We also mention Steve Jobs’ recent attack on flash, and Shantanu Narayen’s (Adobe CEO) response.

We also briefly touch on Plink, a company we previously mentioned, and their recent buyout, by Google.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday May 12^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

Put on your tinfoil hats everyone, the powers that be are meeting in secret to break the Internet. The Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is being threshed out behind closed doors and could change the way ISP’s work.

We also chat about the Digital Economy Bill that’s currently being rushed through the UK house of Parliament without debate. Seriously guys, stop doing these things in private!

We break off onto a tangent about ownership of songs and multimedia, and come up with the solution to the problem of piracy.

We finish by discussing Sonys plan to disable the ability to install Linux on the PS3, April Fools joke or just a really stupid idea? We ask the question, how long before hackers get around the restriction?

This week we talk to Sacha De’Angeli (twitter), an American Chemical Engineer who is working on a project to create an affordable Arduino based Scanning Tunnelling Electron Microscope. This project, he hopes, will enable those who do not have large financial backing to carry out scientific research in the field of nanotechnology.

Sacha talks to us about his motivations for the project, what he hopes to achieve, and his thoughts on open source hardware.

The project is still young (they have yet to obtain usable results) but it’s potential is vast. Commoditisation of the high end lab equipment market could accelerate scientific discovery, and maybe the next big nanotechnology breakthrough will come from someone in a Los Altos garage.

Update: Sacha mailed me after the show to modify one of his responses. The following is the mail he sent to me.

Hey David,

I finally came up with a good answer for your last question concerning the drug implications of my chemical explorations (hours and hours too late, of course):
The truth is that people like me have much more to fear from society than society has to fear from us basement chemistry tinkerers.

The irrational fear that everyone with a chemistry set is making methamphetamines or bombs has caused a lot of unfounded raids and arrests. This stifles innovation and experimentation. Every time I mention that I have a chemistry lab in my house to anyone, that person immediately jokes about drugs or bombs, and that’s a little scary considering my country’s raid first, ask questions later mentality for chemistry. Hence the tagline I use on my website: Chemistry is Not a Crime.

In my case not only do I not know how to make meth, I honestly have no desire to make pharmaceuticals. Or explosives – both are way too dangerous, not to mention illegal. Turning $1.50 of household chemicals into $30 worth of nanoparticles sounds more than lucrative enough to me, and it has a much lower legal cost.

Anyhow – I really wish I had said all of that instead of what I actually said. Cheers!

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 24^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

This week Gareth, Shane and Dave talk with Damien Mulley (homepage, twitter) about the upcoming Irish blog awards, social media fact checking and online marketing.

“Irish blogging is not dead”, claimed Mully, “twitter has improved and [is encouraging] blogging”, by removing the flippant posts and encouraging more thought out updates on blogs. He also suggested that the number of new Irish blogs and bloggers may be due to an increase in unemployment.

We moved onto the idea that blogging is a echo chamber of opinion, not fact checked news. Recent research shows that less than 5% of outbound links from Twitter link to News Sites (with ~60% linking to Social and Entertainment sites). We quizzed Damien on the accuracy of information on Twitter, as he claimed he used twitter as his main news source. [9:37] Damien proposed that the Wikipedia model of self-correction will in time become dominant, driven by a heightened criticism of any source, commercial or otherwise.

And finally, we moved to Marketing. [21:42] When it comes to online marketing, is it possible to advertise online without Google? [23:42] When does a company using twitter to promote their product become a spammer? [26:26] And can you imagine your customers working to be marketed to? Valve have pulled it off with a recent Alternate Reality Game to launch their latest game, Portal 2.

So is all marketing an evil mind control mechanism, or with creative tact can it be a constructive way to reach out to customers, and maybe gain some new ones? Leave you thoughts

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Friday March 19^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 14:00pm.

This week we talk about the common hurdles facing coders, and offer some views about how to overcome these issues.

Patrick, Shane and Dave are joined by Charlie Von Metzradt (homepage, twitter) – a sys-admin and Coder with Demonware (homepage, wikipedia), and Gareth – a manager/sys-admin with HEAnet (homepage, wikipedia).

We first threw our conversational lasso over the topic of frameworks, how they can be a useful tool to get off the ground quickly, but are sometimes a hindrance when it comes to scaling up your application. Shane spoke about how OpenCV has saved him about a man year of coding in his college Final Year Project, but has added some overhead. Patrick and Gareth spoke about Ruby on Rails is a great platform for rapid deployment, but very quickly its idealist abstraction layers result in unmanageable overhead, requiring a complete rewrite of some libraries or modules.

[15:26] Next we moved onto managing client expectations, with David explaining that clients might think that in a feature freeze to fix bugs no work is being performed. Charlie suggested that the client should be given a login to the bugtracker to show that work is being done.

[18:54] Finally we moved onto the topic of developer/system administrator relations, inspired by the recent Shot of Jaq episode, Developing the Devop. If you haven’t heard of Jono and Aq’s latest Internet media adventure yet, then you should check it out.

With Charlie mediating these two groups at his place of work, he spoke about how developers often fail to write coherent logging tools, leading to admin frustration. Gareth suggested that developers package their code and test the unpacking on a testing server before an admin moves it to production. This way a developer will see any potential problems and will familiarise themselves with an admin workflow.

Patrick mentions Capistrano, a deployment tool. Charlie also mentioned a tool called CheckInstall which will create a RPM or Deb when making from source, to keep track of the files modified by the make and easily uninstall the application you’ve just compiled.

So, leave your thoughts below; what middle ground have you found works between Developers and Sys-Admins? How have you best managed a paying client? And at what point have you found a framework to be more hassle than help?

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 10^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

We also mention possible side channel attacks on a cloud services, including a paper by Thomas Ristenpart which was published at ACM CCS ‘09 titled Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds (PDF).

We also interview Jon Åslund, an Engineer at Spotify. Spotify is a cloud based music service, and Jon spoke about some of the engineering challenges in creating the system.

So, are the benefits of always accessible data and acquiring resources according to demand, justified when considering possible vulnerabilities? Let us know what you think?

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 3^rd on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

As a result, a service called Please Rob Me has emerged – showing potentially empty houses, advertising their emptiness. It is based upon people sharing their location then mentioning that they are leaving home.

We talk about where the line lie, and our personal views on the privacy of our locations’. Stalking, kidnap, advertising, crowd control, traffic control and tin-foil hats are all mentioned.

We also reference:

• A paper by Dr. Sjaak Nouwt: Reasonable Expectations of Geo-Privacy?
• Real Time Rome: An MIT project in conjunction with Telecom Italia to track population movements around a Madona Concert and the World Cup

Finally we wrap up, mentioning two upcoming events:

• This Saturday Skynet are hosting Matt Zimmerman, ex-CTO of Canonical. More info on the Skynet and Ubuntu wiki’s.
• The Irish Blog awards have released their long-list, the event will be hosted on March 27^th

So, are we stupid to be giving away so much information, or is it a useful technological progression? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 24^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

We discuss mobile devices and their operating systems, including The Notion Ink Adam Tablet, Google’s Android Licensing, Microsofts new Mobile OS, smartphone market share and Flash on the iPhone. We also speak with Andrew Tanenbaum about micro-kernels in phones (full interview).

Do you have any thoughts on Android, Apple, Adam or anything else not necessarily beginning with A in this rapidly moving mobile device market? Let us know!

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 17^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

Michele also spoke about online privacy, how we protect out mum’s from spam, and what Google might really be up to with it’s Public DNS offerings. We also spoke about the proposal to extend the DNS protocol.

