Techgeist

Warning: This video is loud.

Those Finnish folks at Nokia have released a video demo of the Nokia N900 running the Maemo operating system, and more specifically the Maemo 5 UI. In case you haven’t heard the news, Nokia is officially done with their old OS stalwart Symbian and are going to the mobile, Linux-based OS Maemo. And the video here is pretty darn excited. So far as I can tell, it looks like the iPhone’s grid interface and the WebOS live windows got together and had an illicit love child. And it’s one good looking baby.

Honestly I think a lot of us counted Nokia out too soon. I thought it was going to be Android and iPhone as the two main phone operating systems in the not too far off future, but now I’m not so sure. Maemo looks pretty hot. Additionally, Nokia is great at penetrating all sectors of the market, ranging from handsets that are given away free to new contract signers to the super high priced N97. So at least in theory, there’s a Maemo handset for everyone.

(Video via Boy Genius Report)

The Business Software Association (BSA) recently released a statement about actions it thinks should be taken against online pirates. And guess what? The BSA is for the “termination of Internet service for individual repeat offenders.” To be fair, the BSA goes on to qualify its stance, and it’s a head and shoulders above the Frances of the world which disconnect users for merely being accused of copyright infringement. The BSA says that internet termination should only occur

Through a decision by an administrative or judicial entity, provided such entity gives all parties an opportunity to be heard and to present evidence, and that the decision can be appealed before an impartial court. Before an order becomes final, parties shall have the opportunity to have the order stayed pending appeal to courts.

That’s due process, which is a good thing. France’s law is so nuts because it threatens to cut off someone’s internet connection just because the person was accused of piracy. The latest revamp to the law is to have a judge quickly look at evidence (spending no more than 20 minutes) and come to …

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Samsung announced that they’ll be launching an app store for the Omnia II and Omnia Lite handsets, both of which are Windows Mobile phones. The store itself will be online on September 14th, and already Samsung seems to have a bunch of launch partners, including “Gameloft, Electronic Arts, Handmark, TAITO, Paragon SW, Capcom, Com2us, Prompt, Pearson Longman, Bokan Tech and Diotek.” Anyone who plays iPhone games will probably recognize Gameloft, who have done a hell of a lot of mobile games. And probably everyone recognizes Electronic Arts. Samsung says that there’ll be 300 applications available at launch, which they expect to expand to 3000 by the end of the year.

Perhaps the most important thing about this news is that the Samsung app store will be competing with Microsoft’s own app store for the Windows Mobile platform. The Samsung store is launching in the UK and France and Italy, all of which are also places where Microsoft wants to exert some app store dominance.

While a two app store environment may not be one that most consumers find familiar, a more decentralized environment for mobile applications is …

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The WebOS team have put out a virtual keyboard for the Palm Pre. Despite the Pre’s physical keyboard, there has been clamor for something of the virtual variety. The Pre’s keyboard works very well in portrait mode, but as it slides out the long way, you can’t use it at all in landscape. Guess what? The virtual keyboard does work in landscape mode. And according to some early testers, it seems to be compatible with all text fields.

You can find an installation guide along with all relevant links here.

“This is the second notice that the warranty on your vehicle has expired.” That might be the robocall with which a lot of people are most familiar. Well, those were already illegal, but now the rest of robocalls are going to be just as banned. The Federal Trade Commission has revised the Telemarketing Sales Rule so that people who want to make a profit off of you won’t be able to use prerecorded messages to get you there. According to the FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz (who seems very fond of alliteration),

This bombardment of prerecorded pitches, senseless solicitations, and malicious marketing will be illegal. If consumers think they’re being harassed by robocallers, they need to let us know, and we will go after them.

These changes are such that only the really annoying stuff is illegal. If a business is using an automated message to just convey some information, they’re not going to get in trouble. So your dentist is not gong to jail for that message telling you to come in for a cleaning.

