Introducing the KALQ keyboard

KALQ is optimized for rapid two thumb typing on touchscreen devices. It works on tablets as well as smartphones with a large display.

The design is based on work by researchers from Max Planck Institute of Informatics, Montana Tech and University of St.Andrews. The design considers multiple human factors affecting the movement of thumbs. A user study showed that users could speed up typing by more than 30% over their regular speed with a default Qwerty layout.

Additional discussion at The Atlantic.

A major breach of Adobe security

Many of you have heard that hackers (or some government entity) has broken into Adobe's computer systems and stolen information affecting millions of customers:

Software company Adobe just disclosed a significant security breach of its systems in which it said customer user names, passwords and credit card numbers may be affected. “We also believe the attackers removed from our systems certain information relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers, including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders,” Adobe chief security officer Brad Arkin said in a corporate blog post.

Of particular note for those who don't have personal accounts at Adobe:

The attackers apparently made off with source code for several Adobe products, Arkin wrote. In a separate post on that incident, the company said it is not yet aware of any “specific increased risk to customers.”

There was more analysis of this today:

Security experts said  this is serious business. “This is a source code breach not just a data breach,” said Dan Hubbard, CTO of web security vendor OpenDNS. “Having source code is a huge advantage because they can more easily hunt for and find weaknesses in the code. Before they’d have to run lots of black-box testing to do that.”

Another security specialist who could not speak on the record because he works with many of these vendors, agreed. “The issue here is that these guys will be able to find vulnerabilities and develop custom malware and use it privately before it ever goes public,” he said.

And there's a long discussion thread at Reddit.

ELI5.  How does this (potentially) affect those of us who have Adobe products (flash etc) on our computers but don't have accounts with the vendor.  Are we at risk for having the security of our home computers compromised?

Some may find this advice useful

Imgur source, via Reddit.

"Smart houses" may pose security risks

Exerpts from a column by a staff member at Forbes:

“I can see all of the devices in your home and I think I can control them,” I said to Thomas Hatley, a complete stranger in Oregon who I had rudely awoken with an early phone call on a Thursday morning.

He and his wife were still in bed. Expressing surprise, he asked me to try to turn the master bedroom lights on and off. Sitting in my living room in San Francisco, I flipped the light switch with a click, and resisted the Poltergeist-like temptation to turn the television on as well.

“They just came on and now they’re off,” he said. “I’ll be darned.”...

Googling a very simple phrase led me to a list of “smart homes” that had done something rather stupid. The homes all have an automation system from Insteon that allows remote control of their lights, hot tubs, fans, televisions, water pumps, garage doors, cameras, and other devices, so that their owners can turn these things on and off with a smartphone app or via the Web. The dumb thing? Their systems had been made crawl-able by search engines – meaning they show up in search results — and due to Insteon not requiring user names and passwords by default in a now-discontinued product, I was able to click on the links, giving me the ability to turn these people’s homes into haunted houses, energy-consumption nightmares, or even robbery targets. Opening a garage door could make a house ripe for actual physical intrusion.

More at the link, via The Dish.

I must have a slow mouse

You can take the challenge here.

A graph to share with math-challenged friends

From Chris Blattman, via Within the Crainium.

"Tweet pee, pour les parents geek"

YouTube link.

Via Curiosités de Titam.

The Best Blogs of 2013

YouTube link.

"Nobody does it better -
Makes me feel sad for the rest.
Nobody does it half as good as you.
Baby, you're the best..."

The executive committee here at TYWKIWDI has spent several weeks browsing and reviewing the blogs submitted for this years blogfest. The following winning entries have been selected for four broad categories:  Best Personal Blog, Best Specialty Blog, Best Accumulator, and Best Humor Blog.

Best Personal Blogs

The majority of all the creations for the blogosphere are "personal blogs."  In 2009 when Technorati surveyed the state of the 70 million blogs they monitor, they noted that "hobbyist bloggers overwhelmingly blog about personal musings."  Sometimes these blogs are intended simply as family archives and no outside audience is even sought.  At its worst, a personal blog can degenerate into an obsessive scrapbook of trivia - the classic "Daily Pictures of My Lunch" blog.  A well-crafted personal blog, however, can add meaning to one's existence (even if the purpose of one's life sometimes seems to be to serve as a warning to others).  The best personal blogs transcend the mundane to reach out and seek meaning in events, to share personal fulfillments, to ponder universal questions from an individual's standpoint. Here are the entries judged "best personal blogs" for this year, in the order they were submitted:

Fearfully & Wonderfully Made chronicles, from a Christian perspective, a woman's journey through weight-loss surgery and its effects on her life and body. 

