A Message From Dru

C h - c h - c h - c h a n g e s : Interesting goings on here at Mac Help Desk—

1st - Effect ive Monday March 2nd our hours will change for the first time in eight years. Our new hours will be Monday — Friday 8:30 am to 5:30 pm. We will now be closed on Saturday and Sunday. [And Friday’s closings will be variable to allow me sufficient time to prepare for the Sabbath (which is sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday night, for us Yid kids)]

•2nd - We’re moving! Well not immediately, but soon. About June 1st I suspect. But don’t

panic, we’re just moving around the corner. I’ll keep y’all posted

•We currently have two phone numbers and they will remain the same - 972-783-9787 for the landline when I’m in the office; and 214-336-7162 for the cell phone when I’m not.

Let me remind y’all, once again, that when you call: 1) Please let me know whose calling by speaking your first and last name. I know it might be strange to you but I have more than one Susan, Jane, Bob, Roger, etc. as client/friends; and 2) if you want me to return your call, you MUST leave me a voicemail; and 3) I don’t have caller ID on my office phone <sigh>.

•I always return messages that same way you send them to me. If you call me, I’ll call you back. Email → email. Text →text. Snail mail →snail mail.

•••••Let me again remind y’all, that the Apple Corps of Dallas (ACD) is the oldest Mac User group in the country. We meet on the 2nd Saturday of each month at the Richardson Civic Center [Hwy 75 & Arapaho]. The main meeting starts at 10 am and there are Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings at 9 am and 11:30 am. This is a free event and is kid safe. See more here : www.acd.us

•••••Now is the time to start planning (and booking) those spring parties. The new, reformatted LoveSong band (www.lovesongband.com) is available for private parties, corporate events, pool parties, you name it. The price is so low, I can’t even mention it here. Let’s just say we can be had for almost a song.

So take a few moments of your busy day to listen to the band at http://alturl.com/eq9mq

Let the songs whisper to you and your guests about passion, romance, and love. Then call Dru at 972•783-9790 to schedule the music for the event you’ve always dreamed about.

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INDEX

Page 2For Your Information“4 Safari plug-ins”

Page 3NEWSLINE

Page 4Ask the Tech

Page 5Opinion

Page 6Product Review

“DiskWarrior 5”

Page 7Hints & Tips

Page 8 Comments

Page 9‘One More Thing...’

MacFactsM a c H e l p D e s k , I n c

a Macintosh Solutions Provider•S u p p o r t , S a l e s , T r a i n i n g , & S e r v i c e

(972) 783-9787 • (214) 336-7162 (Cell)e-mail address - support@machelpdesk.com

Web site - http://www.machelpdesk.com

4 Safari plug-ins for a better browsing experience

One thing I hate when I’m browsing the web is being distracted. I hate those blinking, moving ads, auto-play videos, and all the other cruft that websites use to try to get you to click, click, click somewhere, rather than read the article that attracted you in the first place.

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid the most egregious annoyances on the web. Some of them can be easily muted using browser plug-ins, like the four that I use with Safari to make my browsing experience a lot better. (Note: some of these plug-ins also have equivalents for other browsers, such as Firefox and Chrome.)

ClickToPluginOne of the worst offenders on the web annoyance hitlist is Flash animations. They can take the form of videos on YouTube and other sites (though YouTube recently made the default video format HTML5), or those moving ads you often see on websites. There’s nothing more distracting when you’re trying to read an article than something that moves, and that’s the whole point of these ads. They need to attract your attention.

The free ClickToPlugin extension blocks every item on a website that uses a plug-in, swapping them out placeholders.

The ClickToPlugin plug-in replaces any items on a website that use plug-ins with placeholders.

W h e n y o u s e e o n e o f t h e s e placeholders, it shows you which plug-in is used. You can click it to load the item, or just ignore it. There’s also a Flash-specific version of the extension, ClickToFlash, if you only want to block F lash an imat ions, but the fu l l ClickToPlugin is more useful because it blocks all multimedia animations.

Both plug-ins have a number of settings allowing you to whitelist sites where you want plug-ins to load, and ClickToPlugin lets you choose specific plug-ins that will always load. This can be useful if your work involves the use of certain plug-ins.

