In my last post I posed the question of whether it’s time to look for alternatives to the leading publishing platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc., but, truth be told, finding an alternative that can do everything these products do is practically impossible … that is, unless you’re willing to spend money building a customized solution.And that may be the reality of the future; if you don’t build your own solution paying upfront at perhaps 100x the cost (thanks, Keith) of, say, a simple WordPress installation, you’ll windup paying far more than that when you get hacked. According to IBM’s tenth annual Cost of Data Breach Study:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A while ago in another post I asked Is it time to give up on WordPress sites? and I got some interesting comments; here’s two that nail the issue and the growing sentiment:
Marco Naseef: “extremely modular = extremely vulnerable”David Franks: “… I run a hundred or so Wordpress sites and I'm on the verge of throwing in the towel. / All the big hosts like Bluehost and Hostgator have their shared host platforms controlled by hackers and riddled with malware like dark leach. It's very dispiriting. / I think the days of Wordpress are numbered”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A while ago in another post I asked Is it time to give up on WordPress sites? and I got some interesting comments; here’s two that nail the issue and the growing sentiment:
Marco Naseef: “extremely modular = extremely vulnerable”David Franks: “… I run a hundred or so Wordpress sites and I'm on the verge of throwing in the towel. / All the big hosts like Bluehost and Hostgator have their shared host platforms controlled by hackers and riddled with malware like dark leach. It's very dispiriting. / I think the days of Wordpress are numbered”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A while ago in another post I asked Is it time to give up on WordPress sites? and I got some interesting comments; here’s two that nail the issue and the growing sentiment:
Marco Naseef: “extremely modular = extremely vulnerable”David Franks: “… I run a hundred or so Wordpress sites and I'm on the verge of throwing in the towel. / All the big hosts like Bluehost and Hostgator have their shared host platforms controlled by hackers and riddled with malware like dark leach. It's very dispiriting. / I think the days of Wordpress are numbered”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In my last post I discussed a Web-based programming environment for the Raspberry Pi. Today, for your further Raspberry Pi delectation, I have another RPi-compatible programming tool but this it’s rather more specific: It’s called Sonic Pi and it’s for programming music in real time.Created by Sam Aaron at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Sonic Pi is a free, open source, live coding synthesizer released under the MIT License. Better still, it not only runs on the Raspberry Pi as its name suggests, it also runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
From our "Your Tax Dollars At Work" department: You, my friend, are being spied on ... but you probably already knew that. But what you might not know is that besides the usual suspects, the NSA (thanks to Edward Snowden) and probably every other TLA (Three Letter Agency) with any kind of signals intelligence mission, it turns out that the Department of Justice (DoJ) has also been secretly snagging your cell phone data by overflying urban areas with light aircraft equipped with a device called a “Dirtbox,” a successor or maybe more accurately, a sibling, to an earlier device called the StingRay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last August Offensive Security released Kali Linux 2.0, the Linux distro that’s pretty much everybody’s favorite penetration-testing toolkit (if it’s not your favorite, let me know what you prefer). This release was, to borrow a word from the kool kids, epic. Kali Linux 2.0 is based on Debian 8 (“Jessie”) which means that it’s now using the Linux 4.0 kernel which has a sizable list of changes. The biggest change in version 2.0 is arguably the addition of rolling releases which means that all of the latest versions of the included packages will be available as normal updates thus future point releases will really be snapshots rather than completely new builds. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“We are breeding the cow and they are milking it” - German Klimenko, Vladimir Putin’s new Internet czar on Google, Microsoft, and Apple doing business in Russia
Keith Weller, USDA / Wikimedia
When it comes to high tech, American companies dominate the Russian market and, perhaps not surprisingly, that doesn’t site well with the Russian government which would prefer to see homegrown offerings such as Yandex and Mail.ru get more market traction. The consequence, according to Bloomberg, is a plan by the Russian government to increase the taxes the American tech giants by 18 percent. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Watson 2016 Foundation is an independent organization formed for the advocacy of the artificial intelligence known as Watson to run for President of The United States of America. It is our belief that Watson’s unique capabilities to assess information and make informed and transparent decisions define it as an ideal candidate for the job responsibilities required by the president.- Watson 2016 Foundation
Okay, so it's a publicity stunt by IBM but isn't it an interesting idea? Just imagine Watson, IBM’s AI computer system that beat humans playing Jeopardy, in the role of President and Computer-in-Chief. Decisions would be made incredibly fast based on a vast corpus of facts and knowledge … or would they? Is it possible to provide an enormous library of information for Watson to chew on that wouldn’t have political bias built in? Would it be possible for Watson to filter out bias automatically? Perhaps the best place to start is to give Watson a cabinet post, say, secretary of energy and see how that works out. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s being reported by Malwarebytes’ CyberheistNews and other sources that a unexpectedly large wave of hacking has been hitting thousands of WordPress sites (described as the “Weird WordPress Hack” just to fit in with the Buzzfeed style of headlines). The attacks are described as:
