clint's Weblog

The Great Firewall of China

travisgallion — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:23:49 +0000

Possibly the world’s greatest named tech product ever: “The Great Firewall of China” (also known as the “Golden Shield”) is China’s answer to the free press of the world.

It’s even got its own mascot, called Jinjing, the friendly (thought) police officer:

Here’s a list of words Jingjing thinks are bad and doesn’t like you tapping into Google: ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘massacre’, ‘genocide’, ‘reeducation through labor’. You can find a full list here on Wikipedia – unless you’re in China of course, in which case you’re out of luck because Wikipedia is completely banned, as is YouTube, and most international press sites.

Macworld.co.uk is fine though – part of me feels like we’re not trying hard enough. You can test your website for Chinese access here.

It’s easy to have a cheap laugh at the Chinese government. Especially when you don’t live there. The Great Firewall of China and Jinjing are ridiculous enough to bring a smile to the most embittered journalist’s face – although I’m pretty sure Shao Tao, who’s currently serving 10 years in jail after Yahoo gave the Chinese government his IP address isn’t laughing.

I’ve never been to China, but I gather it is in many ways a bad place to live. But hey, most Western people (whether right or wrong) already think that and I’m not going to change the world in this blog. Hopefully the Olympic games will help matters. Several journalists have pointed out that they’re going to find it hard to report on the games if they can’t access their own newspaper from abroad, and China is thinking of bringing down The Great Firewall of China to allow journalists to witter on about what person won which shiny bauble.

Hopefully once The Great Firewall of China is down it’ll stay down, after all, it must be a real pain to monitor the whole internet. I’ve often thought that running a ruthless dictatorship or setting up and maintaining a beaurocratic dystopia must be more effort than it’s worth.

No. My real concern today is Phorm, a new web monitoring web service. It transpired today that BT has ‘illegally’ tested out Phorm on 30,000 of its customers without telling them.

Phorm, for the uninitiated, enables your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to track your online behaviour: what sites you’ve visited, what sort of things you type into Google, what your emails are all about. All this takes place at the ISP end (BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media are developing it with Phorm itself) so you never notice it happening: you don’t need to install any software, or give your agreement.

What Phorm does is track all your behaviour and pigeonhole you: I’d probably go in the ‘Mac enthusiast that likes to go on forums late at night, drunk, and complain that video games aren’t as good as when Sega was still making consoles’ category; endless Apple and eBay ads for its second-hand games section then: no change there.

This technology has been likened to Royal Mail opening your mail, reading your letters and making a note of everything you read and write just to ensure you get a better class of junk mail. But in my mind it’s far more insidious than that.

Advertising doesn’t bother me. Even targetted ads don’t really bother me. But the technology behind this system creeps me out. Phorm is being allowed to develop this technology because its aims are – apparently – benign.

On its website Phorm states that all of this is okay, because: “our technology doesn’t store any personally identifiable information or IP addresses, and we don’t retain information on user browsing behaviour.”

Well that’s okay then. The fact that your ISP is recording every tap of your keyboard is okay because it has kindly agreed to delete your name from its records.

Whatever happened to the idea of a bit of privacy in your life? And don’t give me that nothing to hide nothing to fear nonsense. Tell it to Shao Tao in his Chinese jail.

What really worries me though isn’t BT, Virgin Media or Talk-Talk turning into the world’s most efficient spammers. It’s if a product like Phorm makes its way out of the commercial test-bed and into the offices of governments around the world. Governments like the Chinese, I suppose, but also I worry about my government taking a shine to it. Considering the number of CCTV cameras in this country I wouldn’t put it past them. There are now 30 CCTV cameras within 200 yards of George Orwell’s London flat. The UK government is also arming CCTV cameras with microphones and speakers, so police officers can remotely shout at transgressors. What a depressing thought.

Phorm could be a powerful tool for the governement with a desire to categorise its citizens. You could slot them into Labour, Conservative or Lib Dem (Democratic, Republican and Ralph Nadir’s Green Party for our American guests); I suppose you could think of all sorts of categories: harmless, patriotic, protestor, dissident, terrorist…

An interesting thing I’ve noted is that China refers to The Great Firewall of China as the Golden Shield. And isn’t it funny how every time somebody wants to take away one of your hard-earned freedoms they make out that they’re protecting you. The CCTV cameras are there for our protection. That Phorm system could be a powerful tool in the War On Terror.

