Not sure if this will become a “regular” feature, I hope not, but I do find myself disagreeing with some of the tech articles in the mainstream news media, and sharing is caring.
Men’s sex chromosome is doomed
The article begins with “The poorly designed Y chromosome that makes men is degrading rapidly and will disappear, even if humans are still around.” The Y chromosome was not designed, it evolved.
Spying eyes or a bit of fun, drones fly off the shelves
The clear assumption made in this article is that ‘drones’ will be used to spy on people.
Australians most vulnerable to virtual stalkers
In this article, the author makes the point that Internet companies, namely Facebook, Apple, and Google; provide free services, but make “billions of dollars each year by selling users’ information to other companies, including custom advertisers”, and then goes on to quote an expert saying that “anything we typed into the internet was collected, indexed and collated without our knowledge, and then stored forever on servers overseas.” All I shall say is those scares won’t monger themselves will they.
Google Apps: Saving Schools Money or Paying With Your Kid’s Privacy?
The author’s main point appears to be that the person employed by the school to manage the Google Apps system has access to the Google Apps system. This person has access to, amongst other things (shock horror) change your child’s password. Well, isn’t it their job to do those things. Well, here’s some shocking news for you, The employees of your bank have access to your bank account, and the employees of your cell phone company can access your cell phone records. That’s their job, and it’s the job of the Google Apps Administrator to have access to that data. In my experience, very rarely does anyone who should not be trusted with that level of access ever make it to that level in their career without being found out. Many of the better ones are members of professional organisations with a code of ethics to which they are bound. Google Apps also has a built in audit trail, making it very difficult to do any of these things undetected, it is inherently more secure than a locally hosted system to which the local systems administrator will have unrestricted and possibly unrecorded access to anything.
Security fears over exposure of web-accessible printers
Nothing wrong with the article as written, this problem has been around for years, it is nothing new, however it was linked to from the main page via the headline “Google exposes thousands of printers”. Clearly, this headline is meant to implicate that somehow Google is at fault, rather than the administrators who have failed to secure their printers, or HP who has shipped printers which are, by default, insecure.
Twitter clients stay signed in with pre-breach passwords
So, resetting your password does not revoke any OAuth tokens you may have setup……. because THAT’S HOW IT WORKS! Twitter already provide a way to list and revoke active tokens, including details of the date that the token was granted. Seriously, if a password reset revoked all OAuth tokens I had setup then I would be very very annoyed by that.
This post was originally published on blogger, and has been imported.