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Note: I don’t have time to complete this posting right now, so it’s in a draft format. I just wanted to briefly document my findings before I forget. Back to studying for the Patent Bar…
I finally pony up the Benjamins and got myself an Android handset, wait for it – the Sprint HTC EVO 4G!
You may not share my enthusiasm, but finally ditching my HTC Mogul (running WinMo 6.1) and moving into an even more open platform opens up a lot of possibilities for me. I’ve always been more comfortable developing on the *nix realm, and although I don’t have anything against the iPhone, Apple’s tight control on the iPhone OS just doesn’t sound that appealing to me. At this point in the mobile platform ecosystem, iPhone enjoys a almost 4-to-1 margin in the number of developers probably due to its two year head start in reaching the mainstream market, but the fact that Google opens up the entire Android platform, allowing me to develop apps that interface the hardware in a low-level way is much more appealing. I hope for a day when the mobile platform mimics the general purpose computers that makes it possible to run almost any OS on the same hardware.
A bunch of people have been having problem building a true phone recorder on the Android. Almost all smartphones these days come with an application processor (AP) and a baseband processor (BP). The BP is responsible for handling the radio, and voice encoding -decoding, among other related tasks. While the AP is used to run the OS and applications. The fact that despite having an API that supports recording voice call (both uplink and downlink), none have been able to successfully implement the feature suggests to me that there’s more than meet the eye. Upon further digging through the Android platform source and documentation, I found an interesting project within the platform that seems to be responsible for implementing what I want…, the Radio Interface Layer (RIL).
More to come…
I have been USB-tethering with my Sprint HTC Mogul for more than two years, connecting my Ubuntu 8.04~10.04 and Win XP~7 laptops/netbook to Sprint’s usually-speedy-enough 3G data network. While my Mogul still works fine as a phone, email client, light browsing, an GPS navigation with Tomtom 7 and Google Map, I am really getting tired of Windows Mobile 6.1.
I am a fan of building custom Linux kernels for the x84 architecture and having root access to an OS, so the ability to do (close to) the same on a ultra-portable embedded device with an ARM architecture with an Android OS appeals to me.
The hardware I want is something like the HTC Evo (4G) or the HTC Desire/Incredible. While the Android 2.1 that comes with them pretty much does what I need, and I think I can always tinker around to get USB or Wifi tethering, the rumor that Android 2.2 will come with that ability built-in gets me fired up. Sprint says they’ll be charging an additional $29.99/month for Wifi hotspot on the Evo, so it remains to be seen if a carrier will disable the new built-in Wifi hotspot capability so they can charge more.
If history is an indication of what’s to come, I may have a reason to be optimistic.
Back in October 2007 when I got my Mogul, rumors were that there was a GPS module built-in, but Sprint had disabled it in the ROM. A few months later, Sprint released a new ROM with that GPS module enabled, even though they continue to provide their proprietary Sprint Navigation at a monthly fee. I hope they somehow decide to allow the native Wifi hotspot, but I’m not holding my breath for it.
From CNET:
In a speech Wednesday, Microsoft general counsel and senior vice president Brad Smith called on government and business to shore up confidence in cloud computing by tackling issues of privacy and security–two major concerns that have been voiced about the cloud.
Full article.
 So Google finally announced its 3G phone for HSPDA back on Jan 5, 2010. Unfortunately, for those of us in the US, the GSM camp does not have a wide enough of 3G data coverage that folks over in Asia and Europe enjoy. I was pretty excited when Google said they would release a version of Nexus One that works on the Verizon network in the Spring of 2010. After all, my contract with Sprint doesn’t expire until May.
 Since the GSM Nexus One packs the Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250, which according to Qualcomm’s specs only works on the GSM network, I am guessing that the CDMA version would be screaming with Qualcomm’s QSD8650. According to specs from Qualcomm, the QSD8650 is compatible with both GSM/HSDPA and CDMA/EV-DO, making it a true 3G worldphone (unless you still need iDEN, which I think only Japan and Korea might still be deploying, and Sprint is phasing it out after acquiring it from Nextel). This would be a very nice phone unlocked, allowing a world traveler to utilize local networks at cheaper rates.
According to a press release from Qualcomm in summer 2009 (will dig up the press release later…), they have managed to clocked QSD8650 at 1.3 GHz, a third faster than QSD8250′s 1GHz. Since both chipsets are fabricated using the 45nm process, power-saving from lower voltage should be out of the question. It would be interesting to see how, if at all, Qualcomm can still manage to maintain a comparable running time without sticking a bigger and heavier battery on the back of the phone.
In a way, I am glad that my contract with Sprint isn’t up yet, so I don’t have to rely purely on my (limited) restraint to compulsively buy a GSM-only Nexus One now.
The Italian Supreme Court has issued a decision in a criminal proceeding against www.thepiratebay.org, a P2P website because of the breach of copyright laws through the making available to the public of copyright protected works…
Full story.
German researcher Karsten Nohl has cracked the encryption used for GSM. His team has made information and tools needed to replicate the attack with a somewhat modest set up. The A5/1′s 64-bit encryption key used in GSM is simply too short for the kind of computing power widely available today. Considering that the technology is over 20 years old, however, it’s robustness is still remarkable.
Here’s the A5/1 Cracking Project’s website.
A report from The Register said that hours of unencrypted surveillance video feeds were intercepted by the Iraqi insurgents. A laptop containing the video feeds were discovered late 2008, but it’s not clear from the report when those feeds were intercepted.
Why were those video feeds unencrypted? Granted even the strongest encryption scheme to date isn’t unbreakable, given enough technical know-how, processing power, and time. My guess is that the contractor or subcontractor supplying the camera or the transceiver forgot to turn encryption on, and no one caught the fatal error.
Here’s the full story.
An interesting report by CNET News. How do you define evil? I suppose one way to not do evil is to write the code so that it consumes less resources, either in terms of CPU cycles or memory (or both if you can!), thus reducing the power dissipated in millions or billions of CMOS Flip-Flops. Just think about the implications of wasted charges/discharges and unnecessarily-spent batteries. Wait, maybe I’m getting off topic…
Story from Reuters on the counter-suit by Apple against Nokia on various patents related to handsets.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BA2DO20091214
I don’t need to tell you how important data backups are. These days, several online backup services based on cloud computing are available for either free with some limited storage to a affordable monthly fee for unlimited storage. Carbonite, Mozy, Blackblaze, and Dropbox are a few excellent examples. There are advantages and disadvantages of these various services. I use 3 out of the 4 mentioned, depending on the type of data, frequency of changes, , and how often I need to access them, etc. For my VPS host at RapidVPS which runs on Ubuntu, I use Dropbox because Dropbox has a fairly decent support for Linux.
Here’s a pretty good instruction at Dropbox. I didn’t follow the instruction exactly, but I’ve repeated the step enough times to know that it works for the most part. I had some problems with my Python 2.6 installation after incrementally upgrading from 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04 -> 9.10, but it’s all good now. Anyway, on my VPS host, I set up several cron jobs to dump mysql databases and svn repos, rsync contents of some /var/www and tar-gzip contents of /etc, /root, and /var/log. I don’t need to keep multiple versions of the backups because dropbox automatically takes care of incremental backup and versioning. One thing to be aware, however, is that Dropbox doesn’t encrypt data, either in the transmission or storage, so you might want throw something like TrueCrypt or GnuPG in the mix.
Once backups are set-up with Dropbox, you can even subscribe to the backup/revision history RSS feed(s) provided by Dropbox to stay on top of the status.
Several other useful resources:
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