Top iPad apps for Windows users: Part II

Top iPad apps for Windows users: Part II

By Woody Leonhard

Getting an iPad to peacefully co-exist with your Windows gear is easier than you think.

With 500,000 or so iOS apps now available in the iTunes App Store — 100,000 of which are just for the iPad — and a whole lot of very smart people working on bridging the interplanetary gaps between Apple’s tablet and Windows, an iPad can be the best peripheral your PC ever had. Or vice-versa.

In my Aug. 18 Top Story, I talked about two apps that no iPad-owning Windows user should be without. iTunes on Windows not only tethers the iPad but can be used in clever ways to perform all sorts of magic on the tablet; TeamViewer lets you run your PC remotely from an iPad, from across the living room, or halfway around the world.

The response to that article was remarkably — but not surprisingly — bipolar!

Some of you thanked me for finally tackling the diminutive 800-pound gorilla that’s shaking the technological foundations of many companies, not to mention formerly Windows-only households such as mine.

Others felt I had melded with the Jobs Reality Distortion Field, luring readers into parting with their hard-earned shekels to support the devil’s spawn. More than a couple said that if I ever mentioned the “A” word again, they’d cancel their subscriptions!

Worlds are colliding, my friends, and we Windows veterans sit in the middle of it.

Here you have it, from a guy who’s written dozens of books and many, many hundreds of articles about Windows: the iPad’s a great product, even if you think of it only as a Windows peripheral. Some day, Android and Win8 tablets will do as well — or even better. But for now, the iPad offers all sorts of advantages to inveterate Windows users. That’s what these articles are about.

This week I’m going to tell you about a handful of iPad apps that I’ve found very useful. It’s far from a definitive list. And if you’ve discovered something that works for you, please mosey over to the Lounge and tell us all about it. More apps and tips to follow in future issues.

And yes, I’ll cover the Android and Win8 tablets, too, when the time is right. Promise.

Delivering PowerPoint presentations with an iPad

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a PowerPoint presentation delivered from an iPad. The presenter had a reasonably good PowerPoint presentation, running on a plain-vanilla Win7 laptop connected to a projector. The presentation went extraordinarily well, because the presenter interacted with the audience — not with his PC or with the projector screen.

Surprisingly, the presenter neither hid behind his laptop — mousing his way through the slides — nor turned his back to the audience to stare at the projection screen, clicker in hand. Instead, using the iPad as a sort of mini-teleprompter, he faced the audience and swiped his way through the presentation.

If you haven’t yet seen — or delivered — a PowerPoint presentation with an iPad, you’re in for a treat. The liberating little tablet changes the entire dynamic of presenting to an audience.

The presenter was using LogicInMind’s Slideshow Remote (info page), just U.S. $4.99 from the App Store. Using Wi-Fi, Slideshow Remote lets you use an iPad or iPhone to remotely control PowerPoint on a PC. (You can also connect the iPad directly to a projector using a VGA adapter, though, of course, you can’t run PowerPoint on the iPad.)

Slideshow Remote displays PowerPoint slides on the iPad, of course, plus presentation notes and a preview of the next slide. You can even bring up a full list of slide thumbnails, just as in PowerPoint itself, and jump to specific slides with a swipe and tap.

Tip: If you just want to view your PowerPoint presentation on the iPad (i.e., not project it onto a screen), check out Acoolsoft’s Knowledge Center story, “Five ways to view PowerPoint presentations on iPad.” Several of the options are free.

Slice and dice photos with PhotoShop Express

Nobody would mistake an iPad2 for a high-quality camera. But it’s quick and easy for taking simple photos. And both generations of the iPad are fabulous for sharing shots.

Similarly, nobody would mistake Adobe Photoshop Express for the real thing: Photoshop, which can chew up every bit of processing power your big Windows PC can muster. But if you want to crop, straighten, rotate, or flip a photo — or get rid of redeye or run a simple filter — Photoshop Express does the dirty work in spades, on your iPad.

I find it particularly useful for touching up a photo before sending it in an e-mail message or posting it on a website. No need to haul out your PC: the iPad can do the little stuff in a flash.

Adobe Photoshop Express is free through the iPad App Store.

Extending your Windows display with iDisplay

What? You didn’t know that you can use your iPad to extend your Windows PC’s display?

