Showing 1 - 2 of 2
Buyer's market for smartphones
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/11/2014
» With the Western markets saturated, the pattern for smartphone sales is starting to change. It is a very good time to be the buyer as competition is fierce for those upgrading and for the tiny minority who don't yet have a model from the upper end of the market. Last month, LG was the only major retailer who had a positive number in their earnings statement. By comparison Samsung, HTC and Sony did not do so well. Elsewhere, like in China and India, the markets are expanding and people are starting to update from a regular phone to the smarter variety, but in the lower price range.
Passing the hacker hat
Life, James Hein, Published on 02/04/2014
» A “black hat” is a skilled hacker who tends to lurk in the background, rarely gets caught and is a master at breaking into systems, programs and data. These people have been represented in movies and are usually considered shady characters. There are, of course, rewards in being skilled in this field — both monetarily and in terms of underground notoriety — but there are also risks, such as retaliation from those that have been hacked and the continual threat of government agencies tracking them down. Lesser known but becoming more so are those called “grey hats”, who often straddle the line of legality. And as a recent conference showed, you can be rewarded for finding vulnerabilities in operating systems and application codes. There is a growing market for skilled grey hats, who are used to find holes in social media platforms and all manner of other products, ranging from smartphones to major systems. Government departments will even hire ex-black hats to secure their systems against attack. Major corporations do the same thing. So if you are a budding young hacker, you can potentially make up to $250,000 (8 million baht) if you find a zero-day problem in iOS or around half that for a Windows problem. The zero-day issue was recently represented in an episode of NCIS: Los Angeles.