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Lampost Wi-Fi (They call it Mesh, Mun-Fi and other snazzy names)

Published by in general technology on January 26th, 2006

Notice: The content of this article is based on publicly available knowledge. Whereever applicable, the author has provided links to articles that have published this information. Specifically, no confidential information, unavailable on public forums is presented here.I just got back from a week long trip to the Bay Area (almost my second home). One of the nicest things about the Bay Area is the constant spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that drives the people there. I remember meeting an old friend of mine three years ago, when he excitedly described that he is working on an initiative to “unwire” large scale areas (metro) by placing access points and implementing an efficient inter-access point routing protocol to offer a paraNetwork. When I heard it then, I wished him best of luck, but was fairly positive that this effort would be a disaster. After all, there is the Internet, there are cable companies, there are DSL providers. So why do we need this technology ? Today, I had lunch with him again. And now, he is excited, not because he thinks it is a great concept, but is excited because his dream is being implemented. Google partnered with them recently to unwire

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The Truth Hits Home

Published by in offbeat, Sunil Veluvali on January 17th, 2006

We all get so caught up on the mega-trends of technology that we sometimes miss the simple events that reminds us just how transforming IP is. I had one such experience I want to share. I came to the US in 1990 from India to go to grad school. In those days, AT&T used to charge me $2.65/min to call home. Communication was typically facilitated by having a network of expats who would carry home letters, gifts, and photographs! The Internet happened, at&t happened, and now I have literally free communication services to India. Great! However, my parents lives were pretty much the same the past decade. They live in a humble home in a decent neighborhood and spend their retirement years with friends and family on a very modest pension. And then, my Dad who is 68, learned about the Internet. He bought a computer, got broadband access, taught himself a variety of web programming languages, setup a family website, and finally setted on Flash programming. I absent mindedly encouraged him and assumed it was a passing fad. Boy, was I wrong! The past year, my dad figured out that he could use his computer skills to rekindle his

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Life-graph of a Startup

Published by in corporate on January 13th, 2006

There are hundreds of articles around the web from entreprenuers on the ‘gotchas’ of a starup and what to expect. One of the best visuals I saw anywhere is represented here. These folks are investors who work in the Indian market. I have personally known and worked with some on them in the past, and I mean it when I say that some of those folks running the show are the smartest I have ever worked with. This particular company, to the best of my knowledge ran a job placement website along with some social networking. So here is a lifecycle graph of their company, which began as a startup, crashed during 9-11 and the dot com bubble, refocussed their priorities, got bought by a big company and eventually stabilized. Besides the last part, I am sure many of us have seen this exact scenario in the Valley. The graph represents “team” optimism over a time scale (click for larger version) [reproduced after due permission from the author] I think this graph has a lot of touchpoints for anyone who has gone through the pains and joys of starting a business (or being an integral part of it) : (let’s

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Security and Convergence in your Palm

Published by in mobile, security on January 5th, 2006

Playing Devil’s advocate (or when keeping 4 devices instead of one is a good thing): One Device. In your pocket. Large Screen, hi speed over the air connection. Your phone, your planner, your email, your presence, your Instant Messaging client, your gaming console, your shopping center. It remembers all your preferences and your details. Just ‘one click and go’. Watch TV, order PPV – just one click. Listen to music, buy new albums – one click. Read documents, interact. In other words, that little PDA of yours is your home away from home. Always connected. How much better can it get ? One Word: SecurityAs phones get more ‘powerful’ they morph into general purpose machines, succeptible to the same remote exploits, DoS and security issues an open PC on the internet is. To top it off, many phones work on embedded OSes that cannot offer expensive virtual address space and address locking mechanisms making it easier for one application to write over the address space of others (think heap and stack exploits). Proof of concept viruses for smart phones are already old news (here and here. ) Most of the attacks on PDA phones use the basic concept of buffer

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SPAM over Internet Telephony (SPIT, SPIM)

Published by in general technology, voip on January 3rd, 2006

Happy New Year !!!Click here to get your FREE iPod Nano !No Wait ! This is not a SPAM post. Rather its a post about SPAM !There has been a lot of discussion in the past on how serious of a problem spam for Internet Telephony (SPIT) and Spam for Instant Messaging (SPIM) is as VoIP deployments increase their market share. Spam itself as we all know is all-pervasive in the email world. I was reading an interesting report from Symantec which reports that 67% of email is spam these days. While the percentage is staggering, there is some(?) comfort in knowing that this percentage has ‘stabilized’, which might mean that spam filters/gateways are maturing at a rate that is able to cope with the mutation of spam tricks. The interesting thing is that even though pundits scream about the problem of spam over Internet Telephony, not too many carriers are biting, at least, for now. It’s not that they don’t think its important, but it just seems that they have other problems to solve (like it or not, security is the hardest and the last solved problem in real life). So here is my perspective of SPIT/SPIM: I am

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© Arjun Roychowdhury. My personal opinions only.