Last Viewed Technology Blogs (218)

WOW...Connecting Singles is a "used to be thing".
When someone has to maneuver reading or reply & try to put it somewhere to have it read.
I think it is highly overdone when the the site seems desperate to claim such huge ads. Are they broke?? They can`t realize why we singles are here? And they were once doing so good!!
I`m so sad they go to this length to cover or discover our mail. I really am hating this new stuff.
Answer how you feel. Will complaining do? (at least to make the ads smaller).
Nessie G

Are you skeptical/sceptical about some new inventions or technology yet to come? Don’t be but if you insist, don’t talk about it too much. Some very bright and knowledgeable people made colossal fools of themselves in the past. Don’t let the same happen to you.

I have a few examples here for you, in the reverse sequence that it happened, of how people have made giant arseholes of themselves. Many of them were proved wrong with-in their own lifetimes. Bill Gates and Ken Olsen were proved wrong within ten years, Lord Kelvin in two years and Admiral William Leahy swallowed his words within months.

"640k ought to be enough for anybody."
Bill Gates, 1981

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
Ken Olson, founder, chairman & president of DEC, 1977

"Television won't last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
Producer Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946

"The atom bomb will never go off - and I speak as an expert in explosives."
U.S. Admiral William Leahy in 1945

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
IBM chairman Thomas Watson, 1943

"A rocket will never be able to leave the earth's atmosphere."
The New York Times, 1936

"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom."
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Milliken, 1923

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
David Sarnoff's associates during the 1920s.

"Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value."
General Marechal Foch, Professor of Strategy. Circa 1910

"Everything that can be invented has already been invented."
Charles H. Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office, 1899

"Radio has no future, x-rays are clearly a hoax and the aeroplane is scientifically impossible."
Royal Society president Lord Kelvin, 1897-99

"The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
An internal Western Union memo, 1876

"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction."
Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

"Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."
Boston Post, 1865

"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy!"
Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859

My advice – Don’t comment on future technology.


A great day to ya all.

Totally useless

Rookie errors make it child's play to decrypt data

The encryption systems used in Western Digital's portable hard drives are pretty pointless, according to new research. It appears anyone getting hold of the vulnerable devices can easily decrypt them.

WD's My Passport boxes automatically encrypt data as it is written to disk and decrypt the data as it is read back to the computer. The devices use 256-bit AES encryption, and can be password-protected: giving the correct password enables the data to be successfully accessed.

Now, a trio of infosec folks – Gunnar Alendal, Christian Kison and "modg" – have tried out six models in the WD My Passport family, and found blunders in the software designs.

For example, on some models, the drive's encryption key can be trivially brute-forced, which is bad news if someone steals the drive: decrypting it is child's play. And the firmware on some devices can be easily altered, allowing an attacker to silently compromise the drive and its file systems.

"We developed several different attacks to recover user data from these password-protected and fully encrypted external hard disks," the trio's paper [slides PDF] states.

"In addition to this, other security threats are discovered, such as easy modification of firmware and on-board software that is executed on the user's PC, facilitating evil maid and badUSB attack scenarios, logging user credentials, and spreading of malicious code."

My Passport models using a JMicron JMS538S micro-controller have a pseudorandom number generator that is not cryptographically secure, and merely cycles through a sequence of 255 32-bit values. This generator is used to create the data encryption key, and the drive firmware leaks enough information about the state of the random number generator for this key to be recreated, we're told.

"An attacker can regenerate any DEK [data encryption key] generated from this vulnerable setup with a worst-case complexity of close to 240," the paper states.

"Once the DEK [data encryption key] is recovered, an attacker can read and decrypt any raw disk sector, revealing decrypted user data. Note that this attack does not need, nor reveals, the user password."

Drive models using a JMicron JMS569 controller – which is present in newer My Passport products – can be forcibly unlocked using commercial forensic tools that access the unencrypted system area of the drive, we're told.

