All Shows

Show of 05-28-2016

Tech Talk, May 28, 2016

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Kirk in Fairfax: Dear Dr. Shurtz – I am a long time podcast listener who will soon be upgrading several family computers from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and was amused by your recent tale of woe (including appropriate background music) about losing your laptop. You mentioned that data theft was not a concern because your laptop’s hard drive was encrypted.  Is hard drive data encryption a Windows feature or did you use a separate program?  I’m sure many of your users would welcome your walking us through the set up procedure. From a faithful listener, Kirk in Fairfax, VA.
  • Tech Talk Responds: Windows 10 includes BitLocker Drive Encryption, which provides data protection in case of a loss or stolen device. BitLocker has been around for several years and can be used with Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 operating systems.
  • BitLocker is not available on Windows 10 Home edition. It’s available on Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise and Education editions. If you don’t have the Pro edition and don’t want to spend $99 to upgrade, you could use TrueCrypt, an open source encryption tool that is free.
  • BitLocker Drive Encryption is built into the Windows 10 operating system and uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with configurable key lengths of either 128-bit (default) or 256-bit. BitLocker Drive Encryption encrypts your entire drive.
  • If you have a computer that you purchased in the last few years, chances are that it includes a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip. This is common on most laptops these days. To properly secure your Windows computer with BitLocker, Microsoft recommends you use TPM version 1.2 or later.
  • I recommend that first need to link your login to a Microsoft Account. This will enable you to reset the password in the event you lose it. If you don’t have this option, your data is lost without the password. Then go to Control Panel/System and Security/Bitlocker Drive Encryption. Select enable Encryption. You will go through a few additional screens. You will be asked where to save your encryption key (file, USB, Microsoft Account). I have chosen my Microsoft account. If I did not want the FBI to get access, I would choose a USB drive. Encryption is a slow process. Let it run overnight.
  • Email from Arnie in Colorado Springs: Hi Dr. Shurtz, Your updated Tech Talk podcast & summary format for the 7th was received; I like the new format. Having said that, I haven’t been able to see May 14th podcast & suspect you’re still working on the 21st program. Do I need to make adjustments to my iPad to view the summaries? Thanks, Arnie in Colorado Springs, CO
  • Tech Talk Responds: I have gotten lots of feedback like Arnie’s. Downloads on the new site of trouble free. Thanks for listening. You should not have to make any adjustments to your iPad to view the summaries. The site is responsive and formats for any delivery device.
  • Email from Mike in Maryland: Hello “Classroom of the Airways”, Is there a way that I can surf the internet and read the text or content only? It seems like almost every web site I click onto, the web page appears, but then the web page freezes or locks up until most of the images, the video ads, & audio ads download. This is extremely frustrating. I typical use my brand new laptop, but when people use their cellphone these undesired Ads, just burn up our cellphone data plans in a very short time! P.S. Has Momma Big Voice ever caught Mr. Big Voice trying to sneak “Siri” down into the basement ? Thanks for your great show, Mike from Maryland.
  • Tech Talk Responds: You problem is being caused by ads that a not well be behaved. In order to avoid that drudgery, I use an ad blocker. On my laptop, I use AdBlock Plus. On my iPhone, I use Blockr for Safari. Occasionally, I have to disable ad blocking, when a particular site blocks my entry because they have detected. I love ad blocking software. My the way Momma Big Voice has been trying to get Mr. Big Voice under control. We hear her complaining all the time.
  • Email from Gwen in Reston: Dear Doc and Jim. I am trying to fix a computer that has malware preventing me from getting into regedit (register edit) and task manager. It will not let me boot into safe mode. It will not let me install any anti-spyware or anti-virus software. I’m not sure where to go from here. It has stopped me from doing much of anything to get the malware off the computer. Any suggestions? Thanks. Love the show. Gwen in Reston
  • Tech Talk Responds: Malware can be pretty sophisticated, and it can work hard to prevent you from removing it.
  • You can first try to run Windows Defender Offline. Windows Defender Offline is an anti-malware tool, essentially a stand-alone version of Windows Defender, that you download and burn to CD or install on a USB flash drive. You then boot from this to avoid running the malware on your machine. As a result, you’re able to run the anti-malware tool directly. Use a different computer.
  • Let the tool perform a thorough scan of your machine. Hopefully, it will detect and remove the malware that’s causing your problem.
  • A second option is to temporarily kill the malware so you can remove it. BleepingComputer.com has created a tool called RKill that does exactly that. You may need to download Rkill on another machine (because it may be blocked on the infected machine), but you can quickly copy it over to your machine using a USB drive or something else. You may also need to rename Rkill.exe to something else (like “notRkill.exe” or “leo.exe”). Once again, the malware may be paying attention to the name of every program being run, and may prevent the software from running if it recognizes the name. Run the program, and do not reboot. Rebooting will “undo” the effect of having run Rkill. Any malware Rkill killed will return if you reboot.
  • With the malware temporarily killed, you may be able to download and run anti-malware tools. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is currently one of the most successful tools at identifying and removing the types of malware that we’re talking about here.
  • Download the free version, install and run it, and see what it turns up. Once again, you may need to download the tool on another machine and copy the download over, as you did with Rkill.
  • One of the best and quickest solutions is to restore your machine using a recent image back up.The final solution. Reformat your machine and reinstall everything from scratch. And reformatting and reinstalling is the only approach known to have a 100% success rate at malware removal.

