Chad's News

Remember how Apple flat out refused to allow Adobe Flash on iPhones and iPads? Well it appears we are witnessing another legacy of Steve Jobs. Adobe Systems has decided to stop developing Flash for mobile devices. From their statement: “We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations…. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.” Adobe will instead focus on HTML5 technologies and Adobe AIR. The article doesn’t mention Adobe Edge, but I think that will probably play a part in this new strategy.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)

Thin nautical rope can be a nice replacement for the shoelaces on your sneakers. I got a pair of work boots a few months ago, and the laces are already starting to fray (update: one of the laces broke, just hours after I wrote this post). Nautical rope is more rugged and should last longer. Of course, this isn’t something you can pick up at any department store—you’ll probably need to go to a marine store.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Have you ever wondered why a piece of toast always seems to fall with the buttered side down? Turns out it’s not an accident. Likewise, researchers have determined that amino acids, basic building blocks of life on Earth, have a high probability of forming based solely on the laws of thermodynamics. Thus if we ever do make contact with aliens, they may share some of the basic building blocks of our biology. (And they’ll be humanoid in shape… NOT!)

Link: http://www.wired.com/…
(via Bureau 42)

There are well-defined procedures for permanently erasing data from a traditional hard drive. But for solid-state drives (SSDs), which use Flash memory instead of magnetic platters, things are quite different. The problem stems from two peculiarities of SSDs: “they can only erase data in larger chunks than they can write it, and their storage cells can only be written a certain number of times (10,000 is standard) before they start to fail.” Because of these, SSD firmware does a lot of behind-the-scenes manipulations when writing data to the drive.

Researchers at UCSD have determined the following:

1. Built-in erase commands are effective, but are sometimes implemented incorrectly.
2. Overwriting the entire visible address space of an SSD twice is usually, but not always, sufficient to sanitize the drive.
3. None of the existing techniques for individual file sanitization are effective on SSDs.

That being said, law enforcement agencies are finding that it’s hard to do forensics on SSDs because the drive automatically wipes a significant percentage of deleted data without any intervention by the user. This may seem like a direct contradiction to what the UCSD team determined, but the difficulty there was with the purposeful sanitization of data as well as with the erasure of individual files. So while it’s difficult to wipe everything, it’s also hard to prevent some amount of deleted data from being wiped automatically.

The Ars Technica article (link #3 below) briefly discusses the article in link #1, and then goes on to mention other erasure techniques that are coming down the pipeline. For right now, however, they suggest encrypting the drive as a good way to keep private data secure.

Link #1: http://www.usenix.org/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #2: http://news.techworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #3: http://arstechnica.com/…

Heavy flooding in Thailand is going to cause a short-term drop in the supply of hard drives, so expect prices to increase as demand goes up.

Link: http://abcnews.go.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Update: Slashdot has an article with more information.

October 25^th was the 10-year anniversary of Windows XP, yet it still remains the most popular version of Windows for desktop users. The linked article from Ars Technica provides a bit of retrospective, then explains why it’s time to move on to something newer.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…