AdBlockWhile Flash is a scourge, ads in general can be a major annoyance. The donation-ware AdBlock scours your websites, making them much more readable. It blocks graphical ads, text ads, and even ads in YouTube videos. But it also lets you whitelist sites whose ads you do want to see, to support them (as you’ll probably want to do for macworld.com), or because the ads may be useful, which is often the case for smaller websites that don’t use ad networks such as Google.

AdBlock lets you customize your ad-blocking settings and whitelist sites where you do want to see ads.

F. B. PurityFacebook is one of the biggest culprits in terms of cruft. When you look at a Facebook page, only a fraction of what you see is content that interests you. The free F. B. Purity (which accepts donations) “alters your view of

Facebook to show only relevant information to you.” It nukes spam, ads, sponsored stories, animated GIFs, game and app stories, trending topics, and much more.

F. B. Purity has lots of settings, allowing you to not only turn on certain blockers, but also create a list of custom text filters. So, if you have friends who are constantly talking about a subject that doesn’t interest you, like politics, sports, or religion, you can easily filter their posts.

Purity lets you block unwanted content on Facebook.

IncognitoYou probably know that you’re tracked on almost every website you visit. The free Incognito “prevents Google, Twitter and Facebook from following you on the web.” It doesn’t block ads, but it prevents these sites from tracking you. When you search for, say, cat shampoo on Google, you won’t see ads for cat shampoo on Facebook, or sponsored tweets from companies that make cat shampoo on Twit ter. Incognito is more about protecting your privacy—it doesn’t prevent anything from being displayed, but it keeps your browsing a bit more private.

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PAGE 2 - FOR YOUR INFORMATION

Apple to Spend $1.9 Billion Building Two Europe Data Centers

Apple Inc. plans to spend €1.7 billion ($1.9 billion) building data centers in Ireland and Denmark in its biggest European investment, with the facilities set to run online services including the iTunes Store, App Store, iMessage, Maps and Siri for customers across Europe.

The centers, located in Athenry, Ireland, and Viborg, Denmark, will be powered by renewable energy, Cupertino, California-based Apple said on Monday. The fac i l i t i es a re scheduled to begin operations in 2017 in the two countries known for their use of wind power.

The project lets Apple address European requests for data to be stored closer to local users and authorities, while also allowing it to benefit from a chilly climate that helps save on equipment-cooling costs. Google Inc. opened a data center in Finland in 2011 and in September unve i led p lans fo r one in the Netherlands. Facebook Inc. started one in Sweden in 2013.

Spying threats, in the aftermath of leaks about the U.S. National Security Agency’s data-collection programs, have prompted governments including France and private companies in Europe to adopt stricter data-protection requirements.

Those tighter rules have meant asking providers to host more customer information, such as health records, locally. To tend to this demand, U.S. providers including Salesforce.com Inc. have bulked up their data-center presence in Europe.

World’s LargestThe Europe investment marks a push by Apple in a continent where sales rose 66 percent last quarter from the preceding period, outpacing the 55 percent growth in the Americas. Sales in Europe were $17 .2 b i l l i on , accounting for 23 percent of the total.

The new facilities will have the lowest environmental impact yet for an Apple data center, and the company said it will work with local partners to develop additional renewable-energy projects from wind or other sources.

Earlier this month, Apple made an $848 million commitment to obtain electricity from a solar farm that’s big enough to power i ts offices in California, along with 52 retail stores and a data center.

The Irish and Danish centers, each measuring 166,000 square meters (1.8 million square feet), will be among the largest in the world, Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. Apple said the projects are set to create hundreds of local jobs.

“This is an important strategic investment with significant local economic benefits,” Martin Shanahan, head of the Irish foreign investment agency IDA, said in a statement. “ I re land has for several years successfully attracted data center investments from major corporates.

•••••Just how ginormous is Apple Inc. now?Apple stock hit a new high of $133 at the closing bell on Monday (2/23), rocketing up 2.7 percent on the day to grow its market capitalization to just under $775 billion

What do you get if you combine the value of GM + GE + McDonalds + Walmart? Almost (!!!) the value of Apple.

As the iPhone-maker ’s shares continue to set fresh record highs, its market cap is now above $775 billion. Combined with Exxon Mobil Corp.'s pullback over the past six months, App le has pu l led o f f the rare occurrence of being worth at least double any other publicly traded U.S. company. No. 2 Exxon’s market cap has eased to $374 billion.

