Information freedom for open source users.

CyberSlugGump writes “I am trying to declutter, and I have come across my cheap, off-brand, consumer-grade 802.11b wireless routers, PCMCIA cards, and USB adapters. The routers would still be good as 4-port 100Mb switches, and the other devices have at least 32-bit Windows XP drivers available. However, lack of security beyond WEP and the age of the equipment makes me wonder if it is worth any time putting it to use.”

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Nicros writes “Almost every evening, between 8:30 and 10:00, my Wi-Fi just dies. This, in itself, could be explained by a crappy Wi-Fi source or some hardware failure, except that I know both of my neighbors are experiencing the same loss of signal at the same time. While the Wi-Fi is down, the LAN is OK, and anything plugged into Cat5 can access the Internet just fine. One possibility comes to mind — perhaps some other neighbor arrives home and turns on their router from 8:30 to 10:00? And something in their signal is hosing our Wi-Fi? I have tried looking around for software to help identify the source of interference, but either the programs are ridiculously expensive for a home user, or else my card (Intel Link 1000 BGN) isn’t supported. (Netstumbler is an example of the latter.) Any suggestions on how I can track this down?”

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CWmike sends in this excerpt from Computerworld: “Free unlimited Wi-Fi is coming to nearly 7,000 company-operated Starbucks stores in the US beginning July 1, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said on Monday. Schultz also said that Starbucks is partnering with Yahoo! to debut the Starbucks Digital Network this fall. Starbucks customers will have free unrestricted access to various paid sites and services, such as wsj.com, as well as other free downloads Starbucks didn’t detail. A spokeswoman said the access will be ‘unlimited’ and ‘simplified, one-click.’ By comparison, first-time Wi-Fi users in Starbucks stores now get up to two hours free after registering, but then must purchase additional time at the rate of $3.99 for two consecutive hours. That Wi-Fi access is already free to AT&T DSL home customers and AT&T mobile customers, according to the Starbucks website, but the connection process requires up to nine steps. McDonald’s added free Wi-Fi to 11,500 locations earlier this year.”

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Pax681 writes “[London Mayor] Boris Johnson declared that London will have all bus stops and lamp posts Wi-Fi enabled by 2012 for the Olympics. In an article on Tech Eye, Boris waxes lyrical (or as lyrical as he can get) about how it would be done at a Google Zeitgeist event in Hertfordshire. These would be public Wi-Fi hotpots; as such, would these break the new law on open access points? Would they be just the thing for people to use to infringe with impunity and anonymously bypass the chances of running foul of the Digital Economy Act?”

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Ant writes with this excerpt from an annual review of wireless access for hotel guests: “This year marks HotelChatter’s sixth annual hotel Wi-Fi report. Over the years we’ve documented the progression of hotel Wi-Fi, from blatant disregard, to price-gouging for Wi-Fi access, and reliable Wi-Fi for loyalty program members, through guests taking matters into their own hands with wireless laptop/notebook cards and 3G access. A year ago, we thought guest demand for free, reliable, hotel Wi-Fi might just go away, thanks to 3G, but today, a growing number of hotel guests not only demand the hotel they book have proper wireless access, but most will consider not staying at a hotel that can’t meet their basic access needs. That’s right, Wi-Fi is a make or break amenity for many hotel guests that can sway booking decisions — and that isn’t going away.”

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Just weeks after Linux lost the support of Songbird, a music application, a new Linux browser has debuted.

It’s a version of Firefox Fennec for the Android phone.

It’s a “pre-alpha” release, announced by Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukicevic on his personal blog. He gave a link from which you can download the current build.

It’s not for grandma, or for casual walking around, he writes. Some of the limitations:

• Bugs might require you to reboot the phone.
• It’s a memory hog.
• There’s still an app exit and relaunch on the install.
• It does not support links from other apps.
• You will need Android 2.0 or above, and the phone needs to be OpenGL ES 2.0 capable.
• You have to install it on the phone’s internal memory, not the SD card.

Most of this stuff will be fixed as the developers go along. Vukicevic calls it “a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha).” Don’t say you weren’t warned.

