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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.

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 the pin colour. Besides the base layer, there are two hue-saturation-brightness layers. You use the first layer titled ‘Brightness’ to change the brightness of the colour. Don’t touch the hue or saturation sliders on this layer. The second layer allows you to change the hue…

Ten Dollar Fonts.

Some weird, some cool, only three seem to contain Hellenic glyphs (and two of those only seem to have uppercase glyphs). The lack of good, free (or affordable) hellenic typefaces is extremely disappointing.

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 that would amount to several millions of units sold for a device that was, in many ways, severely lacking and overpriced (at launch). The iPhone came out, and despite having significantly inferior technical specifications in some of the most crucial benchmarks, such as the quality…