In Pictures: 10 Tips For Switching To Digital TV

At the stroke of midnight on Feb. 17, 2009, the analog transmissions that have beamed free television over the air in the United States for over half a century will disappear for good. They will be replaced by digital signals, many of which are already broadcasting, in what will be the most significant change to television since the introduction of color.

The "digital switchover" brings with it higher image quality, better sound and a level of versatility and flexibility previously unattainable through free television. It also brings with it a number of significant headaches, as confusion over exactly who will be affected is inspiring panic in viewers fearful of being left behind in a haze of snow and static as the rest of the country moves into the future. Many of those who will be affected know that the deadline is fast approaching, but are unsure of how to prepare for it. Thankfully, a solution is simple, easily attainable and won't cost you a dime.

There are two major reasons for the switch from analog TV broadcasts to digital TV. First, digital signals offer superior image quality and allow for the transmission of high-definition signals over the air. This means that a properly equipped HDTV can receive local high-definition broadcasts that will look about as good as what you'd get from cable or satellite television.

In Pictures: 10 Tips For Switching To Digital TV

Second, switching from analog to digital frees up real estate on the broadcast spectrum for other uses, as digital signals are more efficient and take up less bandwidth. Telecommunications companies like Verizon (nyse: VZ - news - people ) and AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) have spent nearly $20 billion to secure the rights to the frequencies that were previously occupied by channels 52 through 69, in the hopes of using that airspace to improve their wireless communication networks.

What the digital switchover is actually doing is changing the language that TV broadcasters use to communicate with your television. Since 1941, televisions in the U.S. have utilized a set of broadcast standards laid out by the National Television System Committee. Big broadcast towers sent out information over the air using these NTSC standards and were picked up by the television antenna in your living room. Inside your TV, an NTSC tuner interpreted the information and properly displayed it on screen.

The digital switchover is introducing a new language, a new set of broadcast standards, this one designed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee. On Feb. 17, those broadcast towers are going to stop speaking NTSC permanently and start speaking ATSC. But unfortunately, your old television set doesn't know how to translate ATSC into moving pictures and sound. Just about all televisions manufactured and sold after Mar. 1, 2007 feature ATSC tuners, but if you purchased a television any earlier than that, chances are your TV won't be able to pick up over-the-air broadcasts once the switchover occurs.

The solution: A digital converter box, essentially an external ATSC tuner that sits on top of your existing television and is linked between your antenna and your TV. The ATSC signals are grabbed by the same antenna you've always used, then passed to the digital converter box that translates the ATSC signals into something your NTSC television can understand. They are easy to hook up and available at a wide variety of stores, including big box stores like Best Buy (nyse: BBY - news - people ), Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) and Target (nyse: TGT - news - people ), as well as online retailers.

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On a recent day in November 15,000 people were pushing up against the barbed wire outside the United Nation's mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo in Goma. They were some of the quarter-million refugees who had fled violent clashes in the Congo in the last few weeks, and they were begging for help. Their camps were destroyed, there was no food, no toilets and very little water. Militias were fighting a mere 7 miles to the northeast.

Several hundred miles away in Johannesburg, South Africa, Ory Okolloh was receiving reports from the scene verified by an NGO, and uploading them onto a public Web site. Okolloh, 31, created the site using Ushahidi, a free piece of software that quickly creates Web sites to which eyewitnesses of war and crisis in out-of-reach places can send news by e-mail or text and have it attached to a Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) map. Ushahidi grew out of a citizen journalism effort Okolloh helped lead during the deadly postelection rioting in Kenya last January. The software, still in its early days, has been deployed in South Africa to help gather stories of xenophobic attacks there in May and is now in use in the Congo.

Ushahidi is the latest effort to "crowd-source" newsgathering on unfolding crises in remote areas via e-mail and mobile phones. The idea is to get immediate attention and relief to strife zones, and fill the gap left by news organizations that have slashed their foreign bureaus. Not-for-profit Witness.org, started with help from rocker Peter Gabriel, gives cameras and editing equipment to aid workers and trains them to record any human rights abuses. Sahana, an open-source software similar to Ushahidi, was created in Sri Lanka after the tsunami of December 2004. It has been used to coordinate requests for relief efforts, track victims in camps and shelters, and coordinate volunteers in the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, the 2006 mud slide in the Philippines, the 2007 earthquake in Peru and the 2008 earthquake in China.

