Kien Lam’s amazing journey through 17 countries in 343 days compiled from 6237 photos
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While that title sounds alarming, it’s not actually because of any fault in the latest iOS, but more a matter of new services ( like Siri ) causing users to consume more data. And that will be the trend going forward for most smartphone users as vendors up the ante in a tit-for-tat competition to see who can provide the best feature set. The question to ask is, can the cellular providers keep up with the demand? According to reports, they’re already struggling … Internet usage is breaking all sorts of records each and every year. The numbers are skyrocketing and to say they’re unbelievable is putting it mildly. Here is a snippet courtesy of pingdom:
Accident statistics in South Africa are, I think, mostly regarded as fiction – it’s rare to find traffic death rates as high as in this country, so most drivers ( in this country ) appear to ignore the stats/reality and simply go about their daily business, driving without care or regard for law or other road users. ‘It won’t happen to me’ they think. I’m the better driver. There’s a certain aggressiveness about most drivers. They’ll go through a stop street, exceed the speed limit or break some other traffic law; but the fault is never theirs, responsibility abdicated. Herd mentality reigns, if everyone else does it, why shouldn’t I? I saw the aftermath of an accident earlier this year in which 2 teenagers on a moped were killed because someone in front of them decided to make a u-turn across a solid lane divider. The melted road from the ensuing vehicle fire, at the corner Bosmansdam and Giel Basson, bears a stark reminder that a large percentage of drivers ‘just don’t care’. Until it’s too late of course. I watch every day as drivers ignore the stop street in front of my house, a number not even bothering to slow down. I watch every day as car after car goes through the red traffic lights on Bosmansdam Bridge. I watch every day as moms ignore the stop streets outside Edgemead Primary and at the corner of Letchworth and Thomas Bowler. I watched yesterday as the Bantam bakkie ignored the stop street on Hendrik Verwoed and almost slammed into the back of the Audi that had just entered the lane ( legally ). I recently saw a father driving with his daughter, who was controlling the steering wheel, on his lap. I watch a family member of mine living with an incredible amount of pain, as a result of injury from an accident. I watch all this and hope that no one will be in an accident and die. Inevitably, someone will be and will die. Is it such a common occurrence that we simply are de-sensitised? Or is it that most of us are just plain lazy and couldn’t be bothered to stop at that stop street or driver sober? A combination I think. Friends, family, neighbours, work colleagues, delivery men, truck drivers, taxis, doctors, businessmen, mothers, lawyers, politicians – everyone ignores road law. Call me cynical. Call me insensitive. Call me whatever you want. But when someone drives through a red light a kills you, will it matter? Will it matter that you didn’t try and make a difference by scolding your brother for speeding? Will it matter that you said nothing when your colleague went through the red light? Will it matter that you yourself were intoxicated and still drove? It won’t matter at all. Sensitivity is irrelevant to the person that dies. It’s too late then. Do your part today – respect human life, drive according to the law and teach others to do the same
The arrivealive website has a large amount of relevant information and the Safe Driving Techniques section is especially important. The car-accidents website shows a grim reminder of the reality of vehicle accidents. I’ve never been a fan of the PayCity on-line site. It’s amateurish and looks like it’s been put together by a group of 5 year olds. In addition, there’s no mobile option ( not SMS ) – an unforgivable missing feature in this age of always on and connected-ness. Powertime is the complete opposite – a solution that ‘just works’ and has an app for most smartphones on the market. But the City of Cape Town has done some re-classification of electricity distribution methods ( well some complex changes that I can’t understand ) and PowerTime no longer fits their criteria. So all the CoCT consumers that were happy, are no longer. I really don’t care what the trouble is between CoCT and Powertime: all I want is Powertime or a Powertime-like solution that works 24×7. Unlike this evening where 2 purchases via SMS to PayCity have gone into the ether with nary a response. And the result is a trip down to the local BP at 10.30pm in the miserable weather to spend even more money. Looks like I’ll have to call Mastercard tomorrow to reverse the 2 charges from PayCity on my credit card. And I’ll be looking for alternatives … Scammers and authors of malicious software will take any opportunity to trick users into doing something they shouldn’t – holidays are a favourite time for the scammer. At Xmas, we all have that warm and fuzzy feeling. But so do the scammers and they prey on a softening of attitudes towards security at this time of year. We’re also bombarded by a cacophony of Xmas advertising that all but drowns out the ability to pick right from wrong. So in preparation for the current season of phishing, I’ve compiled a list of links to online phishing tests that will sharpen your phishing identification skills – have fun! The last year has seen a large amount of legal rangling between mobile vendors, more specifically between Apple and everyone else. It seems that according to Apple, they are the only company that can conceive of iPhone- and iPad-type technology. Not withstanding of course the massive amount of prior art that’s out there ( CrunchPad anyone? ). This article shows that given a project, 2 ( or more ) separate project teams can/may come up with similar/same designs. There’s a certain obviousness to this stuff. For example, what use would a round tablet be? Rectangular is the obvious form-factor … This article also shows how far removed from reality Apple is moving. A reality that may end up biting Apple. They’ve just lost a German legal case brought by Motorola and subsequently have all their products banned in the EU. Apple is also not above trying to manipulate internet standards using patents ( similar to what Microsoft did with IE in the early 20000′s ). They’ve done this on a couple of occasions previously and are starting another chapter by purporting to own patents/patent applications that cover internet technologies. What it all comes down to is greedy corporates using a broken patent system to make even more money than they already are. A $billion profit is not enough … UPDATE: further news of Apple’s patent war comes in the form of a transfer of patents to a known patent troll ( other than Apple and Microsoft ). Microsoft has always bigged up their products using whatever mechanisms