gsm interference is lame

one vote for gsm buzzing my speakers being an egregious failure of the fcc and part 15 interpretation. ok, i didn't actually read part 15, but there are just too many audible devices and speakers affected by too many transmitters. if the spirit of part 15 is to encourage cheap consumer devices, i feel that mission has lost a relatively large amount of ground. gsm has been around for over 10 years, but yet i've never seen a consumer product claiming to be "gsm buzz proof"... feels like we've left behind to fumble with clumsy ferrite core and anti-static bag solutions. one problem of course is gsm has such critical mass around the world that it would be difficult to unroot at this point. it'll be interesting but painfully slow to see if this issue becomes popular and how it might be solved in the next 5-10 years.

good kk post

this yunus type stuff rocks...

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/05/technologies_th.php

merlin history sniff post

personally i do think history sniffing is crossing the privacy line… i used to let it slide but facebook and zappos pretty much changed my mind when they wanted to tell all my contacts i bought some new shoes… kinda freaked me into really changing my browsing habits. at least facebook made the “beacon” sniffing visible… i revisited the paranoia of how much secret sniffing must go on.

but i know history sniff can be used for good and not just evil. for this, the firefox plugin SafeHistory is a fitting compromise, which implements same origin policy on history. see also SafeCache for cache sniffing (which i think is actually worse than history sniffing… mostly just evil and no good).

note for both of these, you need to make sure the same origin policy is enabled (network.cookie.cookieBehavior=1)… normally the policy just applies to cookies but these plugins conveniently refer to this centralized toggle.

one final tangent, i believe same origin used to be the default in firefox, but since 2.0 it is not nor is it even accessible in the standard conf screens… now you can only set it with the about:config . i find this somewhat disturbing… same origin really seems like it should be standard practice.