HackerCode

AT&T dropping wireless subscribers who use P2P

This is a less-then-subtle attack on network neutrality. Service providers (including, in this case, wireless network providers) keep confusing providing the network and providing content. Everything that happens on the application layer is, frankly, none of their business. Besides, if they begin attacking p2p users systematically, all they're going to do is force the next generation of software to encrypt its traffic.

From IP Democracy:

AT&T will jettison wireless users that engage in P2P file-sharing over its network, the company said Friday in a letter PDF filed at the FCC (and flagged today by Ted Hearn at Multichannel News). Senior lobbyist Robert Quinn answered a question posed at hearing last week by Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell about the company's policies of managing P2P network traffic on its broadband wireless platform.

uinn said that AT&T's terms of service (as well as the TOS for most other carriers) bars the use of P2P applications on the wireless platform. "Use of a P2P file sharing application would constitute a material breach of contract for which the user's service could be terminated," he said. [From IP Democracy]

encryption, freedom, fsf, isp, net neutrality, p2p

Formation of Open Web Foundation announced at OSCON

Today at OSCON, David Recordon of Six Apart (which produces Movable Type, the software that drives this blog) announced the formation of the Open Web Foundation.

From O'Reilly Radar:

To make sure that we working towards the same goal foundations (like OpenID) and specs (like OAuth) are created. Each time some of the same mistakes are made. The Open Web Foundation's goal it to provide a home for community created specs. with mentorship, resources and infrastructure. Hopefully this will help teams spend time on making the spec. [From Announcing the Open Web Foundation - O'Reilly Radar]

This is a very good thing -- standardized, community-driven specifications can be written at the speed of innovation instead of waiting for one format or another to win out (or waiting for Steve Balmer to giveth).

Here are the slides from the announcement:

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How SIM cards work from Citizen Engineer

Another video, this time from a new electronics-hacking series called Citizen Engineer. The first installment premiered at HOPE over the weekend.

Here's the description of the first installment from the series site:

Learn how a SIM card works (the small card inside GSM cell phones) make a SIM card reader, view deleted messages, phone book entries and clone/crack a SIM card.

Modify a "retired" payphone so it can be used as a home telephone and for VoIP (Skype). Then learn how to modify the hacked payphone so it accepts quarters - and lastly, use a Redbox to make "free phone" calls from the modified coin-accepting payphone. [From citizen engineer]

And here's the video:

Citizen Engineer from citizen engineer on Vimeo.

Metasploit on the iPhone

It looks like metasploit is now available on the iPhone as documented on Muts' Blog:

The idea of getting Metasploit 3 on an iPhone has been bugging me for a while. We've already put it on a WRT54g, so having it on an iphone was a must. The Ruby package in the iPhone installer is broken, and recompiling it... just didn't seem like fun. I haven't had too much background with installing iPhone firmwares, so i called on my trustworthy friend, Jacky.

I read that the Cydia installer was a better environment (BSD Subsystem replacement) for these games...so after a painful process of bricking my iPhone, being saved by Jacky, installing Cydia, ruby, wget, mobile terminal, svn and downloading metasploit - we got it to work!

After all of his trouble, he notes that metasploit is already available as part of the Cydia installer. Couple the usefulness of the iPhone as a portable pen testing device with the known iPhone exploits that have come out in the last year, and a portrait of the device as a truly rich computing environment starts to emerge.

So the big question -- take your beloved iPhone to Defcon? Or leave it at home where it's relatively safe?

Apple, IT, and cloud computing

Apple's front page today links to a ComputerWorld article about the rise of OS X in business computing environments:

June 26, 2008 (Computerworld) - Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said today.

"Then, we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a research fellow atYankee Group Research Inc. who conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. "Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed."

The article notes that Apple makes the advances despite little effort to break into the business marketplace. It goes on with a bunch of usage statistics that completely miss the point; Apple isn't succeeding in the business marketplace because of changes to the Mac. It's succeeding because of changes to the nature of business computing.

