Way back in 2012 LinkedIn had a breach and an unspecified amount of information was stolen.
From Vice
Both Peace and the one of the people behind LeakedSource said that there are 167 million accounts in the hacked database. Of those, around 117 million have both emails and encrypted passwords.
And later…
LeakedSource provided Motherboard with a sample of almost one million credentials, which included email addresses, hashed passwords, and the corresponding hacked passwords.
I previously linked to ProtonMail back in March. I’ve been using it sparingly for the past couple of months and the service is proving to be a dependable and convenient tool for secure email.
ProtonMail requires two layers of login to access the mailbox. First the account login and then the mailbox decryption. This is true of the iOS app and the web application. Without the mailbox encryption key there’s no way to get access to existing messages.
As of today, Smile Software has softened their stance on the new subscription version of TextExpander. If you are an existing user, they cut the price in half of the new TextExpander. I’d have nothing to say if this was all about pricing.1 TextExpander was something I used a lot and was definitely worth the price.
The previous versions of TextExpander are returning to the App Store according to Smile:
I installed the DSM 6 release candidate several weeks ago. As usual, it’s a great update for the Synology NAS. The most notable improvements over DSM 5 for me is the file indexing. Now it’s available as a final release for owners of many Synology NAS boxes.1
From the Mac Finder I can now do a spotlight search on 7 TB of data within a few seconds.
Not to mention, some of the contents of text files are also indexed by DSM 6.
ProtonMail is a secure email service and app with end-to-end message encryption. I’m not using it but I think security is rapidly becoming a business model. I expect to see the government versus citizen arms race to generate a lot of new commercial options.
Even if you’re not important or scummy secure messages are valuable.1 I’m always frustrated when dealing with attorneys or accountants. They rarely have a secure file transfer service.
I found this article to be a good summary of what’s going on with the FBI and their inept bungling. If true, it’d be pretty funny that Issa was more technically savy than the FBI.
But even with all of this, it’s still dependent on human frailty:
More importantly, this technique wouldn’t work at all had Farook used a complex alphanumeric passcode. The weak link in all of this has been Farook and his poor choice of security.
From Apple:
We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.
This latest beta sounds pretty great.
Content Search You can now use Mac Finder to quickly search the content of indexed files within mounted folders on your Synology NAS.
Even the little bits are huge improvements. Like this little note about synchronizing with Google Drive:
You can now convert Google Docs to Microsoft Office or jpeg formats in download-only tasks to keep an offline backup copy.
I love this little computer more every year.
Little Snitch for the Mac is both great and terrible. It’s great because I know exactly what apps are doing with my network. It’s terrible because there are a lot of legitimate processes making calls home that freak me out. For example, the “apsd” process started showing traffic in Little Snitch. I decided to temporarily allow it while I investigated further.
I could just block everything, but setting blanket rules in Little Snitch can cause frustratingly complex problems.
In the beginning we had islands of data. What was on our computer stayed on our computer. What was on our Treo stayed on its chubby little atoll. Then we had SD cards and USB drives to float between islands. Eventually we got Dropbox syncing and it felt like the future. Every document I wanted was available to me on any computer with an Internet connection. Fast forward and it’s started to feel like we settled a little too soon.