"WordPress sites are injected with huge blurbs of rogue code that perform a silent redirection to domains appearing to be hosting ads," Malwarebytes Senior Security Researcher Jérôme Segura wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. "This is a distraction (and fraud) as the ad is stuffed with more code that sends visitors to the Nuclear Exploit Kit." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're trying to convince your management to beef up the organization's security to protect against data breaches, an interactive infographic from Information Is Beautiful might help.Built with IIB's forthcoming VIZsweet data visualization tools, the World's Biggest Data Breaches visualization combines data from DataBreaches.net, IdTheftCentre, and press reports to create a timeline of breaches that involved the loss of 30,000 or more records (click the image below to go to the interactive version). What's particularly interesting is that while breaches were caused by accidental publishing, configuration errors, inside job, lost or stolen computer, lost or stolen media, or just good old poor security, the majority of events and the largest, were due to hacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're trying to convince your management to beef up the organization's security to protect against data breaches, an interactive infographic from Information Is Beautiful might help.Built with IIB's forthcoming VIZsweet data visualization tools, the World's Biggest Data Breaches visualization combines data from DataBreaches.net, IdTheftCentre, and press reports to create a timeline of breaches that involved the loss of 30,000 or more records (click the image below to go to the interactive version). What's particularly interesting is that while breaches were caused by accidental publishing, configuration errors, inside job, lost or stolen computer, lost or stolen media, or just good old poor security, the majority of events and the largest, were due to hacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
FidSafe is a new online repository for storing digital copies of your important documents such as wills, bank statements, tax returns, etc., so that “the critical files you need are available to you and your family whenever and wherever you need them, even after you’re gone.” And by “gone” XTRAC LLC (a Fidelity Investments company), that offers FidSafe doesn’t mean that you’ve just popped out to get ice cream, they mean “gone” as in having joined the choir invisible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Described as “Robotic Falconry”, a new way to deal with drones that need to be removed from the air has been demonstrated by Michigan Tech. What’s so neat about this solution to controlling unwanted drones in your airspace is that the system, which uses a net that is fired at the target drone from another drone, snags the intruder and then hauls it away to a secure area so that any payload (for example, drugs or explosives) can be dealt with. Here's the system in testing:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Home automation has become a Big Thing and with it the surveillance and monitoring systems market has exploded. My focus today, the Icontrol Networks Piper nv, is ostensibly in the monitoring market but it’s an ambitious product that attempts to do a lot more.The Piper nv is a wireless (802.11 b/g/n), ultra-wide angle (180 degrees!) 3.4 megapixel video camera that can deliver 1080p (1,920-by-1,080 pixel) streaming video in h.264 format. It has “night” vision (at much reduced video quality) with built-in infrared illumination. The device has passive infrared motion detection, a microphone, a speaker, temperature and humidity sensors, a 105 dB siren, and a built-in Series 500 Z-Wave Controller. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Home automation is now “A Serious Thing”™ with what seems to be a new technology company throwing its hat into the ring just about every day. Today I have yet another entrant to the market, the Sentri, a home monitoring device with a lot of potential but also a lot of problems.
The Sentri is a touchscreen tablet computer that acts primarily as a video home surveillance and environmental monitoring system. It’s roughly tablet-size (9.842" by 9.842" square and 1.18" deep) with a 120-degree, wide-angle camera, night vision, and temperature, humidity, and air quality sensors. At any time and from anywhere you can view the Sentri’s video using the free iOS and Android apps. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s amazing what manufacturers have turned into “connected” devices and many of them, for example Bluetooth-enabled toothbrushes, seem more like “me-too” attempts to attract attention rather than real product improvements. Not so today’s product which is a great enhancement of a device I’ve never thought needed to be connected: The good, ol’ fashioned padlock.Dog and Bone, an Australian company that started out making cellphone cases (and obviously enjoys Cockney rhyming slang; “dog and bone” equates to “phone”) have recently started selling LockSmart, a Bluetooth LE-enabled padlock and I’d suggest that it’s a really useful rethink of how to interact with a pretty old technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Within hours of the recent Paris terrorist attacks, various politicians and current- and ex-government officials used it as an opportunity to push ther agendas. For example, in multiple interviews James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, blamed Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower:
I think the blood of a lot of these French young people is on his hands ... I would give him the death sentence, and I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted.
He even went so far as to claim that the Obama administration’s changes to government surveillance policies were responsible for the inability of the US and French intelligence services to prevent the Paris attacks. Talk about a partisan viewpoint.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Picture this: You go to a trade show and you collect your allocation of freebies: Teeshirts, hats, USB drives, and so on. You get back to your room or, more likely, you get back to your office and you start sorting out your haul of tschotskes. You plug one of the nerd sticks into your computer and then this happens:
Suddenly your day has taken a nosedive. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Of all of the things that you might think of upgrading as you move into home or premises automation your doorbell may not immediately spring to mind. When it comes to entryway monitoring and security, the solution is usually to use a camera and sometimes a wireless doorbell. A company called, appropriately, Ring, has come out with a solution called, also appropriately, Ring. The Ring is a wireless device with a built in wide angle 720p HD camera, microphone, speaker, and pushbutton. The device communicates over your WI-Fi network (2.4 gHz 802.11 b/g/n with WPA2, WPA or 64-bit WEP) to Ring’s cloud services which allows you, on your iOS, Android, or Windows 10 device, to see and talk to whoever is outside your door from wherever you are as well as make a video record of activity. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mark Gibbs