Techhawking

While listening to one of Mike poor’s SANS security talk, he mentioned the problems with untrusted third-party applications. In this age of trojans, even a security expert like him takes precautions before he downloads and tests a new security tool. In fact, he said, that even uncompiled “source code” of trojans have hidden trojans waiting for an unsuspecting security researcher to try it out.

I don’t download trojans everyday, but I do play around with tools which want to modify my registry. How many times have you yelled in frustration after finding out that the tool you’ve been trying to work with (and failed) for last 2 days doesn’t uninstall anymore. I have a dozen or two interesting third party broken tools deployed somewhere on my computer which I haven’t uninstalled yet.

VMware is in a perfect position to fix this problem. With Microsoft right behind them, they released something called the VMware player. Its basically a stripped down VMware product which can “play” Virtual machine images created by others. What makes it so interesting is that now I can download and run untrusted applications without thinking as much as I used to before. And all those uninstallable tools, which I never got to work, can be easily removed if they were shipped in a VMware image. Its almost like deleting a compressed archive with all the files in it except that in this case you don’t have to worry about that tool messing with your operating system.

Coming from a unix admin background I have to tell you how much fun its is to install an unstable version of an opensource tool. Whats worse is that some of them have so many dependencies that by the time you get to use the tool, you would figure out that you broke something else. A perfect example for me was when I was playing with this great Network Monitoring tool called “opennms”. If I were its maintainer, I would jump on the VMware bandwagon and release an opennms image ready to go for people like me who want to try it out without wasting time. And with oracle giving away its low-end database engine for free, this is the perfect way for some vendors to release their products preinstalled with oracle/linux inside a VMware image.

Now, Microsoft’s Virtual PC is a very strong competitor. They came out from nowhere and literally forced VMware to give out its product for free. And though you might think VMware is on a loosing streak they have one of the best things going for them. The support from the linux/OS community.

The catch with VMware player is that one can’t distribute an image of an OS for free if the OS itself costs money. So if you think you are going to get a demo of “Quicken 2006″ installed on Windows XP platform, its probably not going to happen soon. But if you want to try out “Squid” proxy server running on Linux, you can have it for free. In fact Community Virtual application page at VMware site lists quite a few applications running on open source OS like Linux and Free BSD.

When pkzip/winzip started gaining popularity Microsoft started building compressed folders right into their OS. When Realplayer started gaining popularity they built the Media player. The IE browser, Internet firewall, MSN Toolbar are all part of Microsoft’s effort of killing the competition. (They of course deny it.) So if VMware player gains popularity how will Microsoft compete ? Will they change their licensing policy for distributing Microsoft OS inside a VM image ?

Or worse, will Microsoft, officially, (an openly) claim that Linux runs on Virtual PC ?
Other interesting links on VMware

• VMTN Blog
• VMware Announces Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge
• Virtual Appliances
• Community Virtual Appliances

Its been a month since we heard of google calender rumors. Just when everything has cooled down, Paul stone dug up some links within googles code to a “Google Links” page which had a whole bunch of google services listed. What stood out on that page was a link to “Google CL2″ which said “A calendar for you and the world”. If you have a google account go to this link http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=barc and see for yourself. Image1 Image2

• Google Pages is here for everyone. I’ve heard people comparing it with what geocities (now owned by yahoo) used to do long time back. Google pages allows users to create pages with the help of AJAX. However, what stood out, was the hint that Google pages might be group editable, making it easy to create and manage like a wiki server.
• My Page Rank is an interesting service which allows you to put page rank on your website. Nothing new about it, but its there and does the dirty work of converting stats into an image.
• Zillow.com has got a lot of traction in the media lately. Zillow does one thing and does it very well. It tries to predict home prices based on the past and present price change trends. It takes into account the amenities available to the home which is used to predict its next sale price. With the house prices tanking in some places, the importance of zillow to understand trends will be of great value.
• Google Finance might be on the way. Search engine journal has some interesting observactions.
• An other interesting but useless site I found is Toogle

A lot of people were wondring what Origami is all about. Seems like the secret is out of the bag… and I’m a little dissapointed.

The way it was hyped it was made to look as if this is will be cutting edge, something new, which we haven’t thought about yet. But this device is larger than a PDA and has less features than a small laptop. The advertisement didn’t answer why someone won’t buy a 12inch Powerbook, or a tablet PC. Will someone really walk around with that clunky piece of equipment ? May be they will… but doesn’t the success of iPods and the failiure of Mobile CD players define acceptable size of a mobile device which people are willing to carry around ?
In my personal opinion, based on what I saw in the short clip, this product could be a direct competition for sony’s PSP. Other than that, with the current feature set and its size, it can’t replace the laptop, cellphone, camera or the iPod/music player.
If there is anything to be blamed for the launch disaster, it would be the hype itself. I wouldn’t have blogged about Origami if I wasn’t waiting for it with so much anticipation.

Those of you who never talk to anyone outside this (US) island you live on, chances are that you have never used skype. For others who can’t buy unlimited minutes to other parts of the world, thank skype for trying to change the world.

But skype world is not perfect yet. You still have to use your computer to make and receive calls. There are some skype-phone gateways available, but most of them are just hacks at best. A few companies have big plans for skype in the near future and here are some interesting details I gathered over the last few weeks.

To begin with there are 4 classes of skype devices currently out there.

• Traditional headphone and microphones devices, using speaker/mic-in connections on the computer
• Intelligent wired USB devices which can interact with Skype software on the computer and make/receive calls. Some even have a lcd display on the handset.
• Intelligent USB devices which can do whatever the wired devices can do, but you have the flexibility of moving around without the wires. The catch is that there is a base module which is always attached to the USB port of the computer. And your computer has to on for it to work.
• Skype on handheld devices which requires you to buy expensive PDAs to make free/cheap phone calls

Most of these hardware are available on ebay, froogle and skype.

A few days ago, a friend showed me some interesting news about FON on Om Maliks Blog. Fon is a interesting community project which promotes wireless access sharing by promissing connectivity to its large network of POPs around the world. The catch is that if you want to access thier POPs, you have to set one FON wireless gateway yourself. Aha.. if you know how bittorrent works, u will try to draw some similarities here.

Anyway, so I heard that Google and Skype are two of the investors in Fon. Google, who have been heavily investing in the last mile connectivity (free wireless in cities like mountain view) have a lot to gain by monitoring user activity. But what I couldn’t understand was the reason skype getting into it.

Until I figured out that skype heavily depends on internet availability to allow customers to make phone calls, and without this network being available, every one of its customers will continue to depend on traditional means of wireless communication which bites into thier revenue.

If skype could provide internet connectivity over 802.11, skype users might think about just using skype for thier calls. But who on earth wants to cary their seven pound laptops around with them ? I’m glad you asked.

There are a few vendors out there who have been very busy building 802.11 based Skype phones which don’t need any USB at all. There are a few others who are building 802.11 into the regular cellular phones such that customers have a choice about which network to use when there is a 802.11 network available. Interesting. So who are these guys ?

• Netgear
• Calypso Wireless: C1250i WiFi-GSM
• Motorola

I recently bought free.1 phone which is a wired USB device to use it with my skype account on my powerbook. Though it worked beautifully (as expected) , I’ll probably recommend everyone out there to wait for the 802.11 devices to come out if you can. Also, even though I mentioned about FON, I personally would never set it up without putting it behind a firewall of some kind. So in other words I’ll probably end up paying FON/Skype instead of me setting up the FON wireless device on my network.