SDS

how my supposed to blog while driving if Siri isn’t reliable. honestly, the most frustrating part is that the purple bullets that represent the processing of a voice command request just disappear and there’s nothing! no sorry I couldn’t make that work for you, no sorry I’m having trouble connecting to the network right now. nothing. I feel that Siri was far too popular and utilized for the piddly servers that Apple has devoted to the project. in my opinion Apple needs to do two things to resolve this problem. First, they need you reintroduce the voice commands that were available without the network like they have in the iPhone 4 and 3GS. Second, they need to provide more capacity to the Siri network. this way if they got the Siri equivalent of the fail whale, they’d at least be able to handle some of the audio processing that previous phones have been capable of.

Has anyone else noticed that some of Google’s street view is after sundown? Checkout Laurel Canyon between Magnolia and Ventura Blvd in LA. It’s headlights and neon (last I checked).

The battery problems fixed in apple’s latest iOS update (5.0.1) are a very strong temptation. However, I fear it may delay my inevitable jailbreak. I also imagine that this example of a delta update might even aid the dev team and others working to free our phones of tyranny. Ideally I would like to see a jailbreak able to download and patch the update before installing. Thus maintaining the jailbreak through the update. am I dreaming?

I am already disappointed with apple’s latest change to it’s web service.   Apple has never known what it was doing with it’s web services, but people were actually paying for it.  Now they switched to a free service that does only half of what many were already relying on.

When i originally signed up for my @mac.com email address it was upon installing a brand new Mac OS 9 on my Performa 6400.  Then free service was branded with the tagline “Free eMail for Life!”  Just two years later, apple rebranded it dotmac (.Mac), a pay service with all newly designed web hosting and design services so that anyone could create a polished site in minutes.  I was cynical of this new pay service, there were cheaper hosting services and seemly nothing more valuable then the continued use of my email.  i vowed never to use it.  That only lasted about a year or so before apple gifted it to me for free with my APP certificate.  If memory serves, i just got one free year and another half price, but by then i was hooked.  i was hooked on iSync/iDisk.  it kept all my devices and computers in sync.  it allowed me to work on my desktop, laptop, or work machine with all the latest and most current data and documents. it was amazing.  I used it, loved it, and sold the hell out of it.  I setup so many different installs configurations.  From the Granny with a bridge club to a Travel Photographer with his portfolio.  it was a great system.  (this was years before drop box).

iTools -> .mac -> MobileMe -> iCloud

A few years ago with introduction of the iPhone, Apple rebranded the service MobileMe!  This time forcing users to migrate their websites and design tools away from the older web based system to the newer iweb.  Forcing the people who needed template sites and automated publishing tools to manually move their websites to the new system and to abandon any hope of future updates.  Basically saying “Adopt or Cancel.”  They were discontinuing the very publishing tools that they had sold these customers on only a few years ago.  Outages, lost or duplicated data was a Sword of Damocles looming over any user for over a month.  The migration was so bad that apple ended up giving everyone who remained a few months of free service.

Now it comes full circle and returns to being a free service with iOS 5 or Lion.  No more syncing keychains, mail settings, smart folders.  No more iDisk, so no more Document syncing in ANY application.  Its’s as if Apple wants to do away with any user control over the location if their files.  Some of us like to be able to browse their files if they want to.  It’s great if the application knows where the file is stored.  It can be updated to utilize iCloud, but what if i want to save whatever the hell i want in there.  What if (heaven forbid) the internet is down!??  Can i copy it to a thumb drive?  At least contact and calendar sync reamins uninterrupted.  Location services and tracking have been expanded to include computers.  iMessages to allow rapid decimation of location data (some privacy issues remain).  With any luck, many of these concerns may very will be solved in future updates or by the developers that make this platform so great.

Well, at least we can all quit ponying up $99 to apple each year.  We’ll have to wait and see where we go from here.  See how it evolves.  Photo Stream is pretty cool.  gets my pictures from my iPhone to my iPad , and all my computers without any syncing, though i am still unsure if i need all my vacation picts on my office machine.  I am generally disappointed with iWork for iPad (but of course mine is still the original iPad).  All my custom templates must be updated to look good.  Many of my apps are still waiting for iCloud integration before i can take advantage of the new document syncing.  Wish they could integrate keychain syncing.  What are they if not documents?  Lucky for me i have already migrated much of my file sync services away from Apple to cheaper storage with Dreamhost, Dropbox, Box.net, etc.  For many of my friends, colleagues, and customers this task lies ahead.  Apple certainly didn’t make it easy.

When I got my new iPhone, Siri didn’t work at first but now it does. I think that some limit was reached with the number of people trying to use this awesome new feature at the same time. Apple servers must been overloaded. all in all I’m quite impressed with the new phone, however I do miss all my hacks and tweaks. it is my hope that a new jailbreak comes out soon. I hope the dev team is just waiting for everyone to get their devices so they can publish jailbreaks there are you sitting on. this phone has the same boot ROM as the iPad 2.

all the ssl blacklists are updates. we can return to thinking we are safe. Apple included the patches in a Security Update, Firefox updated to 6.0.2. Jailbroken iOS users can update or install “sslfix” in Cydia to get the protections that apple has yet to release.

After watching Moxie’s BlackHat talk, we seriously need to fix SSL. It is holding up too many technologies to be this insecure.

In the mist of  #antisec and on the heels of the Vegas Hacker/Security conferences, another CA (DigiNotar) was hacked.  This time the hackers got Google’s security certificates.   With that criminals could use a technique known as a Man in the Middle attack to impersonate google and nothing can stop them.  Personally i have heard @ioerror rant about the fundamental flaws of our present SSL system.  Perhaps this will help bring about a change more quickly but for now we can blacklist the offending certificates.  here is how (on a mac)

To protect Safari, the solution is, apparently, to run Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access, click on “System Root” on the upper-left, and “All items” on the lower-left, then type “DigiNotar” into the upper-right searchbox, then doubleclick on all the certs that show up (you may only have one), open the “Trust” detail area, and change “When using this certificate” to “Never Trust”, then close the dialog box.

For Firefox users, go to Firefox’s Preferences, click on Advanced, then the Encryption tab, then click on “View Certificates”, click on the “Authorities” tab, scroll down to DigiNotar, click on “DigiNotar Root or CA”, then click on “Delete…” or “Delete or Distrust…” below (depends on your version).

Read more here:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219606/Hackers_stole_Google_SSL_certificate_Dutch_firm_admits?taxonomyId=85

After ridiculous amounts of trouble all over my new office network.  i devoted the day to fixing it.  Turns out that most of my problems were caused by a simple KVM.  I temporarily replaced it with actually screens/keyboards/mice.  Solved all my mysterious problems.  hazah!  Now if only i can get my drive failures resolved.

Despite numerous problems and unrelenting deadlines @comex has come through yet again with another fantastic jailbreak! When an unfinished beta of the latest iPad2 jailbreak was leaked, we all new that the window for this exploit was rapidly closing. Apple simply cannot allow userland exploits to exist (for obvious reasons). I am delighted that all the iPhone-dev guys got their act together and released. What are you waiting for JailbreakMe.com.

i lost all my iOS backups as well as hundreds of gigs of other software backups.  Doh!  Some things are just too big to back up, but too important to fail.  Attempting recovery, but it sounds like  a servo malfunction, so i am most likely doomed.