Click-to-call or Click-to-spam?

Maybe my mind is just warped, maybe at heart I'm really an evil doer and I never new it, or maybe I'm just pissed that Google didn't give me a job so I could be assimilated with Google Love. Whatever it is, when I read about Google's new Click-to-Call service I had to admit the first thing I thought of was how it could be used for Click-to-Spam.

Their service puts a little phone icon on certain ads that show up with your regular Google search (via their AdWords service). You click on the icon, enter your phone number and then voila your phone rings and the advertiser is there to speak to you. Sounds great right! Google originates the call to you and the advertiser, the advertiser never sees your caller ID and you get a free connection just like a 1-800 call.

But wait, there's more. Didn't Google just create a Click-To-Spam problem? What if I was an evil doer, or just a plain miscreant and entered someone elses number? Or what if I was just a plain dumb ass and mistyped my own phone number... Hmmm, wouldn't that upset both the party called and the advertiser?

Okay so Google is going to track my IP address and send the boys around to beat me up if I do that (what for just mistyping a phone number?), so I wont do it. But maybe I'll wander down the streat and sneak onto someone elses WiFi network and do it, then they wont be able to track me.

Or what if I was a really bad man and purchased a bot net and had thousands of machines do that, all at the same time, or continuously all night long. Couldn't I have someone's number ringing of the hook all night long? Or with enough machines jam up an entire phone network, like some really important government phone system... all tied up courtesy of thousands of calls from Google Click-to-Talk. Oy. Doesn't sound like a good idea at all to me.

So, how about they make Clik-to-Talk work this way... I click the phone icon, it gives me an 800 number and PIN code. I call Google with an 800-number on my phone, enter the PIN , then Google calls me back and the advertiser and hooks us up that way? Then there is no doubt the call originated from me.

I mean they could just connect me right then and there instead of doing a call back, but I suspect the way Click-to-Talk really works is that Google originates both sides of the call over a very cheap VoIP network owned and operated by... Google. They probably have end points in enough cities that its virtually free to them. Then at Google telecoms HQ the two sides of the VoIP call are connected and bobs-yer-uncle. The advertiser gets a premium service and saves on 800 number bills, the caller gets a free call, and Google creams off a big pile of cash by charging the advertiser more and attracting even more advertisers.

But, Google really is going to have to solve the Click-to-Spam problem first.

If someone has actually used this service and confirm exactly what, if anything, they do to stop you entering in your ex-bosses phone number I'd love to hear!

This should exist - and does

Today I thought of a service that might be useful - sending snail mail via email. So I searched around a bit to see if anyone was offering that, and they are, sort of. Along the way I found another web site that is cataloging ideas that people think should exist. Basically its another "unpatent database" except this time its called "Should Exist".

Low and behold the Should Exist site contains an entry for an "Ideas Wiki". It's funny that people use a service to suggest an idea for something that is basically exactly what they are using to suggest the idea. Even stranger is the Ideas Wiki entry actually referes to a Wiki that is implementing what is suggested, its called "Idiki" but so far only contains 18 ideas.

I'm wondering now how many more of this type of idea repository there are out there. Two, dozens, hundreds? I guess what we need now is some way to combine them all into some meta-database with fantastico searching capabilities and get some wide publicity for it. Alternatively the mighty (and mightily controversial) Wikipedia itself could introduce an encyclopedia of the future - inventions that have not yet come into existence.

Update: add to the list:

• Think Cycle
• Why Not?
• Lazy Web
• Halfbakery

DVD Blues

Isn't technology supposed to work? I mean how long have we had DVDs around, and how long have you been able to buy a DVD burner for your computer? Yet still I buy a highly recommended Pioneer DVR-110D 16X DVD burner and Memorex brand 16X DVR+ disks and it just doesn't work like it should - after five attempts in finally managed to burn my first DVD at 4X without errors.

Granted my computer isn't top of the line, but its no slouch and we're not talking about dumping data at gigabits per second, just a measly 10 to 20MB/s. My Windows XP SP2 is fully patched, I'm using the latest version of Roxio software (I've also tried Sonic Record Now), I've even looked at esoteric stuff like the IDE interface set up. Yes its correctly configured to PIO-4 and UDMA mode 4, and I have an 80 pin IDE cable that's shielded. I tried swapping out the cable with no joy. I tried taking off the old CD drive that was on the slave connector, no joy. After one error that said "Power callibration error" I tried a different power connector with no other periperals hooked up to it. No joy.

