Monthly Archive for January, 2005

iTECH Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard — A Real Taste of Virtual Reality!! @ Dave’s iPAQ

Dave Ciccone sent word of the first review I’ve seen of the iTECH Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard (you know, the one that projects a hologram of a keyboard with a red laser onto any flat surface, and lets you enter text by “typing” on it?):

I think this is a breakthrough device, and a necessary one. Someone has to be the first to release a new product like this, and spur the refinement of the category. The price of $225 is a bit steep, for me, but understandable given that this a first-of-its-kind device.

Go check out the 6 page review, and see what you think.

The Reason For T-Mobile’s Port 80 Block

According to BlackBerryCool.com, T-Mobile has admitted that it was a problem with their billing system that has deprived all T-Mobile BlackBerry users of TCP access (for apps like instant messaging) since December 1, 2004:

“There were some changes made in the billing system a while back which in turn blocked Blackberry Web Client accounts from having full internet access (including port 80). Changes are in the works and all T-Mobile BB users should have full internet access targeted for early Feb.”

Wow. The problem started on Dec. 1, 2004. Dozens of us have been complaining to them, and trying to get them to figure out what happened. Mobile technology sites and blogs, like this one, have been posting about it, and trying to get someone, anyone at T-Mobile to take notice and just tell us what’s going on. Now, two months later, they’re saying “hey, we screwed up, and we’re working on fixing it.”

Read on for my (continued) opinion on the matter.

If you follow this site, you’ve heard me rant about companies not “getting it”, missing the Cluetrain, etc. In even spoke about this at length in yesterday’s TinyPodcast.

I’ve lost a lot of respect and loyalty towards T-Mobile because of they way that they’ve handled the communication aspect of this issue. I’ve maintained that they probably didn’t intentionally disable this functionality for BlackBerry users, but that it was likely an unintended result of another change. Through all of the frustrated forum posts, blog rants, and phone calls to customer service and/or customer relations, all they would have had to do to make me and the rest of the BlackBerry community happy was communicate. But they didn’t. Even now, we only know as much as we do because of a conversation with customer care that someone blogged.

Scoble’s “Corporate Weblogger Manifesto” tells us “If you screw up, acknowledge it. Fast. And give us a plan for how you’ll unscrew things. Then deliver on your promises.” It sounds like they know, internally, that they screwed up, and that they have a plan to “unscrew” things. All they would have had to do was communicate this. Tell the people in the Wireless Data Group, so they can pass the information along to angry and frustrated BlackBerry customers that are calling. Tell the people in Customer Relations so that they are aware of the issue, and the fix, when BlackBerry users escalate to them.

To me, this indicates a grave lack of internal communication within T-Mobile, let alone any kind of human communication with their customers. After all, if the T-Mobile employees don’t know what’s going on, how in the world could we expect them to communicate with their customers?

The future of T-Mobile continues to get darker and bleaker. How long until they are in dire straits, and get absorbed by one of the other big wireless carriers? Or maybe just dissappear entirely…

Northwest Noise: Tribune Photo Shoot

Tim Germer of Northwest Noise just posted that he was in a photoshoot for the Portland Tribune’s upcoming article on podcasting, for which I was interviewed. The most interesting part is this:

Portland Tribune’s Podcasting article will be published in the February 1st Tribune. Make sure to pick it up and check out the Life Section. Anna Johns of Delta Park Project podcast wrote the piece, so let her know she did a great job!

Be sure to check out the article when the paper comes out – it’s available for free all over the Portland area. I’ll post a link to it once it makes it to the Trib’s web site.

We northwest podcasts (TinyPodcast, GadgetFamily Podcast, Delta Park Project, Northwest Noise, etc.) are all buddies, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Anna’s article came out.

A special bonus edition of TinyPodcast today – soundseeing at the Apple store in the mall to check out launch day for the Mac mini and iPod Shuffle. Also, playing around with some new audio hardware.

9 minutes 37 seconds, 4.4 MB. You can download the MP3 file directly here.

Expect a full regular episode of TinyPodcast in a few days.

Edit: Fixed the direct download link, which was pointing to the 2005-01-18 show. Thanks to Bill_in_Germany for pointing that out!

SecurityFocus HOME News: Hacker penetrates T-Mobile systems

A 21 year old cracker named Nicolas Jacobsen broke into T-Mobile’s network, and obtained confidential customer data

Jacobsen could access information on any of the Bellevue, Washington-based company’s 16.3 million customers, including many customers’ Social Security numbers and dates of birth, according to government filings in the case. He could also obtain voicemail PINs, and the passwords providing customers with Web access to their T-Mobile e-mail accounts. He did not have access to credit card numbers.

If you’re a T-Mobile customer, I strongly suggest you keep an eye on your credit report and other indicators of identity theft.

Besides just sensitive customer information, the cracker was able to obtain internal Secret Service documents. How? Because a Secret Service agent did this:

[...] agents watched as the hacker surfed to “My T-Mobile,” and entered a username and password belonging to Peter Cavicchia, a Secret Service cyber crime agent in New York. Cavicchia was the agent who last year spearheaded the investigation of Jason Smathers, a former AOL employee accused of stealing 92 million customer e-mail addresses from the company to sell to a spammer. The agent was also an adopter of mobile technology, and he did a lot of work through his T-Mobile Sidekick — an all-in-one cellphone, camera, digital organizer and e-mail terminal. The Sidekick uses T-Mobile servers for e-mail and file storage, and the stolen documents had all been lifted from Cavicchia’s T-Mobile account

You’d think that a trained Secret Service agent, especially one who was involved in taking down someone for selling customer information to a spammer, and who was “an adopter of mobile technology”, would know better than to work with confidential Secret Service documents on something as unsecure as his Sidekick. *sigh*

UPDATE: T-Mobile issued a statement that only 400 customers’ data were exposed, and all 400 of them have been notified in writing.

UPDATE 2: Here’s a Wired article about the break in.