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Show of 04-27-2019

Tech Talk

April 27, 2019

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Doug in Baton Rouge: Shurtz and Jim. I found in the street a run over Samsung S9 cell phone. It is badly damaged with the case backing is fractured on all sides. It is dead for all purposes. How do I go about finding the owner? I have not brought the phone inside for a closer examination, but I would assume that there is a micro card installed with sensitive data on it. Your advice please. If you suggest disposing it because there is no way to locate the owner, I would like to disassemble it out of curiosity. If the internals are not damaged, it probably would be a fun project to rebuild with parts from the internet. Or will the phone be LOCKED and not worth rebuilding? I always look forward to your great radio shows! –Thanks, Doug / Baton Rouge, LA
  • Tech Talk Responds: The phone has two identifiers. The IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number and the phone number. The IMEI (15 decimal digits: 14 digits plus a check digit) includes information on the origin, model, and serial number of the device. If it is a GSM phone you could move the SIM card to another and discover the phone number. Both numbers can be traced to the owner through the records of the telecomm carrier. In all likelihood, the phones data was backed up on the cloud and the owner and restored the data to a new phone. The phone number has then been assigned to another phone and this phone’s connection to the network has been disabled. It is of no value to the current owner.
  • Email from Helen in Rockville: Dear Doc and Jim. I would like to be able to open my garage door remotely for package deliveries. I would also like to have it close automatically in the evening, in the event that I forget to close it. What are my options to enable these two features with my garage door opener? Love the show. Helen in Rockville, MD
  • Tech Talk Responds: Neither of these features are built into conventional door openers. You will have to add a device to your garage door to enable this ability. I would suggest use the Nexx Home Garage Door Opener. Nexx Garage is a companion device to existing garage door openers and allows one or more users to securely open, close, and monitor their garage door from anywhere. Nexx Garage uses apps on either your iOS or Android devices using your WiFi connection. It has a magnetic sensor to know when the garage door is closed or open. You can operate device with your cell phone from anywhere.
  • To trigger your device to close automatically, you will need another app. You will need to use the IFTTT (IF This Then That) app on your smartphone. IFTTT is a free web-based service to create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. An applet is triggered by changes that occur within other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, or Pinterest. For example, an applet may send an e-mail message if the user tweets using a hashtag, or copy a photo on Facebook to a user’s archive if someone tags a user in a photo. Or, in your case, if the time reaches a certain point. Nexx Garage supports IFTTT. Simply configure IFTTT to send a close signal to your garage at the appropriate time. IFTTT only works with applications have support for it.
  • Email from Lien in Fairfax: I keep receiving a notification on my computer saying Microsoft is going to stop supporting Windows 7 in January. I really like Windows 7 and I hate the thought of having to upgrade to Windows 10! Is this really true or is it a scam? Lien in Fairfax.
  • Tech Talk Responds: Microsoft has indeed announced that they’re going to stop releasing security updates and providing technical support for Windows 7 to the general public on January 14, 2020. You have five options:
  • Do nothing and take your chances. Your computer’s Windows 7 installation will keep on working after January 14. It just will not receive any security updates after that date. Not recommended.
  • Upgrade your computer’s Windows 7 installation to Windows 10. If your PC was built not long before Windows 10 was released you can probably save some money by simply purchasing a Windows 10 license and installing the upgrade.
  • Replace your Windows 7 PC with a brand new Windows 10 machine. This is likely to be the best option since purchasing a Windows 10 license will cost about 1/3 of what you’d pay for a new low-cost Windows 10 laptop or Windows 10 desktop PC. If you don’t need a high performance computer you can easily add a couple of hundred bucks to the Windows 10 upgrade price and buy an entirely new machine! Probably the best option.
  • Replace Windows 7 with Linux. If you only use your PC for the Internet (visit websites, access social media, send and receive email, etc.) you can replace your PC’s Windows 7 installation with Linux for free! Your computer will probably run faster with Linux on it that it currently does with Windows 7! May be a good option for a techie.
  • Simply stop using your computer and use a mobile device instead.These days more people access the Internet with a smartphone or tablet than with a traditional laptop or desktop computer.
  • Email from Micheal in Boston: Dear Tech Talk. When I woke up this morning and turned on my laptop to check my email, the laptop could not find my Wi-Fi network. I had it scan for available networks and it found just one. I first thought it might be a neighbor’s Wi-Fi signal that was straying into my house, but then I noticed that it was a really strong signal. When I unplugged my router the new Wi-Fi network disappeared. My router is a Belkin N450DB. It appears that someone has hijacked my router somehow. Can you help? Michael in Boston
  • Tech Talk Responds: It sounds like someone has taken control of your router and renamed your Wi-Fi network. The first thing you need to do is manually reset the router back to its factory settings. Doing so will wipe out that rogue Wi-Fi network and allow you to log in to the router to set up one of your own. Here’s how:
    • With the router powered up, turn it around to where you’re looking at the back panel.
    • Press and hold the “Reset” button for at least 10 seconds, and then release it. The lights on the Router will momentarily flash. The “Router” light will begin to blink. When the “Router” light becomes solid again, the reset process will be complete.
  • Next, you need to log into the router’s setup utility
    • Connect the router to your computer with an Ethernet cable.
    • Open your web browser and paste this URL into the address bar: http://192.168.2.1/
    • After the “Router Setup Utility” loads, click Login.
    • Click the Submit button. .Since there is no default password for this particular router, you can simply leave the password field blank.)
    • Set up a new Wi-Fi connection. Be sure to use WPA2 security and choose a strong password that’s impossible to guess.
    • Finally reset the default router password
  • One final note: Your Belkin N450DB is a really old router. I recommend that you consider replacing it with a more recent model, giving your better speed and security.
  • Patricia in Florida: I am an avid LinkedIn user. I frequently view profiles of people who have left my company, but I don’t want them to know. Is there a way to stop LinkedIn from showing that I viewed their profile? Patricia in Florida
  • Tech Talk Responds: LinkedIn tells people when you view their profiles and shows them your name. That person may even get an email or alert saying you viewed their profile. Here’s how to browse privately without LinkedIn sharing this information.
  • To find this option, go to the LinkedIn website.
    • Click your profile icon on the top bar, and select “Settings & Privacy.”
    • Click “How others see your profile and network information” under Privacy.
    • Click “Profile viewing options.”
    • Anonymous LinkedIn Member. People will still see that someone viewed their profile, but they’ll see only that an anonymous person viewed it.
  • LinkedIn will hide the names of people who view your profile from you after you enable this anonymity option.

