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"One Step At A Time ...Ferociously"

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

iPhone Jailbreaking OK'd by U.S. Copyright Office

Paying for two iPhones monthly (not mines, I'm still on T-Mobile with an old G1 by choice) my daughter now and then asks me about "jailbreaking" her iPhone.


Jailbreaking refers to users bypassing or disabling an electronic device's manufacturer's security and restrictions built into that device. Hacking in other words. In performing jailbreaking there is a slight chance if one doesn't follow the correct procedure due to ignorance or mistake, the device you are attempting to jailbreak becomes inoperative. Unresponsive. Broken. Becomes a "BRICK" in Jailbreaker jargon.

So why jailbreak at all? I think in the beginning it was a way to get back at the factory. The thinking goes that you paid hundreds of dollars for this device so now it is yours! What you do with this device after you paid you money is your business, not the manufacturer.

Up to this point, the logic is pretty sound admittedly. However the catch is that you must use this jailbroken device on a service provider's network that you are paying monthly for and you are also paying for software apps that clutter up your device.

Manufacturer Apple actively discouraged "jailbreaking" their iPhones. Before today, they had two "weapons" at their disposal with which they could persecute (not that they ever did go after any jailbreakers or their websites.)

One was their License agreement. You know, what every software developer puts in their installation program that you must agree to before the software installs? Well before you activate your iPhone you agree to all that jazz too.

Second weapon was the DMCA, the very same law that brought down the original Napster but oddly enough showed the music producers what a goldmine online music could and has become (iTunes, Napster Reborn, Rhapsody, etc.) Apple could've used DMCA against jailbreakers by their very act of getting around the iPhone's protections....

...that is, until today. The United States Copyright office has ruled that iPhone users may legally jailbreak their iPhones as part of fair use. Read about it at the Washington Post.

Monopolistic iPhone cell carrier AT&T doesn't allow "tethering" on iPhones and has foot-dragged in providing such service. But a jailbroken iPhone can act as a Wifi Hotspot! Now not every iPhone user wants to do this but from a hacking point of view it's irresistible to be sure.

AT&T sells you an iPhone and after your contract is up, you are "stuck" with continuing with AT&T for service no matter what. Or are you?

A jailbroken iPhone allows you to use T-Mobile as a carrier instead of AT&T after your contract is up with AT&T. Hah!

So back to my daughter asking about jailbreaking her iPhone. I think it's best to wait after our AT&T contract runs out (about a year and a half left) and by then jailbreaking may have a better standing with (read supported by) both AT&T and Apple.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Email Savvy

If you are having problems with your flexnet email, PLEASE use our HelpDesk User Support system and not communicate with us via email about an email problem!


If you lost your HelpDesk password, then use our Feedback Form and put in a email address that is a "throwaway" email account you got from yahoo or google. we will verify you are whom you say and then change your email's/Helpdesk password if need be.


Saturday, June 12, 2010

Hacker Tricks

From users:

I jjjjgot a note saying the account is temporarily closed due to unauthorized use, was this note really from you? The account still works, is it compromised? Following is the note I recieved,


flex.com support
Attachment Thu, n 10, 2010 at 8:54 AM
Reply-To: hirq83@resourceamerica.com
To: xxxxxx@flex.com

Dear Customer,

This e-mail was send by flex.com to notify you that we have temporanly prevented access to your account.

We have reasons to beleive that your account may have been accessed by someone else. Please run attached file and Follow instructions.

(C) flex.com

open.html
1K View Scan and download
Quick Reply
To: hirq83@resourceamerica.com
Include quoted text with reply


I have received at least 3 "notifications" presumably from you folks. 2 have landed in SPAM and one tonite in my regular email. It has Reply to: hirq83@resourceamerica.com
To:xxxxxxxx@flex.com
a signoff signature as: (C)flex.com
There is a HTML 1K document and instructs to open as Google document View Download.
It says that temporarily had precented access to my account.
This is not anything like the type of message I would receive from you. Please check it out and let me know what is going on.
Mahalo



DO NOT CLICK ON THESE TYPES OF URL LINKS. DO NOT RUN ANY EXE FILE ON YOUR COMPUTER! THIS EMAIL IS NOT FROM FLEX!

in the past when situations came up that we had to email notifications to our users, in the email we always ALWAYS would put in a URL (http://flex.com/blah/blah) that the user would manually enter into their browser's address box (NEVER EVER A CLICKABLE URL LINK) to verifiy that the email was indeed from us.

we haven't had the need to do this for like five years or so...


