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Some time ago we invited our dear readers to send over any newsworthy stuff on wireless and tech. We’re keen readers of a great deal of blogs, podcast abusers, videocast fanatics, we know a bunch of inside chaps plus our own share of industry secrets to share, but I *know* we’re sometimes missing great stories. So go ahead and email us at:

whisper [at] wirelessisfun [dot] com
You’ll be given credit for your finding, of course, unless you want to remain anonymous.

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I’ll set up a separate section for our WiF podcast so those who want to check the audio show only should be satisfied. One should find profiles of who we guest on the podcast and a better RSS integration. We’re yet to create an iTunes account, but the MP3 version is less misleading so feel free to download it. No cash required! :)

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Bragging rights
Many thanks to all our readers who commented or quoted news from WiF! Dennis over at WirelessJobs.comhas a nice description of WiF and arguments on why he subscribed to our feed. ZDnet Security Blog also picked up our story on Skype and the Dell Powered by Linux? story made it all the way up to digg.com top page. All this while still in our infancy, a WiF is a little over a month in a half old! Thanks again to all of you for making it all happen!

February 27th
Dan – WiF crew captain.

Capitol Records was rebutted attempting to shake down another alleged pirate when it was discovered that it was not the plaintiff responsible, but another individual who had access to her account.  The case was dismissed, and Capitol ordered to pay court fees, but the Recording Industry Association of America never sleeps, and they have filed a motion to reconsider, based on the grounds that any internet service provider is completely responsible for all activity on their network.

The implication here is that any individual who allows open access to their WiFi network is legally liable for any illicit activity that occurs over their bandwidth – and can be considered complacent if they are aware of the activity, when ‘awareness’ can be defined as vaguely as experiencing network slowdowns.

Clearly the RIAA members are flexing any legal muscle they can to control what’s left of their industry after missing the opportunity to effectively regulate digital music distribution, even using terrorist tactics of attacking apparently at random, targeting children and families, and now reigning fear over the public at large by implicating open access to internet.

But we’re not going to play the victim, and our pals over at Gizmodo are participating in organizing an RIAA boycott for the month of March. We’re not worried: we vote with our consumer dollars!

Host: Dan, lead WiF-er
Guest: Chad (AustinTX), lead Fonero poster on the Fon.com boards

Dan discusses FON and Whisher with AustinTX on this first WiF podcast. It’s rather experimental, humble and may have hickups. One will find there’s a lot of room for improvement, but as that comes with time, let me see your support by at least bearing with this release episode :)
Dan also has to stop recording at night and sleep more!

Running time: precisely 28:03
Download MP3 file (about 25.7MB) mirrored here.

Google launched Google Apps for domain integration. What’s that? It means you can offer Google services for your group, family, institution, customers or your enterprise, if the case. Google Apps are meant to be integrated by domain administrators in order to let their users access to Google services straight from an owned domain. The Standard Edition is free of charge and offers 2GB Gmail accounts (Google’s free email service), Google Docs & Spreadsheets (word processor and spreadsheet calculator, compatibily includes .doc and .xls files), Google Calendar, Google Talk (instant messaging). The Premier edition costs 50$/year (per user) and includes, among others, a larger email account quota, ad free emails and 24/7 assistance including phone support. Here is a comparison between the two editions.
The service can help small businesses have a a powerful office and data exchange platform straight through their web domain. Small computer resellers and IT consultants can add value to their products and services by offering email accounts and access to online office software (i.e. Docs & Spreadsheets). Might be serious competition to Microsoft’s mammoth (both old and large :) ), Office suite, at least in their “standard” editions. Google now has the power to convince even more conservative users migrate towards hosted applications. Salesforce.com was the first massively adopted hosted application for businesses, a CRM suite completely online supporting desktop synchronization, convenient document and data sharing and extensions and guaranteed success of implementation. Salesforce.com became the leader of the CRM market in a very short time, out competing players like Oracle and SAP. Now, it time for the powerful Google to compete with classic desktop applications.

