An additional thought on my Security Rules Of Thumb:

The DMCA’s clause making it illegal to create or investigate anti-curcumvention devices exists because stupid people were building their own encryption algorithms without having a clue how to do it, and after the inevitable occurred (I mean, really: ZIP compression is more secure than CSS for DVD movies ever was–and ZIP compression isn’t an encryption algorithm), they got their lawyers to pass a law to cover their stupidity.

If I were King for a day I would (a) repeal the DMCA’s anti-circumvision clause, and (b) force any idiot complaining about how it allows “hackers” to “break their security” (*cough* *cough*) to attend a week-long seminar on encryption algorithms taught by folks from the NSA who have a friggin’ clue.

At their own expense, of course.

So I landed in San Francisco, and took the BART to Market Street to go to my hotel on 3rd street. And I’m fully prepared, too: iPhone 3G, Garmin Legend GPS, laptop computer, Kindle, and a large bag full of other, more mundane things. (Pants, shirts, shampoo, toothpaste.) Bag is large and unwieldy, laptop bag is digging a trench into my shoulder, but I’m there at Market Street.

I pick what I think is the nearest BART exit to my hotel (a selection which was made by an uneducated guess), I go up the stairs, and I’m now on Market Street.

With the location of my hotel programmed into my cell phone and into my Garmin, I turn both on in order to get my current location and figure out which way I need to go.

The Garmin does it’s little satellite animation status thingy. I watch as it captures and syncs with one satellite, two, three,… finally, it knows where I am: near Pier 29.

Huh?

I’m standing here with a huge pile of stuff in a large bag, a clean version of the random homeless who have taken an interest in extracting my spare change from me, I’m tired, and there is only 15 minutes left before early registration closes (because my flight was an hour late), and my Garmin thinks I’m two miles from where I know I am–somewhere on Market street?!?

So on comes the iPhone. Same result.

Damn!

Here’s the problem: the way GPS works is by triangulating your position between multiple satellites in orbit around the earth. Each GPS is an ultra-precise atomic clock and a transmitter: in the transmission signal are the Orbital Elements of each satellite and the precise time to the nanosecond. (The time transmitted, by the way, is adjusted to the Earth’s surface relativistic frame. It turns out that the effects of gravity and the motion of the satellites means that the GPS satellites are moving 45 microseconds faster in the orbital relativistic frame than time moves on the surface of the earth. Which means the time on the GPS satellites has to be tuned slower so that the transmitted time matches the time on the surface of the Earth. Yes, that blows my mind too.)

So your receiver gets the ultra-precise time to the nanosecond relative to the satellite, the ultra-precise position of the satellite to within a foot, repeats with five more satellites, and using the fact that the speed of light travels one foot per nano-second, does a little bit of geometry and figures out where you are.

But if you are in the canyon of buildings that is Market Street, you run into signal reflections. Signal reflections create noise on the signal, so you don’t necessarily get the ultra-precise time, and they add distance to the signal’s travel path, which screws up your location. Thus in the canyon of Market Street GPS is useless: the GPS receiver does the math and thinks you’re around Pier 29, give or take fifty feet, when in reality you’re two miles away.

The error circle for the GPS doesn’t help, either: that error is calculated based on the calculated precision assuming you have a clear sky. The GPS error calculation cannot take into account building reflections, because the GPS receiver has no way of knowing if the signal bounced around before being received.

The upshot of this is that I had two GPS receivers in complete agreement, which were utterly useless, and worse: left me lost.

And resorting to the crudest of navigational tools: reading street signs and walking two blocks in order to get my bearings.

A generation from now our children will forget about street signs and we’ll become like the streets of London: their street signs were put on the sides of buildings rather than made into stand-alone sign posts. Over the years, renovations caused the building owners to tear down the signs but never replace them–which means in many places in London there are no street signs at all.

If everyone in the United States has GPS receivers–they’re very cheap and are starting to be included in every phone–then when will city governments decide to save a little money and stop replacing street signs? Will we get to a day and age where the only way to figure out where you are is to pull out the electronic gadget from your pocket and ask it?

And what happens if you’re like me, lost on Market Street, and there are no street signs? Do you just find a warm grate along the sidewalk while your hotel room goes unfilled?

More importantly, what does that mean for the location based marketing software and location-based navigation tools of tomorrow, not to mention the new iPhone “Find my phone” service, when the phone lies about where it’s located?

I hate doing it.

But I had to.

We got a whole bunch of resumés and I have one job. So I filtered out half–sorry! And I plan to spend a few minutes with the other half to weed it down to two or three people to bring in.

However, here’s a hint for anyone writing a resumé. If you don’t want to find yourself on the “immediate discard” pile, don’t write that you’ve worked with “Android OS v3.0”. I didn’t bother to read past that one line.

I can’t spell worth a damn. My english skills aren’t the best in the world. So I don’t care about typos. But something like this–I don’t think so.

Original iPhone owners & Push Notifications

One of the most awaited features, push notifications, requires a constant data connection.

*Rolls eyes*

It’s a shame Mr. Bohon was handed a megaphone without having any bloody knowledge.

The Wireless Application Protocol is the cell equivalent of the TCP/IP protocol: it describes a wireless protocol from the hardware data layer up to the application environment.

At the bottom of this protocol we have the Wireless Datagram Protocol, akin to UDP on the TCP/IP protocol suite: it permits the delivery of data packets to an arbitrary mobile device without having the entire WAP protocol stack turned on and a connection opened or the processors powered on. This mechanism is used with WAP Push, which essentially defines a WDP port and the contents of the packet.

The only component on the phone that needs to be powered on for a WDP datagram to be received by the phone is the cell phone receiver, and it’s related to the same mechanism used for SMS messages. While it is true you cannot receive an incoming SMS or WDP datagram while on the phone if you have an EDGE connection, and while it’s also true you cannot receive an incoming phone call while receiving a WDP datagram, the duration of the WDP datagram is sufficiently short enough it shouldn’t cause more than a fraction of a second delay on that incoming phone call, and the WDP datagram can be repeated in the same way SMS messages are repeated until delivered.

Bottom line: push interferes with incoming calls in the same way SMS messages do: damned near not at all.

The best part of this exercise in cell phone stupidity passing itself for expert advise comes in the form of the mea-culpa at the start of this article:

We have received multiple reports from 3.0 firmware users on original iPhones who are NOT experiencing the problems described, and who do receive calls without difficulty with the push notification service turned on. Cory’s original post is left as-is below; however, we no longer believe the issue is widespread or will affect most original iPhone users. Our apologies for any undue anxiety or confusion.

They make it sound like their massive stupidity was actually a real bug in Apple’s software implementation which was later fixed–and so the problem “is no longer wide spread”, as opposed to “speculative bullshit pulled out of our ass.”

I swear to God I’m sick to death of morons who think a cell phone is the same thing as a network computer–and when things start coming down the pike that doesn’t quite map onto the desktop computer realm, they start making up nonsense out of whole cloth.