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Snippets

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:18:19 GMT

The U.S. now has the 25th fastest internet service in the world, behind Romania, and falling fast. Do we blame FCC deregulation which no longer requires "Information Services" to be competitve?
At $199, Amazon's new Kindle Fire is probably selling at a loss. The new 7" color touchscreen is generating a lot of buzz and pre-orders topped 95K the first day it went on sale.
Ever needed to remove a bunch of hyperlinks from something you are working on in Microsoft Word? Select everything by pressing CTRL+A, then use CTRL+SHIFT+F9 to kill the links. You will have to use the Clear Formatting command to remove the link's color and underlining.

What is NFC?

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:08:28 GMT

Smartphones and Near Field Communications.

Google recently released its Wallet application for mobile payments. Google, Ebay, mobile phone makers and credit card companies are all scrambling to be the ones you use when waving your phone over a register to buy things. Exchanging payment information from your phone to a reader requires NFC enabled smartphones. Near Field Communications is a subset of RFID (radio) with a 20 centimeter range. The short range of the standard, combined with the encryption and authentication capability of modern smartphones suggest that transactions ought to be secure but privacy and security will be major concerns for mobile payment systems. Currently, 67% of users don't even password protect their phones.

Dissappearing Email?

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:25:13 GMT

North America, only 86% of legitimate email ever arrives. While the missing 14% does not quite add up to the headline claims of "1 in 5 Emails Go Missing", the global success rate is only 81%. Of the missing 14%, 6% appears to get caught in spam filters, and the remaining 8% just dissappears.

To understand how big an issue 8% dissapearing might be, let's do the math. Statistics reveal that spam comprises around 96% of the total volume of email. An April 2010 estimate put the number of total daily emails at 294 billion. Throwing away 96% of that volume as spam leaves the 8% dissapearance rate of legitmate email at over 940 million emails daily which just vanish.

Bookmarks

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:23:13 GMT

Random links of local interest or useful web
tools.

NASA - Explore the Solar System Page
     http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eyes/

Rack Photgraphy - Amazing panoramas of Cincinnati landmarks.
     http://rackphoto.com/pp/

Snippets

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 14:22:08 GMT

Foxconn, the Chinese supplier of Apple’s iPad 2, is expecting to ship 20 million iPad 2s before Christmas.
Amazon Chairman and internet billionaire Jeff Bezos' private rocketship crashed and burned during test flight. A "flight instability" triggered safeguards which stopped thrust on the Blue Origin's rocket. http://www.blueorigin.com/letter.htm
A federal judge has tossed out a "grossly excessive" November jury award that would have seen software company SAP pay $1.3 billion to arch-rival Oracle for theft of its intellectual property. A new trial will be required if Oracle rejects the new $272 million dollar settlement.

College Kids are "Search Stupid"?

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:20:19 GMT

A study by Illinois academic libraries (ERIAL) discovered that not only do college students use Google over any other resource to find information, but they are not very good at it. Having grown up with the Internet, the college kids were assumed to have some expertise in data retrieval by the librarians and scholars conducting the study, but the students were "utterly clueless" in how to conduct a good search. Information on how to search more effectively is available by searching 'Google Search Tips" and all students should be encouraged to use Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com.

Cyber-Warfare?

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:18:27 GMT

While most of us think Cyberwar is the stuff of Hollywood movies and Pentagon budget
padding, there is growing evidence of "State Actors" at work in the hacker's underworld.

Security firm McAfee released information in August on "Operation Shady Rat", a 5 year long hacking campaign McAfee has uncovered. Government systems in the US, Canada, and South Korea plus corporate networks of defense contractors were apparently penetrated, with some of the intrusions lasting almost 2 years. Signs point to folks behind the Great Wall as probable culprits.
The Stuxnet Worm reported earlier this year targeted Siemen's controller chips on manufacturing equipment. It just happened to infect and disable equipment necessary for Iran's nuclear program. Such focus suggests a state sponsored attack.
Recently the Dutch Certificate Authority DigiNotar was found to have been hacked and forged security certificates created for domains like Google, the CIA and Mossad. The fake certificates appear to have been used to gain access to anonymizing Tor networks, Skype phone traffic, and the Gmail accounts of 300,000 Iranians. Once again, this hack appears to be state run or sponsored as part of a domestic spying effort.