So, will Google’s products ever cease to innovate and push the boundaries, or are they merely addicted to snooping? Let us know what you think.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 10^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

So, to give us a primer on all things semantic we spoke with John Breslin (homepage, twitter, foaf), founder of the SIOC project (homepage, wikipedia). John told us that Natural Language Processing and extra markup are used to derive meaning from data on the internet. He also spoke about how the Semantic Web will affect both the “average-Joe” user and Web developers.

Our next topic of conversation was ComReg’s announcement that Eircom must reduce the line rental fee charged to other operators from €8.41 to €0.77. We spoke with Peter Evan’s, Product Director of BT Ireland who welcomed the news. Peter spoke about how the market will now be open to true competition, and how we may see new Local ISP’s set up to cater to rural needs. We also discuss the future of broadband here, mentioning that dial up in Ireland (17%) is still more common than the European average (11%) and Magnet’s 50Mbps Fiber to the home offerings.

Christine Heffernan, Acting Head of Corporate Affairs of Vodafone Ireland also sent us a statement in which she said that “[this decision] will lead to more robust competition in the provision of fixed communications services as it will facilitate operators such as Vodafone to offer compelling differentiated products, lower prices, and improved product quality and choice to customers.”

Finally, we had a quick mention of the iPad, and how it’s interesting to see Apple designing their own chips, but we want to see magazines on the device before we buy one.

So, what do you think? Have you moved back to Eircom recently due to high charges? Would a €92 a year saving make you think about moving away from them again? Have you dabbled with Semantic Web technologies? We want to hear from you, leave a comment below.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 3^rd on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

Darragh Doyle (homepage, twitter) of boards.ie joined us for the discussion. We first spoke of boards.ie’s recent attack, and then moved onto an interview with Marie McGonagle, who was involved in the reformation of the Defamation Act.

Marie spoke about new aspects of the law, and how old aspects have changed. She told us about warrant’s and what powers the Garda have under this new Act, where they can search and for what reasons. She spoke of the safe harbor of “Innocent Publication”, where an ISP or forum host does not have to act on content posted to it’s forum until they are alerted of it’s existence. Finally, she spoke of legal services that may be available to those who’s Freedom of expression is being infringed, specifically mentioning Digital Rights Ireland. Due to time constraints we could only include an excerpt of the full interview.

After the interview we had discussion with Darragh about Defamation and Freedom of Expression online. Boards.ie were also named as a defendant in a libel case in 2006, launched by MCD. Darragh mentioned how legal cases against online communities can have a chilling effect on discussion in those communities.

So, do you use a blog, or host a forum? Have you been thinking about the new laws and the effect they may have on your online presence or community? Drop us a comment and let us know.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday January 27^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

We discussed his project, We Predict It, a tool to track and predict trends on Twitter. As We Predict It is powered by tweets (and so by proxy, humans), we also discuss Mahalo, the “Human Powered Search” and ask if Google should be worried.

We brought up the Gawker iTablet Scavenger hunt, where a blog are offering $100,000 in exchange for an hour with a rumoured Apple product. Apple have a team of lawyers and time has shown that they are not afraid to use them, this being no exception.

Our last story was about the recent attack on Gmail China, and whether suspecting the Chinese government is just a bit too tinfoil-hat-y.

So, what do you think? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

The audio and text of this show are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

We also had an interview with Ronan Skehill (Homepage, Twitter, LinkedIn) of PinPoints (Webpage, Twitter), a GPS link service that is device agnostic, converting links to the format your device supports, be it Blackberry Maps, Nokia Maps, &c. Nokia demo’d PinPoints at their CES ovi stand and we discussed the future potential of the service.

We also did our first live video stream. The show is recorded weekly from 19:00-18:00 GMT and from now on you will be able to watch the show being recorded live, and comment in a chatroom, give us feedback as we rant, &c. Below you’ll find the video from uStream; this is probably better viewed live, but it’s good to have the unedited show up too.

