Apple vs FBI: The unspoken Truth on Encryption

While one can admire Apple for ‘defending’ it’s customers privacy, while also benefiting with the positive advertising. It is probably a moot, and hollow victory as the NSA and the CIA have already broken Apple security.

Not that it shouldn’t be of high importance, the resources required to do the cracking of any particular extraction of an encrypted message sent with a iPhone would most likely exceed the budget of a small country. Which is exactly the point of encryption, making it hard, and expensive to decrypt. Imagine the joviality at the NSA/CIA after the hours of decryption, that the ‘Important’ message turns out to be a high priority, top secret Cookie Recipe from you mothers cookbook.

And thereby is the unspoken truth of encryption the first one is this: you must either decrypt everything, to find what is being said, because if you can only choose strategic messages, choosing the right ones are tantamount.

During WWII monitoring enemy communication was aided by observing the frequency of communication traffic, when frequency increased, something important was being communicated. Modern military communications is continuous and unbroken, transmitting meaningless message traffic, and therefore not highlighting any particular message in the traffic stream that would be required to be decrypted. This would now be a requirement to decrypt everything, in the military traffic stream.

The second Truth is this; The assumption that you can decrypt all the messages is the hight of arrogance and ignorance. Anyone, yes anyone can create an encryption that will be impossible for a machine of any sort to decrypt, and many of these can be hidden to the point that even a human expert directly observing the message can not decipher.

Imagine hiding messages in the continuous email stream called Spam, which now constitutes more that 80% of all email traffic?

Thoughts like this keep the NSA/CIA/FBI up nights, and no matter what Bull Shit they might tell you about the need to have back doors and encryption keys it will NEVER catch all the potential secret messages that terrorists might choose to pass to each other.

Because the simplest of truths: It isn’t possible.

If you Love/Hate Nokia read this


Will the Real Stephen Elop, Please Stand Up?

I couldn’t on my best day, speak to this better than this article.

If anything it should speak to any CEO/CFO/CTO that arrogantly enters a new company environment with preconceived notions of what strategy should be applied to their new positions. So this article isn’t just about Nokia, it’s about ignorance of facts.

Apple’s outrageous share of the mobile industry’s profits

That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

Pie chart: Apple’s outrageous share of the mobile industry’s profits

In any other businesses this would be called a RIP OFF! by Apple, but with the Apple-Fanboy base, They can do no wrong. I used to be a Apple Evanglista back in Apple’s dark days, and I still use a MacBook. But I use a Nokia N900, because I can do more, with less Apple regulation, and I pay a great deal less than any iPhone ball-and-chain.

Nokia Smartphone reality check, Ka-ching!

All the bad news,
Nokia smartphones dumb down profits
Nokia releases Q2 2010 results; profits down, market share flat
Nokia Q2 2010 results – profits down but smartphone sales up

So lets do a reality check on the facts; Nokia profits are Down 40%, but are still making a Profit. Which means they are in the green economically, and are making a Profit of €221M Euros (285M$). But 40% less than last quarter, meaning that they are only making 60% of the profit they made last quarter, during the worst recession in over 100 years And everyone is complaining?

The only thing this tells me, is that a manufacture like Apple who makes more profit on their iPhone 4, is ripping off their customers by charging a premium price for a Smartphone and Nokia does not!

Reality Check cashed, Ka-ching, change your misperception!

The best Portrayal of Nokia

This article is one of the best portrayals of Nokia’s Perceived fall from grace: The Background Story

…But somehow with Apple, the facts no longer matter. The iPhone was the ultimate best phone ever – according to Steve Jobs – and because Steve Jobs says so, that started to become the storyline. The truth didn’t matter…


Mobile Phones Shipped last quarter

…Because Apple was in the game, now anything Steve Jobs said was the word from god. And no matter how severely deficient the first iPhone models were, because they were Apple phones, that meant they were the world’s ‘leading’ phones. And if you didn’t match the current iPhone model with a potential ‘iPhone killer’ – then you were obsolete. …

Consider how unfair this issue is. Apple has today 2% of total phone market share. Nokia has 34%. Apple has 14% market share in smartphones – and has lost market share now for 3 straight quarters. Nokia has 41% market share in smartphones and has been growing market share in the same period. Of Apple’s flagship phone the iPhone 4 – with its 5 major improvements now in 2010 – Nokia has had 4 of those in its phones long before 2007. Why is Apple given any credit as the ‘leader’ and Nokia accused as ‘having lost the lead’?

