Robin Knox Johnston: He’s Old. So What?

 General, Media  No Responses »
Dec 142014
 

Recently, Robin Knox Johnston took part in a sailing race, and the BBC spent some time interviewing him and highlighting his progress throughout the race.

Fair enough, but why was it necessary to keep banging on about how old he is? Yes he’s old enough – after all he completed his around the world voyage in the year I was born – but it’s probably the least interesting thing about him and what he was doing.

(Image obtained from http://www.robinknox-johnston.co.uk/)

In practically every interview with him the BBC did, his age came up … and many times it came up more than once. Anyone would think the BBC is under the impression that old people should be sitting in a rocking chair with a blanket on their knees drooling gently.

 

NATS Software Failure: Old Code or Buggy Code?

 Computing, General, Media  No Responses »
Dec 142014
 

Anyone watching mainstream media for news about the software failure at NATS can be forgiven for thinking that old software is responsible for the problem that occurred recently causing many flight delays. The mainstream media seems to have clung onto the idea that the code is old and decided to blame that for the problems. You do have to wonder where they got these ideas from given that most journalists have the technology qualifications of a gnat. Perhaps from industry insiders who have a vested interest in selling new products perhaps?

Anyone who has written code can tell you that it is not old code that is responsible for software failures, but buggy code. Old code can be buggy, but so can new code. In fact as there has been less time to spend debugging it, new code is likely to have many more problems than old code.

That sounds like a recipe for leaving old code well alone. But it isn’t really. Old code needs to be updated and refreshed on a continual basis but not replaced in a “big bang” approach just because it is old.

Small changes and not big changes. Small changes are easier to do, quicker to do, and it’s feasible during testing to say that the small change is rubbish and to throw it away.

The more important a system is, the more important it is to evolve it towards the future rather than simply replace it with something newer and shinier.

And letting mainstream journalists dictate your IT strategy is always a mistake.

It’s Just Weather, Not The End Of The World

 General  No Responses »
Nov 052014
 

Moaning about the weather? You’re just making the world a little bit less happy and surprisingly often making yourself look ridiculous.

It’s fine to whinge a little bit when there are solid lumps coming out of the sky and the lumps are being driven horizontal in the wind, but complaining about normal weather is just a bit ridiculous.

Today for example, everyone is screaming about how cold it is. It’s actually a pretty normal temperature for the time of year, and as a bonus it was pretty sunny today. Every cloud has a silver lining.

As for the people who kept complaining that last week was cold … please! The warmest Halloween on record and you were complaining about the cold!

Now the following looks cold :-

(Stolen from Wikipedia).

There’s no bad weather; just the wrong clothes.

 

 

No Safety Net? No Safety Harness? Just Bloody Selfish

 General  No Responses »
Nov 032014
 

Yes I’m being a curmudgeon, but there is a point to this little range about Nik Wallender‘s epic high wire act in Chicago. And that is the lack of safety equipment does not really make the act any more impressive.

And the use of safety equipment would prevent turning Nik into a splat on the pavement below. Perhap Nik himself didn’t worry too much about this, but what about the people who would be shovelling up the mess into a bin bag? And yes, gruesome as it may sound, it would be shovelling into a bag.

The emergency services of course.

Who whilst they are probably far too used to cleaning up the mess, could probably do without an idiot risking adding to their already high risk of developing PTSD.

So remember when you’re congratulating Nik, that he’s a bit selfish. And should think about safety equipment next time – not to protect himself, but to protect others.

(Image from Wikipedia)

Naked Celebrities!

 General, Media, Security  No Responses »
Sep 042014
 

So apparently a whole bunch of celebrities have had their naked selfies leaked by some “hacker”. As to how this was done, we don’t really know and will probably never know given that Apple is so secretive. But we can guess some possibilities :-

  1. The hacker built up a list of possible account names – jennifer (Jennifer Lawrence) might be a good one to try – and then tried the top 100 dumbest passwords against each one in turn. You would not get every single account this way, and a fair few would turn out to be a fan of Jennifer Lawrence rather than the celebrity herself. But you would get a few that way.
  2. The hacker targeted the celebrities with a phishing attack – basically asking the celebrity what their account password is. This sounds too unlikely to succeed, but with a plausible looking login page it does work surprisingly often. It’s not just the terminally stupid that fall victim to such attacks; the victims are really those who are too trusting and often in too much of a hurry.
  3. The next method a hacker might use is to tackle Apple’s password reset service which uses “memorable information” such as the name of your first school, your mother’s maiden name, etc. There is always a bit of a problem with “memorable information” such as this – it isn’t really that private, and a celebrity is likely to have “leaked” all such private information over time.
  4. Through some unknown vulnerability in Apple’s iCloud service. Given that we suspect that iCloud has certain “issues” with security (apparently Apple has no intruder lock out to make password guessing attacks harder), this isn’t impossible but I would guess that it is less likely that the two more obvious attacks above.

There’s a great deal of hateful “slut-shaming” going on over this celebrity leak which apart from anything else is really missing the point. It may be embarrassing for naked selfies to be leaked, but other personal information could be dangerous if leaked – the celebrity’s home address and alarm codes?

It is not the victim’s fault; it’s the fault of the anonymous (at the moment) hacker.

But the victim can improve their behaviour to make it harder to victimise them :-

  1. First of all if you’re called Jennifer Lawrence, don’t use any permutation of your name as a username; or even enter that as your full name into any cloud service. Make one up.
  2. Make sure you are using a sensible password. It needn’t be excessive, but anything that is just a single word is just not good enough.
  3. Be less trusting with your acount credentials. Make sure you know what the location bar in your browser is and where it is, and check it when you login. And don’t click on links in emails.
  4. If the service you are using offers two-factor authentication, turn it on.
  5. Learn about security; you are a target. Don’t go overboard (but see step 6), but spend an hour a week doing a little reading and taking steps to improve your personal security.
  6. Hire or befriend a geek who can act as your early warning system for threats. And someone you can go to for advice.

Note that I haven’t said “don’t take naked selfies” – it may be a bit foolish, but a life without a bit of foolishness is hardly a life at all.

And of course most of those suggestions work for ordinary people and not just celebrities!

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