Is it time to say NO to LastPass?

Paul1 Reply

Lastpass Recent Incident

Lastpass in the recent has been an excellent password manager and I was one of the many supporters.   The problem with it now is that it is going down hill.   They seem to not want everyone to know just how severe this incident is and have not really done the job that we should of expected.   In December they sent out a small notice to people and reference their blog post.   Who is going to go look at a blog post around Christmas.   I sure as heck was to busy with other stuff to worry about a small email telling people to check out the blog post.   LastPass you should of done better and put out the warning bells for everyone to know just how much you screwed up.

In there blog post:

The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.

Vault and Robbers

You see this isn’t very nice how much information they didn’t send out on the email.  This should of been “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!” type of warning.  Yet, Lastpass didn’t sound the alarm.  Shame on you for not doing the right thing.   As you can see they got your vault data and mine, althought they can’t really use it without the master password but it is only going to take time and then they will have all our passwords for sites across the internet.   There’s the problem they don’t seem to care that it got out.   The threat actors will use GPU’s and other hardware to finally figure out one user at a time their passwords and it could be years before they get to yours or it could be next month depending on how good you Master Password was.   Was it long or was it Short?  What about enterations?  Did you bump it up to keep it from getting hacked and making it harder for them to figure out your Master Password?

The threat actor may attempt to use brute force to guess your master password and decrypt the copies of vault data they took. Because of the hashing and encryption methods we use to protect our customers, it would be extremely difficult to attempt to brute force guess master passwords for those customers who follow our password best practices.

As you can see even Lastpass has stated they will eventually do that to each and every vault password they can, but did you their suggestions?  Probably not and I wouldn’t blame you because we don’t always have time to keep track of what they recommend.

They claim it could take thousand of years for threat actors to crack the Master Password:

f you use the default settings above, it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology.

However that isn’t alwasy true if they have enough computers put enough effort into cracking a vault it could be sooner and not later.   The way technology is growing and the speeds of comptuer now would mean threat actors could start usurping people processing powers and have thousands of computers world wide to crack the Master Password keys.   That is how Bitcoin came into being but we wouldn’t know it until it could be too late.

Is it time to switch to another Password Manager?

I’m inclined to switch to Bitwarden just because it is open sourced and I really feel like at least I won’t have to worry about my passwords being leaked.   I will also probably go through every site that I visit and change my password and also use 2FA (2nd Factor Authentication) to prevent threat actors from taking control of my accounts.   I’m going to explore my options but I am more and more thinking about going somewhere else where my data can be safer than with Lastpass.  What’s your throughts on this?  are you staying with LastPass or are you Planning to go somewhere else?

The Last of Us Is Coming to Steam Deck

Paul
Last of Us on Steam

Steam and Steam Deck

This is one of those games that has been out for years. I won’t say it hasn’t been something that I look forward to play.  It has some graphical scenes but that goes along with the zombie apocolypses that you see every time in movies and shows.   This popped up on my radar last week when I saw this over the weekend on some social media.  I thought they were kidding so I went did some searching and it is comign to the Steam.  I can imagine it will also be coming to the Steam Deck because of how old the game is.   It’s is almost a 10 year old game but has been remastered to work with the Playstation 4 and Playstation 5.   With all this in the air, I am fairly certain it wil work on the Steam Deck out of the gate as it is released.  Even the newer versions of the game doesn’t require as much as Spiderman game.  Which I love to play on my PC or Steam Deck when I am on long car rides.  I can’t see this not being released to the Steam Deck.

Pre-orders 

It is currently on preorder for the game.  It will cost people $59.99 and it looks to be very interested when they finally release it.  I have heard this game has some great story lines and will be like Laura Croft to a point so that much will always keep me going with puzzles and being able to explore the worlds.   I’ve watch people play through the game from time to time on Youtube and it looks to be insteresting.  I have already put my money down for Pre-order since I don’t have a playstation.   My Steam Deck is ready to recieve the game once it is released.  I suspect the first week or two there may be problems with the Steam Deck but I am hopeful that they will fix them quickly enough.

March 3, 2023

That the time it is set to be released on Steam, I am hopeful they don’t delay it because this will be so helpful on my next trip in April that I am all set to go. I will have several hours to waste while traveling and this game will be my game to play to keep my busy while traveling.  I suspect this will be a 30 or 50 Gb download and install on any system.  So i will be keeping that much ready to be downloaded to my Steam deck.   I also have found a really small portable dock that I can take with me.   I’ve found it around town.  It’s Call the Gizmovine USB-C hub and it is currently not available on Amazon.  I guess you can go to Newegg and buy it if you want to pay more for it.  I do wonder if I can find more of these these hubs to use for later.   Small Post about this upcoming game.

