It is my second day with it in my hands and I am not quite sure how well it is going to perform for me. As a piece of technology it is simply beautiful. It is light and thin with a beautiful screen and fast performance. At the moment though it is hard to see that it is a ‘game changing’ as claimed by some of the commentators.

The fact that I am using it before the official launch in Australia has revealed just how much control Apple has over their devices. It only works as an Itunes accessory. I could not even turn it on without first synching it to my iTunes account. Once powered up and synched, I wanted to see what new apps I could find, except the app store doesn’t work in Australia yet. The official launch is not until the end of next week so it looks like i’ll have to wait until at least then before accessing the really interesting stuff. Similarly it seems that I will not be able to use the iBook service just yet either, or buy the Apple iWork applications either, so it’s current utility is rather limited.

One thing that is good, unexpectedly, is the typing on the full size virtual keyboard. I expected it to be quite difficult without the physical response of the keys, but it is actually very comfortable. The auto correct that it uses probably helps me a lot as well too, and the fact that my typing was pretty crap in the first place.

I will keep playing with it an try to generate more output with it than I have done previously with the more mundane PC keyboard.

Adrienne got herself a blackberry and can now get emails anywhere. This is something that I have resisted while working for other companies, but now that we run our own business it is incredibly useful.

So with Adrienne getting email and being able to respond to it anywhere, I started to get more than a little envious. I had to at least consider an iPhone.
I am now continually surprised at just how much I can so with this device.

It covers the obvious basics. It makes and takes phone calls, and synchronizes with my calenders. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. After playing with some of the fun but pointless applications I have started to find some amazing tools.

This post is written entirely using my iPhone. Now that I have this I might actually make the excuse to write some new random stuff.

I should be able to see exactly what data is being shared and be able to limit it and control its use. Until this happens I am unlikely to signup to too many more applications on Facebook.

It is fascinating watching how the “gen y” crowd is using this and other social networking services. They are totally fearless about sharing every last detail about their lives. It makes me feel like an old fart to say so but the way that they these services is completely different to my own. They practically live in these worlds; or rather they co-exist in both the online and offline worlds.

For me though these worlds are still quite separate and the world of Facebook has taken a noticeable back seat to the rest of the non-Facebook universe.

1. When I looked at my boarding pass I confused my seat number (5D) with the departure gate. Stupid.
2. While I was patiently waiting for the (now overdue) boarding call I was listening to a ranting podcast, completely unaware that the plane was infarct leaving on time and was trying desperately to call for me.

Still unaware of my error I proceeded to board the plane from the wrong gate with everyone else in the lounge. As I scanned my boarding pass, there was suddenly a problem. My pass was returning the wrong name. Do they ask for id? No. Do they try and resolve the problem? No, they direct me onto the plane anyway.

Thinking that at last I could relax and be on my way I sit down and stow my bags. A moment later there is another problem. Someone else has my seat number. I am just about to get grumpy now, when the hostess mentions that this flight is headed for Coolangatta and not Melbourne.

Oh. Dear.

Once out of the plane the Qantas staff were very helpful in getting me back on track, although the next available flight was at 10:20pm. It certainly gave me an opportunity to reflect on my attention while traveling.

As Chris states they were not the first to launch a flash or hard drive based music player. Around five years ago I have mixed memories of shelling out AUD$700 or AUD$800 for a Creative Nomad 6GB Jukebox hard drive based player. This ‘little’ baby was basically a 3.5in hard drive repackaged into a portable CD player form factor.

From a technical perspective this gave me everything that the iPod Mini provides. This was happening during Napsters heyday so there was no shortage of easily (if not legally) obtained music, it supported playlists that could be managed via the device and on the synchronised PC. But it never really took off. Why?

• It was still quite big and bulky. Bulkier than even the CD players of the day.
• The interface was awkward and required concentration to navigate through.
• The process for loading up songs and managing playlists was a learning experience.

These are exactly the areas that apple have addressed with the iPod, in all it’s incarnations to date. They created a pocket sized device, with a simple tactile user interface and developed software that for both Mac and PC that was easy to use.

On top of all of this, apple then made it cool to geeks and non-geeks alike. With fun iconic advertising and the white headphone wires they made their devices visible even when they were stuffed in the oversized fashion jeans pockets of their owners.

So where to from here? Well with digital formats the device IS the media. It is the thing that you carry with you. What is changing is how you use it and what you put on it. iTunes is influencing this with their track by track downloads. Podcasting has the potential to listening habits by consuming peoples listening time with non record label content.

