The recent fuss about Google sniffing open WiFi networks while driving around taking images for street view is really not as big a deal as fear mongering politicians like Stephen Conroy would have you believe. Here are some points worth considering.

1. Open wireless networks are exactly that.. they are open to anyone that wants to connect to them. In Australia at least, if you don’t secure your wireless network, it’s not illegal for others to connect to it and you only have yourself to blame.
2. Connecting to a wireless network is not instant, it takes about 3 to 5 seconds to connect, be assigned an IP address and a route and start sniffing. Now picture your wireless router with a circle of at most 80 meters around it. Now picture a car driving past at 40km an hour….. by the time they were fully connected and able to catch packets, they’d be leaving range of your wireless network anyway so the amount of data that would be captured would be fairly tiny (like maybe 2 to 5kb). What that means, is that it wouldn’t even be a full email or file or anything remotely useful, and it wouldn’t be tied to you personally anyway. Google scientists are not reading your emails or browsing though your hard disks so relax people.
3. From what I’ve read, Google collected only roughly 600 gig from the entire world, most of that would be SSID names and assigned IP’s, so as I said in point 2, the amount of data we are talking about here, per wireless network is truly tiny.
As a test. I drove down the street past a couple of open wireless networks at 30kph and each time by the time my phone connected, I was already leaving wireless range.

As far as I am concerned, if you have not secured your wireless yourself, or paid someone to, then you shouldn’t have any expectation of wireless privacy at all. If you feel violated, you have only yourself to blame as people who secured their network have nothing to worry about with this.

After my recent post about the X10 taking too long, it finally came out and I bought one almost instantly.

It hasn’t been out for a fortnight yet and it’s already downloaded a firmware update that fixes the few issues I had with the phone. To be honest I got excited and thought I was getting 2.1 Android while it was updating. Was quite disappointing to discover I was still running 1.6 at the end. Still, it is good news that they are following up with usability updates.

Fantastic phone I have to say. If you are looking for an Android phone, they don’t come better than this yet. Once I know all of its little issues I’ll add more, but I’ve been stoked with it so far.

Update: Interestingly, the GPS has been really slow to start up since the update, i do not know if it is related or not.

It isn’t exactly new news for Linux folks now, but for those that don’t know. SCO’s slander of title claim against Novell has been found in favour of Novell (and Novell have been found to have kept their Unix copyrights). Linux is for now, once again out from under the shadow of legal action. Anyone that delayed deploying Linux for fear of SCO may now go ahead, and anyone who bought one of their licences can now feel very silly and lament the loss of vast sums of money that was wasted.

For the most part, that is show over for SCO. They are going to try to continue by begging the judge to give them the copyrights since the APA said something to the effect of “copyrights as required”.

What SCO are hoping nobody notices, is that “copyrights as required”, intent wise, was referring to the copyrights that might be required in the general daily activities of an actual working Unix business (like oldSCO were for many years before Caldera and Darl Mcbride got involved). NOT the copyrights required by a company who’s only remaining business is trying desperately to find someone to sue for some code somewhere. SCO argued that the “intent” of the APA was more important than the wording. They don’t get to change that now and claim it the other way around. The Intent was never to provide copyrights simply for the purpose of creating a litigation business.

SCO have also said that they will continue to litigate the IBM case where they claimed among other things that IBM put code from Unix that SCO owned the copyright to (though we now know they didn’t) into Linux and thereby made it an awesome competitor that stole Unix’s market share. In 7 years I don’t believe SCO revealed any code they claimed was in Linux that belonged to them that wasn’t almost immediately found to be from free unencumbered sources. Obviously SCO can’t fight this any more since they have been found to not have the copyrights to Unix anyway. Instead they are going to continue on some contract issues. IBM have counter claims as well so it may well be that SCO leaves this world owing IBM some money as well as Novell and dozens of others. Special thanks to Groklaw for making sure that the inconsistancies in both SCO’s public announcements and those of the traditional media were pointed out and corrected thoughout this long saga.

Recently, Sony released the latest update for the PS3’s firmware. It’s been a while so I was excited to see what new features we’d have that would improve its useability. In particular I was hoping for an improved web browsing experiance because currently the system is quite cumbersome to use.

What did I get new from this update? In short, nothing that I can find. It’s all about Sony this one. They made me download a couple of hundred MB of update simply so they could remove the option to install Linux from my PS3. Since that was a point of advertising when I bought it, I feel that they have breached their contract of sale with me by not providing what they advertised.

Other than removing that option, there was nothing I could see about 3d related updates or UI improvements anywhere else. If you are going to remove something from users that you previously sold to them Sony, you should at least make an effort to give something back. Improved useability in browsing using the bluetooth remote would be nice. Or being able to navigate the menu’s using a bluetooth keyboards arrow keys would be likewise helpful. How about some tie in between the new Xperia X10 and the PS3? There are so many things that you could have done to soften this blow that I am left wondering if you people will ever learn that the reason for your lost sales in TV’s and other lines is because you just don’t seem to listen to or think about the user experiance and impressions of your own customers. The PS3 is definately superior in value to the Xbox 360, the included Blueray drive, included wireless, superior CPU power, wireless 6 axis motion controller and bigger hard disks make it fantastic value for the price they now are. The reason you are not in front is simply bad PR and marketing of which this is just another example.

Releasing an update that is basically a downgrade in functionality is bad PR Sony. I don’t think you can’t afford more bad PR at this point.

Update: I just notice that the playstation site says this about the update:

This system software update includes all features contained in previous versions.

This is obviously not correct as they have removed the default system and other OS options. It’s a small thing but I’m feeling rather petty about it right now.

This site is cool — thanks Pat for a simplistic site explaining css — just what lots of us need.

Thank you!

Email updates can be turned on via the Inbox dropdown menu. Once on, Google Wave will notify you with a summary of updates to your waves and email you when you’re added to a new wave. Thankfully you’ll only receive one update for each individual wave — instead of receiving an email for each update to a wave — until you log into that wave again.

All the details here.

Not that this isn’t really wrong — but if you have to steal something this is a cool way to do it I guess …
Drop in off a rope, hide from the motion detectors and security cameras. Only problem — gotta be an inside job.