The $4.99 iDisplay (info) connects the iPad (or iPhone) to a PC via Wi-Fi to create side-by-side Windows displays — no cables or fancy video cards needed. Just download and boot the iDisplay app on both systems, find the iPad on the Windows side, then start iDisplay on the iPad. Stick the monitors side by side (see Figure 1), and you can click-and-drag from one screen to the other.

Figure 1. The iDisplay app lets you extend the Windows desktop to your iPad.

The iDisplay app is best suited for shuffling relatively static information off to the side of your on-screen workspace — all the bits have to travel by Wi-Fi, and they don’t move all that quickly. I use iDisplay, for example, to run TweetDeck permanently on the side of my screen.

Move files between your PC and the iPad

The iPad’s file system can best be described as, uh, rudimentary. Actually, the term “nonexistent” comes to mind. Be that as it may, from time to time you may want to transfer a file other than a typical iTunes file — music, video, podcast, photo — to or from your iPad.

My personal favorite? Dropbox. I wrote about Dropbox in the June 2 Top Story, where I recommended not using it for sensitive files. But for normal, everyday files, Dropbox for iPad (free from the App Store) works fine. Download and install the app, give it your user name and password, and you’re done. Dropbox handles synching across multiple platforms invisibly and reliably. Even if your Internet connection goes down, the files are still in the iPad’s Dropbox.

Working with Windows documents on the iPad

If you’re looking for a Microsoft Office replacement for the iPad, you’re out of luck.

The iPad doesn’t do Office, and none of the alternative applications comes close to Office’s capabilities. Sorry, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents usually get hashed when edited in any of the Microsoft Office alternatives. (Of course, the same can be said for Office Web Apps, Microsoft’s own online version of Office.)

My best advice is to avoid any attempt at editing Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files in the iPad. If you want to create documents that stand some chance of being properly interpreted in the original Office programs, consider using Apple’s iWork apps for iPad (info).

iWork consists of three applications, each of which can be purchased separately for $9.99. Pages handles word processing; Numbers is for spreadsheets; and Keynote produces presentations.

Some of the ways iWork functions will drive Office aficionados mad — for example, documents are selected from a gallery and you don’t save them because they’re saved automatically. Techniques for selecting and modifying text are quite different, but if you follow the on-screen tutorial, you’ll get the hang of it quickly. If you plan on using any of the iWork apps for more than 30 seconds, you should invest in the iPad Keyboard Dock ($69).

Getting Dropbox files into iWork apps is easy — you just open them — but getting modified files back into Dropbox is a monumental pain in the neck. You can e-mail the files or sync them with iTunes, but if you want to make modified files available in Dropbox, follow the instructions on the techinch site.

Tip: If you want to work with PDF files on the iPad, get Goodreader, $4.99 in the App Store. Goodreader lets you read PDFs, but it also allows you to mark up and annotate PDF and TXT files and sync with Dropbox or remote servers. It’s an amazing, legendary program.

Those are the iPad apps I use every day — ones that make my iPad work in my admittedly Windows-centric life. I’m constantly amazed at how the iPad gets little things done well and at how much effort is being expended to make it fit in with the legacy world of Windows. Stay tuned. We’ve only just begun.

Woody Leonhard is a Windows Secrets senior editor and a senior contributing editor at InfoWorld. His books on Windows and Office include the award-winning Windows 7 All-In-One For Dummies. His many writings cast a critical eye on the latest industry shenanigans.

Irene interfered with computers in New Jersey

By Kathleen Atkins

Synching Outlook on three computers and an iPad with Windows Mesh was on a Lounge member’s mind when she began a thread last week.

But then Hurricane Irene blew in.

And now, thanks to the storm, Lounge member globalist finds her Mesh more tangled than before. Other Lounge members suggest clean-up-the-mess steps. More»

The following links are this week’s most interesting Lounge threads, including several new questions to which you might be able to provide responses:

☼ starred posts — particularly useful

If you’re not already a Lounge member, use the quick registration form to sign up for free. The ability to post comments and take advantage of other Lounge features is available only to registered members.

If you’re already registered, you can jump right into today’s discussions in the Lounge.

The Lounge Life column is a digest of the best of the WS Lounge discussion board. Kathleen Atkins is associate editor of Windows Secrets.

