Listen to the Podcast
31 July 2020 - Podcast #704 - (19:57)
It's Like NPR on the Web
If you find the information TechByter Worldwide provides useful or interesting, please consider a contribution.
If you find the information TechByter Worldwide provides useful or interesting, please consider a contribution.
A strong password helps to keep your information private and out of the hands of scammers, but it takes only one single error to hand that private information to crooks. Setting up two-factor authentication is the easiest way to add a layer of protection. It's also not as inconvenient as you may think.
Google, Microsoft, LastPass, and others offer two-factor authentication services and most of them are free or are included with other services you may already be paying for.
The main point of two-factor authentication is to make it impossible for a crook to gain access to your account even if your user name and password have been compromised. Three primary factors exist that can be used for authentication:
Using any two of the factors greatly increases security. Many people objected to using text messages because of the perceived delay in being able to log in even though the delay is rarely more than a few seconds. Using an authenticator application on a smart phone reduces the delay to near zero because there's no need to wait for a service to send a one-time PIN. The app is updated constantly for each account where you've enabled two-factor authentication.
The Google Authenticator has been around for a while, and it works on both Android and IOS devices. For many users, it's the best and easiest choice. The app is free from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
Click any of the small images for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.
After installing the app, which takes only a few seconds, setting it up to work with a site is easy. Take MailChimp, for example. After logging in to the account, I navigated to the account security section and selected the option to set up two-factor authentication.
MailChimp displayed a QR code and a code that I could use if my phone had a problem with the QR code. It also provided a backup code that I was told to store securely so that I could use it to access the account if my phone went missing.
So, I scanned the QR code with Google Authenticator on the phone and the Authenticator app returned a six-digit one-time password that I had to give MailChimp to confirm that I was who I said I was.
I set up the Google Authenticator for several other accounts. Now, when I log in to MailChimp, I'm asked for my user name, password, and the six-digit code Authenticator provides. The code changes every 30 seconds and each code is unique to a specific service. The Authenticator app shows (A) the name of the service, (B) the one-time code, and (C) a visual indicator that shows how long it will be before the code changes. Most authentication apps won't allow screen shots, so I had to use a camera to photograph the screen.
Facebook is another target that thieves like to attack and setting up two-factor authentication is easy there, too.
After logging into Facebook on a desktop system, click the down-pointing arrow at the right of the notification and help icons. Click Settings from the drop-down menu, and then click "Security and login". Click "Use Two-Factor Authentication" and then use the instructions Facebook provides to finish the job.
If you're using the Facebook app on a mobile device, tap the Menu icon (three horizontal lines sometimes referred to as the "hamburger icon"), scroll to "Settings & Privacy" and click it, tap Settings, then tap "Security and Login". Follow the instructions to set up two-factor authentication.
Setting up two-factor authentication is easy for most services, but there are differences. That's one good reason for considering Authy instead. It's also free and there's a tutorial for more than 60 online services.
Microsoft, for example, has its own authenticator service and if you try to set up two-factor authentication on your Microsoft account, you'll be offered the Microsoft authenticator in a way that's reminiscent of a magician who's attempting to force a card into the hands of the volunteer from the audience. "Take any card!" the magician says while making sure that you take the card you're supposed to take. Authy explains clearly how to get past this step.
Because Authy's website lists more than five dozen services, you also might decide to set up two-factor authentication for all of the sites and services you use. It takes surprisingly little time to do this. Then you'll get a pleasant surprise: If you want to install Authy on more than one device, you can.
You probably don't have more than one smart phone, but you probably do have one or more desktop or notebook computers and maybe an Apple or Android tablet. Authy can be set up on all of them. The hidden advantage there is that when you buy a new phone, you don't have to re-authorize every site; just install Authy and, as long as your phone number hasn't changed, you'll be up and running in seconds.
After enabling two-factor authentication, you may receive a notification from the website or service to confirm that you made the change. In most cases, you need to do nothing to confirm the change.
Also, many operations allow you to skip two-factor authentication if you have logged on from a trusted computer. If you select that option, you won't be asked for confirmation when you use the same browser from the same computer. Depending on the site's security policies, the exemption might be good forever or for only a specified period. This exemption is accomplished by setting a cookie on the computer, so using an application that removes browser cookies will also remove the exemption and you'll be asked for a validation code the next time you log on.
