Those Awful ‘safelinks.protection.outlook.com’ Links

Granted, these links are supposed to protect folks from links to ‘bad’ sites. They are so long and garbled looking, how would I know if they are safe?



I expect that link is safe since it is attached to a Yahoo post (remember Yahoo got hacked!).  Ok how do I know Microsoft hasn’t been infiltrated with ‘badlinks’? Now I get gibberish and no way to tell if the site I am going to is safe!

This abomination cannot be disabled either, as advised here:
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is ruining Outlook.com

I am almost tempted to cancel my Office 365 subscription, but it is happening on another email account in outlook.com as well.

Right now, I am stymied. It is only happening with my Yahoo Groups. At first, I thought it was a Yahoo thing, but no it’s Microsoft.

I guess some folks need to be protected from phishing as no amount of education seemed to penetrate, but it should be up to the users to disable this beast.

In order to keep from getting all those ‘safelinks.protection.outlook.com’ links in my email I went back to Yahoo mail for my groups. I added it to my eM Client and now the links are no longer gibberish, at least for now.

1Password

1Password is not free, it is $35.88 a year.

This password keeper is an option if I decide to leave Lastpass.  The setup seems overly complicated because it seems to be aimed at the first-time password keeper user.



Like all password keepers, there is a master password setup. But with 1Password, this Emergency Kit (a .pdf file) contains your secret key and your password (you must put the password in).



The Emergency kit contains your secret key and the Master password and is a .pdf file.

Once you install the app on your computer, login and see this:

 



Lots of categories to store your stuff.

In order to import your passwords from an existing password keeper,  you have to login to the site and import from here.



From 1Password:

Sign in to your account on 1Password.com.
Click your account name in the top right and choose Import.
Click LastPass.
Choose the vault you want to move your data to. If you’re moving personal data, choose the Personal or Private vault.
Paste into the field: right-click (or Control-click) in the text field and click Paste.



This differs from some other password keepers, as others I have tried do this process on your computer and not on the web.

Pasting my Lastpass exported file online will probably keep me from using 1Password, as this process seems unsafe to me.

Dashlane

I recently installed a password keeper called Dashlane.  After reviewing it for a day I decided not to keep it, as I really like Lastpass and Lastpass is free, at least for now. Hopefully it will remain free, but since it was purchased by Logmein, anything could happen.

I liked Dashlane and it could be a great replacement for Lastpass. There is a slight learning curve at least for me, but it is easy to use, and I am still considering replacing Lastpass with Dashlane. However, the biggest advantage to using Lastpass, (at least for me) I can login to Lastpass on any computer anywhere in the event my computer is not available. Dashlane also has this option but only for the premium version which is $39.96 a year. In addition, Dashlane uses U2F YubiKey for authentication instead of Authenticator. Authenticator is available for iPhones and Android in the app stores.

The advantage of Authenticator, it’s free and most of us always have our phones with us all the time. The apparent advantage of the U2F YubiKey is it is supposed to be even more secure, but it is a hardware device and may not always be handy. It also is not free.

There are a number of other password keepers, I hope you use one!

I am going to checkout some more password keepers in the future.

Exploring Windows 10 Fall Creators

After Windows installed the Windows Fall Creator Update I checked some of my favorite tech sites to see what I should look for, as in new and exciting stuff.

I found How to Protect Your Files From Ransomware With Windows Defender’s New “Controlled Folder Access” by the How-to-Geek and got just a bit too much of a hurry to make my files protected.

I protected them from me!  Lesson learned, read the entire article before making any changes!

What happened. I could not make any changes to my documents. I always have several Word documents in a process of creating blog posts. I hit the panic button until I realized what was going on. I decided I didn’t want to make all those exceptions, so just left Controlled Folder Access turned off.

Looking around, at first glance, there were two obvious changes, in the Settings main menu now there is a Windows setting for Phone and a Windows setting for Cortana. So far, I have just glanced at those and haven’t felt the need to go anywhere with either of them.

One thing new, this time after the update finished I didn't have to install Malwarebytes.  After every previous update I had to re-install Malwarebytes and my favorite time waster, Spider Solitaire.

I guess Microsoft finally figured Malwarebytes is one of the 'good guys'. As for Spider Solitaire, I am sure MS wants users to get Spider from the Store, previously named Microsoft Store.  I did try it, but it isn't the same. So I just get those good old Windows 7 games from Winaero.

So now I am a happy camper and still finding stuff in the latest version Of Windows.