The current US government shutdown is a political problem, but one that has real world security implications. We touched on this during the Gestalt IT Rundown last week, but Brian Krebs has an in-depth breakdown of is actually happening behind the scenes.
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Backblaze Releases 2018 Hard Drive Stats
Backblaze has been releasing an annual report of their hard drive reliability for five years now. It’s a rare look into real world performance of drives at pretty massive scale. For 2018, they had just under 105,000 data drives in operation for their cloud storage and backup services.
Windows 10 Mobile Support Ends in December
Microsoft announced that support for Windows 10 Mobile ends in December. It’s a quiet end for an OS that always seemed resigned to playing for third.
Embrace Change with Wi-Fi 6
It might not be universal, but in general, people hate change. Even when a change makes sense, and you’ve been putting up with something just because that’s the way it has always been. You’ll often still find yourself bemoaning a disruption to the status quo. That’s certainly what I’ve come to realize when the Wi-Fi […]
Picking a Monitor for Software Development
If you search for “best monitor”, odds are the first results will be from the Wirecutter, PC Mag, Anandtech or other review sites. These places can be a good general resource to get information about contrast levels, brightness, and color accuracy. But these guides try to find the best overall monitor. Sometimes they’ll break things out […]
Understanding the Rash of 51% Attacks
If you’ve been paying attention to cryptocurrency news, you’ve probably heard about a number of high profile “51% attacks”, which allow for instances of double spending on the blockchain. This post does a great job of understanding the Game Theory that has undergirded blockchain behaivor, and has been successful in dissuading these types of attacks […]
NetBeez Gets Hip To SSID Hopping
NetBeez uses Raspberry Pis to provide sophisticated client-side network monitoring at a reasonable cost. Now with version 1.5, the company is adding SSID hopping to the equation.
HCI Storage Efficiency
How does HCI cluster size impact storage efficiency? Howard Marks has been looking into how economies of scale benefit HCI deployments.
Wiliot: The Power’s In The Air
Traditionally, powering a SoC requires wiring it up to the mains, or plugging in a battery. But a startup called Wiliot is trying to create chips powered by ambient radio frequencies. If they can pull this off, there are some interesting potential applications in the enterprise.
IT Certifications in 2019
It seems like every year we continue to discuss the merits of IT certifications. Certainly there are many instances when a particular certification won’t pay off. But I think the consensus is that even in the rapidly changing IT landscape, certifications definitely have their place in career advancement.