Apple and Cisco have agreed to both use the iPhone trademark in a confidential out-of-court agreement. One statement is that the two companies will “explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, consumer, and enterprise communications.”. Cisco, the world’s largest computer-networking equipment maker and Apple who expects to sell 10 million WiFi enabled iPhones in 2008, are probably looking for profit from interoperability between their devices and technology. Which may have been Cisco’s intention from start, after all, iPhone looked very promising if we analyze the media coverage after official announcement week at Macworld 2007. Why not ask for a piece of the pie in the future? :) And so they did!

There’s been a flaming but rather silent war between Fon’s and Whisher’s hot shots since the former’s market debut. The two products should not really be competing but it came clear that Whisher was exactly what Fon missed – a real social component!
The hot shots fighting over WiFi sharing supremacy, it was just a matter of time until somebody won the first battle. We give the first token to Fon’s CEO, Martin Varsavsky by winning the media war. Alas for him we have to hand out the second token to Ferran Moreno of Whisher for striking hard and making the score even.

Freddy, a prominent part time hobbyist hacking into Fon’s Linux firmwares just released a patch that enables a third signal for the Spaniards’ proprietary router called La Fonera. By Freddy’s words:

“You might have heard about Whisher.com, the idea is similar to the one FON has.
But Whisher is hardware independent and the signal is encrypted.
That’s why I like it, but I would have to use the “MyPlace” signal of the Fonera.
That would allow everybody to access my private LAN and of course I don’t want that.
Due to this I added another signal to my Fonera.”

The patch will add a third WPA encrypted signal to La Fonera.
You’ll have “MyPlace”, “FON_AP” and the new one: “WHISHER_AP”
The new signal prevents access to your private LAN thus making it perfect for use with Whisher.

The score is even now: 1-1! We’ll keep an eye on this war! Great stuff for a wireless news blog, I tell you that much!

Let the hostilities begin! :)

We learn via Slashdot and WirelessJobs.com that Skype has asked FCC to force mobile carriers to open up their networks to other players.
“Skype essentially wants to turn the wireless phone companies into just another network of the kind currently operated on the ground.” the guys at Slashdot explain.
That is obviously bad bad bad baaaad news for those big fellows that run BSs (base stations, that is) as they think they’ll keep those business models forever, until humankind takes over Mars, Jupiter and maybe even half of Andromeda.
Sure, Skype wants to expand the business and jump on the low cost computer to mobile train.
If their lobby does not derail, the secret will probably unveil to be discovered as one of the biggest MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) out there. Let’s evaluate what they did so far:

- managed to open up their calls to most land/mobile lines worldwide through Skype Out service
- effectively jumped over the 500 million downloads mark
- expanded services to provide incoming calls like if they were to fixed local number
- enabled SMS to most GSM / CDMA carriers
- signed with and funded one of the most courageous WiFi sharing initiatives, Fon.com to enhance mobile wireless use of their service
– and now this, the path to having their own mobile service! Read on, we explain why this is big!

Basically they took all the steps to act like a genuine operator, only without their own net. The next step is to change all that in a way that incumbment competition can no longer block Skype’s take off!

Should the trick work we expect Skype to become world’s largest MVNO, with the power to use existant mobile nets for their service only. Why is it big? Because if they make it they’ll tickle the net neutrality bill and make sure those incumbents don’t have fun blocking Skype’s service !
We’re great fans of net neutrality and alternative services so we’ll have to vote for this.
But watch out for that monopoly this promises! Just a thought… :)

Big news from Slashdot again: Apparently after the new customer feedback website opened by Dell, 2 out of 3 customers are asking for a pre-installed Linux distribution. They are talking about a tri-choice between Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE, allowing multiple-boot with Windows installed also, or no Windows at all, because yes, Linux can replace Windows successfully!

Open software like Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, Gimp, PDFCreator, Audacity and of course Open Office will be available. The manufacturer, Dell in this case, will be able to work together with the packagers of a Linux distro in order to have all the drivers installed, maybe offer support from the same packagers, in less words: making it “Idiot proof” like the Mac.

No, it’s not wireless news, but it’s great news! The prices will drop, and the awareness of customers towards Linux will increase considerably. Until now, there was a big myth that there is no consumer request for Linux distributions to ship with new computers, but apparently there is! Come on now, there still are people out there who think that the big rounded E logo from Internet Explorer is the INTERNET!

Digest more on this: Here, here and here!

