RyuKent on Life

OK, I know this has nothing to do with anything, but I found a really cool guide showing you how to make a Super Mario mushroom from an ordinary radish. I feel I need to share it with everyone! Guide here at annathered.

This morning I got an extremely annoying email telling me that Google Checkout has stopped accepting Maestro cards and that I should register another type of card to carry on using its services. Actually I was quite angry. Maestro is one of the most common cards in use in the UK and certain banks do not offer an alternative unless you change your account. How many people will change their whole bank account just to use another website?

It was also quite annoying that there was no explanation. After digging around a bit, I did find answers. Apparently Maestro is now insisting that all transactions use SecureCode. This is the system that asks you to use the predefined password when making a purchase. Unfortunately it is really not very secure as you can quite easily reset your password using a date of birth which can be acquired from a whole host of social networking sites, but that is another story.

Verified by Visa, which is the Visa equivalent is still optional. The SecureCode system takes away a lot of the responsibility of the card company covering the cost of fraud as it is much harder to claim that your card was stolen when they also know your password. Google didn’t want to put users through this extra step and probably didn’t want to pay the higher fees and so, to avoid loosing revenue and potentially putting themselves at greater risk of liability in the case of fraud, decided that they could just stop accepting the Maestro and stick with Visa. In the long run, perhaps it is unlikely they will lose much business and have probably calculated they stand to lose less than if they had taken on the more arduous terms MasterCard were imposing. It seems unlikely that they would have inconvenienced so many users without carefully considering it.

It has also been suggested that SecureCode is not compatible with a number of services such as WAP and as such would limit the channels payment could be accepted by. I don’t really accept this as a good reason for dumping the service though as you could just restrict maestro users on that channel and allow everything else, while still allowing us to use the standard web based system as normal.

HSBC are rumoured to be moving over to Visa too. It seems Maestro is not so popular as it used to be. Perhaps the charges have become proportionally uncompetitive. RBS / Natwest will still offer it as standard though. I think it very unlikely anyone will want to move banks. If a significant number of people have to stop using the service, competitors such as PayPal could well take some of Google’s business. In PayPal’s case, you can fund transactions using direct debit, thus avoiding the card issue. IT remains to be seen whether Google too will start offering this service. Personally, I would like this as you could incorporate the correspondence logging system of Google with the convenience of PayPal. In my opinion and through experience, Google checkout offers better customer service.

Something that has always annoyed me is that there are so many video standards out there and that they are nearly all proprietary systems owned and pushed by one company or another and inevitably restricted in one way or another. Or worse, expensively licenced.

Another thing I hate is that because of this lack of any real standard, it has become necessary for a while to either have a number of different players installed or as the case usually is now, for them to be packaged up inside a flash interface, each with a different UI, none with the easy ability to access the underlying file to download or manipulate and all relying on having flash installed.

I love Flash when it’s doing its Flash thing, but I hate not being allowed it on my iPhone and I really think that Flash is not what videos should be. There is a reason why all websites are not just large Flash files. There is a reason why all website images are not Flash files. Flash has been used to get round the inconvenience of not having a decent standard for video, but really is second best to an ideal solution where all browsers have the inbuilt capacity to play, download, even edit, tag and scan a universal video format.

So along comes HTML 5. Everyone’s happy, we are on the verge of reaching a consensus about OGG Theora and Vorbis for our standards. And Apple and Nokia ruin it. They moan about the fact that the company who created OGG Xiph.org being able to patent it. Yeah, but it is still an open standard. It is still open for people to implement in the way they want. It is still free to adapt and use in every possible device without licensing issues. It is pretty good as far as quality is concerned. What else currently offers such greatness?

I’m convinced the companies who are blocking it’s adoption are doing so merely to srve their own self interest. Apple wants you to use quicktime, they control quicktime. You have to pay them to use it and download their software with their annoying ‘lets install Safari’ crap. But why should I use quicktime on my settopbox, on my Linux desktop. Why should I pay to use restricted software when a perfectly good open and free standard is available? Sure it might be organised by one organisation but it’s a hell of a lot better than what I’d have to live under were I to try and use MP3 or Windows media format.

I think it’s really sad that we’ve lost a great opportunity to move the internet forward to a universal standard that would mean people don’t have to install a whole load of crapware applications designed to peddle other paid services. An opportunity to have all internet videos to work on the iPhone instead of proprietary YouTube only. An opportunity for a thousand developers to make a thousand embedded devices that would all play the same videos. There are people who are simply not skilled enough to deal with the mess that internet video gives us right now. How many grannies understand that you need to download RealPlayer to play real videos and that won’t work in Windows Media Player which they need to play Windows Media files which won’t play on their DVD player. This is unnecessary!

Linux-mag have posted a very interesting article comparing Ubuntu and MacOS. Strongly recommend a read. Link here.

It seems it is possible to synchronise your iPhone to more than one computer at a time, thus negating the need to erase all data if you are often moving your phone around, maybe using a work and home PC etc.

The process involves changing the Library Persistent ID so that both iTunes copies believe they are in fact running from the same library. You’ll need to get down and dirty, hacking the library.itl file using  hex editor, but as long as you take a back up, there will be no danger involved and I found the process quite enjoyable.

Full details can be found over at ismashphone.com

I’ve been doing some experiments trying to use Japanese characters in Adobe Air applications. There doesn’t seem to be much written on this subject so far. I’ve discovered that it is possible to input in Japanese in both Windows and Linux (using SCIM), but that it is program specific and depends on the fonts that have been selected in the application. Unlike Java which has a system of switching to a different font when a character is not found in the default set, Air will not continue if it cannot render the character in the selected font.

