Bill Ray

Short Message Service (SMS) has been the unpredicted golden goose of mobile telephone networks, with more than a billion messages flying through the airwaves every month over the GSM network alone. Even at a few cents a message it's not difficult to see how SMS might be the solution to the growing debt problem faced by companies that massively overbid for 3G licenses... at least until 3G starts to make some money. MS messages don't tend to overload the network. Being non-time critical means that delays during peak times can be tolerated. While a network may regret a campaign to get users to make more voice calls, more SMS messages generally mean just more revenue, something most mobile operators are in desperate need of. But in addition to the general "I'm on my way home"... (more)

Who Would You Trust?

Everyone is looking for our trust at the moment. Schemes for digitally signing applications seem to be popping up like gophers across the mobile landscape, each of them confident that we'll place our trust in their authority. Microsoft, of course, has been trying to convince us to only trust applications and drivers signed by them on our desktops. Now