Firefox 3.5 Hates Google Searchs Rant

After recently updating to Firefox 3.5, I have run into a seriously annoying and killer problem. Firefox 3.5 refuse to correctly load Google searches in a reasonable amount of time or even the Google main page (www.google.com). In a painstaking attempt to figure this out, I have tried everything from running Firefox in safe mode as well as turning off things like Norton Internet Security.

The problem doesn't lie in my computer or in my infrastructure. Firefox loads all other pages normally (including Bing.com) and even loads mail.google.com as well as reader. It's just the search that it doesn't want to do. BTW, IE, Safari & Chrome load the pages perfectly well!

Enough is Enough... Let me know if you've had similar issues?

«Sign-In with Twitter»: Should we be Scared?

Last week, Twitter opened up it's «sign-in with Twitter» open authentication or OAuth service under the radar. To be fair to Twitter, the news last week was more focused on the one million follower story and the arrival of big media names onto the service. Now, I've always been an advocate of using OAuth type services (I personally use OpenID as much as possible) to both simplify a user's life and to avoid the problem of password re-use.

It also goes to Twitter's credit to move in this direction and to provide this type of service to ease the integration of external applications as well as make it easier for user's to provide their Twitter information.

Disclaimer: I have not had the time and that's not likely to change in the near future to fully investigate and examine the security of the Twitter OAuth service. The following rant is purely about Twitter's current public track record...

Twitter's public track record of securing and making a reliable service is less than top par. My top 3 frontal issues that have been discussed, re-discussed and overall made serious news for Twitter can be summed up with this list:

• The service has a huge history of availability issues, well rather non-availability in times of high traffic although this hasn't occurred in a while it's bound to happen again seeing the growth patterns of late;
• The security has a number of times criticized the continued use of basic-authentication (inc. accepting base64 password encoding) to use the service. The problem being that this is an easy way to grab the user's password which would break or poke serious holes in the OAuth service;
• There have been a repeat number of XSS attacks and worms including the most recent mikkey work which last over two weeks in its different iterartions.

These three points push me to think on whether or not I would be able to really trust such a service. Will I be able to use it at all times? Am I sure the authentication might not lead to a password leak? Am I sure that the OAuth won't be replayable? Can I be sure that the OAuth session isn't being misdirected or stolen somehow in XSS or via a worm? Makes me wonder if the service will actually provide a decent and safe mechanism for authentication and whether or not my credentials are going to be safe :- scary......

Related Links:

• hueniverse: Introducing 'Sign-in with Twitter', OAuth-Style "Connect"
  
• TechCrunch: Did Twitter Just Quietly Start Twitter Connect? If Not, It Should.
• Dave Winer: Twitter and OAuth, interesting brew
  
• Twitter OAuth FAQ
  
• Mashable mikkey worm coverage: http://mashable.com/2009/04/11/stalkdaily-twitter/; http://mashable.com/2009/04/12/mikeyy-another-twitter-worm-on-the-loose/
  

Old Posts Appearing in Feed...

So you maybe seeing some old posts appearing that had not be published before. I finally got down to finalizing and editing the content of some older drafts that I think needed to be published just for the historical content.

I am hoping to avoid this situation in the future and should be able to keep a normal release schedule between draft status and published. Let's hope it works!

Don't U H8!

The first in a series of video-blogs (me thinks)! And I am opening it up with my favorite subject - a rant!
Yesterday I discovered that the company was pushing out a new security policy on mobile devices that are connecting to the corporate exchange environment! I don't have a problem with this security policy and am all for it! The problem was that a proper change management process was not carried out and thus those who would have preferred to opt-out couldn't!
So I spent the better half of today removing the security policies (by hand) on my devices. I even bricked my HTC in the process and was forced to reload from scratch... [PS: You can add to the discussion in this Seesmic thread]

Another Day, Another Year

So the new year has come and gone, I've been queried a few times to see what kind of resolutions I was taking or if I wanted to join some challenges (like my friend Nigel is attempting).

Truthfully, for me the new year is potentially just SSDD (same s$#% different day). Resolutions are ok but tend to imply that you need to change something in your life for whatever reasons you might have. This is where it doesn't work for me for in general my life is what it is and I've accepted it as is. Granted things could much better and don't match where I saw myself at my age but I've spent too much of the past years trying to change things with no success - I seem to be plagued with bad vibes - and I'm not inclined to invest anymore energy in fighting it. Some might call it being comfortable with things as they are but at least I know what my crappy personal & work life entails...

