WombatNation

Two engineers (Eric, a.k.a., Narf, and Jesús, a.k.a., Blanka) with whom I work at Voxify won a prize of nearly $14,000 from contributors at OnMac.net for being the first people to publicly get Windows XP running on an Intel-based Macintosh. I was kind of surprised when the Mac showed up in Jesus’s office a few weeks ago, and I certainly didn’t guess that this was what he was working on. It doesn’t surprise me, though, that he and Eric would have been the ones to figure this out first. More proof that Voxify engineers rock.

Update 4/5: On top of all the many other mentions in the press, Eric and Jesús got mentioned in an article by David Pogue in the New York Times.

I suffered through about a month of misery of having my Treo 600 hang on me, typically while trying to place an outbound call or just seconds after receiving an inbound call. The screen would freeze for about ten seconds and either the outbound call would never go out, or the inbound call would be disconnected. In the top left corner “Sprint” would sometimes be replaced by “print” or “rint” and the message “No Service” would also appear at the top of the screen.

Oddly enough, email and web access were not affected nearly as dramatically. Sometimes the Treo would hang for a few minutes while downloading email, which would chew through a lot of the battery’s charge, but it didn’t happen that often.

Another problem is that the battery ran down really quickly. It needed to be recharged every day. The only way the Treo could survive a weekend without charging was if I turned off the wireless radio each night.

Finally, I got around to searching the web to see if this was a common problem. Of course it was. It’s easy to forget that there are a gazillion people out there like me who have problems with things and then post on the web about it. Just like this blog post.

Other people had reported this problem on the TreoCentral (here’s one of many threads on the topic) discussion forums and on several other Treo discussion forums. The first proposed solution was to send your Treo back to Palm if it was still under warranty and the ESN on the back was between 09600716001 and 09600864216. Mine is in that range, but is long since out of the warranty period.

The next thing people discovered was that replacing the battery would fix the problem. I came within one click of ordering a new battery before I decided to take one more look at what people had posted.

I then discovered a couple of posts suggesting that the problem was with the battery connection. The real benefit of replacing the battery actually came from reseating the battery connection. While the Treo would still work with a loose connection, it caused battery discharge and wireless radio problems. I suspect this might be because of undesirable drops in voltage or current across the connection.

To make a long story only a little bit longer, I used some excellent online instructions from gethightech.com to take apart my Treo and reseat the battery connection. Those instructions are for replacing a battery, but they tell you exactly what you need to know to just fix the connection.

Problem solved. It’s now been almost two weeks since I fixed the battery connection, and I haven’t had a single reoccurrence of what had become a near daily problem.

Update 11/1/2006: The problem came back. I reset the battery connection again. Unfortunately, now my Treo reboots everytime I turn it on. I did a battery reset, which fixed the reboot problem, but caused my Treo to no longer find the Sprint network. Then I did a hard reset, and everything seems back to normal.

The RIAA isn’t satisfied with just taking back existing consumers’ rights with respect to music recordings sold by record labels. They now want to greatly restrict the rights consumers have to record radio broadcasts via the proposed “Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act of 2006,” H.R. 4861.

The RIAA wants to eliminate automatic recording of radio broadcasts when used to record digital broadcasts. Technology providers would actually be forced to produce devices that require a person to push a button to start a recording. Also, devices would not be allowed to record in increments of less than 30 minutes. So, if you want to record someone being interviewed in a short segment on the radio, you’re forced to wait until 30 minutes is up, and then go back and hack out the other 28 minutes or so you didn’t want.

What technology giveth, greedy bastards want to take away. Don’t let them get away with yet another assault on our rights.

The EFF Action Center has more information on this issue and a very simple form you can use to send a personalized message to your US House Representative. I sent mine tonight.

This week an AP originated article appeared in the Oakland Tribune on caller ID spoofing. My previous post on caller ID spoofing generated quite a few comments, including a lot of email requests for the source code or for me to provide it as a paid service. Just to cut short further requests, I have no interest in doing that.

As I wrote long ago and the article also states, you shouldn’t absolutely trust the phone number that shows up on your Caller ID service as being the phone number of the person calling you. It’s quite easy to fake for someone with a reasonable level of technical savvy. I originally did it via a VoiceXML application on a hosted VoiceXML service, but you can also do it if you manage your own PBX, such as Asterisk. For the less technical, you can just pay a service to handle it for you.

Camophone is no longer taking new customers, but Spooftel, Telespoof, Spooftech, and Spoofcard are currently active. Interestingly enough, the star38.com domain for the earliest (at least, earliest known to me) Caller ID spoofing provider now redirects to cia.gov. Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.
One obvious concern is any service that authenticates the user based just on Caller ID. One example is credit card activation. Some companies will automatically activate credit cards if the Caller ID for the incoming call to the activation line is the same as the number used when appying for the credit card. That could allow someone to activate a large number of credit cards in a very short period of time by using fake phone numbers.
A dangerous privacy-related example for consumers is voice mail systems that don’t require a password if you call from the number associated with  voicemail box. Many mobile carriers use this as the default configuration. If someone knows your mobile number, they can call the main number for voicemail access and spoof your number. They can then listen to your stored messages.