For me it’s the paranoia surrounding webcams. People outright refuse to own one and I understand, until they go on and on about how they’re being spied. Here’s the secret - unplug the damn thing when you think you won’t use it or haven’t used it in a while.
They, whoever it is, can’t really spy on you on something that’s already off and unplugged!
Password managers. People will use anything but that: paper, notes app (without any security), using the same password everywhere…
Came to say this exact thing.
FFS I have 100’s of passwords saved in my keepass DB, they are all different.
Passwords will only autofill on the correct site, so look alike sites are captured by that simple bit of security.
I keep trying to convince my parents. Then they say but what if I forget the master password? I say they won’t with a passphrase but they don’t believe me.
Also I don’t have experience with PW managers other than 1Password, Bitwarden and Roboform. I personally didn’t like Bitwarden. I think it’s UI is janky and oldschool. Roboform is so bad I don’t even know where to start complaining. So I keep using 1Password even though the UI has been getting worse but it still works for me because of the good integration into the Apple ecosystem. But it’s rather expensive for managing the 20 something passwords my parents have. I read about breaches on other PWMs sometimes so I don’t really know what to trust and recommend.
Eh, I don’t trust any 3rd party enough to give them all my passwords and I don’t trust myself enough to secure a server for self hosting a password manager.
I know all my passwords, can’t forget em, no paper or notes, no repeat passwords.
Keepass. Password database is a local file.
Yes, and personally I use syncthing to sync newest file to all devices when they connect to my home network.
If you know all your passwords and can’t forget them, I’m assuming your using some sort of pattern to remember them in which case you have a major issue in case of data breaches as your other passwords can be guessed.
Just as a heads up, sometimes the pattern is not that easy for computer to brute force. As an example, my old password contains a birth date but with an alternating shift making them a combination of digit and symbol.
The issue is if you are a) targeted, and b)involved in multiple breaches. If they can get the pattern, they potentially get everything.
Is it worth it? That depends. Are you willing to risk it NOT being worth it to a random guy in Africa earning a few $ a day?
Yeah, a fair point
Fucking THANK YOU.
A very good friend of mine doesn’t use any password manager. I’ve often in the past told them why don’t they? They argue that then all their passwords would be gone if they forget that one master password. Okay, I say, how the fuck is having to remember 1 password harder than having to remember 20 passwords?
Rebooting your PC really does fix a lot of issues.
But in Windows, you have to go to a sub-sub-sub-menu of the old control panel, click on a button called “choose what closing the lid does”, then on “change settings that are currently unavailable” and then disable “fast startup (recommended)”, just to get your pc to reboot properly.
Press windows D to go to desktop and press alt F4 until you get the shutdown menu.
Hold shift while you click start and shutdown (or reboot) when necessary. This will have windows do a full shutdown instead of a hybrid shutdown.
Here’s an even easier hack than all of that :effort:
Just hold the power button down for about 10 seconds, ez-pz
I like to call that the “putting a pillow over its face” method of rebooting. Reserved for when even a
shutdown /r /t 0doesn’t work
I call this one forbidden knowledge because I see it so little in public, but I’m sure it’s well known in privacy communities: A password like “I have this really secure password that I type into computers sometimes” is a much stronger and easier to memorize password than “aB69$@m”. It seems more often than not I find networks where the SSID is a better password than the WPA key.
“correct horse battery staple” remains firm in my memory
xkcd #936. Nice.
the SSID is a better password than the WPA key
This is an insult I am definitely saving for later
I agree but I think the problem is that some apps/sites have strict password requirements, which usually includes adding upper-case, symbols, numbers, and then limits the length even sometimes…
At my previous bank the password had to be a 5 digit PIN code…
Sketchy indeed. I’ve seen this as well, and the redeeming thing about it is that you’re locked out after 3 unsuccessful login attempts - so no matter how easy bruteforcing would be, there’s a safety catch dealing with it.
I agree - I do use passphrases in some critical cases which I don’t want to store in a password manager.
However, I believe passphrases are theoretically more susceptible to sophisticated dictionary type attacks, but you can easily mitigate it by using some less-common 1337speak character replacements.
Highly recommend a password manager though - it’s much easier to remember one or two complex master keyring passwords & the random generated passwords will easily satisfy any application’s complexity requirements.
Here’s what I’ve shared with my company.
If you don’t have your files on another physical location you can show me, you don’t have a backup, you don’t own your files, you basically give your “digital life” to someone else.
Likewise, as the old rule goes, if you don’t have a secondary backup, then you don’t have a backup.
Yes, two is one and one is none.
I’ve never heard that expression before.
I like it!
I use raid 0 for backup.
^/s
My RAID5 of 28 disks is ultra safe I tell you
RTFM
An ad blocker, on desktop and phone.
It blocks annoying ads and also protects you against malware (malvertisement).
Disregarding YouTube’s educational side of things. People take YouTube for granted… just use it for entertainment. A lot of DIY projects have been accomplished thanks to DIY videos on YouTube.
