Monday Morning: Get a Pick and Shovel

Mississippi John Hurt’s lyrics seem appropriate this morning — get a pick and shovel to dig your way out of all that snow and ice this Monday morning.

Getting a late start here because I stayed up watching the X-Files revival.

Apple iMessage users’ content at risk if backed up to iCloud
While iMessages themselves use end-to-end encryption, the same content when backed up to iCloud is encrypted by an Apple-controlled key. As many as 500 million users have data in iCloud services, at risk of exposure. You’d think after The Fappening, Apple users would be more leery about enabling iCloud backup.

Network problems affect NFL’s Microsoft Surface tablets, left New England Patriots in the dark
Wow, right down to the “last defensive possession” and *blip* — nothing on the Surface tablets for Pats’ coaches to show their players. Not the first time there’ve been problems with this technology, either. NFL’s network problems are blamed for the loss of play information, but Microsoft’s tablets are taking the brunt of it. Have to wonder why there wasn’t adequate redundancy to ensure network burps would not affect the game. Can’t fault the tablets or the network outage for the delay of X-Files on FOX, though, since the Patriots vs. Broncos were on CBS.

Donald Rumsfeld, video game designer
One of the last things I ever expected to see in my feed: Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, designed a video game. It’s an obscure form of solitaire attributed to Winston Churchill. “…I’ve signed off on something they call ‘UX’,” Rumsfeld said. Heaven help us.

I’m deferring my date with a shovel for later today and crawling back into bed. Stay safe and warm, gang.

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4 replies
  1. lefty665 says:

    John Hurt is so sweet. He’s enough to make you wish the migration to Chicago and development of electric blues/rock n roll had never happened.
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    Graphics are certainly better. I still want to believe. Post 2001 it will be interesting to see how the hidden hand plays.
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    Interesting to see it finally happening to the Pats. Goodell can’t even run a simple network for 50 yards, consumer level WiFi will do that in the open. WTF? Redundancy and failovers aren’t hard in 2016. You’d think Microsoft would care enough about its image to say “Here, gimmie that, I’ll fix it. You guys can’t even put air in footballs right”.

  2. Denis says:

    Let’s see . . . visiting NFL team’s comm goes out. Home team’s working just fine. Where have I heard that one before?
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    Here’s Mark Maske writing for WaPo in 2007 regarding one sided comm issues and piped-in crowd noise over the speaker system:
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    “There’s no such thing as an innocent technical malfunction when the visiting team’s headsets aren’t working. It’s inconceivable that a crowd inside a domed stadium could just be unusually loud. ”
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    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/08/AR2007110802160.html
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    Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
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    I just hope the speculation is true and Brady got cheated out of SB50. “Payback: the second best feeling in the world.” ™

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