Verizon Now Offering A Symmetrical FiOS Package

Verizon is now offering a 20/20 internet package. Yes, 20 down and up! Aimed at the consumer, I guess they're trying to see what a consumer will ultimately go for. I think this is great news, considering the internet is now not only a source of information, but also a place where normal consumers put their information. With the recent surge in online backup solutions, I'm sure having a slow upload connection would have significantly hurt when you had to upload your data. As well, there are more and more devices coming out that utilize servers so a consumer can access their content across the internet. I can only hope that people will take advantage of this, and give a reason for more service providers to jump on the bandwagon.

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Apple Is Now Worth More Than IBM

Apple has finally managed to beat the beast Steve Jobs made a point of beating in the beginning. Steve Jobs is probably most pleased about the news that Apple surpassed IBM's worth after posting nice fourth quarter results (even if IBM's not really in to the sales of personal computers anymore). An excellent picture was posted on a comment on Wired's blog to basically sum up Steve Job's position.
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Source:Wired

Our Future Privacy Risks

An anonymous comment in my previous article (Don't Block Our Torrents!) pointed out a p2p application, Share (P2P). There are many privacy concerns in the world today. Information is collected constantly about us. At our workplaces. At the stores we go to. And even online. Constantly, we are giving out information that is completely out of our control. The world's technology is integrating, and access to information is becoming global. This article examines risks to our privacy and concerns for the future. But first, a history of some anonymous file sharing applications that got me started on this topic.

It seems to have started at first with Winny. It was created by a Japanese man as an anonymous way to transfer files over a peer to peer network. It is non-centralized and supports swarm downloading (pretty much the norm in p2p apps now a days). The creator of Winny had his home raided and the source code confiscated. On May 10th, 2004, he was arrested for suspected conspiracy to commit copyright violation. After the halt on development of Winny, Share was created by an anonymous Japanese engineer to carry on with what Winny started. Winny and Share seem to work by keeping ip addresses secret and encrypting files before transfer, and then decrypting them upon successful file transfer.

Although there have been a few arrests with Winny, the police did not catch them entirely through the file-sharing network. It was not a security breach, but instead a system of elimination. The police obtained ip addresses through an integrated forum, after which they blocked access to all ip addresses except the ones obtained, allowing them to verify the sharing of files from the specific ip addresses.

The programs aren't too useful in many places outside of Japan as most of the rest of the world is still lacking in internet speed in comparison to Japan. Share limits download and upload speeds to a minimum of 50 KB/s. I expect encryption file sharing applications will gain popularity as the rest of the world's internet speeds increase.

There are arguments that anonymous file sharing applications only exist for the reason of sharing illegal files. I am a believer in privacy, and don't believe this to be true. I think people have a right to protect their identity online (as the internet wasn't built for privacy). With an ip address and an extensive network with no privacy, I believe it would be possible for people to keep tabs on others as to what their interests, jobs, and hobbies may be. Programs like this may become important in the future as our privacy is scraped away by the ever increasing online authorities watching our every moves. Another reason this mass documenting could be threatening for our privacy is because information is power. Marketers and business people would love to assemble such a network for these reasons. I think we should have the right to choose the knowledge we allow people to have about us, and the right to safeguard it.

Oh, and in a very funny turn of events, the Okayama Prefectural Police Force had a large leak of data over Winny. Data of over 1500 investigations was leaked, and is apparently the largest amount of information held by Japanese police to have ever been leaked. How ironic considering these police forces chase and track p2p users for their "crimes". The bad side, and another point proving that the archival and tracking of our private information is a threat to our privacy, is that the information included sensitive data, such as the names of sex crime victims!

I'm curious as to what other people think about our privacy in the future, and if we have a right to safeguard it. I must say as well, that an ip database profiling people of the internet would be quite a feat, as there are a variety of ip naming systems, with static and dynamic. I still believe it to be possible to accurately pin-point someones identity even with dynamic ip addresses if a time-stamp system is used (doesn't take much to integrate that, most programming languages have that built in). Internet service providers would have the proper information of which time a person had that specific ip address for police, while it wouldn't be as important for marketers. And although there is a large usage of dynamic ip address naming systems, I think we'll start to see this diminish as the practical use of home servers increases and people start to demand static ip's. Marketers already use things such as Google's Hot Trends, showing a list of the most popular search queries.

Our privacy is slowly eroding whether we acknowledge it or not.


The information for this article was obtained from these Wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny
And a special thanks goes out to the anonymous poster who pointed me towards these amazing applications, working to safeguard our privacy (whether people think so or not).

Postcard Delivered 64 Years Later

Here's a cool story about a postcard being delivered 64 years later. The postcard was mailed in WWII from the battlefront. Read the article, it's a nice read! (ARTICLE HERE)

How Bacteria Nearly Destroyed All Life

Here's an interesting article on bacteria in the early days of the Earth, and how it nearly destroyed everything. It kind of sounds like humans are the new bacteria...