Apple's high-flying performance comes after the iPhone maker posted the biggest quarterly profit of any company in history at the end of quarter four last year. For the three-month period ending in December, Apple raked in $18 billion in profit on revenue of $74.6 billion, much of which came from booming sales of the large-screened iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus handsets.

In November, a number of hedge funds predicted 2015 could be the year in which Apple becomes the first company in history to see its market cap hit the mythical $1 trillion barrier, which at this point is a 30 percent hop away.

[Just to give you a clearer idea of Apple’s size—if Apple were a country and if you were to compare it’s value to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of other countries in the world, Apple would rate 19th...a bit above Saudi Arabia’s $748 billion GDP and just below Turkey’s $822 billion.GDP Wowsers!!! - Ed]

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PAGE 3 - NEWSLINE

Q: Is there a software like Photoshop for Mac users ?

A: Er, tha t wou ld be Adobe ’s Photoshop. You can purchase Photoshop as a stand-alone program or part of Adobe’s Creative Suite. See more here - https://www.adobe.com/p r o d u c t s / p h o t o s h o p / 2 5 - y e a r -anniversary.html?trackingid=KRQMG

Q: Can you set up 2 accounts/profiles on MacBook Air?

A: Sure can. Since OS X is a multi-user operating system, you can have as many users are you desire. You can set them up in the Users & Groups preference panel.

Q: Probably a silly question, can you connect a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for use at the same time ?

A: You can use both with your MacBook. Here's my reasoning:

- iMacs ship with both a wireless keyboard and a mouse, unless configured otherwise. Thus, Mac OS can handle inputs from multiple wireless devices. - My iPhone maintains a connection with my smartwatch even when I turn on my Bluetooth headphones. Thus, most if not all mobile phones can maintain a connection with multiple devices.

I feel safe in assuming that a MacBook Air ($1000+) would have a better Bluetooth radio than my iPhone.

I also feel safe supposing that in general, a "host" can connect to multiple devices at once. By "host" I refer to the device that controls B lue too th dev ices , such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer. Clients, more specialized devices such as mice, keyboards, headphones, smartwatches, etc., are more limited. Many can only be actively connected to one, although they may remember others. My headphones, as well as several others on the market, can be connected to two at a time.

Basically, clients have limits on how many connections they can maintain at a time. Part of this is that they generally have a smaller power source. Hosts technically would have a limit, although the likelihood of any user hitting that limit is negligible. So, connect away! Your MacBook is ready for some serious wireless action!

Q: I have Mac Mini 1.66Ghz intel core duo purchased May 2006, running Snow leopard 10.6.8. Can I upgrade this machine to a more up-to-date OS? What else can I upgrade?

A: Your MacMini probably is ID Macmini1,1 (go to Apple Menu --> About This Mac --> More Info --> System Report --> Hardware Overview --> Model Identifier).

If Macmini1,1 (2006): Snow Leopard (10.6.8) is the highest OS supported. Memory can be increased to 2GB. The hard drive can be replaced with a 2.5" SATA I or SATA II HD or Solid State Drive of any capacity up to 2TB.

But my recommendation would be to NOT upgrade that Mac mini. For the price of those upgrades you could ‘

almost’ buy a new Mac mini. And let’s face it, it’s time.

Q: What's the best dvd/cd player for my new iMac?

A: You can certainly purchase the Apple branded external CD/DVD reader/writer from anywhere that sells Apple products. But the reality is, any external CD/DVD reader/writer should work. They probably won’t look as aesthetically pleasing, but they will be less expensive.

Q: Should I use Quickbooks or Quicken?

A: It really depends what you need to do. If all you’re doing is replacing a checkbook with an electronic option then Quicken is the correct option. However, if you need to have accounts receivables, then Quickbooks is for you.

Q: Can I link two iMac together? I want to have two iMacs linked for a small business. So files are updated on one machine means that the other machine can access them straight away as well.

A: Yes, you can. Connect both iMacs through a router (along with your internet gateway and printer—that way both Macs can get on the internet simultaneously and anyone connected to the network can print). Then go to the Preferences on both Macs and select Sharing and then click the File Sharing box.

The ‘other’ Mac should show up in your Finder sidebar. Click on it and enter the proper password and you should be able to share files from one iMac to the other.

