Archive for December 30, 2014

Serious Android Lollipop Bug Discovered

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 30, 2014 by itnerd

If you were thinking of upgrading to Android Lollipop, you might want to wait. There’s a serious bug in the latest version of Android that manifests itself as a memory leak. In case you don’t speak nerd, a memory leak is when the operating system or an application does not release memory when it is supposed to. As a result memory runs out and the affected computer/phone/device requires a reboot. But the “fun” starts anew after the reboot.

Charming.

Affected devices include the Nexus 6, Nexus 5, Nexus 4 smartphones and the Nexus 7 tablet. I’m guessing that Google is going to be working around the clock to fix this as a thread on Google’s support forum is starting to grow rather large. That means that Google is getting attention in a very negative way.

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Set Phasers To Stun….. Captain Kirk Rails Against Twitter

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 30, 2014 by itnerd

Twitter better watch its step as it has angered Captain James T. Kirk. That’s right. William Shatner is angry at Twitter because they have an auto follow feature that is connected to a MasterCard promotion. Here’s what he had to say:

So imagine my surprise last night as I go into Twitter to get a list of those that I follow to start my yearly project only to discover that an account I didn’t follow, MasterCard was prominently displayed as one of my followers!  Twitter’s latest marketing scheme is to add followers to the list of those trusted friends and acquaintances that you have so carefully put together.

Yes, it did say “Promoted” under the name but it was a visible follower if you looked at my account.  It was also a Promoted follower of President Barack Obama, Dwayne the Rock Johnson and even embarrassingly to it’s competitor VISA card.

To indiscrimiinately add a follower to my list where I may have ethical, moral or business objections to them is wrong on all levels.  For MasterCard I do not but as the Negotiator for priceline.com; I would be furious to discover one of their competitors on my list and who knows what financial damages it could do to future endorsements?

It’s not only promoted corporations that have been included in my list; individuals are being added as well.  This morning I discovered an individual with the Twitter nickname which includes “Ganja” (another name for Marijuana if you didn’t know.) 

That’s not acceptable to me to have this occur on my followers list as it could hurt my income and my reputation.

Clearly, Twitter doesn’t know whom they are dealing with.

Digging into this reveals that this this is a feature that Twitter had rolled out some time ago. But it isn’t clear why this is happening now. Apparently he’s not the only one to be hit by this. Dwayne Johnson, Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, and even MasterCard competitor Visa have been hit by this.

As a result of this, Shatner who is an avid Twitter user, s going to cause him to “reevaluate” how much he uses Twitter going forward.

Twitter would be smart to backtrack from this before the Captain beams down to their offices for an away mission that they will not like to be on the receiving end of.

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Facebook “Year In Review” Feature Highlights Painful Memories

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 30, 2014 by itnerd

Facebook today issued apologies because its “Year In Review” feature reminded people of events that they would rather forget. Here’s an example from the Daily Mirror:

With the death of his six-year-old daughter, Rebecca, Eric Meyer had suffered a year of heartache and loss, one that will take him many more to get over.

So the web designer from Cleveland, Ohio, was ill-prepared to have that grief dragged up again when he logged on to Facebook to discover a picture of her, with the cheery message: ‘Eric, here’s what your year looked like.’

Well, that’s a #fail. Here’s a few examples from Twitter:

https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/548012833804267521

https://twitter.com/BoobsRadley/status/549389021554966528

https://twitter.com/stevekovach/status/548599328093114369

That’s another #fail. Let’s go over to The Washington Post to see how Facebook responded to this:

Jonathan Gheller, the product manager for Facebook’s “Year in Review” app said he has reached out to Meyer and is personally very sorry for the pain the preview feature caused Meyer.

“[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy,” he told the Post. The team behind the app is considering ways to improve it for next time and will take Meyer’s concerns into account, he said, although he did not comment on if they would follow Meyer’s specific suggestions.

“It’s valuable feedback,” Gheller said. “We can do better — I’m very grateful he took the time in his grief to write the blog post.”

