Showing 1 - 9 of 9
Surprisingly, your personal data isn't safe with Facebook
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/10/2018
» Facebook has been in the news recently having large numbers of public profiles harvested by marketing conglomerates. Estimates from this incident alone range from 50 to 90 million users and there may be a lot more. The "more" part comes from the user search and account recovery features that may have been abused to scrape up to 2 billion or more accounts. In other words, if you are on Facebook and have any kind of public profile someone has more info on you than you might like. The feature has since been turned off but not before a lot of information went to the marketers.
The chips are down for a while
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/09/2021
» If you haven't noticed, there is a microchip shortage. Makers of any device ranging from computers to guitar pedals are finding it difficult to source what they need from the marketplace. Expect delays on most things and if you do get yours in time then thank the silicon gods.
The limits of simulations
Life, James Hein, Published on 09/10/2019
» I've recently been assigned to a team working on a simulator to model and test some business scenarios. The details aren't important but the upshot is that a model will be built, some decision points assigned percentages and times, then 1,000 transactions run through to see what the baseline is.
A work around for Microsoft's landmines
Life, James Hein, Published on 04/07/2018
» The law in the European Union that I mentioned in the last article was passed as expected and the response from many quarters has been savage. At the time of writing it has yet to be ratified but it has seeded confusion in the online world as to what will be allowed and what won't. It could end up being a subjective nightmare but that is what you get when you are run by a group of essentially faceless bureaucrats in Belgium. I don't think we have heard the end of this one.
The problem with KRACK
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/10/2017
» I decided to start this week's article by exposing a secret typically only held by IT Experts and specialists. I'll likely lose my secret decoder ring over this but the big secret is, read the pop-ups. As any IT person knows when they are called over to their parent's, friend's or work computer, the first thing to do is read the pop-up messages.
There are two sides to malware
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/01/2016
» Why do people write malware? Some people do it for fun and these people typically do so only on their own computers to see how this kind of thing works. I admit that when I was younger I tried the same thing but never let anything loose into the wild. Since then the software has become far more sophisticated. Others are just nasty and want to cause as much mayhem and damage as possible. Some do it for a cause or to highlight a perceived injustice. The group Anonymous for example are considered to be in this category. In another category are those groups paid by a Nation State to spy on other counties or disrupt a specific activity, as was revealed by the Stuxnet malware.
Fiddling with photos is now a lot more fun
Life, James Hein, Published on 16/01/2013
» This is definitely the age of the digital camera. What many people don't understand when they take digital snaps, however, is that the results can be a lot better with a bit of processing. In the old days the best way to do that was with Apple software and there are those who will maintain this view until they die. The PC started to come into its own about 20 years ago when Adobe released its first Windows version of Photoshop and about 10 years ago support started for RAW camera images. Then, in 2007, out came Lightroom, a product designed exclusively for the digital camera user.
Smartphone patent battle is pretty dumb
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/08/2012
» This week it's time to take a look at the ongoing phone wars. Nokia and RIM, makers of the Blackberry, are essentially out of the market leaving Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and a number of Asian providers.
Join the thousands and add your voice if you don't trust Oracle
Database, James Hein, Published on 13/01/2010
» You may have noticed that things tend to slow down a week or so each side of the New Year.