Rush For Frustration

Recently I have been contemplating about a new phone. It is about time, as I have been using my faithful Samsung I600 for 20 months now. Two months ago I was given an iPhone, but somehow it failed to conquer my heart. Yes, it is a gorgeous toy. It has brilliant applications... I could play for hours with Bloomberg, rotating the screen up and down. Or watch music videos... But when it comes down to some serious business, the iPhone seems to remain a gadget...

So after long hesitation, I decided to give Blackberry a try. The Bold seemed like a perfect choice. Sync - perfect, it is able to fully synchronize with Google via the Google Sync. And it is able to synchronize with iTunes music library, I decided to by my master music meta data. I was about to buy one, but then I met a friend who had been using one for a long time. What scared me was his routine task of removing the battery twice a day... to keep the berry fresh and up to the task. No data connection? Remove the battery... Unable to complete a call? Remove the battery... Well... not exactly what I expected, while the old good i600 has been rock solid, especially since I upgraded it to Windows Mobile 6.

Windows Mobile 6 cleared most of the frustrating experiences I remember from the Windows Mobile 5 days... Like no HTML email or Bluetooth not connecting to the currently active handsfree device. Most is the correct word, as there are still glitches. Speaking of Bluetooth, sometimes it falls into a strange state, while connected to my Motorola IHF1000 car unit. Instead of routing voice calls to the car speakers, it starts playing system sounds instead. I could bear with that, but in this state the car radio is paused in a "call" mode. So I have to reset the Bluetooth subsystem (fortunately there is the Wireless Manager to do this, instead of removing the battery). But it is frustrating... so many years of existence of both Microsoft and Bloototh and they still cannot do it right.

Honestly I was hoping the Blackberry, being a business - oriented device would be stable first and things like daily battery removal would never be necessary. And then I read the rant by David Pogue describing his Blackberry Storm experience. It was a total rant. I just could not believe...:

Both of my review Storms had more bugs than a summer picnic. Freezes, abrupt reboots, nonresponsive controls, cosmetic glitches.

So far that has been enough to stay away from Blackberries for the time being.... There is no rush... I do not need frustration... I just cannot believe marketing and time lines drive the industry... Aren't people just tired with not working gadgets and endless glitches in the constant stream of upgrades?

Nuclear Batteries

So what is the next big thing after the Internet? That question still remains my top one since I formulated it in June 2008 at the Intel Capital CEO conference. It was just a week after the impressive presentation by Chris Cooper at 2008 Telecosm Conference. Still being a little jet lagged, I was immediately awaken by the vision of nano confinement fusion.

Today, while the nano - scale fusion nuclear batteries are not ready, and will not be ready for some years to come, we may soon be getting an intermediate solution - the mini - scale fission reactors. They are just moving into a mass production. According to The Cutting Edge:

...nuclear battery technology pioneered by government scientists at Los Alamos—the facility that developed the first atomic bomb—has been licensed to private companies for mass production and distribution... in its initial format, each micro-reactor will produce just 25 megawatts, but enough to provide electricity for 20,000 average American-sized homes or a major industrial project...

...factory-sealed in concrete, and delivered by truck, train or ship... the reactors will produce heat which will boil an adjacent water source to create the steam that typically turns turbines that generate electricity...

Just try to imagine the consequences. Inexpensive, autonomous power... Even if it still requires wires to distribute around towns and communities, being smoke free, not needing a train of coal every day or two and not forcing us to conserve it in any manner, The Botomless Well of energy will soon be available to most of us.

PS>FAC: thanks for sharing the original article

Watch your DNS!

Computers on the Internet have IP addresses. Like 208.77.188.166. We are used to locate them based on names or Web addresses. Like www.example.com. DNS (Domain Name System) is what translates Web address into an IP address. Seems pretty easy and straightforward. But DNS is absolutely central to the integrity of the Internet and there seems to be a serious weakness that may cause us a lot of headache.

Fake DNS servers. Under normal conditions you get access to the DNS servers when you log in to youe ISP (Internet Service Provider). It is in the very interest of the ISPs not to mess with DNS system and provide the proper references to DNS servers to their clients. But there is nothing that would stop me from setting up a free WiFi network providing fake DNS references. Then any computer joining such network would go to fake DNS servers to resolve any name a user types in the address bar of the Web browser. And as a result users would be redirected to fake servers. After typing in www.MyBank.com I would be first redirected to a different server that could execute a man in the middle attack, forwarding my requests to the real MyBank servers, but sitting there in the middle to capture everything I send and receive (including passwords). Bruce Schneier has a great commentary on these type of attacks.

