Grey Panthers Savannah

Category: rant

  • On benchmarks

    Numbers every programmer should know and their impact on benchmarks Disclaimer: I don’t mean to be picking on the particular organizations / projects / people who I’ll mention below. They are just examples of a larger trend I observed. Sometimes (most of the times?) we forget just how powerful the machines in our pockets /…

  • The wrong time to update software…

    is when the user is the busiest, for example when s/he just started your application. See for example the screenshot below with Adobe Air (click trough to see it in its full beauty). The mistakes it makes: It tries to do the update when I’m trying to start Grooveshark (it interferes with my intention) It…

  • Copyright is not theft!

    Recently there have been quite a few copyright-related posts which came up in my feedreader. This is of course a complicated and layered problem which can’t be solved in the couple of paragraphs of this blogpost, but at least I can post a bunch of great materials which should contribute to the edification of all…

  • Dear people: try to think harder, even if it makes your head hurt!

    This again is the case of a couple of links on the same topic piling up in my reader (this tends to happen if you take a pause in blogging :-)): Gmail’s Spam Filter No Longer Effective? 60% of Facebook users consider quitting over privacy Poll: 93% say Facebook should make you ‘opt-in’ to sharing…

  • On the hopelessness of pulling content from the interwebs

    In the last couple of weeks I had at least two cases where I saw a (provocative) post come up in my feedreader, click trough to read the entire piece (BTW, partial feeds just suck!), just to find that the owner removed the post. The first was from the DynDNS blog named “Open Dialogue” (apparently…

  • Parsing pcap files with Perl

    Recently I was reading the blogpost on the BrekingPoint labs log about parsing pcap files with Perl and I immediately said to myself: it is impossible that there isn’t a module on CPAN, because Perl is great. Turns out I was right, there is Net::TcpDumpLog which can be combined with the NetPacket family of modules…

  • You go PHD Comics!

    PHD Comics is always great and hilarious (and worth to subscribe to if you are even vaguely related to the academic world – like trough a friend of a friend :-)) but there are those occasions when it is epic, like this one: The media can almost never be trusted to get things right and…

  • A missed opportunity

    The theory of capitalism (and I’m greatly oversimplifying here, I know) says that, even is we all follow just our own self interest, a global “good” will somehow emerge. This is what F-Secure is doing in their blogpost where they write about a specific ransomware which – if you get infected with – encrypts your…

  • A game of Chinese whispers

    Yet an other example of real-life Chinese whispers in the security journalism: A Hungarian online news site published an article titled “Hackers tried to steal user data from Amazon” (here is a somewhat usable automatic translation for the non-Hungarian speakers). I assume that the information went like this: What happened –> What the security company…

  • Today’s fudbuster

    We begin today’s FUD-buster with – applause please – cyberterorism via an “article”: Cyberterrorism: A look into the future. The article talks about Estonia (which is the poster-child for “cyber” incidents these days) and says the following thing (amongst others equally high-quality content) – emphasis added: “The three-week cyberattack on Estonia threatened to black out…