Saturday, November 14, 2015

Netiquette IQ Blog Of 11/14/2015 - Can A Boarding Pass Or A Grocery Coupon Hack A Computer Network?





Customized Boarding Passes Can Hack Computers
Written by
November 12, 2015 // 10:52 AM EST
A boarding pass can hold all sorts of information useful to an identify thief, such as a victim’s frequent flyer number. Now, it turns out that simply scanning the boarding pass itself could potentially be used to hack computers, too.
Yang Yu, founder and head of Tencent's Xuanwu Lab, a project with a focus on cybersecurity research, tweeted several videos of what he has dubbed “Badbarcode,” a series of what he describes as vulnerabilities in the way that barcode scanners work. Yu will be presenting “BadBarcode: How to hack a starship with a piece of paper” at PacSec 2015, a security conference held in Tokyo.
Yu and his team created their own series of "boarding passes"—just barcodes, essentially—and programmed different commands into each that would be read by the scanner.
“The scanner in that demo is widely used in airports, so we made a fake boarding pass to do that demo,” Yu told Motherboard in a Twitter direct message. “BadBarcode is not a vulnerability of a certain product. It affects the entire barcode scanner-related industries.”
One of the videos shows the barcode of a boarding pass being scanned, and then a shell—where a user could enter commands—opening on the adjacent computer.
“General speaking, we can make [a barcode scanner] to 'type' any keys to the host system, not only the 0-9 and a-z,” Yu said. He claims this lets someone create a boarding pass to “execute any command on computer.”
Yu wouldn't go into the technical details, but said that he may release the documentation later.
At this point, Yu is unsure of any malicious applications. “I do not know what the bad guys might do,” he said. “But considering barcode scanners are everywhere in our world, so BadBarcode is really a serious problem, not just a bug people could use to get free beer.”
Contact the author by email or Twitter.
You can reach us at letters@motherboard.tv. Want to see other people talking about Motherboard? Check out our letters to the editor.
 
 =================================================== Have you ever wondered how it would be if your email suddenly came to life? You are about to find out.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zw
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**Important note** - contact our sister company for very powerful solutions for IP management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:

www.tabularosa.net

In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” will be published soon follow by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

 If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio  Additionally, I provide content for an online newsletter via paper.li. I have also established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo.  I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. Further, I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and have been a contributor to numerous blogs and publications. 

Lastly, I am the founder and president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a company that provides “best of breed” products for network, security and system management and services. Tabula Rosa has a new blog and Twitter site which offers great IT product information for virtually anyone.
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Netiquette IQ - A Special Tribute To Paris



Let all of us netizens pray for the victims and families of the Paris terrorist attacks. May we all work toward achieving world peace and harmony in our lifetime.



Friday, November 13, 2015

Netiquette IQ Blog Of 11/13/2015 - Do You Think Email Is Evil?





