David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
This week Cnet interviewed Phil Lapsley, the author of Exploding the Phone, a book about the early history of phone phreaking.
Phone phreaking is absolutely fair game for the CISSP exam. I couldn’t tell you anymore how many phone phreaking questions I had to answer, but let me just say I’m glad I’d read those pages in the CBK about phone phreaking.
This week, ARM said what several people seem to have figured out: The key to mass adoption for smartphones and tablets is the $100 price point.
It may happen this year. It’s not hard to find a decently fast $80 Android tablet, but you’ll have to put up with a sub-optimal screen to get it–800×480.
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I picked up some dilapidated postwar American Flyer wheels at the local train store this afternoon to fix up some stuff from my junk box. The wheels were covered in milky white goo/powder/gunk/residue/stuff–whatever you want to call it. Almost anything molded of black plastic–wheels, couplers, truck sides–by Lionel or American Flyer in the 1940s and 1950s is prone to this. Fortunately, the fix is easy. Aim a hair dryer on high at it, and watch the whiteness melt away, leaving clean plastic behind.
Ars Technica has a fascinating article on the trials and tribulations of building a book scanner from a kit.
They lament the lack of software support, however–namely, a program to convert the image files generated by the digital camera into a PDF. Should I point them in the right direction? Why not? The key is Imagemagick, of course.
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A very good question came in as a comment to my earlier post, the benefits of practicing IT at home. What do I mean by putting some Windows 7 machines on a domain? It’s one of several good home network projects.
I mean standing up a server with centralized user accounts and shares, running on Windows Server or Samba, whichever you can afford. Make it a print server too, and print from it, just like you would from an office. Then extend it, and extend your sysadmin skills. Here are several ideas for projects of varying length, difficulty, and expense.
I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard a journalism professor say, “Don’t ever do something you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times.”
It’s worse today. In the 1990s, the news cycle was hours long. Today, with three major cable news channels and the Internet, the news cycle is minutes long, and marching toward real-time.
That’s the problem with Dr. Matthew Harrison’s hope, reported in the Post-Dispatch, to handle the LCMS’s Sandy Hook Vigil controversy “[Internally,] well out of the public spotlight.”
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Yesterday an interesting question popped up on Slashdot, asking for an alternative to a computer science degree for an aspiring web developer. He complained that what he’s learning in class doesn’t relate to what he wants to do in the field.
Assuming that by “web developer” he means someone who can code stuff in ASP and/or PHP with a database backend and do stuff in Javascript–as opposed to a designer who just does HTML and CSS–I think he’s best off staying where he is and asking better questions.
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Consulting firm Deloitte is warning that 8-character passwords will be obsolete this year. Sound familiar? Of course, the Slashdot crowd blamed it as security “experts” (their words) creating hype to make money.
Well, I’m a certified security professional who doesn’t have a dog in this fight, except that I don’t want your accounts getting stolen. So here’s the problem with many of the solutions the Slashdot crowd posed.
This morning, I read something in the St. Louis-Post Dispatch that disturbed me greatly. I didn’t say anything about it until I had a chance to confirm with my pastor that it is true.
In the aftermath of the shooting in Newtown, Conn., Rev. Rob Morris, pastor of Christ the King Lutheran Church, spoke at an interfaith service designed to give comfort to the community. the Rev. Dr. Matthew Harrison, the president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, of which I am a member and a former employee, forced Rev. Morris to apologize. (I will refer to him as Dr. Harrison throughout because he has earned that degree, not because I agree with what he says. It is possible to acknowledge rank while expressing disagreement.)