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With some reservations, Om Malik likes the 3G Nokia 6630: "Clearly, this is the best 3G phone on the market..."

(3G is the general label for third generation cellular networks. These are just coming on line here in the U.S.. For AT&T this means UMTS, for Verizon and Sprint this means EV-DO. These networks are as fast as your DSL but with a little more latency.)

Russel Beattie has a bunch of links as well.

Almost there....
- jim 12-31-2004 1:54 am [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]

Flickr is one of the recent big web success stories. It's a photo sharing site with a great UI and great community tools. Antenna has some interesting thoughts on what makes it so popular:

I’ve been trying for a week or so to figure out what flickr is. I mean I know it’s a photo sharing site, but what makes it so damn interesting? Then, last night, I finally figured it out: flickr is a MMORPG.

Really, it should have been obvious, since the site is literally a MMORPG (it’s built on the old Game Neverending code, which is why you’ll see files ending in .gne on flickr). And Ludicorp says as much on their homepage (“Groupware for Play. We’re building a better platform for real time interaction online.”), but for some reason I was tricked into thinking it was more like iPhoto crossed with Friendster than Ultima Online.
I'm not sure this idea works out perfectly, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Thinking about web apps as games is very important. These things should be fun.
- jim 12-31-2004 1:33 am [link] [add a comment]

Seven pages of Sony Ericsson concept phones. A few gems, but most of these are truly hideous. Why are gadgets like this always so overdesigned? You'd think the iPod would have clued everyone in. As we add features, especially to small devices, we need the designs to be more simple, straightforward, and uncluttered. Not the opposite.
- jim 12-31-2004 1:19 am [link] [add a comment]

Short animation: What the hell is the Fibonacci Series?
- jim 12-31-2004 1:11 am [link] [add a comment]

Wired interview with BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen:

"You get so tired of having your work die," he says. "I just wanted to make something that people would actually use."
With over 40 million downloads of his program, I think he has done it. I know I've posted a lot of links about BT, so maybe it has gotten a bit boring, but this program is *really* important.
- jim 12-29-2004 9:39 pm [link] [5 comments]

Think Secret, a mac rumors website with a very good track record, is reporting that Apple will release a "bare bones, G4-based iMac without a display at Macworld Expo on January 11 that will retail for $499".

The fabled "headless iMac" is one of the longest running debates in the Mac community. Apple has always said they are not interested in pursuing this low margin (sub $800) category. But supposedly iPod sales (and extensive data from their retail stores,) have convinced them they can lure away a lot of windows users with a cheaper entry level machine, and that the economics of "growing the base" make sense in exchange for smaller per unit profits. Could be. I have to admit it doesn't sound like an Apple strategy to me. But I can think of several people to whom I would recommend this machine.

It will be fun to see how this turns out. So far Wall Street is not noticing (Wall St. has wanted Apple to "grow the base" for some time now,) but maybe they don't read the rumor sites. At least there is now some excitement around Macworld 2005. Things had been a little too quiet.
- jim 12-29-2004 8:09 pm [link] [2 comments]

I mentioned this first back in august, and it looks like it is ready now. Tor: an anonymous Internet communication system.
- jim 12-27-2004 8:21 pm [link] [2 comments]

For your Christmas day geek pleasure, a University of Washington video lecture by Urs Hölzle describing the Google Linux Cluster. Some amazing numbers.
- jim 12-25-2004 8:03 pm [link] [add a comment]

The Graphing Calculator is a cool piece of software that shipped with the first PowerPC computer from Apple. "Just type an equation and it is drawn for you without complicated dialogs or commands." The story of it's creation is not so simple though.

I gave a twenty-minute demonstration, eliciting "oohs" and "ahhs." Afterward, they asked, "Who do you report to? What group are you in? Why haven't we seen this earlier?" I explained that I had been sneaking into the building and that the project didn't exist. They laughed, until they realized I was serious. Then they told me, "Don't repeat this story."

