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Monthly Archives: July 2016

Escaping a Cult Through Hacking

Posted on by Posted in Programming Leave a comment

What it is: Hacking is often portrayed as an evil act perpetrated by villains, but hacking is simply a skill that can be used for good and bad.

The media often paints hacking as something bad people do to hurt others. Of course if the media were to publicize everything that bad people do to hurt others, they would report more news stories about corruption in the government.

The truth is that hacking is nothing more than a skill. One interesting story about hacking comes from Shyama Rose. Not only is Shyama a hacker, but she’s also a well-paid and highly regarded security researcher who shatters the stereotype that all hackers are male.

Shama’s path to hacking is rather curious. She was raised in a cult and sexually abused by the cult leader. To escape from her horrid life of sexual abuse and cult life, she discovered the world of hacking.

One day she plugged her Macintosh into a phone jack and learned how to connect tot he outside world. She quickly taught herself binary math and quickly made friends online. That led her to college. Despite the cult leader’s objections to letting her go, Shyama’s mother supported her daughter’s decision to attend college and that provided Shyama a way out of the cult.

Shyam quickly learned more about hacking and soon got jobs testing security for companies like Microsoft and IBM. In a field largely dominated by males, Shyama found a way out to a better life and now devotes her life to helping protect others. As Shyama said, “There’s nothing that pisses me off more than someone doing something bad to someone who can’t protect themselves.”

The next time you think hacking is bad, just remember there are good hackers (known as white hat hackers) who use their skills to protect others. Hacking is a skill that’s neither good or bad. It all depends on the person behind the skill. If you want to see the positive benefits of hacking, just ask Shyama Rose.

To read more about Shyama Rose’s incredible story of how hacking saved her life, click here.

Automation vs. Workers

Posted on by Posted in Business Leave a comment

What it is: Automation threatens to eliminate jobs, but it can also create new ones.

Apple recently revealed a Liam, a robot designed to do nothing more than tear apart an iPhone to recover the recyclable materials. Now Apple’s overseas suppliers, Foxconn and Pegatron, plan to automate their assembly lines that create iPhones in the first place.

Megatron claims they can use 20 people to do the work that previously took 100 people while Foxconn has cut its work force from 110,000 to 50,000 by relying on more robots on the assembly lines. Looking at this data, it’s easy to see that automation can replace human workers and eliminate jobs. However, the long-term effects aren’t as obvious.

Anyone remember back in the old days before word processors when companies had typing pools filled with (mostly) women sitting at desks with a typewriter? Back then when corporate executives needed something typed, they gave it to the typing pool and someone would type it up and hand the finished copy back to the executive. Word processors helped eliminate typing pools, yet no one is crying that typing pool jobs are gone.

Even before typewriters, people used to hire others (called scriveners) to act as human copying machines. If you needed to make a copy of a long document, you had to hire a scrivener to manually rewrite everything. When copy machines and typewriters appeared, scrivener jobs disappeared, yet no one is clamoring for those jobs to return.

The simple fact is that automation does eliminate jobs, but if your job can be replaced by a machine, that means your job most likely treats you like a machine. Being treated like a replaceable cog is dehumanizing and demoralizing. When you feel you’re no more important than a machine, you can’t help but gain little job satisfaction from the monotony and tedium of doing the same tasks over and over again.

Would anyone want to manually copy legal documents with ink and quill pens instead of using copying machines or typewriters? Would anyone give up word processors to go back to typewriters just so more people could have jobs?

Automation replaces jobs that are cheaper and more accurate to do by automation. Yes, workers will lose jobs, but is it worth keeping people in tedious, mindless jobs in return for lower efficiency and accuracy?

It’s no fun losing a job to a machine, but it’s pointless to fight it either. If your job can be done by a machine, you’re little more than a machine. Rather than fight job loss to automation, it’s far more productive to search for creative, inspiring work instead that can’t be easily replaced with a machine.

