Off you go… into the purple yonder!

I got a most intriguing piece of spam in my mailbox today. It passed through dspam because it was so interesting that I would appreciate it. I’m very happy with dspam that way – it really knows what e-mail I like
Here’s what the body looked like:
%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER
Subject: %SUBJECT
Sender: “%FROM_NAME” < %FROM_EMAIL>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME
%MESSAGE_BODY

Yeah, [...]

Last week I wrote about the iPhone and it’s lack of openness. I mentioned the openmoko as an alternative. The company behind openmoko has just released it’s roadmap. The e-mail also contains the detailed hardware specs, and outlines their philosophy and approach, which is as they put it ‘unconventional’. They’ve got it exactly right. An [...]

Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN, RFC 3168) has been around for quite a while now, but there are still lots of devices and hosts out there that don’t support it properly. For instance, http://www.npr.org, and apparently all HP’s ILO and ILO2 baseboard management systems.
If you’re on a GNU/Linux system, just try it:
echo 0×1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn
Now you [...]

Interesting interview with Jeff Schiller, MIT’s main network guy, in Network World. MIT is going to activate a direct link to New York city later this month – 72 10G waves. Yes. That’s 720Gbit/s. From Boston. To New York.

So Apple announced the iPhone on Tuesday. It looks beautiful with its big screen, and it sounds exciting – both from a user interface perspective (those multi-finger touchscreen commands sound fascinating) as from a technology perspective: it runs (a stripped down version of) Mac OS X, which implies that the hardware is quite powerful and [...]

The LA Times exposes the Gates Foundation as an unethical investor. Read the article – it’s shocking. They are trying to do all this good in the world, and at the same time they have their enormous assets invested in companies that make people sick, are heavy polluters, and grossly overprice the very pharmaceuticals that [...]

Brian Krebs put up an excellent article at the Washington Post, analyzing how many days in 2006 IE was vulnerable because of critical, unpatched security problems for which documentation and/or exploit code was available online. IE’s record is abysmal: 284 days of vulnerability, or more than 9 months.
In contrast, Firefox had exactly one period of [...]

The Council of the European Union streams some of its meetings and press conferences online. Unfortunately, that streaming is done in Windows Media format. They barely support browsers other than IE, and then only on Windows and Mac OS X. If you don’t use IE on Windows, you get degraded functionality, and GNU/Linux is not [...]