If I wasn't taking August off, there are two stories that I might have written about.
The first involves Mat Honan, a well-known and well-respected technology writer at Wired who got cyber-rolled in early August. Honan's iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro were wiped, and his email accounts and Twitter account were taken over. The amazing thing about this story is that no high-tech was involved. Everything the hackers did was achieved using a little social engineering and knowledge of the customer support practices of two large tech companies.
Check out the story in Mat's own words in the following video and in the links below. Take a moment to consider whether you are/were vulnerable to a similar attack.
The second big story this month that I might have written about took place a few days later: the Mars Curiosity rover. With very little fanfare, NASA landed a car-sized rover on Mars, with a mission to study the planet to see whether there is evidence that Mars might have supported life in the past.
Curiosity is a rolling lab that landed on the surface of Mars using an incredibly complex (worthy of sci-fi movies) system of parachutes, jets, and cranes. Anything could have failed, but it all worked flawlessly. Curiosity is now taking photos and preparing for a long-term rolling mission on the red planet.I'll be back in September with fresh blogs and hopefully with some material written by friends and colleagues. Interested in writing for RapidGroove? Drop me a line with your ideas and we'll talk about them.
Links:
- http://www.wired.com/
- http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/
- http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/mat-honan-video/
- http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
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