Sure I know what needs changing and how to change them but that may mean spawning even more difficulties and issues. So this year, taking things as they go!

Aside from that shoddy rant, I expect that I'll try to do more of the same:

• 1 new video game a month;
• achieve some form of regularity in my blogging (I foresee a move to video blogging);
• and generally accepting my pains physical & moral alike.

And of course continuously complaining about it... Although I probably should try to stop sounding like a broken record!

Ian Curtis, in Joy Division's Heart & Soul, once wrote:

The past is now part of my Future
The present is well out of hand!

a motto I seem to be fully embedded in :-(

Stuck in Houston

So I was supposed to leave today and quite anxious to as well but I find myself stuck in Houston. The Air France pilots went on strike this weekend and it seems like there are no possibilities for me to reach home before Monday. Air France sent me an e-mail during the middle of the night with a changed reservation to Monday afternoon.

Oh! Well, this sucks but its just a cumulation of just bad events in the disaster that my life is right now. I wish I could say better things but with all the trouble I've been having these past years plus while I was a way a bunch of stuff went down at home that's going to be expensive.

Well gives me two more days to do some last minute shopping... Thinking I might just as well get that MacBook to give myself a nice pill.

Despite Best Effort

The weeks have been long and tedious and despite best efforts, I was just not energetic enough to be able to do somethings I wanted to. Did not have time to do any serious tech stuff or do any gaming. I think the disappointing tech shopping, in ability to exchange some travelers checks and the hesitation to buy a MacBook has not helped.

I think things would actually be different if my job didn't depress me as much and if thinks for me were working better ( crap happened at home that's just hitting the pocket book even more now). I basically know what I need to do to get out of the rut but at the moment the mental energy required to achieve it is not there.

Anyway things are as they are...

Tech Shopping Disappointment

So with this trip to Houston, I was hoping to get some much needed tech. I need a few upgrades for the home PC as well as some portable storage.Unfortunately the selection was not as good as I would have hoped. I did manage to get a few things at a good price including a 6 pack of 4gb thumb drives & a Seagate 750gb sata drive.
Did spend a few bucks on cheap HD-DVDs & large selection of DVDs. As well as managing to pre-order Warth of the Lich King (so I'll be able to jump to Northend as soon as I get home).
What's left, well I am still not sure about getting a motherboard and new CPU however the total would quickly rack up & it's not that much cheaper than buying back home besides think I would rather put the money into a MacBook.

Why Can't the HDD Industry Publish True Size of Disk?

Why can't the Hard Disk industry publish the true size of the disks they are selling? This is the big question! I recently purchased two drives from Seagate from their Momentus series of laptop 2.5 7200 rpm line. To be specific, I have the Momentus 7200.2 in 160Gb and the Momentus 7200.3 in 320Gb. From the product title you would expect to be getting 160Gb and 320Gb respectively from the drives.

However this isn't exactly true. I don't know what the number represents but it's not the size of the drive once you plug it into your machine. I only get 149Gb from the former and 298Gb from the latter, which on the latter is a significant loss of space (close to 10% but more like 8%). It goes to say that this is beyond annoying! When you buy a hard disk, you buy it based on advertised size (hoping to get that maximum space possible) at least that's the general idea. If you advertise the size of something it should be the real size you will see when you start to use it! Not the theoretical size based on platters and cluster sizes!! BTW this is true for almost every hard disk vendor not just the one mentioned here.

Don't get me wrong the drives are fantastic. I bought them for that reason, they perform extremely well and have some interesting laptop usage safe guards. I am just feed up of expecting something and getting a different value in return... For crying out loud! Change your attitude, the industry needs to change its methodology and start giving us the real sizes - didn't this happen with TV to!

So HDD Industry wake-up, smell the coffee and stop lying to us about the size of your products! Gives us the real size...

Integrating Web2.0 Solutions in the Corporate Env. A Challenge for Innovation!

I was in a very interesting discussion with a colleague responsible for the IT Innovation process in our company today.

The company, where I work, has for awhile now had a big focus on bringing Web 2.0 type solutions into the corporate infrastructure via the innovation process . Some current projects include looking at integrating internal social networking (ala facebook, dopplr and similar) or microblogging (ala twitter). There are many reasons behind these ideas and a lot them have to do with attracting young blood into the company & keeping them interested.