Vincenzo writes for Slashdot that Viacom decided to sign up with Joost for releasing their content through them. This step will guarantee some safety from piracy for Viacom’s content since just about everyone can copy content from YouTube or to YouTube. The decision was announced just after Viacom pulled off over 100.000 videos from YouTube. You should expect Joost to host content from MTVI, Comedy Central or CBS.

Viacom will be searching for safe “partners like Joost” in the future.  Joost in the meanwhile, while lacking a bit of the programming we all want, is now going to be able to offer us a wider range of shows, considering they also have a “smaller” deal with Warner.
This is great news for Joost, and we are looking forward to their official exit from the private beta testing, everybody is enthusiastic about it, and so are we!

A study by WiFi Alliance details a dynamic and innovative Wi-Fi ecosystem in India, with investmens expected to exceed a whopping $750 million by 2012.
WiMax is also discussed in conjunction with WiFi deployment but, as we expected, is only set to bringing broadband connectivity to previously unconnected rural and urban areas alike.
This is great news as it confirms our theory that WiFi is here to stay and it will be long until it will get replaced by a new wireless standard!

“India is emerging as a very important and exciting market for our members, both in-country and worldwide,” said Wi-Fi Alliance managing director Frank Hanzlik. “This paper details the wide range of opportunities there, from urban and rural broadband deployments, to product development, to services and software.” and can be found for free of charge download here!

A recent report by our contributor in India plunged us into disbelief as, he said, the country has a huge potential for wireless adoption but the stake is firm on GSM adoption. Eight concurrent mobile operators in Hyderabad and approximately 8.1 million people, India’s 5th largest metropolis, stays low on WiFi availability.

Duncan Riley over at 901am.com writes about Google and their future plans regarding their plans on Artificial Intelligence:

“We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”

Of course Duncan underlines that Google is not evil but always, AI might become… Evil that is. This reminds me of my all time favorites Sci-Fi writers. “I, Robot” anyone? Pozitronic brains? Daneel, is that you?

A couple of days ago, John Gruber, from The Daring Fireball has posted an extremely comic translation of Macrovision’s CEO Fred Amoroso’s reply to Steve Jobs and his thoughts on DRM and music. Don’t hesitate to read it, but beware for a certain amount of fowl language.

Here’s one interesting and unexpected paper: Google was able to compile a really useful list of hard drive failures and health ratio based on monitoring a chunk of a hundred thosand disks used in their server farm, Engadget reports.

We wrote an article last year on how Google is able to provide a such a large storage capacity for their mail service and explained that the power behind their search engine resides in the humongus data center that also uses off the shelf hard drives. Storage capacity that the search engine doesn’t really need.

Engadget says that Google studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm and found a few interesting patterns in failing hard drives. Interestingly, drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn’t or couldn’t determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags (and that’s weird, of course, because SMART exists solely to survey hard drive health); other notable patterns showed that failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age; failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives (i.e. heavy data “grinding” is not a significant factor in failure); and there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot.

I got invited to try it out. Since it’s been widely covered I’ll spare you the trivia.
More so, it’s not even the kind of app to be run on hotspots due to above-average network and internet bandwidth it requires. Not less newsworthy is the fact that some hotspot settings, even much of our own, block some ports required by the new TV venture to run. Joost is not really *the* wireless if fun staff pick killer app, but I’ve come to value the concept a whole lot. Here’s why!I’m mainly a Mac user. A PowerPC G4 user, that is. So I couldn’t have a Mac experience with Joost yet. A limited beta release for Intel Macs was internally made available and there’s hope for the rest of us using old chips. I’ve been confined to go back to Windows to be able to get the feel of Joost. That was a huge effort for me as I haven’t come close to a PC box for casual use in more than a year, without even missing the old buggy XP.

The fact of the matter is that Joost is not so much a player, but an advanced streaming technology base on peers (something you’ve seen at Skype). That’s brilliant and is the genius behind the scenes, making it all run smoothly. It’s common sense, you’d say, to have P2P A/V when you read the specs sheet. But up until now there’s no other major league in prime-time other than these guys! It has been a rather overwhelming experience using the software because it’s one of those new things that like to have an all new approach. The learning curve is kind of steep even for a power user, fact that gave me some ideas.

