Derek Lowe writing at Science:
One way to deal with such nonsense is to go after it head-on, pulling up evidence to show that no, these things don’t appear to be true, and here are a bunch of quite plausible reasons why they’re not. If someone is wavering or wondering, that might be enough. But it’s certainly not going to be enough for anyone who’s really invested in such thoughts (see that expertise link above for more thoughts on this as well).
Akamai was the DDoS protection service used by security researcher Brian Krebs. At least until last September when they couldn’t offer pro-bono protection under the weight of new massive attacks.
Their latest report details the specific attack on Krebs.
As detailed here in several previous posts, KrebsOnSecurity.com was a pro-bono customer of Akamai, beginning in August 2012 with Prolexic before Akamai acquired them. Akamai mentions this as well in explaining its decision to terminate our pro-bono arrangement.
One of my biggest concerns about Apple reducing their commitment to Mac automation is that we will no longer get these fabulous posts by Dr. Drang.
These tutorials by Jesse are a great introduction to TaskPaper. If you haven’t used TaskPaper in a long while, it’s worth another look. The application was completely redesigned and has several cool new features. Even the TaskPaper date picker is one of the most functional I’ve seen. Plain text doesn’t mean featureless.
On last week’s episode of Nerds on Draft (recorded in October) Jeff and I discuss what we like and don’t like about iOS 10 and our new iPhones. We’ve had quite a bit of time to adjust to the new features and there are some great new ways to get at information in iOS 10. The iPhone 7 Plus is my new primary computer and Jeff is still rolling with different iPhone sizes.
I’m not sure how but I stumbled across Diffen.com. It simply compares explanations or descriptions of two things. Some comparisons are quite extensive, like Sympathy vs. Empathy, Ethnicity vs. Race, or e.g. vs. i.e.1 Other comparisons are less than complete. But, I really like how it starts to tackle comparisons between complex topics, such as the Clinton vs. Trump tax plans.
The Grammar section was quite enjoyable. ↩︎
Once again, Bruce Schneier freaks me out:
The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can’t be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
Alfred 3.2 is out this week with several nice updates to the workflow options. It now passes the current application focus so that a single hot key can behave differently in different applications.
Snippets now support a cursor placement token, which makes it much better for expanding large chunks of text and positioning me right where I need to start typing.
Alfred 3.2 also now supports integration with 1Password for families and teams.
Bruce Schneier links to an terrifying new research paper:
In particular, we developed and verified such an infection using the popular Philips Hue smart lamps as a platform. The worm spreads by jumping directly from one lamp to its neighbors, using only their built-in ZigBee wireless connectivity and their physical proximity. The attack can start by plugging in a single infected bulb anywhere in the city, and then catastrophically spread everywhere within minutes, enabling the attacker to turn all the city lights on or off, permanently brick them, or exploit them in a massive DDOS attack.
This is the kind of post I love. Dr. Drang talks about TableFlip for Mac and MultiMarkdown tables. I’m a huge fan of MultiMarkdown tables, which is a weird sentence to write. It’s how I create my crib sheets.1 I think TableFlip is the easiest way to work with MultiMarkdown tables, by far. When I’m on my Mac, it’s mostly what I use now.2 But, as a Sublime Text user, I’m also a huge fan of the Table Editor plugin even though it’s no longer supported (damn you vim).
