Droiding

Happy Humpday. Well that came faster than usual. We’re already halfway through the week!

But that hasn’t stopped the tide of economic data. The Institute for Supply Management issued its manufacturing index on Tuesday, which dropped to 49.1 in August, down from 51.2 in July. When below 50, manufacturing is contracting.

Yet there’s other news actually lifting the Dow today. Hong Kong withdrew its controversial extradition bill…the U.K. parliament voted to block a no-deal Brexit…Treasury yields are headed north…and the Fed’s Beige Book on current economic conditions will be released later today.

If you’re a Droid, it’s a happy day. Android 10 launched today after six betas over six months, and will be available to all Pixel phones first (there’s a reason you paid a premium for *that* phone!)

The download on new features, as reported by Ars Technica: “Fully gestural” navigation, which includes navigational swipe gestures; a fully supported dark theme; machine learning for incoming messages with “helpful” action buttons (think Gmail “smart replies”); and “Project Mainline,” a new and more powerful file type. Android 10 also ships with foldable smartphone support(You know, in case one ever actually makes it to market) and more robust multi-screen support. 

Happy Droiding!

Cyber RATS

It’s been a bad computer hair week.

My MacBook Pro, which is an early ‘08 model, took a hard drive nose dive earlier this week, and, of course, my Apple Care expired in March.

This after the same machine did a hard drive nose dive last summer (along with the motherboard), when both were still under Apple Care.

Here’s the irony: I have a Dell Latitude E4300 that I’d been running Ubuntu Linux on, and decided to go back to Windows 7, and was literally in the midst of rebuilding a productive machine with all the stuff I need to, you know, do actual work, and THAT was the time Mr. Turbo MBP decided to jump off into the bottom of an empty pool.

Thank you, Mactronics, here in Austin, for fixing the MBP in two days.  Those folks are some of the most awesome tech repair teams I’ve ever dealt with.

So we’re beyond the Debt Ceiling deal, finally.  Now, if we can just keep the economic skies from falling.

And there was more bad news today.  MacAfee, the now Intel-owned security firm, issued a jaw-dropping report about a five-year cyber security exposure that impacted 74 organizations and governments around the world.

If you want to get caught up on this story, go straight to the source, a blog post by MacAfee VP Dmitri Alperovitch.  If you had any second thoughts about the severity of industrial espionage and security break-ins online, this ought to put those thoughts to rest.

The list of victims is a veritable “Who’s Who” of nation-states and institutions. Impacted were the U.S., Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam, Canada, ASEAN, the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and a host of companies, including defense contractors and high-tech firms.

Wrote Alperovitch in his blog post, “This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history…The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening.”

Probably not a bad time to remind folks of IBM’s security solutions.

In the meantime, I’m sitting here inside Turboville downloading Mac OS X Lion and in the process of rebuilding my MBP so I don’t have a “No Mac Attack.” 

Wish me luck!