Posts by Morac

App poked through Twitter hole, probed my privates - security bod

Re: Eh? What?

Twitter is more than what is available on public feeds. I don't post a lot of public tweets and my profile has no information on it at all, but I do frequently direct message companies' support Twitter accounts (since that results in the fastest response). Direct Messages are supposed to be secured so they frequently contain things like account numbers, phone numbers, addresses, etc. A hacker can grab all that info very easily if they access your Twitter account.

Also, many sites allow "sign in with Twitter". Getting the Twitter user name and password could allow hackers to automatically log into Facebook, Yahoo, Google, etc.

Yay for iOS 6.1, grey Wi-Fi iPhone bug is fix- AWW, SNAP

It's a common enough problem, that Apple has a support document on it.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1559

Yahoo! Mail! offers! HTTPS! amid! account! hijack! spree!

Unfortuantely Yahoo's SSL usage is flawed

When I turned on the SSL on my Yahoo Mail account, Yahoo Mail proceeded to keep asking me to log in when I took any action. I basically got stuck in an endless loop of being forced to log in over and over again without being able to do anything.

The reason this happens, is because Yahoo is mixing SSL and non-SSL content on the page and the SSL content is referencing non-SSL content (and vice-versa). This causes the page loads to fail since most browsers (I was using Firefox) won't allow mixed content and Yahoo interprets this as needing to log in again and puts up a login page.

Basically enabling SSL breaks Yahoo Mail. I managed to get in to the options using an old version of Internet Explorer (which allows non-SSL from SSL) and could turn off SSL. After that I could use Yahoo Mail without issue.

The mobile version already uses SSL and if I need encryption, I just change the http to https after going to the Yahoo Mail page.

TiVo: Cisco and pals could owe us BILLIONS over DVR patents

TiVo Patent

I see a lot of people are asking about TiVo's patent. Apparently a lot of people don't know how to use Google. Anyway here it is:

http://www.google.com/patents/US6233389

And as someone mentioned above, the patent isn't about just storing video on a drive. It's about a method indexing the audio/video allowing it to be recorded and played back on a very low powered device. The original TiVo had a 40 Mhz CPU.

Cisco vs TiVo DVR smackdown: Whose patent is it anyway?

Re: It's Wrong

TiVo's algorithms (which they patented) were specifically for doing DV on low cost hardware. That's how TiVo was able to produce a commercially available consumer DVR with only a 54 MHz CPU and 16 MB of RAM.