November 2022
Kevin Purdy: A realistic roundup of what today's Matter launch means for your smart home
Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Angie Waller, and Colin Lecher: Tax Filing Websites Have Been Sending Users’ Financial Information to Facebook
Sara Morrison: Holiday scam email season is here. Don’t fall for it.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/25/23473947/scam-phishing-yeti-cooler-kohls-emails
September 2022
Brian Krebs: How 1-Time Passcodes Became a Corporate Liability
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/08/how-1-time-passcodes-became-a-corporate-liability
Barbara Krasnoff & Antonio G. Di Benedetto: Brand New iPhone Features that Android Already Has
https://www.theverge.com/23319739/apple-iphone-ios-16-android-features-google-apps-comparison
This article is relevant to people owning either phone, as Android users may discover features they weren't aware exist./
Mike Sorrentino: Clear Your Android Phone's Cookies, Cache to Erase Junk Files
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/clear-your-android-phones-cookies-cache-to-erase-junk-files/
That article also contains a link for iPhone users to do the same.
Jeremy Reimer: A history of ARM, part 1: Building the first chip (Acorn RISC Machine)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/a-history-of-arm-part-1-building-the-first-chip/
It contains a simple description of how the CPU (Central Processing Unit) in a computer operates, and tells the story of how a ground-breaking 32-bit CPU chip (ARM - Acorn RISC Machine) was designed by only ten people, for very little money, back in the 1980s, which significantly outperformed other CPU chips of that era.
Alas (spoiler alert), it didn't have software in the way of an operating system and applications to match their competitors at the time, and so didn't triumph.
AUGUST 2022
Dan Goodin: I'm a Security Reporter and Got Fooled by a Blatant Phish
Zack Whittaker: TheTruthSpy exposed: This spyware lookup tool says if your Android device was compromised
https://techcrunch.com/pages/thetruthspy-investigation/
It describes how to find a smartphone's International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) 14-15 digit number (*#06#) and its Google advertising ID (16 or 32 characters), to see if they appear on a list of Android phones containing a specific form of Spyware, up to April 2022.
July 2022
Creative content
Steve Dent: The James Webb Space Telescope is capturing the universe on a 68GB SSD
https://www.engadget.com/the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-a-68-gb-ssd-095528169.html
Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng: Who Is Collecting Data from Your Car?
https://themarkup.org/the-breakdown/2022/07/27/who-is-collecting-data-from-your-car
May 2022
Passwordless Sign-Ins soon to be implemented in all Major Platforms
Apple, Google, and Microsoft will soon implement passwordless sign-in on all major platforms
It describes future sign-ins, using a Fast Identity Online (FIDO) process, which eliminates using a password. Basically sounds like two-factor authentication, using a token on a smart phone, which has its pros and cons.
Why You Should Be Taking Security Advice from YOur Grandmother
The Financial Times reports that a joint study by Visa and Aston University’s Institute for Forensic Linguistics brings bad tidings for the young. One in four 18-34 year olds trust scam messages, which is “more than double” of those over 55.
Mike Sorrentino: You Can Clear Cache and Cookies on Your Android Phone for a Privacy Boost https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/you-can-clear-cache-and-cookies-on-your-android-phone-for-a-privacy-boost/
Will McCurdy: There may soon officially be no escape from Windows 11 on your PC https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-windows-11-no-escape-broad-deployment
April 2022
Simon Hill: What's the Matter? We Explain the New Smart Home Standard
Matthew Hutson: Can Computers Learn Common Sense?
It describes various scenarios where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can guess common sense responses to situations a certain percent of the time, and where it fails to do so (corner cases). Humans are often better at reasoning out those situations.
November 2021
Usama Jawad: Five things I hate about Windows 11 (Contains a link to an article on Five Things he Loves)
An Article on how to avoid scams from scammers posing as a trusted source. (The article is from PayPal, and uses fake emails from them to illustrate scammers' tricks, but the examples apply to emails faking those from your bank, your credit union, or any trusted source)
June 2021
An Interesting Video on
How 6 Million Pounds Of Electronic Waste Gets Recycled A Month
Gilad Edelman: DuckDuckGo's Quest to Prove Online Privacy Is Possible :
https://www.wired.com/story/duckduckgo-quest-prove-online-privacy-possible/
This has very little to do with Computers, but I found some very entertaining videos about Squirrels that I think you all would enjoy:
Here's one by the same author on how to thwart Porch Pirates:
May 2021
Zak Doffman: Facebook Still ‘Secretly’ Tracks Your iPhone—This Is How To Stop It
Though that article uses an iPhone as an example, mostly because of Apple's latest operating system for that phone defaulting to _not_ share information with Facebook, etc., the suggestions in that article apply to all users of any device, along the lines of Joe Kissell's Webinar on protecting your online privacy.