The number of interactions and pictures and image gets on Facebook was among the strongest signals in determining which pictures were used for the “Year in Review” product, he said.

Now I think it is safe to say that neither of these examples were deliberate. But maybe Facebook who are experts at mining data and telling you all sorts of things that you never knew about yourself so that they can make lots of money might have put a bit more thought and effort into this feature to avoid this scenario?

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Cybersecurity Firm Tells FBI Disgruntled Ex-Sony Employee Is Behind Epic Hack

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 30, 2014 by itnerd

My gut feeling on the Sony hack was always that North Korea was not responsible for it. In fact, I said this at the time:

So, who could be responsible? It could be hackers who are using “The Interview” and the North Korean connection as cover. After all, Sony is a company that hackers have targeted for years. So quite literally, anybody could be responsible for this. Alternately it could be a disgruntled ex-employee, though they would need the skills to pull this off. A deskside support guy isn’t going to have those skills. But maybe a network admin who has some friends with the required skill could pull this off as long as they know enough about the Sony Pictures infrastructure to make this a viable attack. What makes the latter plausible is the fact that there were significant layoffs at Sony Pictures recently. It isn’t too much of a stretch to think that someone who got separated from their job was looking for a bit of revenge. 

It appears that I’m being proven right on that front according to Bloomberg:

At least one former employee of Sony Corp. (6758) may have helped hackers orchestrate the cyber-attack on the company’s film and TV unit, according to security researcher Norse Corp.

The company narrowed the list of suspects to a group of six people, including at least one Sony veteran with the necessary technical background to carry out the attack, said Kurt Stammberger, senior vice president at Norse. The company used Sony’s leaked human-resources documents and cross-referenced the data with communications on hacker chat rooms and its own network of Web sensors, he said.

Norse said the findings cast doubt on the U.S. government’s claim that the attack was aimed at stopping the release of “The Interview,” a comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The FBI said Dec. 19 it had enough evidence to link the attack to the communist regime, prompting President Barack Obama to vow a response to the cyber-assault.

None of this comes as a shock and I do trust Norse as they are one of the “go to” companies when it comes to this sort of thing. They have the means to prove that someone is behind a hack as well as the means to disprove someone’s involvement as well. Plus they monitor this sort of stuff in real time. Thus if they say that this was an inside job and North Korea wasn’t responsible, you can take that to the bank. By the way, Norse turned this info over to the FBI on Monday.

My only question is if the US Government going to backtrack on their claims of North Korean involvement? I don’t see them apologizing, but they do have some explaining to do. Starting with how they came to the (apparently) mistaken conclusion that North Korea was involved.

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So, You Got A New Wireless Router For Christmas? Here’s Some Tips That Can Help You..

Posted in Tips with tags on December 30, 2014 by itnerd

So, Santa delivered a brand new wireless router to you. That’s great and congratulations. The question is, how do you set it up to get the best performance out of it along with making it secure? Here’s a few tips that you might find useful. Note that these tips can be applied to any brand of router:

  1. Change the router name: The SSID or the name of the wireless router should be changed. Why? If you leave it to the default name, you give those who want to break into your wireless router and steal Internet access a head start to hacking you by tipping off what brand of router it is. It doesn’t matter what you name it, just pick a name that is unique. By the way, don’t bother hiding the SSID. I’ve proven to numerous people over the years that hiding it really doesn’t make it any more secure as I can find it easily using any number of tools to do so.
  2. Use WPA2 for wireless security: Another thing you need to do is to enable wireless security so that it keeps your wireless network secure. There’s two standards. WEP which is incredibly insecure, and WPA2 which is far more secure. Never use the former as any 12 year old could hack into your network if you do. And please pick a complex password that has upper and lower case letters as well as special characters and numbers (example don’t use “password” but use “P@$$w0rd” instead as the latter is more secure).
  3. Change the admin password: If you leave the default admin password in place, then anyone if they try hard enough can log into your wireless router and do anything from lock you out of it to change settings so that they can use it for their own less than noble purposes. This is another place where you’d want to pick a complex password.
  4. Disable or secure remote router access: For most users, there is no need to be able to access and configure the router from outside your network. Thus it would very wise to disable the ability to be able to log into and configure the router from outside your network. Now for yours truly who travels frequently and sometimes gets panic calls from my significant other asking me to “fix the Internet”, it can be handy to have this ability. But I enable all sorts of security such as complex password, plus I enable encryption so that it lessens the chance that someone could cause havoc.
  5. Enable simultaneous 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz support and make sure that the right devices use the right bands: Most if not all routers made in the last year or so support simultaneous 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz transmission on separate networks. You should not only enable this if it isn’t already enabled, but you should also make sure that the devices that only support 802.11 b/g only use the 2.4 Ghz band and devices that support 802.11 a/n/ac only use the 5 Ghz band. Plus you should set the 2.4 Ghz band to only connect to 802.11 b/g and the 5 Ghz band to connect only to 802.11 a/n/ac devices. The reason is that by doing so, you ensure that the slower devices don’t slow down the faster ones since they are completely seperated.
  6. Update the router’s firmware: When you take the router out of the box, the firmware on it will likely be out of date. By updating the firmware, you get performance tweaks and security enhancements which makes it very much worth it to spend the 10 minutes or less to update the firmware.
  7. Download and Save the configuration of the router: Now that you have everything set up perfectly, you should leverage a feature that most users know exists in most if not all routers which is the ability to download the configuration and save it on your computer or a thumb drive. The reason why you’d want to do this is that if you ever have to reset the router back to factory defaults (a common troubleshooting step) or you need to replace a defective one with working one of the same brand and model, you can quickly get up and running again by uploading this file to the router and let the router configure itself in seconds.

Do you have any tips or tricks that would help an owner of a new router? Please post a comment and share your thoughts.

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Review: The Imitation Game

Posted in Products with tags , on December 30, 2014 by itnerd

You’re likely thinking that if I am doing a review of a movie, it’s going to be one that appeals to nerds like me. That isn’t the case. The Imitation Game is very engaging movie that will reach a variety of audiences and may even leave you in tears by the end of it.

The Imitation Game revolves around the groundbreaking computer scientist, mathematician, and and cytologist Alan Turing with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Turing in a role that I believe will earn him an Oscar nomination because of how deep and layered his performance is. You’ll watch as Turing is recruited into Britain’s top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to do the impossible. Crack the Enigma code which Nazi Germany was using to send messages to their military assets in the field. This is where you discover how brilliant Turing was as he developed a machine to crack the code. But you’ll also discover how socially awkward he was, as well as the fact that British society pretty much destroyed his life because he was a homosexual. Something he was only recently pardoned for posthumously.

Another thing that will stand out to you is the performance of Keira Knightley who plays Joan Clarke who is someone who should be a role model for any woman who wants to get into science or technology. Turing fights to get her onto the team to crack Enigma by any means at his disposal and in return, Clarke displays undying loyalty to him. Knightley does a masterful job playing Clarke as and I suspect that she too may get an Oscar nod for this performance as she gives a very emotionally complex performance that made my wife cry when we saw the film.

In terms of historical accuracy, which is usually a big deal for me, this movie does have some misses. For example, in the movie the machine that Turing creates was called “Christopher” after a child that he went to school with whom he had a crush on. In reality, the machine was named Bombe and he wasn’t the principal designer. Another miss is the fact that Turing is portrayed as having either Autism or Asperger Syndrome and is so awkward that he is socially isolated. From all accounts, this may not be accurate as he did have close friends and while he was “odd” it is not clear if having either of the above conditions was the cause of it. Finally, the number of people working on cracking Enigma was in the thousands and not a small group of people as the movie depicts. Having said all of that, none of this detracted from my enjoyment of the movie. Also, it makes the movie far more accessible to a broader audience and not just to nerds like me who know the story of Alan Turing backwards and forwards.

The Imitation Game is in theaters now. If you want to see a movie that you will enjoy on multiple levels, this is it. I highly recommend it.

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