It's all about keeping your data, your photos, and your money safely out of the reach of crooks. So if you've put off setting up two-factor authentication, maybe now's a good time to do it.
Remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and the scarecrow encountered the tin woodman? "Oil can!" he said, "Oil can!!!" and Dorothy wondered "Oil can what?" That might have been the best joke of 1939, playing on confusion about can as a verb (oil can do something or other) and can as a noun (the can is full of oil). Maybe somebody at Adobe thought of that when they named the mobile app PaintCan, but I'm not going to say "PaintCan what?" At least I'm not going to say it again.
Last week I summarized some of the changes to Adobe's big applications. This week PaintCan and some of the other mobile apps earn a nod. PaintCan isn't exactly new. In fact, Adobe released it in 2015, but only for the Ipad. Now it's available for the Iphone, but still not for Android devices. Bummer!
Adobe has several drawing, painting, and image applications for portable devices, so we'll take a look at two of them.
Click any of the small images for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.
Let's start with PaintCan, which is a lot of fun. I'd like to see it come to Android devices, but for now it's just for Ipad and Iphone. I had a snapshot of Chloe Cat sitting on the bed.
< The resulting painterly image eliminates the cluttered background with impressionistic strokes.
When a photo is imported into PaintCan, it will appear to be faded. That's because the app has placed the electronic equivalent of tracing paper on top of the image. As you're working on the image, you can temporarily lift the tracing paper by tapping the Peek button or hide the background image by tapping the Hide button.
This is a photo I took at The Wilds, a place I'm looking forward to being able to visit again when (if) we manage to beat the Coronavirus pandemic.. The giraffe was curious about whether we might have brought any lettuce with us. In fact we had and it proved to be a big hit.
PaintCan's default settings place a white frame around the image and include a tag line that says "Created with Adobe PaintCan." Both of these options can be turned off if you don't like them. Zooming in tells the application to create finer brush strokes and some of the presets automatically zoom in. I didn't care for that option, so I turned it off. I have to remember to zoom manually, but this also reminds me to think about what I'm doing.
I used a slightly different approach with a photo of a Sichuan Takin, an animal that inhabits the same dense bamboo forests as the better known giant panda. They are somewhat like a cross between a goat and an antelope. China gives these animals legal protection, but they are endangered by poaching and habitat destruction. The Wilds specializes in protecting endangered animals.
The PaintCan application is free, but currently limited to Apple devices.
Gobi is our favorite camel at The Wilds, so of course I had to try one of his photos in PaintCan. Adobe's tag line for the app is With PaintCan, anybody can paint. There are no instructions, so learning how to use it simply involves using it. The key is to determine where to increase or decrease brush detail, and which brush styles work best together. Zoom out for coarse, broad brush strokes; zoom in to add detail. On the Ipad, PaintCan offers both presents and manual settings. Just don't expect to be able to choose colors. The app selects colors automatically, and the decision is based on colors in the image. Adobe's intent was to give even inexperienced users "the easiest, quickest, and most successful painting experiences possible."
Adobe Fresco is a free app that offers more features for Creative Cloud subscribers. It's intended for people who really do know how to paint. Because that's the case and because I don't have a clue how to paint my examples would be lame. The examples you see here have been created by people with real artistic talent.
Designed for use with devices that can work with a stylus, Fresco also can be used with just a finger. It includes both vector and raster brushes and a variety of what Adobe calls "live brushes" to create a natural-media experience. Unlike PaintCan, Fresco is intended for those who know how to draw and paint or who want to learn.
Adobe provides instructional videos and that's where these images came from. One brief video provides an overview of the creation of a bottle.
The application includes a wide variety of watercolor brushes that blend adjacent colors in a way that the user controls. In other words, you decide how wet the brushes are.
Additional brushes are available for download. Some are free and others are not. The interface is surprisingly easy to figure out, even for somebody like me who has never done any painting and generally can't draw a straight line without a ruler.
