Tor Messenger: Anonymous instant messaging beta released

Anyone who values their privacy will be aware of Tor, the distributed “onion routing” network that makes it possible to avoid surveillance (though it is thought that even the sophistication of the Tor system may not be enough to avoid NSA scrutiny if they really want to get the login for your Ashley Madison account). While Tor is great for hiding your browsing until now, it hasn’t been able to anonymize instant messaging. That changed yesterday with the beta release of the open source Tor Messenger. Available for Windows, Linux, and OS X the Tor Messenger:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why is double opt-in still not used by everyone?!

Out there in the big wide world there are, beside me, unfortunately, a few other people named “Mark Gibbs” and a number of these individuals don’t know their Gmail addresses. This is a problem as I am the proud owner of “[email protected]” and have been since the start of Gmail while they are not. The trouble with these people is they keep giving my Gmail address to organizations they deal with and more than a few of these organizations fail to do the one thing that they should be doing when it comes to building an email relationship with a customer: Verifying the customer’s email address.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

21 of the greatest computer quotes ever

He said itImage by Mark GibbsThe world of computers and programming isn’t just a world of algorithms, bits, and coding; it’s also a world of dark, sarcastic and or sardonic humor about the world of computers and programming, by which I mean it’s also recursive (see recursive). Here are arguably (and I’m sure you will argue) 21 of the greatest computer quotes ever. Let the wit begin!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Geek Joke of the Week

When encryption is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir rapelcgvba *.If you don't get it or you have a better joke, drop me a note ... * (mouse over, don't click) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NetSol’s new con; renewing unwanted .xyz domains

My friend Michael Williams, a private investigator based in Santa Barbara, Calif., is really pissed off with Network Solutions. This is what made him mad: Mike Williams That’s from an email message he received from Network Solutions a couple of weeks ago and Mike’s problem is that he doesn’t own the domain mswssi.xyz. While Mike does own the domains mswssi.com, mswssi.net, and mswssi.org this was a domain he knew nothing about so the letter made no sense. Mike called Network Solutions customer service and discovered that he had been “given” the domain by the company but, to his knowledge, had never been told anything about it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hello Windows 10. Hello Criminals.

It’s not really surprising that scammers are taking advantage of Microsoft’s consumer release of Windows 10. According to security firm KnowBe4:  Major Operating System upgrades are usually causing confusion among end-users and the current Windows 10 upgrade is no exception. The bad guys exploit these confusions in several ways, mostly through massive phishing campaigns and with criminal call-center operations which claim to be Microsoft tech support. Some campaigns will try to worry the user that their PC has changed somehow, causing access issues. Other phishing emails will try to lure the user with links where they can get their new no-charge version of Windows 10, or have it "attached" in a zipped file, which makes it our Scam Of The Week, because the attachment is the CBT-Locker ransomware!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The StageFright Vulnerability: Maybe the greatest Android vulnerability (so far)

Here’s a nightmare scenario: A simple smartphone exploit that doesn’t require the user to do anything other than receive a text message. If such a thing worries you (and, if you’re an IT manager, in a shop that allows BYOD, it should) then there’s bad news for you: Such an exploit exists for, it estimated, roughly 95% of Android smartphones which runs roughly 82% of the world’s estimated 1.91 billion smartphones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC to AT&T: “Unlimited means unlimited”

AT&T Mobility, in common with many other service providers of all kinds, uses the word “unlimited” to describe their consumer wireless data offerings. Unfortunately, for consumers, AT&T is using a totally different definition of the word because to the company, “unlimited” has meant “until you reach a threshold of service usage after which we’ll throttle back your performance.”The FCC, in their usual slow and lumbering way, has finally got around to doing something about this blatant and devious redefinition of “unlimited” (it’s taken them four, count ‘em, four years) and proposes to fine AT&T … wait for it … a record $100 million for misleading customers on the grounds that the company violated the 2010 Open Internet Transparency Rule that required ISPs to clearly and transparently inform their customers about their network management practices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Suhosin: How to harden your PHP web application

The number of Internet servers that run the PHP language is incredible: According to Netcraft, as of January, 2012, something around 244,000,000 web sites were running PHP and according to a May, 2015, survey by W3Techs “PHP is used by 81.9% of all websites whose server-side programming language we know.” Bottom line: PHP rules.The lure of PHP is that it's easy to learn, easy to develop with, and flexible (though not every one thinks PHP is a good idea). On the other hand, as with all programming languages, PHP has security issues so poor coding practices can make a server vulnerable to hackers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Eccentric 21st Century LED lighting with Bluetooth and smartphone apps

You’re sitting in your office (or cube) and it’s kinda drab. You need something to brighten it up and I have just what you might want: Lamps. But these are no ordinary lamps, these are LED lamps called Notti and Dotti produced by Witti Design which you can program from your smartphone and they are kind of eccentric. The Notti is a white truncated prism (100mm high by 75mm wide by 60mm deep) with rechargeable batteries. It can be programmed via an iOS or Android app and connects via Bluetooth BLE. The Notti can continuously change color, change color according to the music being played on your smartphone, stay on a fixed color, gradually brighten in alarm mode to wake you up, or light up when your smartphone receives a message or you get an incoming call. The battery lasts 720+ hours in notification mode (off until a notification event occurs) or 5+ hours in continuous mode.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Apple has made me feel really happy and really guilty at the same time