Facebook etiquette lessons, circa 1960

By Tracey Capen We may be well into the digital age, when everything seems to change mind-numbingly fast, but some rules of interpersonal relationships remain timeless. Consider the mishaps, crimes, and consequences of life in social networks. In this video, we are transported back to Facebook, as it might have been half a century ago. Play the video

Easily clean an XP PC for a new Win7 install

By Fred Langa Everything needed to give Win7 the freshest-possible start on your XP system is included right on the Windows setup disc. By skipping the Win7 setup defaults, you can even selectively repartition and reformat your XP drive(s) to give Win7 a totally clean slate.

Give Win7 a clean start when upgrading from XP

Most of the process of making the move from XP to Win7 is very well documented. See, for example, Microsoft’s detailed tutorial, “Upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7.”

Unfortunately, such how-tos sometimes fire-hose so much information at you that important details can get lost in the deluge. That’s what prompted reader John G’s plea.

• “We need an XP scenario for an application to wipe out the hard drive (and for showing how to use said application) so we can boot from our Windows 7 DVD to install a fresh copy on a clean disk.”

You’re gonna love this, John. Everything you need is included on your Windows 7 setup disc. With just a couple of clicks, you can ensure that nothing whatsoever gets carried over from your XP setup, giving Win7 a totally fresh start. Best of all, no extra software or special skills are needed. Here’s how:

Whenever making a significant change to your PC, the first step is always the same: make a complete backup of your current system (XP in this case) to a safe location — DVDs/CDs or a physically separate internal or external hard drive that does not include the Windows OS partition.

With that done, boot the XP system from your new Windows 7 setup disc. Follow the prompts until you get to the dialog box shown in Figure 1, and then select the Custom (advanced) option.

Figure 1. Choose Custom (advanced) to start your clean Win7 installation.

The next dialog box displays your system’s drive layouts and partition sizes. The configuration shown in Figure 2 is what came up on my test system; the number, names, and sizes of your drives and partitions will most likely be different. But the basic layout should be the same.

Select a partition that you want to delete (highlighted in blue in Figure 2), then click Drive options (advanced). Press Delete (circled in red in Figure 3), and with one click, the partition is gone.

Figure 2. Clicking Drive Options (advanced), circled in red, pops up basic partition-management tools.

Figure 3. Click Delete to completely remove partitions.

Repeat this select/delete process until all the partitions you no longer want are gone.

The “Where do you want to install Windows?” box will now show unallocated space (shown in Figure 4) with no partitioning, no formatting, and no data. On my demo system, I deleted both of its original partitions, unallocating the entire drive. (See Figure 4.) It was completely empty, ready to give the new Win7 setup a clean start — with absolutely zero baggage carried over from the old setup.

Figure 4. Unallocated space provides a completely clean container for your new Windows 7 installation.

When you’re done deleting partitions, click Next; Windows 7 automatically partitions and formats the unallocated space and installs itself.

Easy as pie. Note that Windows 7 makes many other once-difficult maintenance tasks quick and easy.

Backups show zero bytes! Where’d they go?

OK, I have to admit it: Windows 7 sometimes tries to make things too easy. Some of its efforts to keep users out of trouble actually can cause more problems than they prevent. D’oh!

Al Head ran into one of those too helpful parts of Win7 after he followed the instructions in the May 12 Top Story, “Build a complete Windows 7 safety net.”

• “When I create a system image in Win 7 and it’s complete, I right-click the file, click Properties, and come up with zero files in the image. What’s going on? It takes quite a while to create the image, and then I wind up with nothing.”

Your backups are safe, Al. Windows is helping you by hiding them. I suppose this is to prevent users from poking around inside the backups with the wrong tool and possibly mucking things up.

Instead, you have to use either the Restore or Manage components of the Windows 7 backup applet to view your backup’s contents. The details are fully explained in the June 2 item that I think you’ll agree was appropriately named: “Holy …! My Win7 backup folders are empty!”

It’s downright scary when you first see “0 bytes, 0 files” and it looks as if your careful backups have simply vanished. I think Microsoft could have done a much better job of alerting us to what was going on, instead of falsely showing the backup folder as empty.

Lightning Calendar in Thunderbird 5.0

Nik Finney just upgraded to version 5 of Mozilla’s free e-mail client, Thunderbird (info). It now includes an integrated copy of the open-source Lightning calendar (info). Together, they’re roughly analogous to the e-mail-plus-calendar you get in Outlook.

