Mr. Obama, Please Tear Down This Wall!

Jan 26, 2010 GMT

Only three days after posting my blog regarding the plight of Google's Chinese customers and how their data is now at the whims of a US-based company and its conflict with the Chinese government, I read about the issues of SourceForge.net and the U.S. State Department's Export lists and how the data stored in a US-based company, sometimes created by non-U.S. based citizens, is now being controlled by U.S. State Department rules.In 1984 Digital Equipment Corporation was about to ship a commercial copy of Unix called "Ultrix". As we readied the product for shipment, Digital's export authority raised its hand and asked if there was any encryption code inside the product. Yes there...

Careful As She Goes, Captain!

Jan 23, 2010 GMT

One of the big stories this month has been the attempts of crackers to break into email accounts being held by Google and other companies.There have been a lot of accusations flying back and forth, with many people commenting on the security of web browsers and whether or not Google should pull out of China or continue to do the censoring required by the Chinese government. I am not going to discuss the political issues on both sides of the situation, I will leave that for other people.One point that I have not seen discussed is the concept of whether or not the "Cloud" is safe for a person's or company's data given a company could lose or give up its franchise to operate at any...

Android Unleashed

Jan 06, 2010 GMT

There has been a lot of discussion about HTC's Nexus One, also known as "The Google Phone". The discussions back and forth about whether it is an "iPhone Killer" are often heated, with issues of whether or not this feature or that feature is better than the iPhone.One feature that has not been discussed very much by the press is the fact that the "Google Phone" will has a ROM that will allow you to easily change the firmware, and to set up the phone for booting an unsigned version of the operating system, a changed version of the operating system or perhaps even a different operating system.I have been an Android fan for a long time, but more from a business...

Penguin Awareness

Jan 04, 2010 GMT

Tux lights them off! Today Cesar Brod, a friend of mine from Brazil, sent me a picture of some fireworks he saw on New Year's Day that had a picture of our favorite penguin on them. It was timely, since it was a year ago today that I wrote another blog entry about Tux and "Penguin Awareness Day" (January 20th) and "World Penguin Day" (April 25th), so today I thought I would remind people of these two magnificent opportunities to help celebrate the existence of Linux while I passed along this picture from Cesar.Apparently graphics artists around the world look to the Internet when asked by their clients to supply a picture...

End of the year, a decade and an era.

Jan 01, 2010 GMT

In 1999 I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation's Unix group as a technical marketing manager, making a "six-figure salary". I had met Linus Torvalds in May of 1994, and had recognized Linux and Free Software as something whose time had come. While most of the world in 1994 thought of Free Software only for technical people, educators and hobbyists, I felt that Free Software had commercial value, and I helped start and drive the acceptance of Free Software, and particularly Linux into the commercial marketplace.By 1994 I had fairly extensive exposure to end-user written, freely distributed software. I had used it as a university student in 1969 through the library of the...

Mean Time To Repair

Dec 20, 2009 GMT

The other day I read an article on the web that said that "Firefox, Adobe top buggiest-software list" and which stated that Firefox had reported the most "vulnerabilities" of all the "application programs".The article admitted that the #2 and #3 "application programs" ("Adobe" and "Microsoft") reported were "closed source" and that "open source" programs tend to show all the blemishes, not just the ones reported by their customers, and reflected back through visible reports by the companies. To be even fairer, I would point out that comparing "Firefox" with all of the applications that Adobe has and...

Frogs

Dec 09, 2009 GMT

I am at the 8th International Information and Telecommunication Technologies Symposium hosted by the Federal University of Santa Caterina (December 9th, 10th and 11th) and I have just finished listening to a very interesting talk by Professor Antonio Alfredo Ferreiro Loureiro (Federal University of Minas Gerais) on "frogs".Actually his talk was not *really* about "frogs", but about ad-hoc sensor networks used to sense environmental issues. These sensors are very simple (and often "slow") computers that gather the information, then transmit the information via a wireless mesh network to the Internet for processing and analysis.It seems that frogs are a very...