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Kudos to Sergio Gasparrini
Apple’s security reality is changing right before our eyes and the company’s response will be telling. The toughest challenge will be shutting down hackers while keeping its trademark usability in tact.
Steve Jobs & Co. is known for creating devices that can spur gadget lust with just a mere rumor. Apple customers for years have taken the view—inspired by the company’s commercials—that its software is safer. If you have a Mac there’s no need for anti-virus software. You’re secure. The reality is Apple enjoyed security by obscurity. Its market share wasn’t worth the attention from hackers. Now Apple is worth the attention. Where’s the glory in taking out a smaller computing player when you can take out the big dog—Microsoft?
Here’s Apple’s chain of events over the last month:
* Mac Defender malware attacks Apple users.
* Apple remains mostly silent and tries to thread the customer service needle.
* Apple then announces a fix and that a future update will put Mac Defender to bed with an update.
* Evil doers launch a new renamed version just a few hours later. The new malware is renamed (predictable) and split into two parts, a downloader that delivers a payload similar to Mac Defender (not so predictable).Does any of this sound familiar? It should. Microsoft went through this same learning process with its security procedures. Microsoft had to button down its security operations and today is able to fend off a lot of attacks.
Most of us in the PC Support biz are all too familiar with this particular type of Malware. I wouldn’t care to guess how many clients I have lost to Apple due to end users disgust with having to deal with this ongoing threat. In some cases I have even suggested to some of my more troublesome clients to switch to Mac. Maybe now this problem will get the attention it deserves, and the “evil doers” can be identified and prosecuted? No?….Are we now going to see MalwareBytes for the Mac?
This should come as no surprise to our readers and to listeners of No Agenda, but in case it is…
Two senators claimed on Thursday that the Justice Department had secretly interpreted the so-called Patriot Act in a twisted way, enabling domestic surveillance activities that many members of Congress do not understand.
[…]
During the debate, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that the executive branch had come up with a secret legal theory about what it could collect under a provision of the Patriot Act that did not seem to dovetail with a plain reading of the text. “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Mr. Wyden said. He invoked the public’s reaction to the illegal domestic spying that came to light in the mid-1970s, the Iran-contra affair, and the Bush administration’s program of surveillance without warrants.Another member of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, backed Mr. Wyden’s account, saying, “Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.”
[…]
The Obama administration declined to explain what the senators were talking about.
Didn’t Obama have something to say about Patriot Act abuses when running for office?
Must have read the Doctor Doolittle books upon which the movie was based a few too many times.
Hitler tried to win World War Two with an army of talking DOGS, amazing research shows.
The barking-mad pet-lover believed the animals were almost as intelligent as humans and hoped they’d learn to communicate with their SS masters. He set up a school to train them to talk, read and spell in the belief they could act as concentration camp guards – freeing up more soldiers to fight.
[…]
Other ludicrous experiments saw so-called scientists test telepathic communications between humans and dogs.
The bizarre tale of Germany’s educated dogs has now been detailed by Dr Jan Bondeson, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University School of Medicine, in his book Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities.
At least he didn’t try going this (fake) route. Or did he….
Courtesy cnbc
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Women Are Moving into a Male Domain: Robbing Banks
A woman dressed for success in a pink blouse, brown skirt and heels got an undisclosed amount of cash from a teller at a Charter One bank In Toledo, Ohio, on Tuesday. The robber, armed with handguns, drove off in her own getaway car.
The “Bad Hair Bandit”—named for her unattractive wigs—hit a Spokane, Wash., bank on May 9 and may have been involved in up to a dozen heists in Washington State, sheriff’s spokesman Dave Reagan said in a press release.
A more fashionable ring of at least six little old ladies has earned the nickname of “Mad Hatters” for the head gear they wear while robbing banks, picking pockets and using stolen credit cards. One bank alone estimated it had lost at least $200,000 at the hands of the hatters.
“It’s not an epidemic, but it’s definitely a trend,” says Rosemary Erickson, a forensic sociologist in Florida. She sees the trend as tied to the weak economy, and thinks women often resort to robbery because they need the money for practical purposes, whereas some men may commit the crime for the thrill.
“It’s a safe robbery for women. There’s a sense that no physical harm will occur. You pass a note, maybe you menace that a gun is present, the teller slides back money and off you go,” he said.
Now there’s a statistic not often used as a metric in economic trends – women bank robbers up 5.4 percent in 2003 to 7.08 percent last year.
The Senate’s top watchdog on government waste, in a new report Thursday, said taxpayer money has gone to fund such programs as Jell-O wrestling at the South Pole, testing shrimp’s exercise ability on a treadmill and a laundry-folding robot, all funded by the National Science Foundation. At a time when the federal government is struggling with record deficits and bumping up against its borrowing limit, Mr. Coburn said the agency is a prime example of the kinds of spending taxpayers should no longer tolerate. In one instance NSF employees, in their spare time, engaged in a Jell-O wrestling contest at the agency’s McMurdo research station at the South Pole. In another case, the agency paid $559,681 to test sick shrimp’s metabolism, which one researcher said was “the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill.”
Mr. Coburn’s report noted that the researchers found sick shrimp “did not perform as well and did not recover as well from exercise as healthy shrimp.”
And just in case this story seems like bullshit, as it did to me:
Humans fighting an infection typically sleep more and are not at top physical performance. “The situation is much more critical for a sick marine crustacean, such as a shrimp, where a decrease in performance may mean the difference between life and death,” said David Scholnick, a biologist from Pacific University.
The shrimp treadmill, invented and built by Scholnick, allows researchers to measure the activity of an exercising shrimp for a set period of time at known speed and oxygen levels.
“As far as I know this is the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill and it was amazing to see how well they performed,” Scholnick told LiveScience. “Healthy shrimp ran and swam at treadmill speeds of up to 20 meters per minute [66 feet per minute] for hours with little indication of fatigue.”
There’s just something funny about someone spending time figuring this out.
The first problem with calculating the effect of a Rapture on real estate lies in determining how many people would actually disappear. Predictions range from 144,000 — about 0.0024% of the world’s population, to about half of us, the amount of people who were left behind in Tim LaHaye’s series. However, even if an average of 50% of Americans manage to stay around after Rapture, it seems likely that the post-Rapture numbers would vary wildly from region to region.
[…]
In New York City, for example, a 49% drop would reduce the city’s population to 1910 levels. In the short run, this would cause property values to plummet in the city, but the effects would quickly spread beyond mortgages and rents. […] Effectively, he argues, this would turn the clock back 40 years or more, to an era in which low rents made it much easier for middle-class residents to choose neighborhoods based on preference, not price.Outside of urban centers, Schiller suggests, Rapture would likely be a final nail in the foreclosure coffin, as “People holding on by their fingernails would be more willing to let go of their houses.” […] Municipalities, facing large stretches of empty houses, might be inclined to adopt the solution that Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio, are currently pursuing: “tearing down old homes and seeking adaptive uses for the land.”
This is assuming a post-Rapture world in which the political and economic systems would remain relatively stable — admittedly, a somewhat unrealistic expectation. For that matter, it seems likely that the remainder of humanity, having seen half of its number called into heaven, would be inclined to draw more closely together, further accelerating urbanization. However, even if everything else stays the same, one thing is clear: The Rapture would have an apocalyptic effect on real estate.
Here is the latest conversation I had with money manager Andrew Horowitz…. new insights for anyone who invests in anything. This week we look closely at some weirdness.
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I have to tell you all, that this is exactly what it is like out here!
Awkward…
Click pic to find out what’s going on here
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