Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Thought exercise: “What if web browsers were guns?”

This is just so cool!

Note the venerable, old Netscape browser logo! That sure brings back memories!

And, of course, whatever you do, you sure don’t want to use Internet Explorer! ‘Nuff said!

Will expensive dSLR cameras go the way of buggy-whips?

Smartphones Destroying High-End Camera Sales

Information Week – “Smartphone makers such as HTC, Nokia and Samsung have made it a point to build powerful cameras into their mobile devices. Many of today’s leading smartphones offer not only high megapixel counts, but astounding software that lets them shoot in a wide variety of different modes. The appeal of camera-equipped smartphones has led to a decline in point-and-shoot camera sales for some time. Now it appears that these uber-devices are impacting sales of high-end, professional cameras, too.

Research firm IDC predicts that shipments of what it calls ‘interchangeable-lens cameras’ (or dSLRs) will drop 9.1% from 19.1 million last year to 17.4 million this year. At the same time, Canon and Nikon, the leading dSLR makers, have been forced to lower forecasts for the year. Further, Tamron, a third-party maker of lenses, saw shipments slump by as much as 22% during the first three quarters, according to The Wall Street Journal.

‘We are seeing tough figures at the moment, but I don’t think this will last forever,” said Nikon Chief Financial Officer Junichi Itoh. ‘There still is potential demand, and I think China is the key.’

Tamron knows it is in trouble. ‘Smartphones pose a threat not just to compact cameras but entry-level dSLRs as well,’ said general manager Tsugio Tsuchiya. Nikon and counterpart Canon blamed the slower shipments on a weak global economy, but that’s not the only factor at play.

In July, Nokia announced the Lumia 1020, a smartphone that boasts a 41-megapixel PureView camera. The camera features lossless zoom and controls that often match those of dSLRs when it comes to adjusting the behavior of the camera. Nokia has made no secret of the fact that it wants its powerful smartphone cameras to set Lumia-branded smartphones apart from the competition.

Last month, Apple introduced the iPhone 5s with an 8-megapixel camera. Apple took pains to improve the camera with a wider aperture and more sensitive sensor. The same is true of the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, LG G2 and other top smartphones. Many of these device manufacturers pitch their phones as replacements for stand-alone cameras.

The phone makers aren’t alone. The app economy has risen to support smartphone-based imaging. Consider Yahoo’s Flickr. It has revised both its Android and iOS apps in the past 12 months and offers customers 1 TB of online storage for free. Then there are apps such as Instagram that make editing and sharing picture fun and social. Social networking sites, including Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, all place a premium on posts that include images. All three have worked hard to make it easy to share images online from smartphones. Combine good cameras with appealing software and the easy portability of smartphones, and you have a recipe for disaster as far as dSLR makers are concerned.”

Adobe had a HUGE password leak recently. How do you know if YOUR password was compromised? Well, you now have an email address checker that can tell you, it is at: https://adobe.cynic.al

Find out if you have been owned!

Did your Adobe password leak? Now you and 150m others can check

The Guardian – “Nearly 150 million people have been affected by a loss of customer data by Adobe, over 20 times more than the company admitted in its initial statement last week.

Owing to the proliferation of Adobe products in use throughout the world, from the Flash browser plugin, to the Acrobat software used to create PDFs, to the AIR framework used to make software like Tweetdeck and the BBC iPlayer desktop application, many users have Adobe accounts which they have since forgotten about (including 50% of the Guardian technology desk).

Using https://adobe.cynic.al, a tool created by programmer @Hilare_Belloc, users can check if their email address was included in the 10GB database leaked last week. If it isn’t, then they are safe, but if it is, then they need to seriously check whether they reused the password anywhere else – because it is as good as revealed.

Encryption error

As well as allowing the data to be stolen in the first place, Adobe made two other serious errors when storing the data. Firstly, it encrypted all the passwords with the same key; secondly, the encryption used a method which renders the encrypted data insecure.

The method, called ECB mode, means that every identical password also looks identical when encrypted. So if the database shows 1.9 million people whose password, when encrypted, reads ‘EQ7fIpT7i/Q’, then researchers know that they all have the same password. From there, they can look at the password hints, which Adobe didn’t encrypt at all, to try and guess what the password might be.

In this example, the hints include ‘numbers’, ’12’, ‘654321’ and ‘123456’. That last one is most likely the password itself; and so the 1.9m who used 123456 as their password have had it compromised.

