Inside View

Hacking the iPhone

JUST AFTER I disabled phishing detectors on one of my laptops, I read how a web developer could set up a phishing attack that results in total control of an iPhone. You need to code malicious content in a web page that opens in the Safari browser on the iPhone. Dr. Charlie Miller will be presenting the details of the exploit at BlackHat in Las Vegas on 2 August 2007. The preliminary paper [123 kb PDF] explains the iPhone exploit in greater detail. There are several places on the internet containing scripts that will do this. Here is how the exploit works:

Thoughts While Club Crawling

LOCAL READERS know the social value of crawling between pubs. When you start crawling between clubs, the later hours and louder music mean you normally crawl between the bar and the toilets before hitting the pavement outside to the next club. I spent Saturday evening in loud clubs shouting to friends and looking at a few things that have changed since the first all-night clubbing I did in Ireland on the 17th of March 1995.

Oozing Microblogs

AFTER READING yet-another e-mail from a friend who bemoans my lack of blogging, I get no respect when I explain I'm microblogging. The lack of respect comes from people who are not impressed with the rise of Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and the fenced meadows of MySpace and Facebook. Many of my friends grew up before dial-up. Some grew up as teens without colour television. At least a dozen of my regular readers played video games powered by their cassette players. These readers feel a little put off by the banality rampant on Twitter but they often make time to flick through the short takes offered up by a more literate--and private--Jaiku community. It's time to share a secret.

One Does Phones Another Wireless

LIKE SEVERAL OTHER writers, I watch both Nokia and Motorola produce mass market products. I also watch the end results and know that it will be a strange occasion to discover Motorola vanquishing Nokia in any mobile telephony segment. I think it's down to one core reason: Nokia does phones well and Motorola does wireless infrastructure well. Market results seem to suggest you cannot top both categories at the same time. Nokia has the mobile phone market, selling more than one billion phones to date.

I kick around with the Nokia N70 in the photo. My cat likes it better than any other phone I've owned. I have owned several Nokia handsets costing more than EUR 500 each. I made my decisions based on form factor and business usage requirements. Motorola products didn't even make the short list. I've owned several Motorola phones. One had the most durable finish I've seen for pub operations--you could slide it across the floor, through the Guinness and under the feet of a nearby table and it still held its connection. Another was a EUR 400 fashion statement that my dog ate one evening. But every year, I buy Nokia phones because they fit my needs best. And I know friends with different needs that buy Nokia as well since Nokia's lineup of phones fills complete walls of many Irish mobile phone shops.

I've visited Helsinki and walked the Nokia campus. The place oozes with trendy things and if you avoid getting clipped by the ruthless cyclists, you will see the secret Nokia sauce. It is Nokia's supply-chain management. Nokia's logistical processes pummel the rest of the competition.

Splitting Sony Digital Voice Files

This post has been
Updated
with a link to the Sony Digital Voice Editor Software.

IN ANOTHER THREAD, several readers have reported problems splitting their digital voice files while using the third version of Sony's digital voice editor. This contrasts to the immediate response enjoyed by v2 of the same editing program. A Tampa Bay reader has a Sony ICD-P520 with v3 of the Sony Digital Voice editor. He says, "At times there are delays of 15-20 seconds when I am trying to split a file. I am using the device to record agents in my call center, but when I am trying to split the files to individual calls, it takes me forever, because I have to guess when to push the button to split the files on the software. There are lags doing other tasks." In the local Sony centre, the counter staff thinks Sony will update the software before the end of August. In the meantime, if you arrived on this blog in search of a solution, I recommend you download the Sony Digital Voice Editor by using the links from this post and detailed information follows.

Continue reading "Splitting Sony Digital Voice Files" »

ENTRANTS TO IRELAND'S third level information technology courses continue running at an unsustainably low level. I see this unfortunate trend first-hand at my desk in a publicly-funded ICT department. Teenaged Irish students do not find IT, computer science or mathematics curricula exciting or cool. This trend will result in a dearth of qualified chief information officers before the end of the next decade. Fast forward to 2019 and you will find all CIO positions filled in Ireland. Look behind their CVs and you'll discover the people running the information strategies for many Irish companies and State agencies will not be as qualified as most are today. Tha'ts because a CIO needs substantial business acumen, smooth interpersonal skills and time-tested leadership abilities. You develop these traits over time.

LIKE SEVERAL people in my social network, I get poked a few times every week by people I may not know. In my case, it's an electronic "poke" on Facebook. By "poking" someone on Facebook, you can slip inside their privacy settings. "Poking" friends and strangers on Facebook might be the equivalent of an electronic wave but lots of Facebook subscribers do not realise that the pokee can often see the profile of the poker for a week, whether they become a "friend" or not. To change this from happening, you should read the information below the fold.

IF YOU WANT to stay ahead of your email flow, you need to consider reducing the number of sentences you send. That's Russ Beattie's conclusion. But he considered the adverse reaction of correspondents. Some people think they deserve more than five or six sentences in reply to an email. On mailing lists read by the Irish business community, I've discovered readability, and ultimately action steps, increase if you offer two or three paragraphs in response to a message thread. So reducing your output may not increase your standing with a colleague or a potential client. However, you could adopt a tactic used by Mitch Joel and Dervala Hanley. They append "sent from Blackberry" to mail messages. Looking at the message headers, I know they're on their mobile devices when they send those e-mails. But I also know most people aren't upset to receive a brief e-mail if they think you sent it from your pocket. So I've added a few footers to my Yahoo Mail client and if you're on the receiving end of my electronic correspondence, you might think you've received a mail from my phone.

