I t’s a Verb, Competitor Analysis and Wi-Fi Eavesdropping
How photoshop became a verb
By Jacob Kastrenakes from The Verge
- “It wasn’t inevitable that photoshop would become the go-to term for image manipulation. Photographers had been manipulating photos for more than a century before Photoshop was created, and it wasn’t the only piece of image editing software around in the early days of computers. On top of that, Photoshop was largely inaccessible professional software: hard to use and really expensive. It originally sold for $895, and it never got much cheaper.”
- “Blogs and tech publications were among the first to start referring to Photoshop more colloquially. Wired wrote that someone had “Photoshopped set designs” in an article from October 1999. Something Awful appears to have first used “Photoshopping” in November 2001 while writing about covering its founder’s face with digital pimples.”
- “It was also around this time that Photoshop became much more widely accessible — though not by Adobe’s choice. Peer-to-peer piracy services like Napster had been around since the turn of the century, but it was in the mid-2000s that software piracy became far more widespread. Adoption of broadband internet spiked early in the decade, and, combined with BitTorrent, it became much easier to download and distribute pirated copies of large apps and games.”
How to Do Competitor Analysis and Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy with SEMrush
By Elena Kozlova from SEMrush
- “Each industry develops at a different pace, so you may need to get updates more (or less) often. Normally, we would recommend doing competitor analysis monthly to keep tabs on growing trends and adjust your campaigns accordingly; and quarterly to get to implement bigger changes in your digital marketing strategy.”
- “There is still no universal formula for success in advertising. Still, there is always something to learn from looking at your competitors’ strategies, like which to adopt, which to avoid, and what you may have forgotten.”
- “If you are halfway through your marketing campaign, and it doesn’t show brilliant results (compared to competitors), don’t be afraid of making tweaks or even rethinking the entire strategy. This is why you do competitor analysis — to discover greener fields and move to them as quickly as you can.”
Flaw in billions of Wi-Fi devices left communications open to eavesdropping
By Dan Goodin from Ars Technica
- “The vulnerability exists in Wi-Fi chips made by Cypress Semiconductor and Broadcom, the latter whose Wi-Fi business was acquired by Cypress in 2016. The affected devices include iPhones, iPads, Macs, Amazon Echos and Kindles, Android devices, Raspberry Pi 3’s, and Wi-Fi routers from Asus and Huawei.”
- “The researchers tested Wi-Fi chips from other manufacturers, including Qualcomm, Realtek, Ralink, and Mediatek and found no evidence any of them were vulnerable. Since it was impossible for the researchers to test all devices, it’s possible that other devices using Cypress and Broadcom chips are also affected.”
- “Despite the limited threat posed, readers should ensure their devices have received updates issued by the manufacturers. This advice is most important for users of vulnerable Wi-Fi routers, since routers are often hard to patch and because vulnerable routers leave communications open to interception even when client devices are unaffected or are already patched.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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