Password Security

I had an experience today which has really caused me some concern with regards to security.  A received a notification from Yahoo stating that one of the email addresses that I do not use was breached, that there was a successful login.  My very first thought is that this was a scam trying to get me to click through on the links to get my password.

I opened up a new tab in my browser and manually went to the Yahoo Mail page and opened up my email.  Sure enough, it was obvious it had been comprised as there were emails in my Sent folder that I did not send.  As a matter of fact, I probably hadn't logged into that email in months.

I'm not so concerned with this email address and I may eventually shut it down, it's basically just a 'portal' to create a Yahoo Messenger account with a little more privacy.  The bigger question is how did this breach happen.  Now, I will say this, the password that I used for this email was a very standard password that I had used in the past on other sites.  However, there would be no way for someone to tie this email account to me, so it's not as if someone knew this password, that they'd be able to associate the password with this email address.

The second thing that I thought of was that maybe I had malware on one of my computers and it had captured the password as I had typed it in and silently emailed it out.  However, it's not that either, as I don't use the email address and probably hadn't logged in, in the past few months.

I then thought that maybe it was a brute force attack using software to generate passwords from the dictionary, but I don't think that's it either, as after a certain number of unsuccessful attempts, the account would have been locked.

I come back to someone, somehow knew not only my password but also the email address which normally wouldn't be associated with me.

This is more than a bit concerning. I think that I will need to go through my login ID and clean them up and start taking password security a little more seriously.

NYC - The Big (Silicon) Apple

Very interesting read by Dave Karpen that I found on LinkedIn this morning and his claim that NYC is the new technological capital of the world.  The article is here.

How accurate and unbiased it is, I can't say yet as I haven't really looked at it in great detail but for so many years California has been the defacto location for high tech.  Whether NYC completely supplants remains to be seen, but somehow, the thought of startup companies and technologies in CA seems a lot sexier than in NY.

South Korea Cyber-Attack

I'm continuing to follow this story as this whole issue of technological vulnerability is of great interest - and concern - to me.

One of the bigger problems that the authorities are having is determining who is behind this major attack on South Korea and it's banking system and television networks.  Apparently, it's estimated that it will take another 5 days to restore functionality and somewhere in the range of 32,000 computers were affected in South Korea.

This is serious stuff and I think it is just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm willing to bet that there are many occasions where there have been similar attacks that have not been publicized for fear of eroding confidence in the technology or services.

Streaming Music

It was with great interest I read an article today talking about how Apple, Google and Amazon are jockeying for position in the online music streaming industry.

Listening to music has always been my thing and what I'm reading has made me reevaluate how I listen to my music.

In the past, I've been pretty much a collector of music and I *gasp* actually pay for it.  I do get teased often as I don't believe in getting ripped off music (insert props to my nephew here - you know who and you know why).  I believe that the artists need to compensated in order to keep the innovation in music going, but I digress.

The thing is that I've always liked the fact that I have a very diverse choice in music and the genres and artists that I listen too change depend on the stages in my life or my mood of the day.

This is where I think the streaming music business model makes a lot of sense of me personally.  This will open up the floodgates to trying all kinds of new music and artists.

The only big problem that I can see (and I hate to harp on this) but this will only work on my devices where I actually have an Internet connection.  I suppose in that case, I'd still have my library of music stored on portable device to listen to.

It also seems to me that in terms of music providers, there seems to be a large amount of brand loyalty and this probably explains why the big players are trying to get people on-board with their music streaming service.

This is definitely worthy of future investigation!

Strategic Warfare

As I mentioned in the Digital Terrorism blog entry, I remain convince that technological warfare is becoming more common.

War, by nature, is impacted by, and evolves through, technology.  As technology advanced, so did the weapons, the defenses and the strategies.

In recent news, there has been a major attack on South Korea's infrastructure (including banks and television stations) and it's widely believed that North Korea is behind the attack.

Unfortunately, this is going to be come increasingly prevalent as a digital attack is significantly cheaper and safer than conventional warfare, let alone that a cyber-attack can be launched regardless of the geographic locations.

I was talking about this concern that I have with my son the other day and the way that I put it to him is that a well throughout cyber-attack - or even a natural disruption of technology - can cripple a society in so many different ways.  It can disrupt banking, medical services and records, send the economy into a tailspin, disrupt vital communications and traffic networks.  The list goes goes on.

This dependency that we have on technology isn't such a great thing when we have this completed dependency on it with very little manual fail-safe built into it.

