Saturday, November 27, 2010

US - Internet Lockdown

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I guess  the Statue of Liberty, the Constitution that protects freedoms and rights... are simply forgotten these days and are only called upon in name to garner support and to spread hypocrisy and fascism. 

Sooner or later, US may simply force all their allies and partners and even the world to follow their model of working or risk the consequences for those who don't cooperate with the US ?

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Why Netflix should be shunned

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In my opinion, the open source and supporters of Free software (as defined by FSF) should shun Netflix. Android and it's parent (Google) who supports the open source movement should steer very clear from those who promote DRMs like Netflix. It would actually be better if Netflix is never created on Linux based handsets like Android as it supports DRM, not the goal or in-line of the goals of Free software like Linux.


The Linux OS, which is an open source Free software, has been 'raped' and non-Free stuff have found it's way into Linux. This should not have been the case but it is now the case... a very sad case indeed.

GAE - Simply another Web 2.0 hype

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I have been very cautious about all these Web 2.0 hype fuss. GAE, Cloud, Amazon, Azure... some are good, many are bad.
Here, GAE is simply another of the HYPE in the hype cycle of products in the industry.

We don't want hype. We want good and rock-solid stuff. Not fallible hype with a sheep skin and icing and strawberries and sugar and chocolate coatings all over it while it's core is pretty much paper castle.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Face - Book of Horrors

This is a rant:

WHAT GOES INTO FACEBOOK... NEVER MAKES IT OUT (including the delete button attempt).

Literally a Face - Book of Horrors.

Unfriend Facebook... do not be a victim of identity imprisonment.








Above image take from (with credits): http://stallman.org/



Friday, November 12, 2010

Java & The Three Kingdoms: Oracle is Cao Cao.

Imagine Java as a whole country. And now, it is split into factions. For this context, we would use the infamous Three Kingdoms. Oracle would be Northern Wei with it's leader as Cao Cao, the tyrant prime minister.

What other imaginations do you guys have for Java ?

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Google, Java, Oracle - messed up

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Now Google's legal defense is in a mess, blaming third parties for not modifying their source and all other messed up arguments. Without a doubt, Oracle violated the trust and respect and caused the fragmentation of once the respect Sun and Java earned.

With a simple turn of a hand, Google, Oracle, Java is in a huge global mess. Java, threatened with splits in the community and forks from the main stream Java Oracle is now controlling.

Java Fork Predictions:
Google indeed made a huge mistake, wading into a huge patent minefield without opening it's eyes and being careful. Oracle, as usual, always making situations difficult and always making people find a reason to hate Oracle and Larry, tries their very best to piss people off. Java, now in turmoil, it's fate is still undecied and gloomy, looms closer to destruction.

To stay clear of the Java Chaos, and from it's "polluting aura of madness", I would personally advise people to learn a language other than Java or JVM related (e.g. C++, C#/.NET, VB, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl and many more...). I personally prefer Ruby for it's ability to quickly build and develop applications.

Here's Ruby's License which seems more clean and FREE (FSF definition of FREE) then Chaotic Java: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/LICENSE.txt .

For those Java users who are on the fence, I guess it's time you take sides and it would be better to move away from Oracle's side. I dare say you would not get anything good out of Oracle and they would squeeze you dry like what happened to Sun.

Choose your sides well...

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Password 'Free' WPA2 wireless access

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Oh no... telling everyone the WPA2 password is 'free' is not a nice idea. Now everyone knows it. And it's a bad idea anyway. Providing free wireless WPA2 protected connection is not the key (Wireshark can sniff WPA2 traffic - mind you). The websites must properly secure the connections and always turn on encryption to be safe. Free WPA2 wireless access points is like a temporary band aid to stop a bullet wound. You need a permanent fix... which is every site use well implemented secure protocols. 

P.S. I wonder what is Sophos people thinking. Do they know what they are talking ?

Monday, November 8, 2010

Steve Jobs Lying ?

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Seems like Steve Jobs need to clean up his act and speech and stop lying (if he is - which only his consciousness would know clearly). If you want to compete... do it by being more productive... follow advises given by critics and users. This is how Google improved their services... because they LISTENED !!! That doesn't mean that Google is perfect.

Basics of marketing and sales - "Your clients and critics are your judge and they decide how your company fair." (by Thotheolh)

British Navy Hacked !

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Wow... that was close. Imagine if someone could hack into a military website and steal passwords, he could gain access to sensitive data and resources... and maybe remotely command or send false data within the British Navy's network ? Never know. The way it is hacked is via the SQL injection. Every programmer knows the risk of SQL injection and it such stupid risks should have not existed since there have been lots of given techniques to prevent it. It should have occurred but it occurred - an attack via SQL injection. What a shame of the British Navy. I guess they may have ran out of budget to engage a professional and instead, engaged some script kiddy ?

