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This Ars Technica seems very dire. It’s a huge breach of trust for Intel hardware.

First, Dr. Drang is one of my favorite people on the internet. I’ve read every word he’s written in the past decade. One thing I know about Dr. Drang is that he can be very specific. He’s an engineer and has a very specific definition for that term. Which makes this latest post so wonderful.1 This is the true value I find in reading indie blogs. They are made by people with a real history and real values.

Monday Note is linked more often in my new feed forJean-Louis Gassée’s take on Apple. But I’ve found that Frederic Filloux’s series on the modernization of the news media much more interesting. In his April 17 post Filloux applies some of Jeff Bezos' lessons: Hence the implicit first lesson from Jeff Bezos: put the product and those who will use it at the center of your operations. Hire, train and transform the mentalities toward that goal.

This is a very impressive (and extensively referenced) blog post. I’ve repeatedly struggled to use Trello for project management. It has never clicked for me. This is a great tutorial for the basic capabilities in Trello but it’s also a thoughtful breakdown of an information capture system. I think the conclusion section is also a very honest assessment of the system.

I first met Bill DeVille through the DEVONthink forums many years ago. He was always generous with his time and even tempered with his responses. He made the experience and product better. So much so, that DevonTech hired him which instantly made me their fan. From the DevonTech website: After both his daughter and his wife had died, Bill moved from Baton Rouge, LA, to a log cabin in Nashville, IN.

From Frederic Filloux’s Monday Note: The Fake News phenomenon is like a bio-engineered plague: it spreads to all countries as specialized outlets make it their business to churn false information on an industrial scale. It hits democracies at a moment when professional media see their business models challenged from all sides. … In the end, it boils down to assessing the reputation of both publishers and authors. They won’t admit it publicly, but Google, Facebook and other large news distributors already rely on quality scoring variants.

This story by Brian Krebs is an amazing breakdown of an iCloud phishing ring. It not only provides a lot of detail about the thinking behind these phishing services (and all those phishing emails you get) but it’s a study in human nature too: This is where the story turns both comical and ironic. Many times, attackers will test their exploit on themselves whilst failing to fully redact their personal information.

I’ve said it many times before, I’m an iThoughts fan-boy. Now it’s available for Windows too and there’s a 70% discount for Mac users and a 20% discount for iOS users. It’s normally $50, which is a good price for a great app, but you can get it for $15 if you already own a license. That’s an incredible deal.

From Brian Krebs: That’s because in addition to compromising the download page for this software package, the attackers also hacked the company’s software update server, meaning any company that already had the software installed prior to the site compromise would likely have automatically downloaded the compromised version when the software regularly checked for available updates (as it was designed to do). Read all the way to the bottom for the updates.

This just tickles me. I love these solutions that are really just an opportunity to learn. This gave me the idea to score a pair of anagrams according to how many chunks one had to be cut into in order to rearrange it to make the other one. On this plan, the “cholecystoduodenostomy / duodenocholecystostomy” pair would score 3, just barely above the minimum possible score of 2. Something even a tiny bit more interesting, say “abler / blare” would score higher, in this case 4.