Practical Technology

for practical people.

April 15, 2020
by sjvn01
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With coronavirus forcing us to work from home, SUSE suggests the Linux desktop

Misery is being a system administrator and discovering — as your workforce marches away to work from home, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic — that many of your home users are still running Windows 7 or Windows XP. Of course, you could send them home with Windows 10 laptops or have them all log in via Windows remote desktop services (RDS), but there’s no IT budget for any of that. What are you going to do? SUSE has a suggestion: Switch them to the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).

Now, you may think, “Of course, they’re a Linux company.” But you’d be wrong.

With coronavirus forcing us to work from home, SUSE suggests the Linux desktop More>

April 14, 2020
by sjvn01
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The trouble with 2FA

I use a lot of online services on a lot of different PCs and smartphones. Every day, I would get a handful of two-factor authentication (2FA) text messages from Google, Microsoft, WordPress, etc., etc. And, while I know that this kind of 2FA isn’t security theater, I also know it’s not really secure either.

Yes, 2FA can help preserve your security, but it’s not a security panacea. Here’s what it is, what it’s good for, and, how, far too often, it can be broken leaving your accounts wide open to attack.

The trouble with 2FA More>

April 14, 2020
by sjvn01
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The coronavirus is revealing our technology blunders

You’ve lost your job and now you face an obsolete, sluggish unemployment system that feels like it was written in the 1950s. Actually, it’s more than a feeling. If you’re in New Jersey, New York or Connecticut, your unemployment system was written in 60-year-old Cobol. Meanwhile, if you want to apply for unemployment benefits online in Washington, D.C., the system insists you use Internet Explorer. As I recall, IE was put out to pasture five years ago.

With the United States leading the world both in total number of COVID-19 diagnoses and total number of deaths related to the virus, a lot of people have been asking how the richest country in the world could do so poorly in dealing with a pandemic. We might also be asking how the most technologically advanced country in the world can be so technologically backwards in some ways.

The coronavirus is revealing our technology blunders More>

April 14, 2020
by sjvn01
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How Apple and Google coronavirus contact tracing will work

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “We have the capability of mobilizing identification — testing — identification, isolation, contact tracing” to finally get a grip on the coronavirus.

The first three we know about, but what’s contract tracing?

How Apple and Google coronavirus contact tracing will work More>

April 13, 2020
by sjvn01
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Verizon introduces open-source, big data coronavirus search engin

As we struggle to get a grip on exactly how COVID-19 makes us ill and what we can do about it, researchers have created over 50,000 articles. That’s a lot of information! So, how do you make sense of it all? Verizon Media is doing it by using Vespa. This is an open-source, big data processing program to create a coronavirus academic research search engine: CORD-19 Search.

Verizon introduces open-source, big data coronavirus search engine More>