Having been loured and mesmerized by Apple’s Front Row I can’t stop thinking how it would be if the two, FR and Joost, would be integrated. This is because I like the simple FR interface and the technology behind Joost.
It’s hardly unlikely that we’ll have, even in some foggy future, a venture of this kind. Of course, if Joost was only one of the scroll options under Videos in FrontRow, they’d fear getting lost in blurry waters. Which is acceptable to say the least.

It’s all beta and seeking a course. I suppose we could change and shape Joost to make it more of what we want it to be, rather than leaving it to the decisions of the developers. Sometimes entrepreneurs have great ideas but implement them badly. With all those good intentions, it’s the consumers that buy or ditch.

Joost is great! So you do want to consider it and give it a try! They have a “signup” section for beta on their site.
You could also wait for us to get some tokens as we’ll share them with you.

I will send Joost invites to the first people who post a comment here!
Remember, you can never know how many tokens Joost will award me with, so I can guarantee no numbers.

Remember “Skype, take a deep breath! You’re dead” we published a couple of weeks ago on their new pricing? We should have said “Take a deeper breath” because of new startups out there representing compelling competition. Our readers asked us about those companies and we went researching. But voip-news.com just published a list of 25 alternatives to Skype, making it a hell of a lot easier for us.

Thomas Ricker from engadget.com says that some hackers* found the “secret” processing keys for decrypting HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DRM for all movies released until now. It looks like a chap known as arnezami on the doom9 forums, managed to find those processing keys stored in the memory. What happens if you have the processing keys? well, you can unlock, decrypt, and backup every HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc film released so far. The story goes back to the 9th of January and since then, the members of the doom9 forums are still debating if arnezami was right in unveiling his method of finding out those processing keys, and giving the manufacturers a straight line to walk on while fixing this. And, as Thomas said, “kick back and watch the trickle of HD titles hitting the torrents quickly turn into a flood”

Acording to arnezami: “Nothing was hacked, cracked or even reverse engineered btw: I only had to watch the “show” in my own memory. No debugger was used, no binaries changed.”

*) the word hacker is not used in any pejorative way in this article. See a definition for hacker on WikiPedia

Source: engadget

HP’s latest iPaq, 510 Voice Messenger, is a radical design for a traditional Hewlett Packard smartphone. Conservative power users might instantly drop the cash at the counter because it’s conventional candy bar body. To be honest, we’re really into the design and most loured by the features like the new Windows Mobile 6, quadband GSM / EDGE, a 220 x 176 display, 128MB ROM and 64MB RAM, microSD expansion, Bluetooth 1.2, the very power effective 200MHz OMAP850 EDGE and duuh built-in WiFi.

Looked at it and said “That will be my new Skype phone!”
Only that it won’t be able to run it! Skype for Windows Mobile, with over 6 million downloads, already runs well on TIOMAPs but currently only ARM9 (v5 instruction set) devices are supported. Furthermore, the new VoIP layer added in WinMobile6 it’s not going to make things softer for the awarded application as it’s been designed to differently handle audio.
It may run however, experts say, with some later ROM upgrades.

Romanian free hotspot provider c*free wireless issued an interesting new concept: green WiFi! They propose a certification program that determines the eco-friendliness of hotspot providers.
Anyone cand join if the comply with a few basic rules. In brief:
- wireless equipment used will comply with RoHS (2002/95/EC) and WEEE (2002/96/EC) EU directives designed to minimize danger for humans caused by commonly available electronic equipment
- radio signal boosting or equipment tweaking over the default manufacturer settings is prohibited
- the hotspots will not harm or pollute the 2.4Ghz spectrum

More details about the draft and eligibility requisites will be soon available on the issuer’s website.

It’s like the coolest gimmick I landed on in days! The guys at Art Lebedev design studio in Russia have thought of a freakin cool way to help you get the iPhone!! Preorder their Superbitus, a one-piece bomb-shaped ceramic money box. Supplied with a white marker to write the purpose of savings, highly motivating for jotting down “iPhone”, it’s the funniest way to effectively store that change later to be redeemed into the all mighty Apple phone. Around $25 a week, that is. And you know what? You’ll have the $$$ by summer. Haha, great job, Art!

This is one ordinary night working on WiF and c*free… Me and Dan have endless conference calls that abuse our cellphones, so we can always stay on top of the situation.

