Computer Currents BLOG – 2011- June 1

So here we are in June already. My big news of the week is a new TV that displays my movies and TV shows very well thank you. My favourite word of the week is “fondleslab,” what some writers over at TheRegister call a tablet PC or more accurately the iPad. Best bumper sticker of the week “Keep Honking – I’m Reloading.” Worst TV of the week, a new Ad on Australian TV promoting the ‘Carbon Tax’ that contains more errors and lies that An Inconvenient Truth. OK, back to the computing world.

You can’t keep a good open-source project down. A while back there was a project called Mono that was started to create an open-source version of the .NET platform. A few weeks back the development team was laid off, by the new Novell owner Attachmate, and they promptly created a new company, Xamarin. They plan to have commercial .Net bits and pieces for iOS and Android. They will also continue to work on the open source Silverlight project called Moonlight for mobile phones and Apple’s Mac Store.

This is what open-source projects are all about, providing alternatives to commercial projects that can often be so proprietary as to stifle development and capability. I have used a wide range of open-source applications and development libraries ranging from complex cryptography to simple string routines. The update cycles are faster, the functionality often superior and getting a response to a question is vastly superior to say getting one from Microsoft.

You are sitting at your computer in Australia, or pick your place, checking the prices on eBay or an online retailer. Checking the price of a HDMI cable you find that it is 10 times the price at your local store, even after shipping, and even if you have to pay import duties. You hit the purchase button and in some cases it arrives in a few days. Sounds like a fantasy? Think again, many online shoppers are finding that the items they are interested in are far cheaper online. I chose Australian as the example because it is one place where prices are rarely less than double when compared with the online alternatives.

Yes it is good old greed that keeps the Aussie prices at their at their dizzying heights and the local sellers cry foul while pocketing their high profit margins. When it gets to the digital world the situation is even worse. The Top 20 will cost you more than 70 percent over the same price at the Australian iTunes store versus the US one. Given that the A$ is higher than the US one at the moment this is digital highway robbery. Computer games have an even higher price difference and it can be worse for application software. Even after applying the local GST it is far cheaper from overseas stores.

Looking forward to cheaper PCs in the future, Intel says think again.  As Intel starts to gain the upper hand, a.k.a. a monopoly we can expect the competitive pricing days to be over. Of course if we all don’t switch to their new chip technology that may put a crimp in their plans. Crowing over the recent increases in vendor sales Intel CFO boasted how they had “broken the pricing death spiral that has bedevilled the PC industry for most of its history.”

For those who have lived in countries that have monopolies, e.g. Thailand, we know how dangerous it can be for a single player to gain the upper hand in a technology. If Intel gets their way they will control the CPU marketplace, slow down the release of new chips and put up the prices. This is the way of a monopoly holder. The PC group last year made around 50 percent in profits which as the CEO pointed out not too many businesses get that kind of return except “selling drugs maybe." In a later statement Intel said that he was referring to legal pharmacology.

Industry News

China makes most things for most organizations all over the globe. Foxconn is one such factory and they recently had an explosion that killed three and wounded sixteen. Foxconn has been watched over the past few years and there have been accusations of worker abuse that has lead to protests, suicides and even poisonings. The cause was due to a “super-light dust explosion.” If true the ventilation systems were not up to scratch. The iPad2 is manufactured by Foxconn, at that factory, so I suspect availability may be an issue for a while.

Lockheed-Martin has purchased what is supposedly the first quantum computer from the Canadian company D-Wave. There are many who claim the D-Wave machine is not a true quantum computer. The real question is what does the thing do and how does it do it. It has 128 qubits of processing. Some say that processing above 8 qubits has never been demonstrated. If true this would represent a huge leap forward in computing. According to MIT associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering Scott Aaronson:

“In the new work, they apply an annealing operation to eight coupled qubits arranged in a 1D chain, then plot the probability of a particular basis state as a function of time, by running the experiment over and over and stopping it at various intermediate points. They then look at the dependence of the probability-versus-time curve on a third parameter, the temperature, and claim that they can explain the curve’s temperature dependence by a numerical simulation that assumes quantum mechanics, but not by one that assumes classical simulated annealing.” You decide 

Most agree that the D-Wave approach does not represent true entanglement and that it will still only work on classical computing problems. This may be true but D-Wave claim their machine will still do it faster. The new partnership then may be more about a symbiosis where Lockheed-Martin gets access to new technologies and D-Wave gets complex problems to try.

Professor Ian Hargreaves' is working on a Digital Copyright Exchange that many claim will never happen. Intellectual Property is a complex subject that spans organizations, international treaties and local laws and regulations. These all loosely surround a number of different and often disparate technologies.

As a creator of something, assuming you didn’t just copy it from one else, the treaties are supposed to protect you. How this works varies on the countries involved and who you are. Apple and Microsoft for example in the US seem to be able to patent stuff that others have done before them, with impunity. 

Everyone knows that the licensing for digital music needs some serious work. The current system requires two copyrights, one for the sound recording, which belongs to the labels one for the composition. The labels control how this is split and in many cases the artist and the manager do not know how this is calculated. To figure out how the publishing is handled you need a few doctorates. In many cases there are a dozen different deals going at any one time. Hargraves wants a new opt in program, if you don’t then you are not protected. I would have thought the system should be the other way round, you are protected unless you opt out. The new proposal removes your flexibility and your control.  

Currents Blog – 25 May 2011

I spent the last 3 days of last week teaching Excel 2007. Not in a formal classroom setting but more one on one, one on two on a needs basis. It was an interesting diversion from the programming work I am doing for another organization but I was also somewhat apprehensive because it had been a while since I’d used Excel and even then I mostly worked at the behind the scenes VBA level.

On the plus side it gave me the opportunity to have a good look at Excel 2007, get used to the ribbon, play with Pivot Tables and fill in the gaps between causal use and VBA programming. I found that most people were interested in IF and VLOOKUP functions, Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts, naming Ranges and using them in formulas and what Macros were good for.

Pivot tables are very good for consolidation of information to produce reports for your supervisor(s). Pivot Charts are just like normal charts but you generate them from your pivot table, after that it is all the same kinds of things you would do with a normal Excel chart. Pivot tables are a subset of the OLAP cubes you can have in SQLServer and are generated of a table in Excel or pulled in from an external data source. They are very good for playing around with summarizing data and it doesn’t take all that long to get used to them. There are plenty of tutorials available online. I could not figure out how to get percentages for three levels of row values but I’m sure it is possible somehow.

Working my way through Excel to prepare for the teaching I also found that there was a huge amount of functionality I would never use and I suspect that most others will only be using a small fraction of what is now available within Excel. For Excel 2010 users the best thing Microsoft did was allow you to create custom tabs and groups and rename or change the order of the built-in tabs and groups. Other nice features include the ability to recover versions of files that you closed without saving ( helpful when you forget to manually save), pivot table  percentages against parent rows and columns (annoyingly missing from 2007), better filtering and a few other visual features.

Do you remember that movie Trading Places? Apple has been trading places with Microsoft and Sony in recent times and now it is Google’s turn. It wasn’t that long ago that Microsoft was always the one wearing the black cowboy hat. They were the one facing the anti-trust suits, they always had the not so standard standards and they were the ones with the proprietary software. Google(and Apple)  had the white hat, and talked about the glory of being open to all.

More recently Google talks open but seems to be continually closing off their own code, “to protect their own interests.” It is getting very confusing. Android is supposed to be an open platform but Honeycomb is closed until later in the year. The reason is to keep phone users from trying to put it on their devices so it kind of makes sense, but still. Microsoft has a pragmatic reason for keeping its stuff closed, billions of dollars in revenue. Google is also sticking with the proprietary Flash for video, for the time being. I think this is partially just to continue to annoy Apple who refuses to support it at all.

This does not mean however that Microsoft has suddenly become all open, sweetness and light. It still takes open source companies to court or threatens then that they will. It is also true that some of the anti-Google lobby is being funded by the big Redmond company. They tried to get everyone to adopt Silverlight but found themselves looking at a market that moved to HTML5 and JavaScript. Silverlight is probably dead and Microsoft has responded by enthusiastically supporting HTML5, after some initial baulking of course.