Ushahidi, Swahili for "testimony," has simplified the technology so that anyone can use it, and it's designed to take input from hundreds of people by cell phone or e-mail. It uses free software called FrontlineSMS that turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a text-broadcasting hub. As an SMS is sent from a hot zone, the message synchs with the Ushahidi software and shows up in a Web administrator's in-box. The Web admin can decide to send a text message back to the sender to verify the information, send out a blast alert to large numbers of people or post the information onto a Web page with location information from Google Maps (or do all three). FrontlineSMS provides phone numbers in areas where the larger SMS gateways don't operate. Okolloh hopes Ushahidi can be used to send reminder alerts to people on antiretroviral medication or warnings in regions that are at high risk for natural disasters. Some of these ideas are currently being tried in Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Chad and Ethiopia, among others. Okolloh has quit her consulting job to spread Ushahidi full-time and in June received a $200,000 grant from Humanity United, a Redwood City, Calif. not-for-profit.

Ushahidi got started late last year when Okolloh went home to vote in Kenya's elections. President Mwai Kibaki's victory looked rigged, and vicious riots and looting were sweeping the country. Okolloh found herself chained to her laptop, with her baby left in the care of her family. Okolloh, a native of Kenya with a 2005 Harvard law degree, had been living in Johannesburg but kept up a blog about Kenya politics.

Fifteen hundred were killed and half a million displaced while the news went black for three days. Okolloh was getting updates from both political parties, Kenyan journalists and her own sources within Parliament. She put up her e-mail address on her blog and was flooded with information. At times she was updating her blog every few seconds.

By Jan. 2 Okolloh was running out of diapers and formula and, with supplies scarce in Nairobi, she went back to Johannesburg. In a post she asked if there were any techies willing to do a mash-up of where the violence and destruction (and any peace efforts) were taking place using Google Earth. Next thing she knew, a reader of her blog had bought her a url and donated the server space. Two fellow bloggers wrote the initial software code and within three days Ushahidi was up and running. Okolloh tried to verify information by calling back people who had texted in the news or checking against media reports. "It was very ad hoc," she says. She applied the old maxim: When in doubt, leave it out. Radio deejays started reading some of the blog on air.

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What:

Arshile Gorky ''Study For Agony 1'' Graphite, crayong and ink wash on paper 22 x 30 inches Executed in 1946-1947

Where:

Christie's, New York Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale Nov. 12, 2008

How Much:

Pre-Auction Estimate: $2.2 - $2.8 million Final Selling Price: $2,210,500

Don't feel too bad for Richard Fuld, CEO--at least until the end of this year--of once-mighty Lehman Brothers. Despite the demise of his fabled Wall Street firm, Fuld still knows how to negotiate a good deal.

Take, for example, the sale earlier this month at Christie's of 16 works of art owned by Fuld and his wife, Kathy. The collection was expected to sell for between $15 and $20 million. Instead, it barely pulled in $13.5 million. However, the Fulds still made $20 million on the sale.

Kathy Fuld, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, assembled the collection over the past 20 years and focused on buying drawings from the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. She chose well and presumably had expert advice from MOMA curators.

But selling the group of drawings proved challenging--not only because the art markets has hit a major bump amid the economic gloom that, in some ways, was fueled by the failure of her husbands giant Wall Street firm--but also because Abstract Expressionist drawings are not an easy commodity to trade.

Drawings from this time period are esoteric and intellectually demanding. They require a connoisseur's eye. Most everyone understands works by a pop artist like Andy Warhol, but not everyone gets Arshile Gorky.

Still, the Gorky drawing was one of the few fiscal highlights of the works sold by the Fulds. Bought for $370,000 in 1996, the work sold comfortably within its estimate range for just over $2.2 million. The drawing, called ''Agony I,'' was made between 1946 and 1947 and is a study for a painting owned by MOMA.