But when I say “roughly,” I mean it. So does Nik.

• “I just got suckered by an upgrade to version 5.0 of Thunderbird.

  “After installation, a pop-up message declared that Google Calendar Provider (and something else) was not compatible with the newer version.

  “Now I have to figure out how to revert to the previous version, because I rely on Google calendar to keep my schedule from conflicting with my wife’s.

  “I have just started evaluating Chrome because Firefox pulled the exact same ‘Sorry, your add-ons are incompatible … tough!’ scenario.

  “I understand that upgrades may cause conflicts with third-party software (which necessitates more upgrades). But it should be me, not the developers, who decides whether or not to do the current upgrade. I can’t do that without the necessary information.”

I understand your frustration, Nik. Like you, I was disappointed at the extra hoops you have to jump through to get Lightning working with a Google calendar.

But you can make it work. Here’s how:

First, export the Google Calendar of your choice as an .ics or .csv file (both work). Save the file someplace obvious on your local hard drive, such as the desktop. (If you need instructions, you’ll find them on this Google help page.)

Next, open Thunderbird and import the saved file via Tbird’s Events and Tasks/Import menu.

It’s annoying to have to do this every time you want to update your calendar, but it does work. And I think Thunderbird 5’s other enhancements make it a worthwhile upgrade. Let’s just hope Mozilla improves the process soon.

Problems with the Soluto boot manager

Paul Hanly read about the promising but unfinished (beta) Soluto boot manager in the March 10 LangaList Plus item, ” A great (and free!) way to reduce boot times,” and in Lincoln Spector’s January 6 Top Story, “Four free programs to help control Windows 7.”

But when he tried this utility, he didn’t like the results.

• “I installed Soluto after reading about it in Windows Secrets. I noticed it seems to run a lot, even after boot-up is well and truly over.

  “My computer has been running a couple of days since boot. According to Win XP Task Manager, System Idle Process has 73 hours, 29 minutes of CPU time — and Soluto has 1 hour, 13 minutes. The rest [of the processes and apps], including Explorer, are about 30 minutes or less. Soluto is also among the top users of memory.

  “Does this seem grossly excessive?”

Soluto’s main purpose is to manage your system’s boot process, letting essential boot items load first and delaying or blocking nonessential software. The idea is to get your PC up and ready to respond to your input as quickly as possible.

But in the months since our last coverage, Soluto (it’s still in beta) has added a crash analysis element, to help you figure out why applications crashed, plus a browser sniffer that looks for things that may slow down your browsing experience. These added functions mean that part of Soluto runs after the boot is finished.

All software eats clock cycles and consumes other system resources, so having Soluto show up prominently in Task Manager’s summaries isn’t in itself a sign of trouble.

But if Soluto is getting in your way in a noticeable manner — not just something that your Performance Monitor can detect, but something that you can actually feel and experience when you’re using your PC — that’s definitely a problem.

So, your choice is binary: if Soluto is delivering on its promise of a faster, more stable PC and is doing so by working unobtrusively, then it’s doing its job. In this case, I suggest you leave it installed and not worry about the fact that it will indeed use some system resources as it works.

On the other hand, if your system isn’t booting faster or isn’t more stable, or if the perceived benefits aren’t outweighed by whatever negatives you’re actually experiencing, then Soluto’s not right for your setup — at least in its current, unfinished, beta form. Just uninstall it. It’ll undo the changes it’s made, and your PC will be back as before.

Soluto’s free (info/download page), so you won’t have lost anything, even if you end up not liking it.

Fred Langa is a senior editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He was formerly editor of Byte Magazine (1987–91), editorial director of CMP Media (1991–97), and editor of the LangaList e-mail newsletter from its origin in 1997 until its merger with Windows Secrets in November 2006.

What to do about bad technical support

By Lincoln Spector You might be shocked to learn that not all tech-support people are competent. But then again, it’s likely you’ve already discovered that sad fact the hard way. Here’s what you need to know the next time you run into atrocious support.

Why you can’t trust many technical-support folks

Back in the 1980s, I supported the customers of a mail-order software retailer. I once tried to train a new techie on supporting the popular DOS programs of the day. When I told him to press Ctrl-S, he didn’t understand what I meant. A few minutes after I explained it to him, he still didn’t know.

