What does iiNet’s buyout of Internode mean?

The local Internet service provider scene has been consolidating for a while, and it’ll be interesting to see whether the emerging national broadband network changes that to any significant degree; in theory an open access network that allows for new entrants could see the kind of explosion in providers that was seen back when dialup access was the best that any consumer could hope for. That’s theory for the future; right now there’s been a number of moves in the ISP world that’ll have an impact on everyone, whether you’re next door to the next NBN rollout spot or if it’s many years in your future.

The most recent shift in the ISP space has seen iiNet buying up a number of smaller players; last month it was Canberra-based TransACT, and just before Christmas it was announced that iiNet had bought out the highly popular ISP Internode. Internode and iiNet have long rated highly amongst the technorati for the quality of their service; both in the value of the plans they offer (and a number of similar freebies, such as free access to ABC’s excellent iView streaming service) and the after-sales support. The official word is that the buyout of Internode won’t result in any changes in the short term; iiNet will continue to run Internode as an iiNet “brand” — in much the same way as it does Westnet. That’s confirmed by Internode’s Simon Hackett, who’s written an excellent explanatory document — http://blog.internode.on.net/2011/12/26/q-and-a-internode-iinet/ — that states that Internode will continue as a brand and as it has done
“Providing that plans are sustainable in economic terms”. That’s quoting directly from Hackett, and it’s the key thing that anything to do with Internode rests on; it’d be unlikely that we’ll see no changes to Internode’s offering in the medium term simply because it’d be economically inefficient to do so, and I’m sure that if it became prudent to so, some of Internode’s offerings will become similar (if not identical) to iiNet’s. That doesn’t mean it will happen, but I’d be surprised if this particular acquisition didn’t lead to a little less variety in the ISP space.

So where does that leave Aussie consumers in terms of ISP choice? The obvious answer is that (at least technically) there’s a few less than there used to be, but that’s to a certain extent all just manoeuvring prior to the NBN becoming a fully fledged entity; once that happens the floodgates open for access, and clearly ISPs are all trying to get as large as possible before that happens. While the NBN does offer the possibility for smaller wholesalers, it’s in the extra capabilities and perks that ISPs can offer customers that they’ll sell well; Telstra for example has a number of contracts with sporting bodies for online rights to the AFL, and that’ll be a key thing to get customers on board both prior to the NBN and after it. Paying for those kinds of rights isn’t a cheap exercise, and it’s only the largest providers that are likely to be able to compete.

How Much eHealth Should You Manage Yourself?

Philips recently launched an interesting application for the Apple iPad. Called VitalSigns, it’s a 99c app that uses the iPad’s camera to  record your heart and breathing rate. Unlike when you might do so at a general practitioner’s office or in a hospital, there’s no cuff to wear or sensor of any type to deal with; instead the camera measures the colour differences in your face, as well as the movements of your chest to approximate the rate at which you’re breathing. Give it a minute or two, and it’ll return a reasonable approximation of both.  Curiously, you can then update Twitter or Facebook with your vital statistics, although (while I engage with Social Networking on an incredibly regular basis), I’m befuddled why you’d want to.

I gave the app a quick spin, and it’s quite surprising what it can actually track; within a very short space of time the graph to measure breathing was going up and down in an eerie representation of the way I was breathing at the time. Very cool technology without a shadow of a doubt.

But I won’t be deleting my GP’s phone number from my phone any time soon, just because I’ve got a measuring tool of my own. For a start, the app is plastered with all kinds of legal disclaimers, as it’s not a dedicated and gently calibrated piece of medical technology; it’s a mass market tablet computer running some software. Equally, I’m not fully qualified to interpret the results it gives, except in the most broad ways. As a test, I took a measurement while sitting, then did a five minute jog on the spot and measured again. Not surprisingly, my heart rate was remarkably high for the second reading, but it didn’t mean I needed to rush to call for an ambulance.

The same is true of a lot of online medical information. There’s definitely something to be said for being well read, and if you’re so inclined, many of the world’s greatest medical texts and minds are but a simple Google search away. That doesn’t immediately turn you into a qualified doctor, just the same as reading the instructions for a low water usage shower doesn’t turn you into a plumber, or reading this article turn you into a journalist. Knowledge can be power, but knowing exactly how to apply that knowledge in the correct context is what gives that knowledge power. As such, the Vital Signs app is a nice party trick to pull out, and could conceivably be of use to those who need to take regular readings with a capacity for a margin of error, but I wouldn’t rely on it to save my life.

Do Direct Imports Make Good Sense?

Just recently, bricks and mortar retailer JB Hi-Fi announced it was starting up a direct sales model, selling high end cameras and lenses sourced directly from overseas at lower prices than standard retail. This isn’t a new concept; direct importing (sometimes referred to as grey market importing) is perfectly legal. The reason it works (from a money perspective) is because the tax implications are slightly different, and for the most part, directly imported goods are shipped straight to you; this means there’s no need for warehouses, stores,  staff and so on. JB Hi-Fi’s just the latest (and certainly the largest) to have jumped on this particular bandwagon.

How cheap are we talking? Well, to use JB Hi-Fi’s site as an example, a Nikon D3100 SLR with 18-55mm lens sold as an Australian model sells for $777. JB Hi-Fi sells the same camera as a direct import for $596 plus $22 delivery, a $159 overall saving for the same goods.

So, cheaper goods for all? They can be — although it certainly pays to check for both shipping costs and comparable specials — but it’s also worth checking exactly what the warranty situation with directly imported goods.

It varies from product to product. In some cases (Apple being the most prominent) the warranty on goods is international, and as such their local service agents will repair or replace it if something goes wrong, as long as you’ve still got all the original paperwork. International warranties tend to be the exception, not the rule. Generally most technology vendors only offer warranties in the original country the goods came from, and if that’s not Australia, then the warranty is technically invalid. The problem there is that if you’re purchasing from a local retailer, Australian consumer law is rather strict; goods should be fit for the purpose they’re sold for, and excluding obvious user damage or mis-use, it’s the retailer’s problem if something goes wrong.  What typically happens with direct import goods is that the retailer will accept them back, but then ship them back overseas so that the warranty does apply once more. They’ll be fixed or replaced, but this can be a lengthy process depending on shipping and evaluation times.

It also raises the issue of doing it yourself; using overseas technology suppliers to save even more money. Clearly there you’re choosing to deal with warranty problems yourself — an overseas retailer isn’t bound by Australian consumer laws — and you’ll have to be careful depending on what you’re ordering in terms of applicable taxes for importation.

There’s an argument for supporting local retail and the jobs it creates, but that’s as much a policy issue as anything else; as large parts of retail (and especially technology retail) are becoming online affairs, building their own job forces as they go. There’s certainly nothing illicit about direct importing, as long as you keep the tax and warranty issues in mind.

Choosing The Right ISP Plan

Go back in time about a dozen years, and the majority of Australian Internet users were on dialup. Speeds, to put it kindly, weren’t great, but we were at least (largely) removed from the era where ISPs gave you a set number of hours of dialup time. You might be disconnected at “peak times” if you’d been connected for too long — or if a random seagull landed on a line somewhere, or something — but you could, for the most part, download as much as your poky 56kbps connection could handle.

These days, the majority of Internet users in Australia are on a broadband connection of some kind, but (again, with certain exceptions) those plans are limited by the quantity of data you’re permitted to shift around. Downloads isn’t quite the right word there; the vast majority of plans count any data you upload against your quota. This makes picking a plan with enough data a rather vital consideration. Choose too little, and you’ll either pay hefty excess fees (especially for mobile broadband) or get shaped down to speeds last seen in the dialup era. Choose too much, and you’re paying for data you’ll never use.

How much data does the average Australian use, anyway? The latest figures from the Australian Communications And Media Authority (ACMA) paint an interesting picture. Its latest report (which can be found here: http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_410070) suggests that in the December 2010 quarter, the average fixed line (that’s ADSL, ADSL2+ and Cable) connection downloaded 18.8GB of data; that’s a little over 6GB per month for the quarter. Switch to a mobile broadband service and the figures tumble down to around half a gigabyte per month. Whether that’s to do with the higher cost of mobile broadband or its sometimes spotty availability is rather hard to say, but I’d bet more on the former case.

That’s a whole lot of streaming video, or if you’re feeling uncharitable, a lot of torrented episodes of Top Gear, and undoubtedly there are edge cases on both sides of the equation; those folks who consistently use their entire massive quota each month, and those who only scrape through on a few megabytes here and there. The latter case customers are the ones that ISPs love, by the way, as they’re both far more profitable and less hassle. If every user tried to access their full data quota each and every month, most ISPs would simply collapse; like mobile telephony it’s built on a slightly oversold premise.

The broadband usage figures are interesting, but what’s their take-home value? Most ISPs will allow you to view a rough breakdown of your ongoing figures, and if you’re paying for a connection you barely touch the edges of, it’s well worth examining if you can switch down a pricing tier. That 6GB per month figure seems like a good base point to grow up from, bearing in mind that vital upgrades such as operating system patches and Antivirus software signature upgrades can rather easily eat up a few GB each month by themselves if things get busy. That’s without ever touching a single Web page, and as I’ve covered before, it’d be a very bad idea to leave your PC unpatched and unprotected.