If you buy the arguments in Nicholas Carr's new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, then we are moving to Information Technology as a service rather than a core business function, and we're migrating it to the web.

I'm going to keep my views on the irrelevance of Windows domains to another post, but if you just look at Google Apps' offerings, then you can see how inexpensive and easy it is to move e-mail, shared calendaring and resource scheduling, user provisioning, and file storage/editing to the web. If we're doing that -- and I think that were both are and should -- then all that an end user needs is a browser and a very basic application set.

This is why Apple's business market is growing. It doesn't take an IT department to keep an employee productive on a Mac if their primary application is just a browser. Just hand them a laptop and they're pretty self sufficient.

I know that most organizations aren't there yet, but I'm convinced that it's the future.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS works on Dell Inspiron 1521

I finally got around to wiping Vista from my Dell Inspiron 1521 and installing Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on it. I did a default install and found that almost everything worked fine:

• Sound works, though perhaps not with the same fidelity as under Vista.
• Laptop sleeps and wakes cleanly.
• Display works, even detected my 1680x1050 panel (an upgrade on the model).
• Keyboard volume/mute and screen brightness work.
• Wired NIC is fine.

The only thing that didn't work by default is the wireless card. Unfortunately, I don't think there is an open driver for the device, so I had to use NDIS to get it running. Here's what I did (point and click, no command line required):

First, we need to add third-party software sources to the package repositories. Open Sytem > Administrator > Synaptic and go to Settings > Repositories. Select the Third-Party Software tab and select both of the check boxes. Click Close, which returns you to the main Synaptic window. Now click Refresh.

Now that the third-part repositories are selected, click on Search and look for "ndisgtk." Click in its checkbox and select Mark for Installation. Now, click Apply in the main Synaptic window.

Second Life on a 3G phone?

From AlleyInsider:

A mobile company is porting Second Life to your phone. More precisely, some phones: Vollee, which helps game companies with the move to mobile, says it has figured out how to take Linden Lab's graphics-heavy game and put it on 40 3G and WiFi enabled handsets (no iPhone or BlackBerries, yet). It's free to anyone with an account in the virtual world.

The list of currently supported devices is disappointing, and even though I'm  a little bit skeptical, the video looks promising:

Acer Aspire One preview

The german site EeePC News has photos, release specs, and price information for the new Acer Aspire One. Much as I love my EeePC, I might have purchased one too quickly -- the Acer looks fabulous.

From EeePC News (translated via google):

After the press conference ASUS, I am equal to rueber Acer to find photos of the launch of the Acer Aspire to make one. First impression: Very well-made and it comes with a special and rapid Linpus Linux or Windows XP. Preislich is from $ 379 los verbaute Intel and the nuclear aims 3h (3cell version) or 6h (6cell version) Duration gewaehren.

Part two of Smart Mobs is up

Part two of Howard Rheinghold's Smart Mobs, Collective Action, Media, and Democracy has been posted on his vlog. I mentioned the first part about a week ago.

On to the video:

 

Howard Rheingold's Vlog

Howard Rheingold has posted work related to his 2003 book Smart Mobs that is as relevant today as his classic The Virtual Community was in 1995

Here's the summary that he's provided:

Smart Mobs, Collective Action, Media, and Democracy, Part 1 In Fall, 2007, James Fishkin's Center for Deliberative Democracy and Jim Lehrer's Newshour program brought together 300 Americans to talk about democracy. By The People, was broadcast on PBS in January, 2008. I was invited to address this assembly. I talked about Smart Mobs in relation to the public sphere--the citizen discourse that undergirds democracy. The following video, first of two parts, courtesy MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. Site implementation by Ideacodes [From Howard Rheingold's Vlog]

And here's the video:

geospacial, social networks, web 2.0, community, Culture, Howard Rheingold