One Shot Design

In line with my own July 2008 speculations about the potential of Linux in the net book market, Matt Asay of cnet.com writes about The Quiet Ubuntu Netbook Revolution.

Founded in the Baltic area in 2003, Skype released a cross-platform software allowing to carry out chat, VOIP and later, video-calls, over a theoretically encrypted¹ network. The startup was acquired by eBay in 2005 and it steadily grew in popularity to become the World’s #1 chat and VOIP software, boasting over 300 million users. Skype doesn’t charge calls to other Skype users, but the charge for calls to landlines is hard to beat, sometimes amounting to a meager thousandth ($ 0.001) of dollar per minute.

The software has been ported to Microsoft desktop Windows, Windows Mobile, Apple Inc. OSX, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and AmigaOS. A version for Google’s android platform is available since January 2009 and the company announced today that a release of the application will be available on the iPhone application store.

I had reported on a SMC Skype WiFi phone used to make € 0.003 a-minute-calls to landlines in Western countries. Last week I decided to subscribe for unlimited calls to Europe and a real phone number for receiving calls. I can make calls either with my SMC WiFi handset, my Windows Mobile WiFi-enabled PDA or one of my GNU/Linux laptops with appropriate headset. All in all, it costs much less than a traditional phone line from my ISP. The Skype network is still unstable, with a few seconds of communication mash-up every 30 minutes and a communication drop every 2 hours, but the appeal of huge savings makes me bear with the flaws.

Skype for the iPhone (and the iPod Touch) is great news for Apple Inc. product owners, who will now be able to make some phone calls for free using WiFi or their subscription’s unlimited internet traffic. Needless to say, it will leave network carriers who planned to cash in on mobile phone traffic with a bitter taste. they might not let Apple Inc. get away with it.

¹: Reports do suggest that in 2006 Skype agreed to implement keyword filters to be allowed by authorities to run services in China. Several Western governments are talking about attempts to crack down the encryption or simply putting pressure to allow wiretapping; and the proprietary nature of Skype software does fuel suspicion over some sort of backdoor access.

[UPDATE] Early uninquisitive articles did applause the new version, but once the excitement faded, detailed reviews only seemed to be voicing dissapointment. The 8th release of Internet Explorer finally passes the Acid test straight out of the box… well actually Acid2, not Acid3 like the competition. Springing from the worst browser lineage -ever- in the history of Internet security, IE8 is said to feature at last some security improvements.

I run IE7 on XP at work, and the application needs restart at least 3 times a day… when it does not crash. Internet Explorer is developed by a team that has complete access to all the operating system specifications, unlike third-party developers, and yet they still manage to mess it up. I don’t know if IE8 will be more stable, but it doesn’t offer the same range of free addons as Firefox or Opera. Last time I tried to look for an IE plugin I was asked to pay for it.

If a merger between tech heavyweights IBM and Sun Microsystems takes place, both companies would gain. But so far, Wall Street is lukewarm.

A potential marriage between tech giants IBM and Sun Microsystems is rattling the tech industry. The two companies are in merger talks, and IBM has offered $6.5 billion in cash, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Read the full story at Businessweek.com

WEP used to be the most common wireless encryption standard for Wi-Fi before being replaced by WAP and WAP2, but the recent discovery of a weakness and the apparition of “password recovery” software mean that more reliable encryption standards must be devised.

US-based AccessData has been providing law enforcement and government agencies with digital forensic software intended for cracking encrypted data. Their competitor, Russian software developer Elcomsoft, has unofficially been selling password-cracking software to government staff in the USA and Germany. Elcomsoft was brought to court in 2001 for violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Actand found not guilty. They claim their software is legal as long as the licence owner uses it on his own files. The array of software can conveniently “recover” passwords from Microsoft Office files, Adobe Acrobat documents, ZIP and RAR archives, SQL databases, Wordperfect and Lotus documents, POP3 and IMAP mail accounts, instant messenger accounts and Internet Explorer.

In January 2009, the company launched a ”Wireless Security Auditor”, an application that listens to WiFi data packets between two devices and makes use of the staggering processing capacity and acceleration technology of video cards to cracks the key in a few dozen hours, instead of the usual hundreds.

Basically, no data encryptions method is 100% crack-proof so the only solution for the moment is generating complex and long passwords, favoring Open-Source software encryption with the highest key size (each additional bit exponentially strengthening the password) and encrypting everything in a cascade, like Russian nesting dolls: store your critical data in an encrypted file in an encrypted folder, and only communicate it through encrypted email over an encrypted server connection over an encrypted Wi-Fi hub. Got it?

Now first things first: where did I put my old ethernet cable?