. Let’s take an example (one I’ve never actually used): “open_sesame.” A phrase, not just one word, and easy to remember.

Substitution 1: Capitalize the first two letters or the first letter of each word: OPen_Sesame.

Substitution 2: Substitute easily remembered numbers or signs for similar letters: @ for “a”; 0 (zero) for “O”; 1 for “L” or “i”; $ for “S”; 3 for “E”.  So you might wind up with 0P3n_$es@me. It looks completely incomprehensible, but isn’t. That number of substitutions is probably overkill, but you get the idea. Note that this may not be totally adequate to counter increasingly sophisticated hacking algorithms, but to my mind it is a good tradeoff.

Substitution 3: Add a sign (!, @) to the end of the password or between the words. Add a number that means something to you but increase each digit by 1. Thus, if your birthday is April 21, you might start with “2104” (with European-style order, date then month). But instead, increase each by 1, so you wind up with “3215.” So you could wind up with the password: 0P3n_$es@me!3215.  This has the added advantage that anyone who sees it written down or hears it is not going to remember it because they don’t know the base from which you are starting. In addition, if you are forced to change the password you can easily increase the last number by another digit: from 3215 to 4326.

An alternative method is to get a password program that generates and tracks random passwords for all your sites. However, if you use multiple computers/laptops, etc. keeping the different machines in synch can also be problematic.

There is no perfect solution, but a minimum effort can go a long way, not to mention complying with ethics rules about protecting client data!

Symphony OCR Now Does Email Attachments

The Symphony Suite from Trumpet Inc. (www.trumpetinc.com) has always been one of the best solutions for OCR’ing your scanned documents in combination with Worldox (Optical Character Recognition - that is, making the documents text-searchable).  One of the main reasons for this is that it works in the background and will OCR your backlog of documents.  When you scan a document, it generally takes two and a half to three seconds a page to OCR the document. This is not a big deal for a one-page letter, but it amounts to 4-5 minutes of standing around waiting for the OCR to complete for a 100-page document. This time adds up rapidly.

The latest version of the Symphony suite provide several new features.  You can now check on how many documents/pages would need to be OCR’d in your Legacy documents before plunging in headfirst. This can be very useful in calculating your total OCR needs.

Symphony has always been able to OCR emails moved or copied to Worldox. In the latest version, Symphony will now OCR attachments (in particular PDFs) to emails in addition to the emails themselves. This is a feature that has frequently been requested by firms using Symphony. Glad to see it is now available. The only caution is that it will try to process all attachments that have been saved previously to when you implement this feature, so you will need to check your page count before proceeding.