When I tell people I test the security of mobile applications one of the most common questions people ask is, “Which platform is more secure: Android or iOS?” There are many ways to answer this, but each of them have their issues. You can look at malware stats, you can look at marketshare, you can look at lists…
Archives for July 2013
I’m Quite Unhappy with Obama Right Now
Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs…
Media = AppleTV, Netflix, and AirPlay
I’m a bit impressed right now with that media experience I’m getting with Apple. To be clear, it’s like 20% of what it should be, but damn, that’s pretty good. AirPlay is way better than it sounds when someone describes it. When I sit at home and play music I play it to one of my monitors, to…
Books Everyone Should Read
There are many of these types of lists, but here are some of my favorites. Books Everyone Should Read (Visualization). The Greatest Books Link …and my favorites in non-fiction: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior — My favorite book on the merging of Evolutionary Psychology with marketing and personality. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human…
A Simple Answer to the Question of Whether Guns Make Us More or Less Safe
As expected, gun advocates believe guns make us more safe, and those against guns think they make us less so. Interestingly, both groups seem to have data to support their positions. I’ll say first of all that there isn’t an overwhelming amount of quality on the topic data because the NRA has lobbied against gun research, but that’s…
McDonalds’ Suggested Budget for Employees
Yeah– now, when I first saw that, I assumed that the top line was for a part-time McDonald’s employee. Then I got out my calculator– that is actually what you would make if you were working full-time at McDonald’s. 1,105 dollars a month.via McDonalds’ suggested budget for employees shows just how impossible it is to get by on…
The Pope Came Out Against Clergymen Sexually Abusing Children
What does it say about an organization that has to take this position–especially when the organization’s primary role on the planet is being morally superior to everyone else? This would be like the supposed best people on the earth putting out a rule saying that doing the worst possible thing is bad. Oh, wait. That’s actually what happened.…
An Evolutionary Explanation for Our Experience of Free Will
It’s pretty easy to argue that we don’t have free will, but it’s as least as easy to see that we do in fact experience having it. One argument I often hear about how free will cannot be an illusion is that evolution obviously selected for it, and that nobody has given a good explanation for why. Let…
The Freedom to Suffer
I think a lot about human suffering and how best to reduce it. I particularly enjoy mixing this effort with various political philosophies, such as progressivism, or “libertarianism”, or “communitarianism”. More on those later. For now I want to simply ask a few questions that have appeared to me after reading The Fall of the American Worker by…
iPhone vs. Android: A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words
We hear a lot about how Android is trouncing Apple in marketshare. I’m not doubting the numbers, but I’ve long wondered what these people are doing with their phones. One of the most telling metrics for actual usage is photography. Flickr remains the standard for this measurement, and I’ve collected below some fascinating data on usage between iPhone…