Battle of the Shadow Phones
July 11, 2007
IEEE is running a fascinating article on a discovered intrusion into major Greek cellular networks for the purpose of engaging in unauthorized eavesdropping of prominent officials including the Prime Minister and his wife. In a world where credit card thieves and low-level hackers get all the headlines, security professionals should make special note of the sophistication of this attack. On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months. The next day, the prime minister of Greece…
Ubuntu Impressions
July 10, 2007
Last night was my first foray into the Ubuntu distribution and I must admit to being surprisingly impressed. I've installed various versions of Linux with varying degrees of success since their was a "Linux". My most recent distro of choice was Open Suse, but while it was fun to explore and learn on, it was definitely not polished enough to recommend for the generic consumer desktop. Ubuntu represents the first distro that I could seriously recommend to the average user as a Linux solution that just works. Here's why.... 1) Installation was a breeze. If you can install Windows or Mac OS X you can install Ubuntu. Linux distros have come a long way in recent years with regards to installability, but Ubuntu is the cleanest…
Good Article by John Sullivan
July 10, 2007
Countering the reach of the global jihad within networked diasporas is a global security priority. Police and intelligence services worldwide—especially in “Global Cities” with international political and economic importance and transnational connections—must develop relationships with diaspora communities. These efforts must build upon community policing and develop the cultural understanding and community trust required to recognize the emergence of extremist cells, radicalization, efforts to recruit terrorists, and efforts to exploit criminal enterprises or gangs to further terrorist activities. These efforts need to be linked to develop the intelligence needed to combat a global networked threat. This requires more than…
Google buys GrandCentral
July 2, 2007
I am a big fan of GrandCentral.com and today the prospects for using the service just got a lot better. GrandCentral provides a unified number that can be used to consolidate all your phone numbers. For example, so you have a home office and cell phone and your cell phone doesn't get coverage in the home office. With GrandCentral, you can have both numbers ring at the same time or specify specific rules for when the numbers ring. You can also create web applets to allow people to call you without giving them your phone number (they fill in their phone number in a web form and GrandCentral calls them and you at the same time) and they even have a mobile application that allows you to call a contact where GrandCentral calls your cell…
Posting from iPhone over EDGE
July 2, 2007
EDGE network seems fine for posting, browsing and email. Have had no problems and I am still in the suburbs, not the city.
uh oh
July 1, 2007
My iPod app on my iPhone keeps crashing in the background as I surf the web. Anyone else experiencing this?
Still More iPhone thoughts
July 1, 2007
Unlike a few other bloggers, I'm still infatuated with my iPhone. This is one cool device and I'm using it more as time goes on. A few more thoughts: 1) Devices the iPhone replaces me for me - Nokia N95, Blackberry 8800, Nokia N800, and 8G iPod Nano. Not a bad score on the convergence front. 2) There are claims that push email works from Yahoo, so I set up a Yahoo account to test. However, it doesn't appear that my iPhone (with its built in Yahoo mail configuration tool) is even able to get to my Yahoo account. It tries to authenticate to an apple.mac.yahoo.com server which keeps bouncing my credentials. Will have to look into that more and see if push mail is a reality. 3) In the meantime, I do have mail fully working exactly as…
More iPhone thoughts
June 30, 2007
Here are a few more thoughts regarding the iPhone 1) After successfully syncing my two IMAP accounts via iTunes I decided to add one of my Gmail ones (my domain mail hosted via Google Apps). That seemed to cause the syncing to hang. I've disabled syncing mail accounts for now and it works fine. 2) For some reason, iTunes always needs to sync 11 of my songs everytime I connect. Maybe those are 11 I played and it is syncing the last played and other meta info? Not sure if it is doing that or syning those 11 songs again with the device for some reason. 3) The lack of customization is a real downer. The last 10 phones I've owned, I've sent the CTU ringtone via bluetooth and used that as my ringtone. No ringtone customization allowed on…
iPhone Initial Reactions
June 29, 2007
After the trauma of waiting in-line at the AT&T store, I was finally able to get my hands on an iPhone at the Apple store 15 miles away. First reactions: 1) The screen is breathtaking. I've never seen a screen like it on a mobile device. 2) Interface is everything I expected. Apple has rewritten interface design with the engineering in the iPhone. They haven't complete solved the mobile phone interface problem, but they've come close. 3) Touch typing. No issue for me. Not as natural as a tactile keyboard like a blackberry, but it works well enough for me. Keep in mind I use a zero-touch keyboard interface as my primary keyboard, so I am more comfortable with that aspect than the average user. 4) iPod interface is beautiful.…
The iPhone Exodus
June 28, 2007
With any luck, I'll be swapping out my Nokia N95 with an iPhone tomorrow. Rather than fight the mass crowds at the Apple store, I am likely to just hit the local AT&T store. I have some trepidation as the store seems very unprepared for the launch. As of today, the store I plan on going to had no protocol for how they would handle lines, whether they would hand out vouchers (so people don't stay in line with no chance of an iPhone), and how existing customers can transfer their accounts. The focus really seems to be on getting new customers, which is a shame given I have been with AT&T (then Cingular, now AT&T again) for about 8 years. Having used the N95 for several months, here are some more thoughts about the phone: 1) Bluetooth…
Total Intel on Homeland Defense Weekly podcast
June 1, 2007
Dan Verton's Homeland Defense Weekly interviewed some of the leadership team at Total Intel during our open house this week and the result has been posted as a podcast and webcast on the PodTech Network. Link--->
Second Life Hawala
May 15, 2007
“I see this as a virtual version of the hawala or hundi system,” said Johnson, who heads risk management firm TRMG, referring to the informal money transfer network that is commonly used through the Middle East, Asia and Africa. “It’s trust based — I give you 1,000, you give someone else 1,000 — it serves to move money from A to B to C to D while obscuring the trail.” Link --->
We’re already living in a future nobody anticipated
May 14, 2007
Science fiction authors are some of the most interesting people to watch with regards to futurism in the unparalleled completely unstructured sense. Charles Stross is no exception. Worth a read if you've got 10 minutes to spare today. Total history — a term I'd like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven't experienced yet. I'm really not sure what its implications are, but then, I'm one of the odd primitive shadows just visible at one edge of the archive: I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first forty or fifty years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants' relationship with their…
Lions and tigers and terrorists….oh my!
May 14, 2007
Thanks for Haft of the Spear for the link. Steven Phillipsohn, a fraud litigation solicitor and chairman of the FAP's cybercrime working group, said: "There's nothing virtual about online crime, it is all too real. It is time government took this seriously. "The legitimate benefits of virtual communities will prove enormous, but people need to be aware that this cutting-edge technology has a darker side. "Money laundering is the obvious risk. There will be a migration of fraudsters into these sites when they see all of the opportunities." Link --->
Think Different – The Reading List
May 9, 2007
In my home office, I have a preserved set of the Apple Think Different poster series as inspiration, but I realized that I did not have any books on my bookshelf about the individuals honored in this advertising campaign. I put together this list at Amazon for the Think Different series which I plan to read in these chairs that sit under my poster collection.