Quantum Computing - A New Frontier

My previous article laid the foundation of how data is represented with current technology and that at its most granular level it is represented by a “bit” which is simply an electronic state that is either on or off. Much like a light switch can only have two states, so too can the bit only have two possible values. Last month’s article can be found here: Quantum Computing Primer - Understanding Bits and Bytes and is a basis for this month’s article

A bit is stored and manipulated at the electrical level and is represented by current flowing to that circuit. There is no middle ground, nor is it possible, for the current to be on and off at the same time. A bit can only have one of two states – on or off.

The concept of quantum computing is not new – it has been around since the early 1980’s but it’s only been recently that there have been advances which suggest that quantum computing is more than a theory and is possible in the real world, although for now, it’s on a very small scale. However, where this technology has being considered a new frontier, is that it is moving out of the realm of the theoretical and recent experiments suggest that it is possible.

In 2012, two scientists were awarded a Nobel Prize for an experiment in which they were able to demonstrate that they could have the same light particle at two different spots at the same time.

As the “bit” is the most granular level with conventional technology, quantum computing introduces its own version of the bit called a “qubit” (quantum bit). 

The following is admittedly a bit mind-blowing, especially for someone like me who is not a science major as there’s a revolutionary approach to data storage with the qubit.

The entire technology of quantum computing which makes it so intriguing is that the qubit can also be on or off like the traditional bit, but it can also be on and off at the same time.   What makes the quantum computing qubit so powerful is not only does it have these three states (on, off, on AND off), but it can also be any state BETWEEN on and off all at the same time.

Quantum computing is not based on electrical signals and current but instead, data is stored and manipulated at the atomic level.

How exactly does this benefit technology?  Well, recall in the previous article that stated that each character we type is comprised of 8 bits.  The word “Hello” uses 5 bytes and since there are 8 bits per byte, the most that can be done with 40 bits of information is to store a five character word.  The generally accepted theory is that a quantum computer which contains “only” 30 qubits (the equivalent to the word “hello” in existing bit technology) will be literally millions of times more powerful than today’s computer thanks to a concept called “Inherent parallelism” which suggests that the quantum computer can work on millions of operations simultaneously instead of just one at a time. 

Even though this technology is primarily theoretical, this is laying the groundwork for a technological revolution that none of us have experienced.    In 1812, Charles Babbage conceived of the first programmable machine, the precursor to the computer.  I consider the quantum computer to have the same impact.

How long it will take this technology to become mainstream is difficult to say.  From the little that I’ve read, it’s probably going to take at least 5 years to move this technology out of the labs and into a personal computer prototype and then perhaps another 5 years before the technology matures to the extent that it could be mass produced.  As always, these new technologies are very expensive as there is so much Research and Development cost that they need to recoup up front but I’m still excited at the thought of what this will mean to the computing world.

Quantum Computing Primer - Understanding Bits and Bytes

I've been some reading on the next true evolution of computers, that being quantum computing.  In the current digital world all of the data, all of the application, everything we do with computers can be broken down in it's simplest at the "bit" level - that a bit being a two state "switch" that is either on or off.

Before I can continue to write about quantum computing and what it's implications and impact may be on our technology and lives, it is important to understand how computers work and store data now.  This will be the first in a series of articles which attempts to explain the fundamentals.  For many of you, these articles may not be as relevant as you already understand these fundamentals..

The bit - and the inherent on/off - is a fundamental tenet of our technology.  Each character that we type or read is comprised of 8 bits and it's referred to a more familiar term - the byte (and it's distant relations, megabytes and gigabytes - millions and billions of bytes respectively.  A byte is made of 8 bits, each of which is either on or off which gives us a possibility of up to 256 different combinations of the 8 bits within a given byte which can be demonstrated as below (with 0 representing a bit being off and 1 with the bit being on).




Bit #        0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7
Bit Value  128 64 32 16  8  4  2  1  Byte Value
             0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
             0  0  0  0  0  0  0  1  1
             0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  2
             0  0  0  0  0  0  1  1  3 (2 + 1)
             0  0  0  0  0  1  0  0  4 
             0  0  0  0  0  1  0  1  5 (4 + 1)
repeating the pattern up to the state where all bits are turned on as follows:
             1  1  1  1  1  1  1  1  255 (128+64+32+16+8+4+2+1) 

Each character that we see on the screen is one byte and each letter of the alphabet is assigned one particular byte value.  When we see the word "cat" on screen, it is represented by bytes with the following three values 99 (c), 97 (a) and 116 (t).  If you were able to look so see physically how it is stored at the bit level, it would look something like this.

Bit Value  128 64 32 16  8  4  2  1  Byte Value
c  (#99)                   0       1     1      0      0     0     1      1     64 + 32 + 2 + 1 = 99

a  (#97)                   0       1     1      0      0     0     0      1     64 + 32 + 1  = 97

t  (#116)                  0       1     1      1      1     1     0      0     64 + 32 + 16 + 8 + 4 = 116