Goyza Dumpling Soup

Here I am at London Gatwick, having soup and charging my devices. I was clever enough to bring a UK power plug for my MacBook and the right cables to charge my cell phones. Well, two at a time anyway (only have two USB ports). I do have to buy a USB travel hub somewhere. I’m using my Galaxy S2 as a WiFi tethering hotspot with a prepaid SIM card on the UK 3 network.

BlackBerry Curve at LGW

Suddenly this guy shows up. He tells me he just bought a BlackBerry charger and his battery is dead! We talk a bit and he discovers he bought a Mini USB charger, while his BlackBerry Curve has a Micro USB connector. Bad luck! I unplug my Samsung Galaxy S2 and tell him he can use my cable. He’s off back to the shop to return his charger and I’m wondering: why does he trust me? Why do we trust complete strangers at an airport? I’ve had similar experiences, only the other way around, where I left two of my cell phones with a couple of girls who also got their phones charged with my charger in return.
I’m thinking: We trust people because we want to.

And it works!

Have a great day!

OS X Mountain Lion Preview 1

I am excited. Very excited! This MacBook Air is my first (real) Mac and the timing couldn’t have been better. Over the last few years I’ve owned a lot of different computers and they always used to have Windows installed. My work requires me to run Windows somewhere, although I often prefer some alternative operating systems on the side. My last few laptops  contained a dual boot system with Linux, meaning I always had to save my work, restart my laptop before I could do serious stuff (for instance directly connect my laptop to the internet using a customer’s cable modem – stuff that Windows is not really good at, to put it mildly).

Lots of reboots later, I decided it was time for a change. Maybe desktop virtualisation (well, laptop virtualisation). Something like the very thin and sexy hypervisor Citrix XenClient is, allowing me to run both Windows and Linux at the same time. The problem with that was, that XenClient’s HCL wasn’t that extensive and besides: the laptop I had didn’t have proper processor support for it and I wasn’t sure I was going to get one of the laptops off the XenClient HCL. Not to speak of the (lack of) matureness of XenClient.

Anyway. It was time to replace my Samsung X laptop and I was ready to order the Samsung’s follow up model. Thinner, sexier and better! I don’t know why, but I decided to have a look at Apple, too. This was a few weeks after Steve Jobs passed away. I laid eyes on the MacBook Air and I decided 11″ was not big enough. When I heard of, saw and felt the i7 13″ MacBook Air with the 256 GB flash hard drive, I was sold! Thin, light, fast and just the laptop for me! I knew Parallels had become a good enough replacement for Bootcamp (which was exactly the dual boot system I didn’t want anymore) and I thought I’d try my luck. The 27″ Thunderbolt display came as a bonus

Of course I already had an iPhone 4S and iPad2 and it didn’t take me long to see the differences between Apple’s iOS and Mac OS X, only to find out a few weeks later that Apple made Preview 1 of Mountain Lion available to the Mac Development community!

This is not just any ordinary OS upgrade. This is not just a new version of the same old operating system. Mountain Lion is going to close the gap between Apple’s iOS and Mac OS and I have huge expectations of it. I have heard rumours about Microsoft trying to do the same between Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8, but I have a feeling they haven’t come the distance just yet. And I have a Nokia Lumia 800 to prove it!

The iMessage beta was a lot of fun to play with and it works really well. I was surprised to see the installer was in English, but also pleasantly surprised to see the rest of iMessage for Mac supports Dutch language. But iMessage for Mac is not enough and I want to see the operating system that has built-in support for iMessage, along with the rest.

After applying for Apple’s Mac Developer Program, waiting for approval and downloading a > 3 GB OS upgrade, it is now time to press Continue. I have some questions. The header of the dialog box says “Installeer OS X” in Dutch. The Dutch Continue button is labeled “Ga door”, which makes sense, but the installation instructions are in English. Apart from an incidental beta version of iOS for iPhone/iPad Apple’s iOS betas were always available in Dutch and I wonder if Mountain Lion will play ball. And what will happen to my iMessage beta? Will the in-place OS upgrade work?

