Software

Remote Utilities is remote desktop software. I have tried many products and many of them work great, are simple to use, but expensive, or cloud based. I use to use Team Viewer, its worked really good, but they charge $1200 a year for a license, and there terms of service transparency regarding their polices around subscription billing in my mind is unethical. If you do not cancel the subscription 30days before you want to cancel it, your locked into another subscription for the following year. I have tried gotomypc and that works good but its cloud based. I do not like supporting cloud based applications if can avoid it. Cloud remote support applications like GOTOMYPC are hosted directly from the cloud, and they pretty much control everything about the application due to the subscription based model many companies use.

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Here is my recommendations for Password Managers. I look for solutions that are cross-platform, reliable, and since many of them store your private information on a cloud service, the provider needs to have good security practices. Also, the password manager should not have too many features that complicate the use and performance of the solution. The solution should also have the ability to sync your passwords in an encrypted form to a 3rd party cloud service, instead of including its own cloud solution. This is so you can access and sync your passwords across multiple devices, and not have all of your eggs in one basket. Similar to investing, this practice spreads your risk across multiple solutions, minimizing the impact on your life if the provider ever happens to change their policies, or suffer outages. The draw back is that is a bit more complicated to setup since you have to link your password manager to your cloud service. I have also found that all-in-one products tend to be very loose when it comes to privacy. In my experience, combining the software into a service, sold by the same company is to prevent the user from controlling their own information. Many times, you will see indemnifying language in relationship to your data in their privacy statement....more