Rather than do jobs a machine can do, it’s far better to work with machines to do an even better job than before. When you can avoid jobs that require mindless repetition, you can find a job that requires creativity instead. Let the machines do the routine, boring, and dangerous work. Let the humans do the fun, creative, and far more important work.

The trick is getting people to move from routine work to creative work that pays more and provides far greater job satisfaction as well. The problem is that it’s easy not to think or challenge yourself and collect a paycheck from a job you don’t like but can tolerate. It’s far more difficult to become a more versatile person by expanding your skills and then look for a job that can fulfill you emotionally and not just financially.

Self-driving cars may eliminate taxi drivers, but it will also create new jobs for people willing to manage a fleet of self-driving cars along with maintain, build, and improve upon them. Automation simply frees humans to stop treating themselves and others like mindless machines.

Robots building and tearing apart iPhones are just a small part of the change that’s taking place in the world today. Manual labor is easy for anyone to do, but it’s exhausting and tedious as well that fails to exploit the human mind. For people who believe they have nothing imaginative to contribute to society, a mindless assembly line job that pays well might be their highest aspiration.

For people who truly want to enjoy life, getting paid to do work you don’t like is little more than prostitution. Automation promises to free more people to do more with their lives than tedious tasks. The real challenge isn’t to find people jobs, but to convince more people that their future can be brighter if they’ll only make an effort to embrace the future instead of fighting it.

Automation is coming. The only question is how will you react when it keeps coming anyway?

To read more about the pros and cons of automation, click here.

ed2go

 

The .xip File Format

Posted on by Posted in Software Leave a comment

What it is: The .xip file format is similar to the existing .zip file format for compression but with added digital security to verify the file contents have not been modified.

File compression is a seemingly trivial feature but an important one. At the very least, compressing files lets you combine multiple files into one while reducing overall file size at the same time. This lets you send multiple files easily.

The big problem with file compression is that it doesn’t verify its contents. Someone could easily open a compressed file, replace legitimate files with malware, and compress it back up again. That’s exactly what hackers did with a malware program dubbed XcodeGhost, which modified Xcode, Apple’s free development tool for creating apps.

XcodeGhost acted just like Xcode but every time someone compiled a program, XcodeGhost would boobytrap it with malware. Because developers thought they were downloading a legitimate copy of Xcode, they had no way of knowing they were actually downloading the malware version called XcodeGhost instead.

That’s why Apple has now shifted file compression to the .xip format, which allows verification of its file contents. Theoretically the .xip file format won’t let someone uncompress a file, boobytrap it, and compress it again to masquerade as a legitimate compressed file. This .xip file format is designed to protect against future hacker tricks like XcodeGhost, but could also be used to verify files sent by email.

Suppose you send a document by email. Someone could intercept that document, modify it, and send it on its way. Now the recipient has no idea the document was modified.

However if you sent the document in the .xip file format, then the recipient could be sure that the file contents were not modified en route. This seemingly simple file format can increase security and trust.

For now, Apple will likely use the .xip file format when distributing its own tools but the .xip file format could become more popular in the future. The key is getting more people familiar with the .xip file format and understanding how to securely compress files and validate them.

For most computer users, this will likely be a hassle, but for more tech-savvy users, this could provide additional security when using a computer. Now if Apple could make the .xip file format easy to use so even non-computer savvy users can use it effortlessly, then the .xip file format could take off. Until then, it will likely remain another tool for tech-savvy users while the vast majority of users simply ignore it altogether.

To read more about the .xip file format, click here.

 

Apple’s AR/VR Project

Posted on by Posted in Hardware, Software, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: With the popularity of Pokemon GO, Apple has given additional hints about its own augmented reality/virtual reality projects.

Pokemon GO has become a smash hit in less than a week after its introduction. The main idea behind Pokemon GO is that you can wander around your own neighborhood and by looking through your smartphone’s camera, you can see Pokemon characters nearby that you can capture.