Microsoft has had a kind of epiphany realizing that if it wants to work with the Mac and the increasing world of mobile devices then .Net and Silverlight will not cut it for the simple reason that people are using other platforms besides Windows. So now that Microsoft can benefit from going open to some extent it will and has. MS bought Skype but rather than license everything has seen that keeping it as it is and leveraging the advertising I a better way to go. If they don’t a Skype challenger will simply spring up on the space that would be opened. Where this ends up is anyone’s guess but it will keep changing.

Industry News

 
Firefox 5 is out in public Beta with the release date due at the end of June. The biggest change is support for CSS animations. The Do Not Track header has been moved to make it easier to find. Also included is support for switching Firefox development channels, an improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance, better standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas, better spell checking for some locales and better  desktop environment integration for Linux users.

If you happen to have a Toshiba's Folio 100, the one that came with Android 2.2, you can no unofficially upgrade to Honeycomb. This is because that unnamed group of enterprising coders have succeeded in porting over Android 3.0 to the device. There are some issues that may dissuade you like the rotation sensors are disabled and it may sleep a lot longer than you want it to but it does demonstrate how keen some people are to port Honeycomb to other platforms. There are more ports in the works e.g. to the Dixons' Advent Vega tablet.

According to an executive at HP their new touch pad will dominate over the Apple iPad and take them to the “number one plus” market position. I’m not sure what he was smoking but that is a rather bold and optimistic claim, but one worthy of the Marketing Department. HP is currently number one in the PC market and the expectation is they will be able to leverage on that and out-innovate all other competitors. Seriously, I want some of whatever he is on. This innovation will apparently come from the TouchPad webOS operating system HP gained when they bought Palm. HP also has a solid presences in the business and personal arenas. It is worth noting the RIM also holds a similar position but their PlayBook is not doing that well.

I’m going to predict that HP will not make the splash they are counting on mostly because Android is sweeping the tables at the moment and within six months I expect them to have a very strong position in the market. Third position for HP perhaps?

I love scientists. No, not the ones who sit on climate panels and reverse the real world data graphs to make their case, real scientists. A few over at  Nottingham University in the UK have come up with a plan to use depleted uranium molecules as components for a memory storage device. You take two of them, put a toluene molecule in the middle and this forms a single molecule magnet.  If it can be implemented it will provide about 1000 times the storage for the same size of material that current hard drives do today. It sounds exciting but like so many other discoveries it breaks down at this point. You see at the moment such devices only work at temperatures a couple of degrees above absolute zero. This is why I love scientists they have a discovery and a dream and they work on making it work, in this case room temperature would be nice. There are some other problems with the discovery like how to change the magnetic field state. Don’t expect to see this in a PC near you anytime soon.

Google is putting WebP image compression into Gmail, Picasa and Chrome. WebP is an open source image compression format introduced as an alternative to JPEG. It is a "lossy" compression algorithm like JPEG and works by dropping small pieces of an image. Initially WebP was claimed to drop Web images by 40% but Google says they have improved on this. WebP allows for partial image decoding as the image is downloaded. WebP is also supported by the Opera browser. There are a number of other WebP tools including a plug-in for Photoshop. Mac OSX, Apache and other platforms are supported. To date  Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft have yet to adopt the format in their browsers but Firefox 5 will support it.

Currents Blog – 18 May 2011

Oops, my bad I had the article ready and plain forgot to post it.

Have you ever heard of Minecraft? Someone at work mentioned it to me as one of their favourite “sandbox” games. The basic premise is that you find yourself in a new world full of trees, dirt, stone and other resources and you have to survive. You do this by building stuff out of the available resources. First you collect some wood and build a workbench, then build a house to keep you safe for the night and so on.

I am at the absolute beginner stage where I haven’t even figured out how to put the workbench down on the ground. I can already however see how addictive this game could become. I quick look online will show you what some people have built with blocks. You can make glass, smelt metals, farm crops and what you can make seems to only be limited by your imagination. When I figure out how to play the think properly I’ll give another review.