Profiles in IT: Ren Zhengfei

  • Ren Zhengfei is a Chinese engineer and entrepreneur, best known as the founder and CEO Huawei, the manufacturer of telecomm equipment and smartphones.
  • Ren was born October 25, 1944, in Guizhou, China.
  • After 1949, his father was appointed as the president of No. 1 Middle School of Duyun. His father became a member of the Communist Party in 1958.
  • After completing high school, Ren attended the Chongqing University in the 1960s.
  • He joined the People’s Liberation Army as an engineer, during China’s Cultural Revolution when the country was suffering from food and clothing shortages.
  • Ren was tasked with setting up a chemical factory to make textile fibers, part of the government’s plans to ensure every citizen had at least one decent piece of clothing.
  • Ren and his military comrades slept in shabby housing in subzero temperatures, living on pickled vegetables for months at a time.
  • After Ren successfully reverse engineered a tool that was needed to test equipment at the fiber factory, a supervisor helped him become a party member.
  • He then worked at the People’s Liberation Army Research Institute, as a military technologist in the IT Research Unit.
  • His hopes of becoming an officer in the PLA were undermined by his background.
  • His father had been labeled a “capitalist roader” in the cultural revolution.
  • In 1982, Ren retired from the army due to a large PLA workforce reduction.
  • Ren moved to Shenzhen and spent a few years working for an oil company.
  • In 1987, Ren founded Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd with 21,000 yuan (US$5,000).
  • Three state-owned enterprises (Great Dragon, Datang, ZTE) dominated the market.
  • Huawei was registered as a private company in Shenzhen, a fishing village.
  • Initially Huawei mostly sold telephone exchange equipment from Hong Kong. The company was dismissed as a minor vendor. Huawei struggled to gain market share.
  • Ren pushed employees to work long hours and do whatever it took to secure business.
  • Unable to compete in the big cities, Huawei focused on China’s small towns and villages. Ren invested heavily in research and development, pushing Huawei to create its own technology that would enable it to compete with its bigger rivals.
  • Huawei is essentially independent of Ren because it shares are held by its employees, but the ownership structure remains opaque, a concern to US intelligence.
  • Ren’s eldest daughter, is the chief financial officer (CFO) of Huawei. He was recently arrested in Canada for violation of US export sanctions to Iran.
  • Ren holds 1.42% of the shares of Huawei. The company had an annual revenue of US$92.5 billion in 2017 and was valued at US$450 million in 2010.
  • Huawei is now the world’s largest manufacturer of telecomm equipment and second largest smartphone manufacturer.
  • As of February 2019, he had a net worth of US$1.7 billion.