There are however a number of fundamental issues behind this logic, a primary one being that these types of solutions can be easily adopted into the user's daily business workflow to bring him/her added benefit and ease to complete their professional goals. Even more difficult in a company like ours which is not an IT focused company. Another important issue being that a majority of new recruits are indeed heavily involved in the use of such solutions! Let's face it there have not been that many studies that indicate that a majority of university graduates expect to see such tools in the work place. Yes! They want access to the solutions but at a more global and personal level - a primary goal being to be able to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances as well as continue to exist in the webosphere as they did before.

There is in fact a macro versus micro distinction that needs to be made in this domain. An internal corporate social network or microblog actually only serves a microcosm of users that already have the primary means to achieve essentially the same things with e-mail, corporate directory & IM. In a more than typical internal business environment you already communicate and share information with your colleagues and don't necessarily need to push or publish information via a web based application. Think about it what additional information is a social network going to allow you to serve more than a corporate directory or sending e-mails. One theory is to stay that in a large 50k employee company, it will allow you to discover or facilitate contacting people when you travel to a different site. I question this! As how is different than looking up the colleagues you need to visit or are based in the site you are visiting? Will a social network really bring additional benefit in that sense?

For me a lot of these Internet level solutions function and provide benefit as they permit disperse people the ability to keep in touch without requiring a formal linkage (such as sharing of e-mail or IM) as well as bringing a platform to meet new people outside of your usual domain of influence. I think the whole point here is the ability or drive to expand you domain of influence however in your work environment you already basically have the recognition and access to your domain of influence based on your experience and responsibilities. Microblogging is another good example of this and can be seen as the summum of this ability by allowing you to broadcast updates and thoughts to all your followers in a quick and dirty interface. But how does this fit into a typical business day workflow.

I am in IT and for the moment, I don't quite see it. To be honest, I already have trouble juggling my job responsibilities and keeping my Internet presence up-to-date. And this is for me and more importantly and as mentionned before the key factor: how do you fit these tools into your daily job workflow. Honestly, I don't have the answer and I still fail to see the business benefit. I am open to suggestion and hope this post will open the floor for discussion...

Jamais 2 sans 3

«Jamais deux sans trois» is a french expression that basically means that things always come in threes and in most cases you are talking about unlucky things!
Well, today July 3rd aka my birthday, falls right into this expression. If you remember and refer back to last year's post, you may be aware that my home network got electrically fried on my birthday! Well this year it wasn't my home network but it would seem that it was my laptop's turn.
Yep, this year for my birthday, my laptop fried... dead motherboard!
Can't wait till next year I wonder what will happen next!

Tibet, China & the Olympics [fvter.Rant]

I don't like to rant much on politics, but the recent world-wide noise about the upcoming Olympic games, Tibet and China has shaken my neurons a bit! Let's face it the issue is not that the athletes should boycott the games but more on how does the world protest strongly enough to make their disagreement known. Here are my thoughts! Let's get the audience to boycott watching the games and hit them where it hurts... the money through the publicity and sponsorships! The expected outcome is that hundreds of millions of viewers will watch the games and be attracted by the pitches from the sponsors; however and if only 10% of that viewership actually occurs than it will make the games a disaster and hurt both the CIO and China more!

Anti-fraude ou Fraude des Méthodes Peu Secure

sorry this post is in French as it concerns something that happened to me here in France. I'll post a quick translation in the comments.
-------
J’ai récemment été identifié par le système de FAI-NET pour une vérification ou contrôle, on va dire, d’identité bancaire. La société FAI-Net fournit un service de tiers de confiance a fin de sécurisé les achats sur Internet à la fois pour le commerçant et pour l’acheteur.
Donc en effet suite à un achat sur le site grosbill.com, j’ai reçu un e-mail de la part de FIA-NET me demandant de valider mon achat. C’est à ce moment que je commence à avoir des problèmes ! En lisant le message la première fois, j’étais très sceptique et je pensais que c’était un e-mail de type «phishing scam». D’autant plus que le même message m’a été renvoyé à renvoyer à plusieurs reprise.
En effet, ma casquette d’architecte sécurité en informatique a pris le dessus ! Le problème ? Eh bien l’e-mail en question avait plein d’inconsistance et avait les éléments douteux suivant :

