Government Control

This December International Telecommunication Union is asking for keys to the Internet. Finally there will be central body to control and help expand the network we all use.

And I am scared.

When I look the trend of various countries locking down on Internet privacy and usability in the name of “security” I can just imagine ITU making it mandatory for all countries to implement switch in order to prevent cyber attacks. And then some content filtering of naughty material “for the sake of children”. One tiny step removed I can see countries suppressing criticism and all content that they do not care about.

I do not trust my (or any other government for that matter) in making wise choice. Government will by design try to keep it self in power regardless of what it takes. And each government having same input in ITU is just recipe to allow for Great wall of [insert country name here].

Huge concern is also that ITU is actually quite telco-heavy. That means that all decisions would be very much influenced by what powerful telcom operators think about it. And I can just see how they would like to limit (already low) speeds in order not to invest in their network anymore. Telcos do not care about people, nor should they. Telcos are corporations and they only care about profit for their shareholders.

Yes, currently USA has all keys to the Internet and situation is not ideal. However, even with this there is lot of freedom left to engineers to do what they need. And “freedom talk” that they are all fond of does keep most of censorship and death switches away for now. Having someone like China determine how open Internet will be is not a thought I cherish.

Maybe I am just paranoid, but I cannot see how this can end up well.

PS. A bit more to read. 2012-12-06: USA will probably not let go willingly.

[2012-12-14: I am pleasantly surprised that my native country (Croatia) is not among those who signed ITU WCIT treaty.]

You Cannot Depend on Cloud

Having files in cloud had became a norm. I myself have DropBox, SugarSync, Google Drive and SkyDrive accounts. Every day I rely on them to get my files and synchronize them across my devices.

It gets even worse on tablets. Most of them, regardless whether they are Android/iOS/Windows, rely on cloud storage quite a bit. And why not? Cloud services have became so reliable from technical point of view that any data loss is highly improbable. Solution that requires no backup is finally there.

Unfortunately all those technical accomplishments are irrelevant. TechDirt brings quite a few stories of cloud data loss. And it is not because of technical glitch but because of false copyright claims.

Copyright holders have been quite active in auto-detecting infringing files with most (if not all) cloud providers. If they find unauthorized work they delete it and you get one strike. Few more illegal files later and you might find yourself with blocked account. All your files are gone.

Annoying thing about copyright claims is their “shoot first, ask questions later” approach. It does not matter whether file is really infringing. All that matters is that some automatic bot thinks it does. And than you need to jump through hoops proving your innocence. Even with best efforts and in case of obvious errors that can take days. While all your data is held hostage.

Cloud services are integral part of life these days and almost every computer has some data up in the sky. But do not think that your data is safe just because someone else takes care of it.

Cloud is not a replacement for good backup.

KulenDayz 2012

For next three days Beli Manastir will host crème de la crème of Croatian IT community. Whoever comes there can expect a lot of quality lectures delivered by people all around world. And that will be mixed with huge amounts of fun and mingling.

For all community members sessions are free while other pay nominal fee. Post conference events do require additional payment but they are well worth it.

Unfortunately this year everybody will have to live without me present and no session will hold my ramblings. But do not worry, next year I am back. :)

P.S. If you see Bernard, give him a hug - this conference is his baby and every year he puts enormous amounts of love and energy into it.

Pimsleur Scam

Well, I probably had it coming for a long time…

While browsing on net I got an add for Pimsleur language course. Yes, it was full of nonsense statements but it was cheap. Just $10 for 4 CDs with introductory course. And I thought why not.

Got my CDs. Determined that their course is average at best and that Spanish cook I had in my company was much better source. So I forgot about it.

