AT Does ACTC
We are pleased to announce Aquariant Technologies now has an ACTC on staff.
We stand prepared to solve all your Apple problems today!
Another Adobe Security Flaw
Can we puh-lease stop referring to Adobe with any word that has any meaning remotely connected to security?
Adobe today confirmed that hackers are exploiting a critical unpatched bug in Flash Player, and promised to patch the vulnerability in two weeks.
The company issued a security advisory that also named Adobe Reader and Acrobat as vulnerable.
"There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against Adobe Reader and Acrobat," said Adobe in its warning. The company said it's seen no sign that hackers are also targeting Flash Player itself.
So how does one protect a computer from being pwned by Adobe’s insecure software? By disabling the software you depend on :
Security experts have regularly criticized Adobe Flash's security, with some questioning the company's decision to integrate the media player's capabilities within the almost-as-popular Reader. Adobe has countered those arguments with its own, saying that many users rely on the functionality.
Until a patch is available, users can protect themselves from active attacks by deleting the "authplay.dll" file that ships with Reader and Acrobat. It gave the same advice in June when the earlier Flash vulnerability was reported.
Dumping authplay.dll, however, will crash Reader and Acrobat or produce an error message when the software opens a PDF file containing Flash content.
So the choices are :
1. Use Adobe software and let your computer be pwned by an as-yet-anonymous ‘hacker’
OR
2. Disable the software, and not be able to use it.
Remind us again... why does anyone use Adobe software?
We Want Schmidt's Head !
Google would like you to know they grabbed way more private information than they first let on, but it was completely, totally accidental :
Google Inc said its "Street View" cars around the world accidentally collected more personal data than previously disclosed, and that it was changing its privacy practices.
Regulators in some of the more than 30 countries where the cars operated are looking into the issue.Google's Street View cars, which are well known for crisscrossing the globe and taking panoramic pictures of the city's streets, collected the data. The company displays the pictures in its online street maps.
Google said it wants to delete the data as soon as possible. It disclosed the snafu in May, but said at the time that the information it collected was typically limited to "fragments" of data because the cars were always moving.
Well, if by “fragments” you meant “entire e-mails” or “passwords”, then it appears Google fragmented the hell out of the landscape. And after this massive breech of trust and invasion of privacy we have to trust them Google won’t ever, ever do it again :
Google said it has appointed Alma Whitten as director of privacy for engineering and product management, and that the company was adding new internal procedures requiring engineering product managers to maintain a privacy design document that records how user data is handled.
Google also said it was enhancing its privacy training for engineers and other important groups within the company.
But the most damning evidence, and one that would send a chill racing up the spine of any rational person, is this :
.Google said collecting the additional data was a mistake resulting from a piece of computer code from an experimental project that was accidentally included
So Google is experimenting with means to invade our privacy? Except for an incompetent engineer or thirty, we would not have any clue that Google was building the tools to invade privacy at will. And if it was bad in the spring, and worse now, what would it be like if we could force full, honest, and transparent disclosure from Google?
Are we alone, or does that whole ‘don’t be evil’ thing just appear to be a B.S. marketing slogan right now?
Mostly Dead
Computerworld predicts the obvious, that being Apple is sounding the death knell of hard drives :
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week introduced a slimmer version of the MacBook Air, an ultra-portable laptop without a traditional hard disk drive, he said it represents "the future of notebooks." Several industry observers agree.
Beginning with MP3 players, NAND flash technology in the form of solid state drives (SSD) has been devouring the consumer hard drive market from the bottom up as prices go down.
And, while hard disk drives will still populate servers and storage systems in corporate data centers for years to come, there will be fewer of them as solid state drives cannibalize the top tiers of data storage there.
Of course Solid-state drives will be the future. There are really is no down-side to them besides cost. They are more rugged than hard-drives, faster, silent, smaller and have far lower power-consumption than hard drives. What’s not to like?
But Apple has - historically speaking - always led the way in the computer industry. Many things all computer users take for granted are Apple inventions, such as the track pad. And we wouldn’t be using USB today had it not been for Apple.
Truly, it has been said if you want to know what the rest of the industry will be doing next year, look to Apple this year. Still, that doesn’t mean anyone is going to listen. After all, even when Apple held a funeral for Mac OS 9, it took some Mac developers years to get the hint.
We believe it will be inevitable that the industry shift to SSDs. The only question to be answered is : how long will it take?
You're Doing It Wrong
So, by now you have heard Steve Jobs himself jumped in to the fray during Apple’s financial conference call. MacWorld has the transcript. We will condense the report :
... I just couldn’t help dropping by for our first 20-billion-dollar quarter ...
We sold 14.1 million iPhones in the quarter, which represents a 91 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter
We’ve now passed RIM. And I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately, there is no solid data on how many Android phones are shipped each quarter.
In reality, we think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, “What’s best for the customer – fragmented versus integrated?”
...we are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as “open.”
Second, I’d like to comment on the “avalanche” of tablets poised to enter the market in the coming months.
First, it appears to be just a handful of credible entrants, not exactly an avalanche.
Second, almost all of them use seven-inch screens, as compared to iPad’s near 10-inch screens. Let’s start there.
The seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad.
The iPad is clearly gonna affect notebook computers. And I think the iPad proves it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.
So the more time that passes, the more I am convinced that we’ve got a tiger by the tail here, and this is a new model of computing which, you know, we’ve already got tens of millions of people already trained on with the iPhone.
The moral of the story is that Apple just owns the portable computing market, and for anyone to catch Apple would require them to become... well, better than Apple and that just isn’t going to happen. Anyone paying attention would have been going to Business 101 to listen to Steve Jobs explain exactly what is going on. But then someone who wasn’t Steve Jobs asked this question :
Q: You are the tablet market right now… This is the second time you’ve come on to talk about competition, and I’m just wondering if much like Apple encroaching on RIM’s monopoly in enterprise, if you think Apple is gonna be able to sustain share growth for tablets amid some of those new competitive headwinds. Some of those players may try different things and strategies, like tethering and Flash, multitasking, less content and app restrictions, and subsidized pricing. Just wondered if you think that may create itself a more fragmented market.
To which Steve Jobs answered :
I have a hard time envisioning what those strategies you mentioned are.
There are only two interpretations for this remark :
1. Who let clueless in on this call?
2. Have you been paying attention to a single thing I said for the past 15 minutes?
But Steve Jobs was pithy with a question on Adobe Flash. The same Flash Jobs called - in essence - a steaming pile of crap that will never see the light of day on an Apple portable device :
Q: Any updates on your stance on Flash?
A : Flash memory? We love flash memory.
And an amazing report about the AppleTV - already over 250,000 of them have been sold. We bought one and put it on display in our entryway, and we have to report it is amazing.
But the most powerful thing that caught our eyes was the simple admonition from Steve Jobs to everyone listening in on the call :
You’re looking at it wrong.
Given the recent success of Apple, one would be foolish to not pay heed to this wisdom.