Ralph gives me some great advice on how to approach password management for unsophisticated users. I ask the question why Microsoft would choose to compare the Surface Pro 3 to the 13″ Macbook Air. Fun challenges with learning to screencast using Screenflow on the Mac, using SwitchResX from madrau.com as I work with Home Inventory from Binary Formations. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart takes us through Taming the Terminal Part 18b of n – more Regular Expressions.
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Hi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Sunday May 25, 2014 and this is show number 472. Hey guys – next week I have a wedding to go to, a friend coming in from out of town, AND the intergalactically famous Honda Bob is having his 30 year picnic (Steve and I are his longest living clients so we have to be there) so I’m going to need some help with the show. If you’ve got a cool gadget, software tool, or even a fun rant about some technology, how about doing a listener review for me? If you haven’t done one before, there’s a link in the toolbar over on podfeet.com with some great guidelines on how to record your own review. I go over how long it should be, what kind of hardware and software you can use, and the format for recording. I’d sure appreciate the help! Well let’s dig into the show because THIS week I have tons of content!
Blog Posts
More Advice on Password Management for Unsophisticated Users
Surface Pro 3 Doesn’t Compare to 13″ Macbook Air
Clarify
My buddy Mike seems to think that I’m first tier support for anything made by Apple. His faith in me is fun of course, but I keep thinking he could get better help. Last week he sent me an email when I was super busy asking for help with his brand new iPhone. I shot him a note suggesting that he call Apple, you know, those people who know everything about their devices? He wrote back that he would accept second tier support if I insisted. Well he called them and he said that a) the guy didn’t help him, kept saying, “it’s not supposed to do that” and “you must be doing it wrong”, and then b) was rude to him. Not great. His problem actually happened to be about his email so he called his hosting company and they were nicer but also unhelpful so he escalated to my support.
This was one of the most challenging support calls I’ve had, and probably why the other guys weren’t able to help him. I had no way of seeing what he was doing on his phone. His problem was that he could send email on his account but he couldn’t receive emails. We went back and forth for at least a half hour and I was hopelessly lost on what he was doing and seeing. He tried really hard to keep me informed of what he was doing but it was still really hard. Finally I asked him if he’d mind sharing his account info with me. He could easily change it afterwards so he agreed. I went through step by step setting it up on MY phone and I took screenshots with the iPhone as I went along. You can do that by simply holding down the top button and the home button at the same time and you hear a fake camera shutter go off.
You have to have guessed what happened – it worked on my phone. I bet at least half of you have guessed what I did next. The photos shwooshed up into iCloud and back down into my Aperture library via Photostream, and from there I was able to drag each one into Clarify. Ok, technically they were WAY too high resolution so I took screenshots of them with the built in tool in Clarify. This sounds tedious but it wasn’t because once I took one good shot, I could flip to the next image in Aperture and hit the R key in Clarify which grabs the previous capture area and boom, I had another good shot. After I did that, I put a few annotations on, entered some text here and there and then pushed it out to a PDF from Clarify and mailed it off to Mike.
Sadly he was so sick of dealing with his phone by the time I sent it that he went to the beach to get away from it (and I sure didn’t blame him) but a couple of days later he got his energy to go back in and do battle. With my Clarify tutorial, he got it to work! So. How can you become a hero too? Head on over to clarify-it.com/download/beta to get a copy of the Clarify 2 beta and give it a try. And you know to tell them Allison sent you, right?
Chit Chat Across the Pond
Security Light
Important Security Updates:
- Last Tuesday was patch tuesday – As well as the regular monthly patches from Microsoft, Adobe also patched Flash, Reader & Acrobat – http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/adobe-microsoft-issue-critical-security-fixes-2/
- Apple releases OS X 10.9.3 – http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6246
- Apple releases iTunes 11.2.1 (including a fix for a silly bug introduced 2 days earlier by 11.2) – http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/itunes-11.2.1-fixes-hidden-users-folder-bug-restores-folder-visibility (security content of iTunes 11.2 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6245 – NOTE – no patch for these bugs in Windows version yet! http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/patched-security-flaw-in-mac-os-ios-unpatched-in-itunes-for-windows).
