Year 2014

Δυο ημέρες με το Myo

Πριν από τρία περίπου χρόνια εξετάζαμε το ενδεχόμενο ανάπτυξης του AthensBook ως ένα ‘φυσικό’ αντικείμενο (κιόσκι) το οποίο θα βρισκόταν σε συγκεκριμένα σημεία στην πόλη (π.χ. στο lobby ενός ξενοδοχείου, ενός δημόσιου κτηρίου ή την σάλα ενός καταστήματος) και θα επέτρεπε σε περαστικούς αλλά και τακτικούς χρήστες της εφαρμογής να λάβουν υπερ-τοπικές πληροφορίες ακόμη και […]

The 'Net As A Utility – Arcs of Political Discourse

In the years between his sensational appearance as a Junior Senator before his colleagues at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and his election in late 2008, Barack Obama carefully built a public profile of a quasi-radical reformist who, at the same time, is in touch with the world and realistic about the limits and […]

Unwarranted Takedown

A few days ago Microsoft, in what is probably the silliest action they’ve taken in a while now, took down 22 domains belonging to dynamic DNS company noip.com. We know ’cause we use their services at Cosmical. Their move, against a service provider of this sort, is unprecedented and somewhat dangerous from a legal perspective; […]

Fira Sans and Fira Mono

After many years of using Inconsolata Hellenic on my linux and OS X boxes as the monospace font of choice for development, I switched to Fira Mono, commissioned by Mozilla for their Firefox OS and designed by Erik Spiekermann. Inconsolata might have been one of the best looking monospace fonts I've ever seen – and the fact that it was free made it an insanely great choice – but it was time for a change. Oh and one more thing, Fira has full support for (monotonic) Greek.

Go and Javascript.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Python is being replaced by Go. I don’t have a lot of information to back up this prediction except that most of the positive articles I read about Go are written by Python developers, and a lot of them say that they are now actively migrating their code base from Python to Go. I don’t see as much enthusiasm for Go from developers using statically typed languages, probably because of Go’s antiquated type system (which is still a big step up from Python, obviously).

Υπερίων & η αγορά της Ευρυζωνικότητας

Ξαναγυρίζω σε ένα θέμα για το οποίο έχω γράψει αρκετά. Προ μερικών ετών, σε ένα άρθρο μου έγραφα για το ΣΑΠΕΣ, πλέον Υπερίων, το σύστημα της ΕΕΤΤ για την καταγραφή της πραγματικής ταχύτητας σύνδεσης ανα την ελληνική επικράτεια. Η ιδέα είναι πολύ απλή: γράφεσαι με το email σου και πραγματοποιείς, μέσω του δικτυακού τόπου του […]

Broadband matters.

A 10% increase in fast broadband penetration can result in between 0.25% and 1.38% growth in a country's gross domestic product (GDP), research by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) suggests, as well as a 3.6% increase in efficiency.

Apple UX Regressions

These past few years have been a somewhat turbulent time for Apple. Its market dominance in the smartphone race diminished, its profits holding strong, but investor and analyst confidence evaporated, its once infallible strategy, product line, image and appeal gone and its appeal lacklustre compared to the past. The post-Steve Jobs Apple gradually shifted its […]

There goes your airgap.

This latest leak details how the NSA accessed targets by inserting tiny circuit boards or USB cards into computers and using radio waves to transmit data without the need for the machine to be connected to a wider network. It is a significant revelation in that it undermines what was seen to be one of the simplest but most effective methods of making a system secure: isolating it from the internet.
In other words: the NSA planted tranmitters (or tranceivers) and effectively turned air-gapped machines into machines transmitting to (/receiving from) their systems. Somewhat different from actually snooping on 'offline' machines, ala Tempest, as what many 'news' organizations hinted at by using inaccurate titles (the BBC, quoted above from this article, included). Unless all your offices are room-sized Faraday cages, with physical security and extensive background checks of the machine operators, the NSA just invalidated your airgap policy. But then again, your security was probably flawed anyway, especially against an adversary that competent/determined/resourceful.

We are losing the war against cancer.

Half a century ago, the story goes, a person was far more likely to die from heart disease. Now cancer is on the verge of overtaking it as the No. 1 cause of death.