Nice little flap going on over the Evernote hack: 50 million customers asked to reset passwords.
Evernote is a cool program, and if you used it to its fullest, a hacker could do a lot of damage. It allows you to save notes on every topic the human mind can conceive, nab e-mail pages, synch your stuff between computers, and share said stuff to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and your email. And, evidently, to share stuff with the occasional hacker.
The Evernote app is installed on my iPad. But between the nuisance factor of having to haul a machine around everywhere you go and the never-ending learning curve — I grow more averse to climbing learning curves as I age — I’ve hardly used it…just put a few grocery notes in there, and that’s about it.
Minimal use notwithstanding, the latest flap spurred me to change the password, even though I haven’t even looked at the program in months. This required me to dig out the coded hard-copy list of passwords, hidden under stacks of debris in the office, and then try to figure out which dummy e-mail account I used to deflect the nuisance messages one expects to get from outfits that demand an e-mail address, go to another list to find and decode the password for that, get into G-mail to click on the link Evernote sent to that account, then jump through the hoops to change the password. And then click “deactivate account.” ’Bye!
I find trying to type on the iPad to be exceptionally nuisancey. My fingertips apparently don’t generate whatever static electric charge is needed to make the iPad register my presence, and so I have to tap over and over and over or else dig out the stylus thing to make it work; then you have to keep shifting keyboard “views,” as it were, to get numbers and punctuation. Who on earth has time for that? Translate that time-consumption to a broad note-taking & communication program and…well. 🙄
Soon after I’d installed the Evernote app, it dawned on me that a notepad and a pencil magneted to the fridge are a lot faster and a lot easier and one heckuva lot more convenient than poking messages, character by character, into an iPad. And it’s a heckuva lot easier to tear a shopping list off the notepad and stick it in your pocket than it is to haul a tiny computer to the grocery store and fiddle with an app to see what you need to buy this week.
At least, it is for a dinosaur.
And if somebody steals your scrap of paper, at least the thief doesn’t have the secret codes to half-a-dozen other applications, some of them a great deal more private than a grocery list.
Images:
Funny in her callow youth: Public domain.
Original iPhone 8GB, iPhone 3GS 16GB and iPhone Purple 800 32GB: Yutaka Tsutano. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Ha! I use Evernote, but not for anything sensitive. Anyone who uses a free program for sensitive stuff is a dork. In most cases, anything loaded into it is not technically owned by you anymore. This is why we are forbidden to use free apps like Dropbox and Evernote for work stuff in my company. (Maybe you get to retain your rights when you purchase a copy of the app, I don’t know. Either way my company would still block us from them due to security concerns….entirely valid ones, it seems!) I’m using Evernote these days to plan a vacation, though, and it’s perfect for that. I’ve got notes for each of the locations I’m visiting, have links to my accommodations, and am jotting down attractions and restaurants I’d like to try. I’ll be able to update the notes from whatever device I’m using (work one, laptop, iPad, phone, etc.), and will keep updating when I’m on my trip, too.
For grocery lists and such, though, I love using the built in Notes feature on my iPhone. It’s easy for me to add an item whenever I think of it and to remove the item when I’ve picked it up. A piece of paper is likely to get stuffed into a corner of my small, but packed purse and require me to dig through it more than I’d like. My phone sits in it’s designated pocket, ready for me to pick it up for whatever I need.
It absolutely does have some very cool features. I wouldn’t want to use it for business, though. Outlook and Gmail, either of which is likely to be used by an employer, have features that you can use to keep notes and send reminders.
Evernote has a premium version that people pay for…meaning, of course, that the perps could in theory have netted credit-card or Paypal data. Apparently, they didn’t. But with any hack into a large operation like this, that’s a risk.