And yes, this is my production laptop. After all these years I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way to find out whether something is good or bad. If its new features are any good or not. The betas on my iPhone and iPad never got me in (big) trouble, so let’s see if Mountain Lion meets those expectations! The time is now 01:32 AM and I should be asleep. But I am too excited. I’ll be back with a review of Preview 1, although it may take a while…

Last night as I was trying to upgrade the BIOS of my Samsung X360 laptop, I got a “Loading driver failed. Restart system” error. I searched the entire internet and found a fix that suggested I should install Samsung Update Plus, which didn’t work. I was trying to flash from Windows 7 (32 bit) and I had a feeling that this tiny program wasn’t made to run under this OS.

Ultimately I decided to run the BIOS update program in Compatibility Mode. I right clicked it and Windows proposed to run the BIOS update in Windows XP SP2 Compatibility Mode. Yikes! It sounds scary and it ran way slower than I expected, but it worked and I got my update.

Yesterday, I was at the golf course, doing a Google Apps migration. A young boy sat down next to me during a coffee break at the club house.

I asked: “So… Do you have a handicap?”
He replied (without blinking his eyes): “Yes, sir. 11″
I: “And how old are you?”
He: “12, sir”
I wanted to tease him a bit and said: “Well, ok. It’s good you’re still young, so you have lots of time to work on a decent handicap”

He said nothing, just nodded his head.
I finished my café au lait.

Well, there you have it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m off to bed, now. Have to get up early tomorrow. I imagine waking up tomorrow and… the world will be out of IPv4 addresses. That feels weird! Good night.

Hurricane Electric IPv4 Exhaustion Counters

Did you know you can use your Mac to connect to any Windows PC? Microsoft has a client, which even allows you to relay audio. It’s pretty cool!

Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2

Or click here for a nice chart of possibilities

Today I had an interesting challenge. I was working on an english retail Windows Server 2008 x64, that was configured as a Domain Controller, running DNS and DHCP.

It was still running SP1 and I wanted to upgrade it to SP2, which did not work using the separate download, but it worked using Microsoft Update!

SP2 installed successfully and it took a while for me to figure out that some services were not running afterwards. Those services included DNS, DHCP and… Windows Event Log. I tried to start the Windows Event Log service, but it would fail with a strange error about the service account not being the same as it used to be or so. Uninstalling SP2 didn’t solve the problem, nor did Google have a solution for me.

I checked the Services and saw the following line:

C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe -k LocalServiceNetworkRestricted

The options on the Log On tab were all disabled (grayed out), but the radio button was set to Local System account, which was interesting, because the Path to executable referred to the LocalServiceNetworkRestricted account.

I decided to try my luck and I started REGEDIT on the server, looked up the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog

There was an ObjectName which held a REG_SZ value of LocalSystem and I decided to change it to NT AUTHORITY\LocalService

It worked! The Windows Event Log service started without any complaints and so did the DNS and DHCP. My server was safe and I was happy!

Are you using Outlook 2010, just like me and do you have a LinkedIn profile?
Give LinkedIn for Outlook a try!
If you’re still on Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007, don’t forget to get the Outlook Social Connector (which is included in Outlook 2010)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc0On7Wl-0I

Sophos announces investment company Apax is about to acquire a majority interest in the IT security company.

Apax Partners to acquire majority interest in Sophos Plc.

I’ve been using ÜberTwitter for some time now and in fact it’s the only serious BlackBerry application for Twitter.

Unfortunately the started using ads a little while ago, which really bugged me, although I understand the wish of the developers to make a living out of it.

I happened to see the possibility to pay $5 and get rid of the ads (the ad supported version remains free of charge), which makes it the perfect app for me. It’s well worth the money! Do you have a BlackBerry? Take yours to the address below and pay those lousy $5. Happy tweeting!

Get ÜberTwitter – The only Twitter Client for your BlackBerry!

Did you see it coming? I wrote on Aardvark earlier and now the time has come. Google acquires Aardvark. In fact this did not come as a surprise to me, but the timing is special. Just now, after Google announced their realtime telephone translation service earlier this week (I’m speaking Dutch in my phone and it comes out in Japanese on the other end of the phone, thanks to realtime voice translation by Google), as well as the launch of Buzz…

We’re facing exciting times and I’m really curious as to how the other parties will respond to these strategic moves… Stay tuned!

