Hacker locks up Aussie iPhones, demands ransom

Some Australian iPhone users saw the message "Send me $100 by PayPal if you want to use your phone" on their locked screens, according to reports appearing in Digital Trends, an online newsletter.

Since the threat happened so far away, why should we care about it here? Well, the answer is that it seems to be the kind of lockdown that could happen anywhere and probably will.

Those sending the message managed to trigger the lockdown feature remotely -- and so far no one is sure how that was done -- effectively locking out the iPhone's owner. Some users got locked out of other Apple devices as well, including iPads and Macs.

Tech support forums on Apple.com and Twitter went wild with complaints. Each ransom message named the hacker as one Oleg Pliss, an Oracle employee who apparently had nothing to do with it. Whoever is doing it should obviously be tried in a kangaroo court.

Avoiding Hackers

Next time we travel or use our computers outside the home, we're going to use Avast's SecureLine to connect to the Internet. That way, even if we're using the notoriously dangerous public Wi-Fi in an airport, no hacker can see us.

Actually, anyone who uses a phone, computer or tablet to connect to public Wi-Fi, no matter where they are, opens themselves up to potential hacking. Yet when we wrote about SecureLine before, it was only for users of Avast anti-virus software. Now, Avast has a stand-alone version. You don't have to be an Avast customer to use it.

SecureLine acts as a tunnel in the air, funneling data through an encrypted line invisible to hackers. It's quite easy to use, and there's a free trial at Avast.com/Secureline-vpn. It costs $60 per year for a PC, and there's a version for tablets and phones.

Show Time

A friend of ours owns a bookstore in a tiny town and to get more people into the store, he shows free 3-D movies. He's technologically savvy, so we were curious about what kind of projector he chose. It was the Optoma HD25.

Part of the reason was the price. Epson just about owns the projector market, but until recently, most Epson home theater projectors cost about $2,000 or more. They've since come down in price, but the Optoma 25 was about $800 on Amazon.com.

Our friend says the Optoma HD25e projects beautifully on a 10-foot screen, projects at 2,800 lumens (which means a bright picture) and is quiet. That means it can handle 3-D movies well and is brighter than some Epson projectors at the same price.

This is the second time we've encountered someone who watches television shows and movies using a projector. The image is shined onto a wall, and of course the picture quality depends considerably on how clean and white that wall is. The best picture surface would probably be on those glass bead roll-down screens that used to be common for watching home movies or educational films at school. You can probably find those at garage sales now.

There are several things to look for when shopping for a home projector. First, look for "1080p," which means high definition. It's a must if you want a cinema-crisp experience on a big screen. Also make sure it has support for an HDMI cable; otherwise, it will be more like a computer projector than a home theater.

We Do the Roku

The other day, our smart TV got dumber. It stopped giving us channels like Amazon and Netflix. While using the "reset" command fixed it, the glitch gave us a chance to explore the $49 Roku Streaming Stick.

We never thought you needed a Roku player if your TV already has access to services such as Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. But the extra channels turned out to be fun, even if some of them require a monthly fee. Joy is now hooked on the DailyBurn, which offers unlimited exercise videos for $10 per month. The yoga channel is the best she's seen, and she was sore for three days after doing "inferno" squats with weights.

We also tried out The Wall Street Journal channel, A&E movies, Redbox Instant and Pandora radio. Blockbuster on Demand charges about $4 per movie. Roku has a search function that makes it easy to find movies and TV shows by title or the actor's name. The Roku games include more than the usual Angry Birds and similar games. We had fun with the Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy games. (In the old days, we paid $50 for a Wheel of Fortune game on a CD.)

Finding Lost Photos

If you're like us, you've sent and received hundreds of photos by email and often wonder, where are they now? A free app for Mac or PC called Lost Photos can find them for you.

Unfortunately, the free version will only uncover 100 photos. For $3, you can find all your photos.

However, not one of the first 100 photos we recovered were from friends: They turned out to be ads. So we spent the $3 to go the unlimited route, which turned up 4,830 photos. The program has a nice photo carousel feature, making it easy to flip through them quickly. We saw old photos of relatives and friends we'd forgotten about, though we may not have the time to cruise through all 4,830.

Lost Photos works with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and iCloud. Find it at LostPhotosApp.com.

Games: Lost Civilization

Lost Civilization is a hidden object game set in Prague, London and Mexico. It costs $5 for iPhones or $10 for PCs or Macs. We found ourselves hooked for three days as we tried to get our heroine's fiance back safely moving from one archeological dig to another.

The nice thing about hidden-object games is that your 3-year-old, your grandma and everyone in between can play together. Lost Civilization has you searching for clues and inventing ways to get people out of your way.

Such games are kind of a middle ground between the complex adventure games that can literally go on for years, and the short-term games like Angry Birds that can be played for a few minutes or a couple hours.

Lots of these hidden object games are available in the iPhone/iPad App Store. The one for PC/Mac came from SteamPowered.com. The website requires installing a free download before you can start playing, but it opens a whole world of games to buy or play for free.

Through this service, we were able to re-introduce our nephews to the classic Monkey Island game they played as young children. Bob has one of the first copies ever sold, signed by the creator, but it's almost impossible to get it to play on a modern PC.

SteamPowered became famous for long, complex games such as Half Life, but it also has free games and early classics, such as the LucasArts Adventure Pack, with Loom, Indiana Jones, and The Dig for $10. The Dig was written by one of the great science fiction authors, Alan Dean Foster.

Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joy.schwabach@gmail.com.

Business on 06/09/2014

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