NSA Recommends Dropping Phone-Surveillance Program

  • The National Security Agency has recommended that the White House abandon a surveillance program that collects information about U.S. phone calls and text messages, saying the logistical and legal burdens of keeping it outweigh its intelligence benefits, according to people familiar with the matter.
  • The recommendation against seeking the renewal of the once-secret spying program amounts to an about-face by the agency, which had long argued in public and to congressional overseers that the program was vital to the task of finding and disrupting terrorism plots against the U.S.
  • The latest view is rooted in a growing belief among senior intelligence officials that the spying program provides limited value to national security and has become a logistical headache.
  • Frustrations about legal-compliance issues forced the NSA to halt use of the program earlier this year.
  • Its legal authority will expire in December unless Congress reauthorizes it.
  • It is up to the White House, not the NSA, to decide whether to push for legislation to renew the phone-records program.

Google Bans App That Generate Fake Click on Ads

  • Google is banning a popular Chinese developer from its Google Play Store.
  • The Chinese developer DO Global, which is partly owned by Baidu, was found to be producing fake ad clicks to gain revenue, among other fraudulent practices.
  • At least six apps were found by researchers to contain code for fake ad-clicking that would run in the background even when a user kept the app closed.
  • DO Global previously had about 100 apps in the Play Store, many of them listed under other developer names, such as “Pic Tools Group.”
  • In January last year, Google deleted 60 games from the Play Store after Check Point found a malicious bug contained in the apps that displayed porn ads.

UK To Let Huawei Firm Help Build 5G Network

  • The UK government has given Chinese telecoms company Huawei the go-ahead to supply equipment for the UK 5G data network.
  • The company will help build some “non-core” parts such as antennas.
  • But the plans have concerned the home, defense and foreign secretaries.
  • The U.S. also wants its allies in the “Five Eyes” intelligence grouping — the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — to exclude Huawei.
  • Huawei said it was “pleased that the UK is continuing to take an evidence-based approach to its work,” adding it would continue to work cooperatively with the government and the industry

