Tao of Mac

Jun 26th 2004 · 2 min read

Return Of The Links

A few things of note that I hadn't mentioned yet:

  • One of the most clueless "phone hacking" pieces yet - Ever heard of a "script kitty"? Or care that the hexadecimal for "666" is "29a"? The piece has so much clueless drivel that it's being ridiculed all over tech circles - there's even talk of using it as a case study in bad tech reporting.
  • Windows infects Windows. No comments.
  • Mono Release Candidate 1 is now available. No packages yet, though.
  • 802.11i was recently ratified, but as always, it will take a while to catch on, especially considering the vast majority of Wi-Fi services are still using browser-based authentication and unencrypted access - I still think EAP-SIM is the only real way to go for public service, but as usual, mass manufacturers are reticent to add a SIM reader - it drives manufacturing costs up, and Wi-Fi equipment revenue is being driven down every quarter.
  • A bit higher in the hype scale, 802.16 (or rather, 802.16d) was also recently revised, despite the usual amount of haggling among warring factions. This particular revision ends a lot of squabbling over the radio specifics (i.e., encoding, channel allocation, etc.) and will eventually result in working products (i.e., interoperable equipment) by end of this year. Then comes the interesting bit - watching as operators start figuring out how to deploy it.
  • Back to the Wi-Fi universe, the FCC recently ended another squabble - this time concerning Wi-Fi deployment in airports, malls and other privately-owned locations. This throws a bucket of cold water on US airports' efforts to establishing a monopoly on Wi-Fi hotspots, and is likely to set the tone for European regulation anytime soon. Not that it wasn't obvious, mind you...
  • , Done Even Better - now I can finally start thinking about replacing my Wireless mouse. One niggling thing, though - why the on-off switch? Isn't idle time detection more than enough? Or is it just for transport?
  • Yahoo did it yet again and changed their protocol. I guess Fire isn't working again, but since most people I talk to these days have MSN, I haven't logged in to it for, like, ages now. But on a broader scale, I share Pedro's belief on real-time always-on internet, and I have the good fortune of being to achieving it. But there's a neat little twist that I just thought of: what if were the one to launch a Jabber-based service (maybe tied to Orkut) - and kept it an open standard? Now that would be something.
  • turned out to be quite popular, with people linking to it from quite a few places and sending me leads to BT's MPLS initiative and vendor press releases. But the best e-mail turned out to be the one dissing Cringely's latest piece in comparison to mine, accusing him of being a Luddite (which I wholly subscribe to, at least where it regards real networking).
  • was bumped to 0.8. I keep using , but sometimes I need a Mozilla-based browser to do some XSLT testing, and it's starting to feel a lot nicer than Firefox on the .
  • A 30x zoom digital camera. Hmmm. Too bad it's only 3MPixels, but it's a nice option for nature photography - provided you get a decent tripod, of course.
  • The Portuguese Flag Project - Bruno, ever the stickler for consistency, has taken upon himself to protect the integrity of our flag.