Screen Sharing Crippled!

How annoying, Apple has disabled the power tools in Screen Sharing that are mentioned in this great article. This comes in a recent update to security or system or something. I got around the problem by downgrading my Screen Sharing to 1.0 which I found on an old computer in the office. The app is dated 10/2007.

I use Screen Sharing to connect to my mini at home when I am at the office or on the road and need to access media. I’ve never had to connect to my work computer because I keep that synced with imap, idisk, svn and git.

FileVault is secure if you keep the door locked

I did some research to see exactly how strong encryption is if you use Apple’s FileVault. (Windows has BitLocker).

 

1. If your laptop is stolen while powered on, if someone has the right hardware they can read your ram and steal all vault passwords. This is unlikely but possible.

 

2. If your laptop is off they can brute force your password. For a simple 6 character password this would take ~1000 EC2 computing days and cost ~$5,000. A 7 character password would cost $40,000 to break and 8 character $2.5 million. Use lowercase, uppercase, numbers and symbols for the best password protection. You must also use secure virtual memory or passwords will be written to disk.

 

If you don’t use FileVault nor BitLocker and your laptop is stolen then your bank accounts, your email, your passwords and you are compromised.