The big step in bringing portable digital music to the masses has been made by apple and I thank them for it. The next battle however is for the time you spend listening to it. Do you just randomly shuffle you 60GB of music files? You may never listen to the same track twice! I have practically left the CD loaded music behind, as I listen to a backing up stream of podcast content.

So what will you be listening to today?

Will apple make my iPod experience a good one? or will they shaft me and say that is just too bad. I just don’t think that getting 2 hours out of a battery recharge is good enough, when you can’t replace the battery without incurring fees from apple.

Will I learn from this experience? Probably not. There is a new iPod in town called the nano. I am in techno lust all over again. The weekend before last we were walking past an apple store in Chatswood and they were on display. At the time I barely resisted the urge to bring one home. Now I wish that I hadn’t been so ‘strong’. The fact is that I will buy one, but now they are out of stock – everywhere!!

I have one on order now though. It should be available on Friday. Now I just have to work out how to get to it when it arrives. The battery life is rated at 16 hours but I will remain sceptical until I have used it for myself.

Until now this has resulted in three separate PC’s with shared file access, but no single location of file storage that I could backup easily. It also meant that files were getting duplicated on the different machines since the transient nature of the network meant that I couldn’t know for sure that I could access a network share when I needed a particular file.

Yesterday I loaded up ‘FolderShare’ that goes a long way to resolving this issue. It creates a complete copy of all of the files in the shared folder on each system that needs to have access to it. Although this uses 3 times the storage space it provides a fantastic level of redundancy as well. It then synchronises all of the changes to these files in real time whenever the systems can access each other. This may be locally within the network or remotely over the Internet.

Finally for backups I then just have to back up one location to have the latest copy of all 3 PC’s data. Very impressive and perfect for our current setup. It is great to stumble across a solution that perfectly meets your requirements and quietly exceeds them as well.

Will I upgrade from the 5 day trial and pay USD$50.00 for this service? Well I very rarely pay cash for software, since there is almost always a free solution out there, but this one looks like a winner. There will need to be a major deal breaker to prevent me from making that small investment.

Thanks for finding this goes to Rafe Needleman from ZDNet.

The thing that I have been quietly nervous about is that the amount that i have been using it exceeds the number of daily hours recommended to get the most out of the iPod battery life. Before the podcasts I really had no expectation of listening to more than a couple of hours a day of music. Now however I need to listen to that much just to keep up with all of the feeds that I listen to.

As a result I have been seeing the battery time get gradually shorter and shorter, with the battery indicator sometimes displaying half full before suddenly crapping out at the most undesireable times. This is particularly annoying when I am out for a run, 20 minutes into a 60 minute course when suddenly my head is assulted with the silence of empty speakers.

These shortened times between re-fueling are now becoming a more noticeable issue. I listen to about 2 and a half hours of podcasting now before the battery winks out. At the end of the week I will be traveling overseas (more on that later) which would be a great opportunity to blast through some backed up podcasts while I am on the plane but if the battery craps out before we taxi out I will be very disappointed , to say the least.

But although privacy is important that is not the real threat. There is a real danger that spyware has already found its way onto your computer. Over the last three years there has been a very dangerous convergence between organized crime and the writers and creators of these online nasties.

This past year I have been working with a bank to help them find a solution to help their customers to protect themselves when they bank online. This has been an exciting job, but ultimately disappointing. Disappointing because there is an ongoing denial of the inability of customers, who are just general computer users , to reasonably be able to protect their home computers.

I recently experienced this for myself. when out of the blue i started to get my homepage redirected, and popup began to harass my browsing experience. More than anything, this passed me off. How dare someone compromise my machine! This happed despite a security update regime that borders on the obsessive, with OS patches, antivirus updates, firewalls, and multiple anti spyware applications running and regularly updated. And still it got through, and even after running separate spyware & virus scans I couldn’t get it off.

Now I did get rid of it eventually by going through every running process and looking it up via the omnipresent Google, then killing off the nasty manually, but this is beyond the reasonable expectations of the majority of computer users.

To add insult to injury I noticed today that Westpac have updated their terms of use for internet banking. The amazing (to me anyway) addition is a clause on spyware:

“Part 3, page 11 – Spyware
If you knowingly use a computer that contains software, such as Spyware, that has the ability to compromise access codes and/or customer information, you will be infringing our rules for access code security referred to above and we will not be liable for any losses that you may suffer as a result.”

For all of the reasons above it is unreasonable to expect that mass market pc users are going to comply with this clause .simply because even with the best intentions they are defending against a determined and financially motivated foe. Actually that probably describes the bank as well.