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PAGE 4 - ASK THE TECH

The Apple Car hype is all hot air

By Jeff Reeves

There’s a lot of hullabaloo right now about the prospect of Apple Inc. building its own electric car.

Big freakin’ deal.

Sure, it gets Apple fanboys and haters alike fired up on Twitter, and it helps foster tons of misspelled comments on tech blogs everywhere. But the bottom line is that this electric car will never impact Apple’s bottom line within the next 10 years.

No, don’t say “unlikely” — it will NOT add up to anything for Apple investors in the next decade. Period.

Go ahead — point to the innovative might of Apple. Or point out how dumb naysayers look after doubting the first iPhone in 2007. Or heck, talk about how even if this car fails it’s the right move because you either evolve or die in this high-tech world.

But to me, the problems with an “iCar” run deeper than whether Apple can or will build a successful electric car.

To paraphrase crime lord Keyser Soze, the greatest trick Silicon Valley ever pulled was convincing the world that tangible profits and real value to shareholders don’t have to exist.

Investors like a good story. And so, they simply buy whatever narrative is put in front of them. But that’s all the Apple car is or will ever be for the next several years — a good story.

Here’s why serious investors should ignore this non-issue of an Apple car.

Apple by the Numbers On a basic level, I’m aware that my

writing — in fact, ALL financial writing — is little more than storytelling, too.

But the name of this column is “Strength in Numbers” because I try to ensure any narrative is rooted in hard facts instead of a land full of gumdrops and puppy dogs. For instance, when I craft a narrative about the crash-proof nature of health care, I focus on demographic statistics or profit trends at individual companies.

It’s a story, to be sure… but it is not a flight of fantasy.

So in that spirit, let’s look at the numbers of Apple to see just how insignificant an electric car would be:

Tesla Revenue Is 1% of Apple’s: Apple racked up $74.6 billion in revenue last quarter. In roughly the same period, iconic electric car company Tesla Motors  recorded $957 million in automotive sales. So even if Apple could instantly sell as many cars as Tesla, those sales would add a measly 1.3% to total revenue next quarter.

“Other Products” Are Nearly 3x Tesla Sales: Here’s another fun fact: Lost amid the small potatoes of Apple’s earnings report is its “other products” line item that include things like Apple TV and Beats headphones. This division did almost $2.7 billion in total sales last quarter. So in order for the Apple Car to be more meaningful than these other gadgets, Apple would not only have to instantly become a peer with Tesla … it would have to nearly triple its auto revenues.

these statistics are only proof that Apple will actually spin up its electric vehicle plans by buying out Tesla. The first big issue is that Tesla founder Elon Musk owns some 35.5 million shares for 27% of the company, and is a very active entrepreneur with no plans to simply cash out or relinquish control.

And the second is that the same buy-the-narrative fanaticism has pushed Tesla to sky-high valuations itself; A mere 10% premium would require $30 billion from Apple at current prices! Anyone who thinks that will happen for a 1.3% revenue bump has been drinking too much Silicon Valley Kool-Aid.

Tech fanatics can spin a nice tale and Apple fanboys can gush all they want on Twitter, but the bottom line for investors always comes back to the bottom line.

And when you look at the idea of an Apple car, it is impossible to believe any electric-vehicle efforts will ever result in any meaningful value to shareholders in the next several years … no matter how breathless the blogosphere gets right now.

Further proof of a tech bubble?Perhaps most troubling of all is the notion that this Apple-car fanaticism may actually be bolstering Apple stock despite all rational reasons to the contrary.

That’s because investors continue to swallow the narrative and ignore the numbers — with Apple, with Tesla, and with every other sexy Silicon Valley name out there.

The Wall Street Journal just unveiled an in-depth report about “The Billion Dollar Startup Club” — a veritable w h o ’ s w h o a m o n g t h e m o s t fashionable names in tech.

Too bad that despite nosebleed valuations, a lot of companies on that list aren’t even within spitting distance of profitability.

Take Square Inc., the mobile payments company that has been reportedly bleeding red ink for some time …

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PAGE 5 - OPINION

DiskWarrior 5: The most essential drive maintenance and repair tool gets even better

by Kirk McElhearn

I’ve said it countless times: it’s not a question of if you will lose data, but when. Media, such as hard drives, eventually fails. Or you can make the kind of mistake that results in deleted folders or erased disks. And files can simply get corrupted. There are two things you need to do to ensure you don’t lose data: back up your files regularly, and use software to diagnose and correct problems before they become serious.

