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.

Today might be boring, but it’s not the most boring day ever.

One of the things I truly enjoy about having a whole Internet’s worth of data at my
fingertips day and night is the quantity of information it offers up at a second’s notice. Want
to know who won the 1947 Melbourne Cup, but can’t quite place it? It was Hiraji. Can’t
remember the names of The Commodores aside from Lionel Richie? They were Thomas
McClary, Milan Williams, William King, Ronald La Pread and Walter Orange.
Need to know, for reasons that need not be specified, the name of the world’s largest
earthworm? That would be Australia’s own Gippsland Earthworm, but I won’t link to the
video of them you can find on YouTube — you might be eating.

Not all information is created equal, though, and it’s worth keeping in mind the bias
behind anything you read online, not to mention the context it’s written in. For example, I
recently hit an online news story in which April 11, 1954 was stated to be “The most boring
day in history.” For the record, I can’t state that myself one way or the other with much
certainty, as it’s a little bit before my time.

Boring’s an astonishingly subjective term, though. Personally, rather like a somewhat
overused cartoon cat, I’ve always found Mondays somewhat on the plebeian side, but
April 11th, 1947 was a Friday, according to a quick net search. So what makes that
particular day so stupendously stupefying?

The story was seeded by a company called “True Knowledge” (http://blog.trueknowledge.com/2010/11/most-boring-day-in-history.html) as something of a
publicity stunt, with the key criteria being not so much how engaging the day in question
was, but how many events of world significance actually took place. I’m sure if you
happened to be born on April 11th 1954 you probably found it pretty interesting, although
the distance of time may have faded your memories of the day somewhat. Sadly, though,
unless you happen to be Turkish scientist Abdullah Atalar, your birth wasn’t seen by True
Knowledge as being significant enough to be worth noting down. It’s also worth noting
that the tagline of it being “the most boring day in history” is somewhat undermined by
the fact that it only covered days in the 20th Century. Admittedly historical knowledge for
the preceding centuries does get a little thin the further back you poke, but it’s well worth
keeping in mind.

Despite the veneer of objectivity, this is still fairly subjective information; in this case
it’s subjective to what you find engaging. No doubt billions of fascinating things actually
happened on April 11, 1954 if you happened to be there, and many more tedious things
happened last Thursday. Just because you’ve got a wealth of facts at your fingertips
doesn’t make the context of them any less important.

Getting the bargain you expect when shopping online

Online commerce has changed the way we buy all sorts of things, from music to DVDs to clothing and even whitegoods. I wasn’t that surprised the other day to see an eBay advertisement at a bus stop suggesting that you check out the quality of a particular thing at Westfield — and then buy it online. I’m sure the Westfield folks aren’t too thrilled at that prospect, but there’s equally no doubt that it happens.

What do you do for products that aren’t sold at your local Westfield, or if your local Westfield (or similar shopping centre) are too far away to make it feasible? There’s also whole ranges of product only available online — most Apps for smartphones, certain brands of consumer electronics (such as those offered by Kogan or Millennius )

There’s always word of mouth, which has value — as long as you know somebody with the product you’re after. Online reviews can be good as well, although it pays to know if a particular site has a  bias towards a particular product or style before interpreting a review. Product reviewing is a big part of what I do day to day as a journalist across a number of publications, and I’ll always try to remain looking at the big picture, but the practical reality is that no review is 100% objective.

Bear in mind also that for goods sold in Australia by Australian companies, the same consumer protection laws cover your purchases. The laws vary a little by state and for some products, but generally speaking if the goods you get aren’t what they were stated to be, you should be entitled to a refund or replacement, and your point of call should be the merchant you purchased from. They may suggest you seek warranty from the original manufacturer, and sometimes that’s wise, but as the sales point of contact they’re still liable if the manufacturer can’t be found or won’t live up to the supposed warranty.

There are bargains out there online, but equally there can be flat out duds. One of the more amusing ones that came to my attention recently was conducted deliberately to draw out a dud; in this case American Song/Poem companies that will create music for your compositions for a fee. The folks behind alternative label Dual Plover sent these companies a bunch of classic Aussie rock anthems to do their worst to, choosing classics from Skyhooks, Rose Tattoo, and Australian Crawl. The results aren’t exactly quality-inspired, and at least at the time of writing you could download them free from here: http://dualplover.com/ozrock.php.

Personally, I’ll never be able to listen to Cold Chisel’s “Cheap Wine” quite the same way again.

Which Tablet Is Right For Me?

Apple’s iPad made a big splash when it was released earlier in the year, but up until now there hasn’t been a lot of competition in the tablet form factor. With new release products from Samsung and Telstra, though, there is finally a modicum of choice in the Tablet space.

It’s worth knowing what a Tablet can and can’t do before you plunk down your hard earned cash. They’re not exactly notebook replacements, generally being less powerful than the kind of notebook you can get for the same money. At the same time, the touch-specific interfaces they sport can be great for quick work and especially media consumption on the go or comfortably around the home. That being said, let’s take a look at the field of contenders.

Apple iPad

Price: $629-$1049 (depending on memory and 3G capability)

Why you’d want one:

Apple’s Tablet still leads the market in terms of available touch-specific applications, and if you’re already an iPhone owner, your applications can be shifted across at no charge — although some will look rather pixellated if they’ve not been iPad optimised. The 10″ screen is clear and works much better for content creation than the smaller Samsung and Telstra tablets.

Why you wouldn’t:

Apple controls all things “i” branded with an iron fist, and this means certain application categories get knocked back. There’s no direct file system access without specific hacking, and the Windows iTunes client isn’t always the most stable. Unlike the Telstra or Samsung tablets, there’s no inbuilt camera or phone functionality.

Samsung Galaxy Tab

Price: $999 or on contract

Why you’d want one:

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is smaller than the iPad with a 7″ display screen. It runs Android 2.2, giving it a wealth of applications, has internal cameras and phone capability. The Australian released model will come with Navigon’s GPS software built in, as well as e-reader capabilities and a dedicated application for the Australian newspaper.

Why you wouldn’t:

The outright price is comparatively very high, considering you could buy the 10″ iPad in almost every configuration for the cost of the Galaxy Tab. There should shortly be contract options for the Tab from most carriers, taking some of the sting out of pricing.

Telstra T-Touch Tab

Price: $299

Why you’d want one:

Telstra’s entry level tablet is priced to go, and the price is the key appeal. It’s an Android 2.1 tablet with plenty of Telstra specific applications, inbuilt camera and an excellent inbuilt mobile Foxtel client, although that will cost you extra to access. If you just want a consumption device, it’s adequate.

Why you wouldn’t:

The T-Touch Tab uses a resistive screen that’s much harder to use than the capacitive screens found on the Galaxy Tab or iPad. Any application that requires a lot of touch will bring with it a lot of frustration, marking this out as best used for passive consumption activities, and certainly one we’d suggest you try before you buy. Some users simply cannot get on with resistive screens without the use of a stylus.  Battery life is less than a quarter of the competing pads, and it’s comparatively a little heavy.

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