Monthly Archives: January 2012

I post a variety of things on my blog here, it is MY blog. I have a big interest in communications as you can see from my work but also from my hobby, Amateur Radio or Ham Radio. I don’t travel much but I do get to travel “virtually” via Amateur Radio. So you will see posts of radio contacts with exotic locations worldwide. I plot a lot of them on Google Earth and this is both and entertaining and educational aspect of the hobby.My work is also in communications, but for the marine or maritime market … primarily the sail and motor yacht marine community. I have been in business for 8 years. Please visit my web sites … This one: http://blog.marinetelecom.net which has links to some of the other sites in the left hand Tab Navigation part of the site, http://www.marinetelecom.net, and my WiFi Product page: http://www.wifiyacht.net. I have been a value added supporting reseller of Ericsson Mobile Broadband Voice and 3G Internet Cellular Router units and Complete Installation Kits for many years. This product line can be found at: http://www.marinetelecom.net/Ericsson_W35/, and myself and my Marine Electronics partner have done quite a bit with VSAT and other Marine Satellite systems as well.

* I was an early user of LinkedIn – I have a group: Marine Telecom (Communications) – Alan Spicer Marine Telecom – http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=990752&locale=en_US&trk=tab_pro
* I am on Facebook – and can be reached on there: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1013530132
* I am on Twitter – and can be reached on there: https://twitter.com/#!/alanspicer
* I am an Extra Class Amateur Radio Station and Operator Licensee – http://www.qrz.com/db/KA4UDX
* I am a multiple computer Operating System user: Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, iPhone/iPad iOS
* I am an Internet and Computer Networking Consultant with Land and Marine experience
* I like knowing how stuff works and pushing the outside of the envelope on things…

* I strive to save marine vessels money on their Internet and Voice with multiple Internet Access options

Thanks for looking!

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Alan Spicer Marine Telecom and WiFiYacht.net
http://www.marinetelecom.net, http://www.wifiyacht.net

http://www.marinetelecom.net/Ericsson_W35

communications @ marinetelecom.net
+1 954 683 3426

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/26/2610419/wsvn-directv-reach-deal.html

Posted on Thursday, 01.26.12

(read it at the link above)

* See also … http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/tv/2012/01/wsvn-directv-talking-for-first-time-since-blackout.html

Anyway the dispute was resolved just today. You can read the details at the miamiherald.com link above. The sunsentinel.com article is also interesting about this. So I will not be asking for any more signatures on my petition. Let’s call it a win with only 35 signatures. And apparently other pressure on them got the negotiations back moving along and must have gotten a more reasonable price from Sunbeam. It’s actually probably good that Sunbeam did this … it brought it to light that this kind of thing gets done, where we might never hear about it. It also shows the power of the people that the Internet and other social media (cell phones, Facebook, Twitter) with instant communications – we can actually make a difference. This one was only about television … but I urge everyone to get more involved in things that are important to you, things that are important to your family, things that are important to your community (city, county, state), and things that are import regarding the country as a whole. If we see something rediculous we CAN and we SHOULD talk about it, with our friends, and others in the connected online world. We should probably be saying more often these days that WE’RE MAD AS HELL AND WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE.

“I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do …” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/quotes (Movie Quote: Network (1976)).




We’ll I’m not going to leave you alone …




* And this one has been described as …

5 minutes and one of the most true, impressive and powerful scenes of the 1976 masterpiece “Network” by director Sidney Lumet.
Arthur Jensen explains to Howard Beale how economy and business work and how this determines our everybody’s life.
Although this movie is quite old, these laws and explanations apply and are even more true today than 33 years ago when the movie was shown for the first time.
Listen carefully.




It’s a big club and your are not in it … You and I are not in the big club — George Carlin (Classic!)

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Alan Spicer

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/were-just-like-youtube-megaupload-lawyer-tells-ars.ars

“We’re just like YouTube,” Megaupload lawyer tells Ars

By Nate Anderson | Published about 22 hours ago

Megaupload’s US attorney, Ira Rothken, has a succinct description of the US government case against his client: “wrong on the facts and wrong on the law.”

The week has been a busy one for Rothken, a San Francisco Internet law attorney who has previously represented sites like isoHunt and video game studios like Pandemic. When I call, he’s eating crab cakes and waiting for yet another meeting to start, but he has plenty of time to attack the government’s handling of the Megaupload case.

In Rothken’s words, the government is acting like a “copyright extremist” by taking down one of the world’s largest cloud storage services “without any notice or chance for Megaupload to be heard in a court of law.” The result is both “offensive to the rights of Megaupload but also to the rights of millions of consumers worldwide” who stored personal data with the service.

