2001
Bang Bang Bang
Mark Ronson & The Business Intl...
Great song... and not only because anything featuring Q-Tip is good.
Programming Has Changed For Me
Fake femme fatale shows social network risks
Hundreds of people in the information security, military and intelligence fields recently found themselves with egg on their faces after sharing personal information with a fictitious Navy cyberthreat analyst named "Robin Sage," whose profile on prominent social networking sites was created by a security researcher to illustrate the risks of social networking.
In a conversation with Computerworld, Thomas Ryan, co-founder of Provide Security, said he used a few photos to portray the fictional Sage on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as an attractive, somewhat flirty cybergeek, with degrees from MIT and a prestigious prep school in New Hampshire. Then he established connections with some 300 men and women from the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, information security companies and government contractors.
The goal, said Ryan, was to determine how effective social networking sites can be in conducting covert intelligence-gathering activities.
Here we see how "Social Networks" facilitate the hacker practice of Social Engineering: manipulating people into giving you access to systems or confidential information that could assist in the penetration of a system.
Whats particularly wild is how blatant "her" LinkedIn profile is. (seen here on boing boing http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/23/faux-femme-fatale-fi.html)
My Experience With the iPhone 4 Antenna
So as many of us know, Apple is preparing a press conference "about the iPhone 4". Nobody knows what it is going to be about, but most assume that its going to talk about the antenna design and well publicized issues. Now when I bump into someone (without an iPhone 4) around the water cooler they say "How about that antenna? You having all those problems? heh heh". The thing is, when asked I don't know what to say. Yes I think if I squeeze the phone really hard i can get bars to go down, but only soft of, and only sometimes. I do not have problems with dropped calls at least not any more than I did with other ATT phones.
But what it DOES do, is allow me to make and receive phone calls from the first floor of my house for the first time since the first iPhone and the Motorola Razr. I think the first iphone didn't have as many antenna, sensors, and do-dads to interfere with the good old Edge network, and the Razr, didn't have anything.
Despite being left-handed and therefore ostensible the most afflicted - I'm very happy with the phone. I'm not having any significant problems, and while I don't doubt that people ARE having problems, I'm curious about the actual scale of those problems.
Blu-ray Not Coming to Mac Anytime Soon
In Steve Job's way, he engaged in an email thread with a person named Siva on why the new Mac mini did not include a Blu-ray dvd player. Steve's response:
Bluray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD - like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats.
When I read Nicholas Negroponte's book "Being Digital" back in1996, he pretty much predicted the death of the video rental store, the proliferation of broadband internet over coaxial cable, and the death of any physical media (atoms) used to transport digital (binary) information. It was soon after that i started the laborious and painful task of converting my CD's to MP3 (back then CD's ripped very slowly and you had to hand type the track names).
I think Apple very smartly can and should avoid putting blu-ray onto the mac and while we are at it, I look forward to phasing out the CD/optical drive entirely. The only time I've used the CD drive in my macbook in the last year was to rip the very last vestiges of my CD collection.
Job's closing reply to Siva's assertion that the medium term benefits were substantial said:
No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off. And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue.I think you may be wrong - we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over.
I do not have, and will not buy a Blue-ray player. I will not buy movies or music distributed on plastic transported on trains, driven by semi trucks, and then stored in huge piles in the backs of Best Buy warehoses. Wake up, its 2010.
John Haro
I am a software designer turned suit, occasional low-rent photographer, and as a friend once said a "sarcastic mother @#$@r". I can sleep soundly through any team sporting event but I'm passionate and politely opinionated about music, technology, and many other less valuable topics.
