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Show of 12-19-2020

Tech Talk December 19, 2020

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from John in Baltimore: Dear Tech Talk. I need help. I love taking pictures with m Canon Powershot camera. I store the pictures on two SD cards. I swap them out when the first one becomes full. I accidentally formatted the wrong card and wiped out the pictures that I really want to keep. Is there any way to get those pictures back? John in Baltimore
  • Tech Talk Responds: if all you did was format the card without trying to use it again, you most likely can retrieve most (and possibly all) of your lost photos. You can use a file recovery utility called Recuva. Recuva will scan your memory card and compile an inventory of all the files that haven’t been over-written with new files since the card was formatted. Probably most (if not all) of your photos can be recovered since you stopped taking photos and storing them on that card after it was formatted. I recommend that you download and install Recuva.
  • Link: . https://download.cnet.com/Recuva/3000-2242_4-10753287.html
  • Email from Bob in Maryland: Dear Doc, Jim and the ever-present Mr. BigVoice. I will note that *I* never change the order of these three “characters” in my emails, and ALWAYS give the lowest “billing” to Mr. BigVoice. That “mistake” of giving Mr. BigVoice top billing was probably a small error on the part of someone reading the emails out. I wonder who that could be? I stumbled on another fun way to waste time on the internet that you guys might like to look at: Random Street View Tool (https://randomstreetview.com/). I noticed that there was some sort of disruption in Google services yesterday. Doc, do you know anything about this?All the best, Your faithful listener, Bob in Maryland
  • Tech Talk Responds: I have to admit that I changed the order of names to just stir things up a bit. Mr. Big Voice loved it. I went to Random Street View and looked around. It takes you to random views of Google Street View from all over the world. It is quite interested to view random countries. I love this website.
  • As for the Google outage. On December 14, 2020, Google services like Gmail and Drive were down for about 45 minutes. At the center of the outage was work Google had done to migrate to its User ID Service, which handles authenticating your account credentials. The problem originated in October when the company moved to a new system for allocating system resources, while leaving parts of the old one in place. In leaving those old components in place, they incorrectly came back with an error about usage being at zero. The outage would have occurred earlier if not for a grace period the company had put in place. Unfortunately, that fix expired, and its automated systems started to behave as if the problem was real. Google had safeguards in place to prevent those types of issues, but they were not built to handle what occurred. While the company’s engineers were able to address the problem relatively quickly, Google says it plans to implement new measures to prevent a similar situation in the future.
  • Email from Erich in Sterling: Dear Doc and Jim. I have an HP dv6000t laptop that originally had Windows XP on it. While my son was in for a weekend visit he installed Linux Mint on it. I mainly use this laptop for reading my cooking groups on Facebook and printing the recipes that interest me. The Linux is working out great but I’m having a problem with the USB ports. This laptop has three USB ports and I’m using all of them for my printer, a mouse and the 3.5″ external hard drive that he copied my pictures onto. The printer and mouse work fine but when I plug the hard drive in the laptop instantly freezes up. As soon as I unplug the hard drive the laptop starts working again. Do you think I’m using too many USB ports? I really need both my printer and my mouse but I need to access the photos on the external hard drive too. I need help. Erich in Sterling
  • Tech Talk Responds: The fact that you’re using all of your laptop’s USB ports isn’t what’s causing the problem with the external hard drive. USB can support up to 127 devices per controller, and obviously 3 isn’t anywhere near that number. I believe what’s happening is your laptop’s older USB 2.0 ports aren’t capable of supplying enough current to the 3.5″ external hard drive to properly power it up. USB 2.0 ports typically only supply a maximum of 500mA of current, and many external 3.5″ hard drives require more than that in order to operate correctly. You will probably need to purchase a powered USB 3.0 hub to connect between the hard drive and the laptop. A powered hub will come with its own power adapter that plugs into an electrical outlet. These hubs are not very expensive at all. In fact, you can probably pick up a good one at your local electronics store for around $20 or so. Pick on with good ratings.
  • Email from Allen in Pittsburg: Dear Tech Talk. I have heard that social media companies collect lots of data about their users and sell it. I know to get my Facebook data, but I can figure out how to my Google data. Is there any way to get at what Google has collected about me? Allen in Pittsburg, Kansas.
