A few years ago I moved my private library to the cloud. It uses Calibre to catalog my books, and the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) to provide an Internet-capable catalog. OPDS is built in to a lot of publisher-independent e-reader software. My e-readers can generally retrieve books from Internet hosts that provide OPDS. My... Continue Reading →
Here's a clever two-step attack on a Macintosh. First, the victim downloads a file - it may be enough to email it to the victim as an attachment. Second, the victim opens a file or clicks a link. This executes the downloaded file. Yipes!
The trouble reported earlier with Apple Music seems to have attracted high level attention. James Pinkstone had reported that Apple Music deleted countless unique tracks he had stored in iTunes, and that an Apple service rep assured him this was correct behavior. As he describes in a later blog post, Apple contacted him promptly. They... Continue Reading →
CNET recently published a list of cables to keep and cables to discard. I like to keep things for historical interest as well as for practical reasons. Historical examples allow me to show students different ways of doing the same thing. The picture on the left illustrates "serial vs parallel" and I use a similar... Continue Reading →
[UPDATE: Apple now claims this was a bug; see the updated post] This is perhaps the worst example of entertainment engineering I've ever heard. Blogger and musician jamespinkstone claims that Apple Music deleted countless unusual tracks in his music collection. It "matched" the tracks with entries in its library. Then it deleted the matched ones from his... Continue Reading →
The current fight is about whether we will impose a technological infrastructure which will be exceptionally vulnerable to attackers in order to provide nothing more useful than some very, very short-term advantages to people investigating crimes. Perry Metzger, commentary on the Cryptography mailing list last Friday Let me say it differently: We put everyone in... Continue Reading →
Computing technology is insanely reliable when you look at statistical error rates. Hard drives read and write trillions of bits while rarely producing a reportable error. But when you want some data to live forever (like family photos or critical business records), even an occasional error is a problem. I've been using OS X and... Continue Reading →
I'm upgrading my iPhone and trading in the old one. I had to erase the old one completely and unhook "Find my iPhone" from it. I'd seen headlines hinting that recycled iPhones aren't often erased. Some headlines suggest that the erasing operation itself doesn't really work. It works. It's just time consuming. I turned off TouchID and... Continue Reading →
If you have the technical interest to read this, you probably do a lot of your finances with your personal computer. Taxes, monthly budgets, check printing (on those rare occasions), and tracking numerous accounts - computers are far better than people at handling such details. A typical personal computer, or smart phone for that matter, contains company names,... Continue Reading →
