The Lance J. Technoweb

Which computer is more secure? "Mac!" says the dedicated Macintosh user. Or is it computers with the new Windows OS? Or are they both equally likely to have security problems? There is a lot of debate in the security industry regarding which platform is more secure. Many people assume that the Mac is so secure - perhaps because they have heard of people that have experienced security failures under Windows. Others say that the the Mac is just as insecure as Windows, if not more so. The LanceJ Security Test I propose the following simple test that can be used to measure which platform is more secure from the vantage point of the public. Buy a quantity of new, stock Windows 7 and Macintosh computers from a retailer. For example, buy 5 new Mac Minis and 5 new Windows 7 HP desktops from BestBuy. Distribute each of the sealed, boxed computers to a regular, randomly selected family. Give each of those families identical, stock internet access via, say, Comcast. Tell the fam...

I commute via rail, and so I've always been interested in adding tethering to my cell phone plan. I figure it'd be a good way to spend my commute other than, um, reading literature. And now that the iPhone has tethering capabilities, I figured its my perfect opportunity to get more by spending more. Sadly, AT&T hasn't announced its tethering plan yet, but I decided I can infer some information from their existing plans. I did some research today on AT&T's website, looking into the tethering options for devices they sell now, such as the BlackBerry. I "made" a 450 minute voice plan and added tethering... and the total monthly fee came to $99.99 per month. Certainly more than the $69.99 plan, but clearly tethering will use lots more bandwidth. I also noted that AT&T has a 5 GB cap on their tethering plan. As a cost comparison, I went to Verizon's online store. They didn't have a tethering option readily visible, so I just made a $450 sm...

I have been very interested in the new iPhone 3GS, and so I decided to take a look to see if it'd be possible to upgrade. I made a few phone calls and did some research. I learned that AT&T will allow me to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS without special charges after 1 year and 8 months under contract ... so, happily I don't have to wait the full 2 years to get my hands on the new iPhone. But since I somewhat recently bought my iPhone, I still have to wait another year before I can upgrade. However, since I can't wait, I can upgrade to the new iPhone 3GS for a fee - they'll let me upgrade to the new phone if I pay a $200 premium. That means that I'd pay $399 for a phone that usually goes for $199. The $200 "surcharge" is a number that's comparable to the "contract early termination" fee. I bought my 16 GB iPhone 3G for $299. If I sell it now, I'll have a newer battery and a newer warranty. I feel those improvements are worth $50 to me...

This spring Google is transitioning its telecom service "Grand Central" to "Google Voice", a service that promises to tie together telephone, voicemail, email, video, and chat into a single service. It promises to be like Skype, GMail, Video Mail and traditional telecom all rolled into one. It just also happens that Apple is working on iPhone OS v3.0. iPhone 3.0 offers a lot of new internals to the iPhone, but with no single "huge, new" feature. Rumor also has it that Apple is planning for the next generation of iPhones and perhaps new iPods. So I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that these events are coupled. The seamless convergence of a modern, comprehensive telecom service coupled with an internationally available handset will be a killer app. And AT&T will be on board, as this will sell tons of service. Imagine the features: One device for all communications. A single mailbox. Voicemail is just another type of mail. Videomail is ...

I have heard that users of the iPhone aren't as happy with their battery life when compared with BlackBerry owner experiences. Since both devices use the same battery technology, it seems that either the devices have substantially different power efficiency numbers, or that iPhone owners make more use of their device. So I've looked at some commonly available statistics to see if I can determine if people use the iPhone more than the BlackBerry. The results are astounding. NetApps has recently published their "Mobile Web Browser" statistics, and it looks like the iPhone accounts for roughly 64% of all mobile web sessions (April 2009). In contrast, the BlackBerry accounts for 3.1% of mobile web sessions. So we know out of the gate the people use their iPhones more than BlackBerry users. But this simple statistic doesn't show everything: According to ChangeWave Research 's December 2008 market share numbers, the iPhone acounts for 23% of the smartphone ma...

Today I got around to measuring the electricity consumption of the cable TV box that is in my home - a Comcast Motorola DCT-3412. It's an HDTV Cable TV box with DVR. Is this "powered off" cable box costing American taxpayers hundreds of millions? I measured the box's consumption by plugging it into my awesome Kill -A-Watt power meter and measuring the wattage. Surprisingly, I found that my cable box consumes just about as much power when "off" than when "on"! Here's what I measured with my Kill-O-Watt meter: "Power Off": 30 watts Watching TV: 31 watts Recording TV: 31 watts Playing back a recorded program: 31 watts Why provide a power button when it makes so little difference in power consumption? Who knows! Electricity Cost So I did some math to figure out how much 30 watts of consistent power use costs, using recent prices for electricity around here: (17¢ per kwh x 30 watts x 8760 hour...