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Posted on by Roy Richardson Posted in Funny Technology, Podcast, Security, Smart Devices, Tech
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S3E13:Change Your Password, Apple WWDC, and Fastly Tech News Today

Change Your Password, Apple WWDC, and Fastly Tech News TodayChapter 1
Crap Crap Crap, change your passwords now Edition

So it was announced that a compilation of 8.4 billion email and password combinations were released to the wild, meaning your password has probably been leaked for some website. So basically hackers have been collecting password databases they have found and someone put all those databases into one big file and released it to the wild. So odds are really high that some site you use and haven’t visited in a while has been compromised. So change all of your passwords now, okay, actually after you watch subscribe like and comment on this show. Then and only then, go change all your passwords.

https://cybernews.com/security/rockyou2021-alltime-largest-password-compilation-leaked/

Change all of your passwords now, okay, actually after you watch subscribe like and comment on this show. Then and only then, go change all your passwords.

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

So let’s cover my rules for passwords:
Never ever ever ever use the same password on more than one site. Example, your bank password should never be reused with your Starbucks password. Just saying.

Your password should be a royal pain in the butt to type. Seriously. It should contain a mix of letters both uppercase and lowercase, numbers and special characters. By the way, spaces are special characters. If you are insane, you can use unicode characters to really make hackers pull their hair out. I don’t recommend this as it is not happy fun times.
Your passwords should be as long as you possibly can make them but some websites suck and are stuck at 8 characters which is a short enough password my eleven year old could crack it and laugh in your face while doing it.
Never visit any site that doesn’t use https. Even if it is your grandma’s recipe website. Have her go to Let’s Encrypt and get an SSL cert. Seriously.
Use two factor authentication. Or Multifactor authentication. This is a complicated topic that could use its own How-To so for now, we will let you slide if you use the two factor that sends you a text message. But if you are dealing with something really confidential, I suggest using Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator or an app like Authenticator+. If you are really paranoid, then I suggest getting Google Titan or YubiKey which is a USB dongle that has to be plugged into any device to allow you to use a hardware key to certify your login.
Lastly you need a password manager. I don’t know about you but I have over a thousand usernames and passwords I have to keep up with. I have used Keepass in the past and that is a great program. I use a cloud drive and a very complex password to backup my password database so I can use the same app on mobile, PC and Mac. This is not a user-friendly way to do things. Because of my paranoia and because if I were to get hit by a bus my wife wouldn’t have access to a lot of stuff, I have moved to 1Password. I consider this the best product for keeping passwords that are private and passwords my family needs. You have to teach your family to have complex master passwords though to protect the vaults.

Chapter 2
Apple WWDC 2021 Announcements

So WWDC is Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference where they announce all of the cool stuff Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory has been dreaming up for your phone, iPads, Watches, and Macs. Basically what changes they are making to software that runs Apple devices and how developers out to get use to it already. Sometimes they sneak in a device but not this time. Too soon after the iMacs were released. Speaking of iMacs and Macs in general, you really should watch my video review about the M1 Mac Mini. I lost my mind and if you are patient enough to watch the really short video to the end, you get to see an unboxing video gone wrong. Seriously and maybe a YouTuber on edge. After this video go and watch it. Seriously I had a lot of fun making it and I hope you will have a lot of fun watching.

Bonus points if you subscribe and comment after you watch it. I really want to hear what you think about it.

So the fun stuff, Facetime for Android. What!?! Okay, sort of but not really but yes really. Apple realizing that the rest of the world was sort of missing out on the whole Facetime thing and Zoom and Google Meets and even Microsoft Teams were agnostic as far as OSes, Apple did the next best thing and said, okay soon when iOS 15 comes out for iPhone and Monterey comes out for Macs, Facetime will allow Apple users to send a link to other non-Apple focus to join Facetime via a browser and the Apple user will have to approve each user as they attempt to join. Kind of like Teams and Zoom do now. Not as good as an iMessage app for the rest of us but a good start. Oh and Facetime is going to get video and music sharing so you can watch your favorite videos with friends.

iCloud will get cooler. So if you have an iCloud subscription you will get new features. First you will be able to use a burner email address so you don’t have to use your real email address when you know the company or person you are emailing is probably just going to spam you anyway but you really wanted to get that free eBook or enter that contest. So you will get temporary email addresses to send with so you can protect your identity a little more. Next, Apple is going to offer a VPN (virtual private network) called Private Relay. It isn’t completely like VPN but it will secure you when you are using your wifi in public places by routing all your traffic through some relays to prevent others from snooping on your traffic. You will almost feel better checking your bank account while on wifi at Starbucks but I still say you just shouldn’t. Seriously. And if you are among the small few who have given HomeKit a try, their version of Smart Home devices, if you have at least 200GB of iCloud storage, you can store all of your video from your security cameras that support HomeKit in the cloud.