I don’t like Phorm. I don’t like the idea behind it and I don’t like where it could go.

Now, I’m not foolish enough to think that I can change the world. I’m the editor of a Mac magazine and website and all I really do is convince people to buy good products from bad ones. And there are billions of people in the world and only 300,000 or so individuals read our site every month. We’re proud of our figures but they aren’t really that big in the overall scheme of things.

But here’s the thing. Our research tells us that our readers (that’s you) are ‘influential to other users’. In other words. They’re the sort of people who friends phone up and say, “can I ask your advice on something”. Before saying “I was thinking of buying…”

So, for the record I switched ISP this week. I went from Madasafish (who I still wholeheartedly recommend) to O2. The 20meg line with unlimited usage deal discounted to £15 per month for O2 customers (I own an iPhone) was too good to pass up.

What I specifically did not do was sign up with BT, Virgin Media or Talk-Talk.

credit:Mark Hattersley

Celebrity Mac Spotting!

travisgallion — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:49:21 +0000

I’m told his is Jennifer Aniston of “Friends,” which remains one of my favorite television shows ever made. Much love to Macenstein for this fine bit of investigative paparazzoing.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

travisgallion — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:52:25 +0000

Google Health

travisgallion — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:43:58 +0000

At Google, we often get questions about what we’re doing in the area of health. I have been interested in the issues of health care and health information for a while. It is now one of my main focuses here, and I’ve decided to start posting about it. I’ve been motivated in this field in part by my personal experiences helping to care for my mother, who recently died from cancer after a four-year battle. While the quality of the medical care my mother received was extraordinary, I saw firsthand how challenged the health care system was in supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations. The system didn’t fail completely, but struggled with these phases:

What was wrong — it took her doctors nine months to correctly identify an illness which had classic symptoms
Who should treat her — there was no easy way to figure out who were the best local physicians and caregivers, which ones were covered by her insurance, and how we could get them to agree to treat her
Once she was treated, she had a chronic illness, and needed ongoing care and coordinated nursing and monitoring, particularly once her illness recurred

Once she had a correct diagnosis and we’d found the right doctor, her treatment was excellent. But before and after treatment, most people with serious illnesses have to live through these other phases and suffer similar problems. She was trying to get help from her caregivers in the family and it was incredibly challenging to get the right information and help her make the right decisions. Often the health care system isn’t well set up to address these issues. I believe our industry can help resolve some of these problems and ameliorate others.In the end, one key part of the solution to these problems is a better educated patient. If patients understand their diseases better — the symptoms, the treatments, the drugs, and the side effects, they are likely to get better and quicker care — before, during, and after treatment. We have already launched some improvements to web search that help patients more easily find the health information they are looking for. Using the Google Co-op platform, Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need. Do a search on Google about a medical issue or treatment like diabetes or Lipitor and you’ll see some choices for refining your query, such as “symptoms,” “treatments,” and so on. If you click on “treatment,” your search results are refined and reordered so that sites that have been labeled as being about treatment by trusted health community contributors are boosted in the rankings. Note that how trusted a contributor is -– and thus how much they affect your search results -– is dependent both on Google’s algorithms and on who the user decides they trust. For example, if my doctor is a Google Co-op contributor and I indicate to Google that I trust her, then when I search, the sites she has labeled as relevant will show up higher in my search results.

This is just the beginning of what our industry can do. People need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all. Which happens to be our mission. Health information should be easier to access and organize, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information that is most relevant to a specific patient’s needs.

Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one’s health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial “health.” We believe our industry should help solve this problem.

As the Internet increasingly helps link communities of people, we also think there is an opportunity to connect people with similar health interests, concerns and problems. Today, people too often don’t know that others like them even exist, let alone how to find them. The industry should help there, too.

These are some of the health-related problems we’re thinking through at Google. We don’t have any products or services to announce yet and may not for quite some time, but we thought we’d share a bit about the problems we’re interested in helping out on even before we introduce solutions. As we explore these problems and continue to work on them, we hope to share more about our efforts along the way. Your help is welcome and, of course, if you’re an extraordinary engineer with a passion in this field, we’d love to hear from you.

original post: offical google blog

video post: Refurb

travisgallion — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:25:17 +0000

I just bought a “refurb”macbook!!