William D. Richards uses A Writer's Chronicles to "vent extraneous thoughts" while writing, with a recent focus on "how-to-digitally-publish-yourself."

Abram and a friend are climbing Yosemite's El Capitan this summer via "The Nose."  In Go Up: The Road to El Cap they will narrate their adventure (currently in the planning and preparation stage).

Bailey's Buddy is an eclectic mix of the things which make up Jay Simser's life - "my dog, my causes, humor and my Masonry. Oh and a bit of a diary with an occasional poem."

A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog features projects and life events of "mr random dude on the Internet" - mostly impossible art in perspective, photography, and video projects.  Plus some motorcycling.

Laughing at Dragons presents the life of teenager Aki Nace, with an occasional emphasis on reviews of books.

Barefoot Journey recounts the adventures of a barefoot runner with Asperger's syndrome and prostate cancer.

Dr. Mieke was one of the first readers to stumble upon TYWKIWDBI perhaps five years ago, so I've had the pleasure of indirectly watching her family grow up and her farm prosper at The Grange: a small farm in the Northern Rivers area of NSW.  It includes good photos of the area for those interested in seeing rural Australia.

Robin Johnston may or may not tell you why her blog is called My Pinky Finger.  Robin is "a teacher, a maker, and a book lover who makes things, from jewelry and sewing to clay, painting, and bookbinding. It's a place for me to share whatever art or creation I am working on, feature other artists and craftsmen of all types whom I admire, pursue various thoughts on education, ponder spirituality, and occasionally post about my life."

Steffi uses Bibliosphere to write about college life, science research, interesting events, and childhood cancer awareness.  And of course cat photos.

Mama Bean maintains a "mommy blog" at Update My Status.  It includes gardening-related posts and some insights into mental health (depression, post-partum depression).

Ionut created Irina's Corner for his girlfriend, and fills it with photos, collages and drawings that she creates.

Half Moose with a Twist contains Tom's "doodles, cartoons, nature photos, occasional poetry, short fiction and movie reviews. Oh, and sometimes man's best friend makes an appearance."

Average Jane may be the most experienced blogger among us.  She has been filling the Average Jane blog with "lots of talk about cats, hobbies and food" for over nine years.

Sanity Check! has Tom Tjarks' own fiction writing, notes on gaming and games he is playing (currently Bioshock Infinite).

Natalie and Dustin are DINKS (dual-income, no kids) living on a Marine Corps base in Iwakuni, Japan. Tice Adventures tells of their experience with Japanese culture, nature, and lots of food.

Oregon Expat details the adventures Fletcher and his wife have experienced after leaving Oregon to live and work in southern Portugal, but also includes "a healthy sprinkling of other travel images, science geekery, language/cultural comparisons, and an occasional Mac moment."


Best Specialty Blogs

While often retaining many of the characteristics of a personal blog, those in this "specialty" category have chosen to focus intensively on a single subject or limited range of subjects, typically but not necessarily reflecting the blogger's personal or professional expertise.

The DragonFly BSD Digest is a "running summary of events around the development of DragonFly BSD, an open source operating system."

Crisp Oaks is one of few tumblrs submitted this year.  The focus is on music, with a new song every day.

In Unequally Yoked, Leah, a geeky Catholic convert, "picks fights in good faith."  While the blog is ostensibly about religion, there is also a heavy dose of musical theatre.

Lockwood's Outside The Interzone posts a geology picture (and relevant discussion) every day, most of the subject matter being derived from the endlessly interesting state of Oregon.  The blog features a large dose of humor every week in the "Sunday Funnies."

David Crews covers a range of material, with a focus on "Photos, Essays, Poems, and Musings on Life, Spirit, Ayahuasca and Entheogens, Time, and Travel.

Phasmatic Apparatus is a specialty blog about Polaroid modifications, projects and items of interest to keep the instant film movement alive.

Heather Hutchinson's Dietetic Sinners is a blend of a personal and a specialty blog, with the main topic being recipes, and restaurant/product reviews.

(OvO) is "an ongoing series of images (primarily photographs, both old and contemporary), quotations, and music interwoven to express an organically evolving theme.

Elly Vortex is a fellow Minnesotan who writes about hiking, biking, and other ourdoorsy stuff in Tales of the Witch of November. " It's been a bit quiet due to the long winter, but now that spring is here it's picking up again. More state parks, biking the wonderful Minnesota state bike trails, volunteering (National Frog and Toad call survey coming up, building the Superior Hiking Trail, etc).

