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Nexus One Update

The Day after Canada Day I was walking around Halifax and got a message on the Nexus phone that an update was ready to download.

By the size of it, it wasn’t a big surprise what it was: the 2.2 update (Froyo) had arrived. There aren’t a lot of obvious changes apart from some small changes to the interface, but most of them  seem to be under the hood. The much talked-about tethering (turn your phone into a WiFi hot-spot) is there, as are general speed improvements.

I also went to the market and downloaded the Flash player which means visiting a number of web pages is much more satisfying. In short, some new features, a bit faster, and nothing broke (yet) – I’m happy. Hopefully other Android users will be getting their updates soon.

Apple: Back to 1984

It’s been widely reported that last week Apple made some changes to what tools developers can use to create applications for the iPhone and iPad. Blogger John Gruber also did a pretty solid analysis of why Apple did this: namely to keep developers developing applications that run primarily on the iPhone. I agree in the short-term this makes sense for them, but it seems like they’re forgetting some lessons.

What Apple is fighting is the commodification of a type of product, namely mobile phones and soon web tablets. This happened before to them: in the mid-1980s the Macintosh was quite innovative in terms of a user-friendliness, compared to the many of the personal computers available at the time. By the mid-1990s this had changed: Microsoft had created a “good enough” copy of the Mac experience with Windows and prices on hardware had fallen so that Apple’s products where quite expensive by comparison. The Mac continued to be popular in some circles, but had essentually became the Porsche that people bought calendars of before buying a Honda.

While the Porsche example is not perfect — people buy a high-end sports car for different reasons than they choose a phone — the challenges are not. Like Porsche, Apple has to protect its brand by demonstrating that there is a reason you are spending several hundred dollars on a phone. One of the ways it can do this by having lots of applications that are unique to the iPhone. One way to do this is make sure developers invest the time and money creating an iPhone application, and not spend that on writing for competing phones. The contract changes made last week which seem to be primarily aimed at Adobe’s Flash software are designed to ban technologies that would make it easier for developers to write applications that would run on several platforms, essentially making the iPhone’s offerings less unique. While I don’t anybody is going to be throwing their iPad into Boston harbour over this, it’s not going to help Apple’s image with developers any more than the ongoing issues with the less-than-transparent App Store approval process is doing. Short-term the effect is pretty nil, medium-term though it’s going to make the alternatives more attractive.

While the iPhone had become ubiquitous and in 2010 arguably still provides the best user experience of any smart-phone, its probably only a matter of time before someone, maybe Google, maybe RIM, maybe even Nokia come up with something good enough. Apple lost the PC market because it tried to be Porsche; Apple risks this happening again, but this time it’s not going to take 15 years.

review of Mafiaboy: How I cracked the Internet

It’s the story about a young teenager in the West Island of Montreal who hacked website like Yahoo, CNN, eBay, Dell and others in year 2000. The book follows Michael Calce’s involvement in hacking, from his early adventures on AOL, launching the attacks on Yahoo, CNN and eBay in 1999 to the resulting investigation, trial and sentencing that followed. The second part of the book covers a bit of his life afterwards but is mostly on how hacking has changed since his Mafiaboy days and ways for users to protect themselves online.

http://yyztech.ca/reviews/book/mafiaboy-how-cracked-internet-why-still-broken

Blogging with Twitter

I haven’t updated this blog in a while, but that’s not to say I haven’t been blogging pre-say. I realized a few months ago that most of my blogging had moved to Twitter.

Why? Well there’s a few reasons:

• via its gMail interface, blogging is as simple as sending a text message, making it very immediate
• the restrictions (160-odd characters, no images, short urls) make tight writing a necessity
• you don’t feel like you have to write 2-3 paragraphs (that’s me) when you can sum things up in a sentance
• the social aspects – it’s not Facebook, but that’s probably a good thing – really if i want post an album, I can use Flikr
• the 3rd-party apps – there’s a whole host of things built on Twitter’s api, from search engines like TweetScan to Twitbin there’s a lot of interesting things being built around it.
• it’s fun

Blogging certainly has its place, but if you’re looking for something less formal- and quite possibly the way things are going, give it a try.

Tale of 2 cities: Wifi in Toronto and Montreal

Found this posting on the author’s experience with WiFi in Toronto and Montreal via the Wireless Toronto mailing list. While Toronto doesn’t come off so well, he promising a second posting on some of the good spots he’s found.

Bluetooth explained

I’m always looking for good explanations of technical subjects. Over at CBC.ca there’s a good write-up on Bluetooth, the wireless protocol widely used in mobile phones for everything from wireless mics to file transfer.

On the topic of phones, there’s a new series starting on CBC.ca next week, read about it here while fuming over the slow pace of adoption of phones in Canada – case in point, Fido is just now rolling out a G3 service, nice Flash animation, but we’ve got one phone for now.

The CBC series will will be hosted over at http://www.cbc.ca/technology/ and feature a number of industry people from Research In Motion co-founder Mike Lazaridis to Sir Richard Branson. Should be good.

More on the new spam bot

I caught this article a few days ago on something similar to what I got on YYZtech.ca a few weeks ago: spam without any urls. The author has two theories: 1) they are trying to train automatic spam filters to allow certain words – that will be later used from spamming, and/or 2) they want to get the e-mail addresses where the spam was sent from white listed, again, to use for “real” spamming later on.

New kind of spam bot

While checking out the forums on YYZtech.ca for spam, I noticed something new and kind of interesting. I wasn’t sure if it was spam untill I looked at the address, but for a second or two it fooled-me, the bot had taken a short quote (or just the fist word – there where several posts from the same bot) and worked it into a question, so at a quick glance it looked like just part of the normal forum thread – sneaky