In which I talk about how to solve the problem of communication between two entities (I talk about the archetypal Alice and Bob) so that no one else (notably, Eve) can listen in, and no one (especially Mallory) can monkey around pretending to be Alice to Bob or vice versa. (For those not in the know why these names were chosen, Alice and Bob just designate A and B, Eve is the eavesdropper and Mallory the man-in-the-middle.) […]
READ MOREThis particular article sprung pretty much fully formed from an XKCD comic. It’s the one called “Password Strength” and talks about password entropy and about choosing a password by selecting four separate words at random. I’m sure my readers, sophisticated souls that they are, already know of it. […]
READ MOREI can’t remember the genesis of this particular article on the Turing Test, but this year being the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth certainly makes it very apt a year later. […]
READ MOREA photography topic this time: HDR photos. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is a set of algorithms that attempt to widen the range of detail in a photo from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights to more closely mimic what the human eye can see. […]
READ MOREPossibly a rather lightweight topic this one, but at the time (and frankly since) it was certainly in the news. The topic? Websites getting hacked, having customer data downloaded, including passwords. Sometimes the hacks are really simple, and I talk about a couple in the article: SQL Injection (which, even after all this time, is still one of the primary ways to hack a website) and XSS (cross-site scripting). Sometimes users bring the problems upon themselves by, say, having the same passwords for several sites (your password then is only as safe as the security at the weakest site). I also talk about the need to salt-and-hash passwords in your database if you are a website developer, and the need to use a good password manager if you are a user. […]
READ MOREI’d have to say this article is perhaps the most satisfying of all the articles I’ve written for PC Plus. For a start, it did not even start out as an article but as some research I did to help my wife with a case (she’s a prosecutor). Some of the cases she prosecutes involve computers, and some involve some kind of techy knowledge she has to understand in order to present it to a jury. Seeing as I’m a kind of captive techy guy at home: I get asked questions about hashes, about deleted files, about browser caches, and all sorts of other things. And then there was this case… […]
READ MOREAn article detailing the history of JavaScript, as well as a discussion about its major functionality. I’m going to guess I was late on this deadline, because I probably wrote it in my sleep, the topic was so familiar. […]
READ MOREA quick article about what SSDs (solid state drives) are and one that necessarily talks about NAND-flash, SLC (single-level cell) and MLC (multi-level cells), wear-leveling, TRIM, and all those other acronyms and jargon that crop up with them. I also detail the main difference between SSDs and USB thumb drives (the former will perform some kind of wear-leveling, the latter won’t). All in all, quite a fascinating article to research and to read. […]
READ MOREAt the time I wrote this article, there had been a couple of online articles about faked (or Photoshopped) photographs, especially ones used by reputable news organizations. I decided to take a look and do some research about how it was possible to detect faked photographs, especially those that are not really obviously done. The obvious fakes are, well, obvious, and funny, to boot. […]
READ MOREWithout a doubt this article was an absolute hoot to write. I had the most fun researching the subject, buying an iPhone app, photographing my toy stuffed hedgehog, writing the article, reading press releases about Nintendo’s 3DS (it had only just been announced when I was writing this). In fact, doing everything except, you know, actually watching any 3D TV (we don’t have a telly, let alone a 3D one). […]
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