- jim 12-24-2004 6:19 pm [link] [add a comment]

Samsung is kicking ass. The soon to be released i730 mobile has everything: huge QVGA display, slide out QWERTY keyboard, 1.3 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and it works on the EV-DO high speed cellular network. This is what the Treo could have been. But it runs Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition. Still, I might have to surrender. Somebody stop me.
- jim 12-24-2004 5:56 pm [link] [add a comment]

Very thorough academic analysis of BitTorrent.
- jim 12-19-2004 8:21 pm [link] [2 comments]

I'm still working on the post where I vent my disappointment with Palm. Sure the Treo 650 is better than the 600, and I loved that mobile. But the times are a changin', and Palm just isn't moving fast enough. I'm starting to doubt they can bring their OS into the 21st century. No, scratch that, I'm in full doubt mode already.

But where does that leave us? It leaves us with Symbian (Nokias, Sony/Ericcson, etc.) and Microsoft (Pocket PC) at the moment. I guess I will have to take a look at these. Of course I am extremely prejudiced against Microsoft (maybe that is silly, but I need to have some beliefs) but their OS seems to be on the best mobile offerings here in the U.S. at the moment.

Witness the new mobile from Verizon: the XV6600. Damn. This is the first phone available on Verizon's EV-DO high speed network (previously they have only been selling wireless PC Cards for notebook data access on this network.) In short, if you live in a place that has EV-DO coverage (NYC, check) this is what you want. And the XV6600 looks to be very powerful. No camera (I guess that is too unbusiness-like,) but everything else makes me jealous. I wish I could play with one for a few days to get a feel for how the Microsoft OS stacks up.
- jim 12-18-2004 7:20 pm [link] [1 comment]

Just stumbled upon this new to me Google service: Google Local. You tell it 'What' (e.g. coffee shops) and "Where" (e.g. Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) and it returns location information. Is this new?
- jim 12-16-2004 7:01 pm [link] [add a comment]

The FCC approved the Sony Ericsson S710a. This will probably be on Cingular, and should be available soon. As far as I know this is the best cameraphone you can get in the U.S. at the moment. Absolutely huge gorgeous screen. And runs on the semi-high speed EDGE network. I'm still waiting, but this one is for sure in the running.
- jim 12-16-2004 5:56 pm [link] [add a comment]

I've been watching this thread over at Treo Central develop with some skepticism. The rather enthusiastic hackers there have been trying to get WiFi to work on the Treo 650. Palms choice to not include WiFi (probably to appease cellular carriers who presumably want you to use their network and not some free WiFi hotspot to send your data, but possibly in an effort to not undermine sales of their Tungsten WiFi PDAs) is one of the great disappointments with the 650. I had thought this quest would not be successful, but it's never very smart to underestimate the resources of a bunch of software engineers with too much time on their hands. And damn, it looks like they have done it. The .prc file you need is hosted here (I have it already if that goes down.)

Just two days ago the lead hacker, Shadowmite, posted:

It's just looking pretty bad... It works, but it's completely unstable and almost impossible to keep it working. We really need to completely re-write the network layers to make this happen, and thus the source code is needed.

I'm not giving up, but it's going to be slow, if any progress at all is made now...
And then yesterday at 8:00 pm, after much shooting in the dark, he hit it:
GUYS HOLY FRICKING HECK OF MOTHER BLEH BLEH BLEH! I'M STREAMING SHOUTCAST OVER WIFI!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!1 yOU ALL OWE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111 GFPOIHPOGIHR3O[GIRWHOGIRWHGO42IHF42

oK, INSANITY OVER...
Of course, there are some problems
It takes over the network connection/library... COMPLETELY! Once installed, you can not access vision UNTIL you hard reset and get it off the phone... Maybe with some more time we can find a way around that... But I wanted to mention it...
So wow. Whether this becomes a big thing or is limited to the serious geek set will be determined by how well they can work out the remaining problems with the net.lib and needing to do a hard reset every time you go back and forth between WiFi and Vision (Vision is Sprint's 1xRTT cellular data service.) But still, seriously good show!
- jim 12-16-2004 5:44 pm [link] [1 ref] [1 comment]

Jon Udell article on mobile webcasting. Lots of technical details in the middle, but some big picture stuff at the beginning and the end:

What would be a compelling reason? Imagine the following scenario. It's 2007, and a major political rally is happening in Philadelphia. The downtown has been a WiFi zone for over a year. Bloggers are walking around with camcorders that do what my camera-equipped laptops can do today: encode video and send it via WiFi to a streaming server. Not everyone's blog server also runs a streaming media server, but there are enough of them to spread the load.