Do We Need Another Social Network?

It seems you can’t take two steps without stepping over a mention of Facebook. Just in the past week, I’ve attended a launch of two new phones (the budget-priced HTC ChaCha and Salsa, and yes, those are the product names), both of which feature prominent ‘F’ buttons. Not in a non-family friendly sense; these are buttons that directly link your activity on the smartphone at the time to your Facebook account. So if you’re taking a photo, it’ll upload that photo to Facebook. If you’re browsing the Web, it’ll share that link, and so on.

At the same time that Facebook seems to have taken over the lives of an increasing proportion of the Internet community, Google’s soft-launched its latest social networking platform. This isn’t Google’s first crack at an online social community platform. Google Wave sank without much note and Google Buzz invited criticism for its seeming lack of actual privacy. The latest social network to emerge from Google is known simply as Google+.

Google+’s basic layout is a mix of what you’d expect if you’re an existing Facebook user with a lighter layout tone, such as you’d expect out of Google. It’s early days as yet — so far, the only way to get onto Google+ is via invitation, and the early release of Google+ saw the company restrict invites several times due to overload issues. There’s a few neat inbuilt touches that Google+ brings to the social networking scene. Instead of “friending” people, you add them to self-defined “circles”. These can be friends, acquaintances — basically anything you like, as you’re the only one who sees your friend definitions. Then when you post anything, you choose which circles see your content.

This also highlights a key difference (at the moment) between Google+ and Facebook. Facebook’s “friending” is a two way relationship, where once a friendship is established, both sides see all posts from both people, unless specifically noted otherwise through Facebook’s often labyrinthine privacy menus. Google+’s “Circles” offer one-way sharing. You can add anybody to a circle, but all you’re doing is posting to them; there’s no implicit agreement that they’ll then share material back with you.

It’s early days for Google+ as yet. I do like the interface, which is cleaner and quicker than Facebook, not to mention uncluttered with things like Farmville… so far. Having said that, what Google’s done is being described by the company as a “field trial” of the service, and it’ll need a significant uptake of users to start seriously challenging Facebook.

What do you think? Are you willing (or even interested) in taking on another social network?

Can You Protect Yourself From Hack Attacks?

The recent attack on Sony’s Playstation Network was followed up with a flurry of attacks on a variety of online sites on everything from video game platforms to the CIA. Some attacks were deliberate and debilitating, others for the (alleged) “comedy” value that they gave one of the more prominent hacking groups, LulzSec, including the release onto the Internet of thousands of user passwords. LulzSec recently announced it was disbanding, but that’s not either verifiably true or the end of Internet hacking.

So what’s to be done? At a larger scale, it might not seem as though there’s much the ordinary user can do to protect themselves. After all, the administration of large online services is up to the providers, right?

Not exactly. While it’s true that we can’t control what those companies do, it’s worth noting that many of the behaviours of ordinary users have a profound effect on Internet as a whole. Here’s three simple steps that every single Internet user should follow to help both themselves and the security of the Web as a whole.

1) Keep it updated: Whether it’s operating system updates, new versions of your favourite Internet browser or the signature files of your AntiVirus software, running older, unpatched software provides an easy way into your system for the bad guys. This isn’t just a precautionary measure for your own system data; worldwide millions of systems are compromised and turned into attack or spam vector machines by malware without their owners being aware of it at all.

2) Simple passwords are only for the simple: You’ve probably got a password for dozens of online sites, from banking to Facebook and anything else besides. Remembering passwords is tricky stuff, but having a single login password for everything is just plain stupid. If a system is compromised through no fault of your own, the first and easiest attack on your other accounts is via a single password. There’s a number of software utilities that can help with storing multiple passwords securely via a single strong master password, and many of them can help you generate truly strong complex passwords for every single login.

3) Switch it off!: Most compromised systems are done so effectively invisibly; the whole point from the malware author’s point of view is that you don’t know it has happened, so they can continue to use your PC as a slave in a larger botnet, or more simply mine it for passwords, personal information and hopefully money. While you should protect yourself as well as is feasible via updates, one of the simplest things you can do to confound any malware is simply to switch your PC off when not in use. Sure, it’s handy to have a PC that flicks to life when you move the mouse or run a finger over the trackpad, but that always-on system is always available to malware authors and hackers as well. As an added bonus, you’ll save a reasonable amount on your power bill.