Confirmed: Google has Acquired Aardvark

Foursquare (4SQ) is een location based social network. That means you can tell your friends where you are. Or your colleagues. Or your customers. Or your boss. Or the rest of the world.

4SQ contains a game element. You get points every time you tell your network where you are. Every sunday night the leaderboard resets itself, allowing newbies to make it to the top (at least for a short while).

Telling your network where you are is called “checking in”. The best way to do so is by using your cell phone. 4SQ offers applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Palm and for the remaining phones there is a web version. If you want to check in, your phone checks your location and 4SQ tells you where you might want to check in. These are the places that were defined by people who checked in earlier. If your place is not listed, you can add it. Mind correct spelling, addresses, upper/lower case voor cities etc. Your place will be used by future 4SQ users. If you name your place correctly, it will be easier for others to find it.

Anybody can check into public places. The person with the most checkins in a particular place automatically becomes the mayor of that place. There are places in the US that serve free coffee to the local mayor. Think what this may mean for your business in terms of customer experience or marketing!

Hot: It has become possible to mark a place as private. Only your friends can see where you are and the rest of the world can’t. This may be useful if you want to record a phone number with a place. You might even add a Twitter account to a place.

4SQ made me rethink my privacy strategy and my conclusion is that Twitter is for my contact with strangers (and friends of course), where Facebook is strictly for my friends. This means I won’t be publishing location checkins on Twitter, but only on Facebook.

I used to have a Facebook application that automatically updated my Facebook status upon every new tweet on Twitter, but I removed it. Facebook supports a number of native applications. Native applications can update Facebook status in native Facebook format, so Facebook recognizes what they are. This means you’ll find less frequent, but nicer looking status updates no Facebook from now on.

Some applications that offer native Facebookness are (but not limited to): Foursquare, Flickr, Shazam and Youtube.

Click here to get your free Foursquare account

Technical evolution makes hard drives bigger and cheaper. Today, we have bigger files and more pictures and video’s on our computers than ever before.

Are these files safe? Do you have a backup of there beautiful memories? Even today, in 2010 a lot of computer still don’t have a proper backup.

Imaging the following scenario: What happens if your hard drive crashes today? What is safe and what isn’t? After reading this post you have no more excuse for not having a backup of your home computer (corporate servers are a different league).

Today, we have Wuala! Wuala is a free noline service that allows you to store your files. When you open your free account, you get 1 or 2 GB free of charge. You can use Wuala as a web drive, allowing manual storage of your files, but you can also use Wuala as a backup solution. In that case just point to a folder (directory) and tell Wuala to keep a synchronized copy in the cloud.

Wuala keeps all your stored files encrypted. Your files can only be retrieved with your password. Remember: If you lose your Wuala password, there’s no way to recover your files!

Every file Wuala stores is chopped to pieces and kept in (a minimum of 5) different places on the internet. Nerd note: This is done using P2P (Torrent) technology.

Wuala allows you to buy storage, but you can also trade local disk space for online disk space. If your PC has been online for a while Wuala will inform you that you can trade storage. The more you trade, the more you gain.

All files are private files by default. If you have friends or colleagues using Wuala you can share folders with them. If they wish to download a file from one of your shared folders, they don’t only download from your PC (it may not even be switched on), but the file comes from the collective, making downloads a lot faster!

You can use Wuala on more than one computer and it runs on Java, so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux! I keep a Windows Media Center PC at home (powered by Windows 7). It is always on and online. I traded 30 local GB’s for (almost) the same amount of online storage. I’m using this space to keep a backup of my laptop files, while I have easy access to these files from my home computer!

Please note: If you want to use Wuala as a backup solution, you need a Wuala Pro account, which you will get automatically when you buy or trade storage. If you join through a friend you get 1 GB free storage extra (as does your friend). It pays to makes friends on the Wuala network.

