Just a short newsletter this month, what, with holidays, a home move and a recent surge in windows 10 related repairs! I have barely had time to get keyboard to LCD…

At the end of this sentence, please stop reading this email, grab a pen and paper and write down exactly how you are backing up your data.

So, how’s that paper looking? Hopefully you’ve got 50 lines detailing exactly how each of your devices, computers, phones, tablets, camera’s are being backed up, right? No? Don’t panic, but do be concerned, making a data backup, in my opinion should go right to the top of your to do list. If, however, you’re happy with your backup plan, knowing your data is safe in the event of disaster, here are some relaxing sounds LINK so sit back and relax for five minutes and think about nothing.

You can now pin that paper to the wall as a constant reminder how well, or not, your backing up your precious data…!

This issue has been highlighted to us many times in the past couple of weeks, either through, encryption virus and ransomware, spillages on laptops, accidental deletion or just sudden breakdown, we have had to break the bad news to several customers that their precious pictures or documents have been lost, possibly permanently.

For those without a backup plan or if you want to just improve on what you’re already doing here are a few practical things that you can implement today.

Copy and Paste

Possibly the easiest way to backup, though far from perfect.  Find yourself a memory stick or external hard drive and copy then pastes your precious files to the stick, bear in mind size constraints. Keep the disk in a draw, don’t use it for anything else…! Do this once a month/week/day..!

Semi-Automated Local Backup

Apple Mac’s offer a built in backup tool called Time Machine, it is pretty easy to set up. Just buy yourself an external disk, with at least the same storage capacity as your computer’s hard drive, though large is probably better. Plug it in to your mac, launch Time Machine from the System Preferences and follow the on screen instructions. (Be aware, if it is the first time using the disk on a Mac your computer may need to ‘Format / Erase’ the hard drive to set it up.

Windows 7,8,10 computers offer built in a built in backup tool as well, it’s called Windows File History. It can be found through clicking the Start Menu > Settings > Update & Security > Backup (when you have plugged in an external drive it will be offered here in the menu, follow the onscreen instructions to start backing up.

Cloud Synchronisation

Many of you may be familiar with services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud Drive et al… the list goes on… These services provide buy means of an account and a small installed program a way to store files, photo’s etc online and keep them synchronised on multiple computers. In the event that one of your devices breaks or is lost you can retrieve your files on another device or buy logging in to your account through any internet connected machine. These services are quite easy to use, however the free access come with limited storage capacity unless you pay for the premium services.

Online Backup (Cold Storage)

Another type of online backup, constantly uploads your data to the cloud keeping it safe this is not the same as cloud syncing, online backup tends to be slower to access, but offer higher storage capacity for your money, and also protects from accidental changes such as making a change to a document that will be synchronised across all connected computers. Have a look here LINK for one of these types of backup.

If you are worried about your backup plan and want some help setting up a synchronisation service. We are now offering 45min training sessions here in the shop. Prices are £29.99 for 45min: give us a call on 01442 800126 or fill out this ‘contact us form’ for availability and bookings.

Passwords – June Newsletter

Dear Reader, This month we have decided to cover another security related issue, the infamous PASWORD…!

Hacking attacks and data breaches have become all too common in recent years, as the world and our society goes online, becomes more digital (as the singularity approaches! :-0 – see link for more… ) As our lives and the web become increasingly intertwined, the need for caution, best practice and management of our digital lives increases, and for good reason. Criminal gangs are actively targeting companies to steal their user’s data and passwords, it is becoming more and more important for us to better protect ourselves.

Below are a few more recent examples of data breaches suffered by companies, potentially putting their users at risk.

List of high-profile data breaches

MySpace (May 2016 ) 360 Million potential compromised accounts : Link

TalkTalk (October 2015) around 157,000 personal records compromised : Link

British Gas (October 2015) 2,200 customer accounts compromised : Link

Potential data breaches have also been reported in the last few years at M&S, Twitter, LinkedIn and Spotify, though in some cases it is unclear if systems were hacked or if passwords were harvested from infected computers.

There was also an incident back in 2014 where systematic attacks on celebrity iCloud accounts lead to nude photographs being shared online. This was put down to weak passwords and publically available and guessable security information such as birth towns, first school, mother’s maiden name etc. Link https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/02/gang-hackers-naked-celebrity-photos-routinely-attacked-icloud

Why should I care?

These days, like it or not, you likely have an account and accompanying password for pretty much every online or household service you can think of, from e-mail to Facebook, loyalty cards, online shopping, utilities and banking they all require a password in one form or another. The need to remember multiple passwords has become a fact of life for all of us, and at times can be an infuriating, frustrating and laborious task, especially when we can’t access the information we want when we want.