they can, including paid-for campaigns/ads and sometimes outright lying. The latest statement that IE is the most secure browser ( according to their yourbrowsermatters website ) fits into this latter category. One has to wonder how Microsoft comes about the scores provided on the site. Thumb suck I say. Where does the outright lying come into play? Well apparently my browser benefits from Windows Operating System features that randomize the memory layout to make it harder for attackers to find their target. And my browser benefits from Windows Operating System features that protect against structured exception handling overwrite attacks. The only problem with the above 2 statements is that I don’t run Windows … One also has to wonder how IE is given the most secure browser moniker when it’s just had a major patch released to fix what’s regarded by anyone as a serious flaw ( The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the local user ). So when vendors trot out that “we’re the most secure” malarky, take it with a pinch of salt. Mind you, maybe a whole jar will be better. Malware, phishing, pharming, typo-squatting, etc. There’s a long list of security issues we have to deal with every day. Keeping track of these and responding correctly in each case is a veritable minefield. That’s after our newly updated anti-virus app has completely missed the threat. Typo-squatting is the well-known practice of serving up scams or threats via sites that have been misspelled by the user. ie. user enters www.drell.com instead of www.dell.com and gets sent to an infected web site. This has now been a move to translate this into the realm of email. It consists of using so-called “doppelganger domains” and mail servers for intercepting emails sent by mistake to them. So you send an email to user@zadomain.com when you meant to send it to user@za.domain.com. There is a registered domain for zadomain.com with an email server waiting for your email. All email can now be harvested by the ‘fake’ server and used for nefarious purposes. Further on from this scenario, attackers can now also execute Man-In-The-Middle ( or should I say Man-In-The-Mailbox ) attacks by sending the received email on to the correct address. The recipient replies ( without checking the reply-to-address ) and the attacker now receives the response. Some researchers from Godai Group have also pointed out that these kind of attacks have probably been underway for a while. A number of doppelganger domains have already been set up by individuals that – judging by the domain registrant email information – are mostly (if not all) based in China. But the worst part of it is that even though companies are aware that typosquatting can present a big problem, only one of the 30 companies for which the researchers have set up doppelganger domains have noticed them doing it and reacted appropriately. Approximately 151 out of the TOP 500 are susceptible to these attacks. Time to be even more vigilant … One of the primary benefits of Blackberry phones has been the ‘unlimited’ data contract that is supplied as part of the deal. However, it appears that Vodacom has had enough of some thirsty bloodsuckers and is implementing soft capping by downgrading users’ speed to 2G ( GPRS/EDGE ) after reaching the 100MB limit. Anyone who has used EDGE for data purposes, knows that it is dog slow. Or cat slow. Well whichever is slower. And this ( along with RIM’s poor financial showing as of late ) is another nail in the coffin. RIP Blackberry! It seems that Microsoft ( and others ) is intent on validating my cynical view of clouds. The latest Microsoft outage ( last night and this morning again ) was caused by what the company vaguely called a “DNS issue” and affected not just Office 365 but also the consumer services Hotmail and SkyDrive. The outages were spread throughout the world. Microsoft says “On Thursday, September 8th at approximately 8:00pm PDT, Microsoft became aware of a DNS issue causing service degradation for multiple services. We achieved full service restoration at approximately 11:30pm PDT. We are conducting a review of our processes. We appreciate your patience.” Microsoft’s status portal also went offline during the outage yesterday which means that the system that tells clients what is happening with outages was unavailable itself. Google Docs also had a problem this week past. On Wednesday, they had an outage for about an hour that affected documents and other GDocs functions for most users, caused by a memory leakage bug. One user said that “outages are becoming par for the course”. Which begs the question: why keep your sensitive data with ( and rely on ) a 3rd party when you can probably enable higher availability and maintain stricter security with internal IT processes and systems? From a commercial point of view, cloud is in its infancy so we should assume that availability issues will be sorted out as these solutions mature. But you know what they say about assumptions … Wow, it really has been a bad week for Certificate Authorities. First DigiNotar gets cracked by a seemingly insistent CA cracker called ComodoHacker; now GlobalSign has stopped processing certificate requests due to possible compromise by the same cracker. It all started in March this year with the Comodo CA breach. Next was StartCom the Israeli CA ( although they say that nothing was compromised ). Then an attack on DigiNotar appears to have been initiated on June 17. Apparently 531 rogue certificates were issued ( and then revoked ) in the period July 19 to 29. That amount may not even be the final value. According to an audit by Fox-IT, the attack was mostly successful due to glaring security weaknesses in DigiNotar’s networks, apps and architecture. Last week, Microsoft removed DigiNotar’s root CA certs from it’s browsers, and this week, they have moved these certs as well as some other Dutch government certs to the untrusted certificate store. The Firefox 6.0.2 update this week effectively does the same thing. Cumulatively, these steps will have a massive impact on the Dutch government’s websites and their ability to function. The same cracker has boasted that he/she has compromised 4 other CAs as well, one of these being GlobalSign. As a result, GlobalSign has suspended issuing further certs pending an investigation into the claim. For those who can not ( for some strange reason ) run updated web browsers ( with the compromised CA removed ), you can manually affect the same result by removing the CA cert in your browser: Firefox Edit/Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Encryption -> View Certificates -> Authorities Find the DigiNotar root CA in the list and delete/distrust Internet Explorer/Windows Start -> Control Panel -> Internet Options ( in classic view ) -> Content -> Certificates -> Trusted Root Certificate Authorities Find the DigiNotar root CA in the list and remove Other browsers will have similar options in the preferences section. |
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