Sony’s PSN woes highlight a bigger security problem

The news that Sony’s Playstation Network went offline in late April due to hacker activity might be easy to brush off as just a problem for console gaming types and nobody else, if it weren’t for the wider implications of the particular attack.

Persons unknown gained access to Sony’s PSN network, and, as it later emerged, one of the company’s other businesses, Sony Online Entertainment. From that hack, user details and possibly credit card details were compromised. Sony’s being a bit coy about that latter detail, at first saying they had “no reason to believe” that credit cards had been compromised, to moving to pointing out that details were encrypted before it emerged that a number of card details were accessed from the SOE hack, including a couple of hundred Australian credit cards. They were, so Sony says, cards dating from 2007, most of which should be obsolete now in any case.

The credit card side of things doesn’t fuss me as much as it might, partly because I keep a very close eye on my accounts, but also because most Australian financial institutions will reverse fraudulent charges without penalty to the original card owner if it’s not their fault — and this certainly couldn’t be! A nuisance, to be sure, but a nuisance that shouldn’t haunt you for that long if it’s a spectre at all.

The loss of personal details, especially passwords, is more troublesome. You can’t do anything to change your date of birth or matters like that, but plenty of people use the same easily changed passwords over multiple sites. Needless to say, if you are a PSN or SOE user with passwords that match other services of yours, change those passwords immediately. But even if you’re not, and you’re using the same password over multiple sites, stop it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be as big a hack as the PSN one was, but if your password is the same in one place, it’s reasonable for criminal types to try other services you may use to see if they can gain access there. Moving from a non-critical service (like, say, Facebook, where you shouldn’t suffer any ‘real world’ loss) to your bank account is as easy as waltzing in if you know the password, and having the same password across both is rather like using a simple latch to secure your front door. It looks to all the world like the door’s shut, but if you know that a simple push will pop the latch wide open, you realise that it’s not secure at all.

What does privacy mean for you online?

There’s been a recent storm of protest regarding the revelation that Apple’s iOS devices (iPhones and iPads) store the location of accessed mobile phone towers and GPS signals for a twelve month period on the devices themselves, and then, when synchronised back to your PC, store them as part of the backup. The issue here is twofold; firstly, that the data collection’s been done with little notification to the end users. Secondly, that it’s trivially easy to use the synchronising computer to read all of this information; in short where you’ve been with your device over the last year.

The first point is largely one of interpretation; Apple maintains that there’s mention of location services in the lengthy end user licence agreement (EULA) that you click through whenever iTunes needs an update or you buy a new iOS device. You know the one; the one that virtually nobody stops and reads because it comprises dozens of pages of near incomprehensible legalese anyway? In any case, switching off location services isn’t quite enough; an iPhone or iPad will still get a rough read from nearby mobile phone towers if you’re using 3G data anyway.

The second one is something that is becoming all too common, and it’s something that many of us give away for free in any case. Apple’s lack of security regarding the database on your host PC is a worry all of its own, but plenty of other companies make money — and some make their entire income — from the kinds of personal information that devices and services ask us to reveal. If you’ve used FourSquare, or have a Facebook account, or use certain Google services, there’s an immense amount of data tracking going on. Facebook’s particularly notable, as its defaults for many services, including the “places” facility that indicates exactly where you are at a given point in time are to allow all sorts of data display and data mining, all in the name of delivering advertising to you. Google, likewise, does collect data from Android smartphone devices, but states it does so anonymously. Still, again, Google likes having data on preferences, and again it’s to do with delivering advertising.. for now.

Quite how this kind of thing hits you will obviously depend on your own personal preferences as well. Highly extroverted types may enjoy broadcasting every little detail of their lives, whether it’s location details via FourSquare or personal thoughts via Twitter, while those of a more introverted nature, or those with either a reason to stay somewhat incognito (for better or worse reasons, whatever they may be) will be naturally wary of any kind of data collection.

So what’s the solution? There isn’t a simple way these days to fall off the radar of everybody all the time (and only the most introverted would want to), but it’s certainly worth thinking about how you use online services, not to mention mobile broadband services, and what that data usage says about you. If you’re uncomfortable with that data being available to others — not necessarily broadcast public, but undeniably recorded — then careful consideration of your technology usage would seem wise.

Augmented Reality Makes Reality Easier To Understand

There’s a phrase used in software all to describe a utility that’s so essential, so brilliant, that it simply sells the hardware around it: The Killer Application.

Not as deadly as they sound, it should be pointed out. Windows, in its time, was a killer app. So was the original Netscape browser, so (arguably) was id Software’s Doom. Killer Applications don’t even have to be applications that launch a new idea as much as they refine an existing one, and if you want proof of that, look at Google. When Google launched, there were a plethora of general purpose search engines on offer. These days, if Microsoft wasn’t pouring buckets of money into Bing, there’d only be Google.

