Men have become the tools of their tools.
A keyboard with swappable switches
It started out with a post to Reddit that linked to a series of photos on Imgur of a new keyboard the user had ordered from the Chinese e-commerce site Taobao. Taobao, for those who don't know, is a Chinese-language-only e-commerce site run by Alibaba Group that caters to residents of China and nearby countries where people speak Chinese. Many sellers on the site, even if you could navigate the site in Chinese, won't ship outside of China. To meet demand, a whole crop of sites have sprung up just to help foreigners order products from Taobao. These 'Taobao agents' will order the product for you, receive the product in China, and then re-ship it to you wherever you are in the world. Of course, that service comes with a price, and in many cases that eliminates any cost savings you might get from ordering from Taobao. Occassionally, however, there are products on Taobao that are not available elsewhere. In this case, the user (redditsavedmyagain) ordered a keyboard that was in fact quite unique. The keyboard is called the Team Wolf Zhuque+. I had never heard of it and before that post on Reddit most other people had never heard of it either.…
If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked. What’s more, you deserve to be hacked.
E-mail security stinks, and that makes hackers (and the NSA) happy
The Better Mousetrap Making the perfect e-mail client seems like the build-a-better-mousetrap challenge of our day. Every year or so it seems there's another amazing e-mail client released by a startup, that says it has 'reimagined' or 'reinvented' e-mail and how to use it. Some examples include Sparrow (launched in 2011, bought by Google and discontinued in 2012) and Mailbox (launched in 2013 and bought a month later by Dropbox, and announcement of its imminent retirement just this month). This is kind of ironic considering the move away from e-mail to other messaging services, particularly real-time services, such as Slack and Whatsapp. Recently, perhaps due in part to the imminent shut down of Mailbox, another e-mail app called Polymail has been receiving a lot of hype. It is already the fourth most up-voted product on Product Hunt, and it hasn't even launched yet. Seeing the latest e-mail-mousetrap launch reminds me about one of the inherent security problems all of these applications encourage. A Question of Protocol All of these apps rely primarily on the IMAP e-mail protocol (short for Internet Message Access Protocol). That makes a lot of sense as it keeps most of the e-mail management on the server, and allows app developers…