WE HAVE Eircom service in County Tipperary even after lightning strikes hit the county last night (remnant at left) but subscribers living in the midlands and on the east coast of Ireland may not have their phone service restored until after the 22nd of July 2007. Reports on the national news, on Twitter and on discussion boards show that a lightning strike knocked out the service in parts of Kilkenny, Leitrim, Louth, Monaghan, Sligo, Wexford and Wicklow. The summer storms are not finished for another two months and during that time period, we always have our 3G card to slot into the side of the laptop. We get a decent signal throughout the house and a really strong one when seated on the new floor of our reclaimed attic space.

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x_ref125mw news

ONE THING YOU should consider if you live or work near an area frequented by construction crews: protect your gear with line noise cleaners (that's a Liebert AccuVar 50 shown at right), surge suppressors or back-up power. I learned this while working in the fourth building constructed at Citywest Business Park in 1999. We would lose power once a day in the building but the IBM AS/400 computers would keep churning out code and the RPG programmers would continue satisfying clients. I watched the marketing team handle many of their calls on their mobile phones because the Meridian phone system would also trap incoming calls in voice mail. But I failed to use a desktop UPS for my own gear so I skewered a few weeks worth of web analytics one day in the middle of a data transfer. It was recoverable but a nuisance nonetheless. Now I'm seeing problems where I live and often work because the building crew often interrupts power twice a day. Today, the power went while I was moving an unfinished podcast from a portable Targa Databox to my hard drive and I corrupted 42 minutes of audio. That's recoverable but a nuisance nonetheless. So now I'm in the hunt for desktop UPS that I can put in a box closet along with 500 GB of scratch work.

Making Irish Tech Cool

ENTRANTS TO IRELAND'S third level information technology courses continue running at an unsustainably low level. I see this unfortunate trend first-hand at my desk in a publicly-funded ICT department. Teenaged Irish students do not find IT, computer science or mathematics curricula exciting or cool. This trend will result in a dearth of qualified chief information officers before the end of the next decade. Fast forward to 2019 and you will find all CIO positions filled in Ireland. Look behind their CVs and you'll discover the people running the information strategies for many Irish companies and State agencies will not be as qualified as most are today. Tha'ts because a CIO needs substantial business acumen, smooth interpersonal skills and time-tested leadership abilities. You develop these traits over time.

Poking Around on Facebook

LIKE SEVERAL people in my social network, I get poked a few times every week by people I may not know. In my case, it's an electronic "poke" on Facebook. By "poking" someone on Facebook, you can slip inside their privacy settings. "Poking" friends and strangers on Facebook might be the equivalent of an electronic wave but lots of Facebook subscribers do not realise that the pokee can often see the profile of the poker for a week, whether they become a "friend" or not. To change this from happening, you should read the information below the fold.

Excusable Brevity

IF YOU WANT to stay ahead of your email flow, you need to consider reducing the number of sentences you send. That's Russ Beattie's conclusion. But he considered the adverse reaction of correspondents. Some people think they deserve more than five or six sentences in reply to an email. On mailing lists read by the Irish business community, I've discovered readability, and ultimately action steps, increase if you offer two or three paragraphs in response to a message thread. So reducing your output may not increase your standing with a colleague or a potential client. However, you could adopt a tactic used by Mitch Joel and Dervala Hanley. They append "sent from Blackberry" to mail messages. Looking at the message headers, I know they're on their mobile devices when they send those e-mails. But I also know most people aren't upset to receive a brief e-mail if they think you sent it from your pocket. So I've added a few footers to my Yahoo Mail client and if you're on the receiving end of my electronic correspondence, you might think you've received a mail from my phone.

Lightning Strikes Eircom

WE HAVE Eircom service in County Tipperary even after lightning strikes hit the county last night (remnant at left) but subscribers living in the midlands and on the east coast of Ireland may not have their phone service restored until after the 22nd of July 2007. Reports on the national news, on Twitter and on discussion boards show that a lightning strike knocked out the service in parts of Kilkenny, Leitrim, Louth, Monaghan, Sligo, Wexford and Wicklow. The summer storms are not finished for another two months and during that time period, we always have our 3G card to slot into the side of the laptop. We get a decent signal throughout the house and a really strong one when seated on the new floor of our reclaimed attic space.

---

x_ref125mw news

Learned while living on a building site

ONE THING YOU should consider if you live or work near an area frequented by construction crews: protect your gear with line noise cleaners (that's a Liebert AccuVar 50 shown at right), surge suppressors or back-up power. I learned this while working in the fourth building constructed at Citywest Business Park in 1999. We would lose power once a day in the building but the IBM AS/400 computers would keep churning out code and the RPG programmers would continue satisfying clients. I watched the marketing team handle many of their calls on their mobile phones because the Meridian phone system would also trap incoming calls in voice mail. But I failed to use a desktop UPS for my own gear so I skewered a few weeks worth of web analytics one day in the middle of a data transfer. It was recoverable but a nuisance nonetheless. Now I'm seeing problems where I live and often work because the building crew often interrupts power twice a day. Today, the power went while I was moving an unfinished podcast from a portable Targa Databox to my hard drive and I corrupted 42 minutes of audio. That's recoverable but a nuisance nonetheless. So now I'm in the hunt for desktop UPS that I can put in a box closet along with 500 GB of scratch work.