If you're interested in learning how to paint or if you already know how to paint and wonder how the experience translates to electronic media, the free version of Fresco will get you started. Fresco isn't included in the $10/month Adobe Photography plan, so subscribing to the Fresco premium plan will cost $10 per month for just the one application. Those who have a full Creative Cloud subscription will find that all of the photography applications, Fresco, InDesign, Illustrator, Audition, and Adobe's many motion picture and video apps are all in the $50/month plan.
I spend a lot of time yammering about how most fraudulent messages are easy to spot, yet admitting that it's easy to have a momentary lapse that results in clicking a bad link and ruining the rest of your day, or maybe the rest of your week. Or even longer. I was seconds away from doing something like that on a Tuesday afternoon this month.
Let me set the stage for you: It was after 5pm, hot inside and hotter outside, and I was tired. A Facebook Messenger message popped up from someone I know. It had only a video link and the words "I looks like you." Not "It looks like you" or "This looks like you"; just the illogical and ungrammatical "I looks like you." The person whose account was used to send the message is an editor. To the best of my knowledge, we have never met in person. That means she doesn't really know what I look like. That's clue one. Because she's an editor, she wouldn't have written "I looks like you." Clue two.
So I typed a reply: "I'm cautious about videos with no message," I wrote. "What is this please?" There was no immediate reply. No reply two minutes later. No reply in five minutes. That's clue three and it was a deciding factor. If my acquaintance had sent the video, she would have been at the computer and would have seen my nearly instantaneous reply. She would have responded either with an explanation of what the video was or a denial that she had sent it.
This is one of those examples where someone's account actually has been taken over — hacked, if you will — by bad guys. I visited her Facebook profile and left a message with the bad news. Two other acquaintances had already been there and had already left similar messages. This wasn't a case of an account being cloned because I hadn't received or accepted a new friend request from her.
So I missed a potential disaster by about two seconds — the amount of time required to take a second look at a link and decide that something just doesn't look right.
How big a surprise is it that crooks are using the pandemic to make money? Probably not very. The US Federal Trade Commission has confirmed that crooks have raked in more than $90 million through Covid-19 scams just in the United States.
The average loss to crooks is more than $260.
Sites like covid-19designermasks.com, respiratorfacemasks.com, quarantinerelease.com, and pandemic-covid.com might all look legitimate, but ProPrivacy names those sites and lots of others as sources of scams. The organization has analyzed some 600,000 Covid-related sites and found more than 125,000 threats.
To check a specific site before visiting it, submit the URL to ProPrivacy's research site. The site also provides access to information about all of the sites they've identified as being dangerous. PPE, testing, and stimulus related scams have been the most popular for malicious domains.
The usual cautions apply:
Among the wide-ranging activities adversely affected by Covid-19 are the information technology departments in organizations of all sizes, and IT procurement managers can experience delays and increase in prices of IT hardware like PC, smart phones/tablets, network hardware, server and storage due to supply shortages.
According to Beroe Analysis, global IT spending is expected to shrink by 2.7% this year as enterprises have to put their plans on hold due to the pandemic, according to Beroe Inc, a procurement intelligence firm. Spending on devices segment including tablets, PCs, smart phones, and peripherals is expected to fall to 8.8% in FY2020.
The global PC sales has declined by 12.3% year over year, reaching 51.6 million units during Q1 2020 due to the COVID-19 and eventually following production decline in China. Asia Pacific region witnessed the steepest decline of 27.1% year over year during the period. Server production has stalled owing to the impact of COVID in China. Vietnam is being considered as a preferred location away from China, followed by Mexico and India for manufacturing, however Vietnam does not have the required manpower nor existing infrastructure to support high capacities supported by China.
In July of 2000, I was impressed by Sabre's updates. Travel agents (remember them?) used Sabre to book flights and the company was adding a new division to offer booking of limousine and other ground transportation services.
At the time, booking ground transportation was difficult for travel agents. The goal of the new service was to change that, and I quoted Sabre senior vice president Scott Alvis who said that many corporate clients require agencies to book ground transportation. It's been cumbersome, inefficient, and expensive for the agents, but soon agents would be able to book ground services in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other major cities.