Steal an iPhone, Then What?

My buddy recently spent a couple weeks in Europe, traveling with friends. He went there for Oktoberfest then visited Italy, the Netherlands, and France. While in Paris, someone stole his buddy's iPhone. They tracked it down to a street corner where they found a group of hooligans (there's a word I rarely use); when confronted, the kids ran off.

My buddy and I both used to work at Apple, so we discussed what someone could do with a stolen iPhone. We concluded that a stolen iPhone is useless without the login and password, even if you replace the SIM card. Around 2010, iPhones and iPads were becoming hot items, making them a key item to steal. A common problem on the NYC subway was that a thief would snatch it out of a victim's hand when exiting a subway car as the doors were closing.

In response to the rash of thefts, Apple began making it impossible for an iPhone (or iPad) to be used without the proper credentials. These devices can't be reset to factory settings; so, if you forget your PIN or Apple ID login and password then your device is bricked.

UPDATE 8 Nov 2017: I asked a question at this morning's Tech Coffee, "What good is a stolen iPhone?" and an entrepreneur answered with "Spare parts."
Can iPhones be stripped like a stolen car? Perhaps the screen?

Tips for Getting Back into the Cockpit

Flying to Catalina.

One key thing I learned from Dave Winer about blogging is that its purpose is to narrate one's work. Whenever I type up a long "how to" e-mail, I realize that other's can probably use the info so I post it to my blog.

A classmate from the Naval Academy wrote me, today, saying that she wanted to get back into flying and she asked for my opinion. 

Here's my response...


Hello Melissa,

Great to hear from you.

Head-set, what type do you use? 

I used https://www.clarityaloft.com headset. It uses foam hearing aid plugs which provides excellent passive noise reduction (plus it doesn’t press against your glasses/sunglasses like traditional headsets). When I was learning to fly, a couple of my instructors were using headsets with active noise reduction (i.e. like Bose), but their batteries kept dying making the noice cancellation useless until they replaced the batteries.

If a helicopter uses the same two prong headset connector as a fixed wing plane then it should work.

Ipad? What are you using? Wi-fi, or the wifi plus cellular?

I always fly with my iPad using the ForeFlight app. It is phenomenal. It graphically shows TFRs, weather, etc. I have cellular so I can file a flight plan via ForeFlight  But cellular isn’t required. When you subscribe to the app, you can use it on two devices like an iPad and iPhone, so you could file your flight plane (VFR or IFR) via your iPhone.

You don’t need data connectivity when flying because ForeFlight downloads any VFR and IFR charts that you need, plus it’ll download the approach plates so you can see your position on an approach as well as on a taxi diagram. 

I have a Stratus receiver that I place above my panel and it relays NexRad weather and traffic to my iPad, plus Stratus has WAAS to augment GPS with accuracy down to one meter.

Kneeboard? Type you use?

I have a generic kneeboard that I bought at my flight school. Nothing special about that other than it has a bunch of handy stuff written on it like light signal codes for loss of communications, special transponder frequencies for emergencies, etc. 

Any sectionals or maps you recommend?

The FAA allows private pilots to use ForeFlight as an EFB (electronic flight bag) in lieu of paper maps/charts, A/FD, etc. Keep in mind, though, that technology can fail. I had that happen once, after I landed at an airport, so I pulled out my iPhone and used the taxi diagram on my iPhone to taxi. I still print out my approach plates and taxi diagrams and have them clipped to my yoke.

Anything else you can recommend to help get me back in the air?

I don’t use anything from Jeppesen only because, when ForeFlight first came out, they used FAA approach plates and charts. Now, ForeFlight offers Jepp, but what I’ve been using is great.

Of everything I mentioned, ForeFlight is the most important to me. You can probably download it and try it for free for a month or so to check it out. It’s amazing. It’s revolutionized cockpit resource management for the single pilot.

One other piece of gear that I love is my Brightline flight bag. It’s modularized to be taken apart, but I always fly with the entire bag. It holds my iPad, Clarity Aloft headset, Stratus receiver, clipboard, charts, flashlight, emergency hand held radio etc.

How’s that sound?

Don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any more questions.

Cheers,

Joe

Daylight Saving Time: A Coders Achilles' Heel

Good news – tomorrow's a 25 hour day! Most of us get an extra hour of sleep.

It's also a day when date/time bugs are discovered in code. It's an easy mistake for software engineers to make: thinking that there's always 24 hours in a day.

"When is tomorrow?" asks a coder. Well, I'll just add 24 hours to midnight – a common error that I've seen. Adding 24 hours only works if you add it to, say noon, but not midnight. 

