Oh Brian!

Now that I've had my iPad for a week I've managed to read the NY Times and USA Today every day as well as check out all of my favorite web sites. I also bought my fort book form the iBook store and do a little reading each evening. I pushed a bunch of pictures from a recent vacation to the iPad and experimented a bit with the Photos app is slide show mode. The only problem is that I needed a stand to position the iPad in horizontally rather than ion portrait mode. After leaning it up against some books and such I went to the shop and cut out a stand. Over the weekend I cut out several more prototypes. I think this looks and works really well.

i found this very interesting; the Awesome Foundation (in Boston). soliciting ideas and offering $1000 USD and a place to work the idea to those selected for an Awesome grant.

Geez. How did I find this? I was reading a post in Google Reader from Scott Kirsner's "Innovation Economy" blog. Scott has some great ideas.

Interesting that there isn't a bigger storm brewing around the catchy commercials for FreeCreditReport dot com. It seems the reality is that the credit reports they offer are far from free. The US Federal trade Commission is trying to take them on with a competing commercial. I can understand how the government sees the financial system is in crisis but what's up over at the US Federal Communications Commission? We have pharmaceutical manufacturers required to create and run new commercials about their wares (seen the new Yaz commercial?)

I saw this on Dvice earlier today. It is a three-in-one modular bag made by Ohmetric, a new brand from Allsop.

First reaction was "Wow. Lot's aof pockets". Follow up reaction was "Wow. That will be a bightmare to get through the securty checkpoint at the airport".

It seems rather than laying flat these designers went a different way. Inside a compartment in the back of the pack is a laptop sleeve with a plastic lap tray attached too keep the hot battery from roasting your thighs. Inside a front pocket is a vertical organizer sleeve with four peripheral pockets. When you're on a plane, you slip this out to keep your toys with you at your seat while storing the bigger bag in the overhead bin. And there are even more top and side zipped pockets.

Inside the bag are two other compartments, side pockets, and a chest strap to relieve the stress on your shoulders when you're schlepping your digital gear all over creation

I've been on a cleaning binge recently. I removed almost 120 pounds of old, obsolete networking equipment from my office and storage. Rather than simply placing it at the curb for the garbage people on metal recycling day I decided to take the equipment to a local metal scrap dealer. I did a little bit of sorting. The scrap folks did more sorting and in the end I would up with about $15 and a good feeling knowing that the gear was not going to be part of a huge mountain of trash here on Long Island.

I also located some older cell phones, PDAs, and amazingly a couple of pagers. I had heard about an online site called Gazelle dot com. Gazelle and others allow you to enter what you have. They then value it. You ship the equipment to them and after it's checked in they remit you a small payment. Well, that's if they think your equipment has any value. I entered a recent cell phone (Moto), a Palm Vx, and one of the pagers.

First off they couldn't find the pager. They did offer to let me describe it but I didn't find the interface friendly enough to want to spend my time trying. The reason; they asked too many questions and for several questions they didn't help me with any clues as to where on the device I might find the information.

What bothered me the most was that after I entered the cell phone and the Palm both were located in their database but had absolutely no value. So my transaction (according to their site) was for 2 pieces which according to their own database had no value. They then proceeded to tell me to finish entering data to establish an account and how to ship my worthless equipment to them. Oh, and I should pay for the shipping. They were good enough to create a shipping label. Thanks!

Since I have not shipped anything to Gazelle I have received several emails from them. All ask me not to respond to the automated email. All have asked me about the status of my shipment. the last offered to let me print the "paid for by me" shipping label again.

In my mind the "model" of electronics "recycling" that Gazelle offers is badly broken. If they can't offer some small payment for devices; don't bother continuing on. If they can't pay for shipping they should point to some place local to the user where equipment can be dropped off.

Gazelle: not recommended.

CNet is reporting that Google making SSL changes based on an SSL vulnerability that would allow a hacker to easily intercept someone's communications with supposedly secure Web sites over an unsecured Wi-Fi network. This vulnerability has been bouncing around for a little over a year. The SSL vulnerability potentially impacts Google services like GMail that support using SSL technology. The vulnerability has been around for a while; having been presented last year at DefCon 2007. See this message by Mike Perry to the BugTraq list for more details.

Having been involved in much of the early work around developing Network Admission Control (NAC) I realized that the weakest link is the endpoint. Time after time the objection was raised; "but what if they hack the endpoint". Everyone in the NAC world tries to respond to this the same way - by pointing out that there are already many different ways of protecting the endpoint such as anti virus, anti phishing, anti spyware, and personal firewalls.

The folks at the Mozilla took this a step further in Firefox v3 by adding additional controls in the browser. I was a little concerned when I first read about these controls because they seems to be "list" based (a white list and a black list) and seemed to point exclusively back at Google to source those lists. I like Google a lot but going there alone for this data is too much like Microsoft asking everyone to trust them for security.

What's needed here is a protocol that allows the browser to be configured to retrieve these lists securely from a trusted source. I had hoped that the IETF Network Endpoint Assessment working group would eventually get here (I now doubt that will ever happen). I saw this article on SecurityFocus and it seems to be saying the right things but doesn't define that protocol (yet).

CNet and TG Daily (and here) are reporting that a group of French journalists covering the BlackHat conference in Las Vegas were booted for allegedly attempting to hack (actually sniff) data of fellow journalists in the press room. The reporters were not only ejected from BlackHat and the follow on DefCon conferences but permanently banned from Black Hat.

Anyone want to wager on future sales of their magazine?

Labels: security

I love my Swiss Army watch. It looks great. It's the right size for my wrist. It is usually very comfortable to wear. About the only thing that I didn't like about the watch was the original band. It looked good but something in the construction irritated the skin on my wrist as the band was breaking in. After just a few months I sought a replacement band. While I was looking for a replacement band a friend told me about a "deployant". A deployant is a clasp type release that fits on the band and I find makes it much easier to get the watch on and off. Deployants come in different types. The first time around I tried a "flip" deployant. It was good but sometimes I would notice it poking out from under the band. The more the band aged; the more it stuck out.

I recently decided to buy a new band and a new deployant. This time I chose a "butterfly" deployant. It is really great. It's much more comfortable than any clasp on any watchband I have owned. I highly recommend the online store where I bought this; The Watch Prince. The folks there are really good. After I put together the order and asked that they assemble the new band and deployant (they do this for no charge); they noticed that the band I ordered required a different size deployant. They alerted me both by phone and email and let me know how to fix the issue (different sized deployant). I had the order in hand just days later. Really smooth. If you are looking for a new band or a deployant; give these folks a call.

CNet reported that England's historic Bletchley Park needs a financial helping hand to save several buildings used by World War II code breakers. I've been lucky enough to visit Bletchley twice; but just once when it was open and I was able to join the tour. It's a great place and a real treasure of computing history. If you have a chance and can pass on your StarBucks for a couple of days (OK, 4 days) why not donate $20.