Networking & Internet

The Technology week in view: 23rd April 2008

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Dealing with a cold (man flu my partner calls it) is not the sort of virus I was planning to write about in a technology review but it has that knack of impacting on most aspects of every day life especially as it dulls the reflexes somewhat. This is what happened when I heard about the Live Mesh Technical Preview beta (Live Mesh – are we finally breaking free from the desk?) – by the time I got my lethargic mind round to signing up – the preview program was full. But if like me you want to be added to the waiting list then head on over to https://www.mesh.com.

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Dilbert.com goes Web 2.0-y

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Yes, now this is important geek news! Dilbert.com now has all kinds of cool Web 2.0 type stuff to keep you nice and occupied during your ‘downtime’ in your cube while you’re at the miserable place called work.

What’s new? Mashups. You get to fill in the dialogue for a partially filled in strip. Next up will be the ability to completely write the dialogue for an entire comic. Apparently, Scott Adams himself will be joining in the fun (he writes a good blog, btw).

Oh yes, archives will now go back all the way to 2001. Sweet. Now I won’t have an issue passing the time at that place called… what? Oh yes, ‘work’. Never liked the stuff I had to do there anyway.

via Webware.

Skype offers unlimited long-distance for a flat fee

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Skype has just annoucned that for about US$10/mo, you can get unlimited long-distance (Skype-to-landline) to the country of your choice (well one of 34 at any rate). Not a bad deal at all. This turns the traditional long-distance market on its head. I still remember paying over $1/minute for long-distance calls (made in the same hemisphere no less). Yes, that is per minute.

Ok, so there’s a little * next to the ‘unlimited’ as in no more than 10,000 minutes per month, but seriously are you going to be using Skype for more than 5 hours a day?!

See the page on Skype’s site for more details on rates, etc.

Text your notes with kwiry – win a movie/book/CD

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Remember back to late Dec 07 when we announced the launch of text-to-web service, kwiry, which gives you a great way to add items (kwirys) to your Remember or To Do lists.

Well, kwiry is currently running a promotion at least until Jun 28, 2008 where you stand a chance of winning one of your kwirys assuming it’s a movie, book or music album. They’re giving away 1 per week each up to a value of US$25.

All you need to do is to kwiry like you normally do and just include the keyword ‘music’, ‘book’ or ‘movie’ along with the full title of the item. So if you wanted to kwiry “Spiderman 3” b/c you wanted to remember to buy it, then tack on the keyword ‘movie’ to make it “spiderman 3 movie” or “movie spiderman 3”, and you’re golden.

BTW, if you haven’t tried kwiry, give it a whirl. It’ll take you 5 minutes to get set up and run a few tests. Honest.

U of Chicago Law School bans Internet Access

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In the ‘really?’ department, the University of Chicago’s Law School has decided to block Internet access in classrooms, in what appears to be the first such school-mandated restriction.

While I understand restricting high-school students and to a much smaller degree college students, but law school students? Really? Aren’t they adults who should decide for themselves whether or not they pay attention in class? How about if they decided to just miss class altogether? Wouldn’t that amount to the same thing?

As long as they’re not making a lot of noise, I don’t see the problem, apart from annoying some uptight profs. I wish I had an Internet-connected laptop when I went to classes. I can see it being a valuable tool to help with learning the subject matter at hand. The fact of the matter is that you can only lead a horse to water; the rest is up to them. Just my $0.02.

via Slashdot

eBay may sell off Skype

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The ink had barely dried on the agreement to buy Skype before analysts were criticizing eBay’s $3.1 billion decision. Yes, that’s ‘billion’ with a ‘B’. Now, it looks like eBay is pondering selling it off.

Their reasoning is that if they can’t find a way to integrate it into their core business which is online marketplaces, then it’s of no use to them. I don’t completely agree, but I applaud eBay for having the fortitude to face up to and act on their bad decision quickly. AOL Time Warner comes to mind as an example of the opposite.

How the Matrix Begins

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Morpheus couldn’t tell Neo how the Matrix was first built, I think we’re seeing some interesting groundwork being laid for an ever-more realistic simulations of the earth coming out that will may one day give us the option of choosing to live in a virtual world instead of the real one. Which would make broadband access a vital public utility along with water, gas, and electricity.

First, Google Earth. If you haven’t downloaded it, stop reading right now and go get it. The fact that an interactive model of the entire earth, including detailed satellite imagery, 3D representations of buildings, hyperlinks to user-generated photo albums and a freakin’ flight simulator to fly around all of it is free, as in beer, is still mind-boggling. The thing to remember is that Google isn’t sitting still on Google Earth or it’s web-based companion, Google Maps. There’s a decent chance that since I’ve been writing this post, Google has added another cool feature to its mapping tools that will be the topic of another blog post.

Google Maps Street View

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Doctorow not taking ISP’s service change lying down

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Good on Cory Doctorow. His ISP, Virgin Media, has just announced that they are pretty much ignoring Net Neutrality and will give 2nd-class priority (or worse) to traffic from websites and services that don’t pay them a premium.

Doctorow says that as far as he’s concerned, they’ve just announced that they’re violating the agreement, and he’s canceling his service. We agree. No doubt this is not the last we’ve heard about this or on the subject of Net Neutrality.

The technology week in view: 14th April 2008

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Having been of the feeling that may be losing the war, at least we have won a few battles with incoming spam in our business. There are two main problem areas that we have been looking into. Firstly, there is the scenario of When spam is not spam which we have finally managed to bring under some level of control and reduce the nearly ten thousand daily spam email down to a handier thousand or so. Secondly, and trickier to deal with is When spam should not be spam. Key words seem to be one of the few options available for dealing with information and these have played an important in a recent experiment we did Exploring search using keywords.

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No High Speed Connection… what would you do?

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Crazy Internet Geek Friday morning my DSL provider decided (or maybe the decision was made for them) to go out of business with no warning. I’ve had dreams, well nightmares really, about just such an incident occurring and was in true denial Friday night through Sunday morning. Until Sunday afternoon, the only Internet connections I had were a Blackberry and a Treo which are decently slow at my house. Basically I was able to check email and that’s it (hence the reason there haven’t been any posts from me over the past few days).

What would you do? Take our poll…

I can tell you my wife curled up into the fetal position and started shouting obscenities at inanimate objects while I went into denial and hibernated for much of the weekend while trying to catch up on some much needed sleep.

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