Here's the payoff: bloggers will democratize video reporting of the <<live>> event in the same way they've already leveled the playing field for conventional reporting. The TV networks will still score most of the big interviews, but the collective eyes and ears of the videobloggers will supply a wealth of otherwise missing viewpoints. And their <<archived>> videoblog posts will be stirred in to the blogosphere's bubbling cauldron of links, commentary, and aggregation.
I am looking forward to experimenting with streaming audio and video after our next server upgrade even though I'm a little skeptical about how practical it will be.
- jim 12-10-2004 7:33 pm [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]

Google Suggest beta. Just like Google search, except it "suggests" search terms as you type, sort of like auto-complete of URLs in the location field of most browsers. This is similar also to what Google did with the gmail UI. This completely blows my mind. How can they do that with HTML and javascript? I don't understand. Are they holding a connection open to the server? And doing a round trip after every character you type? Amazing. I know a little bit about this stuff and it seems like magic to me. (via kottke)
- jim 12-10-2004 6:49 pm [link] [3 comments]

The 100 oldest still registered .com domain names.
- jim 12-10-2004 6:45 pm [link] [1 comment]

Most fiendishly clever security hack of all time:

Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. The C compiler contained code that would recognise when the "login" command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.

Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to *use* the compiler - so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would *recognise when it was compiling a version of itself*, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled "login" the code to allow Thompson entry - and, of course, the code to recognise itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.

- jim 12-09-2004 4:00 am [link] [10 comments]

From the folks who created the amazing Wikipedia site comes the new Wikinews:

[A] free content news source. We started in November 2004, and have currently written 121 articles. Our mission is to create a diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events.
I'm not sure this can work, but it will be interesting to see. A wiki, of course, is a site where *anyone* can add or edit *any* entry. Seems like a recipe for disaster, but it has worked surprisingly well at Wikipedia. The problem here, I would guess, is that news (and especially political news) is so much more contentious than most encyclopedia entries. It's hard to see how different political factions won't just endless rewrite each other's articles. But it's always easy to see the downside. I'm glad they are trying. And perhaps it's just so crazy it might work.


- jim 12-04-2004 10:10 pm [link] [4 comments]

Playing around with the page design. Feedback welcome. It is supposed to look something like:

smaller screenshot

- jim 12-04-2004 8:15 pm [link] [7 comments]

Lots of talk about spam around here lately. It is a really interesting topic. Spam is so annoying, yet at the same time it is crucial not to overreact because spam is a byproduct of the free internet. The only way to really stop it is to do something like only allowing registered and trackable devices to connect to the internet. So I've always seen anti-spam tactics as the most likely route for someone to use who wanted to control the internet - who could argue they don't want to stop spam? It's not like terrorism or k.p. which are just abstractly bad things; spam is an actual everyday bad thing for almost everyone on the internet.

I think we just have to live with it. It's the noise in the system.

Anyway, here's a funny look at how inventive these horrible people can be:

Because GMail (and other popular email clients these days) blocks images by default, porn spammers have now begun to use 1980s style ASCII art in order to get their message across....

I confidently expect to see a renaissance in erotic ASCII art in the coming months....
Now that takes me back to the BBS days.
- jim 12-03-2004 3:04 am [link] [add a comment]

Umm, this doesn't sound good:

Former CIA Director George J. Tenet yesterday called for new security measures to guard against attacks on the United States that use the Internet, which he called "a potential Achilles' heel."

"I know that these actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability," he told an information-technology security conference in Washington, "but ultimately the Wild West must give way to governance and control."
Who's he working for now?
- jim 12-03-2004 2:54 am [link] [1 comment]

I understand the frustration, but this isn't the right solution:

Lycos Europe's "Make love not spam" campaign was intended as a way for users to fight back against the avalanche of junk mail messages coming their way.

Participants were encouraged to download the Lycos screensaver which, when their PC was idle, would then send lots of data traffic to websites that peddle the goods and services mentioned in spam messages.