I’m feeling guilty; let me tell you why ... I hate having to stop using a piece of equipment because of designed-in obsolescence but, sometimes, there’s no choice. Consider products such as many of the available Bluetooth headsets; once the internal, non-replaceable battery fails they can only be thrown away. But those are as nothing to the top end Apple products which are designed for a life span of three years.I ran into the planned obsolescence issue recently with a 27-inch Apple iMac I purchased just over four years ago. It was a mid-2010 model  and I loved it until OS X Yosemite appeared. I’d given the new OS a few weeks before upgrading to see if anything  was going to be a problem for me but I didn't find anything major so I went ahead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

LIFTTT gives IFTTT location-awesomeness

In my last article I mentioned If This Then That, a service I covered over a year ago. If you’ve used IFTTT you can skip to the next paragraph … IFTTT is a service that connects other services together allowing you to define triggers (“If This”) and actions (“Then That”) so you can do things that would otherwise require a lot of programming and, most likely as a consequence, a lot of swearing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Misfit Shine: The best fitness tracker

Want to track your health? You need to get the right gear to do this and a product I’ve been testing, the Misfit Shine, offers an outstanding combination of pricing, functionality, and ease-of-use.With the explosion of digital health monitoring products, the “quantified self” movement has moved away from its bio-hacker roots into the mainstream and Apple’s recent release of Health with iOS 8 underlined this change. And this brings up to the three issues that have, to date, limited who can use the tech:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GogglePal: Augmented reality and heads-up meets the snow

It seems like every sport is in the process of getting a high-tech digital makeover and snow sports are no exception. For example, a 3-day old Kickstarter campaign by GogglePal for an augmented reality (AR) heads up display (HUD) that can be mounted on any brand of ski googles is already over halfway to its funding goal of $40,000 and runs through May 28.The GogglePal system (I keep wanting to write “GooglePal” which is what it could become if a certain company gets interested) consists of the HUD module that sits inside your goggles a magnet that sits on the outside of your goggles to hold the HUD in place and a controller “pod” that you clip to your goggle strap.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Linux in the Air: Drone systems go open-source

Look up in the sky, it is LinuxImage by PixabayNot only is spring in the air, so is Linux. But this wasn’t always the case. Early drones relied on either proprietary OSes or simple Arduino-based controllers such as the ArduPilot. While both of these approaches to drone control have been successful, they implicitly limit innovation -- the former because they are closed systems, and the latter because of limited computing power. The recent introduction of Linux-based drones will stimulate the UAV (Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle) market by creating more flexible, open platforms. Here’s how Linux takes off … literally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Indoor Atlas: Smartphones can navigate inside buildings using magnetic fields

Navigating outdoors is easy with GPS and when augmented augmented by WiFi the the accuracy and availability of geolocation increase significantly … until you step inside a building.Once you’re inside and there’s no GPS signal WiFi geolocation might give you a rough fix though usually you’re effectively “off the grid.” But knowing where you are inside a structure can be crucial in large factories or office buildings. It may also be crucial for others to be able to locate you.If you want to build an app that’s capable for geolocation within a building you should take a look at Indoor Atlas, an SDK for iOS and Android, which uses magnetometer data from your smartphone and cloud-based mapping data to locate you to within 2 meters or less in real time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wordfence plugin secures WordPress sites; solves job from hell

Effectively managing your own passwords under any circumstances is hard work but managing your users’ passwords on a WordPress installation can become the job from hell. Say you’re the admin of a WordPress site and you have a variety of users with accounts on your system. You immediately have a problem because WordPress is insanely popular (it’s used on almost one quarter of all Websites) and has roughly three times more bugs identified than the next largest content management system. Not surprisingly, WordPress is the most attacked CMS. So, unless you like having your WordPress installation hacked you’d better get serious about security.While you can enforce user compliance to password standards through the use of plugins such as No Weak Passwords or Force Strong Passwords, users can still choose passwords that are weaker than you'd like. So, how do you check whether their passwords are “good”? You use the Wordfence plugin published by Feedjit Inc.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Spaced out tech auction: 8 vintage space items go on the block

Saturn V Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) Memory ModuleImage by RR Auction It’s not often that vintage space memorabilia becomes available, but if you have any money left after paying your taxes or that refund is burning a hole in your pocket, starting April 16th you might want to check out RR Auction’s Online Space Exploration Auction. They’ve got stuff that’s been in orbit and to the moon and back. What’s that piece of hardware? It’s the Saturn V Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) Memory Module, which has a starting bid of just $500! So, here’s some insanely cool space stuff that you probably didn’t know existed and never thought would be available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Griffin 20 pumps up the digital volume

I’ve tried several speaker systems with my iMac and they have ranged from abysmal through to very good but most lack that audiophile quality. Not so the Griffin 20. The Twenty is a digital audio amplifier with a 20 watt per channel output and you can switch the input from its S/PDIF optical port to Bluetooth streaming. It's got traditional speaker connectors (for either speaker wires or cables terminated with banana plugs) and there’s an RCA socket to connect a subwoofer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bacony goodness + math + 3D printing = an inedible endless Bacon Möbius strip