A law is only effective for prevention if enforcement is likely to happen, but this probably won’t be a …

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Back in May, China experienced a pretty large-scale internet outtage, and police have recently uncovered just what happened. A 23-year old cotton factory worker had been renting some rack space to run some private game servers, and he and his competitors got into a bit of a back and forth of attacking each others’ equipment. Ultimately, the man rented enough server power to launch a DDoS attack against his rival, which took down the domain registrar DNSPod. This made it so that a lot of URLs could not be resolved into IP addresses, thus shutting down the internet for a lot of people.

I think that this was probably a one-time event, though it’d be far more interesting if it weren’t. What if China had a whole mess of people running illegal services off their own servers, and all of them were in a constant cyber battle with each other to try and be the dominant illegal service provider? It sounds like an online mafia to me. It seems more likely that what I just described isn’t the case, but who knows? After all, it is China.

Symantec, the security company behind Norton Antivirus among other things, claims that they’ve found a trojan which can record conversations had on Skype. This is to my knowledge the first piece of malware anyone has found actually capable of SkypeSkraping. Called Trojan.Peskyspy (great name, eh?), the malware works by creating an MP3 of the call and later transmitting it from the infected machine. As MP3 files are relatively small, anyone with an infected computer probably wouldn’t notice the new files being created. And while Symantec does not seem to have found many machines infected with the trojan, they have found that the source code for Trojan.Peskyspy is now publicly available, which is kind of scary.

Trojan.Peskyspy is perhaps the biggest risk for political dissidents who oppose oppressive regimes. Many political activists around the world use Skype because, at least until very recently, there was no way to tap into conversations had over the popular VoIP service. But now that’s going to change. China has a whole team of hackers on its employ whose only job is to shut down dissent. Now all they have to do is come up with …

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Well, that was faster than expected. iPhone 3.0.1 was released by Apple today as a security update to the Apple iPhone operating system. The update fixes a bug that apparently the vast majority (if not all) GSM phones are susceptible to. In short, hackers could run unsigned code by sending a simple text message, and before the update, there was not a damn thing anyone could do about it.

More surprising is that Apple did not use this opportunity to step on the the tethering hack which a lot of us have been using. If you have an iPhone 3G or 3GS, you can enable tethering by simply changing a setting, and it’s really easy to do. Still, we all know how Apple pulls applications and functionality because of AT&T, so imagine my relief when I found that 3.0.1 keeps this little loophole intact. But my pessimism isn’t dead just yet. I expect that Apple will kill tethering by the time iPhone 3.1 rolls out.

The United States’ Federal Communications Commission has launched an investigation into the whole debacle over Apple’s rejection of a piece of software which allows users to use the Google Voice service from the iPhone. Apple’s grounds for the application’s removal were that it duplicates existing functionality, ie that the iPhone is already capable of making calls.

The FCC’s investigation is almost certainly not into the legality of Apple’s policies, but rather into the whole smartphone ecosystem that has cropped up in the past few years. And it’s not like we didn’t see FCC involvement coming. One of concerns the FCC is expressing is that users in rural areas often do not have access to the latest devices, largely because the new SuperPhone 9000 is only available on some big name carrier which has terrible coverage in that area.

So don’t expect the FCC to force Apple to allow applications onto the iPhone. The FCC is merely gathering information at the moment. With that in mind, I would be surprised if the government doesn’t take some sort of action within the year.

(Info via Dow Jones)

We’re getting in reports that the earlier news we posted, that the Pirate Bay was blocking The Netherlands, is either no longer true or was never true. That’ll teach me to trust presumably reliable sources.

This makes a whole lot more sense given how the creators of the Pirate Bay tend to operate. For example, in response to the fine imposed by a Swedish court earlier this year, the Pirate Bay folks opted to pay out the cash via micropayments, causing the plaintiffs to spend a whole lot on transaction cost. So in hindsight, I probably should have posted doubts that reports of the Pirate Bay’s sudden complacency were probably not quite correct.

But, the rest of the story holds true. The Pirate Bay folks have been ordered to stop receiving traffic from The Netherlands, and more and more of a fine will be imposed for every day that they do not block Netherlands traffic.