In a landmark ruling in Europe, a privacy regulator has ruled that IP addresses constitute private data. This is very interesting and long overdue. These days before every Google search I fear the cookie that Google has on my computer. I’ve disabled Google Web History, but I know they’re still gathering data! I could set firefox to delete the cookie after every session as I do with most other cookies, but (a) I like to stay signed in to reader, gmail, etc. and (b) Google can still mine a lot of data from my searches while I’m signed in. (Aside: Perhaps I need to start using different browsers for searches)!.

Coming back to privacy, I talk of Google but its true of anyone. Even if someone doesn’t use private data right now, there’ll always be an evil project manager who’ll wonder why they never thought of using it - its an obvious gold mine. The amount of data someone can collect about you with just a cookie (and an IP Address) is freaky! Just look at the cookies stored by your browser (beyond the necessary authentication cookies) to know how many companies love to collect data!

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A couple of months ago, when apple announced its iphone, I happened to read about a relatively young project to free up the mobile phone, albeit in the form of an incomplete comparison between two phones which weren’t available yet. While the iphone was cool and exciting and apple could be relied upon to come up with a tightly integrated phone with a classy user interface, the restrictions on third party applications and the closed nature meant that you couldn’t conjure up your own apps and scripts. The vendor specific enhanced features was also a big turn off. The notion of an open smart phone was extremely exciting.

Recently, I attended a presentation on OpenMoko (Open Mobile Kommunikations), the project to create a completely open mobile phone platform. Sean Moss-Pultz, the project lead spoke on the motivation behind the project and the business model while Harald Welte went into technical details and gave a demo. It was most informative. An open phone means a lot more than just open source and free upgrades.

Phones have always been a very restrictive platform. The margins being wafer thin, a manufacturer needs to sell millions of units to be profitable. Its in their interests to encourage phone upgrades. One important motivation behind OpenMoko was to reduce the rate at which phones are rendered obsolete. According to Sean, hardware undergoes fewer changes than software so traditionally one ended up upgrading a phone where a software upgrade would suffice.

Of course, FIC has plans to benefit from OpenMoko. Sean mentioned that a major part of the manufacturing cost was software licenses, hence they benefit from free software. FIC also has a few companies interested in innovative uses for OpenMoko based devices. Carriers too would benefit from an increase in ARPU due to increased data usage, reduction in SAC and churn and the possibility of offering value added services such as data backup, etc.

The phone itself follows a simple philosophy, build a phone with great hardware and basic software (dialer, contacts, SMS, browser, drivers for bluetooth, wifi, gps and gsm, etc.). OpenMoko would have a apt like package manager system which would help users install additional applications for their tastes. Applications themselves could be either OpenMoko certified or community driven as in any desktop linux distribution operating system. Thats not all, an open phone allows unlimited flexibility that we’ve been trained to think impossible. For example, when a wifi or bluetooth network is available one could switch to (cheaper) VOIP calls and IM instead of SMS.

For a power user of course, the phone throws up endless possibilities. Some of them are so simple, yet would change the way you look at phones -

• GPS aware profiles - automatically switch phone profiles based on location
• ACLs, any number not in contacts can be made to pass through a set of access control rules before the call is accepted
• Phone Tracking

More interesting ideas are here and elsewhere in the wiki. The first OpenMoko phone Neo1973 is coming real soon! The only question is to see if one should wait for the phase 2 device (which has a faster CPU and wifi) or if FIC comes up with an interesting upgrade deal.

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I’ve seen quite a few instances of mis-configured networks when someone tries to add a wireless router to a small / home network. Most people throw in a wireless router and expect it to just work with their broadband routers. While on some (rare) occasions it might work out of the box, on most occasions it doesn’t due to IP address conflicts, in-flexible configuration options on the routers, etc. Almost everyone ends up configuring double NAT.

I wrote up a small HOWTO to explain a simple method of configuring such networks that should work with the cheapest device with the least flexibility. Here it is - Wireless and ADSL Router HOWTO. Although I use ADSL as an example, it should work with any kind of upstream device.

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I use the akismet wordpress plugin to nuke spam. This eventually screws up the consistency of the wordpress database resulting in incorrect comment counts in some blog posts. Thankfully, this is quite trivial to fix with a few tweaks on the MYSQL database. Here is a script to do just that.

Disclaimer: Although the script fixed my database, you should verify that your symptoms are the same. I am not liable for any issues due to this script :-).

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Yes, I’m back to ranting about everybody’s favourite e-mail address vendor bank. Citibank’s online banking code goes something like this -

switch ($input) {
        case x:
                /* User wants what we want him to want. Ooooh baby!
                  * We love him. Lets give him what he wants. */
                $email = lookup_email ($user);
                send_email_address_to_spammers ($email);
                handle_user_request();
                break;
        default:
                /* Uh, oh! I don't think we'd ever be here. */
                $email = lookup_email ($user);
                send_email_address_to_spammers ($email);
                do_logout ($user);
                break;
}

So every time I select something that they didn’t expect, I get logged off. This, of course, is browser dependent which makes it all the more stupid. Is this paranoid programming?

Wait, there’s more stupidity. RBI introduced real time fund transfer between banks called RTGS. Citibank, of course, has to screw up this simple facility. They decided to make a cool drop down box to help us choose the bank and the branch. Now I know that there are strong emotions regarding the change in Bangalore’s name to Bengalooru, but Citibank takes it to an entirely new level. If you don’t find your bank / branch under one version of the city’s name, you’re expected to try another variant. Thats not all, they even list suburbs like BANNERGHATTA and JAYANAGAR. Citibank somehow managed to screw up the presentation of a simple simple list published by the RBI. I don’t know if Bangalore is known by another mysterious name, but I didn’t find HSBC Bangalore in that list!

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