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I’ve blogged a couple of times (here and here) about the emergence of ARM in the (formerly) Wintel world (known as Windows On ARM – WOA). It’s coming faster than even I expected. We all try to forget about the ill-fated Windows RT devices. I hope you didn’t buy one. But now… At the recent Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Community (WinHEC) event…
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One day on my deals feed was this gadget: The post said “We can all afford to be paranoid at this price.” Should we really be paranoid? So I went to wikipedia. The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Contactless payment systems are credit cards and debit cards,…
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Every now and then my propeller beanie comes out. Here I go again. Last year during the week between Christmas and New Years, I had my annual lunch with two of my geekiest friends. That was a time to be remembered. I’ve already discussed one of the topics we covered. One of the lunch mates is a…
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So do you have one of the new “Chip and PIN” cards? They are also known as “EMV” for Europay/MasterCard/Visa. Instead of swiping you’re supposed to “dip” them. Currently not all merchants have implemented the “dip” technology. There are fiscal liability implications related to that don’t affect the consumer so I won’t cover that here.…
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Sometimes it’s just too easy to make fun of a company. In May 2017 Microsoft had gathered their favorite developers in Redmond for the annual Build conference. The focus of that conference was Microsoft’s offerings of Office and Azure. Yeah, you guessed it. Office 365 went down in the middle of the conference as documented…
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To some I’m sure that March 1st felt like April 1st. Really, that couldn’t be happening? Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) went down in their Eastern Region (Ok, it just had “high error rates”). But there are a couple of lessons to be learned from this. First, it seems nobody is listening to me. Cloud services…
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One of my former co-workers used to say “You Can’t Cut Your Way to Success.” A recent article in CIO.com called out challenges that keep CIOs up at night. Several of the points were pertinent to my former co-worker’s advice. 5. Aging IT infrastructures and IT spending cuts “Many [financial services] organizations continue to rely on IT…
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You always hear that macOS is more secure than Windows. In reality that perception is because macOS has been a smaller target (less devices) than Windows. I recently came across an example that puts money behind the assertion that Windows is more secure than macOS. Pwn2Own is a computer hacking contest held annually at the CanSecWest security…
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I’ve written several times about “cloud” availability/reliability. A recent article on Microsoft’s outlook.com service brought this back to my attention. This is Microsoft’s free service so there’s not really a lot of room to complain. This discussion is to compare the cloud solution to a self-hosted solution. Microsoft has a status page which was getting updated regularly which is good…
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No, I’m not talking about video signals. I listen to a lot of security podcasts. I’d been hearing them talk about “red teams” and “blue teams.” I didn’t know what they were talking about. So off to Google and I came up with this. These terms refer to teams that participate in penetration tests. Red Teams are external…