Showing 1 - 4 of 4
Samsung again pushing foldables
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/08/2021
» Samsung is betting on foldables. The new Galaxy Z Fold 3 will come with IPX8 water resistance, support for the S-pen and an under-display selfie camera. It will be interesting to see how they solved the clarity issue Apple faced with that last one. The front screen will be an adaptive 7.6-inch 120Hz.
Operating without support
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/10/2015
» For most customers, Windows Server 2003 ran out of even extended support back in July but there are still plenty of people using it, including the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) where half of their servers are still running on the old but very good at the time operating system. For some, running an old operating system has no downside. What software and functionality that is running on it has probably happily been doing so for a decade or more and also in all likelihood without any problems. If the device is not connected to a public network of any kind then the risk of security breaches is also very low so missing out on any security updates is likely to have no impact. There is also no need to upgrade hardware to support a later and more demanding operating system. For some users this is a win-win.
Heartbleed causing heartache
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/04/2014
» One of the hottest topics in the computing world over the past two weeks has been a problem with the security of OpenSSL named Heartbleed. The short version is that this popular security layer has had a bug for the last couple of years that allowed people to grab not only information from a computer, but also passwords and decryption keys. The fix is to go to the OpenSSL site download and apply the latest version, anything past 1.0.1f, from here, www.openssl.org/related/binaries.html. If your Android phone is 4.1.x, then download a Heartbleed detector from the Play Store and check your exposure. For the technically minded, the problem is a missing bounds check so that the attacker can grab 64KB of memory. There are code samples on the net if you want more details. I suspect that system administrators have been busy all over the world patching their machines, generating new public and private keys and notifying all users to change their passwords on affected systems. I also suspect that there will be administrators and users who will not take any steps at all, either due to laziness or hubris. There is strong evidence that you should change all your important passwords at places like banks.
Already looking to the next Apple news
Database, James Hein, Published on 17/02/2010
» Seems the feedback for the iPad has been a bit lukewarm. Some have described it as ''an iPhone having a mid-life crisis''. It is like the iPhone but without multitasking, no Flash and no wide screen video playback capability. The iPhone itself is still dong well but the new unit didn't live up to expectations. Some of the problem is the responsibilities Apple has. They need to keep their developers happy to minimise app rewriting. Then there are the shareholders who expect customers to be locked into the iTunes store for everything, hence there is no Flash and you will not be able to play Evony or Farmville on your iPad.