Mat Honan, a cautionary tale regarding cloud services and not backing up (1 Viewer)

[Sam Posten]

Tons of collateral damage to his phone, iPad and Macbook and all they wanted was to get lulz on twitter.

I had done some pretty stupid things. Things you shouldn’t do.
I should have been regularly backing up my MacBook. Because I wasn’t doing that, if all the photos from the first year and a half of my daughter’s life are ultimately lost, I will have only myself to blame. I shouldn’t have daisy-chained two such vital accounts — my Google and my iCloud account — together. I shouldn’t have used the same e-mail prefix across multiple accounts

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/all/
Shows the danger of relying too much on cloud services to back up your data and also the dangers of tying one service to another.

 

[DaveF]

3 lessons
* Use Google two-step auth
* Disable Find My mac on computers
* Have automatic backup system

 

[Sam Posten]

And push for post password authentication schemes tobe developed. As someone with 4 RSA keys already I will tell you 'this does not scale well'. I have no specific suggestions on what it will be but if we are still using passwords in 2020 and beyond we are in big trouble.

 

[RickER]

3 lessons
* Use Google two-step auth
* Disable Find My mac on computers
* Have automatic backup system

Hey Dave, explain this to me? I do not know if i even have this running on my Mac, never thought about it.
I do have it off on my Phone.

 

[DaveF]

System prefs-iCloud-find my Mac

 

[Ronald Epstein]

"Find My Mac"
Seems like damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I'd love the option to be able to wipe my device if
it falls in the wrong hands. Sorry to learn it could
be used against me.

What is two-factor authentification?

 

[DaveF]

You log in with password, and then it sends you a text (SMS) message with a one-time code that you enter to confirm the log-in. This is done per device, monthly.

It's double security for every device and application. It's annoying. But it's a a powerful anti-hack method, implemented a couple years ago because of Chinese hackers into Gmail.

 

[Sam Posten]

Or you can carry an rsa key token:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_token
As I said I have to use these for work but now have em for 3 online games. Huge pita

 

[DaveF]

Ugh. I've got one for work. Tres annoying.
And RSA was hacked last year? They had to reissue a whole bunch of those dongles?

 

[Sam Posten]

Yup, and blizzards battle.net was hacked last week!

 

[Steve_Tk]

Getting the doggles through an app is much easier than carrying those things. Blizzard has that feature, not sure about other places.

 

[Sam Posten]

Yeah, that works for some games, not so much for the corporate stuff.

 

[Sam Posten]

Mostly happy ending:

The bottom line is that I have all my photos and all the home movies I’ve shot. Every one of them. And seemingly all of my most important documents as well. That felt like a miracle.
The bill for all this? $1,690. Data doesn’t come cheap.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/mat-honan-data-recovery/all/

 

[Sam Posten]

Another user who doesn't bother to backup and freaks out when he has to use restore to fix the 'other' bug.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4520303
This time it's a guy who should know better and makes a total ass of himself in the process.
Back shit up. It's only simple to fix if you have backups.

 

[DaveF]

I gave up halfway through the inchoate Wired rant. He's screaming that things don't work, with no description of th experience. A valid experience, but worthless tech journalism.

 

[Sam Posten]

Yup and 400 people tell him the problem is him and still he is pointing fingers.