Drives using a Symwave 6316 controller store their encryption keys on the disk, encrypted with a known hardcoded AES-256 key stored in the firmware, so recovery of the data is trivial.

It must be stressed that the flaws are in WD's software running on these microcontrollers, rather than the chips themselves.

Source:

Still many broadcasting to many (developing) parts of the world. In dozens of languages. The cutbacks, with the internet, seem greatest in Europe and North Merka. But the (FINALLY) rising sun spot cycle index, making for improvements in reception and transmission, is improving things everywhere.
This morning, after a few chats on the ham frequencies, I switched from SSB to AM, and cruised on up to 49 meters. Radio Marti, Havana, Beijing, others, and the usual God squaders, were coming in strong. On a lark, I sauntered up to the higher reaches of the band, usually not very active. Only to find radio Japan, NHK, booming in with news, etc, in Portuguese! Sure, it had a bit of the Brazilian dialect, after all, it was there that the antenna engineers focused their signals. But what a treat for a Gnome struggling with this tongue, so close to Spanish, yet sometimes, so far away.
As I've blogged, listening to these programs can often be just listening to propaganda, on many sides. Yet often, from what's said, it is possible to ferret out a good deal that;s not only likely valid, but inportant, for effective world citizenship.
Used to be that it was necessary to spend large on radio receivers to add this to our knowledge base But those thousands who read my rants, know, what a cheap bastard I am. Just ordered a great AM, FM, SW receiver---with an MPV card reading decent music and voice recorder, for USD 17, delivered, direct from the one party stat of the PRC. Reviews say its terrific, but I'll blog if it's the usual Chinese cheap consumer trash. Pressing my thumbs.
Keep it valid, folks, and if critical, and even a tad bit acerbic, try to do so only as to obvious signs of lower class.

My work computer is rebooting... It stays online 24/7 and I only reboot when necessary.
The video refresh hasn't been right for a few weeks now and I went to the manufacturer of the video board to install new drivers.
Almost done. We shall see.

I will say the reboot process has improved since I switched to Google Chrome, as all my resources come back online after the reboot. Email, Calendar and business apps via Streak and Asana.

The USA has most of these, as other places have concentrations of their own substances. Google these two, for their many essential uses. What a stupid blog, Vierk.

Creating a database of phone numbers, profile pictures and status information of almost all users of WhatsApp turns out to be very easy . The user doesn’t even have to be added to your contacts.  This should raise at least some privacy concerns and hopefully a lot more. Let me explain how it works.

A few years ago WhatsApp made it possible to use WhatsApp in your web browser. That is good for user experience because composing a message on your keyboard is a lot easier than using those tiny touch screen buttons. It also makes copying/pasting and adding attachments easier. So much for the good news. The bad news is that it’s technically possible to use the WhatsApp Web interface to create a huge database of all possible WhatsApp users. There’s only a small group of users not affected: the users who have changed their privacy settings. Unfortunately, most users don’t change those privacy settings and WhatsApp doesn’t encourage it very much. These facts open up the possibility of collecting huge amounts of interesting data which i’m going to show you nowExplanation for normal users
Web WhatsApp connects to the WhatsApp servers by using your phone. In a nutshell the browser instructs the server to send back all the information for a certain phone number. Some of the information that’s being sent back include the following:
The profile picture
The status text or about text, the default texts is the famous ‘Hey there! I am using WhatsApp’
The online/offline status of the user
It turns out that the above information can be requested for every phone number. As said, it’s not necessary that the phone number has been added to your contact list. And because there is no such restriction, it’s possible to create a complete database of phone numbers, profile pictures, about texts and online/offline statuses. The database may be setup in such a way that complete timelines of phone numbers can be reconstructed. That answers questions like: when was the user with phone number xxx-xxxxxx online and offline?Almost all web sites that are being send to your browser, contain specific software that determines how the web site will function in your browser. Such software is written in Javascript. The software determines what happens when you click a button or move the mouse. But the software may also connect to a server to request certain kinds of information. The software in Web WhatsApp does that too. It sends a phone number to the WhatsApp server and in a few milliseconds it receives the information about that phone number. One of the nice things of that software is that everybody can take a look at the source code. That’s not all, you can also use the software by yourself by using certain parts of it stand alone. I’ve used that possibility to develop a script to request information from a huge range of phone numbers. That information contains the profile pictures, about texts and online/offline statuses. Everyone can create such a script.So, what can anyone do with al this information? First of all, again, imagine that anyone can create a database with the above information that contains all phone numbers for a certain country together with the profile pictures, about texts and online/offline statuses. This is in reach for a country like the Netherlands. The database kan be queried in such a way that it tells me when a phone number was online and it tells me what profile picture belongs to the phone number. After a few months it can tell me how often you have changed your profile picture and into what pictures. And how about facial recognition? Those techniques haven been improved over the last years. Imagine this, I take a walk and take a picture of some stranger. Now I feed the database that picture and in a few minutes it tells me which phone number belongs to the picture. Now that is quite scary, isn’t it?