  • Tech Talk Responds: Did you know you can easily download your stored data from almost all of Google’s services right to your computer or mobile device? Google Takeout makes it easy to download a single file containing the data from (almost) every Google service you have ever used.
    • Visit https://takeout.google.com/ and sign into your Google account.
    • Uncheck every service that you don’t use.
    • Scroll down and click the Next step button.
    • Select the options you want to use.
    • Click Create export.
    • Wait for an email from Google letting you know that your export file has been completed (this could take quite some time, so be patient).
    • Follow the instructions in the email Google sent you to complete the download process.
  • That is all there is to it. Now you know how to download ALL of your data from every Google service you have ever used (with the exceptions listed above) in one fell swoop.
  • Email from Mark in Richmond: Dear Tech Talk. I’m hoping you can help me figure out why I can’t get Facebook or Pinterest to load while I’m at work. I use the same laptop at home and everything works fine there. But when I’m at work I can’t get either Facebook or Pinterest to work in any web browser. Everything else loads just fine but when I try to load either of those websites I get an error saying the page failed to load and it might be offline. I know they’re online though because I can sneak to the bathroom and load them on my phone. This started happening over a week ago and it is still doing it now. Can you help me fix it? Mark in Richmond
  • Tech Talk Responds: The fact that Facebook and Pinterest load just fine when you are at home means this is not an issue with your laptop. It is actually an issue with the Internet connection (or more specifically, the local network your laptop uses to access the Internet while you are at work). I suspect that your company’s IT department has made the decision to start blocking social media websites from being accessed via their network. I suspect that they have also blocked Twitter and Instagram. I DO NOT recommend asking your company’s IT department about this. If you do that would be admitting that you check social media sites while on the job. Some companies do not mind, but the ones that take measures to block those sites obviously do.
  • Email from Carl Tyler: Dear Dr. Shurtz: I have been reading in the tech news about companies revoking trust in “Certificate Authorities”. I know there is plenty of articles on the internet about a certificate authority but they are very technical and hard to understand. You have always had a way of explaining things so most everybody can understand them, which is one of the reasons I listen regularly to your podcast. Could you explain what a certificate authority is? Thanks, Carl Tyler
  • Tech Talk Responds: Asymmetric key exchange has become the preferred method of secure communication. Public-private key encryption is used to encrypt the transmissions. The originating computer uses its private key and the public key of the receiving computer to encrypt the message. The receiving computer uses it private key and the public key of the sending computer to de-encrypt the message. The question then becomes: Can the public keys be trusted.
  • Digital Certificates allow a person, computer or organization to exchange information securely over the Internet using the public key infrastructure (PKI). A digital certificate provides identifying information is forgery resistant and can be verified because it was issued by an official, trusted agency. The certificate contains the name of the certificate holder, a serial number, expiration dates, a copy of the certificate holder’s public key (used for encrypting messages and digital signatures) and the digital signature of the certificate-issuing authority (CA) so that a recipient can verify that the certificate is real.
  • To provide evidence that a certificate is genuine and valid, it is digitally signed by a root certificate belonging to a trusted certificate authority. Operating systems and browsers maintain lists of trusted CA root certificates so they can easily verify certificates that the CAs have issued and signed.
  • Email from Lauren in Reston: Dear Tech Talk. Many of the wireless routers have something called “Beamforming”. Can you tell me exactly what that is? Do you think I need it? Lauren in Reston
  • Tech Talk Responds: The antenna would normally transmit the signal in a circular fashion so that any device within signal range would receive the router’s WiFi signal. Much of that transmission is wasted, if there is not device. Beamforming fixes that problem by determining where a user’s device is located and sending a stronger signal in that particular direction while reducing the strength of the signal sent in other directions. Modern AC routers that support Beamforming can send multiple beams of signal to multiple devices, enhancing the connectivity of all users. I strongly recommend this feature.

