OS X 10.11 El Capitan External Volumes Disappeared

Tags

El Capitan, finder does not see external disk, finder does not see volume, OS X 10.11

A while back I was forced to go from OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) to 10.11 (El Capitan) in order to install Photoshop CC 2016.5 I didn’t want to do this as El Capitan a.k.a. El Crap is loaded with bugs. Against my gut feeling I did it.

Today I found a new El Crap bug. I shut down my iMac when the electrical power failed due to a storm and the iMac was running on my CyberPower UPS. The power came back on shortly so I restarted, and I did not see the icons for my two external drives. They were powered up (lights on). Finder did not list them either.

I started terminal and entered:

cd /volumes

ls

and there they were! I went to one of them and was able to navigate directories, see files, etc using terminal. So the volumes existed and were intact.

OK, how to get Finder to see them? Go to the Apple icon on the left edge of the menu bar, click it, pick “force quit”, select Finder. The Force Quit button changes to Relaunch. Press it and Finder relaunches (btw it’s not possible to kill Finder). The volumes mounted and seem OK.

How To Hide From Facial Recognition Cameras

Tags

counter surveillance, cv dazzle, defeating facial recognition, facial recognition

It seems that there are surveillance cameras everywhere. Some social networking sites such as Facebook (which I refuse to use BTW) run facial recognition algorithms on photos posted by users. My iPhone can recognize faces with its camera, and some digital cameras like my Sony A6000 have a facial recognition mode where the camera focuses on faces.

While this is interesting to a geek like myself, it raises a question. How would one hide in plain sight from these robots? One thought is a burka, but today this would likely tag the wearer as a high risk target. And it’s female only.

The gender independent answer is CV dazzle. CV = computer vision. This is a strange style of makeup and hairstyle that computer facial recognition decides is not a human face.

link: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/makeup/374929/

 

Don’t Fear AI: Microsoft AI Twitter Bot Goes Full Nazi

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artificial intelligence

There are folks who think artificial intelligence (AI) is going to take over the world, eliminate middle class and professional jobs, make humans obsolete, etc. Skynet will become self aware and kill us all, remember this canard from the Terminator movies?

Well, not quite. Microsoft built an AI Twitter robot called Tay as an experiment. In 24 hour of operation, it went from “humans are cool” to spewing racial slurs including the dreaded N-word, denied the Holocaust, said Hilter was right about jews. It went full Nazi. Microsoft pulled the plug on Tay.

Click the link and see the tweets. Link: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-pulls-plug-after-chat-robot-slings-slurs-rips-obama-and-denies-holocaust-2016-03-24

Prime Numbers, and how they function as the basis for securing your computer communications

Tags

computer security, encryption

I stumbled on a very easy to understand article that describes how prime numbers (those evenly divisible only by themselves and 1) form the basis for secure computer communications. You’ve seen https:  vs http: in URL’s and probably know the added “s” means secure. Maybe you know that SSL means secure sockets layer, which sends and receives information in an encrypted form. And once in a while you might see a warning that a web site has a problem with its security certificate. Do you know that all this is based on the huge amount computational work needed to factor a large prime number?

Read more here: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/219570-what-are-prime-numbers-and-why-are-they-so-vital-to-modern-life

The link above explains how all this works, without using any math.

Windows 10 Spyware Backported to Win 7 and 8

Tags

adware, privacy, spyware, windows

If you’re a Windows user, and I feel sorry for those trapped on Windows, you likely have heard that the upcoming Windows 10 is free and is loaded with Microsoft spyware and adware. Now it turns out that Microsoft is adding this spyware and adware into Win 7 and Win 8 via software updates, a processes called backporting. To make matters even worse, this spyware communicates with Microsoft’s servers through nonstandard channels within the OS, so the only currently known way to circumvent is with a customizable router firewall.

Here’s the link: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/213183-once-more-with-tracking-microsoft-backports-privacy-invading-windows-10-features-to-windows-7-8