Link

Don't Block Our Torrents!

On MSNBC, I read an article about Comcast blocking some internet traffic. Tests show that Comcast is interfering with some peer to peer (p2p) network traffic. While I'll admit a lot of p2p traffic is of copyrighted material, it does have its major uses as well. For instance, pretty much all Linux Distributions can be acquired from a p2p network (usually through torrents). Internet companies should stay competitive, and neutral on data. Don't think for a moment that internet companies aren't being pressured by media companies either. I tend to rant about the media companies "not getting it". So here it goes.

Torrents provide a way for anyone, especially "the little guy" to provide content to others, while avoiding high costs of servers and bandwidth. Torrents are one of those revolutionary ways of distributing files, and I think some people just can't grasp it.

One way for media companies to avoid many illegal downloads would be to provide a legal way of obtaining them. Of course, the prices should be void of any manufacturing, shipping, or packaging costs. The media companies that have tried to digitally distribute content can't seem to grasp this. Other than ease of use, why should you have to pay full price for half a product, when everyone else can get it with packaging? And, especially when a torrent of the full, non-protected content is a search away.

You must overlook the people who say, "Well, then get up and go buy it". These people can't seem to grasp the idea. Look at it this way. In a brick and mortar store, would you normally sell a product to someone at the normal sale price, even if it was missing its packaging or damaged? Any legitimate store would be negotiable with such an item. The damage in this case would be the extreme DRM (digital rights management).

So take this in mind next time you set prices on digital media:
"Digital Media = Open Box Content. Price accordingly."

TV-Links Raided and Shut Down!

Today, TV-Links was shut down. TV-Links was a site that provided links to movies and TV shows on popular media sharing sites, such as Youtube. Apparently the police in the UK have arrested the owner on charges of "facilitation" of copyright infringement.

Am I the only one who has a problem with these charges? Congratulations media companies, instead of going after the real copyright infringer's, you go after TV-Links. I think these charges might be a big deciding factor in the future of the present internet in the UK. Can anyone be charged for linking to TV-Links? And, are people in the UK going to have to be vigilant about who they link to? The media companies have gone and started a war between themselves and the rights of people on the internet. To me, the big companies are becoming dictators of what content we can link to.

As long as Tv-Links didn't physically help upload the content, there should be no charges for "facilitation". This is controlling who we can link to on the internet. It is completely destroying one of the fundamental parts of the internet, "The World Wide Web".

Hey, guess what? Google has links to all the content TV-Links provided. Why hasn't it been named in the charges? If these charges go through, the internet could be on its way to "The World Wide Marble Pile". It would be nothing more than chaos with no way to navigate.

So my question is this: Should a large corporation be able to dictate who we link to, and what the future of the internet should be? And second of all, if TV-Links can be charged for the links, shouldn't any major search engine also be responsible for their links, regardless of who (people) or what (robots) found and indexed them?

Robotic Cannon Kills 9

A software glitch may have resulted in the death's of 9 people, the South African Defense Force has said.

I think this is an important world event because as countries become more and more advanced, incidents like this will become more common place. Software developers are often rushed and products aren't given the testing time they deserve. Computer bugs are a very big problem for any country that uses software. There is the problem of hackers, and when you mix that in with what can happen with bugs by themselves, it's a wonder why bigger things don't happen more often... Or maybe they do and just get covered up?

Anyways, as we enter web 3.0, I guess we'll see what happens.

(wired article about the robotic cannon here)

The Newly Released Transformers Movie

I just picked up the newly released Transformers movie yesterday on dvd. I went to Best Buy for their exclusive with an action figure and 32 page book. For the increased price, I think the 35.99 CND price tag was worth it. The action figure is quite small, but all in all, its a pretty nice collection. As for the movie, for all the naysayers criticizing the director, I think he did an awesome job at having the movie come to life.

So, don't take my word on how great it is. Go see for yourself!

The Utility Time of Year Has Come Again

Yes, you heard me. That time of year has arrived again. It's almost time to get a new subscription to my security software. Now many people say to use the free programs, like the personal editions of AVG and Zone Alarm. Now, I can't put them down, they are a great option to choose if you have no desire AT ALL to purchase security software. For me on the other hand, I don't mind paying for quality. I like security suites that do exactly what they are supposed to do, with the ease of use to match it. I also prefer it all to be integrated into one and with similar looks and menus. Enter Norton Internet Security from Symantec. Symantec has been in the security game for a long time. They've got "street cred" in the security business (as some people would say).