At the other end of the scale is StarCraft 2. Playing that one has taught me that at the very least I need a new graphics card as things seem to take forever to load. I’m looking at buying a GTX 460 1GB variant. I’ll let you know how this goes, or doesn’t.

On the 8th of June it will be World IPv6 day. Most of us are still on the IPv4 addressing system. If you are wondering what happened to IPv5 , you know that you are, it never became an official protocol. Some time back Internet Stream Protocol (ST) was considered IP version five by industry researchers, but ST was abandoned before ever becoming a standard or widely known as IPv5. Work on ST and IPv5 is also never expected to ever restart.

At the same time giants like Google and Facebook will be start providing their services using of what amounts to this new version of the Internet.  If you didn’t already know, IPv6 was introduced to handle the lack of new IP addresses available for future use. IPv6 not only provides a lot of new address space but also better security and faster addressing.

An IP address currently looks something like 128.196.001.001 i.e. 32 bits. The IPv6 address is 128 bits in length and will look something like 2001:0470:1f09:1890:021f:f3ff:fe51:43f8 that is eight groups of 4 hexadecimal digits. Each group has a 64 bit prefix that is likely to be given to your ISP. Your home allocation then could be more that the whole of existing IPv4 network, just kidding.

So the new system provides almost unlimited addressing, how will this affect you now at home? For the time being probably not at all. IPv4 is not being turned off and most of what you have now is not IPv6 compatible anyway. Your computer can probably handle it, as can the later operating systems so if you enable IPv6 on your network you probably won’t have any problems, probably. There are some sites that use only IPv6 but you are unlikely to hit them for the time being. So expect both versions to be around for a while yet.

So for now you will be given some IPv6 addresses for your network and your router will provide an IPv4 address and NAT (Network Address Translation) for devices. This will also mean that your IPv6 devices will now be visible on the network. It may be that games lead the way with groups like World of Warcraft ready to do with Ipv6 but not yet running it. When they do it will really start to test people’s connectivity. I suspect that when it does start to happen there will be some who find out that things stop working.

Special Report – Intel’s New 3D Transistors

If you haven’t heard Intel had a big presentation recently touting their new 3D Tri-Gate transistors using 22 nanometer technology. This puts AMD in the catch up position as they have their Bulldozer 32 nanometer technology. Since I was curious, and I one studied computer servicing many, many years ago, I decided to take a close look at the technology and see if it will really give Intel the competitive advantage they are crowing about.

Intel’s announcement comes just as AMD is ramping up with GlobalFoundries to produce the 32 nm wafer baking that would have theoretically caught them up with Intel that has had it since late in 2009. AMD’s product contains both a CPU and a GPU on a single die, called an APU. AMD plans to roll out the new products in the third quarter. Intel responded with the latest announcement. Intel will put the new technology in their Ivy Bridge family, an upgraded version of the Sandy Bridge range.

The issue in the simplest form is how power affects switching speeds. The new technology here allows faster switching at lower voltages. In this case at 0.7 of a volt the switching gains run out to about 37 percent. Or put another way 22 nm at 0.8 volts performs as well as 32 nm at 1 volt with a 50 percent reduction in active power.  All of this of a 2-3 percent increase in wafer manufacturing costs. That is some serious power savings and the lower voltages mean less thermal handing required.

The ramification is that Intel wants all chip markets from smartphones to servers and everything in between. The technology itself is not that new and can be found in various forms in labs all over the planet. The difference is that Intel is throwing its considerable manufacturing weight behind the concept and spending $8b to upgrade four plants and build a new one. They are also investing in a new process for 14nm technology.

Industry News

It seems like every time I look at some It news Apple is up to something new to restrict people from doing something. In the latest iteration Apple has made it even harder to swap your hard drive in the latest line of iMacs. They have changed the standard 4 wire SATA connector to a proprietary 7 wire version. They have also moved the drive’s temperature control to that connector in addition to the firmware.