So I'm lead to conclude that either I've got an entire stack of media that's bad, or the drive is dead, or well, shit happens and this time its happened to me.

But why? Why shouldn't DVDs and Windows XP just work? And why shouldn't a drive that says it supports DVD+R 16X and DVD+R 16X media from a reputable manufacture just work? Why is it after all these years of writable DVD availability I have to buy special software just to burn a disk? I'm not talking authoring a DVD movie, or anything fancy. I just want to put data files onto a data disk. I mean heck, as far as I know with Windows XP you still can't even read a DVD disk without special software.

This just doesn't add up. Except to the eternity of the long dark tech-time of the soul that is.

Microsoft tags Sony copy protection as spyware

Sweet, Microsoft decides to have it's anti-spyware program tag Sony's copy protection as spyware. What were those guys at Sony thinking? I used to have high regard for Sony products, but in recent years they have made so many bogus proprietary moves (Memory sticks and MP3 players that don't play MP3s immediately spring to mind) that they have pretty much lost it. I usually stick with Samsung products now.

Saved by Retrospect

Repeat after me:

This backup software is my own, there are many others like it, but this is mine. Without me my backup software is nothing, without my backup software I am nothing.

Yes, that's better.

Suffice to say I've just had my laptop saved by Dantz Retrospect which in 2 1/2 hours recovered 20GB of data and put it back to exactly how it had been at 11am the day before. Not that I've never fired my backup software in before, but this time it was for real.

If you don't have backup software get it, use it and test it. You may have RAID-0 or 5 but when you zap your entire file system (okay I confess, I botched an install of Ubuntu Linux) all the RAID in the world isn't going to do a thing for you.

Unpatent database - idea #5073

Having just ranted on AC/OS about unpatents I thought I'd do one of my regular Google searches for "unpatent" I came across an entry in a web site called the "Global Ideas Bank". The entry was for an unpatent registry and described pretty much the same idea that I have been going on about here under the name of "unpatent database".

Ironically it turns out that the unpatent registry idea is logged as #5073 in the Global Ideas Bank, a site that is really already effectively an unpatent registry - they just don't present and package it as such and call their unpatents "social inventions". When you look at the GIBs about pages you'll see they describe objectives very much intune with the reasons I described for creating the unpatent database. With some more publicity and perhaps a few more formal requirements about content and standard of ideas it could be exactly what I described as the "unpatent database".

Furthermore I think its brilliant that the Global Ideas Bank already contains an entry for the unpatent database - it illustrates my point beautifully, that any obvious idea has probably already been thought of by someone else, and even if it hasn't someone else will do eventually. This is the very definition of "obvious" and the very criterion that should tell us an idea is not, and should not be patentable. Hence the unpatent database should very definitely contain an entry for... the unpatent database!

One step closer to unpatents

It seems like the Open Innovation Network (OIN) has got the world one step closer to my "unpatent" concept of a repository of ideas that are not patented and not patentable. The OIN proposes to create a portfolio of Linux patents that are openly available without licensing fees. The idea is to get as many Linux technologies patented but not subject to license fees, this would form a basis for fighting patent infringement suits directed toward Linux.

It seems interesting to me that ideas actually need to be patented to be protected since it seems patents were primarily about protecting the right to exploit an idea. If you get it out there under copyleft, or other "freedom of information" based licensing terms why bother with the patent unless you're interesting in making money? Maybe I have an incomplete understanding of patent laws or maybe the OIN has a bunch of tame patent lawyers so it can patent ideas so cheaply that they don't really care.

Ultimately this is just a step, were still giant leaps and bounds from what we really need. As the continuous barrage of new web patents shows, obvious ideas that anyone could think of given an hour or two (or day or two at the most) could come up with are still creating great wastelands in the opportunities for innovation and great waste piles of cash and resources expended to defend against and fight patent suits. The soon there is a central repository of unpatented and unpatentable ideas the better. This will cream off the vast majority of obvious solutions and save countless billions of dollars associated with patent filing and litigation, spur innovation and development without fear of patent suits, and funnel actual money into research, development and yes patenting good non-obvious inventions.

Sharing and streaming with Windows Media Player

By chance I discovered something today that I've been looking for almost since I started Windows Media Player - a way to access all my media from a central machine without relying on copying or Windows network sharing. The former is a pain and a waste of disk, yes even if I have hundreds of gigs of it, and the latter is very prone to drop outs during even the slightest network glitch.

