TR

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment July 30th:

• Your GSM Phone is (Probably) Vulnerable to Malicious Text Messages (Andrew Brandt/Technologizer) – Am I the only one who hates SMS? Seems silly that on a smart phone, connected to the internet and hence access to IM of every kind that SMS isn't routable to the IM of your choice or something. I would turn it off on my BB if I knew how. Once I get a spare minute (hopefully late next week as the next several days are fully packed), I'll have to research turning it off or dig a bit deeper through the BB Advanced Settings menu.

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment July 24th:

• Amazon's Bezos Apologizes For The "Stupid" And "Thoughtless" Kindle Incident (MG Siegler/TechCrunch) – I certainly have more respect and trust of Bezos than Jobs and this is the kind of repentant apology necessary. Still I'll be sitting on the sidelines a bit longer than before to be sure Bezos is good to his word.
• Mapping Drug Use by Testing Sewer Water – and we wonder why druggies don't feel any particular need to utilize plumbed facilities?
• Apple's much-anticipated tablet device coming early next year (Kasper Jade/AppleInsider) – Sexy. Put phone capability into it as I mentioned yesterday and I might make the leap… after it's on Verizon, that is.
• Microsoft Offers to Put Rival Browsers on Windows to Settle Case, EU Says (Bloomberg) – I know it was unrealistic, but I would have loved to see MS sell two versions of Windows. Regular non-government manipulated and Windows CP (commie pinko) or Windows STFU and sold the CP or STFU version for say $10, but of course, no online for you!

  Man, Europe needs a real revolution and quick… but then so do we.

• Ashton Kutcher: Twitter will change media (Ina Fried/CNET News) – Actually, given CNN's ratings continue slide to obscurity, Ashton may have more "power" than them. If CNN wasn't playing in airports, would anyone be actually watching?

Things I read that I found interesting and worthy of comment July 15th through July 22nd:

• How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio – All terrestrial radio is public. Oh, you mean the stations we all pay for so liberal orthodoxy can be espoused? If they can't compete in the public marketplace, they should be allowed to die.
• Tech Rumor of the Day: Apple, Verizon Team Up on Tablet (Scott Moritz/TheStreet.com) – I haven't seen this yet, but one thought strikes me as I read this article; "Why not put a phone in it too?". I don't want to carry more devices and already am trained to using a headset with all my smartphones, why not have the device to it all? This would replace my laptop for travel, be my e-book (i.e. all books) reader, phone device and even my portable gaming platform. The only drawback I can see is caller ID / screening if I didn't have my phone out, but customizable ringtones would solve that.
• If you try sometimes – you can get what you need – Cool idea.
• Mayo Clinic throws cold water on Obamacare – There's nothing good about obamacare. Healthcare in the U.S. is the best in the world. The only problems with it are those created by how much the government is already involved in it. Getting them more involved will make things only worse. You do realize this is directly parallel to what happened in the housing market, the resulting derivatives and the impetus for the financial meltdown, right? That was because government interfered with otherwise free markets and this will do the same. I can't believe we even have to debate this given how terribly all other experiments in this area have gone throughout the world.
• Breakfast Topic: What iPhone app should Blizzard release next? – Crafting, AH, cooking and fishing. Calendar and grouping functionality would be sweet too.
• Massively Single-Player Gaming? – This is one huge reason WoW is king. You can group all you want, but there is a ton of content to mess with all by your lonesome. When you only have 15 – 30 minutes you don't have time to gather a group and get anything meaningful done, but you can accomplish quite a bit meaningful in the game in that time, all by yourself.
• Amazon Says It Will Stop Deleting Kindle Books (Thomas Claburn/InformationWeek) – Too late. Going to be a while before I even contemplate the Kindle. Need a long bit of time to see if this type of overzealousness recurs.
• AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure (MG Siegler/TechCrunch) – Wow, I knew AT&T had problems and is one of the reasons I've held out on moving to the iPhone, but a phone company that can't get vmail right? Ouch. I feel really prescient and otherwise smug about resisting the allure of the iPhone.
• Battle.net authenticator now available for other platforms – Bummer. No support for Verizon version BBs. Guess I have to wait a bit longer to get my authenticator on my phone and ditch the dongle.
• Twitter: A Tragedy of Errors – Actual security practitioners are beginning to raise their own concerns around KBA, but at this point in my discussions with real world implementers, the business group still holds sway here arguing for convenience over security. It will take a while, probably quite a while, since the death of passwords has been foretold for a couple decades now, but still that's the 90%+ authentication mechanism still in use.
• Laplace’s Demon, Santa Claus and TSA’s Secure Flight – Not sure how Laplace's Demon has been slain, but seems to me such an intellect with such complete knowledge would then know the nature of time and wouldn't have to complete any analysis, but as time's master be able to move through time to actually visit the future itself. No analysis needed which is good cuz CPU cycles can be expensive .
• How Usable is the Mobile Web? – Much as I like to rag on Apple and the iPhone hype, this data is hard to argue with. If e-tailers get this information properly absorbed, they should probably start discounting the iPhone acquisition and build in incentives to shop their mobile sites with it. On completing online tasks, "iPhone owners had an average success rate of 75% while other smartphones averaged 55%".
• Yahoo's front page makeover (Maggie Shiels/BBC) – Looks like the same old busy, ad-laden, news nonsense Yahoo homepage I've come to loathe and despise. I can't really pin it down, but going to Yahoo is like accidentally channel surfing into "Entertainment Tonight". I'm dazzled briefly by all the pretty flashing pix, feel ill and then surf away in both cases feeling like I need a bath. Probably just me and my anti-pop-culture nature.
• Barnes & Noble partners with Plastic Logic; Opens up; Targets Kindle (Larry Dignan/Between the Lines) – Good to see more competition. I'd love to get a Kindle 2, but no way I'm paying $300 for yet another single purpose device and the latest DRM scrap really puts a damper on my enthusiasm. Want me to carry around a closed system device to use to pay you for more content, it better be dang near free.
• Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 BETA … (Sleonard/Windows Home Server Team Blog) – Cool. Looks like I'll be able to have my home network ready for Windows 7 when it is released. Now just need to figure out which PC to use as Win7 guinea pig.
• Tips on using Recount for tanks and others – Note to self: Contains "how to use Recount" link. Check it out
• Mobile Search Gets a "Push": Aloqa's Location-Aware App Debuts – The "what's nearby" is a cool feature, but I still think all this "where I am" stuff is something several people are going to regret in a big way. No, I'm not making any threats, just observing that now stalkers don't need to stalk, just get on their target's Facebook or similar integrated page. Folks, stop and think about the implications to your real life before jumping into some of this "how cool is that?" stuff. What if today's work friend, who next week is competing for a promotion with you, happens to show your boss where you actually are some summer afternoon when you went to the "doctor"? Let your imagination run wild with scenarios from the sublime to the deadly and we will see them in the news in the next couple of years.
• Another Security Tip For Twitter: Don't Use "Password" As Your Server Password (Robin Wauters/TechCrunch) – Yep, Twitter a toy built by and for kids.
• Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites – Interesting study. Worth a quick skim at least and think about your own usage habits on social networking sites, or not…
• Twitter's Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be "The Pulse Of The Planet" (Erick Schonfeld/TechCrunch) – Wow! This has a lot of information and for me at least, it doesn't clarify for me at all what value Twitter has built. 20 million users vs. Facebook's 250 million? Who will be to 1 billion first? This really a question? Check the time spent on-site of FB vs. Twitter and ask yourself if it is easier for FB to build or adopt Twitter messaging functionality to itself or for Twitter to build a reason for me to actually go to Twitter.com? Twitter as a protocol for multi-casting may have a value, but given their inability to keep the service up for long periods of time and the number of features they've had to turn off to keep it up when it its, I doubt it can't be improved upon. I don't really see what defensive strategy they have beyond that of "first mover" with a base of only 20 million users, but then again I look at even MySpace, yesterday's darling and wonder if this is really a valid defense. I think not.
• Ubisoft Releases Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines Trailer – Not sure what the knock is on AC on DS, but this looks like more AC goodness to me. May cause me to dust off my PSP.
• Mac Shipments Up. Also, Mac Shipments Down. – I thought Apple had crossed over into double digit market-share. Guess I care less about them than I thought and suspect MS does as well.
• Why an OAuth iframe is a Great Idea – Good explanation of a clear use case around the issues of "mashups" and inter-site trust.
• Google Voice mobile app for Blackberry and Android (The Official Google Blog) – So I broke down today and got signed up. Will be interesting to see how this works in actual practice, but figured I'd better see how it works before they enable porting of your "real" / existing phone number to the service. I wouldn't want to do something that extreme and have it be a subpar experience.