Airline disruptions have been in the news a lot over the past few years. Failures in information technology services have caused a number of these problems. These incidents make very clear the dependence of modern…
On October 1, the US government formally gave up control of the Internet to ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This move had been in the making for the past nineteen years. On…
For almost four decades now, we’ve relied on public-key encryption to secure the keys we use to encrypt our data. The most popular form of public-key encryption, RSA, depends entirely on how difficult it is…
Sometimes design mistakes are so dumb that, if you’re conspiracy-minded, you wonder if they were made on purpose. Here’s an example. HTC, makers of the One Max smartphone, decided to leave users’ fingerprints in a world-readable,…
It turns out that Microsoft has been right all along, at least when it comes to software updates. Android has it very, very wrong. And Apple, in its quest to rule everything, got it right out…
An article in The Washington Post today presented some scary but unsurprising news about recent advances in hacking into automobiles to take control of them remotely. From several miles away, an attacker could break into the…
July 8, 2015, was not a good day for tech. First, United Airlines suspended flights for two hours due to a computer network problem . A few hours later, financial markets ground to a halt…
Securing data isn’t easy. If it were, then attacks like this one wouldn’t be occurring so regularly. The fact of the matter is that so much time, effort, and money are spent trying to secure the…
Orwell keeps getting more and more brilliant. A friend of mine asked for some advice for escaping what he referred to as “Google’s all-seeing eye.” He explained that he installed Firefox and added an extension…
An interesting paper (summarized quite well in the MIT Technology Review) presents a new technique for discovering the keys used by popular encryption tools. By measuring the variation in voltage at various points on a computer’s case as it runs…