Are you planning to buy this game or do you think it is worth the 60$ price range?  Let me know what you think and tell me if you have played this before.  Thanks.

Getting my Movies my way is the best way.

Paul

film, video, streaming, button, watch, home, show, entertainment, electronics, control, games, room, animation, furniture, recreation, screenshot, Free Images In PxHere

Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

Time to use my DVD collection

I’ve got a really big DVD collection that I want to be able to use when I want to use them.   I’ll tell you when we were at home for those two months, I should of done that then in 2020 but I didn’t think about it until now.   However that doesn’t mean it is to late to do it.  I have a plan for the my Steam Deck and this will allow me to do that.  Although gaming streaming and video streaming are two different beasts it still has some of the princples that you might not think of.   You will still need to stream through wifi or wired if you are trying to get the best quality.    My plan is to have my DVD’s available anywhere I go, so I even can play on my phone if I wanted to.   I’ve found this awesome streaming service that will do just that on the Steam Deck and any other device.   I’ve installed Plex.tv and created a server for myself.   I’ve got this old NAS (Network attached storage) that hasn’t been used very much.   I’ve been upgrading it lately for just this occasion.   I want to put all my DVD’s and Music on their to listen to or use as I wish.  You can buy a NAS for really small amount of money and add storage as you see fit.

What’s the Purpose

The Truth of the matter is, because I can and it can help with not paying for streamin services as much.  I can be more selective of which services I want to subscribe to and save money in the long run.   I can also buy cheap DVD’s and copy them onto my NAS with realtivity easy process.   The really hard part is the CopyProtection that the big names do to prevent you from do just this.   The problem is that we own these DVD’s and we have the right do what we want with them.  Also there a movies that I want to watch that aren’t either on the streaming service or would need to buy another subscription to another service.  There’s to many services and with the prices going up and I have this NAS hardly being used it should be used more.

Understanding the Basics

We’ll not going to talk about the ethics as much as you want but if you are curious how to do it, you can watch this video and learn something.   I’ll talk a little bit about the copy protection that can be hard to circumvent but can be if you really want to own your media.   The problem is that not all this works with but can be useful to understand.   The copy protection of DVD’s has been something that has plagued mankind since the dawn of the DVD.   They deserve their money for the making the movies and films.  Even TV shows should get what is owed to them but that doesn’t mean people haven’t pirated them around the world through other means.

Copy Protection Software

Here’s where it gets a little bit more interesting to some because if you are like me and have some movies in either DVD or Bluray.  You’re going to need these software to do what is necessary to get to the information you might need. I’ll say this much, use as your own risk or own use.  I will not be responsible for anything that might happen.

I’ll say this I’ve only used DVD Decrypter right now because it works with all that I needed but the others look promising and I will try them out later.  It’s up to you on which one you will want to use to decrypt those DRM heavy DVD’s or Blurays.   I think it all depends on which one will work for you and how you like to use them .  Each one has their own unique way of getting the files needed to copy the main movie file.   So it just depends on what you are looking to do.

Are you planning to do this?  What do you think it will be like when you watch movies on the Steam Deck? I plan to try it out on the steam deck and see how well Plex.tv does the only thing that is problem right now is that you need to buy the server software either monthly or lifetime to do it.  I am going to look into buying the Lifetime because I am really curious as to how well this will work outside of my house.   I also might buy a little Pi board and use that as my server because I can use less energy that way instead of using my tower to do the serving of the movies.  What’s your plans for yoru steam deck?  I’d love to hear your plans on what you want to do with yours.

My Upgrade experience with Steam Deck

Paul1 Reply

Steam Deck

Upgrading the 399$ Steam deck!

I won’t say that anyone can do this if you don’t know how to do it in the first place.  It however was realatively quick and easy.  So let’s start from the beginning, I did  talk about which storage hard drive cards would work with the Steam Deck, they call them NVME’s.   I got mine off of Amazon and it works really well,  I installed it in under 20 minutes.  The problem I had was having to redownload all my Games.  That took like 3 hours with it be connected to the dock, and that is no small feet.  I play Elden Rings, Spider-Man Remaster, Halo, Subnautica, Subnautica Below Zero and also Half-Life series.   Althought that was over 180 gigabytes, that is still really fast in my opinion, unlike downloading over wifi, connecting to a wired connection will always by my way to install games on the Steam Deck.

