PDA replacement

I finally found an excuse to take the plunge and replace my aging Palm Tungsten T3. This is not a transition I make lightly. I've been using Palm PDAs since I bought the first Palm device introduced back in 1996, the Palm Pilot 1000. I got it for special employee pricing since I was working for U.S. Robotics. You may or may not remember that they owned Palm when the first Palm PDA was introduced.

As a longtime and very satisfied Palm user, I would have loved to choose another Palm PDA but Palm's future doesn't look quite so rosy these days. The company has been making some strange moves such as spinning off their software division. They've also apparently lost focus and haven't introduced any new innovative PDAs models in a while. Even the Treo line they've been depending on so heavily has lost ground when compared with other smartphones.

The device I chose as a replacement was the Nokia N810. It includes pretty much all the features the Tungsten has but also features a slide out keyboard, a Wifi adapter, a built-in webcam, a GPS receiver, and can even use a bluetooth cellphone for an Internet connection if a wireless access point isn't available.

Now comes the struggle to figure out how to duplicate all the features I depend on my Palm for on the new device. Fortunately, Access has introduced a Palm emulator called the Garnet VM which should help ease the transition somewhat.

The fleeting nature of data with DRM

This article from the Washington Post highlights a problem which is bound to increase in frequency. It discusses the fact that Walmart has just cancelled their digital movie download service.

When you lock yourself into some form of entertainment which makes use of DRM, you're at the mercy of the company providing the data/service to continue offering it. Now the people who have downloaded movies can only continue watching them on the same PC they downloaded the file to in the first place and they can't re-download should their PC hard disk fail. I'll concede it was more convenient to purchase a movie this way but there wasn't a significant savings involved and what do they have now? Data subject to rapidly increasing entropy thanks to shifting business priorities. They'll definitely lose access at some point... it's just a question of when.

I think the same problem will occur with the e-book readers currently on the market. The Kindle (from Amazon) certainly makes purchasing and carrying lots of books much more convenient and even gives a pretty good ease of use, something important in a device designed to replace physical books. But at what cost? The books themselves aren't offered at a huge savings over paperback editions and they're subject to DRM. So you're tied to the device and should Amazon decide that the device isn't profitable enough and discontinue the service, you're stuck with an expensive device which will continue reading books you've already purchased but won't be good for much else. If they discontinue the service, you can bet that the wireless connection will no longer work.

I've also got other concerns about the device. Can you back up your purchases onto a PC or are you forced to re-download them if you want to re-read them in the future? There are some books I like to read again periodically so a proper replacement for physical books would have to take this into account.

Some companies have little interest in guaranteeing customers have continuing use of their DRM laden files. Microsoft changed DRM formats when they introduced the Zune. It won't play any of their previously purchased songs using the earlier Microsoft DRM technology.

The real answer is to avoid all forms of DRM. Applaud the move of 3 of the 4 major record labels to offer DRM free music on Amazon by supporting their efforts. Whenever possible, support the work of independent artists who haven't been punishing their customers the way the RIAA has. But most importantly, put your foot down and say hell no to DRM.

the sad state of Linux email clients

I use the Thunderbird email client under Fedora at work. I've been searching for a different email client to use to retrieve my personal email since I prefer to keep those messages totally separate. After doing a bit of research, it looks like Evolution and Balsa are the two top email clients (aside from Thunderbird).

I didn't find either to my liking. Evolution (at least the latest version available from Fedora's package manager) was terribly unstable. It also had the worst address book of the 3 email clients. Its rendering of HTML messages was substandard at best. It doesn't display embedded images by default and didn't always display them when I selected the display images option.

Balsa wasn't much better. It was more stable than Evolution but it really didn't support HTML messages well at all. Retrieving messages frequently caused the sorting of message in the Inbox to get confused, forcing me to select the Date heading to force a re-sort. The filtering feature was very disappointing. Adding filters made it activate procmail filtering which caused messages to get stuck in the command line mail utility.

I've settled for using Thunderbird for both work and personal email. Using one of the others just wasn't feasible.

Good Books

I'm reading a couple excellent books at the moment which I thought I'd pass along.

During my commute, I'm listening to Spider Robinson's Callahan's Legacy. Whenever I read a new book by Spider or go back to re-read one of his older books, I'm always amazed at how good I feel while reading it and how I don't want the book to end. There are a handful of authors whose work makes me feel this way: Rudy Rucker, Robert Heinlein, Carl Hiaasen, Richard Feynman, and Richard Dawkins to name but a few.

