Attached please find the slides from my presentation on vulnerabilities in home networks. This talk briefly discusses the lack of security enabled by default on home routers as well as the browser exploits which will take advantage of these.

• Slides

T-MOBILE, the T-MOBILE logo, T-ZONES, the T-ZONES design, the HOTSPOT design, T-MOBILE MDA, T-MOBILE SDA, T-MOBILEWEB, the WORLDCLASS logo, the “digits” design, the T-MOBILE acoustic logo, and the color magenta are registered and/or unregistered trademarks of Deutsche Telekom AG in the US and/or other countries.

Amazing. Consider mauve officially mine. I trademark mauve. Its mine. Use it, I’ll fucking sue you then kick you in the shin.

Via: Gizmodo

However, I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Erie, PA at 1:30 AM is not the best place to find electronics. Fortunately, good ol’ Walmart was open. With a choice between that and some belkin FM transmitter i fatefully reached for the Zune car pack. Regretfully swiping my Mastercard and drawing some stars to suffice as my name I left the store excited to finally be listening to Lewis Black on my Zune. Jumping into the car I ripped open the package and jammed it into my Zune with Speck case. Quickly I realized that wasn’t going to work. But fine. the FM transmitter couldn’t be designed with every case in mind so a pried off the rubber speck case and attached the FM transmitter into the bottom. The FM transmitter auto searched to 88.7. Turn the dial to 88.7 and… instead of a comedian suffering from a bout of high-blood pressure and tourettes I’m greeted with the opposite. Classical music. Assuming maybe it just had a tough time finding a station, I find some static on the FM dial and tune the zune to that. Finally I’m greeted with what sounds like an AM station coming in from Boston on a cloudy night. I adjust the volume and still nothing. Just a slight bit of barely recognizable Lewis Black. I take my hand off the transmitter and back to static. I try two more stations and same results.

Now I know the car has good FM reception as I’ve used my iPod with accompanying iTrip so I’m left to believe this is just absolute junk. I called my roommate who confirmed it the next day. He never left the parking lot with his. I’m absolutely amazed that Microsoft would slap the Zune name on this piece of junk. This is absolutely bar-none the WORST FM transmitter I have ever used. I’ve constructed better transmitters with those little radioshack basic electronics kits. Seriously stay away from this or you’ll be sorry.

So maybe I was wrong. I looked more into hakia today. They actually have a pretty sweet search engine. It seems to utilize wordnet as well as some cool proactive querying. Hakia actually extracts queries from the webpage as its crawled. Thats pretty cool.

Additionally they use a SemanticRank which is allegedly better than popularity rank. This is actually a very useful concept. It seems to be similar to what Chris Anderson talks about in the long tail. While popularity is important in some cases it is generally geared towards the lowest common denominator. For example Amazon.com has information about a lot of things and is very popular. However its safe to say that if I want information about a new phone, a niche blog post dedicated to the phone will most likely contain more information as it is written by subject matter experts in the field they’re interested in.

So how well does it all work? I’m not sure yet. I’ve officially switched my quick search bar from google to hakia for a few weeks (or more if it goes well) I’ll let you (my 5 readers and whoever catches this on technorati) know how it goes.

UPDATE:
Christian from Hakia was kind enough to correct me. Hakia doesn’t actually use wordnet. Its actually ontological semantics. Pretty cool stuff really check out the link in his comment.

Sprint’s Q3 Lineup Leaked?

UPDATE:
While scanning the internets i found this sweet new page regarding the Samsung i760. It’s a verizon wireless spec sheet.

Samsung i760 Spec Sheet for VZW

I’m in a surprisingly pessimistic mood today regarding AI. I was thinking about search engines. We rely on them daily. They take the vast content of the web and shrink it down into some ranked subset of relevancy to a query. There’s just an arbitrary algorithm thrown in the middle to rank results. Thats fine. I just want a lead as to where the results are.

This is where certain search engines cross the line. Search engines like Ask! and Answers.com try to confuse the user by allowing them to ask questions. A user is lead to believe that they are talking to a computer that will give them the answer. In reality these sites simply parse out relevant terms using a large grammar and can’t actually reason at all.

Enter Hakia. A search engine billed as a semantic search engine. Could this possibly have an ability to reason? Of course not. Asking Hakia a question normally yields the same search results without common sense or logical sentence evaluation. Its closer as it seems to do a bit of taxonomic searching and wordnet parsing but at the end of the day, it filters and doesn’t reason.
Of course Just for the fun of it I asked that ugly Alice a question.

Human: what color is a blue car?
ALICE: Red.
Human: really?
ALICE: For real.

So in short, we aren’t there yet.

Live from the nys fair. Sweet iPodish mp4 players.

Heritage not hate? Well wasn’t your heritage hating black people?

Flickr + wordpress + lowres phone cam = low quality crappy blog! Let the deterioration begin!