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Show of 11-09-2019

Tech Talk

November 9, 2019

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Tung in Ohio: Dear Doc and Jim. I would like to hide some photos on my iPhone. Frequently, others use my phone and I do not want these pictures to show up. What are my options? Love the podcast. Tung in Ohio
  • Tech Talk Responds: To hide a photo or video, select it, and then use the share icon to bring up the share sheet. Scroll through the bottom row of activities until you see “Hide.” Tap that, then “Hide Photo” or “Hide Video” to get the job done. To view your hidden media, just open the new “Hidden” folder in the “Albums” But beware the hidden folder is not password protected.
  • If you want a password-protected option on the iPhone, you can download an app called: Secret Photo Vault – Keepsafe. It is password protected and even has private cloud backup. The app is free with in-app purchases.
  • Android phones have either Private Mode or Content Lock. You can set a password for this private area and then hide selected photos or documents. The good news is that these files are password protected. Android also has Secret Photo apps.
  • Email from Louis in Kansas: Dear Tech Talk. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 7 Plus. I like the iPhone, but I cannot use my favorite headphones with it because there is no place to plug them in. Do you know of any way that I can use those wired headphones with my iPhone? I really do not want to buy a set of wireless headphones unless I absolutely have to. Thanks. Louis in Kansas
  • Tech Talk Responds: When Apple decided to stop putting microphone jacks on their devices, many users were unhappy. I does help with water proofing of the iPhone. Luckily, you can buy a very inexpensive adapter that will allow you to connect your existing set of corded headphones to your iPhone 7. You can get an Apple Lightning to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter for $8.79 on Amazon. This does not have an option for power. You can add the power options a few dollars more. Just check on Amazon and make certain to get an Apple certified adaptor.
  • Email from Martha in Alexandria: Dear Doc and Jim. I have a large collection of movies on DVD. I have a DVD player in every room in my house but I also love watching them on my computer while taking short breaks from my work (I’m self-employed and I work from a home office). The problem is I could watch a DVD with Windows Media Player on my old computer but it won’t play DVDs on my new one. Is it not possible to watch DVDs with Windows 10? Surely you can, but how? This is very frustrating so I hope you can help me. Thanks in advance. Martha in Alexandria
  • Tech Talk Responds: You have discovered Microsoft has removed the ability to play DVDs from Windows Media Player in Windows 10. Microsoft now charges for the “Windows DVD Player” app they are selling in the Microsoft Store. You can buy that one or download a free DVD player. It is called VLC Media Player, and it works just as well than most of the commercial video player apps out there. Here is the download link: https://www.oldergeeks.com/downloads/file.php?id=1086. Go to the bottom of the page to find the Download link. By the way this download site, checks all the download files to ensure that they are not infected with malware or crapware.
  • Email from Roger in Arlington, VA: Dear Tech Talk. I think I might crashed my laptop. I ordered new RAM for my Dell Inspiron 14z laptop, and when it arrived I was so excited that I absent-mindedly tried to install it without shutting the system down. I removed the battery but forgot to shut the system down or unplug the charger. As soon as I inserted the first of new RAM stick, I saw a spark. Now the computer won’t turn on. No lights, no sound, and the screen stays black when I press the power button. I tried re-installing the original RAM and even tried a hard reset. Nothing works. I know the battery and charger are working because I tried them with my wife’s laptop (they are the same exact model). Is there something else I can try, or is my laptop toast?
  • Tech Talk Responds: I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your laptop’s motherboard is almost certainly fried. Your accidental attempt to install RAM into a “hot” laptop most likely resulted in a short circuit/current surge, and computer circuitry does not fare all that well when subjected to those. If your computer was responding in any way at all, I would suggest trying new RAM modules, but since it appears to be completely unresponsive I really think you’d just be wasting your time and money. I am afraid it’s time to go shopping for a new laptop. The good news is they have never been cheaper or a better value for the money than they are right now.
  • Email from Angie in Springfield, MO: Dear Doc and Jim. I get too many phone calls from unknown numbers. Sometimes they wake me up in the middle of the night. How can I block anyone who is not on your smartphone’s Contacts List? Angie in Springfield, MO.
  • Tech Talk Responds: It is possible to block calls from anyone who isn’t on your Contacts list, and it’s very easy to do.
  • To block unknown callers with an iPhone if it’s running iOS 13:
    • Tap Settings.
    • Tap Phone.
    • Scroll down and toggle the Silence Unknown Callers setting to On.
  • Unfortunately, things are a little more complicated when it comes to blocking unknown callers with Android phones. Some phones don’t have that capability at all, and the ones that do have it don’t all do it the same way. I recommend that you check your phone’s user manual to see if it is capable of blocking unknown callers.
  • If your particular Android phone does not happen to have a feature for blocking unknown callers, you can still enjoy unknown caller blocking by installing a great free app called YouMail. YouMail actually replaces your phone’s built-in voicemail service and adds several nice features to boot. It is very easy to block incoming calls with YouMail. I have been using it years. In addition, it transcribes your voice mail messages and has some fun messages.
  • Email from Helen in Rockville, MD: Dear Tech Talk. I have heard that malware can attack your home router and redirect you to malicious websites. How can I find whether my router has been hacked? I am worried. Helen in Rockville, MD
  • Tech Talk Responds: Vulnerabilities in some routers’ firmware code allow hackers to change some of the router’s critical settings. For example, altering the Domain Name Server (DNS) settings enables them to instruct your router to send your Internet requests to malware-infested servers and fake websites. If that happens it could result in malware being downloaded onto your computer or mobile device and/or having your identity and online accounts compromised. Bad, bad stuff for sure.
  • F-Secure has created a handy tool for checking your router to make sure it hasn’t been hacked. The test could not be easier to use. Here’s all you have to do:
  • After you click the button, the tool will check your router’s settings to make sure they have not been changed to values that are known to be incorrect or malicious. The entire test takes mere seconds and the results will be displayed right on your screen.
  • If the test detects an issue, you will need to check with your Internet Service Provider to determine what the real settings should be. Your router’s manual should tell you how to change the settings back to their correct values. Do not forget to change your router’s password if it has indeed been hacked. Good luck.
  • Email from Alex in Fairfax, VA: Dear Doc and Jim. I have heard you talk about Python as a great first programming language. Is there a online course that I could take that would me started. I think I would like to program, but I would like to try it out. Love the show. Alex in Fairfax, VA
  • Tech Talk Responds: Python is a general-purpose, versatile and popular programming language. It is great as a first language because it is concise and easy to read, and it is also a good language to have in any programmer’s stack as it can be used for everything from web development to software development and scientific applications.
  • I would recommend the latest Codeacademy Course on Python. It only takes 25 hours. It includes three projects. It would be a great beginning. Link to course: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-python-3.
  • This course is a great introduction to both fundamental programming concepts and the Python programming language. By the end, you will be comfortable programming in Python and taking your skills off the Codecademy platform and onto your own computer.

