Apple ARM Mac rumors

The latest rumor is that Apple is going to announce Macintoshes based on ARM processors at their developer conference. I thought I'd write up some perspectives on this.It's different this timeThis would be Apple's fourth transition. Their original Macintoshes in 1984 used Motorola 68000 microprocessors. They moved to IBM's PowerPC in 1994, then to Intel's...

4w

What is Boolean?

My mother asks the following question, so I'm writing up a blogpost in response.I am watching a George Boole bio on Prime but still don’t get it.I started watching the first few minutes of the "Genius of George Boole" on Amazon Prime, and it was garbage. It's the typical content that's been dumbed-down so much that any useful content has been removed....

Jun 2020

Securing work-at-home apps

In today's post, I answer the following question:Our customer's employees are now using our corporate application while working from home. They are concerned about security, protecting their trade secrets. What security feature can we add for these customers?The tl;dr answer is this: don't add gimmicky features, but instead, take this opportunity to...

May 2020

CISSP is at most equivalent to a 2-year associates degree

There are few college programs for "cybersecurity". Instead, people rely upon industry "certifications", programs that attempt to certify a person has the requisite skills. The most popular is known as the "CISSP". In the news today, European authorities decided a "CISSP was equivalent to a masters degree". I think this news is garbled. Looking into...

May 2020

About them Zoom vulns...

Today a couple vulnerabilities were announced in Zoom, the popular work-from-home conferencing app. Hackers can possibly exploit these to do evil things to you, such as steal your password. Because of the COVID-19, these vulns have hit the mainstream media. This means my non-techy friends and relatives have been asking about it. I thought I'd write...

Apr 2020

Huawei backdoors explanation, explained

Today Huawei published a video explaining the concept of "backdoors" in telco equipment. Many are criticizing the video for being tone deaf. I don't understand this concept of "tone deafness". Instead, I want to explore the facts.Does the word “#backdoor” seem frightening? That’s because it’s often used incorrectly – sometimes to deliberately create...

Mar 2020

A requirements spec for voting

In software development, we start with a "requirements specification" defining what the software is supposed to do. Voting machine security is often in the news, with suspicion the Russians are trying to subvert our elections. Would blockchain or mobile phone voting work? I don't know. These things have tradeoffs that may or may not work, depending...

Mar 2020

There's no evidence the Saudis hacked Jeff Bezos's iPhone

There's no evidence the Saudis hacked Jeff Bezos's iPhone.This is the conclusion of the all the independent experts who have reviewed the public report behind the U.N.'s accusations. That report failed to find evidence proving the theory, but instead simply found unknown things it couldn't explain, which it pretended was evidence.This is a common flaw...

Jan 2020

How to decrypt WhatsApp end-to-end media files

At the center of the "Saudis hacked Bezos" story is a mysterious video file investigators couldn't decrypt, sent by Saudi Crown Prince MBS to Bezos via WhatsApp. In this blog post, I show how to decrypt it. Once decrypted, we'll either have a smoking gun proving the Saudi's guilt, or exoneration showing that nothing in the report implicated the Saudis....

Jan 2020

So that tweet was misunderstood

I'm currently experiencing the toxic hell that is a misunderstood tweet going viral. It's a property of the social media. The more they can deliberately misunderstand you, the more they can justify the toxicity of their response. Unfortunately, I had to delete it in order to stop all the toxic crud and threats of violence.The context is how politicians...

Dec 2019