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Category: Technology

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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The End of Carbon Support

In June of last year we deprecated our support for Carbon. If the word “deprecated” doesn’t mean anything to you, it means that we are no longer updating it. Our Cocoa framework is in very good shape and most of you have been able to easily transition your apps over to building for OS X using the Cocoa framework. It will soon be time to take another step.

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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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64-bit Work Continues

Memory (RAM) gets cheaper every year. As a result, new computing devices (mobile/server/desktop) come with more and more RAM, allowing applications to perform bigger and increasingly sophisticated tasks. My first desktop computer had 16K of RAM. The laptop on which I am writing this has 16GB of RAM. That’s 1 million times more RAM for less than half the price in today’s dollars. Wow.

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Xojo Apps and Heartbleed

As you may be aware, the “Heartbleed” bug in OpenSSL has made the rounds across the internet. As soon as it was disclosed this week we began an investigation to see where we were impacted. Xojo.com services were updated and our SSL certificate was quickly reissued. Xojo Cloud servers were also rapidly updated. This does mean that (like many sites) we were potentially vulnerable for a time until the patch was released.

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