In early June, I was in a nice rainy East Coast US city for meetings dealing with particularly thorny issues related to ways the Internet experience is being killed off for regular folks—and for institutions (NGOs) that are promoting free speech and human rights. Over a small breakfast, I sketched in my book some notes about the progression of malware over time. Basically paralleling the development I describe in my site The Social Graph of Malware, malware has gone from simple and juvenile defacement of web sites to become sophisticated and bandwidth-hogging socially-engineered schemes designed to get people to fall for a purchase they didn’t want to make, or just to click a link to enroll their computer in a network of zombies poised to conduct nasty attacks on other people. [Read more…]
The iPhone is an “amateur radio”
Comeon‘ Apple — we all know “my phone has five bars and yet it drops calls all the time.” I call customer support on average once a month about this. They have even given me credits on my bill (not often). They have told me to download and use their app AT&T Mark the Spot to report poor-reception areas. Which I do routinely.
Now that Apple has announced that the reception measurement on the iPhone is incorrect (reading too high by about 2 bars in some cases), I no longer have an excuse. AT&T claims to have 10 towers within a 2-mile radius of my home office, but most of the time 2 or 3 of them are ”down” and besides, in San Francisco, over half of them are “behind a hill” from me so they do me no good. There are probably only 2 or 3 towers that actually give me any coverage in the office here.
But, Apple knew about the +2 bars problem a long time ago. It was reported in 2009. We were all seeing 2 or 3 bars, and then our software was upgraded and we were seeing 5 bars routinely (except when there were none). We customers knew that the iPhone was giving us more bars than it should have. So why did Apple not know this, or not see the change when this happened in the first place?
And Apple was surprised about this?
Any mobile phone is a mobile radio. And amateur radio operators, which we all are these days, know that if you touch (and thus “ground”) the antenna, you cause a change in signal strength.
Joi Ito on Innovation and Startups
I love Joi Ito’s advice about startups. Mostly he is talking about understanding risk. I particularly focused on one section just after 9 minutes into the video where he talks about how it’s folly to spend a lot of time building a business plan when it’s so inexpensive to go ahead and develop your product iteratively and develop the plan after you’ve seen how your customers are reacting to the product. Here’s the video:
[vimeo 6827318]
Reclaim your Facebook privacy
 Neat idea – although ReclaimPrivacy.org has gone away, you still may want to scan your Facebook privacy settings to see exactly how private you might not be! Comparitech offers to guide you through this. Try it out. |
| Comparitech’s page also describes privacy issues you might want to address on google (gmail and google+) and suggestions on avoiding tracking in browsers. I thought I had most everything set pretty well on my Facebook account, but I was a bit surprised at my results (back in 2010). The old ReclaimPrivacy piece of code could fix the settings for you, but yes, you can do it all yourself if you just follow all the steps. [Read more…] |
Google Chinese-language search, Hong Kong, and Internet Cantonization
So the “solution” to providing uncensored Chinese-language search, at least right now (beginning 22 March, 2010), is to have Chinese citizens use google.com.hk (hk==Hong Kong) rather than mainland-based google.cn. I guess it’s a breakthrough idea to do this, since under Hong Kong law, the uncensored search is legal, but of course the arguments going on these days about restrictive access to the Internet have to do with nations trying to restrict the access of their citizens based on physical location. And the location of a server is important because the local authorities can come in and physically shut you down.
But the great firewall is already blocking Google.com.hk content, as would be expected. [Read more…]
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