Wireless Broadband: It’s been a long time coming (back)

So, I’ve finally rejoined the modern era.

My first exposure to consumer broadband was in 1994 when a friend of mine was a beta tester for @home. Back in the days when you could send an email to a fax machine and have a pizza delivered in 30 minutes.

In 1997 we were expanding into an additional building, but there was a several month wait to get a T1. PacBell was buried in the Silicon Valley with the beginning of the tech boom. We rolled out some Ricochet 28.8kbps wireless modems, linked them to increase throughput, and had a reasonable work around.

Around the same time, cellular rates had dropped to nearly nothing in Israel. I had visions of telecommuting using a cellular modem from the beach.

Y2K rolled around, the world hadn’t ended, and Ricochet bumped service to 128kbps and I jumped on it. Wireless ethernet was brand spanking new at the time, most cell phones were analog, and I was taking the train, streaming music from the internet, and working remotely for $75/month. Unfortunately, they were ahead of their time. The bubble burst, they held on for a while, but finally went under.

Since then, I’ve tethered my laptop to my mobile from time to time, but would usually stick to getting online when I could find a WiFi signal. Yesterday I broke down and got an EVDO card. Right now I’m finally living the dream I first had over a decade ago. Granted, I’m not on a beach, and my Hebrew isn’t very good, but at least technology has caught up.

UK is attempting to ban kink

Well, the kink is still legal, but owning documentation of it may not be. Apparently a man watched some rather extreme pornography, then went of and raped then killed a woman. The bill includes banning “an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life”. If this passes, I wonder if they will go after Catholics. You know why Jesus died on the cross? He forgot his safe word.

Clicky clicky for the linky linky

It’s the people, not the tool

I think this article misses the point behind the events that surround this story. It’s not the tool that got him the help he needed. It was the people listening.

Twitter is a great way to do broadcasting to the masses. But it’s not the only way.

In response to Suckerity…..

In response to the previous post….

Myspace hired to solved their security problems back in 2006:

Quick post on corporate suckurity

If these big corporations with tons of resources can’t do the easy stuff properly, how can we expect them to manage the hard stuff?

 

1) Myspace

Where’s the secure login? If they had SSL and certificates it would cut down on phishing and stolen accounts. I’m at a loss. Maybe someone out there can tell me why they haven’t done it.

 

2) Yahoo

They have SSL implemented, but the certificate was expired for quite a while, weeks, if not months. Also, they are cheap. login.yahoo.com has a proper cert attached, but mail.yahoo.com has a cert for login.yahoo.com, too. Come on guys, pony up a couple bucks for another certificate.

Dead Plot

Take a great 80’s film about computers (and probably one of the first examples of hacking), decide that you want to update it and make it hip. The result (if you’re the current remake crazy execs in hollywood) will get you the following crap:

So it’s a modern day version of the John Badham film we all grew up with. I could see a sequel starring Matthew Brodrick doing better than this.