Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Wednesday 18 June 2008, 5:03 PM
Dutch researchers crack London's Oyster card
Now they've really gone and done it. At the start of the year, some Dutch researchers managed to crack the Netherlands' travelcard, the OV-chipkaart. Now, this card uses the same technology - NXP's Mifare - as Transport for London's Oyster card. When security experts said the Dutch crack meant the Oyster system should be upgraded or replaced, TfL told us there were enough additional layers of security to make the Dutch case irrelevant to London.
No longer. Wouter Teepe and Bart Jacobs, from Radboud University, today told the Dutch parliament that they'd cracked and cloned London's Oyster card. They were able to not only take free rides on the Underground, but even execute a denial-of-service attack on the gates. Check out a Google translation here of an article, by Webwereld's Brenno de Winter, on the subject.
We're awaiting comment from TfL, and are also in touch with one of the researchers. So, expect more on this tomorrow... I get a feeling this story will roll on and on.
UPDATE (Thursday): Click here for TfL's response...
Friday 13 June 2008, 3:10 PM
The OSC's open letter to Becta
Here's the full text of a very angry letter, sent today to the educational advisory body Becta by Mark Taylor, president of the Open Source Consortium and chief executive of the enterprise support firm Sirius. I'm currently writing up a story on this, so keep an eye out for that, but the letter is far too long to include in that story in its totality. Here it is:
---------------------------------
Today, Friday 13th, Becta's Open Source posturing is exposed as a sham, empty spin covering 'business as usual' political sleaze. Becta awarded their 'Open Source Schools' project to establishment insiders and cronies, with no Open Source credentials or capabilities, rather than organisations who could and would make the project work. The losers, as usual, are British schools, British schoolchildren, and British taxpayers.
The 'Open Source Schools' stated aims appeared both worthy and achievable:
Provide community seeding and support by providing school sector focussed online resources, online support and fora.
Community online discussion;
Identify and recruit initial community members
Annual workshop on community topics
BETT seminar development and delivery to promote open source use.
Highlight open source software developed with contribution from UK schools using an online registry of software and developers
Online discussion open by 30/10/08, seeded with 10 active members.
Grows to 20 active members by April 2009.
Grows to 50 active members by April 2010.
Community workshop in autumn 2008 and Autumn 2009
BETT seminar on the use of open source in the schools sector in January 2009
Basic guidance on how to obtain and install
Basic guidance on licensing
Basic guidance on support providers
Adoption and implementation strategies
The very, very best of UK Open Source talent lined up for the project, just a few of the names involved gives a feel:
OSS Watch
Schoolforge UK
Open Source Consortium member companies
Sirius, backed by Red Hat, KDE and the Free Software Foundation
Canonical, makers of Ubuntu
INGOTS
The Open Schools Alliance
And if you are thinking that this is a who's who of Open Source in the UK, you are correct.
But no, impeccable and proven Open Source credentials, capability and community building skills are apparently a hindrance to building a community of British schools using Open Source. Being Becta insiders is what matters, insiders who have no track record in Open Source, do not even give it a passing mention on their website, and until yesterday were completely unknown to anyone in either the industry or community. Just handed a quarter of a million pounds, Becta's friends are now responsible for the direction Open Source takes in British Schools, entirely removed from the UK Open Source community and industry. The result, of course, will be completely disastrous in the fine tradition of Newham, Birmingham and the so-called 'Open Source Academy'. Funny how the UK Public Sector is the only one in the world who consistently 'trial' Open Source by giving projects to those least capable of delivering them, and then claim that it 'doesn't work' or is 'more expensive than proprietary (equals Microsoft) software'. One hopes it is merely incompetence, the alternative would be corruption and surely that could never happen here...
In conclusion, some advice from the genuine Open Source community and Industry:
If you are a school, ignore Becta's project, ignore Becta, and seek advice from the people who are able to give it. Any of the organisations Becta rejected will be your best choice.
If you are a member of the Open Source community or industry not yet touched by this scandal, boycott the project and refuse to have anything to do with it. It's not about 'Open Source', it's about jobs for the boys, spin, and discrediting non-proprietary software.
If you are anyone else, throw your hands up in despair at yet more political sleaze, cronyism and incompetence, and vote for someone other than the current government at the next election, preferably someone with policies on Open Source and Open Government.
Mark Taylor
President
The Open Source Consortium
Bringing Free and Open Source Software to the Public Sector
Wednesday 11 June 2008, 11:59 PM
Handsets World: Stuck in the MID
Home after a flight to Heathrow Terminal 5 (it's all right now, I can bravely report),and I greatly enjoyed the words scrawled on a luggage container being offloaded from my BA flight: "Fly the flag, lose your bag".
Anyway, back to the tech stuff...
Handsets World is one of those rather small-scale conferences but, as I mentioned yesterday, full of rather important people in the mobile industry. The big issue I noticed today (aside from Android - I'll write that up tomorrow) was how everyone is terribly excited about mobile internet devices (MIDs). Y'know, smaller than a low-cost subnotebook (or "netbook") and way bigger than a smartphone. And with a crappy "keyboard", if with one at all.
This sort of device hasn't had a swell time of it thus far. At the top end you have horribly expensive yet useless, prototypey MIDs from companies like Samsung, and at the bottom you arguably have the Nokia N810, which is also kind of an early MID. None have done well with these, although Nokia's done OK in the developer market, because the thing runs Linux.
