British Govt makes Open Documet Format official

If you live in the UK, you'll soon be able to fill out government paperwork with your freedoms intact. The British government announced last week that Open Document Format (ODF), HTML, and PDF will be the official file formats used by all government agencies.

I hope we (Kenya Govt) follow suit soon because the .doc and .docx standards just slow down things. I use libreoffice all the times and ocassionally I have to export to these proprietary forms to share with other users.
More reading here.

GPS Bullets.. an end to high speed police chase?

Starchase have begun developing technologies like its “GPS bullet” pursuit management system, which the company describes as a “real-time tagging and tracking tool to reduce dangerous high-speed pursuits.”
A compression tool is mounted on the front of a police car and fires the sticky bullets on the suspects car. The police now only need to look at their GPS receivers to locate it. This eliminates the need for high speed pursuit.
This is an expensive tech solution by Kenyan standards but it would be nice to have it with our Kenyan cops as well given the high number of traffic offences.
Story borrowed from Ars.

The Matatu Sense. A new sense for the Nairobian cyclist

In our lower primary we were taught about the five human senses and how they are important in the life of every human being. Now, cycling or walking in Nairobi requires you to have another special kind of sense that you only get from living in Nairobi or another busy town in Kenya. If you are a pedestrian or a cyclist then you probably have an idea of what I am talking about. The Matatu sense!
A Matatu is a minibus used for transportation in Kenya and is privately owned. More reading here.
The Matatu sense gives you an added ability that can't be compared to anything, even magic doesn't come close. It lets you know of the following without taking a quick glance behind to see whats coming:

• The size of the Matatu (14 seater or 26/40 seater mini bus)
• The colour of the Matatu
• The router the Matatu operates on
• The recklessness of the driver and crew (just by the way it is approaching)

And not only does it allow you to know what's behind,  some of the above applies to what lies ahead and this allows you to make good decisions and the road and avoid mishaps. A simple decision for a cyclist to
Now with these in mind you can now make a quick decision depending on the circumstance and either accelerate and avoid it or just sit up and give way.
Another advantage that I get from this is that you do not need to look behind and therefore you remain focused and never have to hit the 'wall' on the pave. Let me know your experiences.
So, is this a new discovery in Biology? :-D

Amstel Gold Race 2014

Another big race on the pro cycling calendar! My pick for victory tomorrow is Phillip Gilbert. The BMC rider has shown that he is in top form (recent win at Brabantse Pijl) and should emerge victorious or make the podium at least. More on pre-race analysis here.

Bypassing Samsung Galaxy S5 fingerprint scanner

Samsung just launched the Samsung Galaxy S5 recently and it comes with a bio-metrics feature known as the fingerprint scanner to provide an extra layer of security.
The fingerprint scanner lets you unlock your phone using your fingerprint as well as make payments through Paypal (smell something?). SRLabs researchers recently uploaded a YouTube video, demonstrated how they were able to bypass the fingerprint authentication mechanism to gain unauthorized access just by using a lifted fingerprint with wood-glue based dummy finger. Paypal users are the ones at a big risk since the feature can also be used to transfer money to other paypal accounts. More reading here.

Quick way to check for heartbleed vulnerability

Other than checking the version of OpenSSL that your server is running, here's a quick way to find out if any of your servers is vulnerable.

http://rehmann.co/projects/heartbeat/

This is the work of Luke Rehmann and he's made it pretty easy especially for those of us who can't remember the server passwords or you just want to do some white hat hacking! Just key in your ip/domain name and the SSL port and hit submit. You should get a brief report in less that 30 seconds on whether you are vulnerable or not.

Canadian Taxpayer data stolen.. thanks to the Heartbleed bug

The heartbleed vulnerability is already being used by hackers to gain access to vital information. Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) officials said they removed public access to online tax services last Tuesday, a day after the catastrophic defect in the widely used OpenSSL cryptography library surfaced. But by then it was too late.  More reading here

Fixing the Heartbleed vulnerability on CentOS and Debian

So if you frequent tech news websites or you are on a tech mailing list, you have probably heard about the Heartbleed bug on the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. So why the name heartbleed? The FAQs at heartbleed.com give a good explanation on this:

Bug is in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS (transport layer security protocols) heartbeat extension (RFC6520). When it is exploited it leads to the leak of memory contents from the server to the client and from the client to the server.

 This bug found its way into the OpenSSL software through a software patch which then found its way to the master repository and hence into stable releases at the time. More reading on Heartbleed.
Debian 6 (squeeze) and other older versions of Debian are unaffected. Debian 7  (Wheezy) is running the vulnerable version of OpenSSL and therefore needs to be upgraded. First ensure the the Debian securities mirror (security.debian.org) is enabled in your sources.list and then do:

"apt-get update && apt-get upgrade"

For CentOS, the affected release is CentOS 6. Older releases are unaffected. To apply the upgrade, execute the following:

yum clean all && yum update "openssl*"

More reading and how to revoke and re-issue your SSL certificates.