For me the fix was very simple. Open the Settings app and navigate to General->Reset. On this screen simply look for the button labeled “Reset Network Settings” and tap it. You’ll get a dialog box asking you to confirm this decision and after you do the phone will restart. After doing this my hotspot functionality returned much to my joy.

One thing to note is that every Wi-Fi network configuration you had previously saved on your phone will be gone so you’ll have to reenter the passkeys. Besides that the rest of your data will be preserved so this is a much less painful route to take than doing a complete reset of the phone.

The new plan calls for sending up home-made satellites into space as part of a Hackerspace Global Grid. The project includes low-cost ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.

Anti-censorship activist Nick Farr, bothered by the world’s threats in blocking the free flow of information, started campaigning for contributions to the Grid earlier this year.

Launching communications satellites has been attempted in the past by some amateur groups but low-budget projects have not easily managed the task of tracking the devices.

According to reports, a few small satellites have gone into orbit but usually for brief periods only. Initiatives like space missions have required the big pockets of large public agencies and private companies, but Farr hopes his plan can work.

Farr and colleagues envision a grid of low-cost ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites. They are working with Constellation, which is a German aerospace research initiative. The initiative interlinks student projects.

Attempts to setup an alternative Internet have been proposed but none have succeeded. The main Achilles’ heel has been the hardware side of things. Unless an entirely independent architecture is setup government agencies still have control of the “kill switch” (that is the central points of control such as internet providers, root domain name system servers, etc.). The obvious solution involves wireless of some sort simply because running physical cable is very expensive and it’s unlikely independent entities will be able to get right of way agreements to perform such a task. While satellite communication has a high lag time it’s far better than nothing. You may not be able to play Call of Duty 11 on a satellite linkup but you can certainly communicate with other people in the world.

A few weeks ago I decided to take a look at the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) technology. I noticed a few really bad design decisions which enable an efficient brute force attack, thus effectively breaking the security of pretty much all WPS-enabled Wi-Fi routers. As all of the more recent router models come with WPS enabled by default, this affects millions of devices worldwide.

Ouch, glad I never used WPS to setup the security on my wireless network. Technical details about the vulnerability can be found in this writeup [PDF].

So what Apple has won is a formal import ban scheduled to commence on April 19, 2012, but relating only to HTC Android phones implementing one of two claims of a “data tapping patent”: a patent on an invention that marks up phone numbers and other types of formatted data in an unstructured document, such as an email, in order to enable users to bring up other programs (such as a dialer app) that process such data. The import ban won’t relate to HTC Android products that don’t implement that feature, or that implement it in ways not covered by those patent claims.

I’m not sure what HTC phones this will affect, but I know this patent describes behavior found in my Evo 4G. Regardless of what phones this affects one thing is for certain, this ruling perfectly demonstrations how businesses use the government to force competition out of their market.

While many HTC fans have been quick to jump on Apple as the culprit here I disagree. Apple simply used tools made available to cause problems for a competitor. The real culprit here is the International Trade Commission (ITC) who hold a monopoly on making such rulings and have the ability to initiate violence in order to enforce the decision. Were it not for these two things the matter would be entirely between Apple and HTC. Unfortunately our federal government maintains monopoly power over what can and can’t be imported into this country so this matter is now between Apple, HTC, and consumers who wish to purchase HTC phones. What should have been a ruling consisting entirely of monetary compensation has turned into a series of devices being added to the verboten list.

Another problem that has lead to this ruling are software patents. Software patents are one of the dumbest ideas our government has ever decided to allow. I’m not sure how algorithms are treated the same as physical inventions but alas I didn’t make the stupid laws. All I know is when a product can be banned from importation because of the way an application link is formatted that something is horribly wrong with our legal system.

US telecoms giant AT&T has said it will not pursue its $39bn bid to buy T-Mobile USA after running into fierce government objections.

[...]

AT&T has said it would include a $4bn charge in its fourth-quarter accounts to cover any potential compensation due if the deal does not go ahead.

AT&T agreed to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom in March, aiming to create the largest US wireless network.

While many T-Mobile customers are cheering I question whether or not this will allow T-Mobile to continue exiting. The bottom line is Deutsche Telekom is no longer interested in T-Mobile and is willing to break the subsidiary up and sell it in pieces if necessary. Likewise the $4 billion AT&T just payed for the failed merger goes to Deutsche Telekom, who may or may not invest it back into T-Mobile.

The merger also caused a great deal of damage to T-Mobile as it basically froze them in place. During the merger they did little or no network expansion that I’m aware of, obtained relatively few new phones, and now sit as the only carrier who doesn’t have the iPhone. If T-Mobile wants to remain relevant they have to play catchup for the last several months they did nothing while AT&T attempted to purchase the company. Overall the attempted merger may have caused irreversible damage to the fourth major carrier in the United States.

Carrier iQ is likely one of the most dangerous pieces of software in common use today. I do understand the great amount of benefit it gives to cellular providers but we all know anything accessible by said providers can also be access by the government, often without so much as a court order.

I hate having my suspicions confirmed:

Michael Morisy, a journalist who founded an organization called MuckRock to ease the process of filing FOIA requests, wrote the FBI on Dec. 1 asking for “any manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered by programs developed or deployed by Carrier IQ…. In addition, I ask for expedited processing as this is a matter of immediate news interest: The existence of Carrier IQ’s software was recently disclosed and has immediate ramifications on constitutionally protected privacy rights.”

