Showing 11 - 20 of 26
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.
Predictions for 2014
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/01/2014
» Happy New Year! Like the start of last year I am not sure how the coming one will go in terms of IT and technological development. The current downward economic trends in places such as China will have an effect on manufacturing, so perhaps the focus will be on the low and middle sections of the marketplace.
Will IT firms tighten their belts in 2014?
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/01/2014
» It is just after New Year and things are quiet in the IT world as people reflect on the past and try to work out what is coming in the future. One of the stories that caught my eye was that Hewlett-Packard is planning to make 34,000 positions redundant by the middle of the year. The problem is that HP is not selling its products _ at least not in the volumes required to keep the positions active. They blame this on a contraction of the PC market, poor enterprise demand as companies tighten their belts, competitive pricing pressures and poor currency exchange rates. I suspect that HP will not be the only company to tighten its belt in 2014.
110-inch TV is proof size does matter
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/09/2013
» One of the best things about being involved in this industry is the continuous stream of new goodies I get to look at. The IFA gadget show was held recently in Berlin with the usual range of new devices on display. A Cliff's Notes-type synopsis follows.
Formicidae, neurons and the tweeting mass of life
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/07/2013
» The members of an ant colony work together as if they were a single organism. The human brain has neurons that work together in the same way: one neuron is not "intelligent", as such, but a whole lot of them acting in unison make us what we are. The secret is communication, connectivity and the processing of information. In the modern world millions of people are communicating with each other in almost real time using Twitter, SMS, Facebook and other social networking tools. If a billion people are doing this and we think of each person as a single neuron, does it mean that we starting to create some kind of global intelligence?
Microsoft's masterful marketing
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/07/2013
» When it comes to marketing, companies like Microsoft are masters. They recently announced that the Windows 8 store now has over 100,000 apps and that the installed base of Win 8 has now passed Vista. They also claim that the eight months it took for the 100K apps is faster than for Apple's iPad and Google Play at 18 and 24 months respectively. More interesting figures to me is that Windows 7 still has over 44% of the market and XP is still a bit over 37% with Windows 8 at a tiny 5.1% and Vista on 4.6%. Mac OSX, if you add up versions 10.6-10.8, comes to about 6.6%. So after all the hype and a year on, Win 8 is sitting just under Mac OSX and a very long way behind both Win 7 and Win XP, the latter still being a favourite of systems administrators everywhere.
Google going great, greater, the greatest?
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/07/2013
» In 2010 the figure was a mere 6%, but according to the monitoring firm DeepField, data to and from Google now accounts for a quarter of all traffic in the US across the internet. We all knew that Google was big, but until now no one was sure just how big they were, at least in the US. When it comes to sheer bandwidth demand at certain times of the day, the winner is Netflix, but in terms of overall traffic Google beats Netflix, Twitter and Facebook combined. Remember that Google includes YouTube and a wide range of other services.
Privates on parade
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/05/2013
» Privacy is still a major topic of debate all over the world and in many subject areas. My view has always been that I only put things up on the web that I want people to see. I have the same attitude with CCTV; I don't break the law so I don't care how many of them there are. This leads me to automatically wonder about people who complain about such things, because if they are not doing anything wrong, then what is the issue? I have read some of the counter-arguments but it always comes back to that question for me. Yes, the privacy issue is a little more complex and we will be debating it for some time to come, but apart from conspiracy theories and rogue government agencies, it does make you wonder what all the fuss is about.
XP phases out as robots start to heal themselves
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/03/2013
» Any organisation still using Windows XP should write down this date: April 8, 2014. After this point there will be no updates, no security fixes and no support. Office 2003 users will be in the same boat. To put that in perspective is it estimated that about 40% of desktops still use XP with Windows 7 finally passing them at 44%. Of those 40%, many have not considered their upgrade path as yet and while the OS will continue to work for a long time it will become more and more vulnerable. Hackers love XP as it is so well known to them and is often used as a springboard into organisational systems.
So where do smartphones go from here?
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/03/2013
» No, the upcoming release of the Samsung Galaxy S4 will not be the last of the smartphones but it does raise an interesting issue _ where do they go from here? At five inches the screen size is maxed out as far as being a comfortable handheld device and even at this size some people are already using the word Phablet to describe the cross between a phone and a tablet.