This is really important, since the out of the box WinXP installation is full of well exploited security exploits. The Internet Storm Center tracks the average time before an unpatched system is exploited by the white noise of port scanning and exploit hunting viruses. It is currently tracking at about 23 minutes.

Unfortunately it takes longer than 23 minutes to download the required security patches to protect the system. So my first step was to load up antivirus and firewall software. My product of choice at the moment is Symantec Internet Security 200x. There are arguments against using this, like “virus writers create viruses specifically to defeat Symantec software”, and “there are better apps available for free”, but so far this is what I have at hand and it has performed well for me so far.

Ironically is was the loading of this software that killed my system in the first place, but this time around it loaded up without a hitch. Of course now i have a completely out of date antivirus program, but you have to start somewhere.

Time to get online. I was a bit worried that this would be a problem since I have a wireless network at home, and getting the proper drivers etc might have required a download. I used the old Netgear software that can with the network card in the first place. I was actually surprised that it all worked so easily (even after a bit of stuffing around with network security keys, etc.).

Knowing that I now had to act fast my first stop was to ‘Windows Update’ for the first of many downloads and installs. All I can say is thank god for Broadband. Without it I there is simply no way that these downloads would be feasible. Although the process is not difficult it takes a long time. Each wave of downloads are 10′s of MB in size. With the broadband link I was also able to start updating the Symantec software in parallel.

After multiple downloads and re-boots, and in excess of 150MB of downloads (i lost track after a while) the basic operating system and security software was completely up to date. In total this took over 4 hours. Quite frankly this is absurd, and highlights the reason why the average PC user has no chance to really protect themselves properly even if they are trying to take all possible precautions.

Probably a bit belatedly I then loaded up the remaining hardware drivers for the PC, i.e. motherboard chipset, Video drivers, Sound drivers and USB. Probably should have done these first. No matter.

I guess the next action demonstrates my order of priorities…
* download Firebox for browsing
* downloaded iTunes and iPodder to get the podcast stream back online.

This has turned into a big hassle (not a problem though) as I try to get iTunes to recognise all of the previously downloaded podcasts, and to get iPodder re-subscriber to all my previous podcast feeds.

That is where I am at today. The iPod is at home getting nearly 3GB of music and podcasts re-loaded into its little shiny case.

More geeky updates to follow

Well last night it decided to lend me a hand in my decision making. After being prompted for the 5th time to upgrade the antivirus software that I had been using, I decided to load up a newer version that I was no longer using from a different PC.

Everything was going fine until the first reboot. Just after the Windows logo screen disappeared there was a flash of BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) and then the system rebooted again. I was able to restart in safe mode before and attempted a few systems restores but to no avail. After a few cycles of this I dropped back into the safe mode and started copying files. Just recently I had dropped in an old hard drive from an older PC which I am now using as a backup drive. This has turned out to be an unexpected blessing since I could easily move all data off the systems drive an put it on to the backup one.

So today I am back at ground zero. A clean install is in progress that I hope can be completed tonight. There is actually a lot to do particularly with all of the Microsoft updates that will be required to get the systems back up to a secured level.

I post an update when it is done.

Look for the Blogmap in the sidebar. Let me know it you think it is cool in the comments.

Edit: I kinda like the idea of this tool so I have moved it across from this post to the sidebar.

While I was working on anti spam projects this was a question that came up all the time. The challenge of spam is that the definition of it is a kind of continuum, with email that you want and value at one end and crappy porno, and scam related junk mail at the other end. In between though there is a grey are that generates a lot of passion from people.

In Australia I am actually quite happy with the definition that has been established in the 2003 Spam Act. This basically requires an organisation to either have specific permission to contact someone that they have an existing relationship with or to make a first contact to request that permission. This should put the onus on the business properly establish permission to communicate further.

The use of raw email lists to generate leads therefore becomes prohibited. The other important requirement of the Spam Act was in providing email recipients with the ability to easily adn quickly unsubscribe from the communications

Where the grey seeps in is where a business starts to send messages that do not relate to the original relationship. This actually shouldn’t be a problems when combined with the unsubscribe functions. For example if a magazine that I buy has a number of ad’s in it but also provides relevant content then I will continue to read it. However if they start stuffing the content with irrelevant advertising I have a choice – Buy the mag again or don’t. With a working unsubscribe, I have the ability to not ‘buy’ their messages.

So this might just work for Australian email marketing but it doesn’t apply to the rest of the world but it is a start

I have embraced the new browser, and I am just getting used to the tabbed browsing features. Netscape have jumped onboard as well, releasing Version 8 of their browser based on the Firefox browser. In fact I have been using Netscape lately and like some of the added features. Unfortunately I have just discovered that it does not support the tablet PC’s pen entry function doesn’t work. This means that I have to go back to IE to write this up. Arghh!