Apps are saving the mobile Internet

Apps, Apps everywhere Apps. There has been a lot of discussion on the internet about the value of Apps. Which are abbreviations for applications, in this case small applications on mobile devices remind me of previous discussions, read arguments, about Client Server applications. These applications in the past were a model, a class of applications to distribute part of the workload of servers to the client. In reality, they had a more important role in decreasing the network communications traffic created by old style server based applications like Web-Apps. Using a client-server, or mobile app, can utilize an API that reduces the actual amount of data transferred between the server and client. And while the flexibility of Web-Apps is perhaps better for the application administration, mobile apps are better for the Mobile carrier reducing traffic and congestion on the wireless network. The current arguments are, that mobile apps are just a passing fad, funny how the same argument was used for client-server. But giving the issue with the Apple Antenna producing poor throughput, apps are what is saving Apples iPhone 4 and the AT&T network

Apple Antenna Spin

Apple’s Antenna woes stemming from the poor design of the iPhone 4 are well known. But what has just gotten under my skin is this PC World article Antenna Expert: Apple is Right, iPhone 4 Signal Woes Overblown. The article is laced with the next best thing to professional lying, from a group of self professed Radio Experts AntennaSys, Inc The article blatantly claims;

“This was a non-scientific test, but it was done by two engineers who deal with RF devices for a living,”

and then this is where the spin/falsehood is;

“We succeeded in taking a five-bar display and reducing it to one bar by doing that,” Webb says. “But the call remained solid and never dropped.”

In plain sight they note First that they DID NOT DO A SCIENTIFIC TEST that yes, the signal drops, but the call is Ok. As a geek, and one who has been dealing with wireless communications for 10’s of years. This is insulting, and a professional attempt to baffle with bullshit

First a simple lesson on current digital mobile voice communications;

Speech is divided into 20 (ms) samples, each of which is encoded as 260 bits, giving a total bit rate of 13kbps (kilobits per second). This is the so-called full-rate speech coding


These 260 bit packets are transmitted in serial order with redundancy, so if a packet does not get received, it get’s retransmitted. The data is transmitted into a Time and Frequency Division Multiple Access digital channel. These slots in which the packets of voice are shared are not contiguously serial for each user. So when packets are transmitted they are separated in the channel. So the packet stream must be reassembled at the receiver side to reassemble the stream of packets back into the audio to be intelligible. the packets are chosen to be small enough so that should there be a packet timeout during transmitting/retransmitting the human ear will not detect it.

The professional lie above begins as such, in the use of unscientific terms as ‘the call remained solid’ in reality it never is, they are packets divided in the stream. They may sound solid, but that is due to the nature of human hearing which will fill in any gaps in the sound, and that the actual bit-rate of the wireless sound is very low, about the speed of a dialup modem. This does not constitute much bandwidth and can be sustained on extremely poor wired and wireless connections. It’s a lie to use this as a measure of signal strength. A piece of string and a couple of tin cans, can sustain a voice channel (analog) with no compression at all. Fidelity is in the ear of the beholder, not a scientific result.

When testing the real through put from the defective Apple antenna, the measured bitrate, collision, and retransmitting errors must be tested on a calibrated bench instrument, not by someone clamping their hands around it and listening for the shoe to drop. Someone should tell the ‘Experts’ at AntennaSys to try the same test on a string between two cans, and see if the ‘the call remained solid’ .

