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Showing posts from July, 2021

The story of Dexter - Part 1

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Well no not that Dexter, exactly. Dexter our dog that we got back in 2013. Though to be fair we were watching a lot of Dexter TV series at the time and that is where our dog got it's name. The decision to bring a new dog into our family, was not an easy one, but when we finally did decide to make the move, we posted a Kijiji ad   " Nice Family Looking to Give Good  Dog  New Home "  In order to even get a dog, I said we would have to have at least 25 members join our FB group where we would document the "good" and "bad" things about dog ownership. We got several responses, we posted polls to the facebook page asking about what types of dogs would be best, and what we should name our new family pet (and the name Dexter won. Just around thanksgiving in 2013, we responded to an ad from Cynthia Ann Rubec who had some dogs to give away. We looked at three small pups and we decided on the golden colored one. Little did we know at the time that Ms. Rub

A Brief History of Spam

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While, perhaps, not as good as Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time . Today's post is a bit of a history lesson in SPAM. Back in the early days of the Internet, even before the "World Wide Web", cell phones, and Instagram, one of the first ways of communicating was electronic mail.  E-Mail was the new and exciting kid on the block (Imagine That!). University students would email their professors their reports using command line interfaces, and share thoughts and ideas with students in other universities around the world, and life was good. Remember this young ones - the key magic about the internet was that it allowed for discourse, the connection of people all around the world together, quickly and easily (and almost for free!) (Disclaimer:SPAM is a trademark of Hormel foods ). This article is un-related to the luncheon meat, though if reading this makes you hungry for some, feel free to go out and enjoy some). The word 'spam' here in lower case refer

What is Multi Factor Authentication (MFA / 2FA)?? and Why does it matter??

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 TLDR; Don't have time to read this? - Here is a good video that gives an overview of what MFA is Why is it important ? - Watch this video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGRii5f_uSc Multifactor Authentication (MFA) or Two Factor Authentication (2FA)  You may have already seen this recently with your banking, or in your company, more and more online applications are requiring an additional verification option when you try to login. For example, if you try to log into your gmail from a remote computer, you may have seen a pop up on your phone asking you to confirm the login   Usernames and passwords are inherently 'broken' to 'prove' who you are - Why?  Well if you forget your password, or you give your password to someone else, or someone else steals your password, the app, machine, phone, cannot tell the difference between the 'real' you and the 'fake' you that has your password. To further complicate matters, as computer grow increasing faster, it