Lion security issue(s) 1.0

Since yesterday I just posted about how secure OS X Lion is, today I took a look around for possible flaws and security issues and guess what I've found. Passware Kit Forensic is a software for passwords recovery, and the last version can retrieve passwords from a Mac OS X Lion computer in a few minutes, regardless of password lenght. The software uses the content that is stored in the system memory and reads it via Firewire. This means that login passwords that are stored in the system memory, even when the computer is in sleep mode or locked, are used to get possibly unauthorized access to a system.
The recommendation to protect yourself from this vulnerability is to simply turn your Mac off and not let it sit in sleep mode on your desk (which seems to be rather common sense to me).
Here Don Resinger from Cnet explains the whole thing in detail.

The King of the jungle

OS X Lion has been out for almost a month. When it came out different opinions arose on the net, people were confrotning pros and cons and even mentioned "hidden features". Now you all know that I am a Linux lover, but I have to stress the true reason why I suggest to upgrade to Lion: security. One of the moste heard complaints about Lion involves the lack of support for PowerPc applications, but if you're familiar with Unix shell commands here you can find how to overcome the issue.
For what it concerns me, I love it!!!

The Google+ experience

When we think of Social Networking it's difficult not to think about Facebook. I've heard very different and interesting perspectives about what is the best platform between Twitter and Facebook and I came to the conlcusion that there's no such thing as a "best platform". They both can be very useful, depending on the purpose you're using them.

Still, I always thought that the concept of friendship in social media platforms is pretty standardized. Basically on Facebook every member of your network is equally your friend, a situation that is very far from reality. In real life you may want your best friend to know how much your boss is pissing you off and what a dumbass he is, but you surely don't want your boss to know that.

The new answer to the human need to socialize is brought you bythe Google giant, its name is Google+.

Google announced the project launching yesterday on its official blog and I strongly invite you to go there and to take a look about it. Until now 3 are the features that stand apart from previous social networking experience: Sparks, Hangouts, and Circles. The first one is a feed of the content you're really into, so when you're available, there will be always something to watch, read, or share. Hangouts is a video conference systems that lets your friends know you're free to hangout for a video chat. Then comes my favourite: Circles. It allows you to put different friends together, you can organize your relationships into groups such as "saturday night friends", "soccer friends", "colleagues", and so on. This helps users sharing the content they want just with the people they want.

Here you can take a look at the presenting video:

Now, I am a social media person and I actually can't wait to try Google+ in order to review it right here, but I will leave my last question for you. Do you think that this new patform is going to compete and somehow to contrast Facebook networking structure? Or is it just the same old thing with some new sparkling features? Tell me what you think.

Music of the Future

The music business is almost collapsed. After Napster came in, everybody seems to have an interest in fighting the piracy. That to me seems just as stupid as trying to build a house using marshmallows instead of wall bricks. So, in order to survive, major record companies have to build real celebrity phenomena that would clearly put the music content aside, to push the image of the artist before his/her message. Look yourself around, artists are being always more provocative and graphics of their albums are so eye catching and sparkling it seems to look at a jewlery advertising. Of course, that is an understatement and therefore should not be the focus of my thoughts.

Instead I was about to ask myself and to ask you, my dear readers, what will be the music of the future? Well, the ones among you who are starting to know my personal preferences through this blog will understand why the answer for me could be just one:

algorithmic composition and generative music.

To be very brief and simple, it is computer generated music. Nothing very new actually, but something that is getting more and more interesting. Basically it is software based, just as the majority of music that's recorded nowadays, but it is the software that autmatically generates melodies, notes intensity and tone, leaving the user the possibility to slightly modify them. Any change the user does will affect the algorithm that generates sound, resulting in changes in the melody, tone and/or pitch of the played note. But I'm probably getting too much technical here so...

Let's try to let your immagination run free for once in a lifetime, would you mind?

Ok then. Now imagine computers being able to compose listeneable music, generated via algorithms. Algorithm generated music is already a reality and I think this is a new, future perspective to music. Innovative players and music artists wouldn't no more be forced (and that is already happening) to get a diploma and to become experts of their instrument(s). That's what I love about technology, that it "steals" an exclusive knowledge to make it general and available for piotentially everyone. It will be a new way of making music that could cover all of the previous genres (there are a lot of researchers experimenting with algorithmic composition and acoustic instruments out there) and even create new forms of sounds and rythms.

These are just a few examples of what can be done today.

Modern and future algorithms are and will be more focused on making listeneable music and THAT (to me) is the real new music frontier.

Stay tuned!

Microsoft vs. Java

I' ve been a little bit busy lately but I'm still surfing as usual. Next posts will cover more network analysis, communication and branding related topics. But, until then,  I was just surfing following trails of bits when I had the chance to get to this very funny video. Just to start the day with a smile :-) Check it out!!