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LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

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Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#221
post #54

My old company used Logmein professionally to remotely manage 100s of computers for many years before switching to ConnectWise. They had a great product for a long time but some of the worse licensing decisions I've ever seen. It went from being completely free to several thousand dollars overnight without any additional features, support, etc being offered. And meanwhile development was stagnant with only weird chan…

A customer of mine had LogMeIn Pro just to access a single pc from a couple of phones every now and then. One day it suddenly stopped working. As it turned out, in the three years they had been using it, the price had hiked from about 100 EUR to over 350 EUR. Having no idea who charged them that much and what for, they reversed the credit card transaction. Since then, they've moved on to RealVNC. It's 1/10th of the p…

> Don't let the name discourage you; the product has very little to do with the old and inefficient VNC protocol anymore.

But RealVNC's products are all built on that same VNC protocol...? At least I see many things referencing it and nothing indicating that they don't use it.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#222
post #7

Bitwarden is a nice alternative. And you can self-host the server part if you want. edit: LastPass is owned by LogMeIn, that's why I mention this alternative.

Does BitWarden do auto-fill on iOS?

It does auto filling of username and password but as far as I'm aware, nothing but iOS itself can fill form fields like name and address.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#223
post #123
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. I won't pretend that we're the password manager for everyone. If we're not the right one for you then hopefully one of the dozens of others out there fit the bill. I appreciate you taking the time to respond and let me know your opinion on this though. Thanks! Kyle 1Password Security Team

I assume you have numbers showing the total number of whiners like me are an acceptable loss, but I find dropping that feature inexplicable, honestly.

To be clear, we haven't dropped anything.

We still sell licenses.

We still provide local vaults, in fact you can use them via a license (that we still sell) AND you can use them with a subscription.

Want to buy a license?

On the Mac app for instance, open it on a fresh installation. Goto the welcome screen that pops up on first launch, from the list of options choose the "Create a new Local Vault" option in the list. This will take you down the path of buying a license.

Or if you sign up for a subscription, goto advanced options and enable the option to create local vaults. You can sync these to Dropbox or iCloud if you wish, same as you always have been.

There's similar options for Windows. Though it only includes Dropbox syncing and not iCloud.

Hope that helps.

Kyle

1Password Security Team

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#224
post #54

My old company used Logmein professionally to remotely manage 100s of computers for many years before switching to ConnectWise. They had a great product for a long time but some of the worse licensing decisions I've ever seen. It went from being completely free to several thousand dollars overnight without any additional features, support, etc being offered. And meanwhile development was stagnant with only weird chan…

A customer of mine had LogMeIn Pro just to access a single pc from a couple of phones every now and then. One day it suddenly stopped working. As it turned out, in the three years they had been using it, the price had hiked from about 100 EUR to over 350 EUR. Having no idea who charged them that much and what for, they reversed the credit card transaction. Since then, they've moved on to RealVNC. It's 1/10th of the p…

I'd recommend that your customer checks out [Chrome Remote Desktop](https://remotedesktop.google.com/). It's completely free, simple to set up, and seems to perform way better than VNC. Plus no need to open firewall ports or worry about encryption and security – that's all handled for you.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I have around 500 computers under management, finally left them for Teamviewer after LMI's price tripled and their features halved (or worse). I ran it mostly from Linux, which they seemed to be withdrawing support for.

I wish Teamviewer has a small business pricing model. I love their product. However, I only have ~ 70 clients I need to support at a 501c3 school. Their cost are still too high for us.

You may be able to get a discounted TeamViewer license through the school via Techsoup.org.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#226
post #132

LogMeIn Hamachi was a pretty great way of setting up a LAN over the internet for gaming. We used to play Minecraft on it all the time in college.