At this period of his life, Gorky was a tortured soul, reeling from a fire that destroyed his studio and he was coping with cancer. His grief overwhelmed him one year later--he took his own life at the age of 44.

Locking up personal data is like putting a lock on your front door: It may deter some people, but professionals will break a window. If they really want to get in, they'll resort to more violent entries such as tunneling through the floor, smashing the walls or chopping a hole in the ceiling.

Nothing's different in cyberspace--except that the chances of getting caught are lower than in the physical world. In some countries, cyber-attacks aren't even illegal. And to make matters worse, it can be done remotely and hit many more victims with a single blow.

In Pictures: Protect Yourself From ID Theft

Ian odd bit of protection for the criminals: If a cyberhacker is based in country that doesn't make data snatching illegal, then he can't be prosecuted even if he preys on people elsewhere, notes John Stewart, chief security officer at Cisco Systems (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ). "Even if [an attack] violates the victim's law, it may not be illegal where it was done," he says.

That means protecting yourself--your identity, your company's data, even your health--becomes an imperative.

As more devices rely on software, malicious code has crept into surprising places. Buyers of Insignia electronic picture frames, for instance, got more than they bargained for last Christmas. The frames came pre-infected with a virus. Best Buy (nyse: BBY - news - people ) recalled the frames, but the damage was done. The good news is, it could have been worse.

"The number of attack vectors and techniques continue to multiply," says Josh Corman, principal security strategist at IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ). "No matter how good your perimeter defenses are, as soon as someone uploads pictures of their kids and their grandkids you could have a hardware-based Trojan in a USB."

Significantly more dangerous is the possibility of infecting medical devices. (MIT was researching a piece of malicious code embedded into pacemakers.) "Imagine what would happen if you suddenly shut down all the pacemakers at the G8 Summit," Corman says. "There is a whole market for certified, pre-owned technology that comes pre-infected. It's a very attractive, bottoms-up infection method."

Conspiracy-minded technology developers have long sounded the alarm about technology backdoors--ways into data stored on devices that buyers never knew existed. Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) confirmed last summer that there is a backdoor for the iPhone that allows Apple to remove illegally downloaded programs whenever it chooses. That measure helps Apple protect intellectual property. But given the complex global supply chain of parts that go into most products, unknown backdoors created by companies with unknown backgrounds and connections may pockmark final systems.

And then there is the human element. Many crimes are inside jobs. And a networked corporate enterprise means every computer on the network--sometimes measured in the hundreds of thousands, with even more global access points--is potentially a way into private customer data or corporate intellectual property.

Banks, retailers and even local supermarkets have access to at least some personal information for customers, and some have far more access than they should have. And it doesn't take a top executive to, say, add an in-line keystroke monitor--a device no larger than the tip of your finger--on a device cord or a keyboard to record all the strokes. Alternatively, they can replace a mouse with one that has built-in memory. Security experts say this already is happening.

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Employees can also become unwitting assistants for cyberhackers. IBM's Corman says one extremely successful trick among cyberthieves is to drop USB drives in a parking lot where workers gather to smoke. "They invariably grab it. 'Oh, a free USB. I wonder what's on it?' The penetration of these kinds of attacks is very high."

Some companies such as large banks have disabled USB drives as a security precaution. But employees may also take such "found" drives home, and they often log on to the corporate network from their home computers.

Simply sloppiness of employees can also endanger your private data. Overworked or careless employees can misplace a CD containing private information by leaving it in the pocket of an airplane seat or somewhere else outside of the corporation. The Bank of New York Mellon (nyse: BK - news - people ), for instance, recently notified customers that it had lost tapes containing customers' personal information en route to a storage facility. Many other such errors, however, are never reported.

Bottom line: Even those companies that do have a security policy may discover that their rules about who has access to data are not effective, particularly at a time when companies are laying off employees.

"The highest risk factor is the carbon-based units--humans," says Michelle Dennedy, chief data and privacy officers at Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: JAVA - news - people ). "It's getting them to think about all the risks. The technology usually does what you tell it to do. Where the risk comes in from the technology is failure to finish the last mile."