...more recent posts
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.And then yesterday at 8:00 pm, after much shooting in the dark, he hit it:
I'm not giving up, but it's going to be slow, if any progress at all is made now...
GUYS HOLY FRICKING HECK OF MOTHER BLEH BLEH BLEH! I'M STREAMING SHOUTCAST OVER WIFI!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!1 yOU ALL OWE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111 GFPOIHPOGIHR3O[GIRWHOGIRWHGO42IHF42Of course, there are some problems
oK, INSANITY OVER...
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!
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.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.
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.
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)
The 100 oldest still registered .com domain names.
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.
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.
Playing around with the page design. Feedback welcome. It is supposed to look something like:
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....Now that takes me back to the BBS days.
I confidently expect to see a renaissance in erotic ASCII art in the coming months....
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."Who's he working for now?
"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."
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.It is kind of funny though. Apparently it worked a bit better than expected and brought a few servers to their knees:
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.
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.