The Geek The Ory

Information protection is now scrutinized in all commercial and government industries. Theft of information has crippled many organizations and businesses. One of the main reasons information is lost, corrupt, or stolen is because many industries have not fully adopted it as a risk, and have yet to implement strong quality assurance policies and programs. Some of the most common risks are because of unattended computers, weak passwords, and poor information management practices. Hackers look for the weakest target and tunnel into a business from easy sources, like tablets or cell phones. Using smart encryption software can remediate this threat and vulnerability, making it difficult for competitors or rookie hackers to penetrate your device. However, software alone is not enough to prevent Macs from being hacked. It is the Mac user who has the authority and resources to save it from potential penetration.  The top 10 ways to prevent your Mac from being hacked  is ...

Thanks to a recent software update,  Amazon’s inexpensive Fire TV Stick —an HDMI dongle that works as a sort of mini digital media set-top box—has improved its support for Miracast wireless display. This means that in addition to its normal functionality, you should be able to use Fire TV Stick to mirror the display on your Windows Phone, Windows PC or tablet, or Android device. But there’s just one problem. And that problem is: it doesn’t work reliably. On the Windows Phone handset I tried—my Lumia 930—I was able to mirror the display, but audio didn’t work. This means that you can’t play music or audiobooks, of course. But you also can’t hear the audio in videos, like the TV shows or movies in Xbox Video. I also tried to test this with two Windows PCs, my Surface Pro 3 and another Windows 8.1-based laptop. In both cases, it successfully connected Fire TV Stick as a wireless display. But the video never worked, nor did the audio. According to one emailer, he was ab...

While Miracast was once an unreliable solution for replicating a PC or device screen to an external display, Microsoft’s newer Miracast dongles—in particular the inexpensive Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter—change all that. And I now bring such a device with me on family trips so that we can all enjoy TV shows or movies together on the big screen. We’re in Puerto Rico this week for the kids’ vacation—how we managed to get out of Boston and its historic snowfalls and low temperatures is still unclear—and I brought along the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter for this very reason. It’s a simple and,  at $60 at the Microsoft Store , inexpensive solution: Just plug in the HDMI end of the dongle to an available HDMI port on the TV and plug the USB end into a USB port for power. (If there’s no USB port on the TV, you can use a standard cell phone-like power adapter instead.) In addition to its rock-solid reliability, there are a number of nice things about the Microsoft Wireles...

HP’s stunning new Spectre x360 gives Windows fans reason to cheer: It’s a premium transforming, multi-touch Ultrabook that doesn’t ape the MacBook Air’s styling but does deliver stellar performance and battery life. Best of all, perhaps, the Spectre x360 won’t set you back the $2000+ that other premium Windows Ultrabooks currently demand: it starts at less than half that heady sum. I’ve been using an HP Spectre x360 since last week, and it appears that HP has successfully done for the high-end of the market what Stream did for the low-end: Revitalize HP’s PC reputation by delivering an awesome combination of power, style, and value. Readers know I’m always looking for the best values in technology. And this Spectre delivers. Let’s start with the industrial. The Spectre x360 is precision milled and machine polished from aluminum and immediately presents the kind of understated elegance one might associate with Mercedes. It’s not a head-turner: indeed, on a recent trip I’...

Despite hitting a record 10 million sales in the second quarter of 2015, Microsoft's phone division is in trouble. Competitors, including Apple and Google, are pushing the envelope even further, leaving Microsoft in the dust. Redmond has seemingly chosen to produce only low-end phones with a flagship phone conspicuously absent from the current lineup. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission  highlights just how bad things have become. Microsoft acquired Nokia back in 2013 for around $7.2 billion (a figure which has since risen to over $9 billion, according to the filing) and the division, named "Phone Hardware", brought in $1.4 billion in Q3 2015 with the cost of revenue exceeding that figure by $4 million. This means that Microsoft lost around 12 cents per phone according to analysts, even before R&D costs, among other expenses, are applied, despite exceptional unit sales. The filing talks of a potent write-off of the Nok...

When recently-appointed president of RSA, Amit Yoran, opened his company’s flagship conference yesterday, he warned the security industry was living in the dark ages. Protections just aren’t working, he said. Various anti-virus firms, including big names like Kaspersky and Webroot, have offered proof that the market’s many players get it wrong; they’re on a list of companies whose Google Play Android apps don’t do proper encryption checks, according to research from the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute. The CERT discovered a whopping 22,000 apps that weren’t carrying out “SSL validation”, where the software is supposed to check certificates over encrypted communications to ensure the parties involved are verified.  Kaspersky’s Internet Security app  and  Webroot’s free offering  and its  “complete” tool  (an apt name, perhaps?) both failed to carry out these checks, mea...

You could tell by the din that the  RSA Conference  in San Francisco this week is the largest enterprise IT security confab in the world. The fact that several prominent breaches over the last year have shaken the C-suite out of its ostrichlike complacency clearly turned the volume up on this show all the way to eleven. So now money seems to be flowing into IT security like never before, adding to the commotion. The big question: with all this security gear from the many hundreds of vendors exhibiting at the conference, each trying to get their message heard above the clamor, why do the hackers appear to be winning? Clearly, tools aren’t enough – even when they’re arguably better than ever. Regardless, the RSA Conference is largely about the tools and technologies – where each tool addresses some corner of the security sphere. Here are my picks for some of the most interesting (in alphabetical order, so as not to play favorites). Are they sufficient? You be the judge. ...