LETTERS
6 AUGUST 2019|COMPUTER SHOPPER|ISSUE 378
Letters
Questions, questions. Arecloud-basedpasswordmanagerssafe?What productdid
we recommendthreeyearsago?And wasMel’s last columnhisbestone yet?
[email protected]
Mel-ifluous
Can Iuse your letters
page to thank Mel
Croucher? Ihavebeen a
fanofhis work since the
first PiMan.
In fact, Iwas very
nearly involved
with alater PIMan
episode on the
Spectrum through a
mutual college friend, who
asked me to investigatecopy
protection foralater release,but
nothing ever came of it forme.
But Mel’s article ‘The great digital divide’
(Mel’sWorld,Shopper377), Ibelieve,was one
of the best articles he has ever written. As
well as agreeing with everything
he wrote, Ifound the article
incredibly moving.
Ihavegrown up –and
old –reading Mel’s work,
and Ihavetosay the old
man still has it. Mel,
please don’t stop what
you are doing.
MarkPainter
We wholeheartedly agree
with you –that particular article
also struck achord here atShopper
HQ,and highlights the importance of us
technology experts and enthusiasts to think
about supporting the less tech-savvy,asthe
world continues its march to digital.
Star letter
Pass onby
I’m puzzled by your repeated
recommendation of cloud-based
password managers, most recently
LastPass (‘Use apassword manager’,
AdvancedProjects,Shopper377).
Surely the passwords and other
sensitive information which these
services gather in the cloud, usually a
whole collection of data foreach user,
represent the most irresistible sort of
honeypot on the internet, and therefore
will be the subject of hackers’ most
strenuous efforts?
I’m sure LastPass and others stress how
secure theykeep the data, but we’ve heard
that again and again from the best-
resourced tech companies, to no effect.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but
forthis reason Ihaveavoided all such
cloud-based password services.
Irely on some old software,which
doesn’t touch the internet and puts my
passwords behind amaster password.
This gives me afile,which Ican copy
from device to device formanual syncing.
Iknow it’s old software and therefore
wouldn’t stand up to serious attacks for
long,butit’s on nobody’s radaranymore
andIdon’twritemy
passwords in plain text
within it anyway. Ifeel
pretty secure with this
method of storage.
Do you know of any currently supported
password manager software,which doesn’t
use the cloud and, better still, allows some
direct syncing between devices?
More generally on this theme,how about
aseries of articles foruscloud-refuseniks,
such as managing PIM data across devices?
Syncing directly between, say, Windows and
Android, in away that doesn’t rely on one
device manufacturer’s here-today-gone-
tomorrow software,can be quitetricky.
Mark Adams
LastPass encrypts
passwords on your
device before sending
the data to the cloud.
Without your
password, even LastPass can’t read your
data. If the service was hacked, then only
your encrypted data would be lost.
The bigger risk is using aweak password
forLastPass, but along password and
two-factor authentication helps keep you
safe. The flexibility of cloud sync across
multiple devices more than makes up forthe
potential security threat in our mind.
To protect your passwords offline,an
old-fashioned book with long passwords
written in it is agood bet –just don’t lose it.
❱❱Write in and win
Do you wish your computer was faster when booting and loading
applications? Thanks to Crucial, you can achieve your dream of a
faster PC or laptop with a500GB MX500 SSD.The writer of our
Star Letterwill be awarded one of these solid-statedevices, which
can be installed in adesktop PC or alaptop.
This SSD is 45 times more energy efficient than atypical hard
drive and has sequential reads/writes up to 560/510MB/s and random
reads/writes up to 95K/90K IOPS, making it the perfect replacement forthe
ageing hard drive in your sluggish PC.
STAR
PRIZE
500GB
SSD
Mel is atrueShoppertreasure and will
hopefully be writing forusright until the very
last issue of the magazine –which, all being
well, is many years awayyet!
Combined harvester
Some months ago, in the audio
category of the Best Buy section
of Computer Shopper,aregular
recommendation was foracombined CD
player with other things: MP3 player?
Bluetooth speaker? Radio? It cost about
£300 and was some kind of flattened
ovalshape.
As you can tell, Ididn’t paymuch
attention to it but, that has changed.
Worse,Ihave not kept any of my back
issues so cannot refertothem.
copy
ase,but
me.
well as
he wro
inc
with y
also stru
HQ,and highlights