I know some people are going to disagree, but Norton Internet Security has turned into one nice product. It has a firewall, fights virus's, spyware, and rootkits. The box also says it has "Intrusion prevention", "Web Site authentication", and "Eavesdropping protection". I'm not really too sure about those, I think they should fall under firewall and either anti-virus or spyware, but I guess it makes people feel more secure. And hey, whatever helps! Too many people get creeped out about using the internet, and hopefully this can help them.

So anyways, you all know the old versions of Norton. Those ones you loaded up, and they took forever to load or do anything, and made your computer grind its gears to do anything. Well, I think those days have changed. To me, since Norton 2007, they've done a complete makeover of their product. When I fist installed Norton Internet security 2007, it was noticeably faster. It seemed like a great product. Another good feature was for those people who get freaked out at the first question a firewall asks. Norton has a feature t0 manage the firewall alerts by itself, making yet another task automated. So basically, for the average user, Norton has become a self-sufficient, "let it do it's job and your computer will be safe" kind of program. The user-interface received a make-over and looks more friendly, telling you exactly what its protecting you against and if there are any problems.

So, with all that mumble jumble I just said, you also get a year subscription with Norton (pretty standard in the utility business). Now, what I just found out recently (wish I had looked sooner), was that, as long as you have a subscription to Norton Internet Security, you can receive the latest version. I have 30 days left (give or take) of NIS 2007, and I just got 2008 downloaded and installed. So, if you happened to just buy NIS 2007 and still have a year left, your not out of luck. You can just go to their downloads section of the Norton site, and click the version you have to get the newer one (direct link).

Now, I've been using Symantec software for a long time, and have a lot of trust in their stuff. One thing that might not be the best is their spyware, which I seem to find doesn't catch everything some other spyware scanners get. I'm not sure if the others just have a lot of false-positives or what-not, but Norton does get all the major ones you should worry about. I've had nothing but utmost quality from Symantec and their products. The only thing that has started to bother me recently is there subscription notification. As I said earlier, my subscription is starting to run out, and NIS 2007 and 2008 (tried both to see if they both do it), keep telling me to renew my subscription. As well, Norton looks like somethings wrong with it and keeps saying it needs attention. Now, this is very minor, and in no way affects any of the functionality of the product, nor is it intrusive. I just find it annoying. I like to see the green check mark saying all systems go. As well, 30 day notification will remind everyone to upgrade in order to keep protected. After all, we all know hackers love taking advantage of those who don't have the latest updates, whether of Windows, or while waiting for Microsoft to come up with a patch to fix a problem they promised to fix a week ago! Oh, one last complaint. In the 2008 version, there is no feature I could find to "Block all traffic". This could come in handy if your afraid you may have gotten trojan horsed, and are awaiting a virus scan to pick it up, or, if you just prefer to cut off access with the outside world for some privacy away from our instant technology world (I requested they add that feature back in before product release, but I guess they didn't listen or didn't have time to listen).

So all in all, if you have anything you would like to protect, or you would like to save some time and not have to format if you happen to get a virus, make sure to keep a security suite on your computer. For those who aren't as computer literate, or for people like me, who would prefer to do what they love on their computer, without having to tweak their security to its peek, buy Norton. The new Norton Internet Security experience has been a great one for me, and coming from a long time user of Symantec products, is a significant step up with performance and coverage compared to some of their other not so liked versions (although they have always did the job whether they were slow or not). Or you can use one of the free ones (AVG and Zone Alarm are some of the more popular free ones for personal use).

So, I'll leave it off at this: Use protection or you might give birth (give birth to a private information fiasco, not a baby silly!).

Half-Life 2: Episode 2!

You heard the title. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is finally out! I played it today, and as I suspected, it was a complete success. I enjoyed it immensely, and urge anyone who's into the Half-Life series to go catch up with it. It's well worth it. The story is deep, and I'm guessing a lot of thinking goes into the story, with elements that appear to come from many great pieces of work.

So, login to steam, and grab this game. If your a fan of Half-Life, you will not be disappointed!

Another thing, when you purchase off of steam, you'll enjoy the benefits of digital downloading that Valve is helping to push main-stream. Steams ease of use has gotten better, and as more games become available on it, it is eliminating the need for those annoying CD-keys and CD's that are so widely despised throughout the gaming community.

My Start-Up Life

I was in my local bookstore the other day, and decided to pick a book I hadn't heard of before. The book tells the story of Ben Casnocha, a very young entrepreneur who started Comcate in 2001 when he was only 14 years old. Ben talks about his experiences in Silicon Valley, and about problems he had to overcome in order to triumph; personal and business wise. All in all, I found it to be a great book. It also brings up the question that has been floating around recently (because of the reality TV show Kid Nation), that asks if children are being protected too much, and are prevented from "integrating into the real world" as quickly as they are capable of. Anyways, enough rambling from me, if you come across this book, pick it up and give it a read (My Start-Up Life by Ben Casnocha).