Losing a hard drive full of data is certainly a stressful affair. Not only will you likely go through the five clinical stages of grief, but then you’ll have to figure out exactly how you will continue on after this traumatic event. Can you actually recover any data from the drive? How bad is it? What steps do you take?
Say you don’t have a backup plan in place, as is the case with most people. What do you do when your world suddenly comes crashing down upon you (and I do mean this in the most literal sense)?
Yes, you read that right: Voiceless phonecalls. Keep on watching to learn more about the technology.
I just hope this thing cannot recognize unappropriate thought patterns! I wouldn’t want anyone to hear me “thinking” about how stupid or annoying I think they are.
The biggest reason behind mobile technology being limited in size and performance is the inability of manufacturers to cool hardware appropriately. Every portable device on the market is either horribly underpowered or larger than necessary. This is because most gadgets with acceptable specs need large fans and heat sinks to keep them from burning through your lap.
Nowadays, if a manufacturer wants to cool something down, they smack a fan on it and call it a day. Not only do these fans move minuscule amounts of air, they’re large, waste battery power, and have a limited life-span.
The new, tiny, solid-state fan from Thorrn Micro Technologies uses similar principals as those ionic air purifiers. Basically, the fan emits ions that create an electric field which then pushes air molecules. I was a little skeptical at first, however, the fan can reportedly move air at up to 2.7 meters per second, whereas regular mechanical fans in portable electronics only push about .7-1.7 meters per second.
Research and development of the SSD fan has already been completed and it is now being prepared for marketing to computer manufacturers; the people behind it are expecting to push these onto the market as early as next year. In other words, it may never happen.
“The golden age of science fiction” is a term used to describe a particularly fertile period in science fiction, when old conventions of “the space western” were challenged with new ideas, new themes, and new energy.
There are many names associated with that period—Heinlein Bradbury and Asimov, among others—but no name is more synonymous with that heady time in science fiction than Arthur C. Clarke. The death of Clarke, yesterday at his Sri Lanka home at the age of 90, almost closes that chapter of science-fiction history. With only Ray Bradbury left from the shiniest nuggets of the Golden Age, more than just writers are passing into history… the very ethic that created the world we live in today is slowing growing pale.
When the cost of bandwidth is virtually next to nothing these days, couples who find themselves apart are using Skype to recreate that “at home” feeling. It even has a name – Ambient Skype.
Basically you leave the app constantly running on your computer as background noise. Since Skype-to-Skype calls are free, it doesn’t cost you a dime (except maybe electricity to keep the computer up). You don’t have to talk to your partner all the time (who talks to one another non-stop 24/7 anyway?). Skype just stays running and if the webcam is on, you can drop off to sleep together, listening to one another breathing, snoring, talking in their sleep, farting… just like a real “together” couple!
As I said, this would be good if couples found themselves apart due to business trips but it would also be good for long distance relationships or families who are scattered across the globe for one reason or another. As well as dropping off to sleep together, you can also leave Skype on to listen to your kids screaming their heads off in the background or generally listen to comforting sounds of home. Anything to avoid those pangs of homesickness.
Hannaford Brothers Supermarkets didn’t know much about cybersecurity, but then again, most companies don’t. Companies that don’t use a full-time infosec staff rely on security providers to assess their network and provide solutions that fit their size and need, and hopefully, provides protection for them at an acceptable level of risk. Then those companies carry on with what they do best, which is running a business. In Hannaford’s case, that business is selling groceries at a good price.
Hannaford had turned to a company called Rapid7 to secure their network, their webservers, and most importantly, protect their credit card processing information from hackers. When news of the massive data breach reached the home offices of Rapid7, the security company immediately assembled a team of crisis managers to tackle the issue.
No, they didn’t deploy a forensics team to Hannaford to help contain the data breach. Instead, Rapid7 scrubbed all mentions of Hannaford from their client list. Rapid7 obviously didn’t want to be associated with one of the largest dataloss incidents in history, and they certainly didn’t want to sully the name of their flagship appliance, the “neXpose” which is a vulnerability scanning device.
This information is from Attrition.Org, an online security community that has been around since the predawn of the dot-com boom. They have an outstanding article, with screenshots here, where they are much less kind to Rapid7 in light of their cowardly actions.
These shenanigans provide a teaching opportunity.
First and most obvious, you can’t try to coverup associations with your customers, especially if you so proudly flaunted your relationship on your corporate website.
Second if you are a security company and you maintain a comprehensive list of all of your customers on a public website, you expose them to hack attacks should a vulnerability ever arise in your own product. That customer list turns into a hacker’s menu.
Third, if you are a private company and are forced to be included on a security company’s client list as a condition of purchasing their product, go with another vendor.
Finally, companies should choose a vendor that is there to help you in the worst case scenario. Not a company that will scrub all memory of you from their website when the chips are down.
I live in a pretty neat place. My girlfriend and I live in a small apartment which is connected to her parents house. Our apartment and their house is completely connected by a network that runs our internet, telephones and satellite TV.
When I first moved here years ago, I thought that it was amazing – how everything can be run out of one little room using a computer, server and network, how nearly every room in the house had a computer with internet connection. Every room that is, except the kitchen and the bathroom.