Profiles in IT: Bailey Whitfield Diffie

  • Bailey Whitfield ‘Whit’ Diffie is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography.
  • Diffie was born June 5, 1946, in Washington, D.C. His parents were educators.
  • His interest in cryptography began at age 10 when his father, a professor, brought home the entire crypto shelf of the City College Library in New York.
  • In 1965, he received a BS in mathematics from the MIT began working for MITRE.
  • In 1969, he joined the Stanford University AI lab to work with its director, John McCarthy, on proof of correctness of computer programs.
  • In the summer of 1972, Diffie’s research interests changed to cryptography because of the need for secure networks. However, all work on this topic was classified and Diffe got fed up with the politics. In early 1973, he took a leave of absence to travel around the US pursuing his new interest and was fired a year later.
  • I visited the cryptographic laboratory at IBM in Yorktown Heights. Alan Konheim, as mathematician working on the US Data Encryption Standard (DES), recommended that he collaborate with his friend, Marty Hellman at Stanford. The hit it off.
  • He returned to Stanford with support from electrical engineering professor Martin Hellman, who was also pursuing research in cryptography.
  • Diffie and Martin Hellman criticized the NBS proposed Data Encryption Standard, because its 56-bit key length was too short to prevent brute-force attack.
  • Diffie and Hellman worked together throughout 1975. The results of their work appeared in the paper, New Directions in Cryptography, in November 1976. The insights in this paper underpin secure transactions on the Internet.
  • It introduced a new method of distributing cryptographic keys that solved the key distribution problem. It has become known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange.
  • It broke the government encryption monopoly, allowing secure communication.
  • In 1980, Diffie became Manager of Secure Systems Research for Northern Telecom, where he designed the key management architecture for X.25 networks.
  • He played a key role in the design of Northern’s first packet security product and in developing the group that was later to become Entrust.”
  • In 1991 he joined Sun Microsystems Laboratories, working primarily on public policy aspects of cryptography. Diffie remained with Sun until 2009.
  • As of 2008, Diffie was a visiting professor at the Information Security Group based at Royal Holloway, University of London.
  • In May 2010, Diffie joined the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography.
  • In 2011, Diffie was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum “for his work, with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle, on public key cryptography.”
  • Together with Martin Hellman, Diffie won the 2015 Turing Award. The citation for the award for fundamental contributions to modern cryptography.

