Writing

[…] because of its ability to send software updates to its vehicles wirelessly, the 29,222 Tesla Model S electric cars that were affected have already been fixed.

It seems that Tesla has become the Apple of the car industry by working together with the customers, making their lives easier instead of take the old proven path of having to hand in the car to get it updated.

I just can’t refrain from imagining what may happen if someone were to gain access to the Tesla software update process.

A really worth-while piece on the mechanics behind traffic jams and why they occur.

WHY must a bottleneck develop at a merge zone? Well, because everyone must take turns. Wrong! Under low-traffic conditions, everyone still takes turns, yet everyone merges at high speed. A bottleneck never appears. Traffic jams develop at a merge zone whenever the cars get so close together that there are no gaps between them.

Quite an interesting weekend read for anyone.

Since OmniFocus doesn’t have a muffle option for repeating tasks, ticking off undone tasks has become a necessity. Kourosh Dini has an elegant solution relying on the way you think about the tasks, and the keyword is “consider”.

Writing “Consider” before a task is very easy to do. It almost seems to be a gimmick or “cheat” potentially fraught with thorns of procrastination.

It does however keep the OmniFocus history more honest, even though you would still not know which ticked off actions were in fact really done.

Creepy to say the least, but should definitely be integrated with Nest.

It seems that MacRumors have joined Adobe, Sony and Ubuntu Forums in revealing a large number of user information, including MD5 password hashes.

One day passwords may be a thing of the past, but in the meantime use a password manager such as iCloud Keychain, 1Password, Lastpass to manage unique passwords for all sites.

As you will indubitably have heard, Apple just released the next major version of their operating system. Having run out of cats to name the releases, they have now switched to Californian landmarks, and the first to be Applified is Mavericks.

If there is one review of Mac OS 10.9 you should read, it’s the one by John Siracusa for Ars Technica.

OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review

Yesterbox seems to be an interesting approach for handling large amounts of email.

Instead of going though today’s email which fills up throughout the day and largely ignore the incoming stream of mayhem, focus on handling email from yesterday instead. That way, there is always a finished state, since no new email message can fill up the queue from yesterday.

There are of course times when you really need to reply to an email today, and the model supports this scenario as well. Just get going on the old email and as a “reward”, you may answer important email from today as well.

Evernote has now joined the growing number of online services with support for two-factor authentication.

What this means for the average user is a more secure account, as you will need to provide a second factor when logging in, such as an SMS from your phone, or a challenge/response using Google Authenticator.

A slightly different take on contexts in GTD which, instead of compartmentalizing the current tools at you disposal, focuses on the emotional outcome of completing a particular action.

Presentation mode looks like a great way to collaborate during meetings.

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Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?

As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design.

Ever since we started working on Chromatic we knew we wanted the photos to be as big as possible. No tiny thumbnails, no square-cropping, no wasting of precious screen real estate.

Creating great looking photo galleries is always a challenge, but Johannes Treitz writes about an approach to make it happen. The end result is chromatic.io, a service where you can upload your photos and have beautiful looking galleries created for you.

The author of Simplicitybliss writes about The Planning Fallacy and that we always underestimate the time when planning ahead.

Use a “Next Action” list instead of a daily todo list and work off it as much as you can while dealing with all the ad-hoc stuff showing up – this list represent commitments you need to get done, there is no obligation to complete all or any of them today

This is one of the main reasons I use GTD. Having the ability to take on ad-hoc work, knowing exactly what will be held back and what the consequences of taking on unplanned work can lead to.

Quite humbling to visualize what actually goes on right now on the internet. Every Instagram photo, Skype call and other common datasets are represented with an icon and the numbers are impressive.

Quite the horror show. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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Two major secure e-mail service providers on Thursday took the extraordinary step of shutting down service.

A Texas-based company called Lavabit, which was reportedly used by Edward J. Snowden, announced its suspension Thursday afternoon, citing concerns about secret government court orders.

By evening, Silent Circle, a Maryland-based firm that counts heads of state among its customers, said it was following Lavabit’s lead and shutting its e-mail service as a protective measure.

The only way to protect your communication is to not trust the service, but instead use something like PGP or pinned X509 certificates to encrypt the contents before it is sent.

Twitter entered the two-factor authentication (2FA) game earlier this year when they released the de-facto implementation, time based OTP over SMS. It has been working fine even though it had its shortcomings, including the inability to view app passwords created for apps without support for 2FA. Not to mention the lack of carrier support for most operators in Sweden.

Twitter have just superseded their recently implemented 2FA with a new scheme called “login verification”, which uses your mobile Twitter client as an authentication token, which means that they no longer have to rely on carriers to support their service.

The new two-factor system works like this. A user enrolls using the mobile app, which generates a 2048-bit RSA keypair. The private key lives on the phone itself, and the public key is uploaded to Twitter’s server.

When Twitter receives a new login request with a username and password, the server sends a challenge based on a 190-bit, 32 character random nonce, to the mobile app – along with a notification that gives the user the time, location, and browser information associated with the login request. The user can then opt to approve or deny this login request. If approved, the app replies to a challenge with its private key, relays that information back to the server. The server compares that challenge with a request ID, and if it authenticates, the user is automatically logged in.

A very creative solution to the problem, and since the approval is completely out of band with the authentication, clients do not even need to be aware of the secondary authentication procedure.

The downside is naturally that your phone is ever more important to keep track of, even though they seem to have support on standby in case you lose access to your phone.

Facebook uses a similar strategy in case you have enabled login verification for your account, but instead of relying on RSA cryptography, any logged in client may approve a new computer. The upside compared to the Twitter solution is that the approvals are not locked to one particular device, and the downside is the exact opposite – any logged in client may approve a new client.

When enabling login verifications, you are presented with a backup code, which can be used to access your account in case you lost your phone. I make it a habit of always writing the recovery codes into the current site’s entry in 1Password. That way, you can use any computer with 1Password installed to retrieve it when needed.

David Allen gives an introduction to the principles behind Getting Things Done and stress-free productivity, and the importance of keeping a clear head.

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When Google Reader was shut down, Feedly was one of the more popular free RSS services available at the time. While the free service remains for now, there is now a pro version available with better search and Evernote integration.

feedly pro will be generally available this fall for $5 per month (or $45 per year). To help kick-start the program, we are offering a limited lifetime edition [for $99] which gives you early access to feedly pro and grants you a lifetime membership.

One of the premium features is https support, which immediately raises my warning flags. Why would they voluntarily settle for bad security when they obviously have the infrastructure to handle it properly? Shouldn’t security be the top most priority considering all recent events?

Evernote followed this exact model many years ago, where you pay extra for security. Let’s just say that they learned from their mistake, and security is no longer considered a premium feature. Now all Evernote users benefit from secure connections.