Checking for steganography in video nasties

CIA and NSA analysts go through video clips and images to glean clues about their targets who apparently sometimes hide messages - a technique called steganography - in them. Photo / Thinkstock

The excellent Daily Beast story about United States intelligence analysts watching all sorts of "NSFW" material captured from terrorists is so very 21st century.

Harvested from websites, computers and smartphones, Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency analysts go through video clips and images to glean clues about their targets who apparently sometimes hide messages - a technique called steganography - in them.

The problem with that is the material to be analysed: beheading videos, sometimes in real-time, and brutal, debasing porn. It's so bad that the analysts watching the stuff need counselling after as they react like any normal person would to it.

I've seen some giggly commentary on analysts watching "mostly porn" as this seems to be the viewing choice of terrorists; there's nothing funny about it though from the sound of it, and it's hard to fathom how anyone can do that job for any length of time.

How did we end up at that nasty juncture of humanity and technology?

Find that streaming movie

It's a bit awkward to segue on to streaming movies after thinking about the above video nasties, but I've been trying out Justwatch, a search engine for the likes of Netflix, Apple iTunes and Quickflix, and thought it worth a mention especially since it covers providers for the New Zealand market.

While you can trawl through the enormous catalogues of the streaming providers on their sites or via their apps, it's quite handy to have a number of them together in one search engine - Justwatch works fairly well too, and seems to provide up to date results.

Try it out while it lasts. Something tells me the big movie providers won't appreciate a third-party indexing their sites...

Gear: 2015 13-inch MacBook Air

If you follow Apple news and thought the recent announcement of the 12-inch MacBook was an odd turn in the company's product strategy, you're not alone.

After all, it occupies the spot Apple had previously reserved for the MacBook Air, which was the thinnest and most portable in notebook range, with the slimness and lightness coming in at a premium.

Not so anymore: the MacBook Air is now Apple's allrounder notebook, providing good performance and battery life at a reasonable price.

Apple has upgraded both the processor and the solid state storage on the MacBook Air, with both being plenty fast indeed. On the 64-bit Geekbench benchmark, the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.6 gigaHertz dual-core fifth-gen Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory, the new notebook hit scores like 2,871 for single core tests and 5,754 in multi-core runs.

That's on par with some higher-end Core i7 processors from two-three years ago, but not as impressive as the upgraded storage performance: the new 256GB solid state unit managed 1,150-1,250 megabytes per second writes and 700-750MBps in the Black Magic Design Disk Speed Test.

On Cinebench, the 13-inch MacBook Air managed a respectable 27-plus frames per second in the OpenGL test that measures graphics performance (the notebook uses Intel's HD Graphics 6000 video which is built into the processor).

In normal English, the above numbers tell you that for everyday computing work, the MacBook Air will work just fine.

What's more, there are two USB 3 ports on the MacBook Air, a single Thunderbolt 2 connector and an SD card slot, adding to the versatility.

Battery life is excellent - the 14 hours plus reported by OS X when the battery is fully charged is too optimistic, and drops down to eleven-twelve hours with use.

If you are considering a MacBook Air however, make sure you don't view any of its Retina high resolution display equipped cousins first though: the 1440 by 900 pixel screen on the Air is a bit average and lacks the brilliance of the Retina displays in comparison. The fat bezel surrounding the MacBook Air 13-inch doesn't help either.

Other than that, the MacBook Air 13-inch is a good, lightweight workhorse for $1,800 including GST. I'd add another 4GB of memory ($160, ouch) though.