Great news for compulsive masterbaters and porn addicts!  According to search company’s statistics, there’s been a sharp increase in porn that’s viewable on the iPhone.  Now with 3G technology users will be able to get multimedia faster and probably stream movies right off the Internet onto the touch screen.  I use the phrase “touch screen” loosely as I’m sure programmers will find a way to make interactive naughty apps.  Apple has said that it will be a cold day in hell before they allow any adult-related applications on the iPhone app store but so what?  You can also install your own.

The Internet is in a transition period from the Web 2.0 era(about 1998-2008) to Web 2.5(2008-2010).  During this time a whole slew of different applications and innovations will come about that will be the determining factors for the Internet of tomorrow.  There’s no definitive era’s or time frames of what makes each version of the web except for what the experts and industry leaders have been touting off.  So these are my personal estimates.

Web 3.0, as stated on Wiki, is estimated to begin in 2010.  So these next two years will be crucial to the transformation of the foundation for the new Internet.  Starting as early as 2005, and the majority in 2007, there have been online web applications popping up.  These include web based CRM software, corporate Wiki’s, web office applications, and others.  I believe this will be the heart of the Web 3.0 evolution.  Everyday applications that are currently used on the PC will move over to web based versions.  This will create subscription based content and modules.  Additionally this will also help combat piracy as it’s much harder to replicate an online application as it is for an offline application.

2008 has become the cornerstone for these web apps and now the bigger issue is…  What if your Internet or server goes down?  Company’s still need the ability to work even if they lose connectivity.  Welcome to Web 2.5 and 3.0, where there are offline versions of the online web apps that will sync up the next time you reconnect to the Internet.  Take for example, Etelos, which was founded in 1999 and provides on-demand, browser-based applications such as CRM and Project for Google Apps.  The Etelos Marketplace (TM) also allows developers to license, distribute, and host their applications.  According to this TechCrunch article, Etelos has announced that their new platform will allow web apps to run offline.  Then re-sync with the online version once you reconnect.

I think these technologies still have maturing to do.  For example, in regards to Google Apps, any document or data you create on their service becomes Google property.  I don’t think corporations will like this very much as it creates privacy issues.  There must be some sort of change in this arena to give corporations or any user for that matter a warm fuzzy feeling inside about their data.  Until then, we will be stuck in this transition period.

eBay purchased Skype for $2.6 billion back in 2005 with the intent of integrating the service into the eBay auction site.  A perfect harmony of buyers and sellers asking each other questions about items for sale via voice.  But the idea never took off and for several reasons.  eBay never really had a full plan outlined on the project.  It was a great expensive(and I cannot emphasize anymore on this) idea to integrate the two services.  But if there’s no planning involved for the project to move forward how can such an idea be executed in the first place.  If you go to eBay’s website, look through the pages, the auctions, the buyer and seller profiles, you don’t see a way to contact these users via Skype communications.  Same thing on Skype.com, no sign of eBay’s ownership or service integration.  You can send Paypal payments to Skype contacts but what good is that?  If you could chat via voice and/or video with buyers and sellers it could give each person more confidence with bidding or completing a sale.

I think eBay has the resources to still pull this off, especially with Skype’s current member count of 309 million users.  Also, how many eBay commercials have you seen?  A lot, even during Superbowl’s.  Now how many Skype commercials have you seen?  None.  eBay treats Skype like the red headed step child that it is.  But there is so much more potential behind the service that’s untapped.  eBay may seem more willing to just let Skype go and not even bother.  Especially with the recent talks of selling the service.  As Ars Technica says in this article, Google may be the best company to purchase Skype.  They definitely have the resources and the new Android cellphone platform to push it to consumers.

So you’re browsing the web after work one day at home.  You misspell the website you’re trying to access.  We have all done it, even the best writers in the world have typo’s.  But this article over at The Reg says that Internet Service Providers purposely bank off customer’s typo’s.  Those websites that you misspell and open up a blank page with a bunch of advertisements could be your ISP trying to make additional money from you.  Security researcher Dan Kaminsky said at this years ToorCon that these technique’s ISP’s use to make additional revenue could be insecure to the customers.  ToorCon is an annual hacker conference in San Diego where they discuss everything from device hacking, reverse engineering, to cryptographic algorithm’s.  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Comcast, Verizon and at least 70 other Internet service providers are putting their customers at serious risk in their quest to make money from mistyped web addresses, security researcher Dan Kaminsky says.

Speaking at the ToorCon security conference in Seattle, Kaminsky demonstrated an exploit class he dubbed PiTMA, short for provider-in-the-middle attacks. A variation of man-in-the-middle attacks, it stole authentication cookies and injected arbitrary content into trusted web pages by exploiting weaknesses in an ad server Earthlink used when returning results for non-existent addresses.

Once upon a time, mistyped domain names resulted in a browser returning a simple 404 error that said the address didn’t exist. Then ISPs realized they could make money by returning a failure notice that included banner ads and other content. This ad injection is done through the magic of the domain name system. As a result, browsers get fooled into thinking a request for qww.microsoft.com is a legitimate address that’s controlled by the same network responsible for www.microsoft.com.