- A five-year old bug has been found in the Linux kernel, giving attackers arbitrary code execution as root, if you run Linux VMs or perhaps a home server (or even a web server), now would be a great time to patch! – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/14/linux-got-root-kernel-bug-patched-after-five-years-at-large/
Important Securtity News:
- Yet another iOS lock screen bypass, and yet again, it’s a Siri thing. If you care about security, disable Siri on the lock screen – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/12/open-the-iphone-door-siri-apples-digital-helper/
- The EFF have released their annual “who has your back” report – https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-requests-2014 (Apple, Facebook, Google & Yahoo! come out well – http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-facebook-google-yahoo-earn-top-marks-from-eff-for-protecting-privacy, SnapChat and AT&T come out very badly –http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/19/snapchat-att-amazon-worst-privacy-protectors-says-eff/)
- US Postal Inspection Service is investigation reports of card skimmers in stamp vending machines – be ware! – http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/postal-service-beware-stamp-kiosk-skimmers/
- Top EU Court rules that users have a right to have their data deleted – http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/13/eu-google-dataprotection-idUSL6N0NZ23Q20140513
- SourceForge pro-actively ask all users to re-set their passwords – there is no breach here, but SourceForge want to upgrade their hashes, so they’re asking everyone to re-set their passwords so they will be better protected – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/22/sourceforges-turn-to-reset-passwords-this-time-in-a-good-cause/
Notable Breaches:
- eBay hacked – (slowly) asking users to reset their passwords – http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/ebay-hacked-warns-users-to-change-passwords
Suggested Reading:
- * Some tips from Naked Security for avoid the ever more common Randsome-ware on Android, and what to do if you get caught by it: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/19/android-police-warning-ransomware-how-to-avoid-it-and-what-to-do-if-you-get-caught/
- * Patients Rights group warns that fitness apps are a “privacy nightmare” – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/20/fitness-apps-are-a-privacy-nightmare-shedding-personal-data-to-the-highest-bidder/
- * Ken Shirriff takes apart genuine Apple chargers and counterfeit ones – the differences are shocking (literally) – after reading this I’m glad I alway bought legit chargers! –http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pricey.html
- * For those of you still running Shockwave – an interesting piece by Brian Krebs trying to convince you to stop for your own good – http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/why-you-should-ditch-adobe-shockwave/
- Interesting numbers on which browser’s users are best at patching Flash – http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/the-mad-mad-dash-to-update-flash/
- Apple facing lawsuits over iMessage problems for people changing from an iPhone to a non-Apple phone – http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-already-faces-lawsuit-for-imessage-to-android-text-loss
- Google & Facebook join forces to take down fake tech support scammers – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/14/google-and-facebook-join-forces-to-take-down-fake-tech-support-scammers/
- Facebook extends it’s Bullying Prevention Centre to the UK and Europe – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/22/facebook-introduces-bullying-prevention-centre-for-uk-europe/
- Latest Snowdon revelation – the NSA slip back-doors into US manufactured networking equipment that is sent overseas – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/14/nsa-intercepts-routers-servers-to-slip-in-backdoors-for-overseas-surveillance/ (exactly what they make a big hub hub about claiming the Chinese were doing – can you say hypocrisy!?)
- Chip & PIN may be good, but it’s not perfect (mainly because of poor implementations) – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/20/chip-and-pin-should-be-chip-and-skim-say-cambridge-card-cloners/
- It may be possible to get around Apple’s Activation Lock (at least until Apple fix things) – http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/have-hackers-defeated-the-iphone-kill-switch/
A quick sorbet – “Correlation does not imply Causation”
Spurious Connections is a fun blog graphically illustrating the point that correlation does not at all imply causation – http://www.tylervigen.com/
E.g. ‘Worldwide non-commercial space launches’ correlates with ‘Sociology doctorates awarded in the US’ – http://www.tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=805. I guess that means sociologists launch rockets!
Main Topic
Taming the Terminal Part 18b of n – text is the second half of this blog post: http://www.bartbusschots.ie/blog/?p=3856
That’s going to wind this up for this week, many thanks to our sponsor for helping to pay the bills, Blue Mango Learning at bluemangolearning.com makers of Clarify. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter and app.net @podfeet. Check out the NosillaCast Google Plus Community too – lots of fun over there! If you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.