TEH 058: Relatively Normal to Aggressive Usage

In This Episode: Using a password vault is not enough: you need something else too…. How Randy was convinced to upgrade his computer from Win 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro. Hard drive (the spinning kind’s) reliability. That’s right: USB cables can be weaponized. AT&T sued for saying its phones are “5G” now.

This Week’s Hosts

• Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True. and
• Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!
• Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.
• Longer Bios on the Hosts page.

Show Notes

• In the warmup, Leo has set the date for the 2019 Pacific Northwest Corgi Picnic (and video and photos from last year); no word on when or where Kevin’s Pacific Northwest Pug Picnic will be held. Leo and Randy are dealing with snow, and Kevin has been reading Julia Evans’ command-line zines
• Leo wants more people to use Google’s Password checkup extension to Chrome. Yes, it’s safe to use, and it’s needed even if you use a password vault like Lastpass — we talk about why. The discussion was interrupted by a power failure at Leo’s, even though he has backup power supplies….
• Much to Leo’s surprise, ZDnet has convinced Randy to upgrade to Windows 10 due to this article by David Gewirtz (and we discuss why).
• Kevin dug into BackBlaze’s annual hard drive failure report, and looked up Cult of Mac’s thoughts on it, as well as PC Gamer’s take. Bottom line: hard drives are getting bigger and better.
• While the described use is malicious, Leo finds the tech behind this weaponized USB cable (that’s right: USB cables can be weaponized!) fascinating. The implications are simply that you have to be careful to get USB devices only from trustworthy sources.
• Randy is pleased that AT&T has been sued by Sprint for saying its phones have “5G” access (says Android Police). They don’t meet the actual standard, set last June. That led to a discussion about wireless standards in general.
• Last, we apologized profusely that last week’s episode came in at exactly 1 hour, despite our very best intentions!