All new, never seen before security mechanism: NINE factor authentication!

The first factor merely requests your ID.
The second factor requests your password.
The third factor requires you to answer three personal questions.
The fourth factor requires you to solve a simple mathematical question.
The fifth factor requires you to use a token-authentication.
The sixth factor merely asks you to wait for 4 seconds.
The seventh factor asks you for your birthday.
The eight factor asks you to type a specific letter 10 times in 5 seconds.
The ninth factor asks you to identify the kitty in fourteen images…

Reminds me of Ockhams Razor(!): (paraphrasing) the simplest solution tends to be the right one, until proven wrong. So perhaps we should really try to find a solution without passwords… I think SQRL is a nice option to explore…

categorie(s): security, work | 5 Comments

Fixed Conexant Driver Audio Problem

My Lenovo Laptop T500 had no problems until this week. Somehow the audio driver got replaced by a Conexant HD Audio Driver. After the reboot I noticed that the internal speakers stopped working and only gave a little crackling sound.

As it worked minutes before I was quite sure it was the driver. I removed it, updated it, played with it, but it would not recover. And Lenovo insisted on reinstalling the latest version.

A lot of people said it was hardware related or a loose wire or so. I just did not believe this. Then I found some people who had been playing with the ‘Night Switch’ which seem to fix it for them. Unfortunately not for me.

I noticed, however, that I could not select the speaker output in the crazy setup screen from Conexant. It was just headphones and SP/DIF.

Then I noticed something else: on the Audio Director page I could choose between Classic and Multi-stream. And voila, the blue testbutton played audio through the speakers, the red played through the jack and headphones.

So Multistream it is.

Now I could choose speakers as well on the homescreen (Volume Mixer). It seems this did the trick.

The setup is wrong, the problem rediculous but I hope it helps someone else to solve this, until a fix is presented. It is still buggy, does not detect a headset is plugged in anymore, but at least I can choose to have speakers again with a work around.

 

categorie(s): technology | 2 Comments

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