//del//
Flexnet Tech Support Services


Thursday, November 12, 2009

Dialup Modem user's Feedback

"My best modem of all is the desktop PCI LT Winmodem. That modem uses Agere 1648C chip dated 2000 and using Lucent 8-6-2001 driver version 8.10.

"I doubt many people can find this modem now but it is well matched to the modems used by your dialup provider's various modems used in Seattle. Those may be various surplus modems from previous ISP use?.

"As economics dictate, Internet users may look for cheaper ISP alternatives. Perhaps you can promote Flexnet to keep low income people on line.

"MY desktop can download binary data at 51kbits and some text data gets modem compression resulting 300kbits to the hard drive, I used to think 4:1 was the max.

"I recommend Flex users dial all the local call numbers and use the fastest they find


Thanks Al for your feedback.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

THE PRICE OF GOLD, THE COST OF FAILURE

Below is my post dated November 7, 2007. Gold back then broke it's old record price and reached a new one of $833.50.

Well just two years later it is at an all time high of $1110. That is a change of around $277. In other words, a 33% increase over two years or over 16% return a year since 2007.

No sense rehashing what was said in the earlier posting, but I am curious....


how many of you actually bought gold back in 2007?

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

"The Fall of the United States DOLLAR"
Death Be Not Proud

Today GOLD set a record price of $833.50 an ounce beating a 27-year previous record of $825 an ounce. You may be thinking, wow, gold went up in value. But that is wrong and backwards logic.

If you bought gold around seven years ago when it was $289 an ounce (like someone close to me did) you may be thanking your lucky stars or something. But it is the FALL of the US Dollar that affects us all that we should be worried about.

Let's say I did buy a one-ounce GOLD US-government minted coin, a "$50" Double Eagle back in 2000, for around $285 USD. And some canadian at the exact same time bought a one ounce Canadian-government minted GOLD coin, a Canadian Maple for $426 CAD (canadian dollars).

Okay. So now it's 2007. My gold coin is still worth one ounce of GOLD. The canadian's gold coin is also worth, you guessed it, one ounce of gold. Both values, namely our GOLD, is the exactly the same as it was seven years ago. BUT...

...look at what happened to our currencies! My GOLD coin's "value" as expressed in pieces of paper called U.S. Dollars has changed from 282 pieces of paper (US dollar notes) to 833 pieces of paper. So now we ask, where oh where did the extra 550 pieces of paper come from, and why? This amount of extra paper increased by almost 200% (550 / 282 = 1.95) What happened?

Let's take a look at our canadian friend. His GOLD coin went from 426 pieces of his brand of paper (canadian dollars) to 764 pieces of paper. For him, that's an extra 338 pieces of paper, or an increase of 80% (338 / 426 = 0.79).

So our GOLD coin went up 200% (or two times) in paper and the Canadian's went up 80%. But we still both got, in real value, EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT OF GOLD, namely One Ounce.

It's easy to just say, "Oh, GOLD went up in value!". But that really isn't it, is it? I still just have ONE OUNCE OF GOLD; that amount didn't increase, did it?

If you give this some thought you may begin to realize that the our GOLD didn't increase but that the pieces of paper that represents this same amount of GOLD over the years has LOST VALUE. One US dollar of year 2007 is not worth what a US dollar of 2000 was once worth.

In fact, a US Dollar today (2007) is worth EXACTLY 1/3 of what a US Dollar back in 2000 in terms of GOLD. So again the question is, what happened?