There is no simple way to reverse the encryption, but “brute force” attacks can sometimes figure out what the key used to encrypt them is. That would mean that attackers would have a colossal store of emails and passwords which they could test on other sites around the web.

So even if a user’s password is unique, and the hint means something only to them, they should still consider their data at risk.

‘Clearly those users who chose longer, more complex passwords will be less at risk than those who chose common dictionary words or the most commonly chosen passwords,’ says Graham Cluley, a security consultant. ‘[But] let’s not forget that the hackers gained access to Adobe’s systems and stole product source code as well as the database. It’s quite possible that they also stole the keys that Adobe was using on its database – and so could have already unlocked the information.’

‘If your Adobe password is compromised, that possibly won’t have a huge impact on your online life. But if that same password is being used elsewhere on the net (and sadly, we know that many people use the same password for multiple websites) then the consequences could be significant.’

Ultimately, the leak is just the latest reminder of the risks of re-using passwords. ‘I think it would be best for people [affected] to change their passwords – and, if they were re-using them, to learn the lesson never to re-use passwords again.

‘You should never use the same password on multiple websites.'”

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Fedora is cool, hard to believe it is 10 years old! Time flies!

Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux, turns 10

ZDNet – Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols – “Today, Fedora is one of the most beloved Linux distributions. Top Linux kernel programmers, including Linus Torvalds himself, use Fedora for developing the next generation of Linux. For Red Hat, Fedora’s parent company, Fedora is its road-map for its market-leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It didn’t start that way. When Fedora first launched, it was hated.

Why? Because in 2003 Red Hat had just decided to drop its low-end Linux desktop distribution, Red Hat Linux, in favor of its business distribution, RHEL. The users were not happy. Comments I heard at the time included, ‘Red Hat has betrayed Linux’ and ‘Red Hat wants to be the next Microsoft.’ One mid-major Linux company of the day, Progeny offered paid support for angry Red Hat Linux 9 users.

Red Hat made this move because it found itself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, its most loyal fans wanted Red Hat to continue to be a fast-paced hacker Linux company, always turning out the latest stuff like all the other Linux firms of its day. Red Hat’s paying customers, however, wanted a rock-stable business distribution.

As Greg DeKoenigsberg, today the VP of Community for Eucalyptus Systems, an open-source cloud company, and an early Fedora project leader, said, ‘We had a product in Red Hat Linux that was trying to perform two duties at the same time: It was trying to be enterprise software and it was trying to be cutting edge, ‘release early, release often’ software. Once the business realized that these were two conflicting goals they made the move to splitting the two.’

Fun or money? Which would you choose?

Red Hat made its decision to go for the gold. They were right to do so. In 2012, Red Hat became the first billion dollar Linux company. With the exception of SUSE, the other major Linux companies of the early 21st century, Caldera, MandrakeSoft (later Mandriva), Lindows, etc. have either disappeared or are a shadow of their former selves.

At the same time, Red Hat did not want to lose its strong developer community. So, with the help of its community, noteably Warren Togami who first created Fedora as a community Red Hat software-package repository, and Bill Nottingham, the first Fedora leader, Fedora Core was born. It would become the first successful commercially-sponsored community Linux distribution. This combination of a business distribution and a pure open-source one would become a popular open-source business model. In 2007, Red Hat merged Core with another community Linux project, Extra, to form the Fedora you know in 2013.

Today, ten years after Red Hat decided to have both a business Linux and a community Linux, Fedora is the most popular technical Linux of them all. Its cutting-edge code leads the way for many Linux developers.

Red Hat states on its site that ‘For 10 years, the Fedora Project has beaten the drum for the open-source world, delivering the latest features and technologies approximately every six months, thanks to the dedication of a diverse global community of contributors. Advancing technologies like virtualization, cloud computing, and software-defined everything, Fedora releases from Yarrow to Heisenbug have continuously pushed open source to new heights and addressed the most complex challenges of next-generation computing.’

As Michael Tiemann, Red Hat’s VP of Open Source Affairs, said, ‘We could not make the kind of big bets that we make with major updates of RHEL without … Fedora.’ Looking ahead, current Fedora leader, Robyn Bergeron, said in an interview, ‘For us in Fedora, I think it’s important for us to continue to evolve ways for people to find the OS a fruitful place for them to contribute.”

Happy birthday Fedora! And, here’s to another ten-years of Fedora, long may it innovate!”