Loose Bits, Sept 14 2006

By | November 22, 2011
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A new Loose Wire blog feature, collecting some links that aren’t necessarily new, but worth pointing out in case you missed them:

  • Good summary of what ubuntu, the new Linux windows-like interface, is and isn’t, from David Weinberger: “Until Ubuntu handles its inevitable errors and failures as well as Windows and the Mac do, users won’t get far enough to fall in love with it.” My experience exactly.
  • New (beta) version of Skype out, 2.6, which lets you click to call ordinary phone numbers on any website, find and join Skypecasts and share clickable links in your ‘mood message’. Being Beta, 2.5 won’t automatically find this update, you need to do it manually. (That said, 2.6 has crashed on me once so beware.)
  • Talking of crashes, there have been glitches with the new version of iTunes, according to pieces appeaing by digg: skipping, distorted songs, lost music, and rejected iPods.
  • Microsoft releases a beta version of its Web design software, Expression, a successor to the infamous FrontPage. More from Scoble here.

Getting Data Past Borders

By | November 22, 2011
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Bruce Schneier uses reports that Sudan is searching all laptops being brought into the country to sound a warning: “Your privacy rights when trying to enter a country are minimal, and this kind of thing could happen anywhere… If you’re bringing a laptop across an international border, you should clean off all unnecessary files and encrypt the rest.”

Some commenters take the discussion a bit further, pointing out this may not be enough. Officials may demand you decrypt your files, so a better way would be to encrypt your data in an unpartitioned portion of your hard drive using something called TrueCrypt, which creates a “virtual encrypted disk” within a file (for Windows and Linux.)

Others suggest that this might not be enough, and that it may be better to use some kind of steganography (hiding data within innocent data, like a photo or music file.) It goes without saying that whatever you do encrypt you should have backed up somewhere safe back home. Another option is not to have anything on your laptop and to download what you need once you’re in country, but unless you have a private network you can do this on, chances are your downloads will be monitored.

This is all not as fanciful or infrequent as it sounds. One poster, Abbas Halai, said he had on three occasions entering the U.S. been asked to login to his laptop and then leave the room.

Loose Bits, Sept 13 2006

By | November 22, 2011
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A new Loose Wire blog feature, collecting some links that aren’t necessarily new, but worth pointing out in case you missed them:

  • Discussion at WSJ.com between jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of Britannica, on the future of encyclopedias, which quickly deteriorates into name calling.
  • Business 2.0 piece by Om Malik on widgets: “Widgets are absolutely where the action is today.” Mentions Widgetbox and Mashery, which doesn’t seem to have opened its doors yet.
  • Funny advice for reporters by the guys at Skype Journal on the 1st anniversay of eBay buying Skype. I’m still amazed at the number of Americans I talk to (well email, actually) who say they’ve never heard of Skype, even when they’re in the tech business. Must be frustrating work for the SJ guys fielding reporters’ calls when they’ve never even used Skype.
  • Yes, I know I said the Lonelygirl15 mystery is already boring, but here’s the final piece of the “puzzle”: Her identity has apparently been established as one Jessica Rose, or Jessica-Lee Rose. (Who she? – ed)

The Commuter’s Shopping Impulse

By | November 22, 2011
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A good piece that explores the point I was trying to make earlier about the commuter element in cellphone service adoption, from Reuters’ Sachi Izumi (via textually.org).

Someone needs to look closely at the link between flat free pricing for mobile browsing and m-commerce (yeah I don’t like calling it that either, but it’s there to differentiate between buying online and buying on the mobile. I’m sure the distinction will blur eventually). Japan’s burst in mobile commerce ahead of the rest of the world is impressive, and it’s all to do with people being stuck with their phones for company for long periods. Jun Hasebe, an analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research: “Impulse shopping accounts for most of the purchases done on mobile phones, and that would not usually happen unless users are on flat fee-based services.” Phones, in a word, have become more like our friends than our friends are.

The only thing holding this back? Fear of fraud. Most people don’t like punching in their credit cards to their phones, although this may have as much to do with where they are (public places, public transport) than it is about actual fraud. One reason I think facial recognition as authentication will play a big role.

Loose Bits, Sept 12 2006

By | November 22, 2011
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A new Loose Wire blog feature, collecting some links that aren’t necessarily new, but worth pointing out in case you missed them:

  • Google’s News Archive Search – lets you search back through news articles several years, decades, even nearly a century back. Stories are listed by interest (whatever that means) but with three very handy extra features: a categorisation by period on the left, below it by publication, and the option to view the stories in a timeline (actually a vertical listing by year.) Useful stuff.
  • The Lonelygirl15 mystery gets solved, gets boring quickly. An insight on how little we can distinguish, or care about distinguishing, between fact and fiction. More here and here.
  • Talking of which, I couldn’t access Wikipedia or the BBC websites while I was in China. Made me realise how much I rely on both.
  • My friend and fellow columnist Charles Wright is feeling the pain of declining ad income on his Bleeding Edge blog. It’s a tough business, and it’s easy to forget that if you like a blog you should try to support it. Unfortunately RSS readers make it easy to skip the ads.
  • A new version of Democracy, the oddly named TV viewing software and downloader, is available. New features include playlists, folders, Flash capabilities, non-English suppot for Windows, Mac and Linux and overall tarting up of the interface.
  • My other friend Cameron Reilly of The Podcast Network has gone Moleskine.
  • Interesting talk abroad about the GyroQ, a tool that allows for quick entering of data into a Mindjet mind map. I was tickled to see the address of the company is The Old Dairy, Eggpie Lane, Weald, Kent.