Video post: “Secret Session”

travisgallion — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:22:10 +0000

ACLU objects as two companies offer ‘mind reading’ technology to government

travisgallion — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:17:57 +0000

The American Civil Liberties Union today announced that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the primary American security agencies for information relating to the use of “cutting-edge brain-scanning technologies” on suspected terrorists, RAW STORY has learned.

Two private companies have announced that they will begin to offer “lie detection” services using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), as early as this summer. fMRI can produce live, real-time images of people’s brains as they answer questions, view images, listen to sounds, and respond to other stimuli.

These companies are marketing their services to federal government agencies, including the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, the National Security Agency and the CIA, and to state and local police departments.

“There are certain things that have such powerful implications for our society — and for humanity at large — that we have a right to know how they are being used so that we can grapple with them as a democratic society,” said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project.

Equally worrisome to the group is the fact that experts in the field have told the ACLU that the science to back up any reliable use of fMRI as a “lie detector” or “mind reader” simply does not exist. At most, correlations have been observed between certain brain patterns and particular, highly controlled behaviors produced in laboratory experiments.

Experts also note that these early experiments on a few American college students are a long way from real-world settings, involving individuals in widely varying situations and with widely varying cultures, intelligence levels and states of mind.

“This technology must not be deployed until it is proven effective — and we are a long way away from that point, according to scientists in the field,” said Steinhardt. “What we don’t want is to open our newspapers and find that another innocent person has been thrown into Guantánamo because interrogators have jumped to conclusions based on a technology no one understands very well.”

original post: raw story

MacBook Air

travisgallion — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:46:35 +0000

Mimicking the 13-inch silhouette of the current MacBook line, it’s only 0.76 inch thick at its thickest, and Apple calls it the “world’s thinnest notebook.”

Some nitpickers say an obscure Mitsubishi laptop from 1997 was a hair thinner, but two of the smallest current ultraportable laptops, the 11-inch Sony VAIO TZ150 and the 12-inch Toshiba Portege R500, are both slightly thicker, and neither tapers to 0.16 inch as the Air does along its front edge.

As we’ve come to expect from Apple, the design and engineering that went into the MacBook Air is extraordinary, but it’s certainly a much more specialized product than the standard 13-inch MacBook and won’t be as universally useful as that popular system.

The biggest compromises, which have been well-documented, come in its connectivity: The MacBook Air finds room for only one USB port and doesn’t include a built-in optical drive, FireWire, Ethernet, or mobile broadband. And like with its other laptops, Apple refuses to outfit the Air with a media-card reader or an expansion card slot.

Choosing the Air over the cheaper, faster standard 13-inch MacBook, or the comparably priced MacBook Pro, will depend on your needs. Travelers who want minimum weight, maximum screen real estate, and who live their lives via Wi-Fi hot spots, with little need for wired connectivity, will find the $1,799 starting price a reasonable investment for owning one of the world’s premier bits of high-tech eye candy.

And while the MacBook Air’s specs are inferior to those found on the cheaper MacBook, they compare more favorably when you look at other ultraportables, where a price premium is always exacted. For instance, both the Sony VAIO TZ150 and Toshiba Portege R500 cost hundreds more than the MacBook Air and feature slower CPUs and half the RAM as the Air.

Although it shares a desktop footprint with the standard black and white MacBooks, the first thing you notice about the Air is its aluminum chassis–similar to the one found on the MacBook Pro, and much more fingerprint resistant than the standard MacBooks.

Picking it up, the MacBook Air feels a little heavier than you would expect from looking at it, even though it’s only 3 pounds. At the same time, it feels very sturdy and solid, thanks in part to the aluminum construction, and we’d have no qualms about carting it around with us all day.

y way of comparison, the VAIO TZ150 features an 11.1-inch screen and weighs only 0.3 pound lighter than the Air, and the Portege R500 is 0.6 pound lighter than the Air with a 12.1-inch screen.

The MacBook Air includes an iSight camera and mic, and an LED-backlit display that works with an ambient light sensor to adjust the screen brightness in response to the light in the room.

The keyboard–the same full-size version found in other MacBooks–has backlit keys that are also controlled by the ambient light sensor, although we had to adjust the room lighting a good deal to see any difference.