If you use the link below, you can become a 2 GB Wuala member as my friend

Wuala – Secure Online Storage – Backup. Store. Share. Access Everywhere.

Last year we saw the announcement and release of Google Wave.

For those who didn’t get it: Google Wave is a Hosted Conversation Service. Google thought: “If email were invented today instead of 40 years ago, what would it look like?”.

Rather than sending endless emails to each other, Wave allows you to start a conversation at one central place and involve other people, yes even entire websites!

If all of this doesn’t ring a bell, have a look at: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
There is short video (2 minutes) that explains in plain english what Wave is all about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8wXnVRnYdc

You can get a Wave account through an Invite, just like Gmail at its time. I still have tons of invites left, so if you’re not on Wave yet and I made you curious, let me know and I’ll send you your invite. Invites can be received at any random email address, but I discovered that invites to Gmail addresses actually take longer to arrive! Once you have your invite, you can subscribe to Wave using a Google Account (can be a different address than the one your invite was sent to). If you don’t have Google Account yet, you can create one on-the-fly and you’re ready to go. In the end you get a new address within Google Wave, which, funny enough, doesn’t allow you to receive email… Your Wave address ends in @googlewave.com and it allows others to add you to their Wave. I use daepunt everywhere, but unfortunately daepunt@googlewave.com wasn’t available, so if you want to share your Wave with me, add puntdae@googlewave.com instead.

The first thing I came across once I got started with Wave, was the interface. The screen looks like an interesting mix between Gmail and Google Docs (a chaos I never got used to). Wave is still in beta, so try not to use it for life/death stuff. On the other hand: If you’re not using it for serious purposes, how will you ever find out what it can/can’t do?

We’re using Wave in a production environment, which makes us discover interesting stuff on a daily basis. I’d like to share a few of those things.

The first thing I immediately missed was mobile support. I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone and a I perform a significant part of my job on the road. Google Wave runs within a browser and there’s no mobile support yet. There are numerous non-official Wave applications for the iPhone, but I’m always very careful with that. Those Apps require you to save your name and password and after that, you have no idea what happens to them. No, thanks! I’ll wait for the official Google App, although you might wonder if your name, password and data are safer with Google…

Google intends to turn Wave into an open platform, allowing the whole world to develop my mobile BlackBerry/iPhone App. But until that day comes, you’re stuck to a browser on a PC. The smartest thing I found was a FireFox Add-On, allowing you to see your unread Waves at the bottom of your FireFox screen: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/14973

Wave is still work in progress. My browser hangs a lot and today I discovered that it’s impossible to “unshare” someone, after you accidentally added the wrong person to your Wave. This means you have to be very careful when sharing Waves. Fortunately there is a way to copy existing Wave content to a new Wave (so your data doesn’t get lost), allowing you to share your stuff with the right people. You will then discover that there’s no way to permanently delete your old Wave! Emptying it or stuffing it with bogus is the only way to get rid of a Wave you accidentally shared with a wrong contact. Be careful with sharing (especially with the wrong people) because this is also a way to connect people to each other, which may not always be your intention…

Despite these quirks I see huge potential for Wave. There are people who worry about Google’s influence on our daily lives and I think it’s important to worry about privacy. Yet, I think Google is no bigger threat than Microsoft and we need to consider the options here. We should choose between existing possibilities instead of theoretical, non-existing products/services.

All progress is achieved step by step and taking active part in new developments enables you to stay involved and up-to-date. I don’t know if Google Wave will remain to exist in five years, but I see potential for a service like Wave. And Wave being Open Source creates spinoff projects, allowing you to run your own corporate in-house Wave server. That solves the privacy argument against Google and I reckon we might very well be installing local Wave servers in SMB companies, which are currently dominated by Microsoft Exchange only, anywhere between now and five years…

I wish you all a happy 2010 and I hope we will continue to see beautiful developments!

From: BlackBerry Network Administrator
Subject: BlackBerry Messenger Software v5.0.0.57 Update Available
Sent: 23 dec. 2009 20:20

A new version of BlackBerry® Messenger software is now available. If you are currently running version 5.0.0.55 or 5.0.0.56 of BlackBerry Messenger, please upgrade to version 5.0.0.57 as soon as possible. This version addresses issues with versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56.