The FBI acknowledged receiving his request within a few days, and then issued a blanket denial, which cites a law exempting records from disclosure if releasing them could interfere with law enforcement proceedings. “In applying this exemption, I have determined that the records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; that there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records; and that release of the information contained in these responsive records could reasonably be expected to interfere with the enforcement proceedings,” an FBI records management official named David Hardy wrote to Morisy.

Notice that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) filed for an exemption, they didn’t claim to have no such data available. The only logical conclusion one can draw from this fact is that the FBI has data collected by Carrier IQ on hand but doesn’t want to disclose how much. I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI has issued blanket requests for this data from carriers using National Security Letters (NSL). As targets of NSLs are legally prohibited from disclosing the mere fact that they received the letter we have no idea how much of this data has been collected by the FBI, they could have issued a demand that all data collected using the Carrier IQ software be turned over.

Paranoids are just people with all the facts.

Online retailers have long gathered behavioral metrics about how customers shop, tracking their movements through e-shopping pages and using data to make targeted offers based on user profiles. Retailers in meat-space have had tried to replicate that with frequent shopper offers, store credit cards, and other ways to get shoppers to voluntarily give up data on their behavior, but these efforts have lacked the sort of data capacity provided by anonymous store browsers—at least until now. This holiday season, shopping malls in the US have started collecting data about shoppers by tracking the closest thing to “cookies” human beings carry—their cell phones.

The technology, from Portsmouth, England based Path Intelligence, is called Footpath. It uses monitoring units distributed throughout a mall or retail environment to sense the movement of customers by triangulation, using the strength of their cell phone signals. That data is collected and run through analytics by Path, and provided back to retailers through a secure website.

The location of any device that emits a wireless signal can be triangulated. Again I will state that cell phones are immensely useful but not only to their owners. Combining the fact that cell phones are almost always on their owner, contain a vast amount of personal information about their owner, and have built-in cameras and microphones makes for devices that are great for spying on select individuals. While people can harp on the malls for implementing this technology ultimately it’s nothing new as your cell phone provider, whom I worry about far more, have the exact same information at all times (usually with some history of your past locations).

A data-logging software company is seeking to squash an Android developer’s critical research into its software that is secretly installed on millions of phones, but Trevor Eckhart is refusing to publicly apologize for his research and remove the company’s training manuals from his website.

Though the software is installed on millions of Android, BlackBerry, and Nokia phones, Carrier IQ was virtually unknown until the 25-year-old Eckhart analyzed its workings, recently revealing that the software secretly chronicles a user’s phone experience, from its apps, battery life and texts. Some carriers prevent users who actually find the software from controlling what information is sent.

[...]

When Carrier IQ discovered Eckhart’s recent research and his posting of those manuals, Carrier IQ sent him a cease-and-desist notice, saying Eckhart was in breach of copyright law and could face damages of as much as $150,000, the maximum allowed under US copyright law per violation. The company removed the manuals from its own website, as well.

So Carrier IQ doesn’t like the fact that their little software has become very public. This is likely because people who have heard this news haven’t been taking it very well and I’m sure complaints have been rolling into the customer support lines of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. While it sucks that Carrier IQ are such dicks that they have threatened legal action against Eckhart for bringing their shenanigans to light it’s good to hear Eckhart’s cavalry has arrive:

On Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced it had came to the assistance of the 25-year-old Eckhart of Connecticut, whom Carrier IQ claims has breached copyright law for reposting the manuals.

This is why I give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Hopefully this case is quickly resolved so Eckhart can continue his research unmolested.

Hewlett-Packard has secretly contracted with Intel to keep making Itanium processors so that HP can maintain the appearance that “a dead microprocessor is still alive”, and make money from its locked-in Itanium customer base and take business away from Oracle’s Sun servers, Oracle said in a court filing on Friday.

That’s right, Oracle is throwing a hissy fit because they believe Hewlett-Packard (HP) are secretly floating money to Intel in order to keep the Itanium processo alive. My questions is this: who fucking cares? When one company gives another money in trade for a good or service that is called a transaction. As these transactions are agreements made between two entities neither is obligated to reveal the details to anybody else.

Why is Oracle wasting taxpayer money by bring up the fact HP and Intel do business in court? This isn’t a secret, anybody with an HP computer knows this as it’s advertised by a sticker on the computer that says, “Intel Inside.” If HP is paying Intel money to continue production of the Itanium processor what does it matter? What justification is there for bringing up this fact in court?

Tactics to destroy competition like this is one of the many things wrong with the United States economic system. Were the state controlled courts willing to simply toss this type of stupidity out the door money would be saved but businesses throughout the country and that money could be put to productive use. Instead our economy is so intermingled with government that you can’t make a single move without filling out the correct form in triplicate and getting the expensive rubber stamp of approval. Our court system needs to stop being a mechanism for companies to destroy competition through monetary attrition.

I wish Amazon would put in an easy workaround such as letting the user drop a plain text file containing their key in the root directory of the device. Anything would be better than having to enter in 63-characters of gibberish. With all of that said it is much easier to type in the key with the new touch screen Kindle than it was with the old Kindles.

Besides that the Kindle Touch is pretty awesome. I’ll eventually get a full review of the device up that better expresses my thoughts.