Over time most of us have found ways to cope with this and for a great many of us, we may be putting ourselves at risk. One of the most common ways is to use the same password across multiple accounts or perhaps slight variations of the same one, but chances are the same one is repeated on at least a few accounts. I know I am as guilty of this as the next person.  At the last count, I had around 220 different online accounts with passwords! and a recent security alert from Spotify showed me I had repeated passwords on far more that I realised, I spent an age changing passwords and deleting old accounts, frustrating as it might be it had to be done. Anyway you will realise, as I, that this is a very bad idea and that ‘digital hygiene’ is something we all need to start thinking about more seriously.

Below we will briefly talk about a five of the best ways you can start to improve your online passwords and manage your security more effectively.

Advice

1: Change your email account password.

In my opinion, the most important online service after banking is your primary email account, the one you use most and the one that is most often linked to other online services. If you’re going to go to the effort of changing any password and having a good strong unique password, you should probably start here. (In item 3 we talk about ways to choose a good password.)

It is likely that a great may more of your online accounts and services use this email account as a recovery method, and if it is compromised it could lead to other accounts being accessed as well.

2: Enable two-factor authentication

Many of the big technology companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook support some form of two-factor authentication. This, in its most basic form, usually means registering a mobile phone number with the company, so you can receive text messages containing a single use, unique code to verify that it is really you trying to access your account. Most often, this form of identification will be used when changing important details in your account or perhaps when logging in from a new device for the first time or at an unusual geographical location. It is meant to prevent unauthorised access in the event that your password has been compromised.

3: Use Better passwords

In an ideal world, your password should be a long string of random letters, numbers and symbols, containing no real words or common number sequences, though for most of us mortals it would be too difficult to remember.  That is why talk in the IT word these days has moved away from pass – ‘words’ and instead to pass – ‘phrases.’ This emphasises the fact that, the longer a password is, the harder to crack it will be. Having a passphrase will help in the difficult task of remembering a long unique password that is hard to be broken. For example, if your password is ‘Rex’ you can easily increase the length to ‘mybestfriendrex’ and to follow the best practice you can substitute some of the letters for symbols and numbers to make it extra strong. Such as “Myb3stfr!3ndR3x”There are tools online that measure the strength of a password to help give you and idea how to make a good one. Try entering the examples I gave above to see the difference it can make.  Follow this link for the tool. https://password.kaspersky.com/

4: Don’t reuse passwords

This is easier said than done, I think we are all probably guilty of this to some extent. Though the next item below can help greatly in dealing with all this password and account related stress and frustration.

5: Use a password manager

As I mentioned above in article 3 the best password is a unique random one, combined with never reusing it on any other services, and granted this would be impossible for a human to achieve. That is why ‘Password Managers’ are increasingly recommended by security experts.

The basics of how they work are as follows.

The manager will generate and store strong and unique passwords for your online accounts, the stored passwords are protected by encryption making them impossible to extract without the ‘Master Password’ This master password is your key to unlocking the password manager and access your stored passwords. Meaning; you only have to remember one password that you can make strong. Using a manager for example you would go to your Facebook account and rather that typing in your username and password for Facebook, the manager would pop-up and automatically fill out both, but only after you have entered your ‘Master Password’

Here is a recent review of the best Password Managers out there to help you choose if you want to give it a go. LINK  Most come with some sort of free trial, but do be careful if you fully commit to using one as most will tell you that if you lose your ‘Master Password / Key’ it will be impossible to get back the stored account information.

There are various opinions on how best to keep safe online so don’t just take my word for it have a closer look at what others say. Here are some links on the subject.

Kaspersky – Microsoft – Techradar – Guardian

If you are worried about online security or want some help getting to grips with a password manager or even just want some help using windows 10. We are now offering 45min training sessions here in the shop. Prices are £29.99 for 45min: give us a call on 01442 800126 or fill out this ‘contact us form’ for availability and bookings.

Thanks for reading

Andrew

Dear reader,

Like it or not some of you are probably reading this email on your newly upgraded Windows 10 PC, perhaps you’re a tech maverick and choose to upgrade straight away back in July 2015, maybe you finally bit the bullet and gave in to the constant nagging, or, as many others will testify, you went to make a cup of tea and when you came back your computer was as if by magic, churning away installing Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system. We wanted to try and get to the bottom of this auto-updating saga and in this month’s email we will try to give you a clearer picture as to what exactly Microsoft is doing, and we’ll throw in our two cents on Microsoft Windows 10. Don’t forget Windows 10 is a free upgrade until July 29^th, 2016 after that it will cost £99.99, everyone likes a freebie don’t they?

Anyway, so Windows 10…

Oh.. and a word of advice, before upgrading, first check with your computer manufacturer that it has been tested for Windows 10!

