Irony

Today I had a visit from a friendly German policeman who was curious about what I was up to at my table by the window. The fact that I was using a pair of scissors and strips of paper made him think I was working on something illegal, when I was in fact working on some papercraft artwork. He told me that someone in the neighbourhood saw me through a window and called the police to report something "suspicious".

I don't know if I should feel reassured or frightened about my paranoid neighbors, but I find it really ironical that the papercraft model that I was working on was that of a surveillance camera. Here is what the finished result looks like:

Microsoft's "Mojave experiment"

The "Mojave experiment" is a study launched by Microsoft this week to try and counter the overwhelmingly bad PR that Vista has gotten since it was released.

The basic premise is: A sample of Windows XP users are asked to rate the features of Vista. They are then shown "Microsoft's next OS", called "Mojave" and are asked to rate its features too. At the end it is revealed to them that Mojave is, in fact Vista, and a majority of them rated Mojave as being much better than Vista.

Aside from being quite entertaining, the site does more or less prove that people have had misconceived notions about Vista which were generally unfounded. However it fails to address the main shortcomings of Vista, which have been (in my opinion) awful driver support, a very annoying UAC implementation, high hardware requirements, and very bad (at least pre-SP1) performance.

Also, it looks like the test subjects don't actually use Vista/Mojave hands-on, but are merely shown some of its features. This makes it just too easy for the Mojave team, because I don't think you've really experienced Vista until you've spent a couple of hours trying to make Vista recognize your cellphone via Bluetooth.

The Mojave campaign however does prove that Microsoft acknowledges the general anti-Vista feeling all around. Its probably not too long now until Microsoft spoofs some of the Mac vs. PC ads.

My newest toy: A GPS Receiver

I received delivery of my new Blumax Bluetooth GPS receiver yesterday, and I've been playing with it all day. It has a very compact and slim form-factor, and has managed to consistently get a satellite fix in less than a minute. Totally worth the 40 euros!

So far I have managed to load a simple J2ME program onto my cellphone and track a 20-minute tram ride from Bonn to Siegburg. I used the info to generate a .kml file and loaded it up in Google Earth, which showed everything perfectly.

Unfortunately the bluetooth stack on my Vista machine refuses to work properly for now, so until I have found decent drivers for it I'm locked out of pairing it with the receiver. However I do expect to develop something interesting with it in the coming weeks.

Indian Government may get access to your BlackBerry decryption keys

It looks like RIM, the company behind BlackBerrys may give in to pressure from the Indian government and provide them with decryption keys for specific Blackberry devices. Apparently Indian intelligence agencies are having a tough time reading encrypted traffic between suspected terrorists that are using BlackBerrys.

A few observations:

• If RIM's servers have access to the decryption keys in the first place, then it isn't "end-to-end" decryption, as is advertised on BlackBerry's home-page. If your private keys are actually in possession of someone other than yourself, then you definitely need to re-evaluate your security needs.
  
• I doubt that individual decryption keys are localized in any way, so the Indian government potentially has access to the mailbox of not just Indian users, but of every BlackBerry user on the planet.
• I'm pretty certain that the terrorists will start using something a bit more secure after reading this news article, like maybe Skype.
  
• The Indian government will only be targeting "non-corporate customers" for now, so this looks like a nice marketing opportunity for RIM in India to advertise their enterprise products.

Shops secretly track customers via mobile phone

[Via the Times]
Using cellphones to track user movement in shopping malls seems to be a brilliant idea at first, considering how ubiquitous cellphones are today. However the related privacy issues make me more than a bit uneasy.
While the encrypted cellphone traffic is safe from being snooped, the fact that shoppers are identified by their IMEI code removes any illusion of anonymity. Unless the system converts this to an internally unique identification code, the IMEI code can very easily identify personal information depending on where the cellphone was bought.

If combined with parking lot records, video surveillance tapes, shopping invoices and credit-card info, a very detailed profile can be built by the shopping-mall management of any shopper that they might fancy. Even if the IMEI code itself is not stored anywhere, tying it down to a single unique ID would still build a very interesting profile of an individual shopper. Add in the possibility that all this info is logged and a police subpoena to give them up and what you have is a very sticky situation that is ripe for abuse.

These systems seem to be implemented in the UK by Path Intelligence. It looks like they make use of code from the GNU Radio toolkit.

Hello World!

This is the new incarnation of my blog. I decided to do away with the old posts which were mainly personal rants that I would rather not see published on the internet anymore.

The focus of this blog will be mainly tech-related posts, with some reviews, opinions (and maybe some flamebait) thrown in for good measure. I'll also try to post non-geeky things from my personal life, so as to not alienate the non-techie demographic amongst my friends.