What I found is a Windows Media Player (WMP from now on) plugin called On2Share. This little gizmo scans all the files your WMP knows about and then makes them available using the Windows Media Connect protocol. This wouldn't be so useful on its own - you can download the WMC software from Microsoft and it will do the same for you - with a fancier interface and better features too boot. But it turns out Microsoft has never provided a software client for their protocol so the only thing it could be used with was hardware clients, like the Roku music player.

So the really nifty thing about On2Share is it also includes a WMC protocol client which sees other On2Share servers on your LAN (it uses UPnP so some fiddling with your firewall and Windows services may be required) and any PCs with Windows Media Connect installed and turned on. What happens then is all the files on your remote machien running On2Share show up under a new playlist. You basically see exactly what the remote machine would see in its library - All Music, music by artist, album, and even custom playlists. You can then play from those playlists and On2Share, or more accurately Windows Media Connect, gets on and streams the files for you.

The nice thing is that while streaming Windows downloads the content as quickly as possible. So within your LAN you'll get the entire track very soon and you don't get affected by brief network glitches that occur with say, a WiFi network. Well that's my experience anyway, compared to pointing a remote WMP at a shared drive.

The disadvantages I've experienced are:

• On2Share server takes a long time to index all the files WMP knows about
• Once its indexed them it doesn't keep that list cached so every time it starts it has to re-index
• On2Share doesn't run as a service - it runs as a user so every time you log in its starting from scratch with the indexing
• The client also takes a very long time to get the list of tracks from the server (my collection has 4000 tracks and isn't huge)
• When the client sees a WMC enabled computer it doesn't see the playlists and tracks by artist or album - I don't know if this is a WMC problem or an On2Share problem
• When playing tracks there is always a brief gap between them, usually not noticeable if you tracks are separate with some silence between them anyway.
  
• Crossfading does not cure this problem - in fact it doesn't seem to work with streamed tracks, again I think this may be a generic WMP problem.
• The On2Share site is really bad and has nothing in the way of proper documentation, just a few FAQs and a forum with almost nothing in it.

Other than this I'm happy that such a product finally exists. I'm hoping they'll soon either improve it or someone else will come out with a better one. Maybe even Microsoft will start supplying such a client as part of WMP. As best I can tell there is an add-on for Windows for Tablet PCs called "Windows Media Transfer" that not only transfers media files, but also supports streaming. Very useful for a hard-disk challenged Tablet, but also very useful for laptops in the home, and I would say anyone with a Pocket PC.

Security Enhanced Linux courtesy of the NSA

I have to say I had no idea that Securit Enhanced Linux (SELinux) had anything to do with the NSA. Well, I'll put that down as today's lesson learned because yes indeed, they are the genesis of SELinux! Their handy, dandy FAQ answers all the major questions and you can either get the code from them or wander over to the SELinux SourceForge project and download it yourself.

The key question in the FAQ was Does NSA have plans to use it internally? to which they answer For obvious reasons, NSA does not comment on operational uses.. When I checked their list of things remaining to be done on the SELinux project it did seem like they are bent on making SELinux an OS solution with substantial utility for real world use. You have to believe that the NSA is riddled with Windows laptops and given the never ending list of well known weaknesses they have to figure that at least some security, especially if its in their hands, is better than well, none...

Would I use SELinux? Well, maybe, if I thought it was necessary. But you know people (tin foil hatters) tend to be naturally suspicious of government agencies and will presumably suspect that there is some critical security flaw in SELinux that the NSA isn't telling us about and they have fixed in their own code, but not what the public get. Remember SELinux isn't a trusted OS it doesn't have provable security, and its enhancements are specifically design only to deliver mandatory access controls. What does that really buy me?

Perhaps the most interesting thing I took away from the NSA website was on their background page. It's a reference to their paper called The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments. I wish someone would point that out every time Microsoft, or for that matter any OS manufacturer, company or entity tells us their operatioing system, application or network is secure. Remember such assertions are usually the only thing that is backing up their privacy policy and preventing our personal data from escaping their database for a well earned vacation in Eastern Europe.

So, next time you hear someone talk about security just ask them about the inevitability of failure, and what they are doing to deal with it. If they don't know about it you can tell them about the paper published by their very own government funded NSA. Just remember, if it's not Uncle Sam that's out to get you -it's your own system that's going to collapse right under you.

