Security: the federal administration privated of iPhone

The federal personnel will not receive temporarily more iPhone as mobile phone of service. The informatics department is fearing for the security of the transmitted datas. The Federal Council will decide at the fall on the maintaining or not of this measure.

Some 680 employees of the Confederation actually have an iPhone for professional. The moratorium hitting this type of telephone of capacities near a computer, announced by the “Berner Zeitung”, has been confirmed on Wednesday by the spokesperson of the Federal Department of Finances (FDF) Roland Meier.

At the general secretary of the FDF, the iPhones have even been replaced by other “smartphones”, seeing the collaborators are in narrow contact with the Federal Council. Mr. Meier could not precise if a such exchange has happened in other units.

If one takes to the foot of the letter lhe directives of the Confederation, the iPhones should not be autorized, explains Peter Fischer, delegated at the informatic strategy. “But there rules are technically overtaken.”

The iPhone must not notably be integrated at the informatic systems of the Confederation via iTunes and Apple has then no more access to the datas transferred. An analyse of the security of the telephones said intelligents will be given until the fall at the Federal Council, who will decide the ones to autorize.

Source: ATS
Translation: Oil Tree

The original text is here:

Sécurité: l’administration fédérale privée d’iPhone

Le personnel fédéral ne recevra temporairement plus d’iPhone comme téléphone portable de service. Le service informatique craint pour la sécurité des données transmises. Le Conseil fédéral tranchera à l’automne sur le maintien ou non de cette mesure.

Quelque 680 employés de la Confédération ont actuellement un iPhone à titre professionnel. Le moratoire frappant ce type de téléphone aux capacités proches d’un ordinateur, annoncé par la “Berner Zeitung”, a été confirmé mercredi par le porte-parole du Département fédéral des finances (DFF) Roland Meier.

Au secrétariat général du DFF, les iPhones ont même été remplacés par d’autres “smartphones”, vu que les collaborateurs sont en contact étroit avec le Conseil fédéral. M.Meier n’a pas pu préciser si un tel échange a eu lieu dans d’autres unités.

Si l’on prend au pied de la lettre les directives de la Confédération, les iPhones ne devraient pas être autorisés, explique Peter Fischer, délégué à la stratégie informatique. “Mais ces règles sont dépassées techniquement.”

L’iPhone ne doit notamment plus être intégré au système informatique de la Confédération via iTunes et Apple n’a donc plus accès aux données transférées. Une analyse de la sécurité des téléphones dit intelligents sera remise d’ici l’automne au Conseil fédéral, qui décidera lesquels autoriser.

Source: ATS

I mean, WOW!

No, not World of Warcraft. No, not “Wow, Mars will be as bright as the full Moon” either.

Rather, “Wow, I have friends who believe this shit, who believe it enough to forward it to me as a fact, not even to ask me if it’s true.” (I happen to have a teeny, tiny PhD in some branch of Physics. Not many people know that.)

What’s good with this joke is that, by a happy coincidence on the numbers involved, the calculations needed to debunk it can be done in your head. Well, maybe not in your head, but certainly in mine.

See, everybody knows that the Earth is 150 million kilometers away from the Sun. The e-mail tells us the Earth-Mars distance at its shortest will be 55 million kilometers, which happens to be the only correct information in the whole message. This gives us the Sun-Mars distance as 150 + 55 = 205, make is 200 million kilometers.

Now the amount of sunlight received by a celestial object (or any kind of object, really) is inversely proportional to the square of its distance to the Sun, meaning that if you double the distance, it receives four times less light. So the amount of light received by Mars compared to the Moon (which is at the same distance from the Sun than the Earth) is

Let’s keep it this way for now.