Definitely look at ZeroTier--it is a perfect drop-in replacement that can be self hosted and the free tier of their hosted version supports 100 devices on unlimited networks. You can easily self host the network controller on a small cloud VM. Clients for macOS/Windows/Linux/iOS/Android/openWRT.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#227
post #72

LastPass... :-(

Use Pass ( https://www.passwordstore.org/ ) to generate and store passwords locally, GNU Privacy Guard ( https://gnupg.org/ ) to encrypt them, and then use git ( https://git-scm.com/ ) to backup and sync your encrypted passwords on all your devices in a distributed way. Pass is an open source project by the guy who made WireGuard ( https://www.wireguard.com/ ), and there are open source apps for iOS and Android too,…

Highschool me fucked up pass and exposed a lot of data. It was entirety my own fault, but there are footguns if you don't fully understand the model.

Essentially, I accidentally publicly exposed my private key. I thought I was clever for writing a Python script to dump all my passwords and then re-add them after setting up pass with a new key.

A year later, when I accidentally deleted my private key (reformatted laptop, phone bricked before set laptop back up), I spent a few hours trying to figure out if I made a mistake that would let me recover my passwords. I was very motivated :)

Eventually, I realized that since I'd been using git to sync pass between my phone and computer (the recommended setup) I could access versions of my encrypted data for every account more than a year old and decrypt them with the private key I leaked. I got back almost all my data.

Luckily I was using a private git repository for defense in depth, but many guides recommend a public reposity because they say gpg is very strong.

It all works, but only if you don't do something dumb like I did. Now I'm on 1password and happy knowing that experienced people are paid to make it and smart security researchers like Troy Hunt (of haveibeenpwned fame) have said it's the most secure password manager they've looked into.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#228

The pricing for LogMeIn and Hamechi and TeamViewer is ridicolous. Paying tens of dollars for a TightVNC with a middle server is more luxurious than having WinRar licence

I don't know why anyone would pay for Hamachi when you could self-host ZeroTier for free or pay $30/mo for unlimited user of their hosted service.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#229

A lot of discussion surrounding LastPass and alternatives, but what are some actual LogMeIn alternatives that people like?

I've dealt with just about every RAT in existence, and they all have their tradeoffs, and some were good and then got bought or changed to pricing that became prohibitive.

In DoD side, they tend to use DameWare. It was stagnant for a while but has gotten better and even has a linux client now. Think "ugly but powerful".

I've seen fly by night engineers hurdled by IT deps using TeamViewer way more than I would ever want to admit. It "just works" but doesnt have many of the management features.

I had an awesome experience with on-prem ScreenConnect, but then they changed their licensing and names and all kinds of other things. Nice featureset, writing plugins was easy. I still might consider it if I could get a decent deal.

Bomgar was pretty polished and has some interesting mobile/mdm stuff in the works last I tried it, but that was a long time ago.

GoToMyPC and LogMeIn both tend to be favorites of MSPs for some reason, I never really liked them mostly because of the management interfaces and constant license changes.

Citrix really seems more focused on real enterprise. Features are nice but the price reflects it, good support.

RDS/Terminal Services in the windows world is a staple, just have to watch for licensing violations which happen a lot. Lacks a lot of the management features other things have, but is built in.

Then you get into open source, which really comes down to some variant of VNC (choose your poison) which is really all just remote desktop with no management features. There is also noVNC and Spice which are pretty cool and used in more and more foss software (like proxmox for example).

There is Apache Guacamole which is like a gateway to access RDS/VNC et al instances, which is pretty cool.

So yeah, it really all depends on your use case and budget.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#230
post #79
post #76

Serious question: how much will this impact LastPass? I get that a buy-out creates some risk for the company's future, but is migration really required in the next 6-12 months?

Private equity (PE) has a bad reputation for a good reason. I wouldn't jump to migration immediately, but you should keep an up to date export in a secure place. PE can take years to drive a company into the ground with debt.

I migrated to Bitwarden immediately and removed all content in LastPass and deleted my LastPass account. My experience seeing companies sell out to private equity firms leads me to believe I haven't made that rash of a decision. For me, trust is usually immediately lost once a company changes hands. And when it comes to password management like this, trust is everything.

Honestly, I would have supported Bitwarden before had I known about it prior to this HN post. I appreciate the content you and everyone else has provided in this thread.

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