Category: Technology
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Netflix: Why People Are Leaving You… (The Unspoken Reason?)
I can be long-winded in my blogs, I know, and there is a lot to unpack here. I’ll try to keep it brief. Famous last words =) Any Netflix engineers reading, it will be worth your time even if you skim fast. In the last month there has been global news coverage about Netflix losing…
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Perlroth, Miller, and the First Remote iPhone Vuln
In what is sure to be my last blog (?!) born out of reading “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends” by Nicole Perlroth, this article is basically a quick dive into a single paragraph that contains one sentence with an alleged fact pertaining to vulnerability history. As a self-described Vulnerability Historian, this…
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My Photography is Popular
According to Ken Rockwell, via the first result of a Google search, the definition of a professional photographer is someone: .. who earns 100% of his income from photography. This is the definition required for entrance into the secret Nikon and Canon factory support organizations. People who earn less than 50% of their income from…
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Search Speak for Automaton
Alternate titles for this blog could be “Doodle Transition for Machina” perhaps! For at least a decade I have thought about just such an application and today I have Google Translate for Android. Load, aim, and it will process the text and translate on screen for you. Given the state of technology you would think…
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20 Seconds to Comply; 17+ Years to Get It Wrong. From “Roboguard” to “Steve”!
Recently, news broke of a robot security guard lovingly nicknamed “Steve” who drowned in a fountain in the lobby of the building he was sworn to protect. The various Tweets and news articles jumped all over it, with articles anthropomorphizing Steve and headlines such as “Security guard robot ends it all by throwing itself into…
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It’s 2016, why is rotating a video such a pain?
How many times have you quickly shot a video on your phone and not rotated it for landscape? It happens too often and we see these videos all over social media. I sometimes forget to do it as well, or portrait is more in line with what I am shooting. So, I want to quickly…
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Twitter’s crowd-sourced blocking idea good, implementation bad…
Yesterday I saw a few mentions of Twitter’s new method for “crowd-sourcing” user blocks. The idea is that one person may have blocked dozens of trolls, and you want to do the same without having to dig through a lot of Tweets. I read about how it was implemented, sighed, and moved on. Last night,…
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An Open Letter to @Twitter
Dear Twitter, You run one of the largest and most visible social network sites on the Internet, highly visible to millions that don’t even have Internet access due to media saturation and today’s lexicon. And you suck at it. Despite your recent IPO and suggestions that you finally figured out how to make money off…
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Android & Granular Permissions
For Android-based phone owners, you are no doubt passingly familiar with the permission system that governs applications and what they can do. Every time you install an application, the device will ask you if you accept a list of permissions that it says are required for it to run. If you want the app, you…
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Exploding the Review
In the early 90’s, when I was moving in the world of computer bulletin board systems (BBS), it ultimately ended in my interest in phreaking. It started out reading t-files, moved into wardialing, and a few years later would result in PBX, voice mail, and switch hacking. While I got a late start in the…