Talktalk (Carphone) compromised my password!

I had been getting mysterious emails to someone else that I thought was spam nonsense. This morning, after getting a few about membership of the same club, I emailed the club secretary back suggesting they had the wrong email (assuming some sort of typo).

This afternoon Talktalk Technical Support phoned me to apologise for giving out my password! Over Christmas my email had stopped working and I called to check why and they "reset" my account somehow and I agreed a new default password. I tried logging in afterwards to the online account manager but had lost the password they send you in the post to set up your account and after hanging on the 0870 number for a couple of minutes I gave up and left the password as their default random looking one. It turns out that a new customer in January had been given my email account details and the password as their account. Consequently that customer has been logging into my email account over the last few weeks, probably thinking that email to me was spam and sending email from my address!

I can't believe that a company can be so cavalier about customer privacy. Needless to say, I've gone online and changed the password again from the new one agreed on the phone.

Lessons learned:

1. Never send anything confidential by email unencrypted (at least put a password on a document)
2. Always change passwords from defaults or if given temporarily to someone else
3. Stick to more secure mixed numbers and letters passwords of a decent length (8 characters or more), a tool like Sxipper can be helpful if you have to keep switching between accounts
   
4. If it's important then digitally sign it
5. Expect companies (like Carphone) to give away your details by accident and know who to contact if you think something has been compromised
   

Mac mini - six things they did not tell you about switching from PC to Macintosh

Last November, after my PC died for about the 4th time I knew there was something seriously wrong, probably something odd happening with the motherboard. I thought I'd treat myself to something different so I splashed out on a Mac mini (Core Duo).

Tip: If you are buying a Mac from Apple, consider the cost of memory upgrades. I would have opted for a 2GB Mac mini rather than the standard 1GB version but they wanted £80 for the privilege. The actual memory cost from Crucial.com is £32 and when I sold my old memory on eBay for £12 I realized I had saved myself £60!

Mostly it's worked as promised but the following painful annoyances rather caught me out:

1. Parallels did not come as standard, something I really needed for running some of my old windows applications. My only other option would have been to reserve a major chunk of my hard disk and use dual booting, something that I've had real issues with in the past. I took a trial copy of Parallels and it works fairly well apart from being too slow. In fact so slow that in January I upgraded the memory (to 2GB), though as I'm techie enough to do this myself it was under 30 quid.


2. Webcam did not work. This has been a headache. Not only did my Philips USB webcam not work, there are no valid drivers to make it work (I wasted hours trying to get a generic driver to work). Even worse, there are no guarantees that any other cheap camera I can find will actually work. I still don't have a replacement webcam.


3. Scanner did not work. I have a rather expensive Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. Unfortunately there are no drivers that will make it work natively in Leopard. I eventually got it running under Windows 2000 in Parallels, hardly ideal.


4. EVE Online does not work. I tried out a free account with EVE Online (a well known and popular multi-player game for the Mac), sadly it doesn't run reliably on the Mac mini and freezes up randomly.


5. Can't network with a PC. This is particularly annoying. I've been trying for several weeks to get this working. I have worked through inbuilt help and googled for solutions to no avail. I can get my Mac to recognize my home networked PC and even read/write files to its hard disk but not the reverse. I wanted this to work as I'm using a 500GB USB drive as my Time Machine and I've kept space on it for PC backups but as the Mac remains invisible to the PC my archive/backup process is frustratingly manual and I can't share a central file library.


6. Can't use my microphone/headphone. This was not made clear in the summary specification and is a really stupid design flaw. The audio-in socket is actually only for digital microphones. This means that my headphone microphones will not work (though confusingly they fit the socket and it took me quite a while to find out this was not some sort of driver problem). Consequently since buying the Mac I have not been able to use Skype, a real problem as I use this as my home office number. I have been searching for a second-hand iMic device (they're a bit pricey new), a USB adaptor for microphones, I should be able to find one for under £15. The alternative would have been to get a bluetooth microphone, but I can't bear having yet another device to keep charged up.