Ease of Use vs Security

Teaser medium

Groundhog Day, bad websites, UPnP and your security, astroid updates, quicky on GitHub, calls from listeners and emails too.

Groundhog Day - music intro

We started today’s show with a bit from the movie Groundhog Day by Harold Ramis. If you did not recognize it – got watch the movie!

Cisco Security Report

Highlights of the Report:

  • Android malware grows 2577% over 2012; mobile only makes up 0.5% of total web malware encounters.
  • Online advertisements are 182 times more likely to deliver malicious content than pornographic sites.
  • Global spam volumes are down 18% overall, with spammers keeping banker’s hours for a 25% drop over the weekend.
  • Global visibility into where malware and spam encounters occur and much more.

Universal Plug 'n Play - Security Flaw

There are 81 Million home routers connected to the internet that have a security flaw. Your machine might be effected.

XKCD: What If...

This is one of my favorite weekly things to read. -Ben

Feb. 15 asteroid fly-by will buzz Earth closer than many satellites

NASA says an asteroid about half the size of a football field will blow past Earth on Feb 15 closer than many man-made satellites. NASA added that while the asteroid, designated 2012 DA14 has no chance of striking Earth, since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s, astronomers have never seen an object so big come so close to our planet.

“This is a record-setting close approach,” says Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at JPL in a video about the asteroid NASA put out this week.

Official NASA Report: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news174.html

Details About the Chinese Satellite Asteroid Encounter

As Han Li described it, the asteroid came into view of the camera at a range of 38 km, several seconds after its closest approach. At first the view of Toutatis was largely blocked by the solar array. But seconds later, when the craft was 90 km from Toutatis, the asteroid had moved out from behind the array, and imaging continued for several more seconds. Because the probe was departing from very close to the target in almost a straight line, all images were of nearly the same aspect.
Exactly how close Chang’e-2 came to Toutatis is still unclear. The first postencounter report placed the flyby range at 3.2 km, which was astonishingly—even recklessly—tight. Passing within a few kilometers of an asteroid only 2 to 3 km in diameter at a speed of 10 730 meters per second and following a 7-million-km journey could be described as either superb shooting or a near disaster. But if the 3.2-km figure is true, it would be another scientific bonanza. At that distance, the asteroid’s weak gravity could have measurably deflected the probe’s flight path, providing unique data on its mass. Together with imagery of its shape, this would have led to important clues about its density and composition. Han Li’s presentation did not confirm the flyby range.

GeekBit: Testing the Bay Lights: Stunning Photos and Video

The New York-based “light sculptor” is famous for designing huge, computer-driven LED art installations that cover entire walls of museums and other facilities around the country. But the Bay Lights, an array of individually programmed LEDs stretching across the entire Western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, makes Villareal’s other projects look tiny.

Over the last few months, workers from the Cailfornia Department of Transportation (Caltrans), which owns the bridge, have finished attaching 25,000 LEDs to the suspension cables on the bridge’s north-facing side. Now Villareal is testing the lights in preparation for an official “Grand Lighting” ceremony on March 5.

Google Plus Becomes World's No. 2 Social Network After Facebook, Knocking Off Twitter

Facebook is still far and away the benemoth of all social networks, with almost 693 million active users (from its 903 million accounts) — 51 percent of the global Internet population — but Google and its services are catching up: Google Plus and YouTube are being used by 25 percent and 21 percent of the global Internet populace, respectively; Twitter is also used by 21 percent of the total, global Internet.

GitHub Search Made Easy Discovery of Encryption Keys, Passwords In Source Code

GitHub, a popular Web-based hosting service for software development projects, announced its internal search in “A Whole New Code Search,” posted on The GitHub blog on Jan. 23. Every time developers save changes to their source code on GitHub, the new search infrastructure automatically indexes the code, Tim Pease, a member of GitHub staff, wrote in the post. GitHub users can search for any string through public repositories and private repositories they have access to.

This can be useful for developers who are looking for open source libraries they can use in their projects, or even find code snippets to figure out how others solved a coding problem they are encountering. Users with multiple repositories can also use the search functionality to find specific lines of code in their own projects.

A few users discovered yet another way to use the search tool: finding files containing private encryption keys and source code with login credentials. Scarily enough, there were thousands of them.

The Git Repo for GeekSpeak Website

This is the source code for the GeekSpeak website. Take look at how we do what we do. If you are a Ruby on Rails developer and want to help…

Help Spread the word about GeekSpeak

GeekSpeak is a volunteer program, and we love the love!