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.

I recently purchased 2 packs of Verbatim White Inkjet Printable BD-R TL 100GB Media (20 disks). Of those disks, three were coasters. Needless to say, I was not happy. These disks are expensive. Toast Titanium failed with:

The drive reported an error, Sense Key = HARDWARE ERROR, Sense Code= 0x44, INTERNAL TARGET FAILURE

So I reached out to their customer support, and after verifying my receipt they sent me a new 10-pack free of charge. Even though I am still disappointed that 3 disks failed to write, this more than makes up for it. Great support I think.

Everyone buys from Amazon. Or has in the past. I have been inundated with advertisements from Amazon recently every time I purchased something - all for items related to what I bought. This is just downright stupid. I bought a vacuum cleaner recently, only to get an ad via email a week later for the same base model but other variations of the unit I purchased. I cannot fathom anyone buying a vacuum cleaner just to buy another one in a week's time.

But recently they have upped their game, and even though I am aware of this being done, having it done to you always feels personal. Look at this ad I received: