George Ou
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Ashton Kutcher Meets Firesheep, Twitter Hacked
It appears that Ashton Kutcher has become a high profile victim of Twitter’s negligence when someone at the TED conference hijacked Kutcher’s Twitter account using tools like Firesheep. The Twitter PR account @TwitterGlobalPR twitted that Kutcher should have enabled SSL by typing HTTPS in front of twitter.com, but that deflects from the fact that it’s ...
Finding Spectrum for Mobile
Larry Downes has a good piece on the hunt for 300-500 MHz of mobile Internet spectrum and how the FCC is working to complete an inventory check on spectrum allocation. When it comes to mobile Internet, physics and practical engineering and usability requirements limits us to frequencies between 300 MHz and 3700 MHz. Less than ...
The Misguided Debate on Cellphone Safety
News came out last week that a new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that cell phones caused additional brain activity and it predictably stirred up the old cell phone safety debate again. CNET Editor Kent German interpreted the CTIA’s (Wireless Association) statement that essentially said “nothing to see here ...
Can Apple Make 24-bit Audio Mainstream?
CNN is reporting that Apple is in talks with the music industry to offer improved quality 24-bit audio tracks, but an increase in sampling rate was not mentioned in the article. The 24-bit format has been around since the late 1990s among professional musicians and it’s been readily available to consumers since the early 2000s, ...
House Votes to Block FCC Net Neutrality Rules
A 57% majority of the US House of Representatives has voted to block funding for the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules passed by a slim FCC majority last December. The vote now heads to the Senate and then the President’s desk. We found the FCC rules to be incoherent because the FCC ignored the record and ...
Commercial Implications of IBM’s Watson Supercomputer
It appears that IBM has pulled off a public relations masterpiece with their computer hardware and software placed inside of the TV game show Jeopardy. IBM’s “Watson” (which is a cluster of 90 high-end computers each based the four IBM Power7 processors and very sophisticated software), has managed to defeat two of the best human Jeopardy players ...
Smartphones with Image Arrays Can Threaten Higher End Cameras
I was really intrigued by the Pelican Imaging array camera solution being pitched for Smartphones and other compact photography or video applications. Since Pelican isn’t doing much talking right now, I did some thinking over the weekend trying to wrap my head on the concept and why it works. The problem that needs to be solved is ...
Facebook HTTPS Now Works, but Forgot SSL Authentication
Facebook’s new full SSL feature finally works three years after it became widely known that web pages were passing authentication cookies in the clear which could lead to hijacked user accounts, and 3 months after an easy to use tool called “Firesheep” made this hacking method easy enough for anyone to use. Facebook users can ...
All Wireless Networks are Shared and Limited
A new PDF memo on the Verizon website indicates that they will be throttling the top 5% of data users on Verizon mobile networks, but some members of the blogosphere are calling this a “Net Neutrality Alert”. Engadget said that this move was notable and that: “To our knowledge, this is the first time that ...
Ramifications of Intel’s Chipset Flaw Seem Minimal
Monday brought some bad news for Intel when it was announced that their latest product codenamed “Sandy Bridge” had a flaw in its chipsets. Sandy Bridge is the code name for Intel’s latest microprocessor or CPU and the chipset called “Cougar Point” is the accompanying set of chips that provider peripheral functionality such as storage, and it’s located ...