Well, two years back, we finally got a computer and internet access in the kitchen. Only the bathroom remains internet-free, although I suspect that may not last for long. I want to be able to instantly IM my girlfriend that we are out of toilet rolls and I can’t let the toilet get in the way of digging that all-important GAS article.
As MSN Tech points out in a post, there are definate advantages to having internet access in the kitchen. Here’s my advantages.
You can ask when dinner is by sending an instant message to your partner. Useful if you’re in another room with the door shut and you don’t want to shout. You can also email or IM additions to the shopping list.
Get instant access to recipes. I like to bake cakes as a stress-buster and I often need to look up cake recipes online. So it’s very handy to have online access in the kitchen to look up measurements.
Keep an eye on email or IM. Sometimes I want to start making dinner but I need to wait for a client to get back to me on an important matter. By having my email and IM open in the kitchen, I can start chopping vegetables and still keep my ears open for that important “ping!”
Play music. I have iTunes installed on the kitchen PC and while I am browsing recipes, I am sometimes playing something to get me energised to start burning the place down (my cooking leaves a lot to be desired). A little Marvin Gaye always gets me in the mood to start burning the beef or overcook the pasta.
But I have to admit my main motivation for getting a PC in the kitchen is to IM my girlfriend – when all is said and done, I am a lazy geek and I like to fire up Google Talk and send instant messages asking when dinner is ready. I know, all the feminist geeks will be outraged with me. Go burn your bra’s girls.
Do you have a PC in the kitchen? If so, what’s your primary reason for having it there? What other strange places do you have a PC? In the bathroom? The garage? Come on, shock us.
On Sunday evening, I received the most nerve-wracking instant message of my life, even though I knew right from the start that it was a fake. I decided to write this article in case you get hit by this online scam too. Being computer-based creatures, I figured some of the GAS readership were high risk targets.
When it happened, I was sitting where I always sit – in front of the computer, chatting via IM, and researching some possible blog stories. It was then that a new IM window popped up with the following message :
I am hitman. I been paid lot of money to kill you by good friend of yours. They waiting f0r your funerael announcement. What I want too know is how much youre life is worth?
Now I would be lying if I said that by this point my heart wasn’t threatening to explode and my hands weren’t shaking. But I knew that this was what the FBI was warning everyone not to fall for so I decided to call this joker’s bluff. I was first tempted to correct his grammar (I AM a writer after all) but I decided to get right to it.
Hannaford Brothers Supermarkets, a large New England grocery store chain, reported that they suffered a data breach. The store’s network was penetrated and hackers were listening in during credit card authorizations. Already, there are 1,800 confirmed cases of fraud associated with the breach. At risk are 4.2 Million additional credit card accounts.
A security breach at an East Coast supermarket chain exposed 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers and led to 1,800 cases of fraud, the Hannaford Bros. grocery chain announced Monday. Credit and debit card numbers were stolen during the card authorization process and about 4.2 million unique account numbers were exposed.
The breach affected all of its 165 stores in the Northeast, 106 Sweetbay stores in Florida and a smaller number of independent groceries that sell Hannaford products.
Hannaford became aware of the breach Feb. 27. Investigators later discovered that the data breach began on Dec. 7; it wasn’t contained until March 10, said Carol Eleazer, Hannaford’s vice president of marketing in Scarborough.
“We have taken aggressive steps to augment our network security capabilities,” Hannaford president and CEO Ronald C. Hodge said in a statement released Monday.
The company urged its customers to monitor their credit and debit cards for unusual transactions and report any problems to authorities.
I happen to speak fluent security-breach double speak. When Hannaford says that the breach began on December 7th, they mean they only have logs dating back that far. When the CEO says they are taking aggressive steps to augment their network security, he really means that they are going to get a firewall, an IDS, and start segmenting their database from the rest of the network like they are supposed to do.
And when the Vice President of Marketing gets quoted in the press talking about the security breach, it means that there is no CIO (Chief Information Officer) at the company. It means their network was designed haphazardly with only a minimal thought to security. What, they couldn’t get a quote from the President of Marketing? How does the dairy stocker in store 413 feel about the breach? He probably knows as much about network security as the Marketing VP.
All of this means that as the days go on, you will see more and more headlines talking about this breach being much worse than originally thought. The number of fraud cases will climb precipitously… and no one will be fired from Hannaford.
If you shop there and have used a credit card, get a copy of your credit report ASAP.
By law, you get one free credit report per year. You can contact them below.
If unauthorized changes in your credit reports are detected, you may be a victim of identity theft. A great resource to help guide you in recovery from identity theft is at the FTC here.
My comedy and geek sides have been meshing a bit more lately. About a month ago, I popped into Second Life again, after trying it a couple of times a year or so ago and giving up on it. At the time I first signed up, the interface was very primitive, and truth be told, I was never able to quite “see the point” of the game. However, as my comedy career has unfolded over the past year, I’ve been thinking more and more of trying to find a venue online where I can showcase some of my work. YouTube and MySpace are fine for videos, but there aren’t a whole lot of places where you can easily do a “live show” online as well as easily generate an audience for it.
I live in a pretty neat place. My girlfriend and I live in a small apartment which is connected to her parents house. Our apartment and their house is completely connected by a network that runs our internet, telephones and satellite TV.