(more at the link above …)

Why the feds smashed Megaupload

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

The US government dropped a nuclear bomb on “cyberlocker” site Megaupload today, seizing its domain names, grabbing $50 million in assets, and getting New Zealand police to arrest four of the site’s key employees, including enigmatic founder Kim Dotcom. In a 72-page indictment unsealed in a Virginia federal court, prosecutors charged that the site earned more than $175 million since its founding in 2005, most of it based on copyright infringement.
 
As for the site’s employees, they were paid lavishly and they spent lavishly. Even the graphic designer, 35-year-old Slovakian resident Julius Bencko, made more than $1 million in 2010 alone.

The indictment goes after six individuals, who between them owned 14 Mercedes-Benz automobiles with license plates such as “POLICE,” “MAFIA,” “V,” “STONED,” “CEO,” “HACKER,” GOOD,” “EVIL,” and—perhaps presciently—”GUILTY.” The group also had a 2010 Maserati, a 2008 Rolls-Royce, and a 1989 Lamborghini. They had not one but three Samsung 83″ TVs, and two Sharp 108″ TVs. Someone owned a “Predator statue.” Motor bikes, jet skis, artwork, and even 60 Dell servers could all be forfeit to the government if it can prove its case against the members of the “Mega Conspiracy.”

The case is a major one, involving international cooperation between the US, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Canada, and the Philippines. In addition to the arrests, 20 search warrants were executed today in multiple countries.

No safe harbor for you

Going after Megaupload, one of the most popular sites in the world and one that uses a surprising amount of corporate bandwidth, might seem a strange choice. (As an example of its scale, Megaupload controlled 525 servers in Virginia alone and had another 630 in the Netherlands—and many more around the world.) For years, the site has claimed to take down unauthorized content when notified by rightsholders. It has registered a DMCA agent with the US government. It has created an “abuse tool” and given rightsholders access. It has negotiated with companies like Universal Music Group about licensing content. And CEO Kim Dotcom sent this curious e-mail to PayPal in late 2011:
Our legal team in the US is currently preparing to sue some of our competitors and expose their criminal activity. We like to give you a heads up and advice [sic] you not to work with sites that are known to pay up loaders for pirated content. They are damaging the image and the existence of the file hosting industry (see what’s happening with the Protect IP Act). Look at Fileserve.com, Videobb.com, Filesonic.com, Wupload.com, Uploadstation.com. These sites pay everyone (no matter if the files are pirated or not) and have NO repeat infringer policy. And they are using PayPal to pay infringers.
 
But the government asserts that Megaupload merely wanted the veneer of legitimacy, while its employees knew full well that the site’s main use was to distribute infringing content. Indeed, the government points to numerous internal e-mails and chat logs from employees showing that they were aware of copyrighted material on the site and even shared it with each other. Because of this, the government says that the site does not qualify for a “safe harbor” of the kind that protected YouTube from Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit.

(more at the 2nd link above …)

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Alan Spicer

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/apple-q1-results-show-why-the-iphone-doesnt-have-lteyet.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Apple Q1 results show why the iPhone doesn’t have LTE—yet

By Chris Foresman | Published about 4 hours ago

Apple released its iPhone 4S without high-speed LTE capabilities amidst a sea of high-profile LTE Android handsets. While technophiles complained about lack of support for the next-generation wireless standard, there are multiple reasons Apple has so far shied away from the technology. Poor battery life and lack of a suitable baseband processor to fit the iPhone’s form factor are two reasons that have been cited by Apple in the past. But the company’s most recent financial results offer another clear reason: the majority of iPhones sold today are in areas without 4G networks of any kind.

The US has one of the only significant LTE rollouts in the world. A few major cities in Canada, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia account for most of the rest of the global LTE network availability. Nearly all of Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia lack any LTE service outside of tiny test markets.

After looking at Apple’s results for its fiscal first quarter of 2012, there’s no question that the iPhone continues to be a success. The company sold a record 37 million handsets—as much as the two previous quarters combined, including the record 20 million sold in fiscal third quarter 2011. A large majority of those iPhones were sold outside the US.

(more at the link above …)

* So Apple did the numbers and enough of the market for iPhone 4S didn’t have LTE available … Or so they say. And it would have been a little difficult to squeeze LTE in there. * It would have been nice … LTE … with fallback to 3G(+) and such for those that don’t have it yet. The ownership time of an iPhone 4S has got to be a year or two, right? By the time owners have had it for awhile … the excuse that LTE isn’t available everywhere fades pretty quickly.

