The right to know - and to condemn to death | Bangkok Post: tech

COMPUTER Currents

The posting of secret communications in the Afghan theatre of operations is a case of "the people have a right to know" and technology being used the wrong way.

In this case it is the Wikileaks creator who decided to play God with people's lives in the 'noble' name of the media.

A member of the US armed forces decided that it would be cool to collect a bunch of secret communications and release them to Wikileaks.

The site is a place where whistleblowers and others can post information that might normally be kept from the general public and the world at large. Sometimes this is a good thing, but in this most recent case the site's creator ignored the warnings that people could be killed and decided to post everything.

As predicted, at the time of writing one person has already been killed because of the site manager's actions.

It is expected that many more will follow the same fate at the hands of the Taliban.

People in charge of data have a responsibility.

There are elements in the media all over the world that see these responsibilities as always being superceded by the people's right to know, no matter what the cost.

Data security is important at the small business level, in larger organisations, in hospitals and many other situations. Leaked hospital information, for example, could be used by an unscrupulous insurance company to limit their payments, even valid ones.

In the case of the Wikileaks data, this has and will directly cause the deaths of individuals, which makes the site's creator the worst kind of data protector and, indirectly, a murderer.

If you are a keeper of a database or an organisation's data, remember how important your role is and don't.

Organisations should also realise just how much responsibility your database administrators have. It also highlights how important security needs to be when people's lives are at stake.

Don't you just hate it when the computer wrests control from whatever you are doing? I had forgotten to change my auto update settings on my Win 7based notebook. I was typing away on a document and without warning my machine rebooted.

I lost some of my typing, of course, and immediately changed my auto update settings to happen when I wanted the update to occur. That Microsoft would have as default a no-warning reboot seems completely wrong to me. You can change yours in the control panel under Security.

Should you trust technology? In most cases the answer is yes, unless perhaps it happens to be called Skynet.

You might also want to think twice about blindly following the directions of your car's GPS unit. There have been reports of a car ending up in a tree, in a lake, on a runway and in one story that caught my eye in the Australian Outback.

A family ignored the road signs and instead followed their GPS down a closed road. They ended up being bogged and it took three days to get them out.

Technology is not magic and a car GPS is certainly not more up to date that the local road signs.

Industry news

Apple removed the videos of other manufacturer's phones from their website in response to the negative press they were getting about their antenna problems being the same as everyone else's.

The latest US phone sales figures are out and the winner is still Research in Motion's BlackBerry. No surprise there. The real news is that in second place used to be the Apple's OS in the iPhone line, but Android has followed the same growth they did from Q4 2009 to Q1 2010 and the Q2 sales put them above Apple and pushed Microsoft into fourth.

To be fair, the iPhone 4 didn't ship until nearly the end of Q2, so the Q3 figures will be the one to watch. I'm predicting Android to continue to do well and we may see a new leader by the end of the year.

RIM is planning its iPad challenger for release in November. It is called the BlackPad, will be priced competitively with the Apple device, and have both front and backwards-facing cameras. The unit will not, though, have a cellular network interface.

One clever individual decided to reverse-engineer the chargers in the Apple range. This was triggered by a message "Charging not supported by this accessory" you see when you try and connect a non-Apple device. Minty Boost figured out that Apple uses the two USB data connectors in a non-standard way. The data lines are used to control the resistance the Apple device sees, which then triggers the charging strength, typically around 1 amp or half that. If your charger doesn't have these resistances on the correct lines, the Apple device will not charge at all.

Some news stories can be misleading, such as a recent one about the next version of Linux. It was reported that the "next Linux kernel has been released with a tidy little warning from Linus Torvalds for code committers to pay more attention and be more careful".

Many read this to mean that the next Linux version has problems. The actual story and comments from Torvalds was concerning the way people are dropping items into the Linux-next bucket which is for the next version(s) after the latest release. He and Andrew Morton have been annoyed that some of the items are not very stable and when it sits in that pile, people expect to see it in the next release. Linux-next is supposed to be for items ready for the next merge, not items that still need a lot of work before they can be. It pays to read a little deeper into some news stories.

The last patch Tuesday from Microsoft set a new record for number of bulletins. There are 14 bulletins with eight being critical. Six of these are for Windows, one to both Windows and Silverlight and the last for the Office suite.

Critical usually means bugs that can be exploited to remotely execute malware on vulnerable systems with little or no interaction on the part of the end user.

The remaining bulletins are all important and apply to Windows and Office. For a total of 34 vulnerabilities, that is an important update. Yes, you will be required to reboot a few of them, so be ready for a long update process.

Finally for this week, it appears that Western Digital is a new division of MS. If you have a WD hard drive and want to run some tests on it, then you'd better have Windows installed. The latest version of the Western Digital diagnostic software does not support Mac OS, Linux, UNIX. Basically you have to buy yourself a copy of Windows to test your new WD drive on your Linux machine.