When I worked at Wyndham, a business analyst (BA) reported a bug in our hotel booking website. He told us, in our morning meeting, that QA booked a weekend (three nights; arrive Friday and depart Monday). At checkout, the system was reporting only two nights even though the correct Friday – Monday days was displayed. As soon as the BA said it only happened on one weekend, I immediately knew the problem. I said, "See if that weekend coincides with daylight saving time." Sure enough, it did. It made me look smart, but, truth be told, I had not only made this same mistake myself, as a WebObjects developer at Apple, but I had seen this bug deep in the inner workings of WebObjects prior to version 4.5.

It easy to think that every day has 24 hours and it's hard to test for all the edge cases in software.

Do Not Call Registry

I think the phone company and our federal government's Do Not Call registry (https://donotcall.gov) are letting us down.

The cell phone network is a closed system, which gives the phone companies complete control over who accesses it; so, I'm thinking that it wouldn't be too hard to block calls displaying a caller ID from a disconnected/out of service phone number in the same way that Gmail blocks or filters spam. 🤔

The Entrepreneur's Pitch: Keep it Tidy

Keep your pitch tidy.

I've mentored many entrepreneurs over the years – they usually come from a "maker" background in that they make things. Typically, they make physical products or they are software engineers. Most of them are in the midst of their careers as individual contributors. They usually work quietly at their desks without much interaction with others. While this is great for their productivity, it doesn't give them the soft people skills to communicate clearly when interacting with other people.

I've listened to some entrepreneurs take 15 or 30 minutes to explain to me what their product does. That's 60 times too long. For a conversation opener, it should take a couple sentences to tell someone what your company or product does. Longer than that and people lose interest and they're not going to want to work with you.

If you don't know how to do this then practice. Start off with telling the listener if your "thing" is a product or service. "We manufacture an LED light that's an alarm clock for your nightstand which is more effective at waking you up compared to an alarm clock."

That single sentence is how I'd describe TheUplight. Most importantly, it leads with the benefits, not the features. From that sentence, the listener can follow up with their own questions, i.e., "Why is it more effective?" which the entrepreneur behind The UpLights responds with, "The UpLight gently prepares your body for waking up to reduce morning stress and increase productivity throughout the day."

The problem with listing a litany of features is that customers then have to figure out how those features would be of benefit. I know this sounds simple, but it can be very difficult to focus on what's marketable. For example, "it's patented" isn't marketable. While that tidbit is marketable to venture capitalists, it's not a buying decision factor for consumers. I don't care if I buy a patented or patent pending product. Big whoop. So, knowing your audience is important, too. But, regardless of your audience, make your point succinctly. There's a lot of noise out there.

Here's one of the best example I know of about succinct marketing, "1,000 Songs in your Pocket."

Student Learning in the 21st Century

A few years ago, I heard about some teachers who were "reversing the classroom" by posting their classroom lesson videos on YouTube. Students would watch the lessons at home and then do their "homework" in class. This gave the teacher a more effective opportunity to help students work through the lesson's problems, rather than the students' parents. It seems like a good idea for more affluent school districts. However, one teacher I know, with ties to the Kibera slums in Nairobi, quickly pointed out that it wouldn't work in all areas.

The Gouge

I went to a military college which had a tightly organized student body where we maintained file cabinets of past exams and quizzes. If a professor gave the same test as before then students would have a leg up. When I brought this up with a friend, he pointed out that a well know textbook rental company started getting into a similar business. When I hear of business ideas like that I ask myself, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Communal Note Taking

With apps like Google Docs, where multiple people can edit a document at the same time, students now use it for collaborative note taking during lectures. Brilliant.

Wikipedia

Students can't cite Wikipedia as a source. But any decently written Wikipedia article will cite sources – so students can cite the original source.

The worst of the privileged white men

The worst privileged white men are the ones who have no idea, or refuse to believe they're living in a different context than others.

And context matters. 

Otherwise we wouldn't celebrate the minor achievements of children or have age groups at 5Ks. Why do we celebrate them? Because they represent the best-of, and significant progress forward.

Context matters.

Let money be the absolute quantitative decider and let love be the qualitative one.

Medio Maraton y Ultramaraton 57K in Mexico

This was one dirty forest.

As I descended from the mountain top into the depths of the ashes that had once been a scenic forest it seemed that hell had been here and moved on. It wasn't possible to go up and down the mountains without grabbing onto the dead trees wrapped in a bark of soot. Wearing a white shirt was a poor choice of colors for me. I mean, seriously, who wears white after Labor Day?