“Guys, anything goes wrong on that subdomain [and] it isan element of the parent,” Kaminsky said. “It can access cookies, it can do other things. Normally a subdomain is trusted by the parent. Not this time.”

Farecast.com has been acquired by Microsoft for $115 Million. Farecast is an airfare prediction website that uses it’s own algorithm’s to help predict the best time to purchase airline tickets. The company was founded in 2003 by Oren Etzioni, which is also the founder of MetaCrawler and is a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. According to Wikipedia, the site has collected over 175 billion airfare observations to date.  Microsoft will most likely integrate Farecast’s services into its own barrage of networks and online content.  For example they may utilize Windows Spaces or Windows Live to help advertise the service.

LOL!  I am still laughing after reading this one.  Apparently Philippine medical staff from the Vincente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu City are in deep shit after posting a surgical video on YouTube.  The surgery is for the removal of a perfume bottle that was shoved up the guys ass from a male prostitute.  Now I have nothing against Gay’s what so ever but come on now.  If you HIRED a male prostitute can’t you do more pleasurable things than let him shove inanimate objects up your ass?  Wait a minute, don’t answer that.

Furthermore, the staff not only video taped it but also were shown laughing at the guy in the video.  The video was pulled off YouTube(DAMN!) for privacy issues.  Okay I need to post this because my ribs hurt from laughing so hard.  I feel sorry for the guy but come on we’re all human here!

I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit at the opening excerpt of this article over at The Inquirer.  Although I’m not one for bashing Apple users, especially for my recent respect of the company and its products, but I thought it was humorous:
“Wi-Fi positioning accurate to within one or two continents.  THAT APPLE users are pretty much helpless basket cases is a given. But to discover that the pastel-hued gadgets on which they base their designer lifestyles are about as much use as a chocolate teapot is more amusing than a duck shooting Dick Cheney by mistake.”

Although this technology(dubbed “feature”) would be nice if it actually works correctly.  I think there might be a future security concern here.  This feature is supposed to triangulate the position of the iPhone user with WiFi access points within your area(for um “tracking” purposes so you know where you are).  The article complains that this feature currently is pretty useless but IF they did get it working what happens if you could reverse the technology?  What if you could triangulate the users position just by using the same technology but look up their positions from the access points instead?  This means you could find that person as long as they’re within range of your access point.  I’m sure this technology has safeguards against such a practice but as with everything in this industry, NOTHING is secure.

When Viruses, Trojans, Malware, and Spam isn’t enough researchers have found a more brutal way to hack your computer.  For years, hacking software has been the norm to gain access to someone else’s computer or network.  Now, Samuel King from the University of Illinois says hacking the hardware or the chips is the next level.  A snibbit from the article:

“New research has shown that it is in fact possible to alter chips in such a way as to leave computers helpless to back-door attacks, which would be almost impossible to detect.

To prove their point, researchers set up a demo of such an attack yesterday, in San Francisco, at a security conference called the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats. The alarming demo showed how a processor running a Linux operating system was left totally vulnerable after a malicious firmware laden chip was given instructions to allow an attacker to log on to the computer without any trouble at all.

Needless to say, this will just hype up the paranoia at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) , who already issued a warning back in 2005 about how offshore integrated circuit manufacturing could give rise to dangerous security breaches. After all, if you let pesky foreigners handle your chips, who knows what they might do to them.”

You know those annoying squiggly numbers and letters that you’re forced to type in whenever you open a new account on a website?  These things are called Captchasand are used to help deter from automated bots to create fake accounts.  Computers have been unable to read the text in these images and humans were the only ones that could read/translate them.  Now it has been announced that this process has been cracked and can be read by a computer in under 60 seconds.  This means that spammers can use these automated bots and auto create hotmail, gmail, or any other web based email service to send out spam.  Just when you thought there’s enough spam in the world here comes a lot more.  Source: The Inquirer

The much anticipated release of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 is to be released to Original Equipment Manufacturers(OEMs) on April 21st.  XP SP3 will then be available for download from Microsoft Update, Windows Update site, and the Microsoft Download Center on April 29th.  June 10th, XP SP3 will be available via automatic updates.  Sources: Neowin.net Arstechnica.com Technewsworld.com

Service Pack 3 has been reported to include a total of 1,073 fixes according to Wikipedia.  The update also allows XP to be installed without a product key and run until the end of the 30-day activation period without a product key.

These dates have NOT been confirmed from Microsoft as of the writing of this article.  So there’s a chance that these dates could be off.  This will be the last Service Pack for the Windows XP operating system from Microsoft as reported.  June 30th, 2008 was announced as the last day XP can be purchased for new PC’s.  After this date it will only be sold to OEMs installing on subnotebooks or UMPC’s until June 30th, 2010.

According to this blog post over at sphere.com AOL had quietly started using “Sphere it” icon’s in their News, Sports, and Entertainment articles on 04/01/08.  Well today Time Warner Inc. has announced AOL’s acquisition of Sphere Source Inc.  According to the press release Sphere was founded in 2005, although Tech Crunch says their site didn’t launch until May 2006(with $3.75 million venture financing).  This pretty much says that AOL is not sitting around twiddling their thumbs while Yahoo contemplates merging with them.  Sphere.com on the other hand had a nice run up starting with $3.75M initial investments and selling for $25M not even 2 years after launch.  What a nice ROI!

