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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 10 - 15 JULY 2023
Hello and Welcome,
Meetings This Week
2023/07/11 — 18:00-20:00 — July, Tue — Programming
2023/07/15 — 14:00-16:00 — July, Sat — Web Design
Meeting Next Week
2023/07/18 — 10:00-12:00 — July, Tue — Tuesday Group
Schedule of Current & Upcoming Meetings
First Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Main Meeting
First Saturday 13:00-14:00 — Penrith Group
Second Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Programming
Third Tuesday 10:00-12:00 — Tuesday Group
Third Saturday 14:00-16:00 — Web Design
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Go to the official Sydney PC Calendar for this month's meeting details.
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Penrith meetings are held every 2nd month on the 1st Saturday from 1-2 pm.
The following meetings are in July, September and November 2023.
ASCCA News:Tech News:
Stop Blurring Sensitive Information (Here's How to Do It Right)
See the How-To Geek article by JOE FEDEWA | JUL 4, 2023, at 7:00 am EDT.
Blurred Credit Card
When there's something in a photo that you'd like to keep personal — such as a credit card number or someone's face — you might blur it or scribble over it. But that's not a secure way to redact information — here's why.
Why Blurring Isn't Good Enough Anymore
People have been blurring sensitive information in screenshots and photos for a long time. It's used heavily in the news and other forms of media. However, as technology advances, it's become much easier to crack blurred and pixelated images. So what's the problem?
Blurring or scribbling out something is a great way to hide sensitive information from human eyes, but that's not what you should be concerned about. Machine learning tools have made it relatively simple to get around simple redaction methods like blurring and pixelization.
Researchers at the University of Texas and Cornell University put a simple deep-learning algorithm to identify blurred-out faces. While humans had a measly 0.19% accuracy, the algorithm had a crazy 71% accuracy — 83% when given five guesses. That's pretty alarming.
Tools like this have been around for a while — the study above was from 2016 — and they're not particularly difficult to use. Similar tools have been trained to identify faces blurred with YouTube's built-in video tools. All you need is some open-source software and a bunch of blurred photos to teach it.
It's easy to see how this same technology can be used on even more sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, license plates, social security numbers, and much more. Fooling humans is easy enough, but fooling machine algorithms is another story.
Avoid These Redacting Practices
So blurring or pixelating text and photos is not great for sensitive information, but there's more to it than that. Sometimes, scribbling things out poses security concerns as well. We can look at the Microsoft vs. FTC case as a perfect example.
Sony's CEO of PlayStation supplied confidential documents with numbers, dates, and figures crossed out with black Sharpie. However, when those documents were scanned, it was easy to see the text underneath the marker. Now everyone can see Sony's business details.
For the same reason, you should avoid using only a Sharpie in the physical and digital worlds. It's relatively easy to see through Apple's markup tool if you boost the gamma; Android's similar tools suffer from the same thing.
Blurring and scribbling obscures information, but it doesn't completely block it. And in the case of digital tools, you're sometimes only creating a layer on top of the image, which could be removed if you're not careful.
The Best Method
The best way to truly cover sensitive information is to ensure there's no trace left behind. This requires more effort, but it's worth it when obscuring sensitive information.
For example, look at this image of an Apple Card with the name blurred out. You can't read it, but there is information there that could be used by a machine-learning tool to figure out what is concealed beneath the pixelation. Because remember, technically speaking, I haven't removed anything — I've rearranged the data.
Apple Card Blurred
Compare that to this image, which has the name fully blocked out by a solid bar of colour. Nothing there could be used to piece together what's underneath.
Apple Card Blocked
Finally, there is one other crucial thing to consider. When you redact information from an image or document, you need to ensure the technique yields actual redaction and not just masking.
If whatever format you're working in, be it an image file or a document file, supports layers and continued editing, you can run into issues where you slap a solid coloured bar over the sensitive information. Someone can turn right around and lift that bar off like somebody peeling masking tape off a canvas.
This is a historical and ongoing problem significant enough that tools like Adobe Acrobat and Preview have dedicated redaction tools that delete and overwrite the redacted data to avoid the problem. So whatever tool you use, double-check that you can't turn around and open the saved file right back up and peek under the redaction bar.
This is what you should aim for when hiding sensitive information. Think more about how you can erase more so than obscure. If you're trying to cover something in the physical world, don't be afraid to double down. Break out some good ol' Wite-Out and a Sharpie.
Sensitive information is, well, sensitive, so don't take a shortcut when it comes to hiding it, and always double-check the method you used to redact it.
I Can't Imagine Using Windows Without the Everything App
See the How-To Geek article by JASON FITZPATRICK | @jasonfitzpatric | DEC 8, 2022, 7:30 am EDT.
The Everything App
There are very few apps I can't imagine life without, but at the top of that short list is Everything. I've used it for over a decade, and it's an integral part of my Windows experience.
What Is Everything?
Everything is a Windows freeware file search application created by programmer David Carpenter in 2008. We shared Everything with our readers for the first time shortly after that, and some of us, like yours truly, have been using it ever since.
The single most notable thing about Everything is the speed — which is why we give it a shoutout whenever we talk about searching Windows faster.
If you've ever used Windows file search or some third-party file search tools, the most memorable thing about the experience is how long it takes.
Even after all these years, Windows file search is agonizingly slow. Truly, it's agony. In an age of inexpensive SSDs with instant booting and instant program loading, waiting thirty seconds for Windows to grind through a search feels like torture. It doesn't matter if you're still using Windows 7 or upgraded to Windows 11. Windows search has never been speedy.
Everything sidesteps the shortcomings of the Windows file search by doing something that was novel when the application was first released and remains novel: it taps right into the file table at the file system level for lightning-fast search.