Profiles in IT: Norman Manuel Abramson

  • Norman Manuel Abramson, the father of wireless networking, is best known for developing the ALOHAnet system for wireless computer communication.
  • Norman Manuel Abramson was born in Boston on April 1, 1932 to Jewish immigrants. His father was a commercial photographer, his mother a homemaker.
  • He was schooled in the Boston public schools and attended Boston Latin School and the English High School of Boston.
  • In 1953, he received an Bachelors in physics from Harvard University.
  • In 1955, he received a Master’s in Physics from UCLA,
  • In 1958, he received a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
  • His thesis at Stanford focused on the area of communication theory.
  • Abramson was a research engineer at the Hughes Aircraft Company until 1955, when he joined the faculty at Stanford University.
  • In 1966, he was a visiting professor at University of California at Berkeley.
  • In 1968, eh accepted a position with University of Hawaii, serving as professor of both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
  • Some of his early research concerned radar signal characteristics and sampling theory, as well as frequency modulation and digital communication channels, error correcting codes, pattern recognition and machine learning and computing for seismic analysis.
  • While at the University of Hawaii, he led efforts that gave rise to the construction and operation of the ALOHAnet, the first wireless packet network, and to the development of the theory of random access ALOHA channels.
  • ALOHA channels have yielded significant advancements within wireless and local area networking, with versions still in use today in all major mobile telephone and wireless data standards.
  • The technology they created allowed many digital devices to send and receive data over that shared radio channel. It was a simple approach that did not require complex scheduling of when each packet of data would be sent.
  • If a data packet was not received, it was simply sent again. The approach was a departure from telecommunications practices at the time, but it worked.
  • This influential work also developed the core concepts found today in Ethernet.
  • The resulting radio network technology his team developed was deployed as ALOHAnet in 1971, based on the dual-meaning of the Hawaiian word “aloha”.
  • Aloha is commonly used in Hawaii to mean both “hello” and “goodbye.”
  • Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet.”
  • He did not patent any of the ALOHAnet technology. He published it in scientific journals and placed in the public domain.
  • Abramson continued to serve as a professor at Hawaii until 1994 when he retired.
  • Abramson is a founder of ALOHA Networks, Inc and of SkyWare, Inc., both wireless communications companies located in San Francisco.
  • Abramson served as a consulting expert in communication systems, data networks and satellite networks for the International Telecommunication Union (Geneva), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Paris) and the United Nations Development Programme (Jakarta).
  • An IEEE Life Fellow, he holds eight U.S. and international patents, and has published more than 50 technical papers.
  • 1998: Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society, for “the invention of the first random-access communication protocol”.
  • In 2007, he received the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal.
  • Abramson died on December 1, 2020 in his San Francisco home due to complications from skin cancer that had metastasized to his lungs.

Observations from the Bunker

  • Why is Education Important and What is the Purpose of Education
  • George Orwell once said, “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
  • The world is changing at an exponential rate. Hard skills relevant today will be useless tomorrow. So what should higher education emphasize?
  • Critical thinking and problem-solving top the list of skills that employers believe will grow in prominence in the next five years.
  • Skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility are important today..
  • Skills that cross all disciplines include specialized skills in product marketing, digital marketing and human computer interaction.
  • We should as an overarching goal focus on:
    • Growth Mindset (do not fear failure, take challenges, learn from failure)
    • Ability to Solve a Problem They Have Never Seen (Critical Thinking)
    • Ability to communication (Written and Verbal)
    • Mindfulness (leadership, contentment
    • Happiness (seeking the right goal)

Idea of the Week: Using Gravity to Store Energy

  • A British energy startup company, Gravitricity, will manipulate massive weights in a tall shaft to store and deploy energy as needed.
  • The shafts will rise nearly one mile high and the weights will range between 500 to 5,000 tons. Huge winches will raise and lower the weights, and the shafts will be pressurized to boost energy output.
  • According to Gravitricity officials, peak power generation can reach between 1 and 20 megawatts, with continuous output of up to eight hours.
  • Costs are lower than current energy storage systems, such as emerging lithium-ion battery solutions. The storage mechanism can be charged and discharged multiple times a day with no loss of performance for more than two decades.
  • The system’s efficiency rate is 80 percent to 90 percent. The system should last a half century.
  • Gravitricity envisions utilizing abandoned coal mining shafts globally for such power storage plants.
  • The prototype system that Gravitricity is being developed in Scotland. It will be limited to a shaft 17 yards high and a 250 kilowatt capacity
  • This two-month test program will confirm the modeling and provide data for our first full-scale 4 megawatt project that will commence in 2021.”
  • Gravitricity’s founder is Peter Fraenkel, who invented the world’s first tidal energy turbine.

