2010 Fleet Week, New York City

Fleet Week is always a big deal in New York City. Unlike the days of WWII, New York City doesn't see the U.S. Armed Forces very often. Sure, they still have a recruiting office in Times Square and Ft. Hamilton is located under the Brooklyn side of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. But, many New Yorkers just don't cross paths with military personnel in uniform.

I'm sure Fleet Week, during wartime, is even more memorable for both the service members and the New Yorkers. It's hard to miss the throngs of sailors, in their whites, and ship tours are always appreciated by the tourist. A free piece of advice to the ladies, when you take a ship tour do not wear a dress (especially a short one) since you'll be climbing up and down some steep ladders.

In the 1980s and 1990s, I would wear my dress blues in New York when home on leave and it never failed that someone would ask me what branch of the service I was in.

One time, I was at the Milleridge Inn restaurant coat check in Jericho on Long Island (my father, who was in the Army, and I had a long standing bet, each December, on the Army/Navy Footbal Game that was payable by the loser at Milleridge Inn). While waiting on line, in my dress blues, to retrieve my mother's coat and my boat cloak, a man in front of me turned around and asked me what branch of service I was in. As I started to tell him, "the Marines", the man behind me rolled his eyes, sighed, and let out a mildly annoyed, "He's a Marine, can't you tell?!?".

You have to love New Yorkers - they never have a problem expressing themselves.

U2's Beautiful Day; Nairobi, Kenya; and American Idol

There's something about U2's Beautiful Day that will, until my dying day, remind me of when I lived in Nairobi, Kenya. It started with my boss, at the American Embassy, who loved that song and it has been imprinted on me for the past few years.

I just found out that an American acquaintance, whom I worked with in Kenya, will be flying back there aboard Air Force 2. The funny part is how this connection was made, tonight, since DeWyze sang this song on American Idol.

After all, it is called "TechCrunch Disrupt".

Disrupt was the keyword at yesterday's TechCrunch Disrupt fireside chat with Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz.

I think it's safe to say that Michael Arrington lost this one. Seriously, Michael, you shouldn't have suggested that she was a hypocrite, to her face, earlier in the interview. And you probably shouldn't have written that she was, figuratively, using drugs, in your post, last month.

Here's a 60 second highlight.





The "money shot" is at the very end of the full video (25:00).

Say Good-Bye to T.V. Shows and Cable Channels

All at once the series finales are going... going... gone. Say good-bye to Lost and 24. Will America be safe without Jack Bauer?

How dangerous are the streets of New York City since Law and Order is going off the air, too? It seems that there's a L&O episode airing on TV, continuously, between 6 am and midnight every day. I'm sure they'd like to keep running episodes into the wee hours of the morning, but we have to make room for get-rich-quick and fad diet informercials.

Speaking of informercials; of the all the stations we have through our Time Warner cable subscription between channels 2 and 72, more and more are now off the air. It looks like these stations now broadcast in the triple digits which our old TVs don't receive. I recently counted 13 informercials, all running at the same time, on different channels, throughout the 59 channels that were broadcasting at 5 am. That is ridiculous.

Thank God for Hulu, ABC.com, and Netflix on my iPad. I suspect that watching TV, in the not-so-distant future, will be more common on tablet size devices. A 10" screen, viewed at 18", appears bigger than a large flat panel TV on the other side of the room. Today, homes no longer have party (telephone) lines and, soon, bedrooms may no longer haver "party" (shared) TVs.

State of Mobile Apps Before the iPhone

iPhone too closed?

Before complaining about the iPhone being too closed, keep in mind what the state of mobile phone apps was like before the iPhone.

A $1.99 ring tone, wallpaper, or app delivered "over-the-air" would earn the developer less than 50%. About 95¢–$1.10 went to the wireless carrier and about 10¢–15¢ went to the short code provider (SMS aggregator) - not to mention the 2.5¢–5.5¢/SMS sent.

