Category Archives: Bad Tech

Battery Centre needs the Battery University

About two and a half years ago Battery Centre sold me me a silver calcium battery for my car. According to them silver calcium batteries are the best thing in lead acid battery technology since Gaston Planté made the first … Continue reading

Posted in Bad Tech, Stuff, Tech | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Curse Of Silence

While browsing through hack a day yesterday I found this Nokia smartphone vulnerability. If you go to the link you will notice that it was the Chaos Computer Club that published the vulnerability. I have written about them before and … Continue reading

Posted in Bad Tech, Stuff | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Running those legacy apps

Yesterday Andrew McGill posted the message below on the Gauteng Linux User Group mailing list. Because he is not blogging I’m doing it for him. What he is describing is one of the biggest frustrations people have with so called … Continue reading

Posted in Bad Tech | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

How to fight Zombies

Anyone that runs a mail server very quickly learns how to fight spam if he wants to do his job properly. It is also one of the favourite pastimes of the clueless to think up stupid ways to fight spam. … Continue reading

Posted in Bad Tech, Stuff | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Be careful where you put your grubby little paws

While we are talking about Jacob Zuma and company down here in SA, the Germans are debating the use of biometric data for identification. One of my favourite groups the Chaos Computer Club of Berlin has pretty much proven that using biometric data like fingerprints, retina scans or facial features are not such a good idea by lifting their minister of interior Wolfgang Schäuble’s fingerprints and then showing how easy it is to fool these sytems. The last publication of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has published the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schäuble (quoting the oft-heard mantra “if you have nothing to hide you should have nothing to fear”), together with a tongue in cheek “collection album” page where readers can fill in fingerprints of other ministers if they manage to collect them. The Chaos Computer Club also went ahead published a fingerprint faking how-to on their website and you can also see a nice youtube video on the practical implementation of the how-to where they rip of a pay by fingerprint system. (Warning German) Does anyone remember “Demolition Man”? At least the Chaos Computer Club doesn’t remove your body parts to go shopping. Source: comp.risk digest     more....

Posted in Bad Tech, Stuff | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off