Don’t be fooled, this is not news about the wireless world, it’s feature news about us. ;)

PS: At the time of this post, the call is still on, and the counter just got to 02:07:48 hehe.

Update: going to sleep now, 4:13 AM, the call ended after 2 hours and 28 minutes… we promise we won’t rant about this again…

I’m going to talk about a different kind of wireless, an old school kind: conjure in your imagination some technology you may not have thought about in a while. Before DRM, before mp3, even before the compact disk, we once listened to music using a format called the ‘cassette tape”.

This device was a cartridge that stored analog (!) audio information as magnetic signa on a linear strip of tape of material identical to that inside of a floppy disk (if you even remember those!); the material was unwound from an internal reel, drawn across a read head, and wound on an identical reel within the cartridge. (Trivia factoid: the ubiquitous adhesive company Scotch actually began as a manufacturer of audio storage tape that was sold on a big reel; they invented “Scotch tape” while developing superior methods for getting the magnetic powder to stick to the tape. Turns out that the market for adhesive was better than the market for audio recording medium, and now they’re a bunch of millionaires!) To move through tracks, one had to “fast forward” or “rewind” the tape and just guess when the right spot was queued.

Well the only place one sees cassette tapes any more these days are in older car stereos. I’m driving a boss ten year old Subaru that I’ll probably own forever, because the thing is built like a brick shit-house. The only thing even beginning to wear out is the factory stereo, which has – guess what? – a cassette deck. Which is fine with me, because as audio formats have evolved, so have adaptations for old formats: enter the cassette adapter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a quick guide to help our shrewd readers prevent getting jagged when using an open public hotspot. This is what you need to do:

#1. Your computer comes with an efficient firewall. Use it!

#2. Download the latest wireless card driver from the manufacturer’s website. Your up to date system will have exploits and vulnerabilities patched.

#3. Don’t share your folders or files unless you explicitly need to do so. Anyone using that hotspot can access them. Password protected folders should be the best compromise.

#4. Do not use Outlook or Mail. They send your username and passwords in the clear. Use your webmail service instead. Webmail usually encrypts your sessions. If you must use your email managers, make sure your account supports and has SSL authentication set up.

#5. Do not make online payments unless your life depends on it. Really, don’t! Better wait a little to get home or at the office. You really don’t want to fund some alledged’s hacker girlfriend with Swarowsky Shop credit, do you? Chances to have your account information stolen are minimal, but real!

#6. Some IM programs do not encrypt conversations! A sniffer might return the actual dialogues in clear text. You don’t want that, do you? Sure, most of my IM is just random blurbs and bs so I use IM comfortably. It’s you to decide how sensitive your IM sessions are. Emoticons are not interceptable though. That’s reassuring, innit? :)

#7. Web pages you visit can be sniffed. Complete with images even. This is not a case worth alerting the media for, really! But you might want to be advised.

#8. You think it’s fun to tap on your neighbor’s open WiFi. Sometime it isn’t! You might be surprised to find out it’s a trap. Fake hotspots has been reported to be out there. They exist for the single purpose of sniffing out private data and mining sensitive information. This is called phishing.

#9. It’s easy to check in advance the network name of the public hotspot you plan to use. Most providers have that information on their websites. Why not do so to make sure you’re using a certified/friendly connection.

#10. Use VPN. If you can, know and like to use one, do it!

Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Block over at engadget.com reveals a pretty good case against the release date of Apple’s iPhone. According to him, the released FCC document we have been seeing around is just a photoshopped image, which puts us all in the dark…

Apple might have been planning this in order to have a backup plan in case something like the ZunePhone comes up in the meanwhile. This can be a good thing, and we might get our hands on iPhones sooner than expected, or not… let’s hope for the former!

Still, the release date was announced by Steve Jobs during his keynote at MacWorld, and was not deduced from the FCC application. Things are getting fishy… :)
More at engadget.com

According to TechCrunch and CrunchGear, Microsoft filed an application for a new communications device. It’s supposed to use OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) and will probably be WiMax enabled. Nothing concrete right about now, but the release deadline has been set one month before Apple’s Inc. iPhone.

