Nothing and More

My take on: Junk on the net podcast

Air Force Aims for ‘Full Control’ of ‘Any and All’ Computers

Most of the tools they need for their plans are already available. Making those tools is not as difficult as it seems, and wont take them long, they could even ask the good folks in the NSA for a hand.

All that said, what I fail to see is the good in this approach, it’s not that it will impact the Internet infrastructure negatively in a global sense. But it’s really not going to amount to much, Cyberwarfare is not like conventional warfare, and it needs you to be a couple of steps ahead of your target to be effective. The truth is that you never will know.

Now about the kid that shut out Youtube from his country, that’s well nothing really special or complicated to do, I wont go into details but minimal googling will provide you answers. So if the Air force wants to protect the US from kids like that, they are a little late to the game, and secondly it’s just a waste of task payer money.

DDoS attacks can be mitigated and can be neutralized their are a number of papers on this available on the net, as well as implementations. Problem is the Internet was meant to a be a open information sharing infrastructure, and now trying to tied it down is just an up hill battle.

I do believe every country has a right to defends it’s property, in this case their servers and the service they provide, but not at the potential costs of rendering the resources and services of other countries null and void.

Verizon Snubs Google, Joins LiMo

I think you missed a few very important aspects, one being that Motorola is a big player in the Verizon network, and Motorola has invested quite a bit on Linux, being known that a lot of their newer more desirable models run Linux as their OS.

The second thing you missed to look into, is that Java hasn’t done all that well in the Cellphone market from a user perspective, the load times on the Motorola Z6 (my cellphone) are hideous, and let’s not talk about the lags, now I don’t fault the language, it can simply be Motorola underestimating the requirements to run the applications properly, but it might also be, that they don’t want to put cycles into having Java apps run faster, when they can give that space to more interesting things built in less resource intensive languages.

That said Android is not ready for prime time quite yet, and players like Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and others need solutions now, so LiMo is there, it’s available and is base OS that all this company are familiar with mainly (Linux). So that may be why Verizon has gone with LiMo and not Android.

Another reason might just be that well the person pushing and designing Android (while a brilliant engineer and designer) hasn’t had much luck with some of it’s previous products. Also add the fact that Google made Verizon spend much more money, that they would have otherwise liked, so making life easier for Google is not priority.

To end this, Verizon going with LiMo doesn’t hinder Android from running or working on the spectrum, and why should Verizon go with Android instead of any other readily available alternative? Cause it’s Google pushing it, and design it, and hence controlling it? I don’t think I can fault Verizon in this one.

Microsoft officially teams up with OLPC

I’ve said it once and I’ll said it again amazing project, noble goals. I don’t know Mr. Nicholas Negroponte, but I don’t think his goals are to get a Nobel Peace Prize or any such thing, I have a few of his books, and read a few of his papers, and he truly believes that the OLPC can change the life of this kids for the better, allow them to access knowledge and information that otherwise they wouldn’t be able to obtain, instill the need and importance of community and the power that networking (in all it’s facets) has.

I truly believe his goals are noble and selfless, but it’s just, that knowledge and education are very powerful tools. Teaching a kid to think for itself to question the quid pro quo so pervasive in third world countries, and instead opt for what’s best for the community as whole, is not something most Third world government would want, specially those whose legitimacy is questionable.

So it’s not a matter of a simple device, but what that device signals, and provides for the good of those kids and the future of our world. So yes it doesn’t feed them, or heal them, but it does empower those willing to immerse themselves in the waters of knowledge to be better and just, and that’s the important thing to have a channel to achieve that, and right now, whether that channel runs windows xp or Linux is irrelevant, for the big scheme of things.

Facebook, Google Square Off Over Who Controls Your Data

This doesn’t make much sense to me. For starters the data they have is the one we provided by giving them permission to access our email account be it: Gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail or whatever to get your contacts and search if there were already in Facebook or to invite into facebook. So taking this into account, how can they with a straight face, claim that allowing Google friend connect program to access Facebook data can be hurtful to their users? Why isn’t it the other way around?

Then there is the problem of property of information, according to the article referenced in the podcast anything posted in Facebook has to be kept on Facebook, that seems, fine at first glance, but how on earth can they stop me from posting that same info on my blog? or on twitter? or where ever the hell I want? Why can’t I just extract it from Facebook to publish it? Why can they use my data for their own business and not let me do with my information whatever I want?

Furthermore I believe Facebook has made a terrible mistake, firstly because most of their users are google users, Gmail users, Google Talk users, etc. Secondly something that 99% of the Facebook user base didn’t know has come up to their attention, and that is that Facebook controls your data, and you have no say on it. Don’t get me wrong most people wont care. But when you start seeing the users in Hi5 and other competing social networks taking advantage of Google friend connect, they’ll want that, and in the end either Facebook abide and opens up, or they’ll have users canceling their accounts.

I started using Facebook, and grew bored, and annoyed to the point, that It’s been months since I accessed my account or looked into friends info. So with this little push, I just deactivated my account, they should have a delete account like Hi5.

I highly recommend Junk on the net, to anyone who wants a different more individualistic and less corporate take on tech news, and news in general. It’s not just cause they are my friends, and I sometimes participate when life permits, but because they bring a different outlook, you wont find marketing BS, or blind fanaticism, though I do have to warn you, 99% of the group are Mac heads, making me the only sane person on the group (joking).