I use my iPhone mostly on WiFi anyway … to cut down on the Cellular Data usage. Some things in the phone bitch when I turn off the Cellular Data … For example I can’t use Visual Voice Mail – I would have to call voicemail the old fashioned way.

* It begs the question – How are they handling users being able to download at 50 Megabits/Second or faster? If users can reach their 5 Gigabyte per month limit at 3G on a regular basis … How much is it going to cost the users when they can easily use 10 x or 50 x that amount of data from the 4G Cellular network in a month? Also how are CPU and Storage Space keeping up with that capability? You would also think you would start seeing the bottlenecks in the rest of the Internet when you reach those speeds. The whole infrastructure from your phone (or computer when you are on a computer) would have to handle that speed. It’s not hard to max the file storage space on even a 32 Gigabyte iPhone 4S – I’m already down to around 3.5 Gigabytes on /dev/disk0s1s2 mounted on /private/var out of a total of around 28.8 Gigabytes – according to an app called SysInfoPlus. I might have to dump some music to make room for other things I might need storage space for on the phone. Also some pictures and video need to be take off and archived on my desktop.

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Alan Spicer

TechCrunch tweeted about this … Like OMG!!!!




Shit Silicon Valley Says

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Alan Spicer

HK0NA Camp (See  their web site for more …) 

KA4UDX to HK0NA operating split frequency – RX on 3.770.30 Mhz, TX (775 and up) I chose 3.776.00 Mhz

It’s hard to find this island, on Google Earth, it’s very small, you have Zoom In really close to see it.

http://www.qrz.com/db/hk0na

Latitude 4.002956 (4° 0′ 10” N)

Longitude -81.605686 (81° 36′ 20” W)

Grid Square EJ94ea

Bearing 184.5° S (from KA4UDX)

Distance 1537.1 mi (2473.7 km)

Web Page http://www.hk0na.com

CLICK PICTURES TO ENLARGE TO FULL SIZE

HK0NA Malpela Island – Google Earth #1

HK0NA Malpela Island – Google Earth #2

HK0NA Malpela Island – Google Earth #3

HK0NA Malpela Island – Google Earth #4

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73 de KA4UDX,

Alan Spicer

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/11348298-georgia-judge-orders-president-obama-to-appear-in-atlanta-court

Things are heating up in the race for the White House. A Georgia administrative law judge, Michael Malihi on Thursday denied a motion by attorney’s representing President Obama to quash a subpoena requiring the nation’s 44th President to appear in an administrative hearing seeking to have his name removed from the Democratic Primary ballot on Super Tuesday.
Two Georgia residents filed a motion questioning whether President Obama met the constitutional requirement to be president. Deputy Judge Malihi had previously set a hearing date on their petition for January, 26, 2012 in the Fulton County Superior Court.

(more at the link above …)

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Alan Spicer

01-22-2011 Sunday – Operations on the VHF band Upper Sideband during the VHF Contest. The 6 meter band had fairly good propagation today. This band is not always open and usually relies on special conditions called Sporadic-E or other atmosperic ducting to allow DX contacts.




VHF Contest, KA4UDX on 6-Meters listening up and down and making contacts. This is slice 1 of 4.

In the beginning of the video I had not yet adjusted the MIC input of the Logitech Web Cam – so the audio was hitting to hard. I quickly adjusted volumes to keep the level below clipping. Notice a classic around 20 minutes … I told some jerk “Really your gonna whistle on here.” There are people that must go around the bands looking for difficult conditions in QSOs and they whistle over it.

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Alan Spicer – KA4UDX

Absinth for Windows is now available as of today. Yesterday only the Mac OS X version was available. You can get either version right here:

http://www.guidemyjailbreak.com/how-to-jailbreak-iphone-4s-501/




Video on How To Jailbreak your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 – the method of doing this is pretty much the same for Windows. You download the “absinthe” zipped program, extract it somewhere where you can find it, then run it. You run it with your device already on a cable connected to your computer as if you were going to sync with iTunes. You just run it and click the Jailbreak button. Let it run until it tells you that it is done. It takes awhile. After it is finished there will be an Absinth jailbreak icon on your Apple device. You tap and run that … and let it do its thing. It takes awhile as well. So get a coke or a coffee and be happy that it will be done soon.

* I made a video of my iPhone 4S after jailbreaking was done. I have already installed a bunch of  things from the Cydia repository which is the “open” App Store type of thing for jailbroken iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads. I’ll have that video on this blog post soon … after I upload it to YouTube.com.

* And here it is:

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Alan Spicer