I just read an interesting story on the cbc technology section about a white list approach to computer security.

Who is going to maintain this “white list”? Is there already a consortium of application vendors that have agreed on this “white list”?

If this gains traction there are some interesting technology and business issues that need to be solved. Overall, interesting times ahead for security software industry.

Once again Google is right but unfortunately has to fight old bureaucratic companies, to do the right thing. It’s an open fact that Cisco and ATT have been in bed for a long time.

What this Red Herring story writer does not get is not only press time from Google (funny, a story published on the web with no timestamp, just a date ) but the fact that companies like ATT have indeed stymied innovation.

Case in point, well the internet, which was developed by government research funding to connect networks like ATT and MCI that did not talk to each other, very well, huh!

Executives at large telcos don’t care about innovations or changes and they rarely have passion for new technologies. But they do passionately pursue their bonus checks,options and benefits package, nothing wrong with that except that in order to do so they have to kill competition and maintain status quo, often times ruthlessly and by ANY means necessary.

An open access spectrum means a cell phone user can use any phone (device) on any wireless carrier. Have you ever wondered why you can’t use the same phone on a T-Mobile network and a Verizon network? The technology to use mobile phones, devices on any network is available but its a way of the phone companies to tie us down to their network.

If you ever get a chance to talk about open access, say yes to it … trust me that will open up the real competition and give us more cool stuff like the internet and bring us out of the dark ages.

St Louis Park, MN now has wireless broadband internet access, well almost.

Two weeks back they installed the wireless poles in my area, see the one closest to my house on the 16th street/Zarthan Ave intersection.

I called the 365x24x7 support line this morning only to be told that the service will not be available until mid-August

Another minor annoyance that I found out was that the professional installation was “mandatory”, the FAQ page says otherwise,

” Is There a Mandatory Professional Installation?

No. Professional installation is optional for all service levels. Most subscribers are able to install the gateway and start using ParkWiFi by following installation instructions provided when they receive the gateway. ”

Another 3 weeks does not seem too long a wait and I hope that its worth the wait !

Update: 29th November 2007 10:08 CST

It’s almost December 2007 and still no sign of a working city wide WiFi network. I guess I will have to wait for the yet to be announced Google & Co nationwide broadband service or may be a community based broadband network even.

I like this camera. I bought this camera a couple of weeks back ( last week of June 2007 ) from Walmart.com in preparation for my trip to the East Coast with my mom. A picture is worth a thousand words so take a look at the pictures here.

A short summary of what I liked and what I did not like about the Norcent DC-1020,

Likes

Dislikes

Tip: Get the starter bundle and the energizer battery charger from walmart its a good deal if you can get your hands on it.

Do you want an iPhone? Do you hate standing in lines?

Well it looks like you can check the availability of the iPhone online. If you are lucky and you find a green status ball you can make a quick run to the apple store near you to pick up your iPhone.

The idea seems simple but actually making store inventory available online is a nice feature. I like it and yes thank you apple!

Update
The online inventory check that I was so proud of, does not seem to work. I have checked this at different times of the day but sorry there are no green balls of goodness!

July 27 2007

Here is a nice video review of the iPhone by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal,

iPhone video review

Feel free to leave your comments on the iPhone.

Zoho has released an online notebook application… It lets you create books and the coolest thing about it is that it lets you add sound “bites” and/or video clips if you have a microphone/camera to record audio/video. Thats pretty neat. Best of all the price is right, yeah its free!

Check out their youtube demo here.

If you are interested in a good text book on Information Retrieval a.k.a Search, here is one,

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~schuetze/information-retrieval-book.html

It’s online and oh yes you can’t beat the price!

I thought the captcha system for identifying humans and blocking bots was cool ! recaptcha is even more cooler. The image [challenge] presented has two words instead of one. They use the ”other” word to digitize books scanned using OCR technology. The problem with OCR is that it does not recognize all words but the nice thing is that it can tell you so. The “other” word is now presented to a human to be interpreted.

Check them out here recaptcha ! I give them a thumbs up.