Bacon saverSince 1998, Alsoft’s DiskWarrior has been the go-to tool for fixing disk corruption on Macs. It’s been eight years since the last update to DiskWarrior. At the time, I reviewed DiskWarrior 4 and gave it the highest rating, five mice. It has saved my data, and fixed hard drive issues, many times over the years.

DiskWarrior does one thing, and does it well: it optimizes and repairs disk d i rec to r ies , wh ich con ta in the information that tells your Mac where files are stored on the disks attached to it. If directories become corrupted, you can lose files. While your data may still be on a disk, the Mac is no longer capable of finding it. DiskWarrior works both as preventive medicine—to fix errors before they become serious—

and to correct more serious errors and help recover files when things get really bad.

Goodbye CD, hello flash driveDiskWarrior 5 is a major update to this essential app and includes a number of new features. The most visible is that it no longer comes on a CD. You now get a bootable flash drive that contains the software. To optimize or repair a startup volume, you boot from the flash drive. To work on any other connected disk, you can copy the software to your Mac and run it from there.

However, because of the way Macs now work, you can only start up your computer directly from the flash drive if it was originally delivered with OS X 10.4, 10.5, or 10.6. (See more detailed requirements for running DiskWarrior.) To boot from the DiskWarrior flash drive on a newer Mac, you need to boot to your Recovery partition and then run a Terminal command to launch the software. You can also use the DiskWarrior Recovery Maker to update the flash drive to be able to boot your Mac directly. (Or, better yet, a different flash drive, 2 GB or larger, so you can keep the original intact.)

When you boot from the updated flash drive, which replicates your Recovery partition, DiskWarrior appears in the OS X Utilities window. Click it to launch it, and then select a disk to analyze, optimize, and repair.

DiskWarrior displays a Directory Optimization Index for each drive. Green is good, meaning that the directory is not fragmented. If it’s yellow, this suggests that the directory is “not efficient.” This is a good time to run DiskWarrior to prevent problems from arising. When it’s red, you really need to run DiskWarrior, both to make the directory more efficient, and to fix problems that can become serious.

Rebuild…. Click this, and then check Scavenge to have DiskWarrior recover files.

DiskWarrior can also check files for damage and check drives for their SMART status, even automatically in the background, alerting you to any problems. And it will work with FileVault encrypted drives; click Unlock on the DiskWarrior window and enter your FileVault password so DiskWarrior can read the disk.

PerformanceI found DiskWarrior 5 to be a bit more finicky than previous versions. There was one disk that it wasn’t able to repair, at first. I launched Apple’s Disk Utility, using its repair function and it found nothing wrong. I then tried with DiskWarrior again, and it was able to fix the directory problems.

The speed with which DiskWarrior works depends on the type and size of your drive. It took DiskWarrior just five minutes to run through my retina iMac’s SSD. When I optimized the directory of my Time Machine drive, however, it took more than an hour, and used about 10GB of RAM. (This is not unusual. The way Time Machine works, any such drive has gazillions of files.) But DiskWarrior 4 was often unable to repair Time Machine drives at all because of the large number of files. Since DiskWarrior 5 uses 64-bit memory addressing, it can now handle such large directories.

Bottom lineDiskWarrior remains the essential tool for maintaining and repairing disk prob lems. For both prevent ive maintenance and repair it’s a must-have tool.

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PAGE 6 - PRODUCT REVIEWS

See hidden options

Holding the Option key actually lets you get to more options in the menu bar, as wel l as in the menus themse lves . For example , the Restart…, Shut Down… and so on options in the Apple menu are followed by an ellipses to indicate that they'll bring up a dialogue when selected, but if you hold Option when clicking them, you can skip this dialogue and immediately perform the action.

Hold Option while looking through other menus and you'll see more options change, such as 'Add Link' becoming 'Remove Link' in Mail. Similarly, try holding Option while clicking the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi icons in the menu bar to see more details and options for your connections.

•••••Switch audio source/output from the menu bar

If you have headphones or speakers set up with your Mac, and if you have a headset or microphone connected, you might find yourself wanting to switch between different inputs or outputs, but this doesn't have to mean a slog to System Preferences every time: hold Option and click the volume adjuster in the menu bar and it'll bring up a list of audio inputs and outputs. You can then select the ones you want (though it can't display too many, so might be limiting for complex set-ups).