OK but most of us already know we should not be joining unknown networks for that very reason. So should we feel secure then? What else should be checked? Your very own Internet router at home. This happened to me before. Hijacked firmware. I bought a used Linksys WAP54G on an Internet auction. The access point arrived with default factory settings on and I configured it to match my network. Sometime later I noticed an unknown, but active MAC address in the logs of my firewall. Tracing it down I realized I had an unknown guest attached to my WiFi network. Weird, I thought, as I was running WPA2 security with AES and a long password, a virtually unbreakable combination, even in the light of the new findings in this area. "OK, smart guy, I will change you the password and you will be out" - I thought. And 5 seconds after I changed the password, he was back in. Scary. Repeated the step again and he was again logged into my network. The password simply must have had been relayed somewhere just when I was changing it. The source of the problem? The access point was not a brand new, factory sealed, and it simply arrived with a hijacked firmware. I do not know what exactly was this firmware doing. I panicked. Unscrewed the antennas, to get the intruder out at the physical layer and upgraded the access point to the new firmware downloaded directly from the Linksys.COM site. He never came back again. I found him because I was browsing the logs from my firewall. How many of you regularly do that?

Hijacked router firmware can also be your closest source of fake DNS. With all the consequences described above. So make sure you update your gear before you plug it in to your network. Even if it had come factory sealed... You will be secure... not only feel secure. Unless you have a D-Link router like the DIR-655 using firmware 1.21, where D-Link introduced a feature hijacking the DNS system for marketing purpose. According to http://www.ubersource.com/?p=17, it "hijacked google.ca and sent me instead to it’s own domain at bsecure.com where it attempted to sell me a security software subscription at a discount or a trial". This is very scary. Vendors are now using the DNS service to fool the users and redirect them to sites and services they do not want to go to. It should be considered a crime. Like changing road signs to make travelers visit shops and services they never wanted. Who should we trust now? Certainly not D-Link after seeing practices like that. I have to rethink this twice, as I have already put a lot of money into a D-Link based security infrastructure of my home network. And now I lost the trust I had in them. For good...

No Alternative For Microsoft Outlook

Last week I found myself in a situation prompting me to figure out the new setup for my virtual office. My previous setup was mainly based on the Microsoft Exchange 2007. My laptop running Outlook 2007 with local cache of all mail / contact / calendar items residing on a server. Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone on top of it, synchronizing everything over the air via the ActiveSync protocol. This worked flawlessly. I had all emails and contacts and calendars in sync all the time. My phone, my laptop plus a working copy on the Exchange server. The challenge now has been to do the same, sans Exchange. So I started thinking about my new setup. These days we tend to sore everything in The Cloud (the Internet). I use GMail and Google Documents for my private stuff a lot, so my first steps were to try setting up everything around Google services. I soon found out this was not that simple.

Starting with contacts, my first goal was to move my database of contacts from Microsoft Outlook to Google Mail. My first surprise was there is not an easy way to do this. I used to think everything connects to Outlook. Not that true. Google accepts only CSV (Comma Separated Values) file you can produce with Outlook, but after the first trial import I found it did not work. Everything went into the "notes" field. No names, phones, streets, faxes... no structure. CSV has a concept of a "header row", where data columns are described with names. My header row was in Polish, but this was not the only problem. After digging here and there I found some help on the Google Forums (why o why they have not described the CSV structure in the help pages?). After preparing the proper CSV file with contacts I discovered Google Contacts has just one field for "Name". No first / last name. That means when you sync such database to a phone, you will no be able to select sorting criteria by either first or last name. That was enough. I dropped the Google Contacts concept all together.

My second target to try as the master database of contacts was ZYB. Zyb used to be my favorite concept of a VAS (Value Added Service) for years but to be honest I never tested it thoroughly. I downloaded a trial version of the Nexthaus SyncML client for Outlook (ZYB is SyncML based) and soon my contacts were visible on Zyb. Then I tried to sync my test iPhone to it. iPhone does not support SyncML natively, but there is an application called Synthesis (available via the iTunes store) that helps here. First synch went fine (but that is easy...). So immediately I pushed the "synch" button again and it trashed my newly created ZYB database all together. I mean the contacts remained there, but all the accented characters were lost and garbled. The only solution here was getting rid of accents at all, but hey, this was acceptable in the 7-bit ASCII world, not in today's Unicode...

So after Google and Zyb it seems Outlook is still the place to keep your contacts. Even iTunes can synch to it locally and transfer the contacts to the iPhone. It seems unbelievable nobody has been able to come out with a good "Cloud" alternative for Outlook. Or may be there is one, I am just unaware of?