Showing 1-10 of 15 results
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What would you do without internet?
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/04/2023
» India recently blocked all internet, phone and SMS access to the state of Punjab for four to five days as they search for a Sikh separatist. I had a friend who was there at the time and they told me how eerie it was to see no one on a phone for a few days. Someone would occasionally pull out the phone to see if service had returned but apart from that, there were no people talking loudly on phones in restaurants or on public transport. This impacted 27 million people, which is more than the population of Australia.
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Those pesky pixel trackers
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/10/2022
» I've written about the tracking in TikTok. I recently found out you don't need to have the app installed to be providing tracking data to this platform. The term you need to learn today is "tracking pixel".
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Chinese tech companies are at it again
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/05/2021
» A reminder on the importance of both scalable systems and load testing. The recent Philippines' attempt to expand its national ID programme had a number of issues when they introduced a two-factor authentication system. PhilSys, as it is known, started out just fine when registrations began in 2020, when paper forms were still used. This in itself was a little strange as the purpose of the new system was to do away with the need to present physical documents when interacting with government agencies. PhilSys the digital ID system was marketed as such and promised transformation and other buzzwords including easier opening of bank accounts. All of this would also help everyone involved during Covid times. After 28 million paper applications, the digital system was turned on and in the first hour 40,000 people tried to register. The system promptly fell over due to the load and inability to scale quickly. Most IT people will admit to a similar experience in their past, but by 2021 there are surely enough historical examples of what will happen if you don't do sufficient load testing before a major release like this.
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The fight for a freer web continues
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/03/2021
» The social media platform Telegram has over 500 million users with over 55 million active every day. Unlike other platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others, you are free to express your opinion there without being cancelled, shadow banned or throttled in searches.
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Privacy an artefact of times past
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/07/2018
» If you have learned nothing else from my many years of writing, it should be that unless extraordinary steps are taken, personal data privacy doesn't exist, except perhaps in the deluded minds of government officials. The only thing privacy laws do these days is stop you from returning someone's lost phone. In just one day in the news, I read reports about Huawei infiltrating Facebook, another Spectre CPU problem, political data harvesting in the UK, insecure military servers in the UK, Chinese hackers interested in Cambodia (and the rest of the world) along with other items about lost or hacked data. Yahoo and Google collect far more than the whole of the US spy agencies combined, though at least the latter doesn't deliberately spread it around or sell it to marketers.
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Samsung looks to rebound
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/04/2017
» The Samsung Galaxy S8 will be in stores towards the end of April. Samsung had to get this one right after the Note 7 but they have ended up mostly doing an Apple. One obvious conclusion for the release of a 5.8 and 6.2-inch models so close together in screen size is because of the iPhone regular and S versions; it looks like Samsung thought they needed two models as well. There has been no upgrade in battery size nor camera capabilities between the S7 and S8. Then there are the prices, the most expensive Samsungs ever. Add all of this up and it detracts from what is still a rather nice phone.
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Password ain't a password
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/02/2017
» How many people do you know, including yourself, who are avid Facebook users? Be honest. You will know that your account contains a large amount of information, much of it quite personal, that data thieves would be happy to mine and use. A solution is to protect this information.
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Samsung's US$16 billion battery hit
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/09/2016
» The news has not been good for Samsung with the Note 7 still causing problems as they recall every unit. This situation is unusual for Samsung as they are normally better at the component supply chain. Apple, of course, is taking advantage after their own antenna gate and I suspect secretly gloating that it has happened to their biggest competitor. As I write this, Samsung has taken a US$16 billion dollar hit at the stock market and has had to drop $25 billion from their market cap value. Samsung has also announced they are selling their printer business to Hewlett Packard.
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Keeping protected content
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/12/2015
» Are you allowed to keep protected content? Depending on the country you live in the response is not always "yes". Even in freedom loving places like the United States, some in government agencies try to restrict freedoms, like access to Tor. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), or at least a few of its agents there, certainly appear to have an anti-Tor policy and will actively try to have any public access points shut down. This has, of course, had little success in a place like the US but in other places the whole internet can be shut down.
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The year Samsung outsmarted Apple
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/12/2014
» It is that time of year where I look back and see how many of the predictions I made at the start of the year happened.
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