I keep seeing more articles and blogs about the failure of Windows Vista.  I can’t help but think about what is going on behind the scenes right now at Microsoft.  What are the collaboration idea’s flying around the conference tables.  How far into Windows 7 are they really in terms of the source code and do they still have possible alternatives on the table to change or scrap it.  Is it really going to come out in 2010 or are they just blowing smoke up every one’s asses to try and retain market share.

For the longest time, the PC markets have been divided.  You either owned a Mac or a PC and the software was not interoperable between them.  Recently, Apple has an operating system that not only handles their own apps but also has the ability to run Windows and Windows related applications via virtualization software(you could also dual boot).

Here’s what I think:

Microsoft should create their own Linux distribution.  Yes!  It’s a crazy idea, not new, but it can work and I’ll tell you why.

• Almost every other operating system besides Windows is based on some sort of Unix or Linux flavor.  If Microsoft’s operating system was also on this same infrastructure they would have a lot more alliances.  The open source community will be able to find, fix, and patch security holes to help collaborate with Microsoft’s support team.  Of course all these new patches would have to be verified and released by them “officially”.  Software would be interoperable across all platforms, Linux flavors and Mac’s alike. 
• Hardware manufacturers are still having driver issues with their hardware working properly in Vista.  See the Creative Labs and Nvidia forums.  ATI’s hardware seems to have less headaches judging by the amount of complaints.  But then again, Nvidia also has more market share so take that for what it’s worth.  This will also give the driver teams less overhead as they only need to make Linux based drivers, not to mention they’ll have the open source community behind them.
• Software publishers, same thing.  Even with the release of Vista Service Pack 1, it broke a few software packages.  Granted, no where near as many XP Service Pack 2 during its release but still notable.  Again, they will have the open source community behind them to find/solve issues and work ’s.  They can still charge for licencing and deter pirating with some sort of activation like Microsoft/Adobe.(the activation system is a bit buggy too but that’s for another article).  Windows/Critical updates will be similar to the update system in Ubuntu.  Simple and streamlined.
• Microsoft has released the virtualization Hypervisor feature in Windows Server 2008.  Modify and port this feature over to their Linux distribution as a virtualization layer similar to Wine.  It should have the ability to run not only Windows operating systems but also Windows based applications on the fly.  No need to run it within a virtualization program as the Hypervisor layer will be integrated into the operating system and you can open the programs as if you’re in Windows.
• Microsoft’s Enterprise sector will have to slowly be revamped to work under this new infrastructure.  Windows Server and it’s features will have to ported over but once it’s done once then everything can be modular like Mac’s Leopard and server counter parts.  SQL Server and Exchange, same thing.  But all of this, including Windows Server versions, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. SHOULD all work under the Hypervisor feature just like it does now in the Windows Server 2008 version.  This will help smooth out the transition over to the new operating system structure.
• I’m sure there’s a lot of other things I can’t think of or I’m missing but would like further input on this from the Open Source community.  How would this community feel about Microsoft converging into them?

Yes, it’s an enormous change for Microsoft.  But, they themselves said they wanted to be more interoperable.  It doesn’t get much more interoperable than this.  Microsoft Linux 2012 or Winux has my vote.

Apparently some anti-spam filtering services throttle down traffic from Gmail and Yahoo networks. This is due to the reports from security firms that the Windows Live CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, used by Hotmail and an equivalent system used by Gmail, have been cracked by automated attacks. The Register also reports that “Cyber criminals are employing sweatshops in India for as little as $4 a day to defeat anti-spam security checks, according to a recent analysis by net security firm Trend Micro. It reckons miscreants prefer to hire cheap labour rather than using automated techniques to defeat CAPTCHAs”

Google recently acquired Postini, which is one of the leading email security and filtering systems in the world. Postini not only filters incoming traffic and emails but also outgoing as well. You would think this service would help deter from this type of abuse. I personally have experience with Postini’s service as the company I work for is a Postini partner. It’s a great service that filters incoming and outgoing traffic alike with optional email encryption/archiving. We have converted many customers from software based anti-spam software to this service and its been a huge improvement. About as good if not better than the Barracuda devices. Better actually because it doesn’t even reach your network or consume any of your network resources. I’m beginning to sound like a Postini sales rep now so I’m going to stop. I’m not sure if Postini has the resources to filter out the entire Gmail network, but I would presume Google would have integrated this service with their data centers to help cope.

I don’t know about you but I’m tired of remembering 100+ usernames and passwords for every single site on the internet. Technewsworld.com reports that Project Concordia demonstrated several products at the RSA Security Conference to help with just that. A single username and password that is interoperable with all of your website accounts. Several vendors are involved with this project including Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, FuGen Solutions, Internet2, Ping Identity, and Symlabs. Unfortunately, this service is still in early stages of beta and the current working service is rough around the edges. But if they work out the kinks and get this to be fully operational it will definitely revolutionize the Internet.