Although there are some excellent customer-service people out there, tech-support personnel are often poorly trained, poorly paid, and judged more stringently on the number of calls they handle per day than on the satisfaction of their customers. When you consider what they’re up against, it’s a wonder that any of them are good at their jobs.

Below are seven problems people run into when they call tech support with computer and other tech problems. I offer advice for getting around each of these.

But first, some general advice. If you can avoid it, don’t depend on a product’s manufacturer for technical support. Visit forums (such as the Windows Secrets Lounge), or enter Google keywords that describe your problem to find potentially more expert and willing help.

Of course, sometimes you have to go to the manufacturer. And that’s when you run into problems such as these.

You leave messages: they never call you back

Scott Granneman made many calls and sent many IMs while trying to get his new HP computer repaired. “After going through the fact that I’ve twice been told that someone from HP would call me, and both times no call was made, [the tech rep] says that his supervisor will call me in five minutes.” That supervisor called back 15 minutes later to promise that “a case manager will call within 24–48 hours. This is the third time I’ve been told that by HP.” (Granneman’s story touches on several forms of bad support.)

Before you can enjoy the direct experience of even shoddy technical support, you have to make human contact. Support people can avoid getting in touch with you for surprising lengths of time. Sometimes, as in Granneman’s case, a lower-ranking representative promises a callback but the call never comes; other times, you e-mail a request for support and immediately get an automated response promising a human interaction soon. But that automated message is the last you hear from that organization.

Here’s what to do: When a support person promises you’ll get a callback, ask immediately for a case number. Then insist you’d rather wait on hold than be called back.

If you can’t wait on hold, and someone doesn’t call you back within the agreed-upon time period, call again. Give your case number to the first human being you get, and insist on talking to a supervisor. Don’t lose your temper, but be firm.

You can’t understand a word they’re saying

Alison, a RoadRunner Internet customer moving from one Manhattan location to another, wanted to find out whether she could keep her old e-mail address after the move. The service person’s IMs included such clear and understandable explanations as “Alison, if you have Road Runner service you will get the e-mail if not you will not,” and “new account will also with RR.” (You can read the story in this Dave Pogue post.)

Spoken support is often worse than IM or e-mail.

It’s common knowledge that technical support is often outsourced to third-world countries to keep support costs down. The personnel are not native English speakers. (To be fair, the worst of them speaks English far better than I can handle any foreign language, but that doesn’t really help you.) Working out technical problems can be particularly difficult when you have a language barrier.

Here’s what to do: The most important lesson here is to be patient. Speak slowly and clearly, and if your support person appears not to understand your question, find another way to ask it. If you can get bumped up to the next level in the support stratum without having to wait for that callback that never comes, you might get someone with superior English skills.

And if you get good support from a nonnative speaker, compliment the worker. He or she worked hard to acquire the language skills you benefit from.

You know the answer you’re getting is wrong

A few months ago, I phoned Samsung technical support to find out why my Blu-ray player promised new Hulu Plus support but didn’t actually include it. The support rep calmly explained to me that Hulu Plus wouldn’t work on my older player because, after all, the whole point of Hulu Plus is to watch movies in 3D.

Support specialists are often required to know about a bewildering selection of products, some of which they have never even seen. Yet they need to give the impression on the phone that they know what they’re talking about. In fact, they often know demonstrably less about the product than you do.

Here’s what to do: Call the misinformed specialist out on the issue — calmly. Correct the error and tell the support person how you know that the answer was wrong. (For instance, I explained that I was already a Hulu Plus subscriber and watched programs on it via my computer; that nothing on it was in 3D.) Then politely ask to speak to someone who knows about the subject at hand. If no such person is available, try calling back later in hopes that you’ll get better-qualified help. If multiple calls don’t pan out, you must accept the fact that the company’s technical support cannot help you. (Some months after the phone call, Hulu Plus simply appeared as an option in the player’s menu.)

The advice makes your problem worse

If you’re going to receive bad advice, it’s lucky when you know more than the person who’s supposed to be helping you. At least you won’t act on it.

A Dell representative told one of Michael Horowitz’s clients to do a clean install of Windows XP — without being aware that this would destroy the Dell-specific Master Boot Record needed to access the recovery partition. In other words, “Dell tech support told him to do something that made it impossible to later restore to factory-fresh state — and Dell support didn’t know this.” (You can read the full story here.)

