More ammo for complaints of Adobe Acrobat getting bloated: by including Flash inside of PDFs, whenever a vulnerability with Adobe Flash is found it means a Flash update is required and then a week or two later, Adobe Reader and Acrobat also need to be updated. Today, those Reader and Acrobat updates hit the wire. They were previously announced that they would be coming sometime … [Read more...]
Book Review: Time Management for System Administrators
The Summer really has flown by. Another school year is about to begin. Working at a university, that means the optimum time for working on longer term projects has come to an end and it's about to get really busy with just the day-to-day tasks again. I was swamped through the Summer with tedious projects and with students returning it will only get busier. I've been reading … [Read more...]
Make Animated Movies with Xtranormal
Now, you won't become your own Pixar any time soon, but you can easily work out some dialog with Xtranormal's text to movie offering. There are some premium features to Xtranormal but you can do quite a bit for free. You will have to create an account to use the service. There is an online version of the tool or a Windows downloadable version. They're both pretty easy to use … [Read more...]
See What Somebody Printed By Listening
Here's an eye-opener that is very interesting as well as creepy. Researchers have demonstrated how they can place a microphone next to a dot-matrix printer and translate the sounds the printer makes into what was printed, making it possible to spy on the resultant document without ever seeing it. Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks on Printers We examine the problem of acoustic … [Read more...]
How Your Car’s Tire Pressure Monitoring System Could Allow You To Be Tracked and Hacked
Many modern vehicles (2008 or newer) have a Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) that alerts the driver when the tire pressure is getting low. In fact, it's required for all new vehicles in the US following legislation that was prompted by the 2000 Firestone tire issue. For my car, that means this little orange light comes on to tell me if a tire reports that it is low on air … [Read more...]