Fixing algorithms Will Not Stop Fake News

  • Just tweaking algorithms and infusing Machine Learning (ML) into them will not protect us from misinformation and fake news on social media platforms.
  • Technological fixes cannot stop countries from spreading disinformation on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
  • Policymakers and diplomats need to focus more on the psychology behind why citizens are so vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, they stressed.
  • In a paper published in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, Nisbet and Kamenchuk, Research Associate at Ohio State’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies, discussed how to use psychology to battle these disinformation campaigns.
  • The researchers discussed three types of disinformation campaigns: identity-grievance, information gaslighting and incidental exposure.
    • Identity-grievance campaigns focus on exploiting real or perceived divisions within a country. “The Russian Facebook advertisements during the 2016 election in the US are a perfect example.
    • Gaslighting is when a country is flooded with false or misleading information through social media, blogs, fake news, online comments and advertising. But the goal of information gaslighting is not so much to persuade the audience as it is to distract and sow uncertainty.”
    • A third kind of disinformation campaign simply aims to increase the everyday, incidental exposure to “fake news.” The more people are exposed to some piece of false information, the more familiar it becomes, and the more willing they are to accept it,”
  • But there are ways to use psychology to battle disinformation campaigns.
  • Diplomats and policymakers must work to address the political and social conditions that allow disinformation to succeed, such as the loss of confidence in democratic institutions.

The Dead may Outnumber the Living on Facebook within 50 years

  • New analysis by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) predicts the dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within fifty years.
  • The analysis predicts that, based on 2018 user levels, at least 1.4 billion members will die before 2100.
  • In this scenario, the dead could outnumber the living by 2070. If the world’s largest social network continues to expand at current rates, however, the number of deceased users could reach as high as 4.9 billion before the end of the century.
  • These statistics give rise to new and difficult questions around who has the right to all
  • The management of our digital remains will eventually affect everyone who uses social media, since all of us will one day pass away and leave our data behind.
  • But the totality of the deceased user profiles also amounts to something larger than the sum of its parts. It is, or will at least become, part of our global digital heritage.
  • Never before in history has such a vast archive of human behavior and culture been assembled in one place.
  • Controlling this archive will, in a sense, be to control our history.
  • It is therefore important that we ensure that access to these historical data is not limited to a single for-profit firm.
  • It is also important to make sure that future generations can use our digital heritage to understand their history.”
  • Facebook should invite historians, archivists, archaeologists and ethicists to participate in the process of curating the vast volume of accumulated data that we leave behind as we pass away.

The Most Loved Programming Language

  • The annual Stack Overflow survey is one of the most comprehensive snapshots of how programmers work, with this year’s poll being taken by almost 90,000 developers.
  • A language that’s in-demand and enjoyable to use – Python
  • Python’s versatility continues to fuel its rise through Stack Overflow’s rankings for the “most popular” languages, which lists the languages most widely used by developers.
  • Python’s enduring popularity stems from the language being a jack-of-all-trades. Python is the second-best language for anything.
  • The Stack Overflow survey also shows Python to be one of the most in-demand languages sought by employers.

The Nations of the Amazon want the Name Back

  • Amazon countries say giving control of the domain to the tech giant could impact on their sovereignty
  • Online retail giant Amazon and the governments of eight South American countries have been given a final deadline to reach an agreement over how to use the “.amazon” web address extension after a seven-year dispute.
  • The new Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) rules allowed companies to apply for brand new extensions, offering internet users and businesses more ways to personalize their website name and addresses.
  • But eight countries containing the Amazon rainforest objected to the retail giant’s plans concerning the new .amazon domain name.
  • The governments of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela – all members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) – say that relinquishing the domain to Amazon could impact on their sovereignty.
  • Diplomats are proposing a “shared governance” of the domain name.
  • According to their proposals, Amazon would be allowed to use the domains which are relevant to its commercial interests, such as “books.amazon” or “kindle.amazon”.
  • But each country in turn would be entitled to use domains which relate to their cultural heritage – imagine Amazon nations coming together to promote the region under the “tourism.amazon” domain, for example.
  • But Amazon has rejected these proposals, instead suggesting that the .amazon extension be used in conjunction with two letters representing each country – br.amazon for Brazil, for example.
  • Amazon has promised to work with governments to identify and block the use of “names that touch national sensitivities” and has pledged to support a new top-level domain using local terms such as .amazonia and .amazonas.
  • Other contentious cases of geographical TLDs include .patagonia and .africa
  • In 2013, for example, the US-based outdoor clothing brand Patagonia withdrew an application for the .patagonia extension after objection from Argentina and Chile.
  • The Amazon saga continues