Bookmarks

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:15:21 GMT

Random links which you might find useful or interesting...

Bomomo - Online Drawing Page
     http://bomomo.com

Khan Academy - Over 2400 Educational Videos
     http://khanacademy.org

Shapeways - Personal 3D Printing
     http://www.shapeways.com

Snippets

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:13:14 GMT

Windows XP market share finally drops below 50%. Microsoft announced that at th end of July, less than half of all internet users were using XP.
Lawyers in the Statler v Dell class action lawsuit expanded their complaint to include more components. The year old suite seeks damages from Dell for OptiPlex computers shipped from May 2003 to July 2005 which the lawyers assert Dell knew 8 million of the 11.5 million units sold had defective motherboards.

Spotify

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:07:02 GMT

The Swedish streaming music service Spotify has reached agreement with American record companies and launched in the US. Unlike iTunes or other services which let you listen to songs you own, Spotify is more like NetFlix in that their entire 15 million song library is available to subscribers. Advertisement sponsored free accounts are available "by invitation" while paid accounts can be bought for $4.99 or $9.99 per month. It is going to be interesting to see if Spotify and Apple's new iCloud successfully shift us from the old "ownership" model of rights to an "access" model, at least for music. http://www.spotify.com

Google Launches Google+

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:02:57 GMT

Google has just launched a new social networking component called Google+ which might grow to challenge Facebook. Google's earlier social networking efforts had not met with much success. Orkut, while popular in Brazil, never took off in the U.S. Google+ is getting good reviews for its integration with other Google products like Gmail, for the ability to group contacts into "Circles", and for video chat via "Hangouts". Now Google must convince people to join the new social network to address the "Pretty but empty" criticisms. http://plus.google.com

Snippets

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:03:23 GMT

Apple is now worth more than Microsoft and Intel combined. Microsoft market value of $201.59 billion + Intel $115.21 billion < Apple at $317.6 billion. Must be due to Phones as Apple still only holds about 8% of the PC market.
Red Hat is set to break a billion dollars this year. The commercial Linux and middleware vendor has certainly proved that it is possible to make money being part of the Open Source community.
RSA Security has offered to replace virtually all of the 40 million SecureID tokens currently currently used by governent and enterprise clients. The EMC subsidiary has admitted they were hacked last March. The offer to replace tokens or provide monitoring appears to be prompted by a failed attack on Lockheed Martin which utilized data exposed in the March hacking.
Bloomberg.com reports the Department of Homeland Security ran a test to see how hard it would be for hackers to gain access to computer systems. DHS staff secretly left CD's and flash drives in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors. Of those who picked them up, 60% plugged them into computer systems to see what they contained. When the bait sported an official logo, 90% were plugged in.

Bookmarks

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:10:43 GMT

Tineye - Reverse Image Search
http://www.tineye.com/

Pixlr - Online Photo Editing
http://pixlr.com/

MIT Open Courseware
http://ocw.mit.edu

Cincinnati Area Geographic Information System
http://cagisonline.hamilton-co.org/cagisonline/index.html

Passwords

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:57:16 GMT

The hackers who breached 77 million Sony user accounts published over a million of the passwords plus 250,000 they got from Gawker. Email addresses and passwords of Sony & Gawker users were released in a torrent that anyone could download. Analysis of the information reveals that users are still doing a terrible job of password security.

Half the passwords used only one character type. (Uppercase, Lowercase, Numbers, and Special Characters.) Good passwords should use three or more types.
Only one in a hundred passwords used a nonalphanumeric character.
36 percent of the passwords were found in the dictionary. This suggests that over a third of all passwords would are vulnerable to a simple brute force attack.

Please consider combining two capitalized words with a number and punctuation mark for your next password.

Scareware Arrests

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 13:54:56 GMT

A 12 nation anti-cyber crime effort has apparently cracked an international scareware ring believed to have made over $72 million. A 22 year old man and 23 year old woman were arrested in Latvia and computers and servers were siezed in the US, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands and Lithuania. The gang apparently scammed money out of more than a million victims; secretly installing software on PCs which would falsely claim to detect viruses and spyware, then taking payment for supposedly cleaning the infections. No figures are given for the number of users infected but not gullible enough to pay for a fake cure. More information can be found at the FBI web site or by Googling "Operation Trident Tribunal".