Posts by Owen Geddes

Collaboration - really?

So bored of getting messages from companies/people wanting to connect because they want to collaborate with us/me.

Receiving a collaboration request is always exciting - how do they want to work together? What will the project look like? They have a customer in mind already?

The reality is they are ALWAYS someone who is actually trying to sell. Why, why, oh why do people pretend to want to collaborate when they are trying to sell you their services.

Couldn't agree more

There is no permanence to internet based services 'in the cloud' for your personal data. No matter how heavy an internet services user I am, I cannot bring myself to do anything other than store originals of all my data (photo, video, documents) on a hard drive/memory cards. I treat any data I put on the web as disposable - because that is exactly what it is to many of these services, and that is exactly what these services are to many of their VC's.

Facebook etc is just a way to share for me, not a way to horde/keep/store safely for myself.

A few comments

It is very true that wireless broadband is evolving very quickly. The introduction of WiMAX was not mentioned - this will come to many markets and certainly initially will just look like bigger hotspots in metropolitan areas.

The case made that mobile broadband is more secure than public wifi because traffic is encrypted is not necessarily true. Sure if an AP does not have a WEP/WPA key then the air transmission is clear and could be picked up. But once the traffic has 'landed' at the base station/AP then I dont believe its is any more secure. That traffic still has to hit the open internet, so it is exactly the same at that point - both insecure unless the user does something to encrypt.

It should also be noted that wifi operators with a centralised architecture actually transit data from the AP back to their core via encrypted VPN tunnels or private lines anyway - so are no less secure than a mobile network. Those that have a distributed architecture egress the data directly onto the the Internet - which is no different to a mobile operator egressing traffic to the Internet from their core anyway.

So other than the air interface the statement that wifi networks are less secure is not true.