Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 5, 2011
by sjvn01
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Is Firefox toast?

I remember just how great it was when Firefox first came out. In 2004, when Firefox first appeared, Firefox was a breath of fresh air. Firefox 1.0 was far better and more secure than the already awful Internet Explorer 6. I loved Firefox then. We all did. But, that was then. This is now.

Today, Firefox is getting pummeled from all sides. Its performance is mediocre. Sure, Firefox 8.01 beats the stuffings out of “classic” Firefox 3.6, but that’s not saying much. Compared to Chrome and Internet Explorer 9 Firefox isn’t keeping up.

As features and security go, Firefox no longer really offers anything that the other browsers don’t. At the same time, Google is turning Chrome into not just a Web browser, but an integral part of its software as a service (SaaS) and cloud application stack. Yes, you can run Google Docs and Gmail on Firefox or IE, but the combination of Chrome’s innate speed with Google’s applications makes it the most attractive package.

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December 5, 2011
by sjvn01
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Operating systems don’t matter much anymore

For decades now, we’ve been fussing about operating systems. “Mac OS X is better than Windows!” “Why upgrade to Windows 7 when XP works just fine?” “You’re all wrong. Linux rules.” Such arguments are about to become history.

Thanks to advances in virtualization, cloud technology and the Web, it matters less and less to users which operating system is behind their desktop screens — or, for that matter, their tablet and smartphone displays.

Don’t get me wrong. Operating systems will remain important for as long as we use computers. But for the most part, they are going to matter only to the people behind the scenes.

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December 5, 2011
by sjvn01
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Apple and Oranges: Apple’s tablet design suggestions

I’ve been poking fun at Apple’s intellectual property design claims for some time now. Then, I got a look at Apple’s “suggestions” on how Samsung could avoid Apple’s legal wrath and I realized I hadn’t even scratched the surface of how absurd Apple’s claims are.

In a recently revealed Apple court document (PDF) we see an Apple-paid expert witness explaining why Apple’s designs should be protected under intellectual property law and how Samsung could have avoided Apple’s unique design decisions.

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December 2, 2011
by sjvn01
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Carrier IQ tries to spin its way out of trouble

Carrier IQ, the mobile phone network analysis company at the heart of the smartphone spyware scandal, isn’t talking to me, but it is talking to AllThingsD. To them, Andrew Coward, Carrier IQ’s VP of marketing, explained that “The software receives a huge amount of information from the operating system. But just because it receives it doesn’t mean that it’s being used to gather intelligence about the user or passed along to the carrier.” Tell it to the judge. The class-action lawsuits have already begun.

Besides, thanks to white hat hacker Trevor Eckhart’s video we already knew that Carrier IQ’s rootkit was grabbing an amazing amount of private information. Coward explains though that “What it [Eckhart’s video] doesn’t show is that all information is processed, stored, or forwarded out of the device.”

OK, then why is it being collected if it’s not to be processed, stored, or forwarded? I mean I’m a former network administrator, I get why carriers want to know about why calls are dropped, why a text goes missing into the ether and so on. What I don’t get is why, for example, Carrier IQ or a carrier is collecting a text’s content.

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December 1, 2011
by sjvn01
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Finding and cleaning out your smartphone’s Carrier IQ poison

Isn’t it wonderful? It turns out that a spyware rootkit from a company called Carrier IQ is on hundreds of millions of Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Only Windows Phone-powered smartphones seems to have avoiding this program that reports on almost everything you do with your phone.

In the case of iPhones, it appears that Apple bakes this snooper into every phone. With other smartphones, the carriers, such as AT&T and Sprint, add it into your phones’ firmware before it gets into your hands.

Carrier IQ and the carriers aren’t talking much about their snooping ways.

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December 1, 2011
by sjvn01
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Rumble in the cloud: 5 cloud storage services compared

December 01, 2011, 7:00 AM — It used to be that when I said “cloud services,” people’s eyes would glaze over and in minutes they’d be gently snoring. That was then. This is now. While CIOs and CTOs still debate about what role the cloud will have in business, personal cloud services have been slowly easing their way into almost everyone’s computing plans.

That’s not you you say? You don’t use a cloud service? Really? Do you use Dropbox to store files? Do you get your e-mail at Gmail? Are you experimenting with Apple’s iCloud? Doing work with Google Apps, Office 365, or Zoho Docs? Congratulations, you’re a cloud user. You may be thinking a lot of those are software as a service (SaaS) offerings that mimic traditional client-server computing, and you’d be right. But they’re also all cloud services.

Lately, though, personal cloud services have been moving into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) realm. It’s in IaaS that you find file storage, media serving, and a variety of other ad hoc services for either no or minimal costs. So many of these services have been popping up, and with so many different service offerings, that I thought it was well past time to take an overview of what’s what in personal IaaS.

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