But still. Wa-ha-ha-ha. Candid software. Nudge, nudge. If you’re a man of the world, squire, you might like to give it a tumble. One of the best contributions you can make to open source, as a non-programmer, is to try out new code.

jeremyz writes “With the inclusion of 802.11n in more and more Wi-Fi devices, the WRT54GL is losing its usefulness, even though it’s still the de-facto standard for open source, Linux-running wireless routers. I’ve been looking around for a 802.11n router to replace the WRT54GL, but haven’t really found anything besides the Netgear’s WNR3500L. At first look, the WNR3500L looked great, but after some further investigation, I found that Netgear hasn’t released all of the source, as they should have to comply with the GPL. Are there any good 802.11n routers to replace my aging WRT54GL?”

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unixcrab writes with this excerpt from The Mac Observer: “Apple’s iPad is proving to be popular everywhere — except Israel. The country’s Communication Ministry is refusing to let people bring the multimedia tablet into the country because it hasn’t tested and approved the Wi-Fi technology used in the device, according to Haaretz. Ministry officials commented, ‘The iPad device sold exclusively today in the United States operates at broadcast power levels [over its Wi-Fi modem] compatible with American standards. As the Israeli regulations in the area of Wi-Fi are similar to European standards, which are different from American standards, which permit broadcasting at lower power, therefore the broadcast levels of the device prevent approving its use in Israel.’ The government seems serious about its iPad import ban. Customs officials have already confiscated ten iPads and told their owners to ship them overseas.”

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nk497 writes “UK mobile operator 3 has unveiled a wireless hotspot for cars. It’s essentially a repackaged version of their MiFi wireless router, which lets users create their own wireless hotspot using the 3G network. While drivers will hopefully steer away from using the web at the wheel, 3 predicts the mobile hotspot will let passengers entertain themselves as well as offer a hookup to email, music and traffic data.”

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snydeq writes “InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman sifts through the ‘doubleplus ungood’ of this year’s CTIA and Mobile World Congress to spell out ‘Big Brother’ mobile carriers’ true designs for IT and smartphone users. From fake 4G salespitches, to mobile payment systems that hide text-messaging payment confirmation fees, to the inevitability of tier pricing for mobile data usage, no facet of smartphone use is beyond providers’ latest profit-engineering push. Even IT’s concerns over the invasion of mobile devices at their companies has become ‘a great excuse to sell warmed-over management tools to fearful IT and security execs.’ And make no mistake, mea culpas, like AT&T admitting to falling short on relieving 3G congestion, will result in additional opportunities to pad providers’ bottom lines by, say, buying a $150 femtocell from AT&T to help AT&T ‘solve’ its problem. ‘Of course, in typical Big Brother fashion, [AT&T] told the US government to stay out of wireless — meaning don’t regulate prices or impose Net neutrality — while also asking the government for more spectrum. You know the contradiction: The government is good when it gives you free or cheap services but bad when it tries to impose regulation to prevent abusive behavior: doublethink ungood.’”

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Remember when Halle Berry married David Justice? (Picture from Threebrothersandasister.blogspot.com.)

She was an up-and-coming starlet, but he was the star right-fielder of the Atlanta Braves, heir to Dale Murphy, a big deal. By the time they divorced, in 1997, she was on her way to becoming an Oscar legend while he was heading for Cleveland and obscurity.

That’s the way I feel about news that Mozilla is dropping work on a version of the Firefox browser for Windows Mobile.

Windows Mobile fanboys are furious. (The Berry-Justice relationship did not end well either.) But, really, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Windows Mobile can’t hit the curveball.

Seriously. Steve Ballmer tried to be the same thing with Windows Mobile that Steve Jobs was with his iPhone. The difference is that while Ballmer promised, Jobs delivered, and while Ballmer tried to keep everyone happy, Jobs focused on a single carrier and a customer set.

Now that the iPhone is out there, a target other developers must shoot at and pass in order to succeed, Windows Mobile is lost. It’s got a little speed, a little pop, it can hit .280, it can catch a flyball. But it’s not an All-Star at anything, and the combination pales in comparison to the competition.

If Microsoft tossed its Windows Mobile code over to CodePlex, if it at least made it open core, it might make a comeback. It might become part of a winning team. Justice was a Championship Series MVP and got a World Series ring with the New York Yankees in 2000.

Instead Ballmer seems insistent on being Jobs, which is a little like Rosie O’Donnell coming out for a casting call against Berry. It’s not a contest, unless the role in question is that of a doughy, wise-cracking sidekick. (And even then I’m picking Halle.)

Now if all this makes it seem like I’m just having fun at Windows’ expense, I am. But there is a serious question at the end of this.

Can Windows be a player in mobile, or is it on its way to becoming the answer to a trivia question?