Some applications seem to have implemented a work around by having an international font that can be selected in the settings. TweetDeck is a great example of this. You can turn on the international font and then SCIM works fine. See below:

So basically, at the moment, until Adobe improve the Air system, it looks like the suggested way of getting east Asian characters to work in Adobe Air is to contact the developer and ask them to implement an international font. I imaging the prospect of their software also working in China, Japan and Korea would probably be enough for most to do this.

According to TechRadar, iPhones for official release in China are to have their WiFi facilities disabled. Apparently it is because the authorities would rather that people’s internet access is monitored and controlled through one centralised source. I think this is a shame.

Aside from my view on the monitoring and controlling, I really don’t think this makes technical sense. First because people already have access to iPhones that have been imported from other countries and there is no sign that these will become illegal. Secondly, access will still remain from other devices to the the WiFi hotspots that iPhone users will be denied. These hotspots will be connected to the internet through a normal Chinese ISP which will surely be running the same great firewall software that the authorities will want to run on the mobile network’s servers.

If you are the kind of person who needs to avoid this or don’t want to be tracked, surely you will opt for an imported iPhone without the WiFi disabled, or some of the numerous other mobiles that do have it and you can buy in China. Also, what extra do they really get from restricting people to the 3G internet? Will there be extra monitoring or restricted access? If so, won’t people just wait to go home or pop into a web cafe to post or access the data they cannot on their iPhone. Surely in this kind of restricted regime, you have to block all access or none. The people who need it, will always know of the easiest method to get access and use that anyway. In the mean time, the majority of normal users will suffer significant loss of functionality just to try and prevent what is ultimately impossible to restrict.

Wow. Just read over at the google blog that google are set to launch a new OS. It’s planned to be an ultra fast linux kernel based web browser delivery system. Sounds similar to gOS. All the applications will be online and the windows rendering system will be all new. I’m a bit suspicious about this. Is it not a google attempt to do exactly what Microsoft have been criticised for in defaulting users to their services by tying them to the OS. Also what kind of offline facilities will we see? Are we really happy to run all our software though Java, Flash and the like?

Well it’s quite an exciting development anyway. The backing of a major player like Google can only help develop the linux based platform further. They claim they will need help from the open source community. This sounds great, but only if they give back to us what we put in. Question marks still remain as to how this will tie into Android. Supposedly, “Chrome OS” as it will be known is something completely different. I expect to begin with we will see this installed alongside windows on netbooks for people who need fast boots directly into the browser.

You never know, this could be the ground braking first step in a new era that sees Microsoft’s grip on the OS monopoly slip and herald a new age of more balanced OS competition. We shall see. I wait in anticipation.

TechCrunch is reporting that a new application will allow push email notification for gmail on the iPhone. The system apparently uses the IMAP IDLE function and sits in the background allowing the authors server to ping your phone when an email comes. The only drawback is that you have to give away your username and password to a third company. We are still not sure how secure that will be.

The app, called GPush has been submitted to the appstore for vetting. Who knows whether Apple will agree to it. As push gmail is already available on other phones maybe there is some reason why Apple are allowing Yahoo but not Google. Anyway, it would be welcome for all us gmail users who are willing to risk our passwords and need instant gmail, not being able to wait 15 minutes for the system to dial in. Watch this space. I’ll keep you updated on when this app is available.

What is one of the most dangerous things people do these days? They use one or two passwords for every site that they set up an account for on the internet. They might think that password is secure, but how secure is every site they give it to? A hell of a lot of people use the same password for their primary email account as they do for some random forum they wanted to post on. Dangerous! If someone hacks the forum and gets hold of their password and email, chances are, they’ll try the same combination on every other popular site…. ebay, paypal, online banking. You get the jist.

So if we are to have a different password for every different site, how on earth are we going to remember all these long and secure passwords? The answer is KeePass. This wonderful freeware open source application will keep all your passwords secure. How many times have you forgotten you had an account or had to create a new one because you forgot the password? KeePass will solve this. Moat people fear storing all their passwords in one place, but as long as this place is secure, there is a relatively low chance of anyone getting to the file. Then there’s the fact that the file will be encrypted using AES. This is the same encryption system that US diplomats use. Finally the data stored in memory will also  be encrypted to prevent other applications from accessing it.

KeePass is great, not least because it runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows, so you can take your passwords wherever you go. There’s a Blackberry port, android port, mobile Java port and they are even working on an iPhone port too. Any where you go you can take your password file with you and only with the master password can anyone read it. If course you have to remember one really long, strong password, but if you can remember that, all the rest of your accounts are safe.

And KeePass stores more than just passwords. It stores the URLs to websites you have accounts on and also your usernames. You can even add extra notes for each account. This way you can easily keep track of hundreds of accounts and give each one a different password. The password can be something you’d never be able to remember. The built in copy paste system allows you to transfer these passwords securely when needed without having to type them in, thus avoiding keyloggers.

Of course, no system is without its cons. Keeping your passwords all i one place would increase the danger should someone get hold of your password database along with your master password. But I am very much of the opinion that this would be much harder to do than to hack a small time forum you’ve used the same password as on other sites for. Security is only as strong as the weakest link. Make sure you have decent antivirus and spyware apps. Make sure you avoid using internet explorer and preferably windows if you can. If you follow simple common sense rules, KeePass should help organise your accounts and allow you to implement a more secure password regime.

You can download KeePass here.