It seems like every time we get one security disaster behind us, the next one comes along. This week it is Twitter, which announced yesterday that apparently all of its passwords were accidentally decrypted and stored in plain text for a period of time. Twitter hasn’t said for long, and we don’t know if any hackers accessed it during this time period, but obviously Twitter is telling everyone to change their passwords just in case. Twitter also has optional two-factor verification, so while you are updating your password, you should turn that on for extra protection if you have not yet enabled it. But more importantly, even if you don’t use Twitter, this serves as yet another warning that you ought to use unique and secure passwords for every website and service — a task that is much more simple if you use a Password Manager. (I use 1Password and was able to change both my @jeffrichardson and my @iphonejd account passwords very quickly.) If you don’t currently use a password manager, I strongly recommend that you do so. Better yet, get it for your entire family, like I recently did with 1Password Families. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Twenty years ago, Apple introduced the iMac, and Apple created a commercial called Simplicity Shootout to show how much easier it was to set up an iMac versus a PC. I remember that commercial very well. Michael Steeber of 9to5Mac explains how that video was made, and he even tracked down the two people who starred in that video. The former PC-user now uses a 12.9″ iPad Pro. It’s a fun article and worth reading.
- Jennifer Vazquez of Channel 4 New York reports on a man who saw a notification on his Apple Watch telling him to seek immediate medical attention because something was wrong with his heart rate. He immediately went to the ER and the doctors found a dangerous ulcer that could have killed him if he had waited.
- If you want to get an Apple Watch, for yourself or someone else, Lief Johnson of Macworld reports that they are currently $50 off at Macy’s.
- In my experience, games don’t work very well on the Apple Watch, but maybe I just haven’t tried the right one yet. Andrew Hayward of Macworld recommends 15 Apple Watch games.
- If you use Wemo smart home products, you can add the Wemo Bridge to make it work with Apple HomeKit. That normally costs $40, but as John Levite of iMore reports, you can currently get it on Amazon for only $30.
- Today is Star Wars Day. To celebrate, you can now pre-order tickets for Solo: A Star Wars Story at your local theater. I just bought mine for May 25th.
- Yesterday, to celebrate French film director Georges Méliès, Google released a Google Doodle video. Thuy Ong of The Verge has details. You can watch it on YouTube, but if you have Google Cardboard, I strongly encourage you to watch the VR version of it using the Google Stories app on the iPhone. It is an incredibly well done VR short cartoon. You need to watch it multiple times to catch all of the fun details.
- And finally, here is an interesting picture recently tweeted by developer Steve Troughton-Smith that I don’t remember seeing before, although apparently it was also posted back in 2014 on MacRumors. This is the hardware setup that Apple used to create the initial software for the iPhone before it was released in 2007:
