End of anonymity, or end of innocence?

As Google CEO predicts the end of anonymity my take on it is he is really predicting the end of anonymity and presumed innocence.  Think of it like the person who is arrested for a crime that they allegedly committed and finds themselves confronted in court with the fact that "you deliberately left your cell-phone at home to avoid tracking of your location".  Or the person who's private files are encrypted on their hard-drive and they are forced to decrypt them by grand-jury.  One day we may find the right to privacy fought for as vigorously as "taking the fifth",  eventually Miranda-izing will include "the right to remain silent and the right to remain private" but fat lot of good that will do you. Lets face it one day anyone caught in even slightly suspicious circumstances who tries to protect their privacy instead of disclosing their entire video, gps and audio record of events (logged by their iPhone of course) will be fighting to protect their innocence purely because they didn't disclose.  It's a brave new world folks, and we're gonna know what you're doing, where and who with.

Symbian, your hay day is behind you

Symbian should not be bragging so loudly about the number of units they sell because Android will eat their lunch very soon (breakfast is already gone), and not long after that it will be dinner time.  It makes me sad really because I owned two Psion devices that were precursors to Symbian and that was way back in the late 80's and the OS was superior in every way to everything Palm ever was.  They had twenty years to completely kick ass in the mobile space but somehow they never had the insight to pull off what Apple and Android did.  Granted it was largely the availability of cheap and fast data that really made the iPhone and more recent smart-phone wanna-be devices so alluring, but there was, in my mind, never any excuse for Symbian to be right there.

Sprint and T-Mobile, just say "No" (again)

Arrrgh, for the second time rumors of a Sprint and T-Mobile merger are rearing their ugly head.  Please, please, please T-Mobile, just say "No" already. Really why do you have to have the biggest network or one that can compete with the biggest network?  Why not be happy to be the awesome 3rd place company that makes its users happy with good customer service and reasonable rates?  I know why it is, because of the stock market which values only two things - profit and more profit (which implies growth) but maybe you could just think about the possibility of thinking different for once.

If this eventually happens (it will probably take years to actually happen) I suppose I will just have to hope that Google eventually launches its own data service, in the mean time I will enjoy it while it lasts...

Snaps for ClearOS

About three years ago when I was getting back into the swing of Linux I came across a product called Clark Connect which was an all-in-one Linux based gateway that offered routing, firewall, filtering, web server, ftp, Windows integration (via Samba) etc. etc.  Instead of building a homebrew solution Clark Connect had a nicely integrated turn-key solution that did most of what I wanted.

Fast forward almost three years and I went back to look at it again and ClarkConnect is now ClearOS but still very much in existence which is always a good sign.  Even better they have a complete free product that I was able to test and then deploy internally without my new company's network.  After two weeks of operation (and a month since testing began) I'm very impressed with ClearOs and would be happy to recommend it to anyone looking for such a solution.

Currently running on a modest system that would otherwise have sat gathering dust it is acting as our main firewall, local DNS, internal Windows domain controller (not actually used but there), DHCP, LDAP server, and VPN server.  In the near future I hope to hook up our second network connection and configure for multi-connection load balancing and failover, and perhaps set up a true DMZ.

So far we don't really have a need for some of ClearOS's paid services which are email and content filtering at the firewall level, but I would be more than happy to pay their base subscription price for what we have and will probably add some of the paid services in the near future.

The only thing I don't like about ClearOS is their website which is a bit confusing in that it mixes several different websites into one - its not clear whether I'm looking at free support from the ClearOS community, their products pages or their services.  Hopefully they will straighten things out a bit in the future since having three different sites seems like overkill.

ClearOS was mentioned in a recent techradar artilcle about Linux based firewalls and did very well coming out top for people who don't need all the extra features that eBox apparently offers.  Although I did not evaluate eBox for my company looking at it I would say the only interesting features are it is Ubuntu based (which is the new standard for our Linux systems) and has Asterisk support, something I'd like to experiment with.  However it seems to me that ClearOS through its roots as ClarkConnect is much more mature and has a bigger support base.

iPhone 4 vs. Android G1

I have to admit, sitting in a bar in San Francisco tonight I couldn't help a little shadenfruede as I sat there with my 1st generation Android phone - the G1 - streaming high def YouTube video with full bars of reception while my iPhone 4 touting colleague couldn't even get a connection.  Once in a while he'd excitedly announce "oh, I got a bar!" and then it would go away.  And no, this was all without a Vulcan death grip on the phone's antennas.  Lets just say it doesn't matter how pretty, pretty, pretty it is - without reception an iPhone 4 is just a flashy MP3 player.

