Chuck's Blog

For anyone who doesn’t already know: a ssh client for BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?) is available for free. It’s called BBSSH, and is currently under pretty active development. Being the administrator I am I downloaded and installed it on my Storm2, but noticed one funky thing: it refused to go into portrait mode, or even hide the keyboard. Also it had a weird border around it.

I’m new to these phones, so I very confused until I did my research. Turns out all you have to do to fix this behavior is to go into Options->Applications, select BBSSH, open the menu, and click “Disable compatibility mode.” Once this is done things behave as expected.

About time. Click here for a read.

Two key paragraphs to notice:

Industry stakeholders were quick to weigh in about the FCC vote. Many have charged that the proceeding is a backdoor way to write net neutrality rules without a congressional mandate. Such rules would prevent broadband providers from favoring certain Internet traffic.

Changing broadband’s regulatory status is a “terrible idea,” Verizon’s top lobbyist, Tom Tauke, said in a statement. “Rather than attempting to make the new world of broadband fit into the regulatory scheme of the old telephone world, the FCC should acknowledge that this is an issue Congress should address.”

These statements definitely made my day. If it’s going to irritate Verizon then I’m sure it’s a step towards proper net neutrality.

Title states it all. I bought one of these BlackBerries (pictured right) from Verizon to use in both the U.S. and Canada. I figured – global phone right? And pretty much every network supported?

Yep. Well, to a certain extent. Here’s some data ripped off handy-dandy Wikpiedia, though formatted nicer:

• Quad band GSM 850 900 1800 1900 MHz
• GPRS/EDGE and Uni band UMTS/HSDPA 2100MHz
• Dual band CDMA2000/EV-DO Rev. A 800 1900

So here we have it: just about every network used by modern cellular companies supported. Cool. This means I can just use local services rather than Verizon’s roaming packages, right?

Breaking this down though, Verizon has the CDMA portion of the phone locked. You *could* reprogram it, but it would be an immense pain. So, using CDMA on another carrier is not feasibly possible for the short periods of time in Canada.

So we can use GSM now in Canada now, right? Yeah, but only if you want to be with Rogers. While Rogers is not a bad company, they are the only GSM provider in Canada, and their network has been said to be spotty in coverage at times. Bell and Telus, however, are a much different story.

With Telus and Bell’s recent collaboration, Canada has access to a new high speed network, which does not use the CDMA standard, and is not GSM. And the coverage is terrific, other than in a few cities where the network has not been rolled out yet. Great! Or so I thought.

The key point to notice: 2100mhz. Not the 850/1900mhz supported by Bell and Telus. So unfortunately neither of these providers can be used with a BlackBerry Storm 9550 using their SIM card capabilities. Bummer.

So for those of you fellow Canadians spending lots of time in the U.S., or vice versa: you’re going to be stuck with Rogers if you go down this route.

If only standards were standard..

Why Google, why…

This new layout will confuse me for months. *sigh*

ettercap is a little tool I’ve been playing with the past few days, along with metasploit. For anyone who has never heard of either of these tools, give them a shot in a test environment. What they can do is pretty scary stuff.

And yes, I do not care if you know my internal network IP for my laptop. Or one of freenode’s servers for that matter. However, in the last few examples I blurred out my IRC nick and MAC addresses, because I do care about those.