What is Drupal?

Drupal is an open source free software package that allocates an individual or a community of users to simply publish, handle and arrange a broad selection of content on a website.  It is an amazing tools that I use all the time as a web designer to implement websites for non technical users. There are thousands of themes you can load and edit using CSS to fit the needs of the website you are building. Drupal also has modules that are functional elements such as photo albums, chat rooms, blogs, newsletter....etc...etc. 

From an article from diggs.com,Drupal calling on students for the GHOP Contest I guess Google announced recently that Drupal has been chosen as one of the ten projects participating in the new pilot program the GHOP or Google Highly Open Participation Contest. You can sign-up for a new account at www.drupal.org and join the Drupal GHOP group. From there you can work on a variety of development projects to help towards winning this GHOP award from Google. 

Also Drupal has just finally released their 6th version of this software package. Which has even more security and lots of new themes and modules to play around with. A video article from diggs.com from Noel Hidalgo and Dries Buytaert (Top Drupal Developers) Dries explains that he is giving this way to give access to everyone who wants to build websites. Dries interview explains the history of Drupal and how some of the internal technology just randomly came about. In many aspects he has a similar motto as Google. Doing good and giving away this technology freely to all that want to learn. You can view his interview here: 

http://drupal.org/node/170795

Overall, if your interesting in learning more you can go to their website and there are thousands and thousands of site using Drupal, discussing groups about Drupal technologies and it is all free to learn and use. I think it is a wonderful service to us all just try googling "Drupal" to see what you get.

SOURCE:

http://www.1888softwaredownloads.com/popular-software/download-drupal-6-0-rc4-778.html

http://drupal.org/node/195913

http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0

http://drupal.org/node/170795

http://association.drupal.org/node/71

The Future Of Wi-Fi in America

Free Wi-Fi hotspots  in coffee shops, cafes, hotels, airports and much more have sprang up all over the place in recent years. In fact for about 8 years now this has been one of the most advancing  technology services in the America retail and food service markets. Reading this article from diggs.com called Wi-Fi wants to be free seems to hopefully be a new growing trend in the Wi-Fi service and that is giving this service away from FREE. Currently most major coffee shops like Starsbucks have charging a monthly fee for using Wi-Fi in their cafes. But this  seems to slowly be changing. Now the Wi-Fi service is being giving away like a free TV or free toaster when buying other goods or services. 

Also technology companies such as Google wanted to setup free Wi-Fi all over down-town areas of cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago. Of course these plans are still being discussed there is no question that this trend could slowly become a kind of standard for most major cities wanting to participate in giving their citizens this service. 

Starbucks just announced early this year that it will be dumping it long time partner T-Mobile and going with AT & T. With this transition Starbucks offers free service to (i.e the first two hours) any Starbucks card holder. 

Now of course they are still slowly trying to get you to pay for this service but in a more passive way. I think that as time goes on we will see more and more free Wi-Fi services and in turn will have advertisements within your browsers has you use their services. This could be a great upcoming market for advertisers and many companies could be jumping on this bandwagon. 

Issues with offering these free Wi-Fi service came right from the top of our government when the house of representatives on December 12 approved a bill that if anyone offering free Wi-Fi must report any illegal activities such as child porn, hacking and other illegal uses. Overall this growing trend in free Wi-Fi is done right I believe could be a wonder service for America. This could create more different internal services that use Wi-Fi (i.e.  phone over Wi-Fi) and will advance more of these kinds of technologies. I look forward to seeing how the future of Wi-Fi in America advances. 

Stay tune for some wonderful technologies dealing with our current Wi-Fi technology. 

SOURCES:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=mobile_and_wireless&articleId=9063058&taxonomyId=15&intsrc=kc_feat

http://blogs.computerworld.com/starbucks_announces_free_wifi

http://firedoglake.com/2007/12/11/congress-screams-kiddie-porn-tries-to-kill-public-wifi/

Hacking Apple's iPhone

Reviewing some of the blogs from diggs.com and slashdot.org I came across many blog entries related to the fact that you can "hack" or alter your iphone to do special things. Such as altering filesystem permissions, making it run on other providers networks (i.e T-Mobile, Version), NES Emulators , serial console and many many other things. I also came across some negative issues dealing with iPhone hacks such as a new Trojan that will pull legitimate application off the phone for no reason. The blogs goes into explaining that this worm is more of an annoyance than anything else and only infects iPhones that have been modified or opened through a security hole in the system. 