Is Email Evil?
Overflowing inboxes are wrecking productivity and making people feel guilty. Is the technology to blame, or are we?
Adrienne lafrance theatlantic.com
NOV 12, 2015
Sometime in the past 20 years, people soured on email. Culturally, it went from  delightful to burdensome, a shift that’s reflected in the very language of the inbox. In the 1990s, AOL would gleefully announce, “You’ve got mail!” Today, Gmail celebrates the opposite: “No new mail!”
So what happened to email? What happened to us?
These are some of the questions that come up in the new technology podcastCodebreaker, the first season of which is fixated on the question, “Is it evil?”
“In some ways, [email] is like technology that was built when the world was new, yet we still use it all the time,” Codebreaker’s host, Ben Brock Johnson, told me. “There are some real tensions that come from that, that come from the fact that it’s this free thing that anybody can send to anybody... and we can all send as many as we want.”
All of that is, theoretically, what makes email great, too. “You can't kill email! It’s the cockroach of the Internet,” Alexis Madrigal wrote for The Atlantic last year, “and I mean that as a compliment. This resilience is a good thing.”
“Email is the last great unowned technology,” said the Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in the first episode of Codebreaker, “and by unowned I mean there is no CEO of email... it’s just a shared hallucination that works.”
“Email is not evil. We are evil.”
And while email may work, technically, there’s a profound sentiment—in tech circles, especially—that there’s something deeply wrong with the way people email today. Maybe not surprisingly, most email is “total garbage,” Johnson says, and that’s the stuff that doesn’t even make it to your inbox. Spam filters areactually pretty good, so this virtual garbage-pile isn’t the real problem. The thing about email that bogs people down is the sorting, and responding, the unsubscribing, the reaching out, the circling back.
People are, clearly, consumed by their inboxes. On average, people check their email about 77 times per day, according to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. (On the high end, people checked their inboxes 373 times a day.) “The more email people do, the lower is their assessed productivity,” Mark said in the podcast. “[and] the lower is their positive mood at the end of the day.”
Mark also notes a psychological disconnect between the writing of an email and the receiving of one, a paradox that Johnson told me he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about since: Reading email is correlated with stress, actually typing and sending email is not.
“That, to me, was a totally eureka moment,” Johnson said. “Where Gloria Mark says it feels good to send email, but it feels bad to receive. That has changed my behavior. I have been more thoughtful about how I send email: Why am I sending this email? Is this the most direct way to deal with whatever I am trying to deal with?”
“I am also really bad at managing my own email,” Johnson added. “I am abysmal. I have 12,069 unreads in my gmail right now. People look at that and they get panic attacks on my behalf.”
Several studies have found email hurts productivity and makes people feel bad. “I just think we have to rethink email, and even redesign the way email is used,” Mark said in Codebreaker’s first episode.
She’s not alone in that assessment. But what would a reboot of this nature even look like? And what would it mean for email’s cultural standing? (These are some of the questions I'm exploring for an upcoming story, and it's clear already that they have fascinating, if incomplete, answers.)
Already there are alternatives, or at least complements, to the inbox-outbox cycle: Various private messengers and chat platforms like Slack have been described as email slayers, or at least means of chipping away at its hold on people. Teenagers barely email one another. Just 6 percent of them reported sending daily emails in a 2011 Pew survey. (A time when, it should be noted, Snapchat was in it infancy and platforms like YikYak and Vine didn’t even exist yet.)
“Email is not evil,” said Sabri Ben-Achour, a reporter for Marketplace, in theCodebreaker debut. “We are evil. Email dismantles the barriers and the filters that we have erected to contain our evil selves.”
Even if email’s not outright evil, it does seem to be broken in some way. And if we’re the ones who broke it, it will be up to us to fix it, too.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zw
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**Important note** - contact our sister company for very powerful solutions for IP management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:

www.tabularosa.net

In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” will be published soon follow by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

 If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio  Additionally, I provide content for an online newsletter via paper.li. I have also established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo.  I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. Further, I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and have been a contributor to numerous blogs and publications. 

Lastly, I am the founder and president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a company that provides “best of breed” products for network, security and system management and services. Tabula Rosa has a new blog and Twitter site which offers great IT product information for virtually anyone.
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Netiquette IQ Alert - Google Releases Security Updates for Chrome and Chrome OS






National Cyber Awareness System:
11/11/2015 11:47 AM EST

Original release date: November 11, 2015
Google has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Chrome and Chrome OS. Exploitation of one of these vulnerabilities may allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected system.
Updates available include:
  • Chrome 46.0.2490.86 for Windows, Mac and Linux
  • Chrome 46.0.2490.82 for all OS devices
Users and administrators are encouraged to review the Chrome page and Chrome OS page and apply the necessary updates.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  For a great email parody, view the following link:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zw
scoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618



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Special Bulletin - My just released book

"You're Hired. Super Charge our Email Skills in 60 Minutes! (And Get That Job...) 

is now on sales at Amazon.com 

Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ
·         Get more email opens.  Improve 100% or more.
·         Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.
·         Be better understood.
·         Eliminate indecision.
·         Avoid being spammed 100% or more.
·         Have recipient finish reading your email content. 
·         Save time by reducing questions.
·         Increase your level of clarity.
·         Improve you time management with your email.
·        Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.
Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

 =================================

**Important note** - contact our company for very powerful solutions for IP
 management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:

www.tabularosa.net

In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” has just been published and will be followed by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

In addition to this blog, I maintain a radio show on BlogtalkRadio  and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and  Yahoo I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ and  PSG of Mercer County, NJ.


I am the president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a “best of breed” reseller of products for communications, email, network management software, security products and professional services.  Also, I am the president of Netiquette IQ. We are currently developing an email IQ rating system, Netiquette IQ, which promotes the fundamentals outlined in my book.

Over the past twenty-five years, I have enjoyed a dynamic and successful career and have attained an extensive background in IT and electronic communications by selling and marketing within the information technology marketplace.Anyone who would like to review the book and have it posted on my blog or website, please contact me paul@netiquetteiq.com.

If you have not already done so, please view the trailer for my books below. 
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Netiquette IQ quote for toda:


"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

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