Developers Rejoice: Google Win Android Copyright Case

  • Google has won a six-year court case brought by software firm Oracle, which claimed Google had infringed its copyright by using 11,500 lines of Java code in its Android operating system.
  • The jury ruled that Google’s use of 37 Java APIs (application programming interfaces) was fair use. The news will be welcomed by developers, who typically rely on free access to APIs to develop third-party services.
  • Oracle had contested that Google’s use of its proprietary Java code exceeded fair use, and was seeking damages of up to $9bn. Android is by far the most popular mobile operating system, with 1.4 billion monthly active users worldwide and a market share of more than 80%. Those users downloaded 65bn apps in 2015 alone.
  • More importantly, the “fair use” decision in this case sets a strong precedent in an industry where programs and apps are often as much constructed from various building blocks of code that already exist as they are from whole cloth.
  • If the company that owns the original code language – as Oracle does with Java – can claim ownership over systems which use parts of its code, in varying sizes, that might have a serious dampening effect on developers.
  • When it was developed, Android partly used the programming language Java to build its API. Java was a widely used language, developed by a company called Sun Microsystems in the 1990s.
  • Sun was bought by Larry Ellison’s $169B software conglomerate Oracle in 2010, and after unsuccessfully trying to negotiate for a deal which would allow Google to license the Java APIs, Oracle sued for copyright and patent infringement, firing the first shot in the legal war.
  • The key question in the case was this: between a patent, in which the mechanism is the idea being protected by law, and a copyrighted text, in which the language is the idea being protected by law, where does a program – in which the language is the mechanism – fall?
  • In 2012 a Washington DC judge sided with Google, saying that APIs can’t be copyrighted, effectively torpedoing Oracle’s case that the Java APIs used in Android infringed upon Oracle’s intellectual property.
  • In 2013, the federal circuit court of appeals heard Oracle’s case again, and in May 2014 the federal judge reversed Allsup’s ruling, holding that the “structure, sequence and organization” of the Java API packages – there are 37 in total which Oracle claimed Google copied – and remanded the case back to the district court to be retried, this time to discover whether Google’s actions constituted “fair use” of Oracle’s technology.
  • If you think that all sounds rather arcane, you’d be right. Lawyers for both sides in the San Francisco trial attempted in various ways to explain to the jury how “fair use” might be contemplated in the context of programming language, often using tortuous metaphors.
  • During opening and closing arguments, Google had filing cabinets to point to as a system of organizing things.
  • Oracle was trying to use software copyright to protect a portion of the software that’s basically functional, and copyright isn’t supposed to protect functional things.

Startup of the Week: Hometeam

  • Hometeam, a New York-based startup providing in-home care to seniors, is publicly launching after operating in a stealthy beta for two years.
  • Funded by $11 million in funding from Lux Capital, IA Ventures and Recruit Strategic Partners, Hometeam was founded by Josh Bruno.
  • Since then, the company has placed over 250 caregivers in hundreds of homes across New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
  • Bruno says that 92 percent of adults, when surveyed, would prefer to stay in their own homes than live in a nursing home. In many cases, family members are not equipped to manage caring for a senior relative, so hiring an in-home caregiver is the only alternative.
  • Hometeam provides an iPad for each home with an app that the caregiver uses to track care and communicate with the family via texts, pictures and medical updates.
  • Hometeam also employs a team of nurses that periodically stop by to check on patients and make sure that their medical conditions are being managed correctly.
  • Bruno says that Hometeam differentiates itself by hiring the best caregivers in the field and providing a highly personalized level of care.
  • Hometeam caregivers are required to find an activity that each patient is passionate about and are given a budget to help them achieve it.
  • This can be especially challenging when a person’s mobility is limited.
  • Hometeam plans to open 15 new offices across nine states, including two in California, within the next year.
  • Website: https://www.hometeamcare.com/

Use of Public Open Data is Growing Globally

  • Open data (free, publicly available data) is being leveraged by 1500+ organizations in 87 countries across all sectors of the economy.
  • When you look up the weather forecast, use an app to plan your commute, or check an online ratings site to find a local doctor, you’re using open data. Open data – free public data, typically provided by governments, that anyone can use without restrictions – has become an integral part of our daily lives.
  • It provides citizens, businesses, and nonprofits with critical information to make more informed decisions. This data can be found on government data portals or websites such as the United States’ http://Data.gov or the World Bank’s data site http://Data.WorldBank.org.
  • The use of open data across industries and types of organizations is broad and varied. From an entrepreneur in Ghana providing crop data to rural farmers, to a blogger discovering parking ticket errors in NYC, to a comedy news show using financial data to find inconsistencies in the Miss America scholarship fund, open data is being utilized across all sectors of the economy as a powerful free resource.
  • In May 2015, the Center for Open Data Enterprise and the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network launched the Open Data Impact Map – a public database of organizations using open data – to better understand the growing trends in different countries and sectors.
  • Over the past year, dozens of organizations and researchers across six continents have contributed examples to the Impact Map database, which includes information on the organizations that use open data, the types of data they use, and how they apply it.
  • The first report includes 1534 use cases from 87 countries.
  • The analysis of the Impact Map data has found the most common types of data used across sectors and regions are government operations (e.g. budgets, spending, elections, procurement data), geospatial (e.g. GPS data, satellite imagery), and demographic and social (e.g. census data).
  • Additionally, we found that organizations use open data in four main ways:
  • Organizational Optimization, New Products and Services, Advocacy, and Research. –
  • Link: http://opendataenterprise.org/map/reports/May2016Report.pdf

Open Data Wins Again: Reveals parking ticket errors

  • A blogger in New York has used public data to prove that the New York Police Department (NYPD) ticketed thousands of cars that were actually parked legally.
  • Ben Wellington made the discovery after officers kept ticketing his own car, parked on a pavement ramp on the street where he lives.
  • Drivers have been allowed to park in some of these spaces since 2009.
  • To discover the extent of the problem, Mr. Wellington examined data published through New York City’s Open Data portal, which includes information on the most common parking places in the city where tickets are issued to cars on pedestrian ramps.
  • He then checked some of the locations via Google Street View to ensure that the ramps were not connected to a crosswalk – in which case the ticket would have been justified.
  • At one spot in Brooklyn, $48,000 (£33,000) had been issued in erroneous fines over a two-and-a-half year period.
  • Mr Wellington detailed several examples on his blog, I Quant NY, including three more spaces at each of which more than $40,000 (£27,500) in fines had been given out over the same period.
  • In a statement, the NYPD said: “Mr Wellington’s analysis identified errors the department made in issuing parking summonses. It appears to be a misunderstanding by officers on patrol of a recent, abstruse change in the parking rules. We appreciate Mr Wellington bringing this anomaly to our attention.”
  • It added that while traffic agents had been trained following the adoption of new rules in 2009, officers had not. A message has now been sent to all officers updating them on pedestrian ramp regulations.
  • Wellington has used open data in the past to challenge ticketing decisions in the city. Use of public data in cities around the world has increased in recent years.

Computing of the Future: Artificial Intelligence

  • At its 10th annual I/O developer conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai emphasized artificial intelligence as the next big phase of computing.
  • Machine learning was a common thread in Google’s latest products and launches – Google Home, Google’s Assistant, Duo and Allo, and Instant Apps.
  • Every decade, a new era of computing arrives that pretty much shapes everything we do.
  • During the event, Pichai noted that saying that Google aims to be more assistive and provide a more ambient experience. Google hopes to be your artificial intelligence friend.
  • The 90s was all about Windows PCs and client-server. By 2000s, the world was grappled by the Web, where almost every advertisement carried a URL. Mid-2000s, and the iPod, iPhone, and devices with receptive micro-screens came in.
  • So, what happens next? Pichai bets its artificial intelligence.
  • He believes that computing will evolve from a mobile-first to an A.I.-first world,
  • By connecting machine learning tools to developers via its Cloud Platform as well as the open source community via TensorFlow, Google wants to do things it could never do before.
  • It is bringing machine learning in line with HAL. It may have started as a search engine, but if its vision plays out, it will be more like an ambient being by the end of the next decade.
  • Every product and service that it launches will have Google Assistant built in. This is Google’s answer to Facebook’s chat bots, Microsoft’s Bots, and Apple’s Viv.
  • He’s betting that the future lies in smarter uses of machine learning, rather than clever uses of mobile devices. Various forms of machine learning and AI are already being put to clever use to fight spam, steer autonomous cars, and sort data and images.