Voicemail fro my iphone
September 18, 2009
Testing how posterous can handle my voice memo from the iPhone.
This will be intersting
Sent from my iPhone
A New Beginning!
September 18, 2009
This year alone, I’ve moved my blog to different platforms & services. At the begining, I was hosting my own blog using WP opensource and it was going great but then I found myself not maintaining the blog as I should be and I want to be part of a bigger community.
From there, I’ve moved my blog to VOX which was great but then it will too limited in terms of non-vox-community interaction. On those basis, I’ve decided to give the option of hosting my own blog one more chance, but then due to lack of maintenance and social community interaction, I’ve decided to move it to WP.com which was great till I found out about #posterous.
Posterous provides me the opportunity to share with the world of what I see (videos, pictures, 2 lines of text, etc) instantly by just emailing those things from my iPhone or my mac. And from there, posterous takes another step to syndicate all of those things to my other accounts on other social sites (i.e. twitter, Facebook, flickr, youtube, etc). Which is great!
So far, the limitation I’ve noticed with posterous are the following:
- It didn’t migrate the comments or tags of posts from WP!
- How the hell do I easy add widgets and stuff to the right side bar? I don’t feel like editing the HTML.
- I think that’s all so far.
And yes, I’ve seriously considered trumbl but that didn’t weight enough to convince me to move my blog to.
So, let’s hope this is the permanent home for my virtual space.
موجز الأنباء | Al Jazeera Online News bulletin
September 18, 2009
Not sure how many of you know this. But Al Jazeera produces daily special news bulletin for the Internet & Mobile. You can also subscribe to the podcasts (Arabic & English) via iTunes, just look it up…
Next step for OpenID: Adaption by the Government
August 27, 2009
After OpenID being well accepted by Google, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, and many others, it seems it convinced the US government to seriously consider for use in logging into government agency websites.
OpenID will definitely be utilized to pave the way for a US national ID card. At the most basic level, this would mean that anyone can login with a Google or Facebook or OpenID any other OpenID into government sites. Also not to mention, OpenID will become a single sign on for all systems (Finance, Social Security, etc).
Many people reject the idea of unifying credentials and such, due to the fact that it will not give the person the ability to disclose as much identity or personal information as is needed for a given transaction. You will definitely don’t want to share the same information you do with IRS and Facebook.
As for me, I think it is very crucial for me to be able to control the flow information about me. And if I am about to give it to some party, then I need to know if I can trust that party.
I think what is needed most of all to preserve the freedom for internet users is “proper information” about different authentication / activity tracking schemes ~ let’s say, what could be the consequences of using them? it’s like the information about phishing sites, if you know enough about phishers’ techniques you will be able to avoid being cheated.
Currently we are going through de facto, but weak and broken, ID elements ~ Most critical is our social security number. Since SSN is not authenticated, anyone can claim your id, which leads to identity theft and other problems. By the way, last year alone, theft was more than $50 billion…
But anyway, here is my conclusion about this whole Big Sam and less privacy. I can see possible consequences with tying a knot a National ID with OpenID, but I can see the convinence of such a thing too. Just think about how useful it will be to authenticate that you are who you are and not some Joe Doe.
I can see why people would be paranoid about privacy, but to be honest, I think the privacy fears are overblown and becoming extra-dramatic (thanks to Hollywood?). It is the nature of digital age that everything is traceable and obtainable. People behavior habits will always be monitored to generate revenue out of it (targeted marketing?).
Tagging Humans with RFID: Next step..
July 20, 2009
I’ve asked many of my friends and colleagues for their thoughts on having RFID implanted in humans for identity verification purposes, and many of them rejected the idea and had a variety of concerns the use of such system, including:
- The potential for unauthorized access to the data on the RFID-enabled device
- The concern that the information produced by an RFID-enabled credential system for a stated purpose might be used or leveraged for a different type of purpose without the knowledge of those people whose information was collected for the original purpose.
- The concern that it is more about expanding the surveillance of individuals with more effectiveness.
Now, I see why the concept of tagging people gets received with pessimism and rejection. But, I believe people need to come to realization that such system can be more beneficial to individuals daily routines with such as checking out from the market with a swipe of hand, never have to worry about forgetting the driving license or such.
Many people perceive the concept of RFID as a chip that contains all personal & financial information, which is a misconception. The RFID will only contain an identification number that can be scanned by certain devices only. The device will also need the individual to enter the PIN code for authorization for personal / financial information access from the central database.
From my perspective, I see the “extreme” rejection to such RFID usage on humans is unjustifiable, and the reason is due to misinterpretation of the system concept and lack of understanding of benefits of the system. But then, if RFID will be solely controlled by the government, then I totally reject the idea as a whole. The last thing I need to be is a slave to such system. Here is a video of Aaro Russo talking about the conspiracy theory behind RFID human implant:
I mean, if our personal & financial information is already stored in central databases that are owned by private / public institutions (i.e. hospitals, banks, credit scores inst., governments, etc) where authorized individuals can access all private information by handing them your ID, then why not just have RFID? Many people say: SECURITY & IMMORAL.
Let’s look at it from security perspective: Identity theft has recently increased tremendously due to many factors. But with RFID in place, identity theft is not possible since it requires RFID & PIN code and not social security # and some sort of fake ID. As for “IMMORAL”, that can only be solved with mind-shifting or brain-washing 
I don’t see why not have RFID identity verification system be based on OPENID framework, this will give the individual the power of choice of whom to share his / her personal information with and enable decentralized information access.
But anyway, there are many issues that needs to be resolved, from privacy risks to security concerns. Things already have started progressing towards such system, here are few examples:
- Governments are issuing passports & IDs with RFID chipset built in for ease of identity verification and increase security measure.
- Healthcare industry: in US, companies are providing various types of RFID built-in products to allow hospitals to monitor patients for certain things, including blood pressure & blood glucose level.
Last month, the FDA approved an implantable, rice-grain-sized microchip for use in humans. The tiny subcutaneous RFID chip, made by a company called VeriChip, is being marketed as a lifesaving device. If you’re brought to an emergency room unconscious, a scanner in the hospital doorway will read your chip’s unique ID. That will unlock your medical records from a database, allowing doctors to learn about your penicillin allergy or your pacemaker.
Health monitoring can be the tipping point for people to start thinking of the possibility of having RFID for various applications.
RFID technology still has a long way to go, but I think, soon in near future, it is enviable for RFID to be part of our daily lives.
Cartoonist figured Google out
July 10, 2009
We’ve all knew that Google is coming to bite Windows from behind one day, but not that soon. But apparently, this italian cartoonist saw it coming when Google announced the web browser “chrome”.
I should’ve linked this together, since Internet or let’s say “hybrid” data sync is the next leap where Google came up with “Gears” and allowing the web applications to utilize this tech freely. And of course Google Chrome web browser will totally utilize “Gears” to its full extent and dominate the application market somehow.
But never realized that it will get into the OS business, thought maybe they will create another distr of linux or something. But apparently I was wrong, Google is bold enough to go after Microsoft core business, the OS.
Anyway, here is a cartoon that predicted Google OS:
My hero in childhoods becomes reality? :)
June 14, 2009
Thought I should share this with you. I guess till this day, I’ve always enjoyed watching anime cartoons that deals with robots and how some of them are human-friendly? and some that are evil that try to take over the world.
Anyway, finally, the life-sized Gundam robot in Tokyo has been completed and activated. And it is impressive, I will definitely pay a visit when I am in Tokyo. Here it is:
Gundam life-sized
And here is a video of the first episode of Gundam if you might be interested:
This reminds me, I am excited for the new transforms movie that is coming out this month!