For many people Pokemon GO has given people their first practical use of augmented reality. Unlike virtual reality that immerses you in a completely imaginary world, augmented reality applies something non-existent over your existing world. Beyond Pokemon GO, one likely practical use for augmented reality is the ability to see street names just by aiming your smartphone camera at any road.

Augmented reality is popular because it’s easy to use. Just pull out your smartphone and aim its camera at any nearby object. Virtual reality requires strapping a headset to your face. While virtual reality’s experience is more immersive while keeping your hands free, it’s also less comfortable to use in public or for extended periods of time. In addition, when you’re done with augmented reality, you an tuck your smartphone back in your pocket. When you’re done with virtual reality, you have to carry around a headset anyway in addition to buying a headset in addition to your existing smartphone.

Apple’s next big thing won’t be a hardware product like the Apple Car. Instead, Apple’s next big thing will be augmented reality for the iPhone. Apple has acquired numerous augmented/virtual reality companies over the past few years so it’s likely that Apple already has plans for adding augmented reality to the iPhone either this year or the next.

One interesting company Apple acquired is Faceshift, which lets you change your face in real-time into a cartoon animated face instead. This would let you change your face into an orc’s face or a dog’s face. Now as you speak, someone else will see the orc or dog speaking and making the same facial gestures as you do.

Faceshift was developing this technology for Skype so people could make silly faces to each other while video chatting, but they were also looking to apply this to video games. When people play video games, they could not only use an avatar to represent themselves in the game, but they could act out the movements and facial gestures as well, creating a more immersive gaming environment.

How such face shifting will work in business use remains to be seen, but it’s one of Apple’s more interesting acquisitions. A far more fascinating acquisition is Metaio, which developed augmented reality technology used in German museums. One museum lets you view a building along the border of the Berlin Wall. Yet if you view this building through Metaio’s augmented reality app, you could view people actually jumping out of the building windows to freedom.

Such a use of augmented reality could create more immersive museum exhibits along with advertising possibilities. Besides just staring at a product on a store shelf, you could view it through augmented reality so you could see someone actually using it in different applications.

Imagine looking at a dress in a store window and using augmented reality, seeing how that dress moves when someone wearing it walks and spins around. Look at a car through augmented reality and you could see different colors or custom features, which is what Ferrari did with Metaio’s technology.

Apple has been pursuing augmented/virtual reality for years and their product will likely arrive soon. Most likely Apple’s solution won’t just be to show you augmented reality but to make it easy for anyone to create augmented reality images of their own. While Pokemon GO lets you use augmented reality, Apple will let you create your own augmented reality and let others easily view it as well.

Augmented reality is coming to the iPhone, iPad, and Macintosh soon. It may be here next year or two or more years from now but it’s coming. Augmented reality promises to be Apple’s next big thing that will redefine the augmented reality market as much as Pokemon GO has helped bring awareness to augmented reality in the first place.

To read about Apple’s acquisition of various augmented reality companies, click here.

 

The Apple Pencil as an Input Device

Posted on by Posted in Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: The Apple Pencil is a dedicated drawing and pointing tool initially offered just for the iPad Pro.

When Apple introduced the iPad Pro, they also introduced the Apple Pencil. At the time, the Apple Pencil seemed limited to just the iPad Pro, but if it was just an accessory for a single iPad model, that would be a tremendous waste of resources. As it turns out, Apple recently received a patent to use the Apple Pencil on a trackpad such as the Magic Trackpad used with the Macintosh.

This makes far more sense that the Apple Pencil would be an optional drawing and pointing device that could turn a trackpad into a digital drawing tablet. For years, artists have bought dedicated drawing tablets from companies such as Wacom, but the Apple Pencil threatens to make digital drawing tablets obsolete by letting users draw directly on the trackpad.