This is something that I should feedback to Netscape or Firefox. I’ll update this post when I get some feedback (if I get a response).

Bruce Schneier’s article http://www.schneier.com/essay-083.html implies that two-factor authentication is too out dated to be of any real use.

I believe that this is a very dangerous argument to be promoting, particularly since the existing username and password security that every service currently uses is not enough and criminals are easily compromising this fact already. In my experience the biggest hurdle is the get organisations to spend any money on any more advanced security solution.

Although second factor authentication using one-use changing passwords from a token device or from an SMS, can be compromised by some increasingly sophisticated attacks, they do stop most of the common existing ones. Key stroke loggers, standard phishing and other methods of just stealing static passwords can currently be used to passively generate databases of stolen login details. They become obsolete with the implementation of second factor authentication.

I also believe that online businesses are at the threshold of a new phase of development where the old username and password combination will be complemented with increasingly sophisticated levels of security solutions. These businesses must invest in these solutions and their customers must be given a choice over the usage of them. The penalty for choosing not to use them may be limited functionality or increased costs elsewhere.

Second factor authentication will not be the final solution for online security but it is the most mature solution for the next phase of security developments.

I looks like Bill has discovered bigger phish to phry. In an interview in Germany regarding security Bill Gates has lost some of his optimism about defeating spam although still believes that there will be a spam free future. His attentions have turned to the promotion of the newer security threats like phishing. This time he is talking a lot about collaboration, which I agree, had to be the case.

In Australia I have seen different industries (ie ISP and financial) all scrambling collaborating amongst themselves but not engaging each other. This should be a great way of getting messages about security out to customers (again both ISP and Financial services). The banks could identify the messages that they need their customers to hear and then work with ISP’s to help distribute these messages. After email and general browsing, the use of online banking is the biggest driver of online take up so there should be a shared interest in getting customers online and feeling safe about using online banking services.

For myself, I have also had to back track from my earlier bravado. My old email account nick@bigpond.com is dead and gone, swallowed by the deluge of spam that it received. Even though I had a multi-layered defence to wipe out the worst of it, too much time was wasted in the fight.

• a character played by Bogart in The Wagons Roll at Night.
• a British actor in a long list of bit parts in crap movies and tv shows.

as well as a large number of other “nick”s and “coster”s from around the world.

But now…..

I am creeping up the rankings with this very blog. Sitting at 5th behind the fellows above as well as a kid’s rollercoaster tycoon tribute page and a charity diving site. I am heading for the top!!

In my first attempt I was using a Netgear modem/router that was over twice the price and half the maximum performance. It all seemed to be working fine until I closed the doors in the house. Blink! Bye bye internet. That went back to the shop.

Then, a month or so ago I borrowed a Dlink modem + a Dlink wireless router and again partial success leading to ultimate failure. That went back to the office.
(Having now played further with this at the office I think that i have worked out the problems but it was not a obvious fix. Certainly not consumer friendly.)

Today I took the plunge again, this time back to Netgear (see link) mainly because the thing looks better than the competition at the some price. This time the process was so easy I could hardly believe it.
1) I plugged it in to both the power and the phone line.
2) I turned on my Laptop (WiFi capable) and flicked on the Wireless switch. Up comes the default network setting.
3) After punching in the default IP address for the router I am presented with the config page. I go straight for the wizard option and moments later i am net connected and secure.

Now as I write this (remember… Tablet PC) I am sitting in the lounge room completely wireless. This is the future and I like it.

Question:
“I received an email that I was expecting and the information I needed was sent as an attachment. When I tried to access this it received a message stating I was denied access to an “unsafe attachment”. Others I talked to received the same attachment with no warnings and no consequences to their system.”

The problem here is that the email program is assuming that the attached file is dangerous and will not allow it to be used. This is based on the file type and not the contents of the file. File types that are considered dangerous include .exe, .zip , .scr, .pif, .bat, etc. Also applications like Word and Excel that can contain macros will also be considered unsafe.

To access these files you will need to change the security settings of your email program. It is best to do this only when there is a particular file that you want and that you are expecting. This way the software forces you to think twice before clicking on a dodgy attachment. For example in Outlook Express (version 6.0) go to “Tools –> Options” then select the Security tab.

Uncheck the box next to “Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus”. You should now be able to open the file but don’t forget to re-check this setting once you have opened your file.

All the best from the E-Genie!