“Death of the United States?”, you ask, shaking your head at the lunacy of a blog post that dares to suggest such a thing. As we sit here in 2017, days into a new administration, we are faced with a dangerously narcissistic man in the White House who has suggested voter fraud based on no provable facts, but instead based on his own opinion; a press secretary who parrots whatever he is told, whether it is provably false or not;…
I have three questions for you to start off this post. I don’t care if you’re “in the security field” or not. In fact, I’m more interested in your answers if you aren’t tasked with security, privacy, compliance, or risk management as a part of your defined work role. The questions: If I asked you to show me threat models for your major line of business applications, could you? If I asked you to define the risks (all of them) within…
For a site that has been tracking my life for years, Facebook’s advertising is horrible. Not just weak, not just bad, but horrible. During the last presidential campaign, I started to realize how bad Facebook’s advertising was, when (as a pretty outspoken liberal) it offered me a Mitt Romney ad every single time I logged on. But take a look below. You really couldn’t get more broken in terms of targeted advertising: Where to begin? Let’s just look at each: I…
Within the last few weeks, a very annoying trend on Twitter began to pique my curiosity. I saw random accounts that don’t follow me marking some of my tweets as favorites. What was weird though was the tweets that were getting marked weren’t, frankly, my best work. But I started noticing more about these accounts. First of all, as I said, the accounts that seemed odd were generally marking odd tweets as favorites. Take this tweet for instance, which has…
This week, for the second time in a year, I lost the hard drive in my main computer, a 2010 ThinkPad W510 running Windows 8. I swear I was good to the computer – I don’t know why this second Seagate 500GB drive (yes, the first one was too!) decided to hit the floor. I’ve had so many hardware problems with this system – BSODs, weird display problems, and more, over the last year, that rather than try to jam…
It’s with a fair amount of disappointment (disbelief?) that I read Bruce Ramsey’s article about Initiative 522 (Washington’s GMO labeling proposition) in the Seattle Times. My belief, after reading this piece, is that Mr. Ramsey should generally refrain from writing when his familiarity with the topic at hand leads him to include the disclaimer “I am a novice”, as he did with the statement early in this article, “I am a novice on genetically modified organisms”. There are three modalities…
I ran across a piece yesterday discussing one hospital’s lack of success with iPads and BYOD. My curiosity piqued, I examined the piece looking for where the project failed. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, it seemed that it fell apart not on the iPad, and not with their legacy application, but in the symphony (or more realistically the cacaphony) of the two together. I can’t be certain that the hospital’s solution is using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) or Remote Desktop (RD,…
At an annual Microsoft company meeting early in my Microsoft career (likely around 1999), Steve Ballmer interrupted the lively flow of the event to read a few letters that had been sent to him from executives around the world. As I recall, Microsoft technology was not working perfectly for these customers, and they weren’t happy. After he read the letters, Steve broke into a speech about “delighting the customer” – a mantra he adopted for some time, and I continue to use to this…
Apologies for the lack of updates recently. While the Windows Store has been growing by ~500 apps per day worldwide, only a fraction of these are truly stellar apps, and filtering out the wheat is still a manual process – something I can only do when time allows. Similarly, my rollup reports of the store are a relatively manual process that I hope to automate someday. That day is not today. Given a subtle jab that might seem to infer a…
I like opening with that subject – because it’s two words that Apple seems to never want to see next to each other. On Slashdot today, an article covered my friends from F-Secure discussing the barriers that are precluding the antivirus industry from making inroads in protecting iPhones from malware. Indeed, they are correct, you cannot build A/V into the iPhone platform – the API is explicitly designed to forbid that. However, I have to counterpoint. I mentioned in a…