UPDATE:

Internet Pads everywhere

This article about a possible ARM-based Nokia tablet to come in the fourth quarter? And the author mentions that the Nokia Tablet MAY run Windows 7 Can you imagine? Nokia management shipping yet another OS on their equipment?

I think this is grounds to fire everyone at Nokia from the VP’s on up, and replace them with monkeys. They couldn’t possibly make worse decisions that this group of Nitwits.

SmartPhones in the reality distortion field.

I have had a revelation with regards to SmartPhones and the Reality Distortion Field.

Simply put, if the device, any device, that does not behave like a profit generating platform for Apple, should not be considered a Smartphone.




Platforms based on Symbian OS, BlackBerry , Windows and Palm and are based on a principal that the phone provides smart services to help the owner become more productive. To assist with the communications and telephony functionality and on the side, provide other useful apps. For the newly renamed iOS the goal is looping the customer into more expenses, locking them into Apple products, and Apple’s iPhone Ecosystem. To behave as a continuous advertisement and mobile marketing stream. A profit stream that even Razor Blade Salesmen would love.

Sorry not for me, even Android’s more subtle marketing of Google is too much for me. If you are new here, you can be excused for not knowing that I use an Open Source phone called the Nokia N900. And while Nokia has done a lousy job marketing it, it still does all the things that the mighty Apple iPhone 4.

Snow Leopard upgrade

Snow Leopard has been released for a while (like a year, dude) so I am taking the leap, and doing the upgrade of my MacBook 2.16GHz. I managed a bit of a backup to my old Maxstor drive, and was still amazed at the speed of firewire 400 over USB 2.0. No contest, with the 50G backup I did, it would still be at it.

What really made my decision for me, the upgrade that is, was my dersire to get dirty into programing with Xcode. And of course that required Snow Leopard to use the newest compilers and QT.

So now I’m counting down the next hour with the hope my old macbook will survive.


UPDATE1: I love this just when I get up to date Apple prepares an new Cat . However I don’t think this is likely as the version I how have after the DVD install, and updates only puts Snow Leopard at 10.6.3, quite a bit short of a 10.7.x update.

iPad Virtual Keyboard censorship

This thought has come to mind as there are many voices out there who have commented on the iPad’s virtual Keyboard‘. Many have found it hard to type on and found themselves unable to touch type on it as the very nature of touch sensitivity makes it impossible make contact with the ‘keys’. In other words, you can’t type long missives, emails or any other textual input.

What if the iPad is a form of Censorship? Making it hard to comment on the internet, create content, write Twitters/email/Blogs whatever. Because the keyboard it too hard and frustrating to enter anything other than simple search phrases. A consumer ONLY device, made to fill the passive vessels that constitutes the bulk of the internet readership? Content omnivores as Pew Research calls them, an advertising and News consuming only population.

Another iPad prediction

Having read this article about iPad sales predicted to top 7.1 million in 2010 alone, the term, FanBoy gains a new meaning, Delusional! It’s not that the iPad isn’t cute, or that it won’t BE fun or even useful. It’s that this is still a recession, and there aren’t 7.1 Million geeks in the world who have enough money to buy this thing. The second point, Apple with all it’s planning couldn’t get God to manufacture 7 million of these things this year.

I almost assumed that the article was a late April Fool’s joke. But there really are a lot of people who believe that Apple can do no wrong. Mostly because of youthful forgetfulness no one seems remembers the Cube and even though Steve Job’s was not at Apple, still there was the Newton.

I remember, I still have a Newton 100, which I upgraded from the the original Messagepad. And I think, I’m even pretty sure the sales of the iPad will not exceed 1 million sales this year. I can almost guarantee they will NOT exceed 2 Million. Given that, it will still be profitable, and considered a success. I might even like to have one, except of the fact that I already have something a lot more practical, and ultimately more useful, a Nokia N900!

Update One: I’m calling BullShit on the 700,000 iPads. At best there was 500K with less than 100k which were not pre-orders.