MichaelSmith writes “I code on the tram, going to and from work and I noticed that there are a lot of wifi access points along the way. So one week I made it my job to write an automatic scanner which runs from a cron job every minute during commuting times. My backup script pushes the new AP names to my web server and you can read it on line. It is a mixture of the straightforward, naive and funny, with a few pop culture references along the way. The first column in the file is the number of access points with that name. The second column is the AP name, in brackets to pick up white space.” Why can’t “Dress Me Slowly” and “Domestic Bliss” just share an AP?

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MichaelSmith writes “I code on the tram, going to and from work, and I noticed that there are a lot of WiFi access points along the way. So one week I made it my job to write an automatic scanner which runs from a cron job every minute during commuting times. My backup script pushes the new AP names to my web server and you can read it online. It is a mixture of the straightforward, naive and funny, with a few pop culture references along the way. The first column in the file is the number of access points with that name. The second column is the AP name, in brackets to pick up white space.” Why can’t “Dress Me Slowly” and “Domestic Bliss” just share an AP?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I am not a programmer. I’m a journalist.

Journalists routinely write and talk about things they can’t do. Sportswriters can’t dunk. Business journalists aren’t entrepreneurs. And few political journalists could get elected dogcatcher.

So maybe I am not qualified to make the following complaint, but I’m going to make it anyway because it’s what I do.

Does open matter if you won’t or can’t play with it?

What brings this up is People Power’s launch of the SuRF Developer Kit (above), a $149.95 set of boards with TinyOS software that lets you build wireless applications under the Open Source Home Area Network (OSHAN) specification.

I have been fascinated with this idea for most of a decade. Applications that live in the air, using a wireless network as a platform. Home security applications like cameras and movement sensors. Home automation applications to control your heat and lights. Medical applications to measure your heart function and alert doctors to trouble.

When I first wrote about this, at a time when I was otherwise completely unemployed, I called it “The World of Always On,” in that these applications were always available, not dependent on a continual flow of electricity. They’re low power and can live on rechargeable batteries.

It’s the next market boom, I said. I gave a talk at Stanford about it, during their 2004 Accelerating Change conference. I drew almost no one. Everyone was more interested in getting David Brin’s autograph.

So now it’s six years later. We’re starting to see movement on the medical front, albeit in closed, expensive systems. And we have OSHAN, plus what looks like something Steve Wozniak played with in high school.

Trouble is, it seems no one wants to play like it’s 1973. We have grown accustomed to ready-made solutions. Our kids are users, not builders. (Well, mine are.)

Can new technology grow in such an environment? Yes, it can. Developers create, companies market, people buy. But in that environment, does it really matter much whether the resulting solution is open or closed, since you’re not going to open it anyway?

“If Apple wants to be a real leader, it should be fostering innovation and competition, rather than acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord.”

Is that a quote from Richard Stallman? From Steve Ballmer? Some dirty hippie blogger like myself?

Nope, it’s Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Fred von Lohmann (right), responding to his own “get,” a copy of the iPhone Developer License Agreement, now posted on the EFF Web site. (Picture from ZDNet Government.)

How convenient of Tim Bray to land at Google on such a propitious day. This has to be considered an enormous opportunity for Google to attract developers to the Android platform.

In his own blog post about the document, called a legal analysis, von Lohmann says he got the document through a Freedom of Information Act request, after noticing that NASA has an app in the Apple app store.

What makes this relevant to open source is von Lohmann’s charge that iPhone developers are forbidden from even allowing interoperability with open source software in their apps. “If Apple’s mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition than the PC era that came before.”

In early trading the stock was down one percent, a loss of over $2 billion in market cap.  That may have nothing to do with this story, however. Google was down a similar amount. Major averages were down marginally.

code prole writes “With two upcoming trips to Germany, and no readily available Internet (Wi-Fi or otherwise) in the location where we’ll be staying, I’m looking for a no-contract USB stick and pre-paid data plan. Vodafone has a huge selection of USB sticks but has proven to be unresponsive to questions about data plans. And the US-based T-Mobile Help Center was clueless about getting the device in Europe and using it there. Hopefully the Slashdot community has some suggestions. Any duds to avoid?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

adeelarshad82 writes “T-Mobile announced that the webConnect Rocket USB Laptop Stick, the first HSPA+ device for the US, will be available beginning on Sunday, March 14. The device was originally announced at MWC in February. HSPA+ is interesting because it could enable 4G LTE-like speeds using existing 3G infrastructure and according to a hands-on, it smokes Wi-Max. Right now, it’s still just for Philadelphia, although we should see several major cities light up with HSPA+ on both coasts well before the end of 2010.”