The revamped trackpad is large, measuring nearly 5 inches diagonally, and it works with new multitouch gestures. Other MacBooks let you do things like use two fingers to scroll through documents–this one lets you use three fingers to go forward and back in your Web browser history, and use your thumb and forefinger to zoom in and out of documents and photos–much like on the iPhone.

The three-finger forward/back gesture was immediately useful, and we’re already missing it when using other laptops. Apple tells us these new gestures won’t be available on older MacBooks as a firmware upgrade, as the hardware behind the new trackpad is different.

Another noteworthy new feature is the remote disc function. Since the Air lacks an optical drive, you can instead remotely use the optical drives of other systems, PC or Mac, as long as they’re on the same network.

The setup was a little cumbersome for the “host” PC–requiring us to insert the OS X disc that came with the Air, run a small setup program, and then find and turn on “CD and DVD sharing” in the Windows control panel (the documentation could have been a little clearer on what you need to do to on the Windows side).

Once we set it up, however, it worked like a charm. You won’t be able to stream DVD movies or music CDs via remote disc, but it’s fine for getting files and installing apps. A matching external USB DVD burner is available from Apple for $99, but any USB DVD drive should work.

The display offers the same 1,280×800 native resolution as the standard 13-inch MacBook, but the Air’s LED-backlit screen means its lid is thinner with an image that was somewhat brighter, at least with both systems set to max brightness.

The real key to finding out whether the MacBook Air is right for you lies in its stripped-down set of ports and connections. Those who regularly use more than one USB device, or need FireWire, an SD card slot, or an Express card slot will find the single USB jack too limiting.

Likewise, we often say the telephone modem jacks and S-Video outputs on most laptops are a waste of space, but the MacBook Air goes even further, removing the Ethernet jack (a USB-to-Ethernet adaptor will run you $29) and offloading video output to a pair of included dongles (one VGA, one DVI).

If you live on Wi-Fi hot spots, use Bluetooth for your external mouse, and only need a USB port to occasionally sync and charge your iPod or iPhone, these limitations may not be a deal-breaker for you.

While most hardware vendors offer a choice of mobile broadband options, Apple continues to offer none, which is disappointing for a system so clearly meant for life away from home and office.

Without an Express card slot, your only option would be a USB mobile broadband modem, but with the sole USB jack under a tiny flap on the right side of the system with limited clearance, you may need a small USB extension cable to get a bulky USB mobile broadband modem connected (similar to the problems people had with the iPhone’s recessed headphone jack).

While the 80GB hard drive included in the base $1,799 model may be smaller than you’re used to, the only other option is a 64GB solid state hard drive. With no moving parts, and advantages in heat, power consumption, and reliability, SSD hard drives are certainly the way of the future.

The future may have to wait a few years for prices to come down; however, swapping the 80GB platter drive for the 64GB SSD drive is a whopping $999 upgrade. The only other internal hardware option is a CPU uptick, from 1.6GHz to 1.8GHz for $300. With the upgraded CPU and SSD drive, the $1,799 MacBook Air suddenly becomes a $3,098 laptop.

We are pleased to see that the MacBook Air comes standard with 2GB of RAM, but with a processor that runs at a much slower clockspeed than the standard MacBook (2.0GHz or 2.2GHz), plus a 4,200rpm 1.8-inch hard drive (as opposed to the standard 5,400rpm), it’s not surprising that the MacBook Air is not as fast a performer as the $1,649 MacBook we reviewed in December 2007. Do note that the baseline $1,099 MacBook features a slower processor and half the memory of our MacBook review unit.

And as we often point out, any modern dual-core CPU is going to be more than adequate for Web surfing, multimedia playback, and productivity tasks, and we were able to surf the Web, play videos, and work on a document at the same time with absolutely no slowdown or stuttering.

We’re currently conducting additional benchmark tests and will update this review with new results as they’re available.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the MacBook Air is the lack of a user-replaceable battery. While most laptops will be obsolete before their batteries wear out, we are sensitive to the desire to occasionally carry an extra battery for extended field use.