Trivia of the Week: First Emoticon

  • Although the history of using typography to, unconventionally, display some sort of face goes back over a century, the first person to specifically propose that a set of keyboard strokes be used to stand in for a smile or frown in order to convey an emotional state to the reader was Scott Fahlman—a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University.
  • In a post to the computer science general board at Carnegie Mellon University on September 19, 1982, he wrote the following:
    • 19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman 🙂
    • From: Scott E Fahlman — Fahlman at Cmu-20c
    • I propose that the following characters sequence for joke markers:🙂
    • Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:🙁
  • This was not the first instance where a form of typography had been used and/or suggested for use as a way of displaying a facial expression. All the way back in 1881, Puck—a satirical magazine published in the United States—jokingly suggested that multi-line typographical constructions could be used to make faces.
  • In 1912, renowned influential journalist and pioneering writer Ambrose Bierce proposed that writers could append funny or ironic sentences with this typographical construct: \___/ to represent a smiling mouth.
  • However, it wasn’t until Scott Fahlman’s message board post that the general public was really ready for the idea of a typographically constructed face. Computer use was on the rise, more and more people were communicating via email.

The SolarWinds Hack Is Serious

  • This is the most serious security breach every experience in the US.
  • The SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign has apparently targeted a many government and private organizations: the State, Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security, and Energy departments; Microsoft; the cybersecurity firm FireEye; the National Institutes of Health; and the city network of Austin, Texas, just to name a few.
  • The state sponsored Russian hackers injected malicious code into a SolarWinds update. The compromised SolarWinds update that delivered the malware was distributed to as many as 18,000 customers.
  • On its website, SolarWinds says its 300,000 customers worldwide including all five branches of the U.S. military, the Pentagon, the State Department, NASA, the National Security Agency, the Department of Justice and the White House. It says the 10 leading U.S. telecommunications companies and top five U.S. accounting firms are also among customers.
  • The SolarWinds Orion products are specifically designed to monitor the networks of systems and report on any security problems. They have access to everything.
  • Even more worrisome is the fact that the attackers apparently made use of their initial access to targeted organizations, such as FireEye and Microsoft, to steal tools and code that would then enable them to compromise even more targets.
  • As it turned out FireEye was the first to discover the intrusion because of an unexpected login on an infected system.
  • After Microsoft realized it was breached via the SolarWinds compromise, it then discovered its own products were then used “to further the attacks on others.”
  • This means that the set of potential victims is not just (just!) the 18,000 SolarWinds customers who may have downloaded the compromised updates, but also all of those 18,000 organizations’ customers, and potentially the clients of those second-order organizations as well—and so on.
  • SolarWinds that granted intruders broad access to the entire network of every system it was installed on. SolarWinds had apparently persuaded many of its customers that its Orion products needed to be exempt from existing antivirus and security restrictions on their computers because otherwise it might look like a threat or be unable to function properly.
  • Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at DHS said it was working with other agencies to help “identify and mitigate any potential compromises.”
  • The federal government would do well to assume that its computer systems are still being actively infiltrated and not imagine that, simply having discovered this breach, they are anywhere close to reaching the end of it.


 

Twitter is shutting down Periscope

  • More than five years after being acquired by Twitter before it officially launched, Periscope is shutting down.
  • It will officially be shut down March 2021.
  • Most of the app’s live streaming capabilities have been added to Twitter as features, and streams that were shared on Twitter will continue to be available for replay.
  • Users can also download an archive of their data and content before Periscope goes off the app store next March.
  • Launched in 2015, Periscope quickly became a popular way to share and follow live events, boosting a trend that prompted rival platforms Facebook and Instagram to launch their own live streaming services.
  • But the app also sparked controversy on multiple occasions, with sporting events cracking down on spectators illegally streaming online.
  • Periscope said shutting down its individual app has been in the cards for some time.
  • a report from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology.