Category Technology

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.

Mostly Cloudy is no good.

With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away… the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.
- Woz

A Colourable iOS 7 Map Pin (Photoshop)

For anyone developing iOS 7 maps-enabled apps, you probably know that the pin image has changed for this version of iOS. iOS has long limited the provided pin colours to Red, Green and Purple. Here is a layered Photoshop file that we used in the latest version of AthensBook and you can use to change […]

Mind your Mind Share

It is almost 6 years since Apple announced and released the iPhone. I still remember Steve Jobs mentioning that his goal for the first year was to get 10M iPhones shipped; at the time almost 1% of the global mobile telephony market share. The goal seemed totally unrealistic to anyone involved in the industry as […]

SimCity (2013)

Of all the games that I’ve played over the past twenty five years or so, SimCity, in its various incarnations, has to be the one that I cherish and have spent time playing the most. Ever since I laid my eyes on the first version of SimCity in the early 1990s, I became enamored with […]

On CalDAV and Google.

People are annoyed about the demise of Google Reader. Yet more than Google Reader, a service I've used and loved for more than 7 years, I am truly annoyed by the fact that Google is canning CalDAV. And not just because CalDAV is an open, free and widely used protocol (all very good things), but because, in the past, Google has been a champion of open protocols, because its support for CalDAV was reaffirmed only two months ago when it dropped Exchange Support from its Google Docs apps. Because it demonstrates that Google has been somewhat cavalier with its use of 'Openness'.

Oh my God, it's full of funds!

Νεοφυείς επιχειρήσεις. Καινοτομία. Εξωστρέφεια. Επιχειρείν. Ένα μεγάλο γαϊτανάκι από εραστές του φιλελευθερισμού, πιστούς του καπιταλισμού, των αγορών, κάποιους τολμηρούς και άξιους, κάποιους — απλώς — θιασώτες της όλης υποκουλτούρας, της ‘φάσης’, του χαβαλέ και της (σαφέστατα υποκριτικής) αίσθησης της αυτονομίας, της ελευθερίας κλπ. που επικαλούνται συχνά οι δορυφόροι της επιχειρηματικότητας. Παράλληλα ένα τεράστιο κενό σοβαρών […]

Using OTE's 11888 to provide fast CLID data for FreePBX/Asterisk

For those using FreePBX (a configuration/administrative interface that manages Asterisk) there is a CallerID Lookup module, published by the FreePBX team. The module allows you to interface with data sources using several methods, one of them being http. Like many companies, we maintain several systems that can be easily integrated with our VoIP PBX system, […]

Mango / Tears of Steel

Tears of Steel is the fourth film (and the first live-action short) by the blender foundation and a giant leap forward for the community and the software. It is a sci-fi film that showcases recent work on blender, including Compositing, the Cycles render engine and many of the features introduced in the blender 2.6x series, […]