Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy

by Parth Detroja

Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers…

Bitcoin isn’t part of the dark web — it’s an independent technology with plenty of legitimate uses.

In short, none of these technologies

Bitcoin, Tor, the dark web — are illegal. Many illegal activities use these technologies, but we can use them for good too.

though your information is encrypted between your computer and the server, the server can decrypt your information and read it.[648]

Amazon can’t charge your credit card unless it can decrypt and read your credit card number.

Since iOS 8, an iPhone doesn’t just check that the password you entered matches the stored password. It mashes up the password you enter with a 256-bit code

(called a UID)

This mashup, or “hash,” can’t be reverse-engineered, so there’s no way to get in without knowing the stored password.[671]

you don’t know the password to a phone, your only option is to randomly guess passwords, also known as

brute forcing.[672]

Apple refused, saying that being forced to write code would violate the company’s free-speech rights.[677]

How could a phony Wi-Fi network help someone steal your identity?

phony Wi-Fi

Hold on, you might be thinking. Doesn’t HTTPS encrypt all communications? That’s true. If your connection uses HTTPS, the hacker won’t be able to understand any information you’re sending, and you’ll be safe.[687] But there’s a catch.

In 2009, a researcher released a tool called

SSLStrip,[688]

which lets an attacker fool your computer into talking with a server over HTT...

SSLStrip attack:

SSLStrip,

This is what’s called

“man-in-the-middle” attack.[695]

man-in-the-middle attacks,

hackers could impersonate you to e-commerce sites, email, social networks, and the like — which could be devastating.[696]

VPN,

virtual private network.

Technologists often say that VPNs create a direct, secure “tunnel” between you and websites.[700]

Well, if a hacker got you to connect to their network and used

SSLStrip,

they coul...

man-in-the-middl...

to get your passwords and other identifyi...

VPN.

Each 1 or 0 is called a bit. Bits are too small to be of much use on their own, so we usually measure data in bytes,

A kilobyte (KB) is a thousand bytes,

megabyte (MB) is a million bytes,

gigabyte (GB) is a billion ...

CPU:

i3, i5, i7, and i9.[723]

So what’s the best CPU? It depends on what you need. The more powerful your CPU, the more it costs and the faster your battery drains.[725] So if you’re just browsing Facebook and sending emails, you don’t need a mighty CPU, just like you don’t need a Ferrari if all you do is drive to the grocery store and back.

two major types of CPU chips:

ARM and Intel.

Apple announced MacBooks would switch from Intel to ARM in 2020.[727]

newer solid-state drive (SSD), which has no moving parts but instead stores information in a huge grid of tiny boxes, called “cells.”[732]

“flash memory,”

hard drives need to spin around a moving disc to find information

SSDs just need to send pulses of electricity,

flash memory is small, energy-efficient, and resistant to getting dropped, which are all very useful to have in mobile devices.[748]

Tradeoffs

“planned obsolescence”.[763]