• L’e-mail est émis par une adresse en fia-net.fr mais leur site et les conditions de vente sont tous attribuées à fia-net.com - dont on peut questionner la validité de l’émission de l’e-mail ;
• L’e-mail n’est pas certifié, c.a.d il n’y a aucune sécurité associé à cet e-mail, ce qui est important pour un e-mail demandant vos informations bancaire – de nos jours il n’est pas difficile d’envoyer un e-mail au moins signé !
• Ils disent avoir essayé de m’appeler par téléphone pour valider la commande – je n’ai jamais reçu d’appel téléphonique de leur part au moins pas sur les numéros inscrite dans ma commande sur grosbill.com ;
• L’e-mail me demande d’envoyer une copie de ma carte d’identité et mon RIB – attention ! il n’y aucun garantie que l’e-mail va vraiment à FIA-NET ou que l’e-mail ne sera pas intercepté ! Vous imaginez ce qui pourrait ce passez si …

J’ai donc décidé de faire connaître ma pensé sur cet e-mail et ma désapprobation de la méthode à FIA-NET. J’ai donc visité leur site. À fin de pouvoir communiquer avec FIA-NET, il faut d’abord s’inscrire. Et paf encore un problème : Après inscription, FIA-NET vous renvoie par e-mail votre nom d’utilisateur et puis votre mot-de-passe en clair ! Je dits NON ! Ce ne sont pas des pratiques dignes de nos jours avec touts les problèmes de sécurité associé à des pratiques telles que celles-ci !
Pour une société qui agit en temps que tiers de confiance et qui lutte contre la fraude sur Internet, il y a un sérieux manque de protocole et de sécurisation de leur méthodologies ! C’est tous que j’ai à dire !
J’ai finalement envoyé mes informations en PDF sécurisé (non copiable et non imprimable) avec les informations (signature, etc) importantes sécurisé par des dégradations d’image et watermarking. Ce qui m'a valu de recevoir mon achat avec une semaine de retard! Quel bordel...

HD-DVD is dead, yeah so...

So the news is out, Toshiba finally dropped out of the HD video disc format race... Of course the downfall which started at CES 2008, was exactly 2 days after I received my HD-DVD player for the X-Box360! [ed: just to add to my crappy year 2007...]
This is actually quite upsetting as IMHO the HD-DVD format was way more interesting than the Blu-Ray solution. Here are my 3 top rants regarding this subject:

• For one thing, HD-DVD were not region encoded which is a big plus (while Blu-Ray is)! I am so tired of not being able to buy the version (especially considering language) of the movies I want to add to my library!
• No competitors means that the technology rights will remain high & costly (Sony has to make back the money they spent buying the studios to jump onboard Blu-Ray somehow) which converts into a user expensive experience...
• Blu-Ray will only be really good once 2.0 and greater players start to come-out for the online updates and content additions!

Will I buy a Blu-Ray player, maybe once the prices come down and 2.0 players are more readily available... By that time, I may not need to! I am also tending to see (especially in France where high-speed broadband is readily available) that more and more HD content will more likely come from direct downloads or IPTV solutions!
At the end of the day, I don't regret my purchase and I will try to collect as many good HD-DVDs I can before they disappear...

Europe-Wide Online Content

Apple recently announced that it had settled with the EU commission regarding the pricing difference between it's iTunes UK store and the rest of Europe (Yahoo News Article). The EU is now looking at trying to enforce a European wide online-content model. This is a good thing for the users/customers despite what some people seem to think and are writing about (see this TechDirt post). Alot of this discussion rants around what business is allowed to do or wants to do! I say horse-manure... Business is trying to protect its single local market business model, trying to avoid having to negotiate regional/global business models to make this possible. There is no financial reason/restriction stopping business in one EU country to sell to a customer in another (or the world for that matter). This is the premise of the common market model! [Note: ok I over simplify but you know what I mean...]

Despite what some have been saying it is my opinion that Europeans are in fact enlightened and want to be able to purchase and access content from their neighbors (i.e. other countries in the EU). People are interested in seeing/listening to content from their neighbors... I know of a lot of people from France, Spain, Germany and Sweden for example that want access to British music and TV shows and because it is not available through official means, they obtain them through less than correct ways.

Or take some one like me or some of my colleagues who are international and have worked/lived in and out of these different EU countries... We would like to be able to have access to the content we grew up with and love!

I really don't see why these business don't want to do this.. it would provide them with a much large market for the content!

Are Facebook Apps the New Chain-Mail Syndrome?

I have had a profile on Facebook now for quite a few months (lost track to be honest). At the beginning my activity was simple enough, it consisted of just friends and posting from wall to wall.

After a few weeks, I started getting Facebook App invitations from all over the place. Some even multiple times as different friends invited me to use the same applications. The natural thing to do is to accept those invitations and add the new App to your profile. Now here is the interesting part, and the rant.