More about this at:

CrunchGear 1, CrunchGear 2 and TechCrunch

FollowUp: Ryan Black over at engadget demolishes our theories with three strikes… read at engadget.com

Well..Dan asked me to say smth about wifi in India. Hmm..If you stay at a 260$ hotel you have free wifi (they should provide free bitches too at that price). Those hotels are Accord hotels, or hotel. The room looks exactly as the ones in Accord Europe ****, the ones with 120eur/night and 20eur/day for wifi. And that’s about it. If you search for connectivity you have to look for internet places (not internet cafes). I traveled in all Hyderabad with taxi studying every meter (just as an European in an alien weird place) and I’ve seen only 2 coffee shops…I don’t think they heard about (free) wifi. OK maybe you’ll think, at least I’ll have some GPRS….well nope. Here GPRS or EDGE is available only for business subscribers from India. Anyway if it would have been available the cost would be really high (for a call to RO they charge you 2.2 EUR/min).

I’m sorry to say that India is not quite a tourist friendly place. I believe in “the mystery of India” but I don’t know how can you get too that.

See you in Europe!

Aliph’s Jawbone is the ultimate uber-headset! I was completely blown off!
I thought there was nothing more to see about Bluetooth and Bluetooth headsets. My trusty Motorola HS820 gives good sound a very healthy battery life. But no way did I expect to see such a sexy gadget featuring top military-grade noise cancellation like Jawbone’s! And this is where the fun starts. You got to see/hear it to believe it. No matter if your roomate is a little noisy in the bedroom, it’s guarranteed your mom won’t hear a thing. You told your mom you work in an office, too ashamed to admit you work at McDonald’s? No problem, just crank up that Noise Shield, your mom rests assured you’re in your own cubicle.

Fucking amazing, really! I’m getting my own!

“Someone needs to reinvent mp3 sales or the industry will go bust, as people like to see value for their money.”

Here’s some thoughts on some recent buzz around DRM music. You probably already know Steve Jobs called on the industry to abolish DRM because of recent rise in tension around Apple’s closed DRM. Called FairPlay, iTunes purchased music system works only on iPods and on up to 5 iTunes-enabled computers. That has not been on the likes of democratic EU where seeds are planted to abolish closed ecosystems such as Apple’s. Facing marketshare loss and fines, Steve Jobs took a radical stand placing it all on the record labels industry. That said, should Apple open FairPlay to hardware manufacturers such as Creative they’d risk DRM reverse-engineering and consequently content withdrawal from the iTunes music store. The workaround, Jobs says, is for the industry to start providing DRM-free music and allow the market to self-define.

“Nobody ever legally sold DRM or DRM-free mp3 music in Romania”

Of course music big shots fear their biggest losses ever, but that’s complete nonsense. Here’s some of why DRM-free music works:
- more flexibility and all-round compatibility with any mp3 hardware ever manufactured
- higher margins (less hassle with DRM enforcing and updating)
- more positive market response
- allofmp3.com and the likes could go legal (on a global perception of legality) or could be effectively taken out of business
- Zunes owners would be able to actually exchange tunes
- those WiFi mp3 players would really start to appeal

The drawbacks, of course, are easy to guess. It’s likely less music would be aquired through stores like iTunes to the fact that more music sharing will be possible. But that’s argueably insane! Just take a look at allofmp3.com and how they sell DRM-free music at a growing factor of 10. And then DRM-free music ripped off CDs has been around like crazy. People have anyway exchanged albums regardless of DRM efforts. It’s called sharing and not really piracy!
Piracy, say, in Eastern Europe (now most of it part of the European Union) or Asia is also nonsense as nobody ever legally sold DRM or DRM-free mp3 music there. For example Romania has been known to join the EU years ago but no large company took the opportunity to provide services and products other than Microsoft.

People pay for things that they think come with no ulterior commitments. It’s a fact. For example Americans are reluctant like nuts about signing a two-year contract with a service provider. The rest of the world (those aware) fear they might not like Apple anymore at some point or there’d be a way more cool mp3 player than the iPod and they’d have to drop all the music they ever purchased on iTunes Music Store.