To download the most current version of BlackBerry Messenger software, please visit www.blackberry.com/blackberrymessenger and follow the on-screen instructions. Please note that the software update is available free of charge, however downloading and using applications over the wireless network may incur data usage charges depending on your service plan. Please check with your airtime service provider for information about service costs. If you have any questions about this update, please visit www.blackberry.com/support/messenger.

Thank you,
Research In Motion Limited

©2009 Research In Motion Limited. All rights reserved. BlackBerry®, RIM®, Research In Motion®, SureType®, SurePress™ and related trademarks, names and logos are the property of Research In Motion Limited and are registered and/or used in the U.S. and countries around the world.

Are you using a BlackBerry? Go to the above URL and get the latest version of BlackBerry Messenger!

If you have a BlackBerry, taking screenshots can be a great help when making manuals.
You can do this by using a tool called loader.exe, which is a part of the BlackBerry Desktop Manager.
This program can be found in folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader (on 32 bit systems). On 64 bit PC’s it is the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader folder.

Connect the BlackBerry to your PC, open a Command Prompt, go to the directory mentioned above and start:

loader.exe /screenshot filename.bmp

to take a ‘picture’ of your BlackBerry’s active screen.

You can find more information and options in Research in Motion’s KB17215:

Use loader.exe to take screenshots of your BlackBerry

Let’s see if this works…

Haha! COOL! It’s not fast, but it does work!

Let’s see if I can explain this without images…

Beware! If you’re not currently using Twitter, I suggest you get an account and play around with it for a while before checking out Twitter Lists. I wrote an article in Dutch, which is called “Twitter voor Jip en Janneke”. If you don’t understand Dutch, then maybe Wikipedia has the solution.

Due to the nature of Following people on Twitter, Twitter is an excellent tool for networking. It allows you to find people based on what they wrote or where they wrote it. And from now on you can make lists using Twitter Lists!

Anyone (with a Twitter account) can make a list. The list can then follow other people and of course others can follow your list. Repeat this sentence out loud.

It sounds simple and it is, but it has huge potential.

The following URL shows which lists are following me:
http://twitter.com/daepunt/lists/memberships

Of course you can find me on our own team list of Punt & Partners automatisering, @ppaut/team but I happened to see I also got listed on @Lars_Schenk/developers (probably because Lars, whom I don’t know yet, thinks I’m a developer, which is basically not far from the truth) and I’m listed on @tweepguide/nl-iphone (probably because I tweet about my #iPhone on a regular basis).

@Lars_Schenk was the first stranger to enlist me, so I went out and checked his blog to see what he was all about. I discovered he’s a German who blogs using WordPress, just like I do! He also writes articles in his native language, as well as English, which is why I tweeted to inform him about WPML, the free system to make your WordPress blog multilingual! @Lars_Schenk was very happy with that, he tweeted back, which is exactly what Twitter Lists are all about: More Contact!

I hope my article was useful to you. The link below shows you what the Twitter blog has to say about their own Twitter Lists. Happy tweeting!

Twitter Blog: Soon to Launch: Lists

(Hi there, MobyPicture guy! I lost your Twitter account and your email address, so I hope this information gets to your by Twitter and maybe we’ll be able to solve the case together)

I’ve been using the MobyPicture App on my iPhone for some time now and it’s great!

When I shoot a picture, the App sends it to MobyPicture, Twitter and Flickr, along with the description, tags and even a geotag (information on where the picture was taken).

However: there is a nasty bug in the App. It’s taken a fair bit of time for me to discover exactly what the problem was and it took me some time to collect the evidence, but here it goes:

On September 19th I used the MobyPicture App to shoot the following picture::

I added a title and tags:

#Cat on the #roof

The App shows me that all went well:

#Cat on the #roof

The picture was sent to MobyPicture without any problem (click the picture to see the result in a new window):

#Cat on the #roof

BUT…

Flickr shows me two pictures; one with the right title, no description, (just) the tags and no geotag (click the picture to see the result in a new window):

#Cat on the #roof

and one which has the (a) location as its title, the title for description, no tags, but it does have a geotag (click the picture to see the result in a new window):

#Cat on the #roof

I’m puzzled! What’s wrong?