April 2021
More News on Mars Helicopter:
Mars Copter Gets More Time to Fly
Here is an interesting list of:
How Secure is Google Drive in 2021?
Answers & Tips for Online File Storage
FIRST FLIGHT A Real Time video of the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet.
NASA A fascinating briefing on NASA's plans for the first flight of a powered aerial vehicle on another planet: The helicoptor Ingenuity. Play the included video.
Dark Patterns An article on how Websites use tricks to make you say yes
Easter Egg Fun!
By Dorothy Fitch, Green Bytes Editor
No, we're not talking about dying hard-boiled eggs. We are talking about surprises that programmers sometimes insert into their code for us to enjoy—if we can find them!
According to Wiki, "Easter egg is a term used to describe a message, image, or feature hidden in a video game, film, or other, usually electronic, medium. The term used in this manner was coined around 1979 by Steve Wright, the then Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure, in reference to an Easter egg hunt."
Since then, various software companies, including Microsoft and Apple, have inserted Easter eggs into the software they distribute. This practice, likely to the great disappointment of programmers, was halted by Microsoft when it began its Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2002, which helped it sell to big businesses and the military. Steven Jobs stopped allowing Easter eggs in the early 2000s.
However, this doesn't mean there are no more Easter eggs to uncover in the software on your computer. Let's take a look at some of these hidden gems.
______________________
Google's search engine has many tricks to entertain you. For example, go to Google's main page, search for the following words or phrases, and see what happens.
· do a barrel roll
· askew
· Google in 1998
· number of horns on a unicorn
· answer to life, the universe, and everything [a reference to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy"]
· number of horns on a unicorn and answer to life, the universe, and everything
Search for the following terms and look at the "Did You Mean:" suggestion above the search results.
· wubba lubba dub dub [a reference to a Rick & Morty tune]
· anagram [the suggestion offered is an anagram of anagram]
· define anagram [the suggestion is an anagram of those words]
· recursion [the suggestion is recursion, basically defining recursion: in computer programming, recursion is the process of defining a problem (or its solution) in terms of itself]
You can also type these into Google for an instant game experience:
· play tic tac toe
· play snake
· play pacman
Here's a list of Google Easter Eggs (Wiki).
______________________long form text area designed for your content that you can fill up with as many
March 2021
The hidden fingerprint inside your photos
An In-Depth article from BBC Future, delving into all the hidden information that digital photographs hold.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210324-the-hidden-fingerprint-inside-your-photos
Zoom
In case anyone is curious about Zoom, in an article about notable billionaire wealth gains during the pandemic:
"Eric Yuan, co-founder of video-conferencing technology Zoom, saw his wealth rise by $8.4 billion during the pandemic year, a gain of 153 percent. A year ago, Yuan had $5.5 billion which increased to $13.9 billion. Last year Zoom paid no federal income taxes on its $660 million in profits, which increased by more than 4,000 percent."
https://itep.org/zoom-pays-0-in-federal-income-taxes-on-pandemic-profits/
Clearly, Zoom is doing well financially.
An interesting article about your privacy:
HOW TO TELL WHICH EMAILS QUIETLY TRACK YOU
FUNNY STORY:
Windows vs. Ford.
For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX) : Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated,
"If Ford had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments,
Ford issued a press release stating:
If Ford had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics (and I just love this part):
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash.........twice a day.
2.. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3.. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4.... Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5... Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6...... The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
7...... The airbag system would ask, "Are you sure?"before deploying.
8....... Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9........ Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10......... You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.
PS - I'd like to add that when all else fails, you could call "customer service" in some foreign country and be instructed in some foreign language how to fix your car yourself!
Please share this with your friends who love - but sometimes hate - their computer!
February 2021
Here is a variety of information from Microsoft about new capabilities available on Office.
An Interesting Story about a Cat Filter
San Diego Parks and Recreation Department is offering free one hour phone consultation about computers and other technology. Call 619.236.6906 or e -mail thescroll@sandiego.gov to make an appointment.