Rats! Ubuntu on MacBook Pro v7 FAIL

Well here I am with a brand new MacBook Pro (version 7 with an i5 processor) and thought I would be able to run Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) on it with no problems.  This expectation was based on my experience with a v4 MBP and Lucid that worked fantastically requiring only installation of WiFi and nVidia drivers after the initial CD install.

Alas although Lucid booted and I was able to use it there was a multiplicity of issues that just made it unusable, not least of which were problems with the multi-touch mousepad, slowness, very poor battery life, and who knows what else lurking beneath the covers.  Of course I don't blame Ubuntu - this is very new hardware and Apple as usual throws in a whole bunch of custom stuff you wont find on any other PC and will require custom hacking by the good folks over at Mactel Support.

Unfortunately since I need this machine to really work for business purposes I can't deal with the issues right now so I will have to stick with MacOsX for now or hold out for a new non-Mac laptop that will work just fine out of the box.  The most suitable candidate I've found is the new Toshiba Portege R700 which is small, light, thin, EPEAT Gold certified, has great battery life, eSATA and HDMI ports (absent from Macs of course), an all metal case and damn it, actually looks pretty hot:

Nagios double FAIL

I was disappointed to see that after signing up for an account with Nagios they sent me my password back in an email in plain text.  Frankly that's a very strong indication that they are storing my password in plain text because if it was encrypted they wouldn't actually know what my password is.  There is a remote possibility that the code that initially processes the password (before my account is created) composed and sent that email before my password was encrypted and stored, but somehow I don't believe that. 

To re-iterate: storing passwords in plain text is a known vector for password hacks on user accounts.  It means anyone with access to their database, or their database backups or even their internal network can snoop passwords in plain text and use or redistribute them for their own nefarious purposes.  This could be an inside person with a grudge, or just bad ethics or it could be an outside hacker who compromised their systems and then can suck down thousands of email addresses and passwords.  It is then a simple matter to sell that data or start using them to hack into other accounts using the same credentials.

So I did what any good concerned citizen should do, I submitted a support request via their website pointing out this issue and requesting that they notify their developers and rectify the problem.  I then got a confirmation that a bug had been entered in their system.  Then I got a perfunctory email saying I wasn't entitled to support and would have to purchase a support plan.  Then I got another email saying my support ticket had been closed. 

Let's just say I'm not impressed with this so I end up having to post my concerns in a public forum and hope they will notice them. 

Diversify or suffer the slings and arrows of your lack-luster partner

I'm hearing yet another round of rumors that Apple is on the verge of announcing a CDMA capable version of the iPhone which presumably would be made available on Verizon and/or Sprint, the two main US carriers using CDMA.  It is more likely it would be Verizon since it is the leader in CDMA and leaders have more dollars to pay Apple big money to get "an exclusive" (hardly and exclusive since AT&T already has iPhone) and we know how Apple loves these deals.  However I think if the rumors come true then this is spectacularly bad timing for all the existing iPhone users who are currently stuck with AT&T and hating it.  Just think how many of them will have held their nose and re-upped their contracts to get the iPhone 4 and will then find Verizon is actually offering the same phone - they will be LIVID! 

But signs are that some Apple faithful are already abandoning their creed ahead of schedule - a colleague of mine, previously an iPhone devotee and developer has just ordered an Incredible from Verizon in spite of a one month wait.  As he pointed out, it doesn't matter how good the iPhone 4 is if he can't actually make a call with it then it is basically useless.  Other friends of mine have been expressing the same sentiment and I'm expecting to hear similar stories first person in the near future,  So just remember Steve, the killer app for phones it still making phone calls and if your Apple users can't do that they may just decide to stop being Apple users.