•••••Quickly and perfectly select chunks of text

Sure you can use the mouse to click and drag over a section of text, but you have to be quite precise to position the cursor perfectly - which slows you down - and you can often capture rogue spaces and punctuation that you then have to edit out if you're copying and pasting. But there is a quicker way!

1. To select a word, position the mouse cursor anywhere along its length and then double-click. To select an entire paragraph, position the mouse cursor anywhere inside the paragraph and then click three times. But wait, there's more!2. Let's say you want to select three words in a row. Position the cursor somewhere on the first word then double-click, keeping your finger pressed down on the second click. Now drag left or right to the last word - you'll see you're now selecting a word at a time.3. Not quite selected everything you wanted? Hold Shift and then click beyond your selection to add the text i n b e t w e e n t o t h e s e l e c t i o n . Alternatively, to make a selection, position the cursor where you want the selection to start, scroll to the end then click while holding Shift.

•••••Use Home Sharing to share your iTunes library

It's pretty common for members of a family or a shared house to want to share their music or movies with each other, and you can do this easily with iTunes. Go to iTunes > Preferences > Sharing, and then check the box labelled 'Share my library on my local network'. If you want to limit who can access your library, set a password in the box near the bottom, otherwise everyone will be able to access it.

You can also limit sharing to particular areas or playlists in your iTunes library. Once Home Sharing is turned on, other iTunes users can see your library by clicking the Library drop-down menu in the top-left of iTunes. iOS device users can also access libraries through Home Sharing by going to the More tab in the Music or Videos apps.

•••••

Add a Guest User account to your Mac

As you probably know, you can add multiple users to your Mac, so that every person in your home or office, say, can have their own space to work and to set things up how they like them. But there's another kind of account you can turn on: a Guest account.

Turn it on in System Preferences > Users & Groups, and now you'll be presented with Guest as an option at the login screen. Anyone can use it - no password needed - but once they're finished everything they do will be wiped. This is great not just for Macs in foyers or spare rooms, say, but it's also great for if a friend or colleague says, "Can I just borrow your Mac for a minute to do something?"

You probably should turn off Automatic login and set your Security & Privacy settings to require a password after, say, five seconds o f s leep or screensaver time. That way you can be sure nobody will be able to access your stuff, but when they try to use your Mac they'll be offered the option of switching user and can then pick Guest.

•••••Restrict what someone can do - and when!

The Parental Controls in OS X are simple, but there are plenty of options in there - some of which are useful for other things than preventing underage access. You can limit computer use to a certain length of time every day, set a 'bedtime' after which users won't be able to use the computer, limit the functions of the Finder, limit what apps that user can use and more. You could, for example, disallow a nervous computer user from modifying the Dock or changing their password.

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PAGE 7 - HINTS & TIPS

Microsoft and Apple are killing the password: Thumbs up to that

New technologies are moving us away from easy-to-guess passwords, but we still need to be careful about how we use fingerprints and other biometrics.

By Steve Ranger

Let me see if I can guess your password. 12345? Qwerty? How about abc123 or Dragon or trustno1 (yes, I see what you did there), or Master?

If I guessed right, then shame on you: all of those feature in the top 25 worst passwords -- along with plenty of other all-but-impossible-to-crack strokes of genius like 111111 and letmein (yes, I see what you did there, too).

Passwords: Decent ones are impossible to remember; easy ones are hardly worth having at all. Passwords: An alphanumeric-must-be-changed-month ly -w i th -no-repetition plague on all of our houses.

This is not a new problem, of course, and nor is it the first time that the death of passwords has been announced. Over a decade ago, Bill Gates was predicting the end of passwords, and yet millions

still have a Post-It note stuck to their monitor with '1234567' written on it. And so passwords still leak, by the billion.

But this time around, could the end really be in sight for passwords? Microsoft has confirmed that it is working to kill off passwords in Windows 10, introducing a whole new set of options by adding support for the Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) standard.

That means you could be logging on with your face, voice, ir is or finge rp r i n t ( o r you r dong le ) depending on which method your organization chooses.

