Categories
quotes

Hegemony through holy genocide

My concept of God does not allow for God’s blessing of genocide as a means for one country’s hegemony over the earth.

Andrew Sullivan in Exceptional and Unexceptional America [theatlantic.com]

He is obviously not a fan of the Old Testament God of Deuteronomy and Numbers.

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them

Deuteronomy 7:1-2, King James version

Sounds like hegemony through genocide to me. And it’s not even the worst thing in the Old Testament; remember the Moabites and Midianites?

Categories
technical

The stalker in your pocket

Sometimes it’s easy to wonder what all the privacy advocates are screaming and yelling about all the time. While I agree with much of what they say, I find it hard to explain why privacy is important to Joe-not-a-geek. Enter the power of visualization:

Tell-All Telephone

This is from an interactive feature at Zeit Online [zeit.de]. Very cool. They took data collected by a mobile operator about a specific person and linked it with data taken from his public internet sites (such as twitter) to create scary — very cool, but scary — timeline of his activities. Now what’s missing is who he called and messaged, that data was not released but you can bet the mobile operator has it.

Now imagine this, in real-time, for every one on every mobile operator running on a big screen in a secret room somewhere. The technology exists. Imagine the CIA tracking ‘suspected terrorists’. Imagine being on that list. Imagine Bin Ali’s, Mubarak’s or Gaddafi’s secret police using this to anticipate protests and sending in the thugs before the protest even begins.

Categories
technical

Why cloud backup for your mobile will not be provided by your operator

This article [zdnet.com] and several others making the rounds in the past few days point to Microsoft re-branding the cloud backup service it included with its’ short lived Kin line of mobiles. The cloud backup – Kin Studio – was the coolest feature of the Kin phones, maybe not the most sexy but the most useful. Now it looks like Microsoft may add it to Windows Phone 7 handsets – if they combine it with the Windows Live service, providing 25GB of free cloud storage connected to the users Hotmail/Windows Live and Office Live accounts then they may have a compelling offer.

Of course Microsoft is not the only mover, Apple has long had its’ MobileMe service which has significant overlap. To date this product has only attracted hardcore Apple fan-boys, but for over a year now there has been a rumor that Apple will drop the subscription fee and include as a free service for all iOS devices (more recently there has been a rumor that Apple will drop the subscription fee to $20 a year, I think maybe it will be free for 1 year with your iOS device and then $20 a year unless you buy a new iOS device). Link this to the rumored iTunes media cloud service that will run out of the billion dollar datacenter Apple has built in North Carolina. Again this could be a very useful service providing automated backup and streaming of all of your media (movies, photos, music, contacts, messages) from the cloud.

Google wouldn’t have to move very far to offer the same sort of service with Android.

In my time in the telco industry I’ve seen several projects at mobile operators around the world try to provide this type of data backup service. Unfortunately I’m not aware of any that actually succeeded. They died for many reasons —customers not willing to pay for the service, limited features, crippled features, lack of marketing, lack of handset support…

All in all I think the data-backup-as-a-service boat has already set sail and the telcos will be left behind due to their own dithering on how to make money on the offering. The same thing that happened to them with Location Based Services —they could not figure out how to make money on it so they never launched it, the phone makers opened the on-device location services (initially mandated for emergency number calling) to application developers and they figured out how to make money from it. So the telcos are left with LBS systems that cost them money but generate no revenue and don’t provide any value even in generating ‘customer stickiness’. And

All in all I think the data-backup-as-a-service boat has already set sail and the telcos will be left behind due to their own dithering on how to make money on the offering. The same thing that happened to them with Location Based Services —they could not figure out how to make money on it so they never launched it, the phone makers opened the on-device location services (initially mandated for emergency number calling) to application developers and they figured out how to make money from it. So the telcos are left with LBS systems that cost them money but generate no revenue and don’t provide any value even in generating ‘customer stickiness’. And

All in all I think the data-backup-as-a-service boat has already set sail and the telcos will be left behind due to their own dithering on how to make money on the offering. The same thing that happened to them with Location Based Services —they could not figure out how to make money on it so they never launched it, the phone makers opened the on-device location services (initially mandated for emergency number calling) to application developers and they figured out how to make money from it. So the telcos are left with LBS systems that cost them money but generate no revenue and don’t provide any value even in generating ‘customer stickiness’. And if you need a computer network that connects smaller networks, it’s imperative that you learn what is WAN.

C’est la vie. Real consumer service innovation in the mobile market continues to move away from the telcos and towards the internet. It’s one more step on the road to mobile dumb pipe networks.

Categories
quotes ranting

Secular Socialist Islamism

Could somebody slap Newt with a limp herring?

“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,” Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

Jonathan Chait in Gingrich Reductio Ad Absurdum on The New Republic [tnr.com]

Huh? I mean; What. The. Fuck?

Categories
ranting

Fuck you Sony

Fuck You Sony

As usual, the cluster fuck that is content licensing [confusion.cc], means all kinds of suck for consumers. Fuck you Sony. It’s called the internet… it’s global, get a fucking clue.

P.S. In case you’ve been reading my rantings wayyyyyy tooooo long; Yes I still hate Sony! [confusion.cc]