Lycos said the idea was to get the spam sites running at 95% capacity and generate big bandwidth bills for the spammers behind the sites.
It is kind of funny though. Apparently it worked a bit better than expected and brought a few servers to their knees:
Two of the sites being bombarded by data have been completely knocked offline. One other site has been responding to requests only intermittently as it struggles to cope with the traffic the screensaver is pointing its way.

The downing of the sites could dent Lycos claims that what it is doing does not amount to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). In such attacks thousands of computers bombard sites with data in an attempt to overwhelm them.

- jim 12-03-2004 2:41 am [link] [add a comment]

The Broadband Daily is a brand new group weblog featuring a bunch of bloggers I read already plus some new ones all opining on, you guessed it, broadband. Looks very nice.
- jim 12-02-2004 9:09 pm [link] [add a comment]

On distinguishing humans from robots, which is something we've been dealing with around here lately.
- jim 12-02-2004 6:37 pm [link] [4 comments]

Microsoft launches MSN Spaces:

With MSN Spaces, you can easily create and manage your blog from your computer or your mobile phone. It's a great way to share information and photos with your friends and family. And best of all, it's free!
You know, Bill Gates is right, Microsoft is all about innovation. A blog service? At the very end of 2004? Who would have thought?
- jim 12-02-2004 5:48 pm [link] [4 comments]

I thought I remembered posting about this before, but I can't find any reference to it. Liquid lenses for camera phones:

The company was founded two years ago to exploit two core technology patents covering lenses based on the principles of electro-wetting. This is the tendency of liquid to spread on a substrate, Paillard explains. "It means we can tune the shape of the drop to create a lens. Think about a tunable lens, like in the human eye," he suggests....

The company has a non-exclusive licensing deal with a subsidiary of Samsung to develop the lenses for use in its camera phones. Paillard expects products will be on the shelves by Q1 2006 at the latest, and maybe even in time for Christmas next year.
Better lenses are crucial, especially in light of the first round of 1 megapixel cameraphones that are exhibiting lackluster image quality. Sheer megapixels are only part of the issue, and improvements there without corresponding improvements in the lenses and other sub systems are not going to do it. Here's to hoping their time frame isn't overly optimistic.
- jim 12-01-2004 7:51 pm [link] [add a comment]

Clean System to Zombie Bot in 4 minutes

Slashdot thread on a USA Today investigation into how long it takes computers attached to the internet to be attacked and compromised:

According to the latest study by USA Today and Avantgarde, it takes less than 4 minutes for an unpatched Windows XP SP1 system to become part of a botnet. Avantgarde has the statistics in their abstract. Stats of note: Although Macs and PC's got hit with equal opportunity, the XP SP1 machine was hit with 5 LSASS and 4 DCOM exploits while the Mac remained clean. The Linux desktop also was impenetrable, but only was only targeted by 0.26% of all attacks.
In the slashdot thread the well known geeks from Avantgarde had some more info. The interesting bit is the difference between XP SP1 and SP2 (Service Pack 1 and 2 - these are Microsoft security updates you XP users should be installing. Obviously 2 is the most recent.)
There was an SP2 machine included in the same test. It went unmolested, due largerly to the new firewall enabled by default. This particular test environment included no user activity, i.e. no email reading, no web browsing.

Generally speaking, I'm pleased with SP2. As long as you're running XP, and it won't affect your critical functionality adversely, install it. It won't be exploit proof moving forward, but it's the easiest way to patch the current set of problems.
Of course, it will probably take you more than 4 minutes of being connected to the net to download the SP2 patch! D'oh.

In related news, Ars Technica recently did a roundup of spyware removal tools for Windows. No sense reading the whole thing, but they conclude that the free Ad-Aware is your best bet. You can download it here.
- jim 12-01-2004 12:32 am [link] [5 comments]

I am still trying to keep a grip on all the comment spam here, so I have neglected, so far, the other issue of referrer log spam. But that's on my list as well. Here's a post on clone blogs and referrer log spam that is interesting and frightening.

BTW, this site has been running for 5 years, with over 20,000 comments in the database. We've only been getting spam comments for a few months, but already we have deleted, as of this moment, 11,745. They should overtake real comments in number in another few weeks. Those are some industrious spammers.
- jim 11-30-2004 6:38 pm [link] [368 comments]

older posts...