os x Archives - The Silicon Underground

Another reason to block fonts at the proxy

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 11:00:58 +0000

Last week Apple released a bunch of patches up and down its product line. One of the vulnerabilities it fixed in OS X was a vulnerability in its font parser. In the past you could mitigate vulnerabilities like this by

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Will ARM overtake x86?

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 11:00:25 +0000

Here’s an interesting question I got recently: Will ARM overtake x86? I think the answer depends on how you define “overtake.” If you mean everyone setting aside x86-based computers in favor of something running ARM, I don’t expect it to

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Droidpocalypse? Josh Drake says no.

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 01 Aug 2015 11:00:34 +0000

Josh Drake, the researcher who discovered the Stagefright vulnerability in Android that lets an attacker hack into an Android device by sending a specially crafted picture or video in a text message, was on the Risky Business security podcast this week to

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How the Amiga could have lived to age 30 and beyond

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 14:25:46 +0000

It was 30 years ago this week that Commodore released its landmark, long-time-coming Amiga 1000 computer–the first 1990s computer in a field full of 1970s retreads. Yes, it was a 1990s computer in 1985. It had color and sound built

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Expect a rough road ahead for Flash

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 11:00:05 +0000

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

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How to keep Excel from dropping zeroes after the decimal point

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 20 May 2015 11:00:44 +0000

At work part of my job is reporting security metrics along with my colleague, and sometimes we report things like the number of machines running a specific operating system. The problem we run into is that when it comes to

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Bash is worse than heartbleed! Oh noes!

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 11:00:35 +0000

A really bad remote code execution bug surfaced yesterday, in Bash–the GNU replacement for the Unix shell. If you have a webserver running, or possibly just SSH, it can be used to execute arbitrary code. It affects anything Unixy–Linux, BSD, Mac

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Vuescan: A review from a non-photographer’s perspective

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 11:00:24 +0000

Vuescan is a third-party scanning tool for most versions of Windows, OS X, and Linux. It supports hundreds of scanners, including those abandoned by manufacturers. It’s probably better than what came with your scanner. The pro edition probably costs as

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Google is your friend if you have an old scanner

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 11:00:12 +0000

My wife bought a scanner around the turn of the century. It’s old, but has always worked well. It’s a Canon LIDE 50, which should come as no surprise. Canon generally makes good hardware. The only problem is that Canon

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The trade off of fidelity and convenience in marketing, and how it doomed my favorite company

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 11:00:35 +0000

I’m reading a book called Trade-Off, by former USA Today technology columnist Kevin Maney. It’s primarily a marketing book. Maney argues that all products are a balance of fidelity and convenience, and highly favor one or the other. He additionally

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