That is until a few days ago when I was sorting through credit card charges on unrelated issue. I was surprised when I noticed strange $64 charge under name of “STR*LANGUAGE LEARN LEV2”. That made me pull out even older bills and here is what I saw:

2012-08-14  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN LEV2 866-362-3822   $64.00
2012-07-15  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN LEV2 866-362-3822   $64.00
2012-06-10  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN BASIC 866-362-3822  $64.00
2012-05-11  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN BASIC 866-362-3822  $64.00
2012-04-11  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN BASIC 866-362-3822  $64.00
2012-02-10  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN INTRO 866-774-4754   $9.95

I have been getting charged for a while. Yes, I should have noticed it before.

In my defense, I had lot of charges those months. I was in middle of moving around States and paper statements from my company were going to my old address in Croatia. I did have access via Android app but with lot of charges, these were just missed.

Simply put: I was stupid and careless.

I double-checked my e-mails and no, I haven’t ordered anything more than introduction course. They did send me some stuff via mail but I threw this out with other spam. I never authorized them for any kind of subscription. However, they did have my credit card information so they felt welcome to use it.

Sorting things out with my credit card company will take some time. For start I reported unauthorized charges and canceled the card. Real pain in the ass since I had lot of stuff on that card but it was really only thing I could do. One dishonest company can really ruin your day.

P.S. No, at time of ordering, Google search for Pimsleur scam didn’t return anything in first result page…

P.P.S. Do notice how they didn’t start charging immediately. They waited for one more month just to avoid early detection.

Finally

Both Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 are finally available to MSDN subscribers.

I already got leaked versions from the torrents so this was just great opportunity to check whether SHA-1 matches. Guess what, it does. :)

Since everybody is trying to download these images right now, torrent also gives better experience.

Same general slowness and server crashes are nothing new for MSDN site (remember Windows 7). Maybe Microsoft should just embrace torrent network as distribution media instead relying on its own (obviously inadequate) infrastructure…

World IPv6 Launch

Tomorrow is World’s IPv6 launch. Are you ready?

P.S. It is not too hard.

* Drive

It seems to me that Internet drives are everywhere.

For a while we had DropBox as undisputed king of remotely synchronized files. When it prove successful, we got bunch of others, among which SugarSync seemed like most serious contender.

This week things got interesting with Microsoft introducing SkyDrive. And today we got Google onboard with Google Drive.

Only company missing action is Amazon. Yes, they have their drive also but they are missing half-decent sync client.

With so many heavyweight players around, things are bound to get interesting soon. :)

I Like Unique Identifiers

As I was finishing my order of MSDN magazine I was puzzled with one field. It said “In lieu of a signature, we require a unique identifier. In what month were you born?”

I am not quite sure in what universe month of birth is even close to being unique…

P.S. It is January.

Using IPC-3605N Without EaZy Wizard

My laptop has no DVD drive since I removed it a while ago in order to get another hard drive in. Therefore I was little bit unprepared when I bought myself ZyXEL IPC-3605N camera. User guide told me I have to run tool found on CD that I could not read.

I am lazy, so first I tried to download that tool (eaZy Wizard) from ZyXEL pages. Only when I could not find it anywhere (thank you ZyXEL for forcing users to keep CD around) I decided upon more imaginative solutions.

Since manual did mention some addresses in 192.168.0.x range and that range being most often used, I set my laptop’s wired network adapter to 192.168.0.254 and connected camera directly to it. Than I used MagiWOL’s import functionality to scan network for all MAC addresses in range 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.253. That resulted in single hit - my camera was at 192.168.0.100.

After finding out IP address, all I had to do was to enter this IP in browser and use “admin”/“1234” as user/password combination (not “admin”/“admin” as user manual suggested). With that I could proceed with setting-up configuration.

And CD was left forgotten.

WinDays 2012

I will hold a presentation on WinDays 2012.

This year theme will be .NET Micro Framework. Although this platform works very close to hardware, I will try to avoid too much electrical engineering theory and just show what can be done with it in practice.

All examples will be shown on Netduino Plus, probably cheapest way to start working with .NET Micro Framework these days.

[2012-02-29: Unfortunatelly, I will not attend. My stay in USA got prolonged and, due to certain limits of physics, I cannot be at two places at same time. :(]