geek stuff

Santa Cruz culture gives tech start ups a competitive edge

Santa Cruz inspires Tomfoolery.

“The culture of community is Santa Cruz’s greatest export,” said Sol Lipman, one of three local entrepreneurs speaking at an event Thursday evening celebrating the growth and innovation of the local tech scene.
Sol is the founder of Tomfoolery, a start up that’s targeting the corporate sector with mobile apps that grow social networks within companies organically. He pointed out that the top three social networking platforms used for business are actually well known consumer market apps: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, in that order.… More

Pure Unix slides as offspring mature

21 September 2013 by Steve Blum
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Big iron gunned down.

Recent obituaries for Unix have made for amusing reading. Two market analysis companies, Gartner and IDC, are predicting a long slide for the venerable operating system in the big iron side of the server market. Between 2012 and 2017, Gartner says that Unix’s share of the server market will slip from 16% to 9%, while IDC predicts revenues will drop from $10.2 billion to $8.7 billion over the same period.

The declining numbers – which are very plausible – aren’t a function of Unix’s appeal or utility, but of the types of machines it tends to run on and the people who maintain it.… More

Proprietary home automation platforms spring security leaks

1 September 2013 by Steve Blum
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Open source makes it harder to open doors.

The open source versus proprietary platform debate is moving into the home automation sector. Z-Wave is a proprietary protocol for wirelessly managing home devices, including locks, sensors and security cameras. It’s been hacked by two network security professionals who wanted to see if it’s really as secure as advertised.

It is and it isn’t.

Behrang Fouladi and Sahand Ghanoun took over a Z-Wave motion sensor using an idiot-simple trick – intercept a wireless command, record and replay it – and defeated a lock with only a little more effort.… More

U.S. group drafting standards for industrial strength Internet

31 August 2013 by Steve Blum
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Sorry. I thought you said the castanet of things.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is coordinating an effort – with broad industry support – to create security and operating standards for industrial machine-to-machine (M2M) data communications.

There are already a couple of efforts underway amongst mobile carriers and equipment makers to standardise protocols for wireless segments of those networks. The expectation is that billions – 50 billion by 2020? – of devices will communicate directly back to the Internet of Things via mobile data modules.… More

Chattanooga notches up a major geek milestone with Ironman selection


I’ve been waiting a long time for an excuse to post one of my Ironman finisher photos.

When people outside of the industry ask me “What do you do?”, I usually answer “Swim, bike, run. Eat, sleep. Repeat.” If pressed, I’ll admit to doing something or other with broadband, then quickly steer the conversation back to triathlon, particularly the ultra-distance form of the addiction sport. So I can’t resist the temptation of a press release from the World Triathlon Corporation and the Chattanooga Sports Committee, announcing Ironman Chattanooga, a new race beginning in 2014.… More

Next Microsoft CEO needs to come from outside of the shrink-wrapped box

24 August 2013 by Steve Blum
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Steve and Mini-Steve.

The best news Microsoft has had in many months came Friday with the announcement that CEO Steve Ballmer would be stepping down some time in the next twelve months, and a top level board committee, that includes Bill Gates, will be looking for his successor.

Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000, when Gates began pulling back from day to day management of the company and increasingly focused on tackling the big problems that face mankind via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.… More

ZTE might get some developer love with cheap Firefox phone

17 August 2013 by Steve Blum
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Or it might be chasing its tail.

ZTE isn’t big in the U.S. Only the least of the four major mobile carriers – Sprint – offers a branded ZTE smart phone on its website and then just a single model. Its only distinguishing feature is the number of flaming negative reviews written by unhappy buyers.

With little to lose, ZTE is bypassing mobile carriers and going direct-to-geek by selling an unlocked $80 phone – the Open – running the new Firefox mobile operating system on eBay.… More

Bezo's WaPo purchase a chance to do good by doing well

5 August 2013 by Steve Blum
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Distinguished company.

The best explanation of today’s announcement that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is buying the Washington Post comes from the Post’s own story of the deal…

Throughout his storied business career, Bezos, who has a net worth of $25.2 billion, has been an empire builder, although he has never shown any evident interest in the newspaper business. He has, however, maintained a long friendship with [Washington Post CEO Donald] Graham, and they have informally advised each other over the years.

… More

Lawless governments can break Gilmore's Law

27 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” said Internet pioneer and activist John Gilmore in 1993. A real world test, though, shows there are limits to that law.


Syrian government stops traffic completely, cable cut only slows Egypt. Source: Akamai.

Buried deep in Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report are some interesting stats showing how world events, including the war in Syria and submarine cable cuts, affect Internet traffic. The former resulted in Internet censorship at a brute force level, the latter involved physical damage to infrastructure.… More

Tizen Foundation throws candy at mobile app devs


Game on.

A $4 million lolly scramble is underway to jump start the Tizen mobile operating system’s app store. The Tizen Foundation announced a developers’ competition with individual prizes that could go as high as $250,000, and released a new version of the software developer kit for the Linux-based and HTML5-centric OS.

Among other things, Tizen is Samsung’s coming replacement for bada, its in-house smart (or at least modestly bright) phone OS. While bada is a very functional, if lower end, platform, it’s suffered from a lack of developer love.… More