This is the introduction post to the TechVirtuoso Guide, what we hope will become a daily breakdown of important IT tidbits from the previous day, and what we expect to happen that day.
Yet again, someone has come forward with another rumor that a CDMA iPhone is coming this summer. This time, it comes from the Wall Street Journal. The new iPhone would work on Verizon Wireless, as well as Sprint Nextel in the United States and a handful of carriers in other countries including South Korea and Japan. The current iPhone is designed to work on the vast majority of carriers world-wide, including AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, using a signaling technology called GSM.
It would seem that SSL isn’t as secure as once thought. The problem isn’t the encryption, but the certificate providers. Ars has a breakdown of how governments are working with the CAs to “subvert the entire system to allow them to spy on anyone they wish to keep tabs on.”
Apple has released a major update to OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” — fixes in version 10.6.3 include enhancements to USB, OpenGL, DNS, QuickTime X, AirPort, iCal, Mail, MobileMe, Time Machine, and numerous other areas of the operating system. Choose Software Update from the Apple menu to check for the latest Apple software via the Internet, including this update.
Future versions of the Ubuntu Linux operating system will change the way units are measured in the operating system and enforced throughout applications used in the OS. Starting in Ubuntu 10.10, coming this October, SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on. This is similar to the way OS X started measuring data in Snow Leopard. Neowin has a full breakdown of the measuring guidelines.
You will soon be able to jailbreak an iPhone over the air, instead of having it tethered to a computer. Your move Apple.
Need help running Linux as a guest OS in Microsoft Hyper-V? Sounds strange, but Microsoft has released a best practices guide to do just that. Download it off their website. Don’t blame us if you create a black hole in your datacenter though. In related news, Hypervizor.net has a great article on anti-virus exemptions in Hyper-V. Proper configuration of your antivirus can prevent performance issues, but also keep your VMs from being eaten alive by an aggressive scanning engine.
Using LastPass and YubiKey to secure your online life
If the recent Gawker password breach (re)taught us anything, it’s the old and valued lesson of “don’t use the same password everywhere” — but as often as I repeat that phrase and cringe a little bit when I find out someone else did it, I’ve been just as guilty of this cardinal sin of network security myself… from time to time. It’s hard not to.
When you’re as active on the Internet as I am, it’s impossible to resist the urge to duplicate passwords, especially if you’re against writing them down. So you’re left to memorize them all, hope you don’t forget, and hope that you can later rely on the splendid password reset via email later on.
All of the Gawker fun also taught (or should have taught) website administrators like myself to take better care of their users. Gawker fouled up in a huge way (beyond simply exposing user data) by not taking proper steps to secure the information in their database once it was exposed. Gawker used an easily crackable cipher system (DES) which was depreciated by a new industry standard (AES) long ago.
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