Some Caveats

Let’s talk about some of these small warnings.   If you haven’t backed up anything on the SSD than you will most likely loose them.  You can easily move files that you want to save to your sdcard, which also is very helpful in keeping backups.  You’ll also want to make sure to remove the sdcard before you try to open up the Steam Deck, or you will break the Sdcard.  I’ve done that at least one and it isn’t a fun experience buying a new one.   You’ll also want to install the recovery disk onto a USB-C drive if all possible unless you have a dock and then you can use the dock to reinstall the Steam OS.   The app that comes with installing the Steam OS didn’t require much from me other than making sure I knew it would delete all files on the NVME.  It was a new one so I wasn’t worried about loosing any data.  Also if you moved any files from the SDcard, unless I missed a step, you’ll most likely need to reformat the SD card to move files back to the SDcard.   I honestly think I missed a step because I should of been able to verify my integratity of the files and not have to download all these big games back, it however didn’t cause me too much grief.

Some Take Away

Knowing that if I had to replace the SSD it wouldn’t be much problems.   I did buy a 256gb NVME just because I found some for 30$ on amazon.  You can however install 1tb or 2tb when they become more availabe and cheaper.      It was way cheaper than buying a 512 on the Steam Deck website and I still can replace any part I might need to in the coming years.   One day I’ll buy a newer model of the Steam Deck with better hardware or updated hardware.   It however is going to be an interesting time to see what they come up with on the Steam Deck.  I simply love it and even use it at a desktop whenever I need to.  It will be a great international Travel accessorie instead of taking my laptop to browse the web or do what I might need to do on the go.   I’m in the process of looking for a good Mouse and keyboard setup that might be small and portable so I can do what I might need to do on the go.   Very Powerful and great little gaming device.  Have you upgraded yoru Steam Deck yet, if so what did you do with yours more storage or change the display to a better dislpay?  i’d like to hear what you might did to yours and let’s compare notes.

 

PolyMC no longer working on any Platform

Paul
“The account has expried and needs to be logged in manually again.”

No More PolyMC for Steam!

According to sources Lenny, the owner of the polymc program, decided to remove all contributators for the GitHub depository due to a political Mess. Everyone thought he got hacked and I am going to guess it was something he didn’t think to entirely about when he decided to all this. He’s has his reasons, and I will not debate those reasons or even try to comprehend them. I’ve tried PolyMC on my desktop Windows 10 Computer and I get this same error. You can’t even link your account back to polymc, this seems like Microsoft is serious about keeping some of their younger users safe. They blocked the app from being used and now no one can use it anymore. I don’t know how long Microsoft will ban or if there is even a chance to get this game unbanned by Microsoft. Due to that issue we will need to find another game launcher to play on Steam and others platforms. Many people are urging players to go to other launchers and I really can’t blame bloggers from saying this. You just don’t know what is in the code and why the author did what he did.  Now my tutorial will not work and we should focus on a new Minecraft launcher.

Other Minecraft launchers on Steam Deck

There are several good launchers on steam deck, if you are using JAVA.   You can always get them either through the Discovery App or through Pacman in Console.   Here are a few that I have seen that might work just fine with a few tweaks:

  • The Official Minecraft Launcher— You Will need to install gnome-keyring with a few strings to keep yoru minecraft creditials from having to be entered everytime it launches.
  • ATLauncher — Is best know for me as least with Sky Factory and other mods for a serious good time in Minecraft.  It however may not work as well as we hope.  I’ve seen comments where this doesn’t work, so only time will tell.
  • Minecraft Bedrock Launcher — If you like play the bedrock version this is the luancher for you on Steam or even Arch.   I haven’t tested this one out either.  It however looks to not be working on arch.

There are several other launchers on Arch but they seemed dubious and I don’t want to recommend them until we get more comments and more people trying them out.

Minecraft Launcher

I will be using the Minecraft official, until I can find a better one and hope I can figure out how to get it to save my profile for offline and online use.  I’d hate to have to keep putting in my when I want to use it and have to be online all the time to do it.  Other than that, I am not sure what else to try to play Minecraft on Steam.   I know I’ll be looking for ways to play Minecraft on Steam again without have to do much hacking or doing anything that might be too difficult.  I’ll probably even post a tutorial on how to install a good Minecraft launcher once I find one that will work with my Steam Deck.

What’s your Plans on playing minecraft on steam?  Do you know any good ways to do it now?  or are you like me just searching for another way to play on the Steam Deck?   Let me know your thoughts, I’d love to hear them.