How fast is it? It's so fast that if you create a new file, by the time you open up the Everything search box a moment later, the file is instantly in the index. It's unlikely you could create the file and get to the search box fast enough to beat the nearly instantaneous addition of the entry into the Everything index.
The only downside to Everything is that it works off the file table and the file names and does not index the contents of the files. If you need a tool to look deep into documents and help you find key phrases, this isn't it. But if you're trying to find where, exactly, you put that 2022 Johnson Farms Drilling Proposal Rev.A.pdf file or your tax returns from five years ago, it's almost magical in its speed and efficiency.
And Here's Why I Find Everything Indispensable
I titled this piece "I Can't Imagine Using Windows Without the Everything App," and I say that without a bit of hyperbole. I've used Everything daily since it came out and across multiple versions of Windows — Windows XP to Windows 11 — numerous computer upgrades and on every Windows machine I've owned.
It's a perfect tool for somebody like me. I have a huge number of files across a huge number of folders and drives. But as long as I name files and folders sensibly as they come in, it doesn't matter where they end up. They could be on the C drive, the G drive, or even buried in a network drive hosted down in my basement (you can enable network drive search in the Everything settings).
No matter where the files are, I can find them if I remember even a fraction of the folder or file name. Old taxes, work forms, Photoshop projects, comic books I hoarded five years ago, you name it. I can churn it up to the surface with a few keywords if I want it.
For example, Nintendo recently sent a cease and desist letter to the Internet Archives to pull their massive archive of old Nintendo Power issues. Naturally, as a lifelong amateur archivist, that made me say, "Didn't I squirrel scans of Nintendo Power away somewhere?" sure enough, I did. I might have forgotten where they were, but Everything didn't.
It instantly powered through 3,558,139 files and folders on my computer and the attached drives to find what I wanted when I wanted it.
Now you might have less than 3.5 million files. And you might not have random old files from a decade ago that you want to find. But even for files from last month, it's an unbelievable time saver. If you can remember anything about the file — part of the name, the file extension, the root directory it might be deeply buried in — you can dig it up with a few keystrokes.
Even on my laptops, whose files are not stacked ten terabytes deep like on my main computers, I still install Everything immediately. I can't live without that instant file search, and I certainly don't want to be stuck waiting for Windows search to sift through the files at the rate of a folder a minute.
In fact, after writing this veritable love letter to the app, I'm going to donate to the project, and I hope you download the app and maybe shoot a few bucks their way too.
And hey, if you're on the fence… it's freeware. Download it. Try it. Feel the unbelievable thrill of searching, well, Everything, on your computer instantly.
Hard Facts:
The Fraught Journey to Reach the Titanic
See the ABC News article by By Simon Elvery, Georgina Piper, Margaret Burin, Tim Leslie and Matt Liddy | Updated 23 Jun 2023, 11:26 am | Published 23 Jun 2023, 5:47 am.
The North Atlantic Ocean, where the Titan submersible was launched on a
fateful trip to view the wreck of the Titanic is inhospitable, at times outright
hostile.
And that's before you even venture below the waves.
Take a 3,800-metre journey to understand why seeing the Titanic remains such
a rare and dangerous adventure.
One of the first big challenges of a deep sea expedition is manoeuvring a submersible from the deck of a boat into the water. Usually, a huge ship equipped with a crane is the answer.
But in the case of the Titan, it was lowered into the water on a platform, and then scuba divers unclipped it once submerged. This allowed it to operate from a smaller ship.
At the Earth's surface, you're experiencing one atmosphere's worth of pressure. But under the ocean, the pressure increases by the equivalent of one atmosphere for every 10 metres you go down.
So at a depth of just 200 metres, the pressure is already 20 times greater than at sea level. For comparison, the pressure inside a car tyre is only roughly double the pressure we feel on the surface.
This intense pressure is the most significant risk to deep-sea missions.
Ahmed Gabr undertook the deepest scuba dive on record in 2014. He reached 332 metres below the surface of the Red Sea.
The operations of military submarines are classified, but experts say they typically max out at depths of about 500 metres.
The deepest-ever submarine rescue occurred at 480 metres in 1973 when two men were saved from the submersible Pisces III on the seabed off Ireland.
Deep sea expeditions have to grapple with entanglement hazards — being tangled up in a fishing net or caught underneath a rock overhang could stop a mission from being able to return to the surface.
Submersibles rely on ballast to adjust their buoyancy and return to the surface; this involves dropping weight when it's time to ascend. The Titan reportedly had seven levels of fallbacks, so it could surface even if some of its systems failed.
...
The debris of the Titan has been discovered on the ocean floor several hundred metres from the Titanic wreck, with all on board believed to be dead.
If it had been found intact deep underwater, then a remote-operated sub like the French Victor 6000 on a long cable would have been needed to attach a line to it and winch it up to the surface.
ROVs can operate to depths much deeper than the Titanic wreck and have been used to raise fighter jets and smaller ships successfully.
Most scientific and industrial work at these depths involves submersibles that don't carry humans.
Professor Stefan Williams from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics says you can often see as much using cameras on robotic vehicles that are operated remotely.
"A crewed submersible they have their niche. It gives people that sense of being there."
"But you're looking through a tiny little porthole. You don't have a broad expanded view. Light attenuates quickly, so you can only see what's right before you."
Experts estimate the Titan submersible lost contact with the surface when it was about 3,500 metres down. Importantly, some of Titan's navigation systems relied on communications with the surface.
The Titanic hit the ocean floor around 2:30 on April 15, 1912.
Over a century, the world has changed beyond recognition, but these depths remain at the very outer limits of the human experience.
The Titanic at 3,772 metres deep
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Bob Backstrom
~ Newsletter Editor ~
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