New York City now has electronics recycling drop-off days all over the city four times a year, organized by the Lower East Side Ecology Center. All those materials go to a recycler that is in full operation. That recycler is extracting all sorts of materials and selling them. People thought that paper recycling was crazy when it started, now NYC makes a profit from it, and now, people steal the paper from the curbside because its worth money. Now its great that more of this toxic material is being recycled, but if we go back to the 3 Rs, there are two things we should be doing first: reduce and reuse.

For now, let’s talk about reuse. You don’t need to solder to reuse stuff. Most of the electronics that people discard still work fine. And most of it is far more powerful than a microcontroller like the Arduino. The software is a main limitation, its currently not very easy to put your own software on your own phone or iPod. That is mostly because the restrictions the manufactures create for putting your own software on devices, they put a lot of work into making it really difficult to install software on these devices.

It is true to a degree that a 10 year old mobile phone is limited, but that view is very short-sighted. A good example is Apple computer versus most others. They are generally built much more solid and made to be upgradeable. Therefore people use them for a much longer time, and they have a much higher resale value. I sold my 5 year old, broken PowerBook G4. A 3 year old Dell costs that much. Since the parts are easier to swap, lots of people frankenstein working powerbooks out of old ones. Few people do this with PCs since they are just not built for it (sadly, it seems that Apple is making it harder to swap parts with their newer MacBooks).

Imagine if phones, iPods, and PDAs were made to be upgradable? Personally, I get quite attached to the physical shape, size and feel of my daily device, and there is always a big adjustment period. But if I could install my own software and upgrade the hardware, I would change much less frequently. Like computers and laptops have, mobile devices are now maturing and they aren’t really changing that much. For example, my 2005 Palm TX has a screen with the same resolution and capabilities as the latest iPhone (320×480). My 2003 Sharp Zaurus has a much better screen than almost all phones out there (640×480, still very bright, and more colors that most).

So the problem really is nothing inherent in the problems of making computers small and mobile. The central problem is really that the business models of telecoms encourage people to throw away working devices and buy new ones. A number of laptop companies sell computers that last many years, and make good money doing it. It is not hard to make money selling devices where people can always upgrade the software and the hardware. And ISPs make money selling all-you-can-eat bandwidth for a monthly fee. We need to think of our phones, devices, media players, etc. as little computers and treating them accordingly.

PC Advisor: WPA wireless security cracked in 60 seconds

The WEP standard for encrypting wifi networks has long since been easily crackable. Now the next ‘uncrackable’ standard, WPA, can be cracked in 60 seconds. Expect more and better automatic cracking tools to follow, just like the WEP tools like aircrack-ng, wesside, etc. So apparently, WPA2 is now the gold standard, the one to beat. I’m guessing its only a matter of time.

Additionally, its now getting as easy to crack the GSM encryption used in GSM mobile phones, which is the most popular standard around the world: Huge GSM flaw allows hackers to listen in on voice calls

Its really time to start thinking about network security differently. Laptops are becoming ever more common, more and more phones have wifi, etc. Instead of trying to create a safe network, instead we need to think of our computers and devices as an island in rough seas. If you are smart about it, and follow good practices like turning off any network service that you are not using, you can even run a Windows box directly on the internet without problems.

I am a devoted user of NeXTStep, ahem, which I started using in 1994 and still use to this day. Except now, NeXTStep is called Apple Mac OS X. I am also a vocal advocate for Free Software. This may be a contradiction, many have pointed out. While I wish I had the programming skills to code everything I need in GNUStep and Étoilé and then ditch Mac OS X, I do not. So I have chosen the slower, incremental route towards full freedom. Using this very familiar environment keeps me productive while I am writing code for free software like Pure Data and Arduino. The key part here is being vigilant that I do not slip back towards proprietary software.

Even though there are many good, proprietary tools included in Mac OS X, I found even better free tools. So I already install lots of free software as my main tools instead of the proprietary ones from Apple; things like Aquamacs (XCode), Camino (Safari), Adium (iChat), VLC and mplayer (Quicktime Player), SSHKeychain (Leopard SSH Agent), Meteorologist (Dashboard Weather Widget), etc. Plus it turns out that
Apple’s TextEdit is free software.

I started using iTunes in 2001 when I got my first Apple computer, an old iMac that someone threw away, and have used it as my main media player since then. Now I have happily replaced iTunes with Songbird. I don’t have an iPod or an iPhone, and I don’t buy from the iTunes store, and Apple is tightening down the ratchets on iTunes more and more. While Songbird suffers a bit with basic usability, like key commands and things like that, its much quicker. The open architecture means I can do things that Apple prevented me from doing before, like connecting to a shared music collection by IP address, or automatically downloading album art cover without using the iTunes Store. There are already an amazing array of plugins for Songbird, and its getting better quite rapidly. There are even numerous stores in Songbird to buy from, you don’t have to be locked into Apple.

Now I am eagerly following the Étoilé project because they sound like they are truly building upon and improving the ideas of NeXTStep, unlike Apple which seems more interested in adding ever more eye candy effects and tie-ins to the iTunes Store.