The system is conceived in such a way that when you add a new App, it automatically asks you to share it with your friends. You can of course skip this but the natural tendency is to send the new found App to your friends on your list. Now it dawned on me, yesterday, while chatting with some colleagues in Cambridge that this is almost like viral marketing or messaging (or whatever you want to call it). I would even go as far as to say this is almost like the old chain-mail, and chain-email stuff from the 80's and 90's! Remember those things, where you would receive them and in the message it would say, please forward this to your friends and colleagues etc etc etc! I am sure that this was not the original intent of the Facebook creators when they created an API and there are some good things about the extensions that Facebook supports. But...

Think about it! Facebook Apps are doing exactly the same thing right now... Some are even monetary chain-mails (yes some Apps allow you to opt into giving the creator money)! So what, well:

• My question is will this explode into the new viral marketing of the decade...
  
• Are we as humans still not evolved enough to be gullible like that (I am guilty of this)...
• Or do we just need to have this affirmation of our power to share new things and new information with our firends

iPhone Not so Happy for Apple in France = unlocked

It's started! The iPhone is not even officially released yet in Europe and more specifically France than Apple is already facing trouble with its selling methodology.

In fact Les Echos recently reported that Apple has forgotten one fundamental principal that stands in Europe and specifically France today: You can't screw the customer! Consumer law prohibits the sale of any good and service that are dependent on each other in France and some other EU countries. For mobile operators this translates into the fact that they can no longer tie a phone and mobile plan together.

Because of this law, Orange in France the official iPhone carrier, may in fact be forced to sell it without a data plan and carrier lock! Of course this is a big problem for Apple as the current price of the iPhone with «subsidies» is still very expensive and gives no real motivation to buy a locked version... Besides why would you want to buy such an expensive multimedia phone with no 3G+ and no video, when you can buy cheaper and better multimedia phones like the Nokias, Samsungs and others!

France may be the first place where Apple is in fact forced to sell the iPhone unlocked!

Ok, so I have just spent total of about 3 hours last night trying to get to the support from Free. Of which I got through like 5 times except that 4 of times I was hung up on. I decided to write a letter to them about this (they replied almost a month afterwards saying they had no idea what I was talking about).

Anyway when I finally got through.. There only answer is they cant do anything until I take my box and try it on a neighbors installation. Use their power supply and line! Who the fuck! are they kidding... That's insane!

First off, none of my direct neighbors have Free and besides that is like a by definition unrealistic argument because it doesn't prove anything! It also is just a complete and total disrespect for the customers. There is also a moral objection or social argument that by definition would not allow me to actually visit people I don't necessarily know and on top of that I must ask them to let me play with their ADSL connection. I say NO! This is just not RIGHT!

This just goes to show how this company just does not care about its customers nor do the respect them!

Today's my B'Day.. and F'up Very Much

So today turned out to be my birthday and like the rest of this year has turned to some what crap... Anyway this is the extent of my exciting day:

First off, car bill to fix it in order to be able to pass inspection = 2700€
Then to top it off while I was doing something in the kitchen, an loud bang and flash of light hit one of the telephone connection points up the street. I saw it from my window! This was about 19:00! So apparently the surge jumped wires, etc ( I am on a different connection box) and hit my house anyway which basically did the following:

1. Blew out the ADSL box. now I am fighting to get it fixed :- the little green lights on the left side of the led display are blinking... IMHO the box got fried.. Free, the adsl supplier, thinks its the power supply;
2. Blew out my Network gear;
3. Blew out one of my phone, which I purchased only 2 months previously;
4. Nuked my home PC (how you ask read below).

Interestingly enough, you'd be amazed at how easy a surge can jump across telephone wires and spread. The surge came through the line until it hit something that was either a termination point or grounded. In this case the grounded equipment happened to be my PC. So the surge went through the phone line, into the DSL box (fried it), jumped into the Ethernet network (fried the switch) and finally landed on the computer...

Why no news...

I have to admit my Blogging has been kind of slow of late. To be truthful I am spending way too much of my free time on WoW. What to do... You spend so much time on medical leave you loose track of the real world and immerse yourself.

But there are some more concrete reasons as well. To be truthful, I have not come across anything really worth writing about in great detail (a ping on Twitter is enough). I also don't want to add to the blah-blah about the good and bads of some of the important tech news lately like why the iPhone needs to be better for Europe, etc...

No worries... I'll blog when the time is good and right and when the Rhum flows.