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Author: Geoff Perlman

Should you continue to trust iCloud?

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve heard that some celebrities had their iCloud accounts hacked and naked pictures of themselves made available on the Internet. I’m sure that many of you who use iCloud for backing up your iPhone, iPad and/or Mac are wondering if your data is safe and whether or not you should continue to trust iCloud.

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The Last Four Digits of Your Social Security Number

Not long ago I had to visit my bank. Yes, I actually had to go down to the branch, walk in and talk to someone. I needed to make a deposit and this one was too big to be done via my smartphone. That’s a nice problem to have of course, but it’s inconvenient because the closest branch is not really close at all. I handed the friendly teller my check and deposit slip. She then asked for my ID. Apparently, they don’t want just anyone depositing money into my account. I handed over my new driver’s license so there was little doubt I was who I claimed to be. I took my receipt and walked out.

Comparing a person to the ID they present is not a foolproof way to ensure they are who they say they are, fake IDs are not THAT difficult to obtain after all, but it’s better than nothing. It’s certainly better than the way so many companies verify your identity: with your Social Security Number (or government ID outside the US).

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There and Back Again: The Evolution of the Graphical User Interface

30 years ago this past January, Apple launched the Macintosh and with it, the first widely available computer with a Graphical User Interface or GUI. If you are less than 25 years old, there’s a very good chance you’ve never used a computer that didn’t have a graphical user interface. But at the time, it was a radical departure from the way in which most people interacted with a computer. Over the past 30 years, the GUI has evolved and in some ways has come full circle.

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Too Much Security Is Never Enough

This week we have seen another example of why you can’t be too paranoid about Internet security.

Code Spaces, a company that specializes in svn hosting (hosting your source code so your team can access it) announced that their servers were hacked big time. Apparently, the perpetrator began with a Denial of Service Attack then gained access to Code Spaces’ Amazon EC2 account. He or she then contacted Code Spaces via email in an attempt to extort a large fee to stop the attack. When the folks at Code Spaces attempted to take back control of their Amazon EC2 account, the hacker deleted all of their data including backups and off-site backups. Unable to recover, Code Spaces has made the decision to shutdown completely. The cost of the attack is just too great to continue.

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Spread the Word, Grow the Community

A bigger community is always beneficial to its members. More Xojo users lead to more ideas, more discussions and more resources for everyone. At Xojo we aren’t just marketing a development tool, we are advertising our truly amazing community! However, marketing is inherently met with a degree of skepticism. You say it can hold 12 times its weight in liquid, but can it really?

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Progress Report: iOS Auto Layout in Xojo

We continue to work towards Xojo support for iOS. Since the last update, we have been working on support for Auto Layout. We demonstrated Auto Layout at XDC last year. However, at the time we only had support for it in the framework; not the IDE. In case the term Auto Layout is unfamilar to you, it’s a technology for controlling the size and postion of controls. In Xojo today, you use the locking properties. We determined early in the development of our iOS framework that locking would not be sufficent for iOS since the user will often radically change the size of the layout by rotating the device. Instead of locking, you will use Auto Layout. Think of it as locking on steroids.

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Getting Healthcare.gov to Handle 50,000 Users

Healthcare.gov, the US Government’s health insurance exchange website for states that didn’t provide their own, was supposed to handle about 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know what a complete disaster the website as been. But it didn’t (and doesn’t) have to be that way.

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