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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
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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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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