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An anonymous reader writes “The IEEE MAN/LAN Standards Committee — better known as the people who brought us Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth — is celebrating its 30th anniversary next week. This article has interviews with the original committee chairman and other veteran members, and reveals some of the inside situation. It also looks at some of the upcoming 802.x standards including one that sends data by modulating visible light.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Once again, Google has bought something only to open source it.

This time it’s ReMail, first acquired, then put on Google Code as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. (It previously did the same thing with DocVerse.)

ReMail was more efficient in terms of system resources than Apple’s own mail.app, it offered full text searching, and it had other neat features, like autocomplete.

Founder Gabor Cselle now lists himself as just a software engineer at Google, the rest of the development team has also scattered, and Apple has taken ReMail off its app store.

What’s going on? Well, it’s not a bug it’s a feature.

For Google, open source simplifies vendor relationships. You can join the Google software ecosystem without signing a contract. You can exploit Google projects like Android and ReMail and profit from them, because they’re under an Apache license.

Just as the Internet takes friction out of the distribution and development process, open source for Google removes friction from the business process.

Why did this not happen before? One reason is you leave a lot of “money on the floor” by doing this. The other reason, of course, is that Google can afford it.

As I have written here many times, Google’s advantage lies in its infrastructure. It is the low-cost producer of full Internet infrastructure. This includes more than bandwidth. It includes all the tools and hosting needed to deliver Internet transactions.

This advantage can be exploited against any rival. In this case it is being exploited against Apple.

Until someone is willing to try and match this advantage, and even the phone companies seem for now unwilling to even try, Google will exploit this advantage against all comers.

These advantages lean in favor of anyone with ideas, but they also put a limit on the degree to which you can profit from those ideas. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lone programmer in your pajamas or Steve Jobs — Google’s advantages both enable you to bring your ideas to market and squeeze your potential profits like the view of buildings you see on Google Earth.

It’s easy for Google not to be evil in such an atmosphere. There is no one for it to be evil to.

But it does make open source start to feel a bit like Orwell’s Animal Farm. All pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Apple’s suit against HTC could end one of two ways.

Either Apple becomes the next SCO, which ran itself aground claiming rights to Linux, or it becomes the next Microsoft, which is prospering while claiming to own Linux.

The answer depends on how hard Apple presses its case.

You can get a clue by looking at who Apple has sued. While the suit is actually about the Android operating system Google sponsors, the company has been careful to only go after one of its OEMs, a Taiwanese one at that.

That’s a strike-at-the-weak strategy. You get the best deal you can with a weak player and then use that against the strong. The emphasis here is on the word weak.

On the other hand there is every indication Apple is willing to go to trial. As Larry Dignan noted last week, this could quickly put it into court against both Google and Microsoft. It would be a legal Vietnam.

Jason Perlow wrote last week about a technical cure for any problems caused by the suit — virtualization. You can’t sue what’s common, and virtualization could make a fight against rivals like trying to grab clouds.

The real cost in going to trial and claiming to own the smartphone space is more subtle. Apple could become a laughing stock, as SCO did. The intent of our patent and copyright regimes is to encourage innovation, not discourage it, and seeking control of the whole smartphone market does not encourage innovation.

There are enormous public relations risks in becoming a public plaintiff in patent court. Many people will, as a result of such a suit, avoid the plaintiff’s products as a way of weighing-in. This is what really happened to SCO — its sales dried up.

Had Apple sued Google directly, I might give credence to this. SCO sued IBM. You go after the strong when you seek to run the patent table.

Could that happen to Apple? Yes, I do. At least one market researcher thinks Android sales could pass those of the iPhone in two years.

Which brings me back to Microsoft.

I have written here that the way Microsoft views its own patent efforts, like its recent agreement deal with Amazon, is as a way to take patents off the competitive table. Microsoft is using legal threats to create patent peace between it and its rivals, freeing its engineers to concentrate on creating things, not dealing with lawyers.

Apple doesn’t really innovate. Apple doesn’t really litigate. Apple markets.

If Apple can settle these suits under favorable terms it can also win patent peace with Microsoft. This would free it to create iPhones as the market directs, rather than within constraints of lawyers and patent rights.

That’s the way I think it will play. Apple will settle. Apple is not stupid.