What this means is if you use a non-Apple cable or hard drive to say increase your available space you will end up with a hard drive fan that always spins at the maximum speed, i.e. is noisy, very noisy. The fan scream you hear is Apple yelling at you for not buying their replacements. Wonder what they will do to mess up your life next week? This is yet another reason why I don’t buy any Apple products, ever.

Also this week in the new technology stakes boffins over at HP think they have cracked the memristors technology. This is a combination of physical and chemical technologies that could replace NAND and even DRAM in the future. In theory the technology could be ten times faster that flash at one tenth the power cost. They can also be stacked to achieve high density memory structures. Fabrication is also fairly simple and they have tested 3nm devices that switch at about one nanosecond and provide 20Gb per square centimeter, before stacking. The breakthrough is that now they know how the process works at the microscopic level. Planned ship dates for some early versions are planned for 2013.

It is expected that the first target for memristors will be flash memory devices. Since memristors also mimic synapses there is one scientist who is working on modeling a cat’s brain. With this new development Wei Lu may be closer to making an artificial cat. I for one will welcome our new cyber-kitty overlords.

The chip maker Tilera is coming out with a new range of processors that currently range up to 100 cores in a single die. There will be three versions depending on what the IO and memory requirements are.  16, 32, 64 and 100 core versions are planned all with a mesh network construction. Each core has 32 KB of cache giving the 100 version a whopping 32MB of cache to play with.  There are lots of other features like fact encryption, fast graphics processing and 80 GB/s PCI express bandwidth. In a word, fast.

Blog Currents - 11-May-2011

I start this week with an oversight on my part that caused me to lose most of this month’s ADSL bandwidth. It all started when I received a throttle warning from my ISP. Only half way through the month and I had used 80% of my bandwidth for on peak. My normal response was to be careful but two days later I was up to 93%.

I knew this was wrong and my first thought was someone was hijacking my WiFi connection. I started checking but no other connections but mine over the past 24 hours. The I heard baby sounds coming from my notebook speakers. Since nothing was running I knew that was wrong. Jumping to the task manager and finding out what was using CPU uncovered a file name I didn’t know. I stopped it and looked dup the executable, it was a Worm.  For some reason I thought I had installed my trusty Vipre on the notebook but wither I hadn’t or it has been removed. Reinstalling found where the Worm was hiding, removed it and protection was established. The moral here is that when it comes to malware take nothing for granted. Remember to check from time to time that the system is protected and that everything is up-to-date.

So according to a bunch of groups, e.g. Gizmodo, it isn’t really an issue that Apple, Microsoft and Google have been collecting data from your mobile device. Apple has or will be issuing a patch to correct this minor “oversight,”  Google says that users have been warned and can opt out and Microsoft, well Microsoft will probably just keep doing what it has been, like it always does.

The position of those like Gizmodo is that yes data is being collected and yes it is being sent back to the vendors but that it is all being anonymized so stop complaining or worrying about it. In response to this I have one word for you, Sony. Their recent hacking experience only emphasizes that someone could break into any one of these sites and grab the data before it gets anonymized and then they have all the data they want.

Then there are the WiFi hotspots that are often used to connect this data. People can also break into to each individual data collection system at this point. In some cases it isn’t even illegal to do so as the Google StreetView audits have shown.  Also despite what the vendors say, being something drafted by the legal department and then spun by Marketing we don’t really know what their intent is.

In say Australia it comes down to what is in the respective Acts e.g. privacy and telecommunications. In the latter it is fairly clear on what info can be collected and sent. For location based services this is the phone number for provision of a location based service. In the case of Google et. al. there is more than the phone number being sent.  Elsewhere it also states that they cannot use this information even if they have collected it. Since the info is being used, even if anonymized then there appears to be a contravention. You can check your own local rules and regulations on this one.

So are the carriers and service providers breaking the law in Australia? I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know. I do believe they are being very fast and loose with the definitions and what may be covered under the EULA. For a very funny take on this check out the first of the new season of South Park.

