Day: December 12, 2014

‘Security by Antiquity’ Bricks Payment Terminals

Last week, several thousand credit card payment terminals at various retailers across the country suddenly stopped working, their LCD displays showing a blank screens instead of numbers and letters. Puzzled merchants began to worry that this was perhaps part of some sophisticated hacker attack on their cash registers.

Windows Desktop Naming Convention Unveiled

I was sitting in an interview in Dubai, UAE , discussing the finer points of Active Directory, provisioning users, user life cycle management, monitoring AD changes, recovering from AD changes, etc. During our conversation, we got onto the issue of Windows desktops and the history of Microsoft and the desktop. We noticed that there is a distinct pattern of good and not-so-good (OK, in some cases AWFUL) operating systems.