Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Grace and I are heading out to go camping in the Adirondacks this weekend. I look forward to relaxing on the banks of Tupper Lake and reading some science fiction. We have made some upgrades and improvements to the camper so this is a better shakedown cruise.

I bought myself one of those little DJI Spark drones. It is a great little tool that is basically a flying camera. I used it to take some aerial photos of my house to add to my Zillow listing and just to learn how to make it work. Pretty amazing little flying robot!

Thank you so much for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes team,

Don & Emily

Data breaches have become commonplace, with online thieves constantly breaking into corporate and government servers and making off with millions—or even hundreds of millions!—of email addresses, often along with other personal information like names, physical address, and passwords.

It would be nice to think that all companies properly encrypt their password databases, but the sad reality is that many have poor data security practices. As a result, passwords gathered in a breach are often easily cracked, enabling the bad guys to log in to your accounts. That may not seem like a big deal—who cares if someone reads the local newspaper under your name? But since many people reuse passwords across multiple sites, once one password associated with an email address is known, attackers use automated software to test that combination against many other sites.

This is why we keep beating the drum for password managers like 1Password and LastPass. They make it easy to create and enter a different random password for every Web site, which protects you in two ways.

Because password managers can create passwords of any length, you don’t have to rely on short passwords that you can remember and type easily. The longer the password, the harder it is to crack. A password of 16–20 characters is generally considered safe; never use anything shorter than 13 characters.

Even if one of your passwords was compromised, having a different password for every site ensures that the attackers can’t break into any of your other accounts.

But password security hasn’t always been a big deal on the Internet, and many people reused passwords regularly in the past. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if any of your information was included in a data breach, so you’d know which passwords to change?

A free service called Have I Been Pwned does just this (“pwned” is hacker-speak for “owned” or “dominated by”—it rhymes with “owned”). Run by Troy Hunt, Have I Been Pwned gathers the email addresses associated with data breaches and lets you search to see if your address was stolen in any of the archived data breaches. Even better, you can subscribe to have the service notify you if your address shows up in any future breaches.

Needless to say, you’ll want to change your password on any site that has suffered a data breach, and if you reused that password on any other sites, give them new, unique passwords as well. That may seem like a daunting task, and we won’t pretend that it isn’t a fair amount of work, but both 1Password and LastPass offer features to help.

In 1Password, look in the sidebar for Watchtower, which provides several lists, including accounts where the password may have been compromised in a known breach, passwords that are known to have been compromised, passwords that you reused across sites, and weak passwords.

LastPass provide essentially the same information through its Security Challenge and rates your overall security in comparison with other LastPass users. It suggests a series of steps for improving your passwords; the only problem is that you need to restart the Security Challenge if you don’t have time to fix all the passwords at once.

Regardless of which password manager you use, take some time to check for and update compromised, vulnerable, and weak passwords. Start with more important sites, and, as time permits, move on to accounts that don’t contain confidential information.

The big headline is that you can now configure a MacBook Pro with 32GB of ram, a 4TB SSD drive, a 2.9GHz six-core 8th generation i9 processor and a fast video card for around $7000! That’s a lot of laptop!

Apple updated the MacBook Pro line on Thursday and discontinued the 2017 models and one 2015 non-Touch Bar 15-inch MacBook Pro. The non-Touch Bar 13-inch models survived the cut.

The new MacBook Pros feature the latest 6-core and quad-core Intel processors. You can now get up to 4TB of SSD drive which is simply amazing (I can still remember how thrilled I was with my new 100MB drive years ago!). Apple also listened and now allows configurations of the MacBook Pro with up to 32GB of memory.

The new MacBook Pro is the fastest yet with Touch Bar and Touch ID. It features the stunning Retina display with True Tone technology and has 3 ThunderBolt 3 (USB-C) ports.

The 13-inch model weighs just 3 pounds and the 15-inch MacBook Pro weighs in at a pound more at 4 pounds, The True Tone technology, now on the MacBook Pro delivers a more natural viewing experience by adjusting the intensity and color temperature to the ambient lighting of the environment.

The new Intel 6-core 8th generation Intel i7 and i9 Intel processors in the 15-inch MacBook Pro deliver speeds up the 4.8GHz with Turbo Boost. The 13-inch is no slacker, now featuring the quad-core Intel i5 and i7 processors with Turbo Boost speeds up to 4.5GHz.

Both of the new MacBook Pros feature the Apple T2 chip that was formerly only found on the iMac Pro. The T2 supports secure boot and encrypted storage but also handles task like “Hey Siri” to free up the main processor for other more important stuff. It handles things like the speakers, the fans, the microphone and other tasks.

Apple also says the new keyboards are quieter and I assume that they have solved the issues with the “butterfly” keyboards.

What’s new in the 13-inch MacBook Pro

Quad-core Intel Core i5 and i7 processors
Intel Iris Plus graphics 655 with 128mb of ram
Up to 2 TB of flash storage
True Tone display technology
Apple T2 Sub-system chip

What’s new in the 15-inch MacBook Pro

6-core Intel i7 and i9 8th generation processors
Up to 32GB of DDR4 memory
Radeon Pro graphics chip with 4GB video ram
Up to 4TB of flash storage
True Tone display technology
Apple T2 Sub-system chip

We should start getting stock on these new units next week. They are basically the same price as the ones they are replacing starting at $1799.99 and working their way up – way up to $6699.99!