At night I've started reading Theodore Sturgeon's The Nail and the Oracle: Volume XI: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon. I've been reading this complete collection of Sturgeon's works as they have been published which has been sorely trying my patience as I wait for each new volume. I was originally under the impression that there were to be 10 volumes in the series but a good friend recently mentioned that he had received volume 11 as a gift which caused me to order it as soon as I got home. When I started reading Sturgeon 30+ years ago, I was struck by the fact that his work really transcended the genres of SciFi or Fantasy and that it was sad his audience was probably much smaller than his talent deserved because of these labels. Reading Harlan Ellison's lengthy and touching foreword in this volume, I find I'm not alone in this feeling.

I highly recommend both books. If you haven't read anything by one or both authors, I envy you. You're in for a great read.

Wireless Keyboard Security Compromised

This post at the excellent HackADay web site discusses how the security of wireless keyboards has now been compromised. This makes it even easier for hackers to capture passwords and other information you type on your wireless keyboard. They don't need to risk physical access to install a hardware keyboard capture device or install software to perform the same function. They just need to set up a sniffer device in close enough proximity to capture your key strokes. Under ideal conditions, wireless devices can transmit far beyond their stated maximum range.

I personally use a wireless mouse, a wireless Apple Mighty Mouse which I love, but not a wireless keyboard. I see little benefit to getting rid of the wire on my keyboard since I don't need my keyboard to move so the wire never gets in the way.

Good luck to any hackers who want to derive meaningful information out of my mouse movements and clicks. Without knowing what's on the screen at any given moment, that information is next to useless. I know it's possible to spy on Van Eck radiation to read what's on a monitor from a distance but the equipment required to do so is either expensive or complicated to build. It's also a non-trivial problem to tie what's on the screen at that moment (an analog signal) with what's being typed. I'm quite satisfied that the barriers to that my monitor and mouse emanations being compromised are sufficiently high to discourage all but the most determined hacker. Realistically, you can never make something 100% secure. All you can hope to do is to raise the barriers high enough to nudge them along to easier targets. Rest assured that there are many easier targets. I can see 2 completely unsecured WiFi networks from my house and I suspect this is constrained by the distance between houses more than anything.

NTFS Alternate Data Streams

Quite some time ago, Microsoft quietly added the ability to embed an alternate data stream in another file. This was ostensibly done to improve interoperability with other modern file systems such as Apple's HFS. The problem is that many of the command line and GUI utilities supplied with Windows don't support (or at least easily so) manipulation of these alternate data streams, making them an ideal place to store data undetectable by normal means.

This capability can be useful for OS features such as displaying thumbnails images when a user opens a folder containing image files. That way, the thumbnail image gets deleted when the user deletes the image file itself. The user is also not confused by the presence of a multitude of files which they don't remember creating.

The negative implications of alternate data streams are twofold. First, it can make figuring out what is occupying your disk space. Second, it makes a convenient place for Malware authors to hide their malicious software. They love this functionality which has been embedded into the Windows operating system since NTFS was introduced because it frees them from the need to resort to a rootkit to hide files. To Microsoft's credit, in Vista they've added switches to the venerable "dir" command to give it the ability to detect alternate data streams. Users of older versions of Windows will need to avail themselves of a utility such as Streams from the great team at SysInternals, now part of Microsoft.

For a good summary of the security implications of alternate data streams, see this write-up at Security Focus.

PayPal Security Key

Since I do a lot of technical reading in my spare time, I find myself becoming more and more interested in computer security. One thing I'm particularly concerned about is is the use of usernames and passwords alone for authentication on web sites which contain any of my financial information. A while back while listening to the always entertaining and informative Security Now! podcast, Steve Gibson (one of the hosts) mentioned that PayPal had started offering Security Keys for a nominal fee. These keys display a number which changes in an unpredictable pattern every 30 seconds and which can be used to tighten security on your PayPal and eBay accounts.

PayPal should be commended for offering this capability and at such an affordable price. Multifactor authentication is much safer than its single factor sibling.

Find out more about the PayPal Security Key here. If you have trouble accessing this link, go to PayPal's site, click the Security Center link at the top and click on the picture of the Security Key. This program is on a timed deployment so it may not yet be available outside the U.S.