SIM cards have long been a source of frustration for equipment manufacturers.  With the relentless drive to produce smaller and smaller devices, the SIM card is a hurdle to be overcome.  It's relatively large, and when you account for the necessary housing, it becomes quite the design challenge.

Recently, another "exotic character" bug was found in iOS.  If someone sends this particular character (a special character that's part of the Indian language pack) to your phone via any messaging app, it will not only crash your phone, but cause a variety of messaging apps to stop functioning.

Do you own a Mac?  Do you use APFS "sparse disk images?"  If so, be aware that under certain conditions, your trusty computer may allow you to copy important data into the void where it will be lost forever, without giving you a heads up first.

This unusual error was recently discovered by Mike Bombich, the creator of Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a popular Mac backup application.

Here's a statistic that is as disturbing as it is frustrating.  According to the latest "State of the Internet/Security" report for the fourth quarter of 2017, as published by Akamai, bot-traffic accounts for a staggering 43 percent of all login attempts.

Rumors of the death of HDD technology have been greatly exaggerated.  The advancement of solid state technology and its increasing rate of adoption has been largely responsible for this, but don't count old school HDDs out just yet.  They still have many important advantages, and recent breakthroughs should add further to the longevity of the tech.

There's a new strain of the "Rapid Ransomware" making the rounds, and because of how it's being transmitted, it's destined to have a higher than average rate of infection.  The new strain was first discovered by Derek Knight. It is disturbing because it claims to come from the IRS, and will feature subject lines like "IRS Urgent Message-164."

The body of the email then goes on to say that the recipient owes some amount of money in real estate taxes, and "helpfully" includes instructions for how to settle in the attached file.

Last year, Apple had to fix a "special character" bug in their Message app that was more of an annoyance than anything.  This year, a new special character bug has been found, but this one is much more serious and could allow an attacker to crash your phone and block access to a variety of messaging apps.

Google is poised to make an important change to its Chrome browser beginning in July 2018.

Here's the summary from Emily Schechter, the Google Chrome Security Product Manager:

"For the past several years, we've moved toward a more secure web by strongly advocating that sites adopt HTTPS encryption, and within the last year, we've also helped users understand that HTTP sites are not secure by gradually marking a larger subset of HTTP pages as 'not secure.

Image theft is one of the biggest problems on the internet.  If you're a photographer, you've almost certainly lost money because people find your work online and make a copy of it rather than paying for the right to use it.

Unfortunately, Google has made that incredibly easy to do, but that's changing.

Hackers are picky about their victims.  They'll target just about any group or organization, including the 2018 Olympics.

Cisco's Talos Group recently identified a new strain of malware they've dubbed "Olympic Destroyer" which is wreaking havoc in Pyeong Chang's computer networks and causing downtime to internal WiFi and television systems.