fbpx

Tag Archive for scifi

You’re not paranoid… enough

February 23, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on You’re not paranoid… enough

 

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/superfish-doubles-down-says-https-busting-adware-poses-no-security-risk/

It’s almost a rite of passage.  You buy a shiny new computer (or tablet, or phone) and the very first thing you do (well, many of us anyways) is to start killing bloatware.  Virus checkers, game suites, custom browsers that direct you to a very specific set of stores, you name it, someone has paid the fee to have it sitting right there on your desktop as soon as you boot your machine for the first time.

But you don’t tend to think of these things as malicious.  Opportunistic?  Yes.  Annoying as all h*ll?  Absolutely.  Occasionally useful?  Okay, maybe.  And, while Just about everyone on the planet thinks it’s a P.I.T.A, not a lot of people seem to regard it as a threat.

Until now.

The issue, in this case, is not so much that the company in question is allowing ads to sneak in (that’s total crap, but not beyond the pale for the kinds of bloatware you find).  The real issue is that, in order to do it, they are bypassing security.  They are opening a door that a hacker with enough time and energy can exploit (and, lets face it, if there is a hole, they WILL find it.  period.  It’s not an IF question, it’s a WHEN and what color HAT are they wearing today question).

 

Catch and Destroy

February 16, 2015 future, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Catch and Destroy

Image from Astrobiology Magazine online

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja507983x

 

Walter Jon Williams may have described it most clearly in his novel “Aristoi”, the idea that any nano-technological critter, given the ability to reproduce, can go bad and take over a whole environment, devouring everything it can reach.  If you are a cyberpunk/hard sci-fi fan, you may have heard of it as “Mataglap” or “Grey Goo”.  It begs the question, how do you control against a microscopically sized organism?  Or more to the point, how can you control against them on the fly, away from lab facilities and clean rooms?

Here and now, for biological organisms, there is a solution.  Specialized adhesive tapes that can be impregnated with chemical compounds to neutralize biological organisms.  The kinds of germs, bugs and viruses that many imagine the architecture of future nano-particles will be based upon.

As always, the link’s there at the top so you can read the original article for yourself and decide if you’re going to be taping the cracks around your windows closed in case the Measles epidemic comes to your street in suburbia.

 

« Older Entries   Recent Entries »