Microsoft is desperately fighting back against Apple for the title of most draconian overseer.  They are or have rolled out a Windows Phone update 7392, I guess they ran out of cool names.  All this update does is pretend to fix a few ‘out of date’ security certificates. It all has something to do with the NoDo improvement and the ChevronWP7 updater that provided an unofficial update for WP7 users. No problem the original releasers of the update will be coming out with another update that will move people back on the official update path, the one terminated by 7392. Sorry Microsoft you are not even close to taking the crown from Apple.

Industry News

So where is eInk these days?  They have colour at a reasonable resolution and refresh rate but I already told you about that. E Ink Holdings won’t be bringing out a new screen until sometime next year however. They have a good reason though. How about the ability to create a screen on a range of different surfaces? They are working on technology that will print a screen on cloth. This means T-Shirts with billboards, envelopes with messages and even new technology for full motion colour videos. Looks like eInk will be pretty good in 2012. 

An AOL presenter at a recent conference declared that “Flash is the new disk and disk is the new archive.” For the personal user I’m not so sure about that. Flash is used as both a disk and as backup. Removable drives are used as backup storage. Flash is still a bit too expensive and a bit too slow to replace the disk drive for the time being though that may change in the near future. Tapes are also still used widely for backup .

I do agree that flash performance has been improving in recent times but price is still a bit too high for wide spread commercial use. For some types of enterprise use flash is becoming more competitive and so in the near future there will be a switch from disks to flash in some areas. In the really large storage space disks will reign for a while yet. I do agree that as flash comes in disks will switch to a more long term storage use. As Google found out recently, having tape backups can also be of huge benefit when other data storage options, particularly on a network, becomes corrupted. They aren’t sexy but they are there when you need them and the cost per GB still can’t be beaten. The newer tape technology is also better as far as reliability when compared to a disk. They only spin once while writing and again when getting it back so there is little change of a mechanical failure corrupting your data. You also need to deliberately overwrite them and even then this happens slowly unlike disk where it can be done in an instant.

You know you’re getting old when the calculator you once used is celebrating its 30th birthday or worse if you are still using one. The venerable HP 12c Financial Calculator arrived on the scene in 1981and is still popular today. If you talk to a stockbroker, an accountant or a financial planner there is still a good chance they will pull one out of their pocket when going over figures with you. The HP 15c and 16c were introduced at the same time but they have long since faded into obscurity. You can however still buy the 12c online from HP for $69.99 or $79.99 for the Platinum Edition. The latter is supposed to be “6 times6 times faster with 4 times more memory than the original HP 12c.” It can also accept normal algebraic calculations instead of the RPN approach (blasphemy for some).

Blog Currents – 04-May-2011

So, do clouds fall from the sky? The Amazon one has certainly had its problems over the past week or so.  Their AWS infrastructure cloud has been subject an extended outage to the point where Amazon is giving 10 days of credit to its customers. It all happened during an ‘upgrade’ of network capacity when traffic was shunted to the wrong router, one that could not handle the load. This initially affected one region but then shifted to others on the wider network. The biggest criticism came from what you could now call the Sony effect, i.e. not telling anyone what is going on.  Amazon said that they will now be giving out more frequent and detailed information if problem arise in the future.

One user of the service complained that they were continually being told “just a few more minutes.” This is of course a standard mantra from networking people in any outage. It is right up there with “this time it will work” from programmers. The sequence of events reads like a comedy of errors but does show how these things can cascade like dominos. It also highlights why I prefer to leave networking stuff to the networking experts.

This latest incident highlights how fragile a network based solution can be. It can be like a stack of dominos where one problem causes another, and another and so on across the whole network. In this case some data was lost but just how much has not been disclosed. It reinforces the need to keep backups somewhere other than on the network if you are using cloud services for storing business data. Even person information can be important and if it is lost can be difficult to retrieve. Local backups are essential, even in the modern age of cloud computing.

It had to happen, Apple has announced their own iCloud.  Ios5.0 and Mac OS X Lion will hook into their new service called iCloud. This will allow users to store and synchronize a wide range of data on Apple servers. Apple bought the domain iCloud  from a Swedish company who moved their stuff over to to CloudMe.com. What you now do on MobileMe will move to the new service. Some expect that iCloud will mostly be for music but Apple have expanded the name to cover lots of different services.  For those keeping score it all started out as ,Tools then .Mac, then MobileMe and now iCloud. It is also expected that the iTunes Store will eventually be folded under the same umbrella.