The energy revolution is one of the biggest opportunities of our time. If I had to start all over again, I think that’s where I’d put much of my time and resources.
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VIRGIN -- Watching the DS Virgin Racing team really brings home how far we have come and how the energy revolution is really underway. Formula E is a great example of how competition is driving forward huge innovations.

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I’m often asked how the energy revolution affects Virgin’s strategic thinking and how we do business on a daily basis. As an investor and entrepreneur, I’ve never seen a more compelling business case than the one presented by the development of more energy-efficient systems. The falling costs of renewables and batteries make cost-effective, clean electricity unstoppable and essential to the transition to a low carbon, energy-abundant world.



I think it’s important for all businesses to treat climate action as a long-term investment rather than a short-term expenditure. Taking action now, from investing in renewables to more energy-efficient production, will not only make your business more resilient, it will also make you more competitive. A dollar spent now on clean energy, is a thousand dollars saved in the future.



In the Caribbean, where I live, building decentralised grids powered by solar and wind will help slash generation costs and make island communities far more resilient to natural disasters, like Hurricanes Irma and Maria last year. It’s a positive shift. It gives people more choice and control, and makes the local environment cleaner, along with the planet as a whole.



One of the most exciting developments I’ve noticed is consumers are becoming increasingly aware of energy issues, and demanding answers and positive action from businesses. What sources of energy do you use? What is your energy footprint? What are you doing to be more sustainable?



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Virgin is doing some really exciting things in this space. As a Group, our activity covers a lot of sectors, including some where we are still big carbon emitters today: aviation, space travel and more recently, cruises. But we’ve set some pretty ambitious goals, and the most important one is to reach net zero emissions by 2050, ideally a lot earlier. We want to push our companies to become leading examples of business action on climate – even our top emitters.




Take aviation. I think this is one of the sectors with the greatest potential for innovation. Virgin Atlantic, for instance have made great progress in reducing the carbon footprint of every flight. Last year, Virgin Atlantic announced a 22 per cent reduction in aircraft carbon emissions over the last nine years. The majority of these emissions reductions have come thanks to our multi-billion fleet investment in more efficient aircraft (Boeing 787, A 350), as well as from operational improvements including optimized aircraft maintenance, cleaning and new flying techniques. VAA are also on the cutting edge of renewable fuel development, thanks to their brilliant partnership with LanzaTech, who turn industrial waste gases into commercial jet fuel. The project is now incredibly close to becoming a reality – with the potential to deliver big carbon savings.



We’ve also incubated a number of projects with Virgin Unite, our entrepreneurial foundation. We set up the Carbon War Room in 2009 to work with the most polluting industries to reduce their carbon footprint. They merged with Amory Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute in 2014. Today, ‘Global Energy Transitions’ is one of RMI’s core focuses. Their ‘Islands Energy Program’ is accelerating the transition of 13 Caribbean island economies to local, renewable energy and creates a blueprint for other