Each purchase required at least two SMS text messages to be sent to the buyer in order to meet the carrier's double opt-in requirements. Additionally, the wireless carriers would only allow content to be sold which could be "consumed by the phone". In other words, none of the carriers would allow you to walk up to a vending machine and make a purchase that would show up on your phone bill.

Also, every developer had to negotiate a deal with each wireless carrier in order to get them to support your SMS short code. If a carrier didn't approve your short code application then no wireless subscribers on that carrier's network could access your service.

Short codes are expensive (the short code, SMS aggregator, etc. typically costs more than $2000+/month) resulting in a $15K-$30K per year expense not including the costs of sending each SMS.

It has been less than three years since the iPhone's introduction and how quickly we forget what it used to be like.

You can see the details in this two year old SMS white paper.

How to tell it's not a cloud.

People always ask what is cloud computing? - and it's not always simple to explain. Perhaps it's easier to just explain what cloud computing is not.

1. If you can’t buy it on your personal credit card… it is not a cloud

2. If they are trying to sell you hardware… its not a cloud.

3. If there is no API… its not a cloud.

4. If it takes more than ten minutes to provision… its not a cloud.

... and 12 other things that cloud computing is not via James Governor.

Here's what I think cloud computing is all about.

Too Much Energy Efficiency?

Is it possible for technology to be too energy efficient? Looks like that's the case. New LED traffic lights don't produce enough heat to melt the snow that builds up around them.

What's so sacred about 140 characters?

Why 140 characters? The obvious answer, which I'm sure you know, is so that a tweet can fit into the 160 character limitation of an SMS text message. In other words, the Twitter user name (which can be up to 15 characters) followed by the 140 character tweet can all be packaged nicely into a single SMS text message.

Which begs the next question: Why restrict a tweet to the limits set by SMS when this is the World Wide Web? One of the "limitations" of e-mail and the Web is that you need Internet access for connectivity. In developed countries, we take Internet connectivity for granted. Having spend some time living in East Africa I was amazed to see how important SMS was to the locals who don't own computers, printers, or even have an e-mail address. But, nearly all of them had pre-paid cell phones and they used SMS just like we use e-mail (they also had trivial SMS to e-mail and e-mail to SMS bridges).

Additionally, their cell phone networks have features which I wish we had here in the US. Basically, people in developing countries have substituted the computer, printer, and Internet with the cell phone, fax, and the carrier's wireless network. This is how most of the world gets "online" with technology.

Imagine if Twitter didn't just go after the consumer market who own computers and smart phones with Internet access (I'm guessing about one billion people), but, instead, what if Twitter went after every person on the planet who's an active cell phone subscriber (which will reach 4.6 billion by the end of 2009). Now, that would be a fantastic communications tool!

iPhone Bandwidth on Edge, 3G, & WiFi

Script Kiddies SSH Attack Solution

Are you tired of seeing attacks against port 22 (SSH) on your public servers?

The attacks generally look like the following log snippet which is a simple dictionary attack (usually against root or admin).


Nov 15 07:41:58 static-171-163-154-171 sshd[5470]: Failed password for rootfrom 68.152.76.202 port 50818 ssh2
Nov 15 07:41:58 static-171-163-154-171 sshd[5472]: Invalid user password from 68.152.76.202
Nov 15 07:41:58 static-171-163-154-171 com.apple.SecurityServer: authinternal failed to authenticate user password.
Nov 15 07:41:58 static-171-163-154-171 com.apple.SecurityServer: Failed to authorize right system.login.tty by process /usr/sbin/sshd for authorization created by /usr/sbin/sshd.


You could try reporting the offending IP address, but the attacking computer will frequently turn out to be a compromised Windows machine owned by grandma and grandpa.

Solution
Your best bet, after ensuring that you're using a strong password, is to have SSH listen on a port other than 22, such as 8080. Since port 8080 is usually used as an alternative to port 80, attackers will try using the http protocol to exploit it, which will fail before the attack even has a chance to begin. At this point, script kiddies will move along since there are so many other servers, with vulnerabilities, to choose from.