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Expect a rough road ahead for Flash

Dave Farquhar security July 15, 2015July 14, 2015android, apple, breach, chrome, IOS, ipad, iphone, oracle, os x, Patch Tuesday, yahoo

Adobe has patched Flash twice in two weeks now. The reason for this was due to Hacking Team, an Italian company that sells hacking tools to government agencies, getting hacked. Hacking Team, it turns out, knew of at least three unpatched vulnerabilities (also known as “zero-days” or “0days”) in Flash, and exploits for these vulnerabilities were among the things that got breached.

That’s why Adobe is having a bad month.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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Meet Waze, the crowdsourced GPS

Dave Farquhar Android June 10, 2015June 9, 2015android, apple, motorola, podcast

I’ve read a few things here and there about Waze, a crowdsourced GPS that runs on smartphones, including those that run Android, Apple, and Windows. Its premise is simple: Based on how traffic is moving, it figures out the fastest way to get where you want to go. It adds intelligence to the GPS.

The trade-off, of course, is that it’s tracking you too. The data is anonymized, they promise, but it’s up to you to decide whether it’s a showstopper.

Dave Farquhar

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Build the best, most secure wifi in your neighborhood

Dave Farquhar DD-WRT, Servers and Networking March 24, 2015August 26, 2017AES, android, apple, cat5, DDWRT, lowercase letters, malware, Meraki Wifi Stumbler, Micro Center, netflix, Roku, SSID, TL, wi-fi

My neighbor asked me for advice on setting up wi-fi in his new house. I realized it’s been a while since I’ve written about wi-fi, and it’s never been cheaper or easier to blanket your house and yard with a good signal.

Blanketing your house and yard while remaining secure, though, is still important.

Dave Farquhar

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Tinkering isn’t dead, but it is changing

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized February 12, 2015December 4, 20181980s, apple, apple ii, capacitor, capacitors, IBM, pi, radio shack, raspberry, Raspberry Pi, tinkerer

When Radio Shack announced its bankruptcy, I read more fears that the age of tinkering is dead than I read laments for the store.

I follow the logic, because Radio Shack was the only national store chain that ever tried to cater to tinkerers. But I don’t think people abandoning Radio Shack means tinkering is necessarily dead. I have plenty of indications that it’s still very much alive, but it’s also very different from how it used to be.

Dave Farquhar

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1984 called. It wants its surveillance back.

Dave Farquhar security January 23, 2015January 22, 2015apple, Debit card, insurance company, mortgage, net neutrality

So, the reaction to my story about my coworker’s 10-year-old going all Scooby Doo on the guy who had the nerve to steal his dad’s car was definitely mixed. Most people, of course, lauded the 10-year-old’s detective work. Others pointed out the dark side.

And there is a dark side.

Dave Farquhar

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Painting model figures in five easy steps

Dave Farquhar Toy trains December 7, 2014December 30, 2020apple, clearcoat, hardware store, Pledge Floor Care, police officer, Purple Power, Stain, toy train, train layout

Painting model figures for train layouts is a task that few toy train hobbyists relish, but we can borrow techniques from other hobbies to solve that problem. The model railroading and toy train hobbies have solved a lot of problems for hobbyists in other fields, and I don’t think we borrow knowledge back from those other hobbies as much as we could.

One problem the miniature wargaming hobby has solved is painting large quantities of figures rapidly while getting acceptable results.

Dave Farquhar

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This week’s photo leak is a reminder of the need for good passwords

Dave Farquhar security September 2, 2014September 1, 2014apple, celebrities, decent password, nexus, OPSEC, passwords, tweet

This week, numerous celebrities, mostly female, had their Apple accounts hacked and intimate photos stolen and leaked. There are several things we all need to learn from this.

We don’t know yet exactly what happened, though I’ve heard several theories. One possibility is that the celebrities’ accounts were hacked recently. Another is that someone who’s been collecting these photos through various means was hacked.

The incident probably was inevitable, but it’s also entirely preventable. I can think of three things that led to it. While this discussion may seem purely academic, there are misconceptions many people, famous and not, have and need to get rid of.

Dave Farquhar

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The forgotten computer that changed the world

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing July 22, 2014December 6, 2020amiga, apple, apple ii, commodore, commodore 128, IBM, macintosh

A rather hastily written and sloppily edited piece showed up on Slashdot yesterday morning that caught my attention, because it was about the Amiga 2000. The Amiga 2000 is a dear machine to me; in 1991, our family upgraded to one from a Commodore 128. I still have both machines, and there isn’t much that I know today that I didn’t first experience on one of those two machines.

This is an Amiga 2000 that looks fairly pristine. Inside there was lots of room for hard drives, memory, CPU upgrades, and video devices.

Although I think the piece was little more than a used computer store’s effort to unload some hard-to-move inventory, I do agree with the premise. For a machine that had a tremendous impact on the world as we know it today, the A2000 is criminally unknown. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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The legend of Mt. Fuji

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing July 18, 2014July 17, 20141990s, apple, journalism, Missouri, university of missouri

Twenty years ago, I was a promising young–and very unseasoned–columnist for a student newspaper at the University of Missouri–home of the Tigers–called The Maneater. Get it? Tiger? Maneater? Actually, healthy tigers never resort to eating humans, but legend has it by the time the founder learned that, the newspaper was already publishing and it was too late to change the name.

We were a ragtag bunch putting together a newspaper on a shoestring. Our computer network was quirkier than our staff, which took a great deal of doing–trust me, I’m used to being the weirdest guy in the room, and there I didn’t even stand out–but the piece of equipment that probably gives the production crew the most nightmares to this day was an old Apple Laserwriter–don’t ask me the specific model–named Mt. Fuji. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Curious conspiracies… or maybe just progress all at once

Dave Farquhar security June 11, 2014October 5, 20191980s, 1990s, android, apple, atx power supply, BSD, chrome, IBM, intel, MBR, power button, TrueCrypt, UEFI, windows 8, Windows 9, Windows XP

In the wake of Truecrypt’s sudden implosion, someone sent me a link to this curious blog post. I can see why many people might find the timing interesting, but there are a number of details this particular blog post doesn’t get correct, and it actually spends most of its time talking about stuff that has little or nothing to do with Truecrypt.

What’s unclear to me is whether he’s trying to say the industry is deliberately sabotaging Truecrypt, or if he’s simply trying to make a list of things that are making life difficult for Truecrypt. His post bothers me a lot less if it’s just a laundry list of challenges, but either way, the inaccuracies remain. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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