The beautiful forest that the trail took us through had been torched by wildfire, last month, leaving dirt and dusty ash with charred bark on the trees. It took two showers for me to get clean. 

Don't let that smile fool you. It's a facade.

This was one of the most grueling races I've done in terms of the trail. The mountains were so steep that going down them at any pace was a challenge and walking up was at a slow crawl that was nearly unbearable. It became my own personal Vietnam.

If I stopped to take a breather, while feeling sorry for myself, the vultures would start circling (jk).

I don't know if I'll do this race again, but it was a memorable one, especially with people cheering me on in a domestic language that was foreign to me.

Dirt, dust, and ash.

A Symbolic Look at Equifax

Here’s a video that symbolizes my interactions when enrolling in Equifax's credit monitoring service (audio is a must with this video). Nothing like a happy-go-lucky bear caught in a bear trap. 

Details

1. I checked to see if my data was compromised. (Some people reported yes, some reported “We believe that your personal information was not impacted by this incident.”) Fortunately, mine was the latter: https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/potential-impact/

2. I clicked “Enroll,” and I provided my information. Then, I waited several days for a confirmation e-mail for the next step. (http://trustedidpremier.com)

3. I clicked on the link in the confirmation e-mail. I provided a little more info and got redirected to a web page asking for me to login, but I never set up a password. (https://www.trustedid.com/premier/myaccount.php) 

4. I clicked “Forgot password” and received a reset-password e-mail to set up my first time password.

5. I set up a new password and clicked login after confirming my info.

6. I repeatedly received a “Server is down” error message.

7. I waited (hours/days) and kept trying while continuously receiving “The server unexpectedly dropped the connection” error messages.

To be fair to Equifax, it’s virtually impossible to standup a website in a matter of days/weeks that could handle a load of this magnitude. (Remember when Twitter used to go down – “Fail Whale” – in the early years? Facebook avoided this problem by managing their rollout over college campuses to control their growth and server load.)

In the Equifax case, server downtime works in their favor since less people will enroll. And it gets very confusing for consumers when dealing with so many different domain names (equifax.com, equifaxsecurity2017.com, trustedidpremier.com, trustedid.com, etc).

I’ll report back when I’m able to successfully enroll. I'm still getting a "server is busy" error message.

Anyone else have luck enrolling?

iPhone X Form Factor and Security [u]

Perhaps. One solution is to turn off
the phone at LEO encounters

Over the past two days, a surprising number of friends and colleagues have asked for my opinion on the iPhone X. This new smartphone seems to have received a lot of attention.

While I love the new features, I'm concerned about the form factor. Initially, it seemed to be as big as the iPhone 6/7 Plus models, which is too big for me. (I've been using the iPhone 6 & 7.) 

It turns out I was wrong about the size. Compared to the iPhone 7, the iPhone X is about about one tenth of an inch higher and about 0.15" wider. So, it's slightly bigger than the iPhone 7. And, compared to the iPhone 7 Plus, the iPhone X is about half an inch shorter and quarter of inch narrower, making the X significantly smaller than the 7+. The beauty of the iPhone X is that the screen is more than a quarter of an inch larger than the screen on the iPhone Plus models (6, 7, and 8). That's a bigger screen on a smaller phone due to the X's edge-to-edge design.

So, the bottom line is I'm considering getting the iPhone X. 

Face ID

Instead of using Touch ID's fingerprint recognition feature for authentication, the iPhone X uses Face ID, which recognizes a person the same way humans do, by their face. Apple claims that Face ID is 20x more accurate than Touch ID, which is great. But, some people have raised alarms that law enforcement officers (LEOs) could take you into custody and simply unlock your phone by pointing the screen at your face. Could that really happen? Perhaps. But, I've seen alarmist headlines before ("Apple Crosses The Line With New iPhone Feature"). One way to protect against this is to simply not enable this feature for people who are deeply concerned. Another option, if Face ID is turned on, would be to simply turn off your phone before a LEO encounter (i.e. crossing international borders, etc). 

Each time the iPhone is turned on, the secure enclave, which processes your Touch ID or Face ID credentials, remains inactive until a person manually enters their PIN to decrypt this information. It appears, during Craig Federighi's demonstration of Face ID, that his demo phone had been restarted but not unlocked with the PIN, prior to his demo. This prevented Face ID from working. While that's the correct technical behavior, it happened at the wrong time – but he seemed to recover well during the demo.

Update: Apple's Craig Federighi details Face ID and how to quickly disable it.