SOME PEOPLE SAY life runs in cycles and if that is true then I am back where my communications ran through MARS and my daily vector is governed by MARSA. Both of these acronyms are a foreign language where I work today but in the 80s they represented a special connection to home and family.
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BLACKBERRY OWNERS should check out FreeNews, one of the smartest applications I've used on my mobile phones. In fact, you don't need a Blackberry -- smartphones run FreeNews. If you like to read your news sources while on the move, FreeNews can deliver full feeds to you through a one-button sync. This is less effort than required to launch a river of news browser. Once you sync--something I do in less than two minutes for more than 80 newsfeeds--you carry your entire river of news with you. In my experience, I can stay updated with the flow of information on Irish websites, specialised keyword alerts, new bookmarks in my del.icio.us network and inside information related to public works projects. Because the newsfeeds download onto your Blackberry (or smart phone), you can peruse what you need while on the subway or flying. I read my newsfeeds aboard Irish Rail and Aircoach (or Air Couch, as one visitor called it). This idea appeals to readers of Tailrank and that news aggregator carved out a little space to hold a cluster of related content.
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WHEN I HELD my radio crystal in my hand during a visit to the family home, I realised that I have never heard anyone in Ireland talking about listening to a crystal-powered radio. Those were early radio days for me as a 12-year-old and they involved wrapping copper wire around a spent toilet roll, stringing a long line of cable to the top of the attic and hunching over in a corner to hear a scratchy radio signal. Early days--and age-revealing as well.
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NOKIA PHONE owners can sign up for a beta test of Voylent, a program that runs on your S60 phone and encrypts your conversation before sending it out over the wireless data-channel in the GSM network. Normal GSM conversations are only weakly encrypted and can be easily sniffed. Technology available to law enforcement agencies in Ireland cannot break Voylent's encryption algorithm. From the developers:
Voylent is a client for GSM cellphones that encrypts voice conversations (IP support not available in this version). We have just released our first public beta and are looking for testers, feature requests and feedback. The client has been tested only a few models, mainly Nokia S60 with Symbian OS.
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