And it's not just on the desktop: similarly on the consumer side, Apple's Touch ID for the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus, and iPad Air 2 and Mini 3, replaces a passcode with a fingerprint. Samsung's flagship Galaxy S5 also has a fingerprint reader. While no technology is entirely secure, fingerprint readers have improved dramatically in recent years: Apple claims you would have to try 50,000 fingers to find a random match -- which it argues is much more secure than the one- in-10,000 chance of guessing a four-digit passcode. This week two UK banks announced that they will use Touch ID to allow customers to access their bank accounts.

It's a lot easier to forget a password than it is to forget your fingers or your eyes, and you can't write either of them down. That should help with some of the more boneheaded security lapses. Apple's system and the Microsoft-supported FIDO standard also have a different architecture to the old password-based model: rather than one central store of fingerprints or other

biometrics, they are stored locally, which makes it much harder for hackers to swoop in and bag millions of credentials as commonly happens now.

The move away from passwords certainly removes a horrid security vulnerability that we have been living with for decades. But we should still move cautiously when it comes to biometrics, for several reasons.

Passwords are mostly abstract (unless you're one of those fools who uses names of family or pets) and impersonal. Biometrics, by contrast, are deeply and definately personal, and the uses to which they're put ought to be carefully monitored. The intelligence services' insatiable hunger for all kinds of data would make such information an irresistible target, for example.

In some ways, biometrics may be a too perfect a way of proving our identity. For many services, a vaguer sense of identity is more appropriate: most people would be uncomfortable about an auction site or an once-visited online retailer having access to such intimate details. Online identity has often been ambiguous, fleeting and shifting for all sorts of reasons. Biometrics provide an absolute level of identity that must be used carefully.

Right now, part of the wonder is that on the internet still nobody knows if you are a dog. If we have to provide fingerprints -- or paw prints -- for every transaction, then some of that magic will be lost.

V O L U M E 2 4 , N U M B E R 2 F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

M a c H e l p D e s k , I n c • S u p p o r t , S a l e s , T r a i n i n g , & S e r v i c e

PAGE 8 - COMMENTS

Safari plug-ins, cont.

Incognito lets you surf the web without being tracked.

With these four extensions, you’ll be able to surf more easily, save yourself some annoyance, and cut down time downloading overloaded web pages. Try them out and see how they change your browsing experience.

•••••Apple Car, cont....and pursuing a buyout in part to keep the company in operations as well as to win its “innovative” early investors a massive payday. The WSJ reports that this company is valued at some $6 billion despite a lack of profits and a ton of competition as everyone crowds into the space.

But hey, who cares? CEO Jack Dorsey is the “heir apparent to Steve Jobs”! Mobile payments will replace cash registers and credit cards and everything else!

Who cares about profits when you can simply get lost in the sexy, overhyped narrative?

Or how about Dropbox, a cloud storage company that is valued at some $10 billion? I mean, it’s in the cloud, man! You’d be stupid not to want to invest in this company when it rolls out its inevitable IPO.

Except for the fact that peers like Box Inc. are unprofitable. And with Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. slashing prices on their own cloud-storage businesses to maintain market share and undercut these startups, they will probably remain unprofitable for quite some time.

Maybe that’s why Box shares are down 18% since it went public a few short weeks ago; I guess the facts finally caught up with the narrative.

I, for one, am not inclined to buy the story and simply hope that it will have a happy ending. Not in Apple with its electric car, and not in many of those overhyped startups that surely will go public in the next year or two.

So forget the iCar. If you want to buy Apple, make sure it’s because you believe in the iPhone, which accounted for two-thirds of revenue last quarter. Or make sure it’s because you believe in the tens of billions being spent on dividends and buybacks, driving real value to shareholders.

A n d i f y o u w a n t t o i n v e s t i n “innovators,” make sure you are buying something of substance and not just a lot of hot air.

•••••Thanks for taking the time to read this month's newsletter.

Hope you enjoyed it. If you have any comments or suggestions for stories (or would even like to write a story ~ hint, hint, hint), please send them to me at: machelpdesk@tx.rr.com

Feel free to share this newsletter with a friend. The newsletter archives are located at: http://www.machelpdesk.com/page6a.html

Y'all come back now, y'hear.

V O L U M E 2 4 , N U M B E R 2 F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

M a c H e l p D e s k , I n c • S u p p o r t , S a l e s , T r a i n i n g , & S e r v i c e

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