Here’s what to do First, be suspicious of any advice that you should reformat your hard drive and reinstall the OS. If you do follow the manufacturer’s support instructions and they further damage your machine, your attitude needs to be: they did the damage, they should fix it. Go high. Write to the president of the company. File a report with the Better Business Bureau (info). Complain about the deed in online forums and anywhere else you can get meaningful attention. Let the company officials know you’re justly blackening their corporate reputation.

But also stay sane. Threats of lawsuits almost never make an impression. If the company remains intransigent, you’ll have to pay a third-party PC service company to fix the problem. But you’ll also know never to buy from that brand again. (Unfortunately, few news sources can still afford to do extensive tech-support ratings for consumers.)

They try to sell you something you don’t need

Randy Knowles (randythetechprofessor.com) reported an incident involving an elderly friend. She called Dell support and gave the technician permission to remotely access her computer. He told her that the computer had no antivirus software. “If something wasn’t done soon the computer would become infected,” warned the techie, according to Knowles. He talked her into buying a three-year subscription to System Mechanic for U.S. $131.00. Knowles had already installed the free Microsoft Security Essentials on the PC.

Alas, tech departments aren’t always separate from sales. Tech people may have incentives to sell you items you don’t need.

Here’s what to do: Never buy something on a technical support call. If the technician says you need to make a purchase, say you’ll think about it. Then research it on your own to decide whether you really need that product and where you can find the best price.

And if you or someone you know falls for this type of pitch, you ought to return the purchase and demand a refund.

Not helpful, not legal — and really, really wrong

Tara Fitzgerald called Dell technical support and, just like Randy Knowles’s friend, agreed to giving the tech remote access. The support representative took from her machine erotic photos (intended only for Fitzgerald’s boyfriend) and posted them on the Web. “I trusted him because he was a Dell technician,” she told ABC News 10 in a July 28, 2010, report.

When you give remote access to a tech rep, you’re giving complete control of your PC to a stranger. You don’t even know who that person really works for. For instance, the man who stole and posted Fitzgerald’s photos was not a Dell employee but worked for Sitel India, a call-center service to which Dell outsources support calls. Many of these people receive relatively low wages and are not above temptation. (Dell responded that the tech no longer handles Dell products.)

Here’s what to do: Secure sensitive files (including bank statements and other financial or legal records, as well as those embarrassing photos). Encrypt them with TrueCrypt (info) or a similar program, and make sure the encryption is closed and the files inaccessible before giving a tech rep permission to take over your hard drive.

“You’ll have to reformat and reinstall Windows”

In the Salon.com article, “We don’t support that,” Kyle Killen described his experiences working in technical support for an unnamed company. He had little respect for the techniques his co-workers used to get people off the phone quickly. “Ted is a formatter. Ted, and those like him, have only one solution to their customers’ problems. Erase everything on the computer’s hard drive and start over from scratch.”

Yes, this extreme solution fixes almost any problem that isn’t hardware-related. But it can take days to get everything back the way you want it. And that’s assuming the process doesn’t destroy your data.

Here’s what to do: As mentioned above, be suspicious of any “reformat and reinstall” advice. Give up on that particular tech person and call again, hoping you get someone else.

If everyone at the company gives you that advice, research other support sources. Check the archives of appropriate forums, or ask your question on one of them. Google any key words that describe your problem. You might also check my April 7 Best Practices article, “Fix that problem without reinstalling Windows,” and Fred Langa’s Top Story, “Win7’s no-reformat, nondestructive reinstall.”

And if none of that research helps you fix your problem or refute the sketchy advice of the tech-support person, you may have to face the possibility that maybe, just this time, he’s right. You really do have to reinstall Windows.

But take whatever else tech support tells you with a very large grain of silicon.

Lincoln Spector writes about computers, home theater, and film and maintains two blogs: Answer Line at PCWorld.com and Bayflicks.net. His articles have appeared in CNET, InfoWorld, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.

Multifunction printers' hidden element of risk

At this year’s Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences, talks focused on attacks against the embedded operating systems found in thousands of digital gadgets now in use.

Any Internet-addressable device is threatened, including smart meters, medical monitors, and similar dedicated-use equipment. But the threat also encompasses those multifunction, printer/scanner devices (MFPs) found on almost every network.