If your pieces of paper you call DOLLARs are worth less is it because whomever makes these pieces of paper is screwing things up. Simple as that. We as americans must accept these pieces of paper in our day to day living.

An immediate come-back to this logic is something like "well, i can get more stuff now with my money than i could have gotten back in 2000 dear del..." and you'd be exactly right in many cases. But that is because of the real American economy that constantly innovates and creates wealth and opportunities. And no thanks to those whom control the government money printing presses.

It wasn't so long ago that a good ol' AMERICAN DOLLAR was the standard of the world. In fact, it wasn't all that long that a CANADIAN dollar was worth just 75 cents US.

Wanna guess how much a CANADIAN DOLLAR is worth today right now in terms of the AMERICAN DOLLAR? A canadian tourist exchanging ONE CANADIAN DOLLAR at a Waikiki money desk will get in return... (hold on to your wallet).... $1.10 in US money. WHAT DAAAA????


So how did it go from 75 cents to now $1.10????

I read somewhere that only 15% of Americans have passports. That means only 15% of americans have ever bothered to travel to a foreign land. That is sooooo sad. It is an eye opener when you travel to foreign places as you'll soon find out that THE USA DOLLAR HAS FALLEN IN VALUE...

(...as you get your cafe bill after sipping that wonderful cappuccino overlooking Hadrian's PANTHEON in Rome, no doubt. But what a view!!)

It is a shame what we've allowed to happen in our USA thru costly wars and unrelenting demands by its citizens for more and more social services.

Massive government spending creates equally massive monetary devaluations. A nation's thriving economy can only mask -not cure- it's government's fundamental problems for so long.

It is a sad day when gold reaches an all-time-high; it's not a cause of celebration at all. It means there is something seriously wrong with our money. Gold reaching an all-time-high is a WARNING SIGNAL.

Are you listening? Are you getting the message? What will YOU do?

Do you even CARE you ignorant American? Rather listen to MTV, wear silly fashion trendy clothes and view internet PORN instead?

Open Announcements

Modem Drivers

Richard Gamberg's Modem Troublshooter Page Please use that page as an initial first step!

Those of you having dialup modem connectivity problems - disconnects (other than the 10 Minute Idle Timeout, see below), difficulty connecting, or disappointing speeds -- You MAY find relief by updating your modem driver IF your modem is hardware controller-less:

Winmodems, Soft Modems, HSP Modems, AMR Modems, many USB modems - includes Rockwell/Conexant HCF, HSF, Soft56, Lucent/Agere 'LT', AMR, Scorpio, Mars, Apollo; Motorola; PCTel; BCM; IntelHaM, etc.

However, please go read this web page before you go updating your modem driver. There are lots of information that can help you and your dialup modem out.

________________________________

drop.io for Quick Transfers of Large Files

FlexGmail limits email attachments to 500K bytes TOTAL. If you want to send over large files, use Drop.io instead. Pretty good. Recommended.

________________________________

Continental U.S. Keepalives

Here are the dialup session limits for all Continental U.S. dialups:

  • Idle Timeout: 10 minutes - Typing a response to an email for instance, is NOT considered activity as nothing is sent over the modem until you press "SEND".

    - To keep your modem session from getting killed due to inactivity, go to this link: http://www.flex.com/refresh. Then, minimize the browser window.

  • Hard Session Limit: 5 hours - There is an overall FIVE HOUR session timeout that no amount of activity will prevent.

  • Simultaneous Dialup Connections: 1 - Your dialup can be from any computer, but only one login is allowed at a time or you'll get denied.



  • ________________________________

    News Server Authentications

    All flexnet users who wish to access our news server (news.flex.com) MUST now login. For example if your username is "someuser", you will need to login as "someuser@flex.com", and use your regular flexnet password. This parallels the modem user login changes and is our way to make things uniform across all our services.

    ________________________________

    Webpage Form Mailers

    For those who wish to do FORM MAIL, please know that we now have a walk-thru (complete with an actual working example) of how to set one up on your web page. Go to Flex FormMail.

    ________________________________




    Del Wong
    Sysadmin, FlexNet Inc.