Tank Hughes "used to be semi-informational discussions of English compounds, but now it's just a photoshop comic every Monday and some screenshots from Batman: The Animated Series which I call Bruce Waynesday."

Mikeb302000 has a very topical focus: gun control (plus some other liberal issues).

Richard Hartmann's blog has a lot of (very) "technical stuff," plus some travel diaries and general observations.

Lady Aritê gunê Akasa participates in a living history group called the Society for Creative Anachronism. Sarmatian in the SCA is where she posts what she has learned about the Sarmatian culture and her other experiences in the SCA.
  
Best Accumulators

An "accumulators" is created by a web surfer who wanders cyberspace like an uncontrolled Roomba, scooping up whatever he/she perceives to be interesting items to preserve and share.  While the accumulators often harvest one another, because of the galactic breadth  of the internet, no two blogs wind up alike - just as no two cooks will create the same meals when they combine ingredients.  Each of these blogs has a unique flavor

Emily selects epigraphs from books and movies and assembles them in Epigraphic.  Although it might be considered a "specialty" blog, the topics for the epigraphs are so varied that the end result becomes an accumulator.

Allhomosapienswelcome compiles interesting facts and articles on science, music, math, art, nature, and much more.

PHSChemGuy is a Midwestern chemistry teacher who uses In Deference to My Idols to blog about music, movies, media, games, and interesting websites, and links the blog to the course he teaches at school.

Goodies//Random Awesomeness I Encounter is Ben Wildeboer's classic accumulator, whose content is defined by its title (and presented in a unique format).

Gort Nation is Oblio's creation, dedicated to "motorsports, politics, music, social commentary, weirdo art, science fiction, home repairs, and cooking."  Oh, and also counterculture ephemera.

Those interested in Icelandic culture will find relevant material at Flippism is the Key, along with "an eclectic mix of short-form 'thought pieces', photos and even a full length novel in serial form."  And the mandatory cat photo.

furthermore, flask is about "whatever i am thinking about at the moment. i have a short attention span, a wide range of interests, a finely tuned sense of outrage, a quirky sense of humor, and no sense of fashion.  soon i will be posting some stuff about the pond skimming up at the mountain, the mushrooms growing in my kitchen, and my continued correspondence with nigerian email scammers."

Chris describes Reboots DaMachina! as containing "Observations & Deep Thoughts
Mostly observations that I find interesting," but I think the range of material puts it in the "accumulator" category.

Regarding Criminal Wisdom, Nathaniel quotes Samuel R. Delaney: "“The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.”

Andrew denies that Andrewt.net has a focus or topic.  I would agree; it's pretty broad-based.

Dan's Now I Know is not exactly a blog; it is more of an email newsletter, the purpose of which is "to share something new, interesting about the world, each morning. Like the fact that carrots used to be purple, or that Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service the day he was fatally shot, or that there's an island of hyper-poisonous snakes off the coast of Brazil."

I occasionally harvest material from Rob's Webstek for TYWKIWDBI.  He writes from Amersfoort about "history, paintings, old photographs, maps, classic movie actresses, city walls, Königsberg, Crimea War, geography, Amersfoort and more."

Le Cafe Witteveen is described as a "scatterbrained exploration of personal thoughts on being raised religious, owning and operating a photography and video business, and posting from my favorite blogs."

The title for Clayton Ashley's Clayton's Internet Life came about as a result of a mondegreen.  It is a repository for "funny or interesting videos I find in my daily Internet browsing, but I'll also post about interesting video games, cool photos, web comics, and other neat things."


Best Humor Blog

The recurrent tragedies of the real world and/or the mundane dreariness of everyday activities drive most bloggers to seek out humor to incorporate into their blogs.  Thus one finds a smattering of funny cat videos in poetry blogs and Calvin and Hobbes' cartoons in political blogs.  But some blogs are devoted entirely to humor, and those are the ones we turn to when we need a mental health break.  Only one blog was submitted for this category this year (Miss Cellania being unaccountably absent).

Criggo has been harvesting newspapers for bloopers, unfortunate advertisements, bizarre articles, and odd headlines for years.  Only someone with terminal melancholia could go through several pages of Criggo without at least a chuckle.

A man who outsourced his own job

A security audit of a US critical infrastructure company last year revealed that its star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor and was spending all his work time playing around on the internet...

After getting permission to study Bob's computer habits, Verizon investigators found that he had hired a software consultancy in Shenyang to do his programming work for him, and had FedExed them his two-factor authentication token so they could log into his account. He was paying them a fifth of his six-figure salary to do the work and spent the rest of his time on other activities.