Then the amount of light reflected by the planet is proportional to its surface, which is proportional to the square of its diameter. Maybe not everybody knows that Mars (6772 kilometers in diameter) is twice as big as the Moon (3475 kilometers, I told you the numbers involved were convenient), but people know that Mars is “a bit like Earth”, which would make it four times bigger than the Moon, which would be in the benefit of Mars and still work. But let’s stick with the correct numbers. The amount of light reflected by Mars compared to the Moon is therefore

Finally, the amount of light received by the Earth from each of our objects is, like before, inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Again, everybody knows that the Moon is 384 thousand kilometers away from the Earth. That’s the average distance. The maximum distance is rather 406 thousand kilometers. I’ll round it to 440 thousand kilometers because it’s in the detriment of the Moon and it’s convenient. So the amount of light received by the Earth from Mars compared to the Moon would be (beware the units)

Now it might be that the surface of Mars reflects light better than the surface of the Moon. It’s even probable: Mars is red whereas the Moon is black (Don’t believe me? Remember those rocks they took back from there, like exactly forty years ago? Did they look bright white?). But I’ll assume they both reflect light equally so we can compare the numbers with real data in the end. We can make the calculation again with Mars ten times brighter than the Moon later if you want.

So, to sum up, we have:

• Amount of light received by Mars compared to the Moon: (3/4)²;
• Amount of light reflected by Mars compared to the Moon: 2²;
• Amount of light received by the Earth from Mars compared to the Moon: (8/1000)².

Let’s multiply all this (because the light reflected is proportional to the light received from the Sun, and the light received on Earth is proportional to the light reflected):

The light we get from Mars, in the best case ever, is almost seven thousand times less than the light we get from the full Moon. What a surprise! And if we had taken Mars to be as big as the Earth (four times bigger than the Moon instead of two, gives another factor 4 once squared) and ten times brighter than the Moon (i.e. very wrong numbers in its favour), it would still appear 170 times fainter.

Now let’s check this result quickly. The Wikipedia article on apparent magnitude tells us that the magnitude of the full Moon is -12.6 and the maximum brightness of Mars is -2.9. It also tells us that the ratio in brightness between two objects is given by

where x is the difference between the two magnitudes. In our case:

We weren’t far with our seven thousand, given the approximations we made, don’t you reckon?

Do we need to check the claim that Mars can appear as big as the Moon, too? That won’t take long, now that we’re experts in the field. The apparent size of an object in the sky is given by the angle under which you see its diameter. In radians and for such small angles, it’s calculated as diameter/distance. Hey, we happen to have all the necessary data already. For Mars:

For the Moon:

That is, Mars appears 70 times smaller than the Moon in the sky.

So next time you see a message that claims such unbelievable things, make a quick mental calculation before forwarding it to everybody. Or even easier, ask yourself if you have ever seen a celestial object that looked bigger than a dot to the naked eye, apart from the Sun and Moon, and check on the Internet. There are sites like Hoax-Slayer (English) or HoaxBuster (French) dedicated to this and checking the validity of such e-mails can be done very quickly.

Next time in this column: why doesn’t the height at which you must throw a grenade to have it explode the moment it touches the ground depend on the weight of the grenade?

In particular, I’m talking about the ‘feature’ where, when you move a window close to a screen edge, it sticks to it like a steel stretcher to an MRI. It’s all very nice when that’s what you want to do but first, that’s almost never my case, second when it is, I’m able to do it without help, thank you very much, and third, it makes it almost impossible to position a window a few pixels away from the edge of the screen, which I like to do because it leaves me an access to the desktop.

So we are dealing with a feature designed to help you with something that is not very difficult in the first place, while rendering another, usually simple task very hard to achieve. It’s like replacing the staircase in a building with an elevator that only goes to the third floor. You can still reach the first floor but you have to take the elevator to the third, make a rope out of your neighbour’s bedsheets and climb down the window. And it’s not like the third floor was hard to reach before.

A good rant is no fun without pointing fingers. Here I’m especially talking about Twitterrific and Adium. I don’t use the former anymore (partly for this reason but mostly because of its utter uselessness when it comes to following discussions) and have switched to Tweetie, but I still use Adium regularly. I tried reporting the issue, years ago, suggesting to make it optional, but the developers looked down on me, saying they didn’t want to bloat the preferences with such details. Right, from the makers of an application that has preferences to turn off window shadows or to choose whether tooltips are displayed when in the background.