The most common hack that I have been seeing is not just limited to the iPhone but almost every digital phone on the market and that is having people (or companies unlock your phone. I found this one article called The Story Behind iUnlock which actually give you some code to use to unlock your iPhone SIM. But they commented that this code should be used at your own risk to unlock the iPhone SIM.

Also there was an interesting blog about Apple fighting back against these hacked iPhones by providing a mandatory update as a payback to the hacked device. It goes into saying that this update "bricking the hacks" is blamed directly on Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs. They believe that Jobs has done this because he can't stand people hacking his perfectly crafted device and this was a kind of retaliation against these hackers. I think if you build a device such as the iPhone people will always find ways to overcome these restrictions set by the manufacturer.  The iPhone is a advance palm computer which runs Safari and a dumbed-down version of OS X. When you build something like this people will always create a hack to do something they want it to do that it originally can't. I am sure Microsoft has the same issues with their mobile devices as well as  most other Technology companies. (i.e software companies, internet companies.....etc.) 

If you restrict it people always find away to get around this restriction. This is how it is and how it will always be when it comes to technology. People want to use these devices to do things they personally either need or want to do. If enough people want it, knowledgeable computer programmers and hackers will bring this to these people. This is the technology Black Market and I believe this will never change.

SOURCES FROM SLASHDOT.ORG & DIGGS.COM:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/10/iphone-hackers-we-have-owned-the-filesystem/

http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2007/11/19/technology_hacking_the_iphone_for_espionage.html

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/08/06/nes-emulator-on-the-iphone/

http://hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1408

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/16/1920255

http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/12/the-story-behind-the-free-open-iphone-sim-unlock-software/

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2007/10/cultofmac_1003

OLPC and Intel Corporation Part Ways

Well, if you haven't heard of the OLPC . (i.e. One Laptop Per Child) It is a association that is trying to develop a low-cost laptop (the $100 laptop) to use to educate children in third-world countries. Basically they are trying to bring the information era to the door-steps of countries like Peru, Mongolia and some countries in Africa. People of this organization believe that if you bring information / technology (i.e. www) to the less developed countries that are suffering from war, corruption, and disarray, It might bring future peace.  The strategy of the OLPC is to bring this technology to the child in hope that by doing this it will bring some kind of future peace as well as an array of other things. (Education, knowledge, The power to think for themselves.)

Recently posted on Diggs.com and Slashdot.org:

OLPC Responds to Intel Breakup   (Diggs.com)

Why Intel and OLPC Parted Ways  (Slashdot.org)

About 6 to 8 months Intel Corp. joined the OLPC as a member of the association. The OLPC was trying to get them to help them out in building a low cost, low power consumption microprocessor chip to put into the OLPC low-cost laptop. But for some reason they parted ways now and these two blogs describe Intel as a ruthless big corporate thug that doesn't care about the people but just the market it sells its chips to. Now both of the blog posting are very one sided (in favor of OLPC) and I tried finding Intel's argument as to why they drop-out of the OLPC. But I couldn't find a blog that sided Intel in either of the blog sites. I did though find a link in the blog from slashdot.com that took me to a CNET.com blog that gave more of a perspective on why. I guess Nicholas Negroponte asked Intel to stop making its Classmate PC while it was part of the OLPC. This seems to be one of the sources of friction between the two groups and probably is why they parted ways. But it doesn't really go into any depth as to why Negroponte asked this of Intel.

The diggs.com blog wrote this,  "Intel contributed nothing of value to OLPC: Intel never contributed in any way to our engineering efforts and failed to provide even a single line of code to the XO software efforts - even though Intel marketed its products as being able to run the XO software. The best Intel could offer in regards to an “Intel inside” XO laptop was one that would be more expensive and consume more power - exactly the opposite direction of OLPC’s stated mandate and vision."  This was from the head of the OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte and just by reading this you could get a really sense as to his frustration and disappointment towards Intel. It is kind of sad that things couldn't work out. Intel could of really contributed to the future success of this project. Not saying that they won't be successful without them. It just would of been great to have the leading microprocessor company evolved. 

Overall, I am sure it is a sad day for the OLPC when they couldn't reach an agreement with Intel. But it must of been a good day when AMD was asked to be involved in the project and supply a low cost, low power consumption chip and hopefully help the OLPC towards their goals. We will have to see what the future entails.

SOURCE:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7485

http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9839806-37.html?tag=nefd.top

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/04/0520254