The analysis of his workstation found hundreds of PDF invoices from the Chinese contractors and determined that Bob's typical work day consisted of:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch
1:00 p.m. – Ebay time
2:00-ish p.m – Facebook updates, LinkedIn
4:30 p.m. – End-of-day update e-mail to management
5:00 p.m. – Go home

The scheme worked very well for Bob. In his performance assessments by the firm's human resources department, he was the firm's top coder for many quarters and was considered expert in C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Story from The Register.

Shhh... don't tell anyone....

This post is only for the eyes of regular readers of TYWKIWDBI.  To keep it "under the radar" I have left key words out of the title.

Four years ago I designated a day in mid-April as "Small Blog Appreciation Day," inviting readers of TYWKIWDBI to share their own blog with other readers via a compendium post here.  That year 18 regular readers responded.

I have continued the tradition in subsequent years, and it has grown a bit.  In 2011 we compiled a list of 59 blogs, and last year it was 71.

In order for me to do this, it is important that the participation be limited to regular TYWKIWDBI readers.  I don't want the great unwashed public flooding me with requests to promote their blog, nor do I have the time to compile a list of many hundreds.  I would like to get responses from those who have commented here using a name I recognize, or for the anons evidence that your blog that has a link here, or a sidebar blogroll inclusion of TYWKIWDBI.

If you would like to participate, just go to the Comments section for this post, and write -

The name of your blog

The url (you don't have to make it clickable; I can cut and paste), and

One or two sentences (max) describing what focus or theme your blog has.

 

The resultant post will look something like this or this and will appear after April 15 (because I'm going to be busy with a certain type of paperwork before then).

"Remote administration tools" explained

The woman is visible from thousands of miles away on a hacker's computer. The hacker has infected her machine with a remote administration tool (RAT) that gives him access to the woman's screen, to her webcam, to her files, to her microphone. He watches her and the baby through a small control window open on his Windows PC, then he decides to have a little fun. He enters a series of shock and pornographic websites and watches them appear on the woman's computer.

The woman is startled. "Did it scare you?" she asks someone off camera. A young man steps into the webcam frame. "Yes," he says. Both stare at the computer in horrified fascination. A picture of old naked men appears in their Web browser, then vanishes as a McAfee security product blocks a "dangerous site."...

"Man I feel dirty looking at these pics," wrote one forum poster at Hack Forums, one of the top "aboveground" hacking discussion sites on the Internet (it now has more than 23 million total posts). The poster was referencing a 134+ page thread filled with the images of female "slaves" surreptitiously snapped by hackers using the women's own webcams. "Poor people think they are alone in their private homes, but have no idea they are the laughing stock on HackForums," he continued. "It would be funny if one of these slaves venture into learning how to hack and comes across this thread."

Whether this would in fact be "funny" is unlikely. RAT operators have nearly complete control over the computers they infect; they can (and do) browse people's private pictures in search of erotic images to share with each other online. They even have strategies for watching where women store the photos most likely to be compromising...

Welcome to the weird world of the ratters. They operate quite openly online, sharing the best techniques for picking up new female slaves (and avoiding that most unwanted of creatures, "old perverted men") in public forums. Even when their activities trip a victim's webcam light and the unsettled victim reaches forward to put a piece of tape over the webcam, the basic attitude is humorous—Ha! You got us! On to the next slave!..

Today, a cottage industry exists to build sophisticated RAT tools with names like DarkComet and BlackShades and to install and administer them on dozens or even hundreds of remote computers. When anti-malware vendors began to detect and clean these programs from infected computers, the RAT community built "crypters" to disguise the target code further. Today, serious ratters seek software that is currently "FUD"—fully undetectable...

Additional grim details are available at Ars Technica, via Get Cynical, which recently underwent a near-death experience, but is now alive and kicking again.

Say goodbye to Google Reader

It will no longer be available.  This announcement from the Google Reader Blog:

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). 

We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too. There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

To ensure a smooth transition, we’re providing a three-month sunset period so you have sufficient time to find an alternative feed-reading solution. If you want to retain your Reader data, including subscriptions, you can do so through Google Takeout.

There's some discussion of alternatives at Reddit.  I think a lot of people access TYWKIWDBI via Google Reader; it will be interesting to see how the traffic changes over the next several months.

Some school buses now have wi-fi

As reported in the Star Tribune:

As more classes go digital, wireless access is no longer confined to brick buildings but is spreading to school buses.