Profiles in IT: Sally Jean Floyd

  • Sally Jean Floyd was an American computer scientist known best known for her work on Internet congestion control. Profile suggested by Susan in Alexandria.
  • Sally Floyd was born May 20, 1950, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
  • Her father, Edwin, was a mathematician at the University of Virginia.
  • She spent a year at the Univ. of Michigan before transferring to UC Berkeley in 1969.
  • In 1971 she received a BS in Sociology, with a minor in math, from UC Berkeley.
  • Seeking a way to support herself after college, Dr. Floyd took a two-year course in electronics at Merritt College, a community college in Oakland, Calif.
  • In 1975, she was hired as Computer Systems Engineer for Bay Area Rapid Transit, where she designed, maintained, and repaired BART’s real-time computer systems, including work on a BART-LBNL project to replace BART’s train control systems.
  • She was attracted to theoretical computer science while working on this project.
  • Floyd returned to Berkeley in 1984 and received an MS in Computer Science in 1987 and a PhD in 1989. Dr. Jacobson convinced her to study network congestions.
  • She joined the Network Research Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in 1990.
  • Floyd is best known in the field of congestion control as the inventor of Random Early Detection (“RED”) active queue management scheme, thus founding the field of Active Queue Management (AQM) with Dr. Van Jacobson.
  • The work required a lot of careful mathematics and the development of simulations.
  • Almost all Internet routers use RED or something developed from it to manage network congestion. The 1993 paper describing RED has been cited in 9,100 articles.
  • She devised a method to add delay jitter to message timers to avoid synchronization.
  • Floyd is also a co-author on the standard for TCP Selective acknowledgement (SACK), Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) and TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC).
  • One byproduct of Dr. Floyd’s work reflected her passion for keeping things fair to all internet users. For people with both fast and slow connections.
  • Floyd was known for showing interest in the work of graduate students, whom she often met at technical conferences.
  • She received the IEEE Internet Award in 2005 and the ACM SIGCOMM Award in 2007 for her contributions to congestion control.
  • She has been involved in the Internet Architecture Board, and was in 2007 one of the top-ten most cited researchers in computer science.
  • Floyd met Ms. Leita, a reference librarian, in 1983. They married in 2013, soon after the US Supreme Court cleared the way for same-sex marriage in California.
  • Floyd retired in 2009 and died at the age of 69 on August 25, 2019 in Berkeley, California from gallbladder cancer.

Random Early Detection for Internet Routing Explained

  • Random Early Detection, or RED, an algorithm widely used in the internet. Though not readily visible to internet users, it helps traffic on the network flow smoothly during periods of overload.
  • The internet consists of a series of linked routers. When computers communicate with one another through the internet, they divide the information they intend to exchange into packets of data, which are sent to the network in a sequence. A router examines each packet it receives, then sends it on to its intended destination.
  • When routers receive more packets than they can handle immediately, they queue those packets in a holding area called a buffer, which can increase the delay in transmitting data.
  • If the router continually receives traffic at a higher rate than it can forward, at some point it will discard incoming traffic.
  • Well into the 1980s, the internet frequently experienced a period of huge degradation in performance known as a congestion collapse.
  • Here the network’s capacity was consumed by computers repeatedly transmitting packets, which routers were forced to discard because of overload.
  • Floyd’s Random Early Detection was an enhancement of work done in the 1980s by Van Jacobson, a computer scientist whose scheme for signaling computers to slow down is often credited with saving the internet from collapse in the ’80s and ’90s. Dr. Floyd and Dr. Jacobson developed RED together.
  • With RED, a router would generate a signal saying, ‘I’ve got enough backlog that I’m going to tell senders I’m backed up.
  • This meant that by discarding the occasional data packet earlier, routers could often avoid getting completely clogged