Some people at Handsets World - particularly Windriver's Jason Whitmire - were being very enthusiastic about MIDs, and were suggesting that MIDs and smartphones are starting to merge. Ummm....
I can see the use case. I think they make sense for a certain market, say in hospitals. But mass-market devices? Where's the evidence that people actually want them? Even the early adopter market hasn't exactly gone wild for what's out there. None of the boosters really had any evidence, other than to point frantically to the focus groups they'd conducted.
Here's the problem. Remember the Nokia N-Gage? Remember why it expired noiselessly the first time they tried it? Because anyone walking around with that thing pressed to their ear looked like a... (I struggled to find a family-friendly word to insert here, but failed). The thing resembled a taco shell. This is not the MID's specific problem but, given the screen size requirements of a MID, anyone pressing that up to their ear will look just as daft.
But you can use a Bluetooth headset, say the promoters. Yeah, you could, but most people don't like to do that. And the MID's battery life could not match that of a proper smartphone. And they cost a fortune for what they are - especially since the appearance of the Eeeetc.
It's not just me that's rather sceptical about MIDs. At least one big bod from a big phone manufacturer was looking pained at today's presentation, and a very respectable analyst was muttering about emperors and clothes. I think the iPhone is about as big as anyone will want their phone to be, and if an internet-friendly device can't be used for one-handed surfing (so to speak) then it may as well have a netbook's proper keyboard.
Tuesday 10 June 2008, 6:33 PM
Handsets World: Show me the money!
The first day of Handsets World in Berlin is now over. I'll have a story up tomorrow on Nokia's views on open source (interesting, I reckon) but in the meantime, since the people milling around this smallish event are high-level in some pretty important companies, let me give you a flavour of the presiding sentiment.
First off, nobody still has any idea how to make serious moolah out of their fancypants features and apps. In one particularly enlightening panel discussion, featuring manufacturers and operators, the chair asked whether there was any real evidence of users even using these features. Some responses:
Daniel Meredith, head of handset and device marketing at T-Mobile: We in the industry are asking consumers for more input, through panels. That's why picture messaging is now easier than ever. If we get the user interface right and get the back-end working…
Christian Lindholm, partner in the Fjord handset design consultancy We are still very excited by mobile photography… Being remotely present will be a big movement…
Patrick Fisher, technical standards manager for LG: I don't want to talk about evidence it will happen. From a standards and technical point of view, we can talk about hope. In the technology we are just getting there, so services become available and usable…
Simon Rockman, head of requirements and apps, Sony Ericsson: They already are using them. We have sold more Walkman phones than Apple has iPods. It doesn't really matter if people don't use all the features, as long as they can use all the features. People adopt new stuff slowly… sometimes you just have to wait…
Dr Ari Jaaksi, VP of software, Nokia: 100m pictures are taken with Nokia phones every day. The camera is the biggest purchase element. Someone will soon figure out how to make that a business…
In other words, don't ask us guv, we just sell the handsets at increasingly low prices and pray for extra revenue to somehow materialise.
Otherwise, the main topics of the day were the iPhone (no-one had a bad word to say about it, bar Symbian research chief David Wood, who rather sniffily claimed the iPhone could "get away with" a relatively simple user interface because "it doesn't have that much functionality") and power consumption (umm, how're those fuel cells coming along? Anyone?).
There is, thus far, a lot less discussion of LTE and WiMax than I'd expected. I did learn, however, that the original iPhone cost around $215 to manufacture (that doesn't include IPR or software costs), a whopping 28 percent of which went on the display alone. That was from Niels Kellerhoff of Portelligent, a company that disassembles cool gadgets then tries to guess how much each bit cost. He loves the iPhone: "Apple chose a different route from other cellphone manufacturers. They took a top-down view saying, 'This is what we want the product to be', then waited for the components to become available to fulfil their vision of what users want to see."
Tomorrow: Androidy goodness…
Monday 9 June 2008, 5:54 PM
Roaming - all or nothing?
A thought occurred to me (it does happen from time to time) as I got out of Berlin's Tegel airport this afternoon. I carry two phones - I like to keep a personal handset for, you know, my personal life - and, upon arriving in Germany (for Handsets World, since you ask), I treated the two devices differently.
I turned my workphone on, but left my personal phone off. Now, before Our Viv managed to get the operators to drop their voice roaming rates, that would have been the reason. But now the rates are more reasonable (not to say there's no room for improvement), and I still left the phone off. Why? I have my phone automatically set to download emails, and - rather than disable this function and have a working phone - I instinctively decided to forego the whole experience.
This is partly, of course, because I also have my work phone with me. But still, it made me wonder. The operators have now cut their voice roaming rates, which should encourage people to use their phones abroad. But, seeing as having your phone's browsing functionality turned on is fast becoming the norm, I wonder how many people like me arrive at a foreign destination and think, "£7.50 a megabyte? Haha", and just turn their phone off. Then the operator gets nothing at all.
Operators: cut those darn data roaming rates. Right now all you're hoping to do is either screw those unsuspecting folk who don't realise what your rates are, or punt to those who don't care (i.e. if the employer is paying for it). If the rates were more attractive, you'd get a lot more regular revenue from people not only using data roaming, but leaving their phones on to use voice roaming too.
Right, rant over...
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