I would trust a computer to...

Ask yourself this: if a computer can't even download and display a simple image on your screen without compromising your system then exactly what can it do safely? Well that's exactly what Microsoft has admitted it's latest Windows XP systems can't do right now. If Microsoft is looking for ways to get front page news this is the way, but if they want to try and pull as fast one about secure operating systems, it isn't.

At last - the pocket personal server

I feel like I've been harping on about the concept of a server in your pocket for years. In fact I was just brainstorming about it with a friend today, we postulated a gumstick sized PC that would plug into USB with a fingerprint authentication.

Oh well, there goes that idea. Thank you Blackdog from Realm Systems. Still I can't wait to get one... Now I just have to figure out how to make it useful and win that $50,000 prize.

Open Source Community - just another WalMart or fundamentally better?

Matt Asay's AC/OS blog pointed me to an interesting presentation on Open Source software given by Robert Lefkowitz. It's an interesting and at times extremely entertaining look at Open Source software and how really from the buyers perspective it isn't anything magical or completely different from other products.

At least that is what I think the conclusion is supposed to be. Without the words that accomplished the presentation its difficult to tell - some of the slides seem to be so tongue-in-cheek that its entirely possible the meaning of the presentation was supposed to be something completely different.

The way I see it is if a product on the shelf then you are mostly getting what you pay for. What you get that you didn't pay for at the point of purchase is actually paid for in some other way in which you didn't notice. My feeling is that the intangible costs of Open Source ownership are on the whole larger than regular products - because they amortize less of the costs into the purchase price - which is often close to nothing or actually nothing (if you are given a CD, download a binary, or compile source code yourself). Where the Open Source product quality is high there are usually more intangible costs you don't know about. Perhaps somewhere, someplace a company is paying its engineers to maintain that open source project, or someone made a fortune at a dot com and is no devoting their "free" time to the project. Who knows?

In one respect buying Open Source because its cheap or free is kind of like buying products at WalMart. Both WalMart and the Open Source community market themselves as purveyors of goodness, both appeal, by and large to our fundamental (and economically required) cheapness. Yes I know many people use Open Source software for other reasons, especially in the early adoption pahse, but does your average Firefox, Apache or Open Office user really care? In the end uou walk away with a cheap product which may or may not do what you wanted to do and last as long as you expected. But who knows what the intangible costs were associated with acquiring the product from WalMart or your friendly Open Source community? Granted that a large number of studies have been focused on the overall impact of WalMart on our society and good deal of people want to believe the end game of WalMartization is bad, very bad.

But what about Open Source? Cost of ownership studies - yes, code quality studies - yes, ease of use studies - yes, but so far as I know a thorough analysis of weather Open Source as a whole is good for society has yet to appear. Its all guy feeling (mostly in the positive) and base appeals our base sense of socialism (if we have one) and feel good "lets all get along together" nature.

So ultimately I think the argument about Open Source is whether, by and large, for society it is a better (by which I mean "efficient use of society's resources") way to create, distribute and maintain software. As I said, that is a question which I have yet to see a good answer for, but unlike Matt Asay I'm no expert on this field, perhaps he has one?

Advertising gone underground

Those crazy Germans have come up with a projector and computer in a box that they attached to a subway train, the result is projected images on the wall of the subway tunnels. They chose to project cute fish and other interesting objects but I'm certain its only a matter of time before the advertising industry does what it does - commercializes this idea. I mean there is only so much space inside a subway car to utilize without blocking out all the windows and this lets them get you even when you are looking out of the window and makes it extremely easy to dynamically change the ads from day to day, even minute to minute.

Of course there are some problems to solve - like the suitability of the average subway tunnel wall for projection, they are not usually nice clean white walls! However if the tunnel had white pannels along it at regular intervals the projector could turn on an off as the train passed them creating an animated effect. With mirrors the image could even be made to track the white panels to give a longer persistance.

Plus there is the problem expense - adding expensive projectors to subway cars could take a long time to pay back for advertising. The key benefit of projecting form the car is that the image moves with you rather than being a fleeting glimpse. So why not just put the projectors inside the cars and project on the wall of the subway car. Or have screens on the outside of the windows that somewho go clear in stations, or use a camera to show the outside view that you would have seen if the screen wasn't there.

Lots of ideas, and I have no idea why I'm brainstorming to help the advertising industry. I think a month of interviewing at Google (didn't get the job) has warped my tiny litte mind...