New Product! Outdoor Tech Turtle Shell Boombox

Now that the NCAA championship is over and the Celtics are lottery-bound, I can turn my attention to baseball and cheering on my Cubbies, who, as usual, are off to a slow start. My friend and former Small Dogger Geoff Blanck hooked me up with some tickets for when the Cubs visit the Red Sox in inter-league play at the end of May. While it isn’t at Wrigley (who is celebrating its 100th year as a major league ballpark), I am excited to see the new faces and bats in the Cubs lineup!

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
_Don, Kali & Stephanie_

These are the Privates, Outdoor Tech’s touch-control, Bluetooth, wireless headphones. They feature a touch-pad interface on the right earpiece that allows you to change tracks and control volume with the swipe of a finger, built-in call functionality, a 3.5mm AUX jack for plug-in capability and a tough canvas wrap around the headband. These headphones are seriously ballin’!

*Enjoy free shipping for the next week!*

The Buckshot features the same angular, triangle-themed design that is signature to many of the other products in the Outdoor Tech lineup. The rugged, rubberized exterior means that it’s no big deal if you drop it from time-to-time, and the built-in speakerphone and microphone means that you can have little hands-free calls with your therapist basically wherever you want.

*Enjoy free shipping for the next week!*

I got a few questions about my Mac Treat from last week, “*Localize Files in the Cloud,*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/kibbles/kb874/ and I came across a scenario that others may want to know, so that seemed worthy of an addendum.

The main question that users wanted to know was if the files viewed in Finder would be changeable if accessed there and not in their respective apps. The answer? Yes. Files accessed through the Finder can be edited and saved in the cloud. This includes both the content and name of the files.

The problem I ran into had to do with permissions. In the time that I had saved the iCloud file search to the Sidebar using the process I outlined last week, I both changed my iCloud password and updated some settings. As a result, I couldn’t access any of the files in the list, even though I could see them.

To fix this, I went into *System Preferences > iCloud* and updated my password. Then, I made sure “Documents & Data” was checked. (This is pretty obvious, but it’s worth noting since I sync two computers with iCloud. To ensure each computer has adequate permissions, you’ll want to make sure each has that option checked.) After that, I noticed that the files disappeared completely from the saved search Sidebar shortcut. So, I repeated the steps from last week’s tutorial, essentially saving a new Sidebar shortcut for the search, and deleted the original Sidebar item. Now, everything is as accessible as it should be.

The Adapt will make anything with a 3.5mm audio jack wireless. Now you may talk on the phone with your old headphones or turn your car stereo into a speakerphone with its built-in mic.

Make sure to clip it to your favorite sweater vest for a totally hands-free experience. You may also skip tracks and control volume without having to touch your Bluetooth device. Your life is getting easier just reading this.

*Enjoy free shipping for the next week!*

Don’t be!

The internet may not actually be a series of tubes, but it still is a complex layering of protocols, software, hardware and people. One of those protocols that we rely on heavily is SSL/TLS (Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security). This protocol is what allows your data to pass securely between your computer or device and the sites you visit. It does this by encrypting the data end-to-end.

For example, you might notice that Smalldog.com’s shopping cart URL has an “https” at the beginning. This signals that you’re viewing a secured page. Any information you enter on forms will be transmitted encrypted. Credit card numbers, passwords, and everything else are all encrypted and safe. Any site that handles credit card information, or other sensitive customer information must be “PCI compliant”:https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/. Here at Small Dog Electronics, we go through compliance testing each month to verify that our servers and systems check out. When something like the “Heartbleed”:http://heartbleed.com/ bug comes along, we take it very seriously and have procedures in place to resolve it.

The bug works by exploiting a flaw in the way heartbeat messages are handled in OpenSSL. A heartbeat message is nothing more than a tiny message from a client to the server that says, “hey server, even though I’m not sending encrypted data right now, I’m still here, so don’t close my secure connection.” It does this because closing and reopening the connection takes work, so it’s more efficient to leave it open. These heartbeat messages typically contain some payload data and an indication of how big the payload data is. So a message might be “Hey server, I’m still here” and the payload size might say 32 bytes. The server hears this message and responds by returning the payload data and payload size to the client.

In the exploitation of this transaction a malicious client would send a heartbeat message with a very small payload (say 10 bytes), but it would lie and say that the payload size was very large (50,000 bytes). When the server goes to respond by sending back the payload, it mistakenly grabs 50,000 bytes worth of data from its memory. This could include all kinds of data that this client should NOT know about. It could be anything the server was working on at that time: other client secure data, passwords, or even encryption keys. This is all very bad, so we want to stop it from happening.

Fortunately, the fix for the bug is fairly simple. Servers running OpenSSL need to upgrade their version. Because it’s possible that encryption keys and certificates could have been compromised, it’s advisable to also replace those keys and certificates. Here at Small Dog Electronics, we’ve done both of these things. We’ve also reset login sessions in case an old user login session was still active or compromised.

So what else should you know? *OS X itself is not vulnerable to the bug.* We use custom software versions and configurations on our servers to allow us to keep up with the latest bug fixes in a more timely manner, but in this case, it meant our version included the bug.

Because we’re lovers of security here, we suggest everyone “update their Top Dog Club passwords”:https://checkout.smalldog.com/topdog/club/#topdog_settings just to be extra safe. Additionally, since OpenSSL is very common software used all across the web (somewhere around 60% at last estimation), we also suggest that people update passwords for accounts on other sites. As always, we recommend choosing “good, strong passwords”:https://www.google.com/intl/en_US/goodtoknow/online-safety/passwords/.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us on “*our blog,*”:http://blog.smalldog.com “*Twitter,*”:https://twitter.com/hellosmalldog or “*Facebook*”:https://www.facebook.com/hellosmalldog if you have any questions about our security, what we’ve done to patch the Heartbleed bug, or you’d like help updating your account passwords.