New Product! Outdoor Tech Turtle Shell Boombox

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!*

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_

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!*

_Dear Friends,_

It is definitely rumor season as we move into spring and Apple is clearly working on new toys and tools. “*The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference*”:https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/ (WWDC) is coming up in June and as usual, it sold out in minutes — this time through a lottery system for the tickets. If my observations of the level of activity out at the Apple campus in Cupertino are any indication, there is a lot of work going on that we will see soon.

We have gotten our “*Hammerhead USB/Lightning cables*”:http://www.smalldog.com/search?search=hammerhead+lightning in stock and they are now available online and in our stores. I am very happy with this new product. While we could have purchased less expensive cables, we chose to buy cables that have the Apple MFI — or “Made for iPad & iPhone” — license. This assures you that your cable will always be up to Apple specifications. These are high-quality cables that feature a flat cable design to eliminate tangling. They have aluminum ends for durability and are available in a 1 meter (3.28 feet) length and in red, black or white. Everyone needs a spare cable and I think this is a great product to consider. They are $18.99 each.

I have been planning my route back to Vermont as soon as I get the all clear that mud season is over. I will be riding my Indian Chieftain and taking the route on the western side of Florida up to Asheville to visit our friends at Charlotte Street Computers and then onto the Blue Ridge Parkway.

My special for this week is a road warrior’s bundle. We are going to take care of your charging needs while on the road. I am assuming that you have a Mac and either an iPad or iPhone, so we will get you the gear you need to protect and charge these devices. If you are like me, you do not want to be constantly plugging and unplugging your Mac power charger, so we will start with either a 60W or 85W Apple charger for your Mac. For some added protection, we will include a Hammerhead neoprene case for that Mac, too. For your iPad or iPhone, we are going to include the Hammerhead 12W charger and one of our new USB/Lightning cables.

This combination would normally sell for $144.00, but exclusively for Kibbles & Bytes readers, this special is only *$119.99!*

“*Purchase the Road Warrior’s Bundle here!*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001361

Have an old computer that’s just not working for you anymore? Don’t go crazy!

*From 4/7 – 4/21, you’ll get an extra $100 in trade-in credit on your old Mac or PC when you purchase a new Mac!* That’s right — you’ll receive at least $100 for your old computer, and in most cases, much more. Just bring your computer in, and we’ll get you a competitive trade-in value. See an associate for details!

Plus, if you buy any new Mac along with AppleCare (same invoice), we will transfer the data from your old Mac to your new one for *FREE*! There’s no need to stress, fret, or worry about how you’ll get all of your important documents and pictures to your brand new Mac.

??*Transfer promo requires a working Mac with OS X 10.5+.??

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.