We’re still conducting our standard DVD battery drain test on the system, and will report those scores shortly, but in anecdotal testing, the Air lasted for nearly 4 hours of mixed use, including video playback, software installation, Web surfing, and productivity tasks. That’s reasonably close to Apple’s 5-hour claims, but may not be enough for a full day of off-site use.

We’re still not fans of Apple’s nearly obligatory extended warranty upsell (so much so that we’ve simply copied this complaint from our last MacBook review).

The default warranty for the MacBook is one year of coverage for parts and labor, but toll-free telephone support is limited to a mere 90 days–well short of what you’d typically find on the PC side–unless you purchase the $249 AppleCare Protection Plan, which extends phone support and repair coverage to three years

original post: tech&supp

iPhone’s EDGE Network not functioning.

travisgallion — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:18:08 +0000

Yes, this happened to me.First a back story. I didn’t pay my bill in time, received no warning, just no service. i noticed with the EDGE network first as that is one of the coolest things on the iPhone. Even if it’s slow, its practically omnipresent. So I called att, paid my bill 7 waited. About two hours later my phone *blinged* but still no edge (argh) I was stumped and decided to wait until the next morning to call AT&T.SOLUTION:

Try holding down your power button on the upper right hand side and reseting it. That worked for me.

CONCLUSION:

Duh. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that, i mean really! However it is of note that Cynthia at AT&T was nice, but wasn’t aware of how to fix this solution and after i explained the EDGE network was AT&T’s deal with data networking and all she still didn’t buy it and offered to transfer me to Apple. It took about 5 mins, but she did and transferred me to KC over at apple. He was quick and to the point, and after we reset it & I turned off my wi-fi, the iPhone searched and found EDGE within about 20 seconds.

I apologised for my blockheadedness and asked if this was really Apple’s deal, he laughed and said that he tried to explain to Cynthia that this was an AT&T issue. We both laughed at this and I explained that I said the same thing to him. We them discusses the Elliot spitzer call girl situation quick, of which he was better informed than i was and in a cold familiar voice said, Thank you for calling, A-pple. Not ATT&T. Hmmm doesn’t seem like a match made forever and like Spitzer and his 22 protege, not a match made forever.

original post: Think Different

How To Find the Best Credit Card Rewards

travisgallion — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:27:54 +0000

If you’re using a rewards credit card it’s important to that you get the best credit card rewards possible. Why? Because if you’re not putting your rewards to work for you, you’re technically throwing money away. Here are some factors to consider when looking for the top rewards cards and redeeming your credit card rewards.

Who Doesn’t Love Cash?

Some of the best credit card rewards have nothing to do with points or miles. The best rewards are often cold-hard cash — and who’s complaining? There’s something to be said about getting paid to use your credit card. If you pay your statement in full each month, you won’t be paying interest and you’ll be getting cash back for each purchase you make. It’s like getting paid for good spending habtis.

Double Your Rewards?

Oftentimes the best credit card rewards are rewards that can be doubled. Some credit card companies, such as Discover Card, allow you to double your rewards if you redeem them at participating merchants. For example, if you’ve earned $25 in rewards you’ll be able to get $50 if you use your rewards at a participating store or website. It’s a great way to get more mileage out of the rewards you earn.

No Limits

Not all rewards programs are created equal. The best credit card rewards are unlimited. Some credit card companies cap the amount of points, miles or dollars you can earn each year. If you want to get the most from your credit card spending, opt for a card that doesn’t impose rewards limits.

Understanding Miles vs. Cash vs. Points

Credit card rewards come in different shapes and sizes. Some cards offer miles, others offer cash and others offer points. Finding the best credit card rewards means understanding how to compare the three different types.

Before opting for a points-based card, check to see how many points equal a dollar. To do this, look at a monetary reward (gift cards, etc.) and see how many points are needed to get that card. For example, if 2500 points are needed for a $25 gift card, it takes 100 points to earn $1. Miles-based rewards, as a general rule, are worth from 3 to 9 cents per mile depending on how you use them.

If you’re going to opt for a rewards card, why not make the most of the rewards you get? While getting the best credit card rewards takes a bit of research and some proper planning, it will be well worth it when you see your rewards stretching further and further.

For more tips on the best credit cards, saving money and avoiding getting taken, check out the best credit card section at CreditCardTipsEtc.com, a website that specializes in providing credit card tips, advice and resources.orignal post: articles, finance, and investments