...more recent posts
is a backwards-compatible modification to the TCP protocol which adds opportunistic encryption. It's designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet.
TLS is the solution to protecting sensitive information. However, there's room for a low setup cost protocol to protect the bulk of traffic which isn't currently encrypted. It can't stop a focused attack, but it can assuage untargeted, dragnet sniffing of backbones and spoofing of RST packets.
New iPhones are $199 and $299 (8 GB and 16GB.) 3G cellular (much faster) and GPS and longer battery life (we'll see about that.) Not much else different on the hardware front. Very nice software update though. They are really doing it right. (Maybe I'll post more on this if I get the time.) And their on line (web, email, remote backup) service .mac has been renamed 'MobileMe' and runs on the me.com domain (I'm meh on the name but that's a pretty nice domain - must have cost a few bucks.) The syncing is very tight between the iPhones and MobileMe. Contacts, email, even pictures are synced immediately over the air so your home machines and iPhone (and your shared calendars on your partners iPhone) all stay in sync all the time. $99/year is not cheap, but I think it's going to be so slick that you'll basically have to buy it. Good thing the phones are so cheap now - I guess that's the trade off.
Due on July 11. I'll be there.
IEEE Spectrum magazine has a huge round up of thinking on the singularity.
Free Wi-Fi for AT&T users at Starbucks. Well, sort of mostly almost free. You have to sign up for a Starbucks card and have used it at least once in the last 30 days (just adding money to the card counts as "using" it.) And you have to make an account with AT&T where you agree for them to send you 4 emails a year, plus look at your Starbucks card puchasing data. In exchange you get 2 hours of Wi-Fi a day, limited to a single session (you can't leave and them come back, but I'm not sure if there is any safe guard against creating multiple Starbucks and AT&T accounts in order to get multiple sessions.)
This is a pretty good deal in my opinion, especially for an infrequent traveler like me (where having some sort of 3G modem for my laptop makes no economic sense.) Starbucks do have a great advantage of ubiquity.
Lots of stuff still to clean up, but the main work on the geneva blog engine is finally complete. Yes, this is what was just going to take me a week or so to finish back around the first of the year. I double dare anyone to claim the ability to judge time more poorly than me. Sadly my miscalculations are never off in the other direction.
Anyway, I'm not being too hard on myself - there is some good work in there. It's just funny how everything is harder and takes longer than I think. Still, this is a pretty big milestone. The whole thing is now minimally usable. Probably only take me another decade or so get it to final release. :-)
Yahoo BrowserPlus is a downloadable (semi-) cross-browser plug in that enables a bunch of cool services for developing more desktop like web apps. The javascript APIs allow for image editing, visual notifiers, and for me the big one: the ability to drag and drop files from the desktop into the web app. It's crazy this has taken so long. And the wait is not over since BrowserPlus is still a long way from ready. Worth watching.
Check out this quick video demo of Google Street View app running on a prototype Google Android mobile phone. Compass mode: nice.
Was up in Maine for the weekend with only sporadic connection to the internet. So of course the server started acting up. Luckily just the mail server, and at least it never went down completely. Made in back to NYC late last night and have been working away this morning. I think I have it sorted out now but we'll see if that holds up.
I'm going to move mail services to the new server this week and then start migrating people over. The new Qmail Toaster Plus packages should be much easier to manage, should do a *much* better job against spam (which has been a real issue,) and should be easier to maintain and upgrade, hopefully making worrisome weekends like this one a thing of the past. We'll see.
Well I missed my April 1st launch by a little bit. I am the worst estimator of time ever. I really got psychologically stuck. It's the same point I always get stuck at. I just don't want to finish it. I start to get cold sweats and then the next thing I know I'm day dreaming about how to start all over again and build it even better. But I will not let that happen again. I am going to finish this one no matter what. And now finally in the last week I've made some good progress.
The new server was necessary, and everything is going well on that front. But in some ways it was just a giant procrastination. Like, "I really don't want to finish this software so let's buy some hardware and get wrapped up in learning new stuff on that front." But still, like I said, it did need to be done, just maybe not in the order I did it.
Anyway, I'm going to try to get back to some blogging. I just haven't been able to find my focus. I know what this page is about, but I doubt it's clear to anyone else. So I'm still working on that. And to restart things off in a totally lame way here's two computer security links that probably won't interest anyone and that, further, I won't even offer any comment on.
Exploiting Network Cards, and a post about the impact of the major Debian OpenSSL vulnerability on other *nix distributions. Yikes. Scary world out there.
The new server, cedar.datamantic.com, should go online tomorrow. Won't make much of a difference to anyone on the outside, but it will add a large measure of redundancy to my setup giving me a little more peace of mind.