minima-list // mnl.st

I wrote another article on Medium. We’ve only got 10 more days of Google Reader until it’d be gone.

Long story short: an iPhone generated wifi access point can be hacked. It takes 59 minutes for a computer with a AMD Radeon HD 6990 GPU to crack the iOS generated password. It takes an AMD Radeon HD 7970 to do the same job in 24 seconds.

Hacking an iPhone access point is something everyone is doing on a regular basis, right? Because you use your iPhone tethering capabilities in a park, at events, at friends homes, and each and every one of them carries around - especially on the street or in a park, where you most probably would use the iPhone as access point - exactly a desktop (!) computer with an AMD Radeon HD 7970 GPU and this, of course, is your main goal, to crack iPhone wifi connections.

Some journalists are just stupidly alarmists. Or maybe they’re just stupid.

PS: You know how much money you’d have to pay to your operator if you’d be using your iPhone as access point? Tons!

So, do chill on this topic. Nobody is that stupid to stay connected for more than an hour in a closed environment where, most probably, they’d have a real wifi connection, and the only place where a desktop computer with an AMD Radeon HD 7970 GPU could be found.

oneinfinitewatch:

I’m making this announcement with a heavy heart. After much deliberation over the past few days, i’ve decided to pull the plug on this site

This is sad. It was a good daily digest.

Just posted another article on Medium

…there were few significant examples of how iCloud would expand or enhance the experience of using an iPhone beyond a handful of feature updates, and nothing to address the growing trend of power users with homescreens full of third-party replacements for core apps.

You see, what - as far as I can tell - nobody gets it is that Apple’s core business is not the default apps. Their core business is the full product: the hardware and the ecosystem. Apple is not Microsoft, nor any other software company to depend on some default apps. Neither Mail, nor Contacts, Reminders, Weather, not even Maps are profitable. What is profitable is the AppStore, and paying developers 10 billion dollars means Apple got itself a nice 3.3 billion without doing anything. That’s free money. Well, sort of, because they still have some expenses like data centers.

Anyway, look at its latest ad. Apple is not about launching betas. Apple is about launching great products. And unless they’re functional, they won’t release a new version. Yeah, maybe Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services, but mark my words, there’s a logical reason for anything at Apple, even for not adopting the technologies developers want, may that reason be security or any other thing. Yeah, iCloud is not something developers love, but it sure is a good reason why Apple sticks with its current systems.

So I’m not sure why anyone was really shocked by the whole PRISM thing — I can’t be the only person who just assumed this was happening all along? But wow, those slides are terrible. Yikes. For so…

Awesome irony :))

Rather than commenting it’s utility, I ‘m actually looking at its design. And considering all the rumours about the new and revamped black and white iOS7, I wonder if this might be a glimpse into what we’re going to see. On the other hand, the iPhone music player is also black and white (well, grey, whatever.)

Whereas there is a constant clamoring for Apple’s to use its cash to “acquire” or “buy” something, anything, maybe people not looking hard enough. If you need the satisfaction that comes from knowing that money is being spent, a glance at the Cash Flow statement and Balance Sheet shows that Apple buys the equivalent of one Yahoo! every three years.

Or 10 Tumblrs every year, as Horace adds in the footnotes

Dugan shows a pill that can be ingested and then battery-powered with stomach acid to produce an 18-bit internal signal. After that, the swallower’s whole body becomes a password.

I agree with Jim: but how does it show the ads?

Tragic Carolina Picchio, from Novara in Northern Italy, fell to her death in January this year, after video and photographs of her were circulated over the internet.

And you were asking why would teens leave Facebook…

Google is deep into a multipronged effort to fund, build and help run wireless networks in emerging markets such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, a move that could connect a billion or more new people to the Internet.

I think this is a bit dangerous. Imagine that you connect to Google wifi and Google knows pretty much everything you do, each IP address you connect to, each site you visit, each piece of data you share, because, well, it’s being sent through its own infrastructure.

OK, it’s not like this wouldn’t happen right now, because it kind of is happening. You already have a Google cookie planted in your browser’s files, it’s how AdSense works. And, of course, Google says that though it knows everything about you, they don’t know who you are. Well, hat doesn’t mean they can’t find out really fast, especially if you’re logged in to a Google account (GMail or whatever.)

A Google wifi network is pretty much the road to world domination. There are going to be a whole lot of questions regarding privacy. And I fear they’re going to be justified by the huge quantity of info transferred via their infrastructure. Plus, it’s not that simple to check if they actually respect the privacy regulation.

Definitely, this is going to be very interesting.

You know that guy, Steve Jobs? What a jerk! He has never ever donated one dollar! Luckily, his wife did.

Anonymously.

PS: Jokes aside, I love rich humble people, that don’t care about making their donations public. I’d bet Steve Jobs actually contributed a lot, but hated to be in the spotlight. Most probably, he preferred to be seen as the bad guy in the industry.

A recent study on human willpower, involving college students and baked goods, should be cautionary here. Its results suggest that our willpower gets tired, like a muscle, so when we use it a lot in the course of a day we end up hardly being able to use it at all by day’s end. It seems to follow that, faced with media’s stronger, more regular seductions, we’re bound to give in earlier and more often. Perhaps this helps explain why the ends of long American workdays often feature alcohol, dessert, and hours of consumer media.

Oh, this is a very good article.

One of the problems with the U.S. economy, in fact, is that American corporations have become so obsessed with near-term profit growth that they’re achieving it by underinvesting in the future. (…) But firing employees and cutting research and development spending this year may also depress growth two or three years from now, when the products that this extra investment might have produced would finally have hit the market. Thus, in the interests of pleasing impatient short-term shareholders, the companies might be shortchanging their long term performance—not to mention the rest of us.

A good read.

Just what we needed to find funny cats.

Good to know.