Chapter 3
Fastly
Why couldn’t I get to some of my favorite sites today?

https://www.wired.com/story/fastly-cdn-internet-outages-2021/

So while most of us were sleeping this morning in the US, a company named Fastly was having issues and it was affecting things all over the world. For example, you couldn’t get to the United Kingdom’s Government home page. Or if you are a Reddit fan, you probably couldn’t get to a lot of stuff there either this morning, the NY Times, Wired Magazine and even Spotify.

Today’s word of the day is CDN (acronym for content delivery network). Basically think of it as a collection of servers all over the place that store images and other data websites server up. It is an attempt to make sure their websites seem fast as that picture of Kim Kardashian that you just clicked on came from a server 500 miles away instead of 5,000 miles away. Basically it is an attempt to make sure the content you download is closer to where you are so that websites seem fast. It does this through load balancing, caching, and DNS tricks as well as locating servers all over the world.

Two other major CDNs you may have heard of are Cloudflare and Akamai. If any of those puppies are down, the Internet sucks a little more. It was Fastly’s turn today and a technical glitch that has yet to make the press as I am talking about it caused a kerfuffle, which is a word I always wanted to use in a sentence.

Here is the live version of the Podcast if you want to watch what happened (recorded now)
https://youtu.be/-wbdRDUKVKs

The Bonus Chapter

And now for a new segment I am going to call Stupid Smart Assistant tricks. Tonight Alexa dazzles us with her knowledge of pop culture.

It all started when Google gave me a free Google Mini. Wait?!? So now I can ask Google anything in any room of the house without my phone? I was excited. But then I wanted to know what else I could do with it.

Alexa, can you tell me a “yo mama” joke?
Alexa, what happens if you step on a Lego?
Alexa, do aliens exist?
Alexa, I’ve got 99 problems.
Alexa, how was your day?
Alexa, how high can you count?
Alexa, what is the value of pi?
Alexa, what do you think about Cortana?
Alexa, is your refrigerator running?
Alexa, why is six afraid of seven?
Alexa, do you have any pets?
Alexa, do you believe in ghosts?
Alexa, are you blue?
Alexa, I like big butts.
Alexa, why did the chicken cross the road?
Alexa, how much do you weigh?
Alexa, can you give me some money?
Alexa, my name is Inigo Montoya.
Alexa, do you know Siri?
Alexa, I am your father.
Alexa, do you know the muffin man?
Alexa, how old are you?
Alexa, testing 1, 2, 3.
Alexa, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Alexa, are we in the Matrix?
Alexa, surely you can’t be serious?
Alexa, where is Chuck Norris?
Alexa, do you like pizza?
Alexa, are you married?
Alexa, can you sing in autotune?
Alexa, do you love me?
Alexa, give me a kiss.
Alexa, make me a sandwich.
Alexa, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Alexa, what’s your favorite color?
Alexa, will you marry me?
Alexa, can you tell me a Star Wars joke?
Alexa, can you talk like Yoda?
Alexa, can you rap?
Alexa, who is on first?
Alexa, winter is coming.
Alexa, beam me up.

I hope you enjoyed the show.

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Posted on by Roy Richardson Posted in Funny Technology, Podcast, Security, Smart Devices, Tech
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S3E11:Google Photos Unlimited is GONE

Google Photos Unlimited Is GoneS3E11 Google Photos Unlimited is dying. These are the show notes for the podcast. They are not word for word what the podcast contains but I try to keep them pretty close. 

Chapter 1

Starting June 1st, Google Photos Unlimited option is gone. If you are like me, you have been using Google Photos to backup your photos on all of your devices (yes it works on iPhone and iPad as well as any PC/Mac or Android device. But the feature is going away and Google is going to rename its High Quality storage feature (which basically compressed and downscaled your images) to “Storage Saver”. In case you didn’t know you get 15 gig total storage with Google. That means your Gmail, your Google Docs, and your Google Photos only have a grand total of 15 gig. So if you get lots of big attachments in your email, you may be eating up all of your storage.

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You can go to this link to see what your storage situation looks like:

https://one.google.com/storage

So everything you have uploaded before June 1st is your freebie but after June 1st, everything you upload counts toward that 15 gig limit. So you will have to decide “do I want to upload in Original Quality (meaning full size) or Storage Saver?”, which is compressed and downscaled. 

Now if you love Google Photos like I do, maybe you want to buy storage from Google.

You can buy 100 gig for $1.99 a month or $20.00 a year and that is probably the best deal for most folks. You can by 200 gig for $2.99/month or $29.99 a year or you can be insane like me and pay $9.99/month or $99 a year for 2TB. And you can share any of these storage tiers with your family and they can backup their computers and their devices to it. 