Apple is Serious about Privacy

  • Apple is securing your data using Private Federated Learning.
  • The simple idea behind this is to not only obscure and scramble a user’s personal and private information to hide it from apps and services, but also to learn and analyze user data, locally and on the device.
  • The way Apple deploys this is that all of the processing happens on your iPhone,
  • , with no data ever being uploaded to a server or shared with Apple or any other app developer.
  • The Hey Siri personalization and the artificial intelligence-based features in the Photos app are two examples of that. The Apple Neural Engine in the A13 chip performs over 100 billion operations per photo to recognize faces and places without ever leaving your device.
  • Apple says that every single message that you send using iMessage to another iMessage user, is encrypted. And whatever contextual suggestions that iMessage offers during your conversations, those are generated on the device itself.
  • The Safari web browser has something known as Intelligent Tracking Protection. It works by separating the third-party content used to track you from other browsing data. This throws off all ad tracking software.
  • The AI and machine learning work is done on the device itself (which means no data is shared with any third-party services) and this feature is on by default on all Safari browsers
  • Data used to improve navigation, such as routes and search terms, is not associated with your identity. Instead, that information is based on random identifiers that are constantly changing.
  • Apple did make a significant change in iOS 13 with regards to how apps get access to your location and Bluetooth data. As a user, you now have the power to choose between Anytime, only when the app is in use or never options for every single app that you may have installed on your iPhone.
  • The blatant misuse of these settings is why Apple has brought this out in the open with iOS 13.
  • Apple has something called Sign in with Apple. Apple Sign in gives next to no data to the app or website developers and can mask your credentials if you wish.

Google Chrome Zero-Day Vulnerability

  • If you’re using Google Chrome right now, you should make sure your browser is patched. If not, you could be subject to a serious zero-day vulnerability.
  • Security researchers at Kaspersky have discovered a zero-day vulnerability that leaves Chrome users open to a malicious attack that could see hackers take full control over the machine and download malware to the computer.
  • Worst of all, the exploit was in the wild before anyone knew about it, and millions could have been at risk.
  • Called Operation WizardOpium, the flaw was first injected into a Korean news website. When people visited the site, a script from a third-party site would load and see whether the machine was one worth attacking.
  • The attackers designed the code to only attack Windows machines running Chrome versions 65 or newer.
  • Zero-day exploits are the most concerning of flaws affecting software. They mean that a security problem is in the wild and the software maker has not yet released a fix. Now Google has already issued a fix.
  • To install the latest update, open Chrome. Click on the three dots in the upper right hand corner. Click on Help. Click on About Google Chrome. The page will check for updates and install them, if requested. I installed my update this morning.

Chinese Hardware Sold to US Military – Supply Chain Corruption

  • In August 2018, an Air Force service member noticed something strange about a body camera being used by security personnel at an Air Force base: Chinese characters on the screen.
  • A subsequent investigation found numerous indications that the camera — and two dozen others in the same shipment — had been made in China.
  • Investigators found three telling logos in the camera’s firmware: an Air Force Logo, the logo of the Chinese company that made the camera, and the logo of China’s ministry of public security.
  • Forensic analysis indicated that all three images had been loaded on the camera at the same time by someone in a Chinese time zone.
  • This suggested that not only was the camera made in China, but the Chinese knew that the body camera would be shipped to an Air Force facility.
  • How did a Chinese-made digital camera wind up at a US Air Force base?
  • In a criminal complaint unsealed Thursday, federal prosecutors blamed Aventura, a New York-based company that has been fraudulently re-selling Chinese-made gear for more than a decade.
  • On Thursday, six of the company’s founders and senior officials were arrested and charged with fraud and other crimes.
  • Since 2006, the feds say, Aventura has been buying Chinese-made cameras, metal detectors, and other products, slapping “Made in America” logos on them, and re-selling them in the United States — to customers including U.S. government agencies who are legally prohibited from buying such items.

Change is Exponential: A Response from Education

  • In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil proposed “The Law of Accelerating Returns”, according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including but not limited to the growth of technologies) tends to increase exponentially.
  • Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier.
  • He cites numerous past examples of this to substantiate his assertions.
  • He predicts that such paradigm shifts have and will continue to become increasingly common, leading to “technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.”
  • How can educational institutions prepare students for the future, when we don’t know what the future is actually bring?
  • There are five attributes that will ensure an successful life, even in a time of extreme change.
    • Growth Mindset
    • The Ability to Solve a Problem you Have Never Seen Before (Critical Thinking)
    • Communication Skills (Verbal and Written)
    • Mindful Leadership
    • Happiness and Goal Setting
  • This can be accomplished with project-centric, competency-based education.