Earlier I wrote about the possiblity to share your Twitter Favorites (for example to Twitter, via TwitterFeed).
I assumed this would be possible some day and today I figured out that it works! If you run into a nice video on YouTube, it’s easy to mark it as a Favorite. RSS allows you to share your YouTube Favorites with your friends (or Followers on Twitter).
If you have an iPhone, you can set a Favorite by pressing a single button, allowing quick and easy sharing.

In fact: the approach is exactly the same as sharing your Twitter Favorites. You just need the URL address of your YouTube Favorites.
Go to www.youtube.com and log in using your account. If you don’t have one yet, sign up (you can use your Google account), so you can get started!

Your Favorites on YouTube

Go to your Favorites and check the URL in the address bar (click the picture to enlarge it)). Notice the orange RSS icon. YouTube automatically creates a dynamic RSS feed of your Favorites and we’re going to use it.
Click the orange RSS icon:

Your Favorites on YouTube as an RSS feed

Write down (or copy) the address of your YouTube Favorites and use this RSS feed as an input source for TwitterFeed. Just like the Twitter Favorites, you can run this feed through Yahoo!Pipes to add or manipulate the stream. If you’re interested in who’s clicking your favorites, you might consider using Google FeedBurner. Yes, FeedBurner even allows you to set up an automatically generated Newsletter by email with your favorite video’s…

And Bob’s your uncle! As soon as you mark a video as a Favorite on YouTube, TwitterFeed can now send out a tweet to Twitter. Of course you can replace Twitter by MySpace, Facebook or even your weblog…

Good luck!

I wrote about Woopra earlier, which allows you to view live website traffic, unlink Google Analytics, which has about a one day delay.
If you have a high traffic website Woopra looks very impressive! @marcned made a cool video to demonstrate this:

Have you been using Google Analytics to find out who’s been visiting your website? After all: knowing beats guessing, right?
Although the one day delay in Google’s statistics was always bothering me. Well, Woopra does it live! With a world map that could have escaped straight from a James Bond movie, telling you who’s visiting your website right now and even how (s)he got there! You can even start a live chat with your visitors. It’s great! Free beta testing closes today, so make sure you get a free account and sign up your website(s!) for beta testing approval ASAP!

Woopra – Web Statistics 2.0

If you have several weblogs and a username and password for almost every social network available? Collect and combine all data from these networks into one readable timeline with

Yesterday @marcelprins and I visited Amstelveen to meet Mr. Daniel Brunnert, Regional Sales Manager of Syncsort for a live demo of Backup Express BEX, a great new technology that allows not only backup of virtualized servers, but also restore!

The beauty of this technology is the super efficient way (both speed and storage) you can back up (to tape, files, and even files, presenting themselves as tapes) while the restore part of the solution allows you to restore single files, mount live disks or even mount live virtual servers!

I’m confident we’ll hear more of this great solution. At this moment there is support for VMware ESX and the engineers at Syncsort are busy building support for (Microsoft) Hyper-V. Unfortunately Xen is not on their list.

I met Daniel at the CeBIT in Hannover, earlier this year and -accidentally- running into great stuff like this is exactly why you need to get out of the office every now and then to visit a fair or exihition

Syncsort Backup Express (BEX) – How Fast Can you Recover?

Are you looking for a good, reliable and free TFTP Server for upgrading software of your switch, firewall or router?

Try TFTP Server from SolarWinds!

TFTP, Free TFTP Server, TFTP Server: Free Network Monitoring Tools from SolarWinds

Tip: If you want to know if a program is 32-bit of 64-bit, you can use FileVer.exe to find out.

How to use the Filever.exe tool to obtain specific information about a file in Windows

Are you worried about the security of your WordPress blog and do you want to upgrade it to the latest version?

If you’re using WordPress MU, you’ll probably run into an error.

Read the following link and find out how make one tiny change to a file can repair WordPress MU’s auto upgrade feature.

