Author: Terry

Tech Enthusiast with a passion for teaching others new technology.

Jan142020 by TerryNo Comments

NSA warns Microsoft of severe Windows 10 bug

Recent Posts, Software, Windows

Windows Patch Tuesday gets Exciting On the last day of support for Windows 7 news breaks of a severe Windows 10 bug. The bug was so severe the NSA told Microsoft once it was found, or did they? https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/microsoft-critical-certificates-bug/ This bug was related to digital signatures, which is used as a defense against users downloading malware disguised as a typical program. However, due to the bug an attacker could include a digital signature from a trusted provider on any files they wanted. Once an unsuspecting user downloads those files their system could be compromised because of the digital signature Windows 10 would believe its safe. Below is a tweet from the NSA "Strongly" encouraging users to update their Windows 10 OS https://twitter.com/...

Read More

Jan112020 by Terry2 Comments

What is Data Science?

What is Data Science?

Recent Posts, Data Science

The data science field encompasses a wide scope, ranging from collecting data to data management, analysis, and visualization. Pulling all these areas together, a data scientist can gather information from obtained data and create visualizations to communicate results. Collect and organize data The collection and organization of data is arguably the most important factor within the data science field. You cannot do anything without having data to work with, so you must have a method of collecting data. This can be done independently/on your own, for example scraping the web or applications or even conducting a survey for respondents to take. You may also have access to data that has already been collected either by open source repositories, or sites such as Kaggle. You may get the d...

Read More

Jan52020 by TerryNo Comments

Technology is BLOATED

Technology is BLOATED

Recent Posts, Blog

The internet has answers to all that you ask, it might be correct, or it might not, how do you know? Should you just look it up and believe what you read is true? This is the issue that comes with being so well connected to all and everything, 24/7 news cycle and social media. Big exciting news or an interesting technological breakthrough spreads rapidly through networks, but when it’s found to be the work of a photoshopped image or quote taken in the wrong context that will never reach the same amount of points in the network. This is dangerous and we now see how people can be influenced by others, even worse is realizing it and now not knowing who or what to trust. Recently this has been a major subject in news, entertainment, and politics. You can even see similar iss

Read More

Jan32020 by TerryNo Comments

MFA Security Concerns

MFA Security Concerns

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is now a common security measure for just about all accounts. Logging into your bank account, video game accounts now require MFA. In order to log in, you must present multiple forms of evidence to prove you are who you claim to be. Something you knowSomething you haveSomething you are The better the security typically means a longer or more difficult process. Which for a user causes an inconvenience and can add more costs for the company. (Causing prices to be raised) If multi-factor authentication requires multiple forms of evidence then how are data breaches and account information still being stolen? Currently, in the consumer space, two-factor authentication is the most used involving sending SMS or utilizing "Soft tokens". Security exper...

Read More

Oct132019 by Terry6 Comments

Renaming Columns with R

Renaming Columns with R

Recent Posts, Data Science Using R

Often data you’re working with has abstract column names, such as (x1, x2, x3…). Typically, the first step I take when renaming columns with r is opening my web browser. For some reason no matter the amount of times doing this it’s just one of those things. (Hoping that writing about it will change that) The dataset cars is data from the 1920s on "Speed and Stopping Distances of Cars". There is only 2 columns shown below. colnames(datasets::cars) [1] "speed" "dist" If we wanted to rename the column "dist" to make it easier to know what the data is/means we can do so in a few different ways. Using dplyr: cars %>% rename("Stopping Distance (ft)" = dist) %>% colnames() [1] "speed" "Stopping Distance (ft)" cars %>% rename("Stopping Di

Read More