Forget snoozing or socializing. En route to athletic games or other events, Chaska and Chanhassen students can now do their homework online, upload photos from field trips and read Web articles from their bus seats. Their school district, Eastern Carver County, is the first in the Twin Cities and second in the state to bring Wi-Fi to buses, joining a trend nationwide of turning raucous rides into quiet study time.

“It’s the future,” said transportation coordinator John Thomas.

This month, the west-metro school district finished outfitting 25 buses with the technology and plans to expand it to all 110 buses so kids — some of whom have 45-minute rides from rural homes — can also connect...

The 25 Wi-Fi buses are in use every day by the two high schools and three middle schools, he added. It cost about $13,000 to start up the technology and there will be about $5,000 a year in service fees from the district’s $4 million transportation budget. While Chaska schools mostly use the Wi-Fi buses for activities, the Bemidji buses are used more on daily routes, which can average an hour each way in the sprawling district.

Who else benefits from the technology?

“The bus drivers have said it’s been some of the quietest trips they’ve been on,” Thomas said.

The perks of being a blogger

A blogger writes a post about Milano cookies.  The next day he receives from Pepperidge Farm the letter above in a case of the cookies.  FedEx'd overnight.

For the record, I prefer Little Debbie cookies and treats.  And Ruffles with ridges.  And Diet Pepsi to make up for the previous two.  Thanks in advance.

Trailer for the new Sim City

YouTube link. 

I've built Sim cities for about 30 years, so I'm really impressed with the graphics for the new version to be released in March.  I'm NOT impressed by the report at Flesh Eating Zipper that this new version will require an internet connection at all times.  That's a game-breaker for me, as it is for many on the Reddit thread.

Risks of QR codes

Malicious QR codes combined with a permissive reader can put a computer's contents and user's privacy at risk. This practice is known as "attagging", a portmanteau of "attack tagging". They are easily created and can be affixed over legitimate QR codes.

On a smartphone, the reader's many permissions allow use of the camera, full Internet access, read/write contact data, GPS, read browser history, read/write local storage, and global system changes.

Risks include linking to dangerous web sites with browser exploits, enabling the microphone/camera/GPS, and then streaming those feeds to a remote server, analysis of sensitive data (passwords, files, contacts, transactions), and sending email/SMS/IM messages or DDOS packets as part of a botnet, corrupting privacy settings, stealing identity, and even containing malicious logic themselves such as JavaScript or a virus. 

These actions could occur in the background while the user is only seeing the reader opening a seemingly harmless web page. In Russia, a malicious QR code caused phones that scanned it to send premium texts at a fee of US$6 each.

So how does one detect a malignant QR code or protect onself against them?

The most subtle spam I've ever seen - updated

All of you who maintain blogs know that the battle against spam comments never ends.  I spend time every morning weeding the comments to remove obvious spam, tricky spam, and some of the borderline my-business-is-linked-in-my-name (the latter I judge on a case-by-case basis, depending on the value and relevance of the comment).

Yesterday I encountered a new form of trickery.  The only reason I spotted it was that this type of wording is typical for spam - generic, broadly applicable, and complimentary - designed to be retained by the recipient blogger.

I had to look closer to discover that the two periods between "posting" and "thanks" are in red, and were in fact links - to two different sites.

I'm not sure it's right to call this "spam," since the person is not trying to get traffic.  I presume it's a form of black hat "search engine optimization," by which someone hopes to improve the status of their blog or website by being "linked" to mine (and I didn't know that search engines rank sites by links in the comments - I thought they just used links in the body of the posts).

This would have slipped by me if the "comment" had been in any way relevant to the text of my post.

Addendum:  For a thorough explanation of this phenomenon by a knowledgeable person, see the discussion by Benjamin in the Comments.

Updated:  Here it is again (that red period was a link to spam):

I monitor every single comment written on this blog.  They all come to my email inbox for review, which at times becomes a tedious chore, but which I think helps improve the quality of the blog.  Any comment from an "anonymous" gets extra scrutiny, and is subject to a more vigorous deletion policy.

Posted for the many readers who maintain their own blogs.  Don't let yours get "used" in this way.

When you're on your deathbed...

From The Chalkboard Manifesto, via Neatorama.

The new Sim City

YouTube link. 

I've been a Sim City enthusiast since its original release.  The video in my previous post about the new version has been taken down, so here is a new one.  The graphics in this version are awesome.  Too bad I'm so busy wasting time blogging nowadays that I don't have time to waste time with Sim City.  (first world problem)

A reminder to guard your privacy

YouTube link. 

A public service announcement from a Belgian bank - worth watching.