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Oracle introduces commercial JVM

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Finally, Oracle has introduced a commercial and a free JVM. It's no more one free JVM but a commercial and a free version. What is the mission of Java ? To be cross-platform. Now you have to handle Java for the free and the commercial variant. Nice job, Oracle. You just pulled the trigger on the once free and venerable Java + JVM.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Six degrees of seperation

We have known that the connection to each other is just a six degree of separation. To put this to the test, we could go make use of our MSN contacts and view our friend's contacts list and start tracing down. If it is possible to make a software using MSN Contacts web service APIs to automate this function of mapping the "friends-of-friends", we would be able to some how see a huge portion of the world linked to each other.

For agencies who love to peek at our private lives, they could use this technique and have already been using this technique to map our relations with others.

This also expose a fundamental social security problem which is to allow people to freely access your friends and contacts list without the proper security measures to restrict views. Even if you restrict the view on your own list, people could use the concept of "six degrees of separation" to find others who have YOU and make a map about who have YOU in their contacts list, making it difficult for you to hide yourself.

So what's this all about. This is the prove that our social privacy, is faulty and weak even with access restrictions, are we able to fully hide our private life from others and protect it ? Yes to a certain degree as long as others do not have any "pointers" pointing at you.

Does it mean that we should just stop all privacy controls and just open up our life for all to see... making ourselves "naked" in front of the world ?

No. It means we need a far better measure to protect our private life and anonymity then what we have currently.

Battle for Java Earth

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And enjoy. Pick your sides and prepare for bloody battles and skirmishes.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Wired's ignorance of AK 47

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Wired's article of the AK 47 shows some obvious prejudice and obvious flaw in it's article. Putting the AK 47 in a really disgusting light in it's article.

Here are some of the flaws:
  • Page 1:
    • Main Page image claims the AK is a serial killer and a murderer. Any weapon system is a serial killer and murderer, not just AKs. Teens touting berettas or glocks or even M16s to school and shooting... does that make the berettas, glocks and M16s not a serial killer or murderer. This is pure prejudice against the AK.
    • "Its ammunition lacked the stopping power of other rifle cartridges". This is so false. compare the stopping power of 5.56mm NATO and M1943 (AK 47 - 7.62mm x 39). The stopping power is enormous for an infantry rifle. That's why currently, people are trying to beef up the 5.56 by creating 6.5 Grendel and 6.8 SPC rounds, trying to find an intermediate rifle round with the stopping power of an AK and the range and accuracy of the M16. 
    • "The AK-47 and its variants can be seen as a lot of things—amoral massacre machines..". Simply, it depends on how you use it. A knife can be used for the kitchen and can be used on the streets for evil. It depends.
As everyone can see from the above samples of prejudice I found in Wired's article on the AK 47, Wired, as a well known publication on technology spilling out very badly made and researched articles that contains apparent prejudice such as those I have shown as above, is undeserving of it's status.

I wish Wired could research more carefully before writing an article and also removing it's prejudice and bias-ness when writing articles.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Cisco doesn't respect privacy

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By releasing this software, Cisco is heavily undermining the public's privacy. This is a bad thing and such tools and software could be abused and misused all so often by companies, organizations... those with or without malicious intents.

To prevent this from happening, participant less in online social activities because it allows you to be so much more easily traced.

ATG - Future Victim of Oracle

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Another future victim of Oracle. When would people ever learn that doing business with Oracle is pure madness ? Look at what happened to Sun... I guess Sun is simply just a name, a couple of pages in history, some innovations, empty shell and that's about it.

HTML5 flash video

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What I felt is just not appropriate of the Skyfire technology which converts flash videos to html5 videos is because, you have to convert flash to html5 videos, which needs an extra step then just having a flash player in the page. Imagine if you want to watch flash videos, you need to send it to their cloud servers somewhere to convert the video you wanted and then send it back to you. It's such a long route and it takes much much longer then a native flash player built-in.
Since Apple doesn't allow Adobe Flash player, why not create a plugin that would replace the flash codes to a Smokescreen player call which would use Javascript and HTML 5 to become a flash video player ? Or maybe, the page should run their flash videos with a backup Smokescreen player in the event no Adobe Flash player is detected. Since Smokescreen is HTML 5 and Javascript, it should theoretically work well with HTML5 enabled players like Apple's Safari.

Why not take a shorter route than a longer route ?

Monday, November 1, 2010

The Demise of OO.o and the resurrection via LibreOffice

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As one of my friends called it, it is the death of OO.o and the RESURRECTION (in literals) via LibreOffice and The Document Foundation (TDF).

33 developers of OO.o (NOT 3 BUT 33) left OO.o and have got into TDF to help develop and improve LibreOffice.



I would soon be trying LibreOffice in my LinuxMint 9 Fluxbox virtualized environment. :D

Credit: Lawrence for the word 'Resurrection'.