The Big Question “Does windows 10 automatically install itself?”

In short, well… Err… maybe, sort of… there’s not really a short answer…

Most of you are probably familiar with the windows 10 pop-up box asking to upgrade, or reserve a copy. In the IT world, this type of popup or advertising is called ‘Nagware’ as it keeps nagging / reminding you to upgrade or buy something.  Up until February of this year that was the pinnacle of pushiness from Microsoft, however, the reclassification of the windows 10 update from an ‘optional update’ to a ‘recommended update’ took Microsoft’s aggressive roll-out of windows 10 up a gear.

Windows 7 and 8.1 PC’s have settings panel where users can choose how updates are installed based on the updates designated classification, i.e. automatically or not. By default, important updates are downloaded and installed automatically, and crucially there is also a checkbox that reads “Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates” this checkbox is by ticked by default, meaning that the reclassified windows 10 upgrade would, for most users be downloaded automatically.

Once this update has been downloaded, users of windows 7 or 8.1 would see a ‘Get Windows 10’ popup window either when they turn on their computer or at apparently random intervals. (See image below) This window would present a message to the user stating a time and date to schedule the full upgrade, now this is probably where most people get the idea that they were upgraded to 10 without consent. On the various iterations of this ‘Get Windows 10’ message window, the most aside from the message advertising Windows 10, the most prominent button is ‘OK’ which if clicked means agreeing to the scheduled time and accepting that Windows 10 will be installed. In fact, most of the various iterations, the popup, has no clear ‘NO, I do not want Windows 10’ button. There is only the smaller slightly obscure option to ‘Change the upgrade schedule or cancel the scheduled upgrade.’ otherwise, the ubiquitous red ‘X’ to simply close the window only for it to reappear later or at the next login.

I can imagine entirely that a great many people have simply clicked the ‘OK’ button, either without reading or fully understanding the content of this message box, or simply out of frustration brought on by the constant nagging. Indeed, it is completely possible that another user of the PC, sold to the idea of Windows 10 clicked ‘OK’ knowing fully well the consequences of this fateful left click. Either way, however the upgrade was scheduled, it does appear the manner in which it’s happening is messy and unclear enough that a great many people are convinced that they have been upgraded without giving consent.

In my opinion, the way Microsoft have gone about the whole thing seems a bit underhand, they are employing similar tactics we see in malware and adware, in fact only recently as this BBC News article discusses they took it a sneaky step further in yet again changing the ‘Get Windows 10’ scheduled upgrade popup so that if a user clicked the red ‘X’ to dismiss the window, it would, in fact, mean they were agreeing to the update the same as if they had clicked ‘OK.’ The lesson here is read the small print and be carful what your click on… easier said than done…!  Either way, Windows 10 is here to stay, and unless you turn to Apple side of the force or indeed go all-out and install a version Linux, you will most certainly be using a Windows 10 computer soon enough.

Opinion :

I asked the guys in the shop what they thought about windows 10, here’s what they said.

William Said: “It’s amazing! a lot more user-friendly than Windows 8 and is much better for users accustomed to older systems such as XP and Vista. I like that they removed the popup charm menu included in windows 8”

Nihat: Nihat is so impressed, he was left speechless when I asked for his opinion, although when pressed for comment he said “01101001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101110 01101111 00100000 01101111 01110000 01101001 01101110 01101001 01101111 01101110”

And me? (Andrew), *cough… Apple OS 10.11 is where it’s at, more stable, safer and user friendly for the average non-technical user, anyway, fruit sales pitch over (I will save the rest for another email) No, seriously, though, Windows 10 is in my opinion a powerful user-friendly operating system, and shouldn’t be too much trouble to get used to. With a little persistence and playing around I think most users will get their heads around it quite quickly. It does offer a much similar experience to Windows 7 / Vista than Windows 8 did, after all, I’m guessing that most of you have used a Windows XP or Vista computer before, and I would hazard a guess that the trauma of moving from XP to 7 has been long forgotten…

I’m very much of the opinion and philosophy that keeping up with the new will give you less of a problem in the future, that doesn’t mean pitching a tent on Regents Street to be first in line for the new iPhone, but instead trying not to fall too far behind making life more difficult when your forced to upgrade or move on. We see this kind of problem often when helping customers move from Windows XP and old versions of Microsoft Outlook or Live Mail to new Windows computers.

This sort of thing is a new phenomenon and I feel the tech companies have let down consumers when by not providing easier ways to move from one system to another. Never the less I feel we must accept this sort of change and as an inescapable part of the larger consumer computing revolution. (Sorry for rambling. All that to say Windows 10 is not bad… coming from an Apple fanboy, that must mean something…!)

By Andrew Shaw