The PhoneBoy Blog » messaging

Finding a Needle When You Can’t Look in the Haystack

PhoneBoy — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:10:56 +0000

Long before I was a security geek, I was a systems administrator. Oh sure, security goes with the territory when you’re a systems administrator, but it’s only one aspect of the job.

Needless to say, I’ve maintained email servers as part of my duties, where I’ve had plenty of access to look at people’s private emails. I also ran a computer bulletin board in the late 1980s, where I had the same privilege. In college, I did a term paper where I wrote about the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which protects people’s personal email, but does little to protect corporate email. Provisions in the law allow business to monitor their networks for business purposes, which means they can see everything going on–including potentially non-business related communications.

While generally speaking, all an employer in the U.S. has to do is disclose that use of the corporate network is subject to monitoring, that is not the case in many European countries, where there are strict data privacy laws forbidding the practice. That would make it difficult for, let’s say, Nokia, to find out if a Finland-based employee was leaking secrets about upcoming handsets. It’s so difficult, in fact, that there was a reported rumor that Nokia was threatening to leave Finland if they couldn’t get a law passed that would allow employee email monitoring.

While Nokia spokespeople are officially denying this rumor, it doesn’t change the fact that the passing of such a law would be extremely beneficial to Nokia. Many companies, including Nokia, have a similar problem: how can evidence of corporate wrongdoing be found when you can’t look where evidence of wrongdoing would easily be found? In Europe, obviously, there are strict laws regulating who can see or do what with “private” electronic communications like email.

Even if monitoring workplace communications is legal, let’s assume the communication is somehow encrypted. How would you determine something inappropriate is going on? One school of thought is that the very use of encryption implies you have something to hide–something the company might not like.

Even if a communication is encrypted, some things about the communication usually aren’t: who it’s coming from, where it’s going to, and how much data or how long it is. One can certainly make some inferences based on that information, but one cannot conclusively prove that wrongdoing is taking place. However, you might find out enough just from that information alone to suspect something.

Of course, if you’re going to leak any company secrets, it’s probably best not to do it using the corporate network

Comments

4 February 2009, Dave Michels writes: I got into a weird situation years ago. I was managing the IT function when one of the engineers approached me about another engineer he suspected was reading private mail through his admin rights. Mostly his command chain, which included me. The engineer reporting the deed did not want to go on the record and asked us to leave him out of it. It was a very odd situation. Of course we had to urgently determine what to do, but could not use email to discuss it. We had my boss and HR involved and were trying to figure out our rights and his rights - remember it was only an accusation at this point. I honestly don't remember all the steps, but it did result with me firing him. I think it was my only termination where we had the (former) employee actually escorted out of the building. We also had to go thru a complete system password change-out and he not only had admin rights, but knew way too many passwords (early Microsoft). So while your post talks about the laws governing corporate snooping, there is an even murkier area around completely unauthorized snooping based on admin rights - when as an admin snooping and when is an admin doing their job. In most systems now, admins can't get to all the data without changing the password - but that isn't always the case.

This work originally came from The PhoneBoy Blog and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Nokia Email Beta 3: Still Needs Work

PhoneBoy — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:44:37 +0000

After all the fits and starts over the weekend with their backend server upgrade, my comrades in the Software and Services at Nokia got Nokia Email Beta 3 rolled out. It’s certainly an improvement, but it’s also got some room for improvement as well. I installed it both on my shiny new Nokia N96 and the trusty Nokia E61i to give it a workout.

From a functionality standpoint, it seems about the same, though they did add support for S60 3rd Edition FP2 devices and add the ability to support up to 6 different email accounts! I can confirm that both handsets handle Mail for Exchange and Nokia Email together, though I did find a bug with that support that be summed up in the following screenshot:

However, the Nokia Email service still has some issues. One usability thing I noticed right away on both the N96 and the E61i was the amount of time it took to actually enter the inbox on both handsets. Huge FAIL and work should be done to optimize that.

The other thing which I find absolutely irritating is there is no support for Access Point Groups either that existed in the older E series devices or in the new FP2 devices! Considering I roam between WiFi access points and the mobile phone network frequently, I’d like the service to use Access Point Groups. (Mail for Exchange also needs this support, to)

Ok, one more thing: There is no middle ground between syncing once an hour and always. At least Mail for Exchange allows me to sync every 15 minutes. Can we get support for more frequently syncing (short of always-on push) into Nokia Email?

One can always grouse about lack of enterprise mailbox support as well. Perhaps that can be a feature that will be charged for in the future?

Comments

12 October 2008, spg writes: for the last ten years good value voucher prepaid plans have appeared in the USA; but only for very short time periods before they disappear. for example i use a verizon prepaid phone agreement from eight years ago that i only pay 0.06 cents per minute on; the plan existed for less than six months before it was cut. it also had completely free unlimited data when i first signed up; that disappeared in less than 90 days(they eliminated data altogether for a few years on prepaid. unlike with voice the carriers have not grandfathered in data. for example they have kept me on the same voice minute rate even though they shut down my data access. this has been pretty typical of all the major carriers. they let you keep whatever voice plan you had at sign up indefinably; but use there rights in the TOS to change your data terms. spg p.s. i wonder how much the recent publicity about using prepaid medianet with USB dongles and tethering has prompted AT&T's decision?
12 October 2008, Marc writes: I was only waiting to see if an iPhone 3G 32gb was on the horizon...If AT&T removes their $20.00/month Unlimited data 'Go Phone' prepaid option (and does not offer a suitable alternative in its place) I'll scratch getting an iPhone 3G altogether. During these uncertain financial times, you'd think that corporations would be more concerned with losing/shunning customers. You could argue that prepaid customers are seen as 2nd class/undesireable, but I see more customers that were previously 'contract' customers now going prepaid or removing cell service from their list of monthly charges. I know (from your blog) Europe is ahead of the US in prepaid data offerings. I cannot believe I cannot find an inexpensive prepaid plan (under 30.00) that would allow me to use a cell handset with tether option merely to satisfy my minimal mobile net needs of checking email and wind reports (no downloading of big files or streaming either)
12 October 2008, spg writes: Marc, if your needs are as minimal as email and wind reports you may be able to get by fine with the 1mb(only $5/month) or 5mb($10/month) plans still to be offered. its the heavier users who are being pushed aside here.
12 October 2008, Marc writes: I was hoping it was 1gb & 5gb you were referring to. I would not need any voice with my minimal data needs prepaid plan. I wonder if I can run an app on my laptop to monitor my avg. internet consumption to get an idea of how much I would be downloading?
13 October 2008, PhoneBoy writes: Until average consumers revolt against 2 year contracts in large enough numbers, this is the way it's going to be in North America: prepaid will always be second-class. The carriers like contracts because it creates a predictable revenue stream. However, it will be interesting to see how Xohm (the Sprint WiMAX service) will play into prepaid data decisions. Assuming they stick with the $25/mo plans I've heard reported (no contract, even), that could put the necessary pressure to not only offer prepaid data, but do so at a lower price.
13 October 2008, spg writes: it will also be interesting to see how Xohm develops in terms being included in laptops, etc. will it be used more on a subscription basis or perhaps more just as needed for a single session at a time; similar to how many people use WiFi hotspots at airport, hotels, etc. for example i have access to free wifi the majority of the time; it would be nice to be able to pay a small fee for an hour or two of Xohm usage on those rare occasions when i need to use a laptop and nothing free and open is available.

How Do You Feel About Mobile Communities?

PhoneBoy — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:01:44 +0000

Ericsson is doing a study on Mobile Online Communities. This covers things like Twitter and Jaiku, but also mobile versions of things like Facebook. If you feel like helping their research efforts out and possibly getting some iTunes vouchers out of it, go take the survey. Took about 5 minutes for me to go through it.

photo credit: Ikhlasul Amal

Rapid Messaging Possible In The 18th Century?

PhoneBoy — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:01:04 +0000

Before the electrical telegraph was invented, there was the optical telegraph. Optical telegraph were the “smoke signals” of their day, making it possible to communicate messages over a long distance.

According to an article on optical telegraphs,optical telegraph networks existed all over Europe and North America until the electrical telegraph was invented. They were able to use two semaphores–those dangly arms–to signal a particular character. 196 such symbols were possible and they could be signaled at 1-3 symbols per minute at a distance of 5-20 kilometers per minute.

Given the technology of the day, it was pretty high-tech. However, it had numerous issues. The first, most obvious one is the whole line of sight thing. You had to have a line of sight between each tower in the telegraph network. This means messages could only be sent during daylight hours when there was no obstructions between the nodes on the telegraph network.

Second of all, not only can the intended target see the symbol, anyone else nearby with a telescope could see the message, too. If they could see the communication and figure out how to decipher it, they would know what the message was.

Finally, the network was prone to human error. Each tower required a human to read the symbol, transcribe it, and send it along to someone else. What is to prevent someone from compromising one of the tower operators and causing them to send a different message? Can you say “man in the middle” attacks?

Of course, the electronic telegraph eliminated the first two issues: no line-of-sight issues and no easy way to intercept messages. Human error was the still an issue with electronic telegraphs. Still an issue with email, and every other communication method, too.

Via Slashdot

Comments

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S60 Versus Windows Mobile: Contacts, Calendar, and To-Do

PhoneBoy — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 07:01:05 +0000

More on Windows Mobile versus S60: the personal information management (PIM) parts of the phone. Again, I will be comparing the Nokia E61 to the HTC Mogul Qwest lent me for review.

Disclaimer: I work for a competitor of both HTC and Microsoft in the smartphone space. That being said, my day job currently has nothing to do with smartphones. This is my own opinion.

I have used S60 devices for a number of years. The basic PIM functionality has not changed all that much in that time. No surprise, since the S60 PIM clients go back a couple of decades to EPOC, from which Symbian itself evolved.

Windows Mobile’s PIM functionality is based on the gold standard PIM for the desktop: Microsoft Outlook. Outlook itself has only been around a little over a decade, but it’s basic functionality also has not changed all that much across the versions either. On the Windows Mobile side, the PIM functionality in Windows Mobile 6 looks exactly the same as it did on Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition, which I had on a Dell Axim X30.

The calendar in S60 stores appointments, the contact list stores pretty much any piece of information you want to enter (though not all the fields will sync with, say, Mail for Exchange), and the To-Do List lets you keep track of what you have to do. Windows Mobile is pretty much the same way.

I prefer the task list view in S60. The view is far more compact: one line per item, complete with date. The task list in Windows Mobile takes two lines per item to get that information.

The calendar functionality between the two is very similar, but there is a clear difference between S60 and Windows Mobile: in the “alarm” functionality. When a meeting or task is scheduled for an alarm in S60, you are given an alarm at the appointed time. If you hit snooze, you will be reminded every 5 minutes for a half an hour unless you hit Stop. In the case of Windows Mobile, you can pick a certain number of minutes to snooze the alarm for, though it does take a number of extra key presses to activate this functionality.

The contacts application in S60 is fairly straightforward. You are presented with a list of names in your contacts. You can type some letters to narrow down the list. You can click on a contact and get their details. You can edit details. There are a couple of cool things in the contacts–things you can’t do on Windows Mobile, or at least not with this HTC Mogul:

Assign Ringtones to specific callers.
Set a default for calling, texting, video calls, MMS, email address, VoIP, and Push-to-Talk
Send the contact via Bluetooth, email, MMS, or text message
Customize the name of a particular field

As far as I’m concerned, the only thing the Windows Mobile contact manager has that S60 doesn’t is that the listing of contacts includes a telephone number in the name listing. However, it’s the same number of clicks to make a call from the contact manager in either S60 or Windows Mobile.

Another key part of the PIM functionality is the idle screen on the phone itself. In S60, this is called Active Standby. On Windows Mobile, it’s called the Today Screen. I will cover that in another post as that is a topic in itself. Zach over at Symbian in Motion covers it better than I could. However, there is one thing I like about S60 that I’m not sure how to accomplish in Windows Mobile: list the actual unread emails on the Today Screen. On S60, I can get up to 3 messages showing (sender and subject).

The final verdict: S60 wins for me, mostly because of the contact management. Tasks and Calendar are about equal in my mind.

Comments

6 October 2007, Kefrotate.Com » S60 Versus Windows Mobile: Contacts, Calendar, and To-Do writes: [...] Linder wrote an interesting post today on S60 Versus Windows Mobile: Contacts, Calendar, and To-DoHere’s a quick [...]
6 October 2007, Mowdolwis.Com » S60 Versus Windows Mobile: Contacts, Calendar, and To-Do writes: [...] Yamamoto wrote an interesting post today on S60 Versus Windows Mobile: Contacts, Calendar, and To-DoHere’s a quick [...]
6 October 2007, Rob Evans writes: I think you've called this one wrong for the calendar. Windows Mobile is better at Calendar by a country mile. I wouldn't use an S60 phone as a business phone as the calendar just isn't up to the job. The biggest fustration I have is timezones, the WM device handles this really well, change timezones and it adjusts the appoitments accordingly. I tried doing the same on a Nokia and got in a right mess. You can read loads of reviews of 3rd party calendar apps for the S60 as it's pretty well known the calendar is poor. Don't get me wrong I like S60 and use one every day, but for professional level calendar management, the Windows Calendar is miles better.
7 October 2007, jthousand writes: I think they are about equal here as well. Although when I used Winmo I had the 3rd party pocket informant which made it worlds better. Papyrus seems to be an equivalent for S60 platform but I haven't purchased it due to the low ram on my Nokia E62 (Muttering crippled junk from AT&T).
9 October 2007, PhoneBoy writes: The Calendar largely depends on how good your sync software is, I think. I generally don't have any Timezone issues with Mail for Exchange or recent versions of Intellisync Mobile Suite. And the E62? I'm sure if you hunt around on the Internet, you can find a way to remedy some of your issues.
10 October 2007, rosh writes: Syncing is very important when it comes to PIM, and this is where S60 fails. No category syncing support in S60 for calendar, todo, and address book! This is really just plain unacceptable and vaults WinMo over S60 IMHO.
13 October 2007, PhoneBoy writes: Category support isn't a feature I have personally used, so I can't comment on it.
1 November 2007, Ogami_ito writes: Just FYI, Windows Mobile suprisingly falls down big-time in the sync department for one important reason...it does not allow you to only sync sub-folders. This is vital if you want to have a contacts folder for general contacts...which may have several thousand contacts...and a folder for phone-only sync. I suppose you could get over this by catagorizing every contact for phone sync or not. I don't like that method because your phone contacts -many of which may be personal - would then still be in the same folder as your business contacts.
1 November 2007, Ogami_ito writes: I just received this and I'm going to reply here: "I don't think S60 does folder-based contact sync either. Then again, I haven't tried. -- Dameon" Actually, this is not about S60 v. WM but is about Activesync versus the Nokia Phone Suite. I have not synced an S60 phone... I've yet to buy either the N81 (not 8G), or the N95. But when I owned a Nokia 6131, I could sync individual folders. For a business-phone, this allows you to have a seperate personal contacts folder and a business contacts folder on Outlook. When I briefly switched to WM, I had to move my personal contacts onto another computer with a new installation of Outlook. I really don't know why Activesync does not allow this ability. On the other hand, Activesync provides one very cool feature: it acts as a reverse-modem sort off. WM phones can access the internet through Activesync. Why is that good? Well... think GoogleMaps, Mgmaps, and RSS feed programs. For an S60 phone without Wifi, you need to through on-air data to get internet data.
12 April 2008, S60 Pim - Dogpile Web Search writes: [...] experts' analysis! Sponsored by: www.morningstar.com/ [Found on Ads by Google] 13. S60 Versus Windows Mobile: Contacts, Calendar, and To-Do I have used S60 devices for a number of years. The basic PIM functionality has not changed all [...]

Quechup Spam

PhoneBoy — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 07:40:08 +0000

A couple of people I know got signed up for Quechup. My address was apparently “harvested” from the address book of these folks and I’ve been invited–multiple times, even–to join this service.

I’ve looked through this service and I see absolutely no reason to join this place. It looks like a lame me-too service with no obvious value. The fact they want an address book is very irritating. Given the relative intelligence on the Internet with regard to these matters, I suspect I will see a lot of spam related to Quechup. Even people who do know better occasionally get sucked in.

Bottom line: avoid these twits like the plague.

Comments

7 September 2007, Quechup spamming for new members, abusing current ones - Download Squad writes: [...] Quechup is fast becoming 'The Social Networking site to be on'."Interestingly, it appears that we're not the only ones this has happened to. Make sure you read that privacy policy when you sign up, or you could be [...]
7 September 2007, Eric Hanke writes: Seems like a "MySpace" or "LinkedIn" wanna be. You can skip the address book sign-in process.
7 September 2007, Quechup spamming for new members, abusing current ones · ringtel dot net writes: [...] it appears that we’re not the only ones this has happened to. Make sure you read that privacy policy when you sign up, or you could be [...]
8 September 2007, Skype Journal writes: Quechup - Rat Bastard Disease of the Internet. Read it and be warned! Now if Ken would just fire up his Skype client so I could personally thank him for having developed such an ethical reputation.PhoneBoy comments also. Tags: Ken Camp, PhoneBoy, Quechup Powered by Qumana [IMG]
8 September 2007, Software Online Guide writes: to meet new people, catch up with old friends, maintain a blog, share videos & photos, chat with other members, play games, and more. It's no wonder Quechup is fast becoming 'The Social Networking site to be on'." Interestingly, it appears thatwe're not the only onesthis has happened to. Make sure you read that privacy policy when you sign up, or you could be giving away your friends' e-mail addresses.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments [IMG]
9 September 2007, Skype Journal writes: Quechup - Rat Bastard Disease of the Internet. Read it and be warned! Now if Ken would just fire up his Skype client so I could personally thank him in writing via Skype IM for having developed such an ethical reputation.PhoneBoy comments also. Tags: Ken Camp, PhoneBoy, Quechup Powered by Qumana
13 September 2007, steve writes: Check out this link for mobile accessories.Mobile Accessories

Why I Have Facebook Fatigue

PhoneBoy — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:01:24 +0000

Om Malik ruminates about why people have Facebook fatigue. While I don’t claim to speak for everyone else, I can explain why I’m not using it.

To put it bluntly, their mobile interface sucks. Their mdot interface only provides a small subset of the required functionality. The SMS interface requires I send way too many ‘n’ messages in order to read a message someone sends me.

And yes, I have to spend time managing when people try and “add” me. Or send me a stupid zombie eating game. Anything I have to spend too much time managing and not getting value out of isn’t worth my time.

Right now, my “social network of choice” is Jaiku. I can get to it from anywhere, it has a great mobile interface, either the closed-beta Symbian client or their mdot interface. It assimilates my lifestream (i.e. anything I do with an RSS feed attached). My “friends” can take as much or as little as they want. Same me and the people I’ve friended. Best of all, I don’t have to manage it. It just lets me connect.

Twitter, FaceBook, and Cowboy Boots

PhoneBoy — Thu, 10 May 2007 06:16:31 +0000

I have to smile at this use of Twitter and FaceBook by Dan York, which I saw unfold as I saw the first Twitter message he sent out. I’m glad it worked out for him, and it basically confirms why I don’t think Twitter is a waste of time, even though it does waste a lot of my time.

Why People Don’t Get Twitter

PhoneBoy — Tue, 08 May 2007 06:40:16 +0000

I look at anti-Twitter articles like this one and I realize what it is people aren’t understanding about Twitter. People who hate it break out the “who cares what you are doing” argument. I’m not going to argue with that, but what I can tell you is that it’s not really about that.

When it first started, sure, I was just posting silly updates. But something happened: someone posted an update that was a direct response to my update. And I posted an update to someone else’s. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a medium to post inane updates. It became a mechanism for inane chatter. I suppose there’s not much difference in that distinction, but trust me, there is.

Twitter has become, as I wrote before, my backchannel for life. I have connected up with a slowly-but-surely growing list of people that share a common interest, as well as some people that just like me. It’s IRC without the chatrooms and certainly without being tied to a computer. But it’s also a way to reach certain people who carry lots of mobile phones, thus never sure what I should use to reach them on. Twitter virtualizes all that for me.

Whether you find any value in that or not, well let’s just say I don’t care if you do or not. I do and so do a lot of other people. What really matters, of course, is how Twitter will monetize themselves in the end.

Comments

8 May 2007, Monetizing Your Blog » Why People Don’t Get Twitter writes: [...] View original post here: PhoneBoy [...]

TinyTwitter… On my Phone!

PhoneBoy — Mon, 07 May 2007 07:44:39 +0000

(Title sung to the tune of Tiny Bubbles by the late Don Ho)

No, I’m not talking about the Mobile Twitter interface that the Twitter folks finally got done, I am talking about a Twitterrific-like application for your mobile phone called TinyTwitter. I’ve been wanting to use this application for a while now, but every time I tried to use it before today, I would get a failed attempt at authenticating. Today, after a little cajoling from me, the author fixed the authentication bug and I was off and running with TinyTwitter.

The application is a J2ME application and should run on most phones that support J2ME. I tried it on my Nokia N95 and it worked pretty well. I also, for kicks, fired it up on my Nokia 9500 Communicator and it works there as well. Here’s what it looks like on the Nokia N95:

The program uses the Twitter API to fetch the latest 20 tweets. You can send in tweets (of course), both public and private. However, you have to type in your tweet first then specify if you want to send it to someone privately. You can specify multiple people, which is neat. It’d be neater if you could specify groups.

The biggest thing this app has over some of the others is the fact that the application will, in theory, auto-update the tweet list. That alone makes it worth the price of admission. I have had some issues with this part of the app, but it seems to work after a manual refresh for a while.

I will be using this application more over the next few days. The fact I can leave it running on a Nokia 9500 permanently tethered to a power cord might make an interesting replacement for Twitterrific on my Mac.

Twitter: Life’s Back Channel

PhoneBoy — Sat, 05 May 2007 06:59:15 +0000

When I saw David Beckemeyer’s agreement with Tom Keating’s dissing of Twitter, I did stop and think. And then I Twittered: Twitter is like an IRC backchannel for everyday life. It’s my link to a continual conversation that I can participate via whatever method makes the most sense. It’s also become a real nice way to contact certain people and to have them contact me. It’s SMS untethered from your phone. Whether or not you feel life needs a backchannel is a different question, though I would encourage the naysayers to look at al the possible usage before discounting it entirely.

I certainly don’t fault either of these fine gentlemen for their low opinion of Twitter. Being that connected is not for everyone and I certainly wouldn’t be one to suggest everyone and their brother needs to be that connected. While there is a lot of “sharing” of private thoughts in a public way, it’s more than that. And unlike the boom box of the 1980, you can choose to follow me (or anyone else for that matter) on Twitter or not. It’s hard to ignore the guy with the loud boom box when he walks by, but you can easily ignore the self-obsessed geek who updates 50 times day.

Comments

5 May 2007, ricky writes: I like that assessment. Thats how i see twitter, like an anywhere-you-want-it chat room.
7 May 2007, Why People Don’t Get Twitter writes: [...] has become, as I wrote before, my backchannel for life. I have connected up with a slowly-but-surely growing list of people that share a common interest, [...]

GrandCentral on my Mobile

PhoneBoy — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:25:14 +0000

One of the highlights of my trip to New York a couple of weeks back was meeting up with Craig Walker from Grand Central and Jonathan Greene. At that meeting, he showed off GrandCentral Mobile. Jonathan Greene goes into more detail about what it is and some of the other things that transpired in that conversation.

The mobile web interface to GrandCentral rocks the house. It provides that “visual voicemail” thing without requiring any help from the mobile carriers. When you can get all your numbers to eventually forward to your GrandCentral number, you essentially get unified voicemail in the palm of your hands. Slick!

Comments

27 December 2007, Your Source for the Latest VoIP Happenings writes: he showed me their new (at the time) mobile interface
27 December 2007, The VoIP Weblog - Main page - Your idea of Voice over IP - voip, phone, vonage writes: he showed me their new (at the time) mobile interface
30 December 2007, The Year In VoIP: Q2 2007 : wpdaily.net writes: [...] Mobile, Get's Bought By Google: In March, I got to meet Craig Walker of GrandCentral, where he showed me their new (at the time) mobile interface, bringing “visual voicemail” to any web-enabled handset. Then of course, a short time [...]

Gmail App on Symbian Updated. So What?

PhoneBoy — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 06:46:27 +0000

The E-Series blog (FYI, Nokia officially refers to it as Eseries) points out there is a “new” version of the Gmail app for the Nokia E61 and friends. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t really fix much over the version I had on their before.

Aside from still not dealing with attachments worth a damn, the other thing the app still doesn’t do is fix a bug that happens with the E61/E62: If you are on the message index and push the “7″ key without holding down the blue shift key, your cursor will “move down” to the next message before asking you to confirm if you want to delete the message? Guess which message get deleted? Not the one you expect. A pretty serious bug, if you ask me. The other keys (e.g. 8 for spam flag and 9 for archive) do not experience similar behavior.

Tuesday Roundup

PhoneBoy — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 06:28:18 +0000

A few morsels of interest:

The Mac was hacked? Really: Everyone blew this supposed “Mac” security issue out of the water, it seems. The Mac was “hacked,” but it wasn’t exactly specific to the Mac as the issue could be replicated in any browser on any system. It was a local exploit, at best, and it involved cross-site scripting, something that is inherently dangerous on all computers. Please let me know when the Mac can be remotely rooted, though. That will be some serious news.
Voce: Pat Phelan gets credit for finding this one. I certainly like it for the simplicity: $200 a month, all you can stomach for voice, data and SMS. You get a personal assistant as well. And there is no contracts. The $500 initiation fee is a little steep, but if I were using that much stuff, it’d be a good deal. The phones they offer are swank, too.
Vonage Wins Permanent Stay: Paul Kaputska, Jon Arnold, and others noted the big news of the day: Vonage got a permanent stay against Verizon regarding their patent dispute. Basically, it means they don’t have to give Verizon anything while the issue is under appeal. However, they do have to put up the $66 million and the 5.5% royalty fees in escrow in the meantime. The first oral arguments in their appeal will be taken in late June. Not quite “business as usual” as Jeffery Citron is saying, but at least it gives Vonage some breathing room while the wheels of justice turn.
Hictu! Goes Social: It looks like the folks at Abbeynet are trying to take advantage of some of the buzz behind services like Twitter, which I use way too much, and integrate some additional “social networking” aspects into their Hictu! contact manager. For the full Twitter effect, they’ll need SMS and IM update capabilities. For better contact management, they need some kind of Outlook plugin that automatically syncs the relevant data back and forth between Outlook and Hictu. Certainly a way to bring some attention to your service.

Comments

25 April 2007, Ricky Cadden writes: On Voce - The handsets they use are all GSM, meaning they use a SIM card. It wouldn't be half bad to get that 8801 as a backup for free and then use whatever S60 device you wanted. $200 IS steep, but for unlimited everything? It's really not THAT bad. I'm sure there are people who pay more than that for Cingular and don't get unlimited.

Sunday Roundup

PhoneBoy — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 05:59:58 +0000

I’m almost to Inbox Zero on Google Reader. Here are a few things that caught my interest this weekend:

You Might Be A Web Worker: It’s not about your “lifestyle.” Well, maybe it is. But it’s definitely not about whether you work for a large company like I do or you work for yourself. It’s about how you view and use the web to get things done. I would go so far as to say it’s not even about being a “Web Worker” but rather having the web being an integral part of your work and play, which it certainly is for me.
Full versus Partial RSS Feeds: I am not into partial RSS feeds. In fact, with a couple of exceptions, I basically do not subscribe to sites with partial feeds. I like full RSS feeds. Ads in the RSS feed, so long as they aren’t obnoxious, are fine with me. I just wish I could figure out how to get MHonArc to output a full RSS feed for FW1-Gurus.
Twitter is Better than Digg: I have to agree with Jeff Pulver: Twitter is better. It’s more immediate. It forces people to be concise. I am also more likely to see recommendations from like-minded people, thus a greater chance I might actually like what is being recommended.
Digital Media Archival a Challenge: With all the new data formats and the ever-increasing progress of technology, I have to wonder at what point all those pictures we took will simply not be readable. Maybe I’ll go through the CDs my wife burned and reburn them to DVD. And then I’ll have to reburn them to something else. I also have to wonder if the conversion process the studios are going through will introduce “lossiness” into the process. Did they store the data in an uncompressed format? If not, expect some extra “artifacts” to be introduced in the conversion process.
DD-WRT Going Down the Sveasoft Path?: This guy clearly has it out for the folks at DD-WRT, who make alternate firmware for the Linksys WRT54GS and other routers. The guy at the linked article claims that DD-WRT is starting to do some of the stuff that Sveasoft did with their “open-source” firmware, namely do some questionable stuff with other people’s code. I admit to not having verified all of this on my own, however it did give me a reason to try a new firmware I had been hearing about: Tomato. I loaded it on my WRT54GS. The interface is a lot nicer, or at least a lot less “bloated.”

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