I have a small parsley plant in my house. Whenever I rotate the pot by 180°, the leaves moves to face the sun coming from the window next to it. The leaves move surprisingly quickly. Below you can see 6 hours and 23 minutes compressed to 10 seconds.

Capturing this was made much easier by the built in intervalometer in the Canon 5DsR.

The internet is a very large place. Some estimates place it at 1 exabyte (1 billion billion bytes). Or almost 5 billion web pages. Take note that these are horrible simplifications as the internet is comprised of much more than just the World Wide Web. Regardless, every person who has ever interacted with anyone will probably have some kind of digital footprint. Do you have a driver's license? Passport? Health care card? Have you ever visited a doctor? Even though you may not have given any consent, interacting with the world will create digital traces of you all over the internet.

Unfortunately the internet is a little bit like entropy - it always only increase. The internet gets more complicated, bigger and with that, your privacy becomes more and more at risk. Every day we connect more devices to the internet than ever before. Think of the prefix "smart" that has become so commonplace. Smart phones. Smart baby monitors. Smart video cameras. Smart TV's. The list goes on. Most modern Blu-Ray players, TV's and amplifiers can connect via WiFi or ethernet to the internet. Your baby monitor can probably do that too - so too your security cameras, smart light bulbs, smart smoke detectors, smart air conditioning, smart car...

Being connected is cool - it makes many things much simpler and better. But there is a dark side to all these advancements. Unfortunately technology outpaces our ability to reason properly. We build smart cars that can download firmware updates over the air and update your status with Facebook, without stopping to think what the downsides of doing that might be. It is trivial for people to hack your smart car and take over control of the automated components such as braking, sometimes steering etc. This is a terrible risk. Many of these smart cars have no security whatsoever. I recently reviewed a smart surveillance camera that does not even support secure HTTPS connections - it only had HTTP. This for a security product!

We have had technobabble for a long time now. If you are old enough, you may recall the Star Trek TNG episode where they mentioned:

...reversing the polarity of the annular confinement beam through the warp-field flux capacitor.

This is clearly non sensical, but even for someone with a good understanding of science and physics, it is still coherent. A beam can be ring shaped and act to confine something, and even have some kind of polarity to it if it is an electron beam for instance. Warp is an imaginative construct, and flux capacitors an invention of Back to the Future, but the concept of flux is a valid electromagnetic phenomenon (magnetic flux) and so too are capacitors - a basic electronic device to store electric charge. So all in all, that statement would not raise the hair on one's back. It sounds cool - in line with the rest of the Sci-Fi series.

As the old adage goes - attacks always only get better, especially computer related attacks. I consider myself a very tech savvy user - I cannot recall that I have ever fallen for a phishing attack (yet). However there were times that I almost got caught.

Today I have read an article about a new attack that tricks a user into believing they are on a certain web site - all with green SSL icons - when in fact they are on an imposter's site. Looking at the URL field of the browser will not reveal anything useful. The only way to be sure is to actually view the SSL certificate detail to see that the SSL certificate is for a different domain. Almost nobody does that... The whole point of the green SSL bar is to perform that check automatically.

This attack uses unicode encoding in URL domain names to obscure the real domain name by substituting letters for other letters that look the same. In unicode, there are more than one letter a, letter b and so on. Some browsers render them the same, making this almost impossible to spot.

Every year Vancouver transforms spectacularly into spring when all the cherry trees start blossoming around the city. Here are some photos I took last weekend.