In This Episode: Cutting the cable/satellite cord. Amazon plagiarism and Createspace hacking. Alexa light switches, Cribbage, and TaskRabbit (oh my!) Alert sirens are too hackable. Another free DNS service. Breaking into iPhones.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:02:55 — 28.8MB)
This Week’s Hosts
- Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!
- Gary Rosenzweig host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.
- Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.
- Longer Bios on the Hosts page.
Show Notes
- Kevin talked about switching from DirecTV to YouTube TV and we all joined in to say some good and bad things about DirecTV and about cutting the cord.
- Kevin also mentioned how he found a plagiarized book on Amazon and how this problem could be widespread.
- Leo talked about getting his first Alexa-controlled light switch.
- Gary mentioned his Cribbage app beta and the problem CreateSpace may be having with hacked accounts.
- For breach of the week, we talked about TaskRabbit. Then Kevin mentioned how easy it turns out to be to hack city alarm sirens.
- Kevin also brought up the Cloudflare DNS service.
- Gary finished the episode talking about the GrayKey box that allows law enforcement agencies to break passcodes on iPhones.
You discussed the Cloudflare DNS and the many things the IP address (1.1.1.1) has been used for. I stayed at a timeshare/hotel in Cabo this winter. During the time we stayed at the timeshare I used the wifi local to that part of the property. We stayed at the hotel for a couple days before leaving (airline screwup). The wifi there was different, but I was unable to switch to the hotel system. Forgetting the network in iOS preferences, even resetting the network setting on my iPhone didn’t work. I was told to enter 1.1.1.1 in Safari on my iPhone. That disconnected me from the timeshare wifi and allowed the sign in page to come up on the hotel system.
Maybe you found out already, my YouTube TV offers “the walking dead” and offers me 6 season 8 eps, though I’ve never watched or recorded it.
YouTube TV excels with its “infinite dvr” feature, and with the way it handles sports by recording teams, rather than programs — no need to figure what channel carries the game.
Speaking of streaming DVRs, what I really want is a way to download shows to a “DVR” at whatever speed I want — if it takes an hour to DL a half-hour show, so what? SO THAT I can watch it without any “buffering” later. It would be fantastic for those with slow Internet speeds to get a good watching experience.
You mention GreyKey box for law enforcement being able to get into locked iPhones. It’s too bad Apple doesn’t have a way to get into locked iPads where the owner gets locked out and can’t get in because they have forgotten their own password…or, in a case I know of, they lent it to someone else to use and when they got it back couldn’t get into it, because that person has forgot the password they used. They now have an iPad that is totally unusable.
Gilah: The problem with that is that for Apple to be able to get into locked iPhones and iPads, they need a tool that will circumvent the password protection. This is what has been called a “backdoor” in the news. The problem with backdoors is that they are valuable targets for hackers who will devote tons of time and resources to getting access to this backdoor and then sharing it. Then, no one’s iPhone or iPad is safe because it becomes easy for anyone to break into your iPhone and iPad. That’s not to mention that governments could force Apple, through legal means, to unlock iPhones and iPads using their backdoor, which many people would not like and many companies would then not consider the iPhone a device secure enough to use. Even if you trust your own government, chances are there are other governments that don’t live up to your standards of privacy and individual freedom, right?
Plus, it is not at all true that an iPad with a forgotten passcode is totally unusable. You can erase it and reset the device. This doesn’t mean starting over either if you have backed up your device, or are simply using cloud services for everything. For instance, on my iPhone if I were to forget the passcode now, I could reset it, then sign in to my Apple ID and iCloud and all of my files, settings, and information would be restored. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204306