Granted, you can disable screen edge sticking by holding I don’t know which modifier while you drag the window, but since the feature is useless and annoying, why not make it kick in only when you jump through enough hoops to deserve it, instead of when you’re quietly minding your own business, repositioning your windows like you’ve always done for the past twenty-five years?

Last week I finally got around to patching Adium to get rid of this nonsense. The regular windows are made evil by making them of class AIDockingWindow, which is defined in the AIUtilities framework. AIBorderlessWindow, in the same framework, takes care of evilising the contact list when it’s made border-less. I could have changed the class in Interface Builder, but still would have needed to patch the code for the border-less window, and patching a nib is less robust than patching a source file.

To fix Adium for your own use, please:

• Download the patch. It was made for Adium 1.3.8 but it will likely work for a few future releases;
• Download and unpack the Adium sources (Yes, the current release must be downloaded from the Previous Releases page. Just remember we’re dealing with open source people);
• Apply the patch with patch -p1 < adium-NoDockingWindow-1.3.8.patch from within the adium-1.3.x folder;

• Build Adium:

  cd Release
  make
  

(Near the end there is some GUI scripting going on to tweak the disk image, better stop working at that moment.)

• Adium can be found in the Adium_1.3.x-NDW.dmg disk image in Release/build/.

• Optional: if you use foamee, get me a coffee:

  @ioucoffee @oscherler for de-evilising Adium windows.

  Thanks.

Hope this helps.

Update (5.11.2009): Patching the Makefile too now, updating the instructions.

[Edited version in case you have filters. I trust you’ll get the gist of the original.]

When I copy code from a <pre> tag, Safari inserts artificial (they’re not in the page source) non breaking spaces where lines are indented.

[all capitals]This is the most [mean word for “not very wise”] thing to do [lots of exclamation marks][/all capitals] because usually, you have code inside <pre> tags. And compilers and interpreters don’t like it when spaces are replaced by non-breaking spaces, and it gives rise to errors you can’t easily see the origin of, and it’s incredibly [expression that pictures private properties reduced in powder].

I should write a filter that does this automatically.

If you are a Mac developer and have been directed to this page, it’s probably an invitation to improve the user-experience in the very first phase of your customer’s dealings with your software.

Spaces (Macintosh only)
We do not officially support the Apple OS X Leopard “Spaces” feature. If you are experiencing problems when using Photoshop CS4 and Spaces, please contact Apple Support.

What they meant:

Using (Macintosh only)
We do not officially support the Apple OS X “Using Software” feature. If you are experiencing problems when having an Adobe product and trying to use it, please contact your ass.

Evidence can easily be found here and there.

Apple gets “massive, global exposure” when it sneezes.

• Fixed the tendency of one of the ponies (the pink one) to throw a shoe on alternate Tuesdays.

Er?

Great hint. The number of problems with adobe updater has just been reduced by one. 1,653,453,245 to go.

P.S.: Technically, FileVault cannot be called the culprit. adobe updater is the culprit. FileVault is the thing we can act on to work around this particular problem, since there is no way adobe is ever going to fix a single bug in updater.

P.P.S.: This is not an attack on the hint author. We need such workarounds since the only other solution is for Apple to rewrite Mac OS X from scratch around adobe updater, which is a little bit, but not much more likely to happen than adobe fixing the damn thing.

The Energy Saver icon used to be an incandescent light bulb; Apple has replaced it with a compact fluorescent as a part of its quest to reduce the energy consumption of its icons.

:-)

There’s no reason to overcomplicate it to where your uninstall scripts have to include Python 2.5 IN ITS ENTIRETY so you can uninstall on fucking Mac OS X 10.4. Again, think about this…you have to include a major language framework so that you can UNINSTALL PROGRAMS. The fact this passed the laugh test shows how far up your asses your heads are.