Last week I wrote about Apple being caught out sending location information back to head office. To be fair the rest of them do the same thing. Microsoft Windows Phone 7is yet another that quietly sends back the exact physical location to a central database, if you have GPS activated that is. So that’s Apple, Google’s Android and now Microsoft that does it. The privacy advocates are up in arms saying that everyone from the police to and abusive spouse could be tracking a person’s movements over a period of time.

Unlike Apple the Microsoft location services are an opt in service and they do not store any of the location information on the Windows Mobile unit. The iPhone 4 can and does store information on the unit for moths and even years in an easily accessible file. Android units keep track of cell towers and WiFi hotspots but limits the number of entries to the last 200 and 50 respectively. Apple and Google have publically said that their devices report their location when services are on but nether have admitted that they store the data on the handset.

On the subject of phones I plan to get myself a Samsung Galaxy S 2. This will replace my aging O2 Windows Mobile based unit. I was tempted by the HTC HD 2 a while back but since then I have decided that HTC is not a very smart company. At the time the HD 2 was a very advanced unit. It did all the cool things, had a great screen and a Windows Mobile OS. Since then people have managed to port just about every OS to the unit. I was watching my brother play with Android 2.2 on it recently with no issues.

The problem is that HTC took a great phone and never formally allowed for any OS upgrades of any kind. They closed down expansion on their flagship product almost as soon as it was released. This puts HTC squarely in the same camp as O2 as far as I am concerned. Yes their interface is a great one but to freeze their top line product from any expansion or upgrades is just plain stupid.

Samsung in Australia by comparison has announced that no single carrier will get the monopoly on their latest device and all indications are that as new versions of Android are released an upgrade path will be available. Even Apple beat HTC in this arena with upgrades provided for an allowed for their units. Too bad their store does not allow for older software to survive the upgrade path. Not being an early adopter I’ll wait for the prices to drop a little before I buy but the initial reviews of the S2 are very favourable.

Industry News

If your telephone bills were not high enough already Google has announced Android support for video chat via Google Talk. This means as an Adnroid phone owner you will be able to chat with others like you on your phone and to those on a PC. 3G, 4G and WiFi networks will be supported.

Brace yourself for a new round of 3G service bill-shock horror stories: Google has announced Android support for video chat and voice chat using Google Talk. The service will be part of Android 2.3.4 and others will get the update as the system rolls out. This brings Google up to date with the Apple functionality that came out last year. The Goole solution works with Gmail while the Apple solution only works on WiFi at the moment. The Google solution also supports in conversation text chats. Even smarter if you follow a link while in chat it maintains the audio until you return.

A cautionary tale in phone use comes from Tasmania, Australia. Australia is one of those countries that has opened ended charges for phone services use, in particular the Internet. The individual was given a SIMM extracted from an intelligent electricity meter. She then downloaded and called her way to nearly $200,000 worth of services in three months. It took the electricity company 3 months to notice the card usage.  The real story is that someone could rack up such a large bill over three months and that there are no limits on what you can be charged in Australia.

So when did doing the right thing suddenly become bad? Ask the people at the German software company Magix AG. A security researcher found a vulnerability in the software product Music Maker 16. Acidgen, his tag name, found a stack buffer overflow. He sent the details along with some sample code of how it could be exploited and how they could fix the problem to Magix AG. He also told them he’d be releasing the details once they had patched the problem. Very nice of him all round right?

Not according to the Germans who sent him the following reply.

“MAGIX does not appreciate that you are intending to publicly release the Exploit and to cause irreparable harm,” a company attorney wrote. “As you maybe [sic] aware it is illegal to release software which is intended to commit computer sabotage (e.g. Sec. 202C I No. 2 German Criminal Law). In addition this announcement together with your offering to have the vulnerability fixed by your company may be considered as an attempted extortion.”

You can sum this up in a single word, “Germans.”