If you are an Apple family, then you may want to look at iCloud (which only works okay on Windows and isn’t an option for Android) but if everything is all Apple in your house, then iCloud is probably your best bet. You can do 50 gigs for $0.99/month, 200 gigs for $2.99/month and 2TB for $29.90/ month. Ironically iCloud is hosted on Google cloud. Just saying.

Lastly the next option is Microsoft OneDrive assuming you need Microsoft Office. For $99/year subscription with O365 you get 5 accounts each with 1TB of storage and the Full Microsoft Office Suite for your Macs, PCs, Android and iOS devices. OneDrive does not work awesome on Mac but it is good on iPhone and iPad. At least you can just keep snapping pictures and they will be backed up full size. Though you have to open the app for it to backup. iCloud doesn’t have that issue. Google Photos on iPhone/iPad also has to be open to actively backup to your Google cloud. A drawback for sure. You can tell iPhone to default all your photos to Google Photos though and it is easy to work with as you spend a lot more time in the app.

Do you need to stop using Google Photos if you don’t buy in, maybe no. Depends on you and your photo style. Do you need original size images and you take a lot of images? Then the free tier simply won’t do.  But if you don’t take a lot of pictures or if you are mostly happy with Storage Saver versions of your photos, you can get by for a bit. And Google has many great features that are too much to mention in this video and not bore you to tears.

One more option is Amazon Photos. Already an Amazon Prime member, then Amazon Photos offers unlimited photo storage but only 5 Gig of video storage. One of my YouTube videos is 5 gig, so for me that doesn’t work but what if I told you I back up to four cloud services? 

I use iCloud 50 gig tier for $12 a year, Amazon Photos because I am already a prime member, Google Drive as I buy 2TB from them to store nearly everything, and lastly I have Microsoft O365 subscription which gives me 1TB of storage per member of my family. I also backup to an external hard drive. Paranoid often? Maybe. 

https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/05/22/maybe-you-shouldnt-look-for-a-google-photos-alternative/

https://one.google.com/about/plans

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238

And now Chapter 2

So Google IO, their big product announcement conference and developer fest was last week. As I said last week I would talk about the big announcements. I am such a huge Google Fanboy, but um, well, Google is getting boring. No, seriously. 

So they announce Workspaces which integrate their disjointed products such a Gmail, Meet, and their Office Suite better. 

Google gave up on their WearOS and are merging their effort with Samsung’s Tizen OS to try and create a better Android watch experience. This means Samsung and Fitbit and Fossil will all be using the same OS and they will have to find ways to make their watches different from each other while running the same OS. This was the challenge before but with Samsung secret sauce thrown in, what will Google do with Fitbit. I love Fitbit and one day I will tell you why I no longer Fitbit. 

Google and everybody else is working on their way of making video meetings more 3D by creating 3D models of the person you are talking to so it seems they are right in front of you. 

Next Google will make a way for you to animate still photos, think the crazy nostalgia stuff from the Ancestry sites that make deep fakes of famous people in still photos. Creepy.

Actually the coolest product they announced is that Chrome’s built in password manager will help you change compromised passwords right inside the password manager. I do think that is cool. They announced other stuff, a new Pixel phone, Pixel buds, yada yada yada. Google, you have gotten boring to me. Do something amazing already. Odds are something is baking in their labs that should scare the heck out of us and they will announce it at a later date.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/18/22435419/google-io-2021-event-recap-biggest-announcements-pixel-android-12-wear-os-workspace

Chapter 3

This is a short chapter. Apple Vs Epic. The trial is over and in the coming months a verdict will be announced. When that happens, things will get interesting in the Apple App store. Will Apple win or Epic, I think it will be unfavorable for both. If the judge rules against Apple, Google will get its own lawsuits as well, it basically does the same thing as Apple, just not as well. If Epic loses, then consumers’ fates are sealed and we will choose yet not really have a choice, we will have the illusion of choice. 

Chapter 4

From the Not soon enough machine, Microsoft has announced the end of Internet Explorer. If you install the latest builds of Windows 10, Internet Explorer 11 is not a part of it. You can still go and download it (if you must) but it isn’t on there by default. In fact in June of 2022, it will be dead, end of support. Go Download Microsoft Edge. Seriously. It works on nearly every platform and it is using the same browser engine as Google Chrome and Microsoft has added some features Google has added yet to theirs. I am not a Microsoft fan but I have to give Microsoft credit, Edge isn’t too bad. Though on my Mac I have resorted to using Safari again after all these years of only Chrome and sometimes Firefox. 

And that is it for this week. Here is a brain teaser. What if Netflix goes into the video game streaming business? That and all the tech news that is worth talking about on next week’s show. 

Friends Reunion May 27

Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. 

When is doubt, reboot. 

Here is a link to the YouTube Live version of the Podcast

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