I strongly support DRM-free music. For its intrinsec coolnes but also because of those widely expected WiFi’ed players. We’re in a wireless world and it feels like stagnant because of RIIA and the record companies.
Thing is there’s less appeal to mp3 than to convetional CDs in terms of a standalone product. They have no added value. They bring no cute album art and touch/feel experience (granted, there’s embeded album art). They are sold for the same price to a more gourmand audience, on a very simple three-click basis. But someone needs to reinvent mp3 sales or the industry will go bust, as people like to see value for their money.
iTunes and its competition have to find a way to keep their clients abreast and provide a little more than just the mp3 file.
I just called DRM dead. Will 2007 be that year?

BusinessWeek Online tells us that Google Steps Into Microsoft’s Office

Apparently Google plans on hitting the corporate market with a new office solution, the Google Apps they have been beta testing lately. From a calendar, e-mail program, word processor and even presentations processor, they are coming up and they are knocking on important doors with them. Up till now, Pixar and the Disney Studios are two important players who said they were going to switch from Microsoft’s solution, but they are not the only ones interested.

The people at Slashdot ask themselves if this is going to be the end of a monopoly or the start of another, but Google does not want to make this an “us vs. them” thing, they say they just want to offer choices to people. Go Go Google, but watch out for Microsoft’s Office Live coming up from Redmond.

Read more at Business Week Online: Google Steps Into Microsoft’s Office .

Myria from pagetable.com tells us that Skype Reads Your BIOS and Motherboard Serial Number

What happens, is that they use a protected executable file to dump the BIOS POST data, feed it to the client installed on your computer and then probably call back home with this info. What they use it for, and why they are doing that, is still unknown, and the blogosphere will buzz about this until an official press release from Skype will surface. Probably nobody would have figured this out if it wasn’t for Skype omitting to think about all the 64bit processors out there, not compatible with their code.

This seems to be another big screw up from the Skype team, and will surely make all reverse engineering fans try to take a look at *everything* Skype does while running on their computers.

Read more about it at: Skype Reads Your BIOS and Motherboard Serial Number

Follow up: As expected, Skype came up with a plausible explanation for reading your computer’s BIOS POST data with a protected executable. According to them, it’s a thingie that will help them lock their plugins to a computer by embedding the motherboard’s “public” serial number. I use quotes when I say public because they used a “public query to the BIOS” but if it’s that public, why is it hidden? and why don’t they do it when you’re installing your newly acquired plugin from Skype, instead of sending it back home? Apparently, the last build available for download from Skype does not include reading your BIOS POST data anymore. Well, let’s see what the users think about this.

But no matter how you put it, reading of such sensitive data broke Skype’s commitment “Skype is free of Adware, Spyware and Malware” and by their definition:

What is Spyware?
“Spyware relates to software that becomes installed on computer without the informed consent or knowledge of the computer’s owner and covertly transmits or receives data to or from a remote host. For example, spyware may monitor a user’s behaviour and pass on details of a user’s activity (for example their user names or passwords) to a third party.”
Skype’s announcement was made on their Security Blog.

Now we were curious who EasyBits are and followed a few Google leads. We ran over this page for a product called Skypito. I wanted to reproduce some stuff here about their service and privacy policy but it’s a big NO NO! :) Just go there and check it yourselves. The page is 70% “Privacy Policy” and “Legal Notice”. Since I can’t replicate any copyright protected information on that page I’ll have to let you read it. Nevertheless, I know we don’t like any application that phones, even in a way that’s not personally identifiable, critical system data to a given server.

Engadget reports two new routers from ZyXEL and D-Link that sport 3G connectivity built in. The cool factor about these wireless machines is that, albeit nothing new, they’re a must in those markets that developed 3G flat rates. And better, these routers are so cool that they’re not even ‘n’ compatible. Usually we’d not recommend for or against (riiight), but don’t spend your money on these things. Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t anyway. First of all, should you have a 3G card with a flat subscription, it would be in your PCMCIA slot. And would you want to share it, you’d be buying a $59 c*free mini USB card that would turn any computer into a live hotspot in just about three clicks.

Or just look at these guys and what they have to offer! Don’t spend money on extra 3G PCMCIA cards because the Bytton lets you plug in the SIM card alone. Or get any Asus router out there with a USB port and plug that 3G/EvDo/EDGE modem in for less than a hundred bucks.
And if you spare something of that $300 D-Link or ZyXEL ask for their stuff, remember to treat us with a beer. In any case, better none of the gadgets above. Get a plain and simple DSL. We’ll all be better off! :))