WordPress MU › WordPress MU Forums » Upgrade to WPMU 2.8.2 failed

A while ago I discovered that, despite its fantastic looks, the iPhone is actually a very unsecure device and just the idea that it might be broken, lost or stolen one day is driving me crazy already. Time to act!

I decided to remove my company data, followed by my Gmail and today I’m only using my iPhone for Twitter and a digital shopping list. For me, personally, the features of my BlackBerry BES are the minimum standard of security and apparently it’s lonely at the top…

Even the use of Twitter is dangerous (if Twitter is online), because my favorite Twitter application SimplyTweet doesn’t use secure SSL to send my data to Twitter. Consider this: The whole security community shouts “SSL is insecure, use EV SSL instead”, while there are still companies, services and application who aren’t even using “plain” SSL… Even our Dutch Government and our National Banks barely see the need of SSL and given the demonstrated and obvious security flaws of SSL they don’t see the need to implement EV SSL, so why would you worry about it?

Tweetie, my previous favorite Twitter application has been using SSL for years. I just think that Tweetie was far ahead of its time and that’s probably why we haven’t seen an update of Tweetie ever since.

I think it’s incredible to see that many people don’t seem to care or think about possible loss or theft of their cell phone, what may happen to their data and the possible impact this may have on their position. And if nobody cares about it, why would the manufacturers of the devices? Except, of course, Canadian company Research in Motion…

Imagine the following scenario: You’re an accountant and you’re using email on a daily basis. You have a cell phone. Let’s say: a Nokia. You’ve had it or a while and it accommodates quite a lot of phone numbers. You’ve had your phone linked to your corporate Exchange server, which took some effort (certificate, software update for your device, sometimes it’s not working and WiFi has never really worked properly), but it allows your to read and reply an occasional email.

Now, imagines your phone being broken, lost or stolen.

Phone broken
Which information did you have on your phone? Did you poke around with that data cable or Bluetooth every day to copy your valuable contacts and appointments to your computer? Did that sunday afternoon of deleting double appointments invite you to try again later? No, of course, because it’s too much pain and too much software is involved. This means: what you don’t have elsewhere, you don’t have and that’s a shame.

Phone missing
If your phone is missing and you don’t know where it is, there may be a chance it’s at home, between two pillows on your couch, but it may also have been stolen. The problem is, that you don’t know and you have to assume you’re not going to find it again. First of all: block your SIM card, so the possible thief can’t call on your expense. ALWAYS secure your SIM card with a PIN code (and pick something a bit more difficult than 0000 or 1234), preventing the thief from calling between the moment your phone went missing until the moment you’ve had your SIM card blocked. And then your data. It’s not only gone, but somebody else is sitting on it. Somebody who only has to press hash-menu to gain access to your contacts, phone numbers, appointments, emails, text messages, notes and whatever I may have forgotten.

And this: What if your phone isn’t stolen, but you have a grateful collegue, competitor, “friend” or somebody who checks your phone from time to time to see if there’s any interesting news? I don’t know anybody with National Secrets on their phones, but your stuff is your stuff and everybody should stay away from it. Well, you can’t take care of that with your Nokia.

And what goes for Nokia, goes for the iPhone in a similar way. Linking your iPhone to your company server is easier than with Nokia, but the remaining data you hadn’t copied using the data cable goes missing if your phone does, nevertheless. And then security. Can you imagine Apple making an iPhone 3GS, allowing your data to be encrypted with a key, that is stored on your phone itself?!? You don’t have to be a genius to understand that this level of “protection” is just a thing from the Marketing Division, who wanted to put on the box that the iPhone 3GS supports Encryption…

Restoration is a small freeware tool which can undelete files (NTFS/FAT) in Windows. It can be executed without installation on the same active partition of the to-be-recovered files (not recommended).

Search with google: ‘restoration brian kato’

BrightGeist

Originally uploaded by jon|k

Wow! Do you want to know where your friends or collegues are hanging out? Well, you can call them, of course, but hey: phones are soooo last millennium! Look what I found today: a mashup of Brightkite and Microsoft Surface… The future is now!