The audio and text of this podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

• High school teacher in the US fired for running SETI@home.
• Somali pirates set up a Stock Exchange.
• Dane challenges copyright law.
• Upcoming talks at the 26^th Chaos Communications Congress (26c3). Keep an eye on the GSM talks.
• Irish fabless chip Firm DecaWave sign €250,000 deal with LG for Ultra-WideBand (UWB) chips.
• Plink (an Irish firm, not an application by Simon Tatham) win the second Android Developers Challenge (ADC2) with art scanning application, PlinkArt.
• Last week in an interview with the Economist Roger Faxon (CEO of EMI) mentioned that physical sales still account for 80% of recorded music sales.

The audio and text of this podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Our first topic was embed systems, as Travis is a respected speaker in this field. We spoke about the Brazilian power outtages and how smart power grids in other countries would be susceptible to attack too. We mentioned hacks to get access to the chips, like timing attacks (Travis has written a tool called GoodFET to enable hobbyists to start debugging chips) and using a camera flash.

We spoke very briefly about EU banking data being shared with the US department of justice.

And finally we discussed recent developments in Quantum computing, a historical paper by Feynman, Simulating physics with computers, that laid down much of the Quantum computing groundwork, and Quantum Tunneling and what it means for chip manufacturers.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

We also had a great interview with Hugh Nowlan (homepage, twitter) who was team captain for the winning team in last weeks HackEire, a capture the flag contest hosted by the Irish Reporting & Information Security Service (IRISS) (not the IRC client).

The interview on it’s own is also available.

Links:

• Ars Technica: Spain and Finland’s Broadband schemes
• Three Ireland’s National Broadband Scheme page
• Google Chrome OS press event

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Topics covered were:

• Google’s new protocol, SPDY.
• Microsoft bans 1 million modded Xbox 360’s.
• Microsoft launch new Xbox Social service, including Facebook, Twitter and last.fm support.
• Microsoft alegedly patent SUDO.
• Ozdok botnet taken down.
• The BBC hire a botnet for tech show.
• Dr. Dennis Jennings of ICANN/NSFnet to talk in UCD.
• Google launches Go, a new systems language.
• Some Ruby, Arch Linux and Emacs bashing

We interview Emmanuel of 2600 on his way to the HAR (Hacking at Random) conference and hear his views about the quality of bloggers, twitterers and the like. Then we just leave him in a taxi with Dave – we’re very mean – hahaha

All this and more in this week’s IT Freely podcast.

Also, some comments on the U2 gigs in Dublin, which Patrick was lucky enough to go and hear.

Enjoy!

Segue to an investigation of Voice over IP (VoIP) as implemented in HEAnet and some of the advantages it can bring over using more expensive, proprietary solutions. Does it solve all things telecomms related? Certainly not, but there’s a lot it can do.

We also mention resources businesses and individuals can use when working with Open Source, The System Administrators’ Guild of Ireland and the Irish Linux Users’ Group.

Dave also interviews Patrick Collison (homepage, twitter, Facebook) and has a chat about Tech start-ups in Ireland (based on his Irish Times article) and iPhone App School (homepage, twitter).

The full interview (MP3) is available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 3.0) license.

But first, check out this weeks astounding episode of IT Freely, now with even more technical talking type content:

Eircom have had a rough week, with DNS problems redirecting or knocking their ISP clients offline. While a suspected DNS cache poisoning problem, we talk a little bit about why this is a problem and what you can do to avoid it.

Enjoi!

In this week’s podcast, Apple have released v3.0 of their iPhone/iPod software, which is leading to some heated discussions. “Not cool!” Apple. Dave talks about a new penalty for premium mobile phone services in Ireland. Ringtones as public performances and synchronisation of information across phone platforms is discussed, along with some old-school audio technology, the Sony Walkman. Copyright and photography on the back of a bus, rejoicing over the death of the UK ID card scheme and lamenting over the HIQA suggestion that Ireland should spend some €46 on ID cards in Ireland, nonsense, tomfoolery, cut price monitors and other epic fails are all touched upon.

Enjoi!