Well the big Skype news this week is that a group of Chinese engineers have managed to reverse engineer the protocol used by Skype’s VoIP client. This item has been extensively covered in the last few days so I won’t bother to flog that horse further. But I will mention a few things that haven’t been overly flogged.

I doesn’t take a great leap of logic to infer that the Chinese government was behind this effort. Skype is well known for it’s ability to traverse firewalls and the Chinese are well known for their ‘Great Firewall‘ so it was inevitable that they would try to crack the code. Skype allowed those behind the Great Firewall to contact the outside World and get access to all that pesky Truth that the government there is so desperately trying to protect them from. Now that they know how it works they can shore up the Great Firewall to block it.

[sigh] Continue reading Everyone can hear me now… unless your in China →

This is a nice overview of the systems design behind the Google machine.

One of the interesting points in this article is a quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures,”. This is in line with my approach to building infrastructure. Continue reading Google is smarter than you, redux →

Now these are some cool handsets.  I prefer the Bluetooth PIP*PHONE myself; I haven’t decided if I prefer the black or the yellow.

Hulger

There about as many FM transmitter accessories for the iPod as there are smells in the T but this one has something different. This unit from Kensington transmits Artist name, track and album titles to your RDS equiped FM receiver.

For those non-geeks among us this means that your car stereo will now display artist, track and album names while they are being played back from your iPod. Sweet.

Now if only they made A2DP compliant car stereos so that I could playback from my beloved Audiovox SMT5600…

Kensington RDS FM Transmitter/Car Charger for iPod