Convenience might translate into less security

With the rollout of IPv6, there will soon be enough Internet addresses to connect any digital device to the Web — for decades to come. As one security expert put it: if the number of available IP addresses under the current IPv4 standard is a grain of sand, the number under IPv6 is an entire galaxy. Consider that soon, every electrical device in your house could have its own IP address.

That level of connectivity promises a host of new capabilities, both good and bad. The good includes using a smartphone or tablet to remotely control and monitor anything connected to the Web: turn on the house lights and heat while driving home, start the laundry and the coffee maker, record a TV show; or, if you live in snow country, start your car from your office.

The flaw in this vision of a vastly connected future? There’s almost no effective antihacking protection built into the dedicated operating systems that control and connect these smart devices — at least for now — and upgrading them is either too costly or technically impossible. Or, as in the case of MFPs, we simply don’t know that they pose a security risk.

Web servers are here, there, everywhere

In his Black Hat talk, “Corporate espionage for dummies: the hidden threat of embedded Web servers,” security company CEO Michael Sutton noted the increasing presence of Web servers in common products such as printers and routers. Unlike software-based Web servers, which provide access to the Internet, embedded Web servers generally serve as an administrative interface to the host hardware. (They’re typically part of the device’s chipset; they tend to be low-performance and have very limited functionality.) The administrative access is often where the threat exists.

Sutton said that most wireless home networks — and many small-office networks — in use today were likely set up by someone who didn’t know much about network security (typically through some sort of setup wizard during the installation process). That can leave wireless, small-network products such as printers and scanners exposed to any hacker on the Net.

Sutton said common faults he found include the use of default passwords, the failure to apply firmware updates from the vendor, and general misconfigurations. And no one knows just how pervasive the problem is. At the end of his talk, he issued a call to begin fingerprinting these devices on home or office networks and on the Internet. This would give security scanners a better chance of finding wireless devices on the network. We need to identify and flag the security in dedicated Web servers, just as we do PC-based Web servers.

Beware the common multifunction printer

Sutton’s warnings about Web servers were amplified a few days later at the DEF CON conference. Researcher Deral Heiland, in his talk, “From printer to pwned,” focused on embedded Web servers found in multifunction printers. Heiland demonstrated various ways to compromise (and pwn) consumer-grade Internet-compatible multifunction printers — and he named names.

If you own a network-ready MFP, check its administration password settings — soon. In most cases, you can do so through your Web browser by entering a specific IP address listed in your device’s documentation. If it’s set to a default password, change it immediately.

Unfortunately, that small security step won’t stop a persistent criminal; it’ll just slow him down, says Heiland. And he proved his case. Using an HP LaserJet M3035, Heiland showed how he could simply right-click the password field on the administration page inside the Firefox browser and see the source code and plain text of the device’s password fields — an area that should normally be hidden behind black dots. So even if you do change the password, a skilled criminal could still see the password. In some cases, the password might allow a criminal access to files already printed but stored on the MFP’s hard drive. In other cases, the password might give elevated network privileges.

Heiland also found that, when using the backup features on Lexmark and Xerox multifunction printers, the backups exported account passwords in plain text. Worse, by tinkering with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) on Sharp and Ricoh MFPs, he was able to set himself up as a valid user and redirect the printers’ test pages to his remote computer. In a corporate environment, that type of hack could elevate privileges on the internal network and possibly lead to stolen data.

Reduce the threat to network devices

At the end of his talk, Heiland offered a new penetration-testing tool called Praeda (Latin for “plunder, spoils of war, booty”). The tool is designed to help IT administrators discover vulnerable multifunction printers on their networks. Heiland has individual modules to test for each of the vendors cited above. (Unfortunately, cyber criminals might also use these tools to develop new avenues of attack.)

Home users, less-likely targets of this type of threat, don’t need these tools and have simpler choices:

• Turn off Wi-Fi access to a device if you don’t plan on using it.
• Turn off Bluetooth access if you’re not using it.
• If you need to print to a printer in another room or on another floor, set a strong and unique password other than the default one that came with your device.
• And if you haven’t already put encryption — such as WPA2 — on your overall home network, do so now. This will further limit any access to your network by your nosy neighbor or that cyber thug out on the street.

WS contributing editor Robert Vamosi was senior editor of CNET.com from 1999 to 2008 and winner of the 2005 MAGGIE Award for best regularly featured Web column for consumers. He is the author of When Gadgets Betray Us (2011)