Showing 11-20 of 28 results
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The Chinese are coming
Life, James Hein, Published on 07/01/2015
» This will be the year of the Chinese phone manufacturers.
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Phishing, Stuxnet & Samsung
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/12/2014
» Today's new IT term is spear-phishing. According to Kaspersky Labs, Australia is attacked by phishers a quarter of the time, which I suppose makes them the most gullible nation.
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How secure are our secure transactions?
Life, James Hein, Published on 22/10/2014
» So far, this month has been security issue after security issue. Not counting the usual Microsoft updates, Adobe has been having all sorts of vulnerability problems, which explains the rapid fire updates you keep seeing on your computer. The biggest hit nation so far this month, however, has to be South Korea.
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Just who is accessing your data?
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/10/2014
» According to a recent Department of Finance announcement in Australia, agencies must now adopt cloud technologies. In the announcement, the word "must" is in italics because there are some qualifications like "where it is fit for purpose, provides adequate protection of data and delivers value for money".
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7, 8, skip 9, and it's 10!
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/10/2014
» Forget Windows 9, Microsoft is so certain the next version of Windows is so good they are jumping right to 10. Yes, Windows 10. Its reasoning is something about this not being an incremental update, which is what I thought was the point of a decimal numbering system (8.1).
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Safe surfing with a VPN
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/08/2014
» So how safe is your surfing? Not the water, board and shark kind, but what you do on the web. Sitting in front of your computer you will either have your own internet protocol (IP) address or be assigned one as part of a pool that is doled out by your internet service provider (ISP). Somewhere between you and the rest of the internet will be a domain name server (DNS) that knows how to get a message from out there back to you and vice versa. Or to put it another way, they know where you are.
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Get ready, this week is Apple-heavy
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/07/2014
» At a talk given at the recent Hackers On Planet Earth conference, Jonathan Zdziarski found a number of hidden surveillance tools hidden in the iOS operating system. One provides a back door that, while not wide open, is enough to gain access to the user’s address book, account info and other bits and pieces. In this case, you can get data out, but not back into the device. The retrieved data is in a raw format and needs additional processing. There is also an undocumented packet sniffer (com.apple.pcapd) that can log and export network traffic. These items have been actively updated by Apple, meaning they are not left over from testing.
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Protect your photographs from spies
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/05/2014
» Beware the Cloud, or at least Google+. I took a picture with my phone recently, something I don’t do all that often, and happened to visit Google+ soon after. The first thing I saw was the photo I’d just taken. This was the first time I discovered that any photos I take are by default sent immediately to my Google+ area. You would think this was a setting in the Android G+ app but it is instead in the Photos apps. Google’s default push is to fully open up everything you do to Google, so be careful what setting you have and how you use your camera. To be fair the photo was in a “protected” area but we all know how well that kind of protection remains in the open-to-the-world-plus-their-dog environment we live in.
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Happy birthday, Gmail
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/04/2014
» This month Gmail turned 10. According to legend, it was created in the free time of Google engineers, who were allocated 20% of their time for personal projects. In those days there was Microsoft (who managed to lose all of my Hotmail emails one year; I’ve never touched it since), Yahoo! and AOL, making Gmail’s rise from nothing quite an achievement. Gmail introduced threaded mail, more data storage and allowed users to send larger emails. They also introduced an “undo send” option, long-term storage of emails, better searching and didn’t delete your account if you remained inactive for a while. It handled spam decently and worked on almost every browser. Microsoft responded by charging for extra space. No wonder it is now the top free email service, at least according to some measures.
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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.
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