I have done stuff by myself they in anybtime before yt would need someone to show me.
Whem car mechanic tells me I have problem on my car I can find yt on how to detect it and how to solve it. I don’t get knowledge to do it, but I can definitely appreciate their work more and not think they are just ripping me off.
It is amazing what we have and take for granted.
I’ve been helping my parents renovate their house recently, and I’m trying to get them to understand this. Just watch a video, it instantly gives you context for commonly agreed upon solutions. You don’t have to reinvent solutions to solved problems.
For example, my mom decided to refinish her cabinets doors. They were painted with one layer of a typical latex house paint you could even still see the original finish in the brush strokes. I sanded the paint and the original varnished finish off the interiors in just a few minutes with an orbital sander.
She decided that because she saw that her aunt use a paint stripper on Facebook, that she should do that. So instead of sanding it down to wood in a few minutes, she’ll coat the doors with stripper, scrape the paint off, clean the caustic paint stripper off, and then sand the varnish/wood at the end anyway. I tried to explain this, and pull up a video showing how messy and overkill the paint strippers were, and she got mad that I played a video.
Meanwhile, my step dad was helping me install quarter round over their baseboards, I showed him 3 options to finish the ends. A simple 90° cut, a standard 45° bevel, and another mitre with a tiny triangle to round over the end. I explained that the mitre looks the nicest, but it takes twice as long to do.
He proceeded to freehand two bevels for half an hour with a dull chipped chisel. They were completely uneven and jagged. Then I explained he had to repeat that work 18 more times in the hallway alone, assuming he was happy with his… handiwork.
They have been trying to finish renovating this house for 20 years. Now I see why it is taking so long.
Even if you don’t use it as a password manager, bitwarden has an excellent pass phrase generator. The only annoyance is when I run into maximum password lengths at times.
The generated password lenghts can be set in the UI at least. It’s worse when the password form accepts only SOME special symbols (looking at you bank)
Majority of “webcam” use is in laptops, tablets and phones, grandpa… No “unplug the damn thing” to be found?
They often come equipped with a privacy slider to cover the lens. Or you can just put a sticker on them.
They don’t “often come with” I’d say it’s fairly rare, and especially in the last generation of computers that most have now.
Also, what you mention are all steps above and beyond OP’s direction to “just unplug it” and they come with compromises - I.e. A shutter cover isn’t a HW disconnect, two very different things. And, a sticker isn’t really removable temporarily when you actually do need the camera deliberately. Certain high end laptops have a purported physical HW disconnect toggle or even some “flip around” cameras that are only deployed when needed, but again, few and far between.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
I feel the same way about webcams. I’m paranoid about them too, but you know what’s an easy solution? Buy a desktop monitor without one and then buy a USB webcam.
If you’re on a laptop, then for the camera just tape a piece of paper over it. As for the internal mic, you might be fucked lol cause I got nothing.
Honestly, just Googling (or DuckDuckGo-ing) things. I tend to be the “tech person” that people ask about their computer problems quite often, and 9/10 times I just copy-paste the error code into the search bar and it tells me what to do. I’m not secret about it either, I’m like you can literally just Google it and it’ll usually work. But people still seem to think it’s magic lol.
My colleague (we work in web dev) will literally sit there staring at an error message but apparently not reading it, and then he’ll open ChatGPT and start asking it what to do. The fucker never even Googles error messages, it’s an absolute nightmare.
People who complain about ads on YouTube. I tell them about ads blockers and they always go “Huh, you sure it works? Sounds good, I might try that” and then proceed to forget about it and complain about ads in a few months time…
I think this happens because people believe that ad blockers are “too good to be true”. That was what I first thought when first getting an ad blocker, that there was going to be some kind of “catch” like slowing down websites, making them less functional or being malicious. But it turns out they actually improve performance, rarely affect functionality and are even recommended by the FBI because they protect against malicious advertising.
I hate the ad blocker argument for youtube. How am i supposed to do that on my tv or my phone?
I literally just use normal Firefox with normal ublock origin on my phone
- invidious
- piped
- some TVs have 3rd party specialized versions of the official webapp
The first two have web pages and phone apps. You can find the phone apps on F-droid.
Fun fact: did you know that the youtube app on your TV is just a no-effort web browser with a URL fixed to a web page, which you could even use on your PC?
Always get the version of the gadget with replaceable batteries unless you want a brick in 3-10 years. Additionally, prefer 18650, AA, AAA batteries, and keep some rechargeable ones around.
Eneloop batteries (the white ones, not the black ones) are the best AA and AAA batteries out there for sure. Panasonic sells a package of Eneloops with a charging device that accepts both AA and AAA batteries, it’s very good. Can be charged via USB and can also charge other devices, it’s the kind of device I dreamed about in the 90s.
I have a webcam that we use when we’re not home for longish periods. It’s unplugged when we’re here. Also, it is connected to my own server, not some corporate cloud crap.
