Farewell, Digg Reader

Unfortunately, Digg announced that Digg Reader is shutting down tomorrow. While I never used Digg Reader as my main RSS feed reader – I’ve got a paid subscription to Feedly – I was very happy to use it as a backup reader for those feeds that weren’t always that great at adhering to the RSS feed standard (I’m looking at you, bringatrailer.com) as it was more forgiving when it parsed feeds. Unfortunately it appears to be another one of the “feed readers are dying” incidents that seems to have started when Google Reader was shut down. There weren’t really that many alternatives in the first place unless one wanted to self host.

I recently blogged about Google and Samsung starting to offer regular security patches for their Android devices.

Over on ars technica, Ron Amadeo has an interesting article describing why the current Android ecosystem is not conducive to the quick and widespread distribution of security fixes and why this needs to change, urgently.

At this point in time it seems that in order to be halfway secure, one has to basically root the phone and run well-tested and well supported distribution like CyanogenMod. While I - and presumably most, if not all, readers of this blog - certainly have the technical know how and abilities to root a phone, that’s a poor approach to security because most people either will not or cannot root their phones.

Some security researchers from UCSD showed a proof of concept exploit via one of the dongles that appears to be also used by car insurance companies to monitor your driving “to give you discounts for good driving”. I’m not really a fully paid up subscriber of the tin foil hat brigade but stuff like this makes me glad that I’m still opting for the old-fashioned way of paying for car insurance. Of course the fact that over half our fleet is too old to be OBD-II compliant may have some bearing on that as well…

We have an early 2008 MacBook “Blackbook” that is still working perfectly well and does everything we ask from it. It’s one of the reasons I love Apple hardware - it’s well engineered and works without a major fuss. Obviously we’re not playing games on it but it’s perfect for us to use for tasks that need a bit more power or typing than you’d want to do on a tablet. It’s also perfect for doing tasks that I want to use a separate computer for, like online banking.