One of the big buzzwords that has been labelled as a killer application in recent years has been the concept of Augmented Reality. This is taking a device with an inbuilt camera (typically a smartphone) and often location awareness (usually GPS), and matching the two to enable the screen on the smartphone to display additional information about the location around you. To date, it’s largely been used simple games and for navigation-style applications, such as pointing out where nearby restaurants are, or for interacting with Wikipedia entries for local points of interest. Reasonable stuff, although the number of people actually willing to wander around unfamiliar environments holding an expensive smartphone up to their faces is, not surprisingly, rather low.

I’ve recently been testing out something that could well be the next great killer augmented reality application, even though it’s on a platform that’s very well established: The iPhone. As with all things iPhone, it’s an app, and in this case, it’s a translation application called Word Lens. And as with most killer applications, it’s not really in what it’s doing — which is essentially just crude machine-based single word translation — but in how it melds existing technologies with new ones to achieve its purpose.

The use of software to aid in language translation goes back decades, but until relatively recently it was largely limited in use to those in fixed positions. What Word Lens does is use the iPhone’s camera to capture text, then translate it on the fly and superimpose it over the onscreen display. The end results can be a little shaky depending on how well you’re focusing the camera and whether the font used on the text is easily readable or not, but for basic translations, as long as you’re aware of the essential context of what you’re looking at, it’s surprisingly good. For those with a sense of the impish, it’ll also reverse words or blank them out altogether in the free demo version. For now, it’ll only support English to Spanish or Spanish To English, but apparently other languages are in the works.

Word Lens isn’t the only augmented reality application with utility at its core on the market, even though it’s one with immediate impact for any traveller, especially as it works without an active data connection. Google’s been slowly improving its Google Goggles application (available for Android and iPhone), which uses the same kind of image recognition for immediate searching as well as simple translation via optical character recognition, although its text-handling capabilities are nowhere near as good as that offered by Word Lens.

Where Augmented Reality applications like Word Lens or Google Goggles get it right is by reducing the need to interface with the application down to a few seconds, rather than a constant connection. You’re much more likely to pull out a phone and take a quick snapshot than you are wander around with your phone on prominent display. Equally, by providing a genuinely useful service, such as translation or the display of a quick search to help you understand something, they’ve got the real ability to provide genuine value.

ABC’s iView app spells the death of the couch potato

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll recall the mascot of the “Life Be In It’ campaign: Norm. Norm was fat, lazy, and essentially interested only in sitting in front of the TV eating pies and drinking beer. Norm was a character of the seventies, although the Life Be In It organisation that promoted him has stepped away from the Norm character in recent years for fear of emulation. For our own health, we should get up from the couch and get mobile.

A recently released application from the ABC might make the couch potato stereotype an obsolete historical oddity, offering TV in a mobile format. Sure, it’s not exactly a trip to the gym, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and TV addiction is a tough thing to beat.

For years, one of the promises of mobile television has been that it’ll be not only mobile but watchable and engaging, but for years all we’ve had is tiny little grainy screens and high data charges, making mobile TV rather off-putting. Most of the solutions have relied either on heavily compressed data or specific mobile broadcasting solutions that have so far failed to really take off.

ABC’s led the field in IP-based TV solutions with its Web-based iView catchup TV service, and last week launched an iPad version of the iView service. iPhone and Android versions are likely additions, although no timeline is promised. The application itself delivers smooth video playback across the iPad’s screen, and even on a moderate broadband connection I hit no real playback problems. The range of programs is naturally limited to the stuff that the ABC broadcasts, but there’s a wide library to pick from.

Unlike many of the stabs at mobile television of years gone past, the iView service simply uses the same internet protocols as your other internet applications (which is why it’s IPTV), so as long as your net connection stays up, so does your stream of Bananas In Pyjamas, or whatever suits your tastes. IPTV is slowly making its way worldwide as a way to deliver television services, especially as the quality of our internet connections improves. The UK equivalent of the ABC, the BBC, has announced plans to bring its iPlayer (which uses a similar technology platform to iView) to international viewers sometime next year on a subscription basis.

There are some catches for what we’ve got right now. The iView iPad application won’t run over 3G as yet, so you’re still stuck using it only in places where you have WiFi. Like many coffee shops, McDonald’s and your own home or office. Where, the thought strikes me, you’re normally sitting down and not getting all that fit.

Perhaps the couch potato isn’t quite dead yet.

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