The trackpad can already detect motion with a fingertip so it seems trivial to allow the trackpad to detect the Apple Pencil as well. In a worse case scenario, this will require the purchase of a new Magic Trackpad to work with the Apple Pencil. In a best case scenario, the Magic Trackpad can already detect pressure so perhaps the next version of macOS will enable the current version of the trackpad to work with the Apple Pencil.

Whatever happens in the future, the Apple Pencil is not restricted just to the iPad Pro any more, but will likely become a common optional device to go along with the Macintosh and most likely the iPhone as well.

Just like today, many people do not need the Apple Pencil but many more will find the Apple Pencil an intuitive pointing device than the mouse or trackpad, or an indispensable drawing tool that eliminates the need to buy additional drawing tablets.

The traditional PC user interface relied on menus and icons. The traditional smartphone user interface relies on icons and touch screens that can detect motions such as swipes and taps. Tomorrow’s user interface will likely blend the two into one until it will seem just as common to control a computer or smartphone with finger gestures as it will be to control it with a pointing device like the Apple Pencil.

The Apple Pencil isn’t just an iPad Pro accessory but the start of a new user interface design. Drawing has always been clumsy with a mouse and slightly better with a trackpad and a fingertip. With the Apple Pencil, drawing can be more natural. The biggest problem with the Apple Pencil is simply keeping track of it.

To read more about Apple’s patent to use the Apple Pencil on a trackpad with the Macintosh, click here.

ed2go

 

Overlooking Apple Pay

Posted on by Posted in Software, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Apple Pay is a contactless, wireless, secure payment system for Apple products.

Wall Street analysts constantly look for Apple’s next innovation. Unfortunately, these analysts either get lost in the myth of market share or they look for innovation in hardware and overlook Apple’s numerous software innovations.

On the first case, analysts keep touting Android’s huge market share while completely ignoring the far lower profit share of Android. Meanwhile, Apple has a much lower market share than Android but captures 94% of the smartphone profits. Analysts would have you believe that high market share is more desirable than high profit share.

In the second case, Apple’s innovations aren’t just limited to hardware such as the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Most of Apple’s more recent innovations are software related. Perhaps the most overlooked one is Apple Pay.

Apple Pay lets you link  credit card to your Apple device (iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch) and then pay using that credit card without actually revealing that credit card number. By keeping your credit card number secret, Apple Pay prevents others from knowing your credit card number. The fewer people who see your credit card number, the more secure that credit card number will be.

hackers currently teal thousands of credit card numbers every year by simply breaking into retailer’s computer servers. By eliminating the need to store credit card numbers on other computers, Apple Pay greatly increases security and reduces credit card fraud.

More importantly from a business perspective, every purchase made through Apple Pay gives a percentage of that sale to Apple. The reason why MasterCard and VISA are such huge companies is because they get a cut of every credit card purchase. With Apple Pay, the credit card companies still get a cut of every credit card purchase, but now they have less expense dealing with credit card fraud. That means increased profits for the credit card companies, an additional source of revenue for Apple, and far lower chances of credit card fraud for consumers.

Swiping a credit card and giving away your credit card number is now the riskiest way to shop. The safest way to shop is through Apple Pay or similar systems such as Samsung Pay or Android Pay. As Apple Pay grows in use, that just means more money going to Apple. Instead of relying on sales of hardware to make money, Apple can now rely on people’s everyday purchasing to make money as well.

Apple Pay is just one way Apple makes money through services as opposed to hardware sales. Making continuous hardware sales is a difficult way to make money. Just ask the car companies. Making money through services people use everyday is a far simpler way to make money. Just ask the credit card companies.

With Apple Pay, Apple makes their own devices more appealing with security, and creates an additional revenue stream that will only get bigger. Apple Pay helps everyone, but most of all, it helps Apple create a reliable and steadily growing source of revenue for doing very little beyond their initial work in creating and implementing Apple Pay in the first place.

To learn more about Apple Pay, click here.

 

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