Tag Archives: Technology

Alpha human is not?

I came across an interesting statement that runs contrary to the preaching of the society:

As I keep having to point out, there are no biological alpha males in humans no matter what Evo-Psycho prophet-wannabees preach under the false mantra of “Real science is not PC, let the chips fall where they may”. Gorillas have them. Baboons have them, with variances between subgroups. Our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, don’t. What they have are shifting power alliances for both genders (differing in detail in each species). They also have maternally-based status because paternity is not defined and females choose their partners. Humans have so-called “alpha males” only culturally, and only since hoarding of surplus goods made pyramidal societies possible.

This is interesting and sounds logical. I want to investigate this question a bit further. I would appreciate any useful pointers to information.… -->

continue reading →

A word about RIM and BlackBerry

In an excellent article about RIM and its BlackBerry Messenger, Andrew Orlowski slashes at the current “bleakly uniform design of today’s smartphone slabs” and rightly so. The good old manufacturers like RIM, Sony, and Nokia had a lot to go for their names and devices. The interfaces, the convenience, the engagement they created were priceless. Hope they come back…… -->

continue reading →

Surveillance at large

It was only a matter of time before all those security cameras would supply the images to a central location and become a part of a large surveillance network. It was inevitable from the beginning. Now Wikileaks apparently revealed some documents that shed light on the USA surveillance network that is, indeed, using those surveillance cameras all over the country as this article in io9 reports. Inevitable.… -->

continue reading →

Go! Go! Hypersonic!

Well, it is all military at the moment but the military technology has a history of seeping through to the civilian world. US military is developing hypersonic flight at Mach 6 and the decisive test for that particular project is today. Hey, I know it is all about bombs and rockets but I hope we will have the hypersonic intercontinental flights in my time because I missed out on the Concorde!… -->

continue reading →

Buzziness of Buzzwords

Stob at The Reg shares the latest of word on the buzziness of buzzwords:

Jargon Credibility
(1.0 best, -1.0 worst) agile -0.17 design by contract -0.82 data-driven -0.76 fluent 0.97 functional 0.95 injection 0.65 inside-out/outside-in 0.32 lightweight 0.57 native 0.81 object-oriented -0.84 pattern -0.13 performant -0.21 pushback 0.77 seam 0.93 technical debt 0.16 test-driven 0.12 top-down/bottom-up -0.72 unit test (as noun) 0.36 unit test (as verb) 0.43 virtual -0.53

Incidentally, one of the latest BOFH is about jargon too. So, am I not the only one tired of jargon?… -->

continue reading →

USA love TSA!

The Reg reports on a recent survey that conclusively shows that “the majority of Americans think the Transportation Security Administration, which handles security screening at US airports, is doing just fine…”

Overcoming the initial shock, my conclusion is that if the government keeps something up long enough, people will just swallow it in the end because they will no more know any better. Duh, the humanity.… -->

continue reading →

Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?

A very interesting paper was published at Microsoft Research by Cormac Herley. It looks at the question “Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?” and comes out with an unavoidable conclusion that that is by design.

Far-fetched tales ofWest African riches
strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an
advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since
his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian
scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives.
By sending an email that repels all but the most
gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to
self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his
favor.

An interesting consequence of which is that even if only few people take the trouble to answer those scam letters but never actually go through with the money transfer, the Nigerian Scam would become prohibitively expensive to run.… -->

continue reading →

Holy Hash! Yahoo! keeps passwords in clear!

Washington Post reports on the Yahoo password database leak, the auditors say that Yahoo stores passwords in clear text. I am shocked.

I mean, how more silly can you get? We have been talking about not storing passwords in clear for, oh, I don’t know, ages now. Definitely long enough to expect that nobody in the right mind would do such nonsense any longer.

We do expect an occasional idiocy like the recent discovery that LinkedIn stores passwords hashed with a weak algorithm and not following the security recommendations. Fine, but just storing the passwords in clear is beyond such simple fallacy, this is almost like intentionally evil.

We know that sites get broken into. If a site has not been broken into, it is just a matter of time. And the more prominent sites are, of course, prime targets and should expect the break-ins like everyday business.

When the break-in occurs, the first thing attackers would go after are credit card numbers and other monetary assets. Next on the list are the password databases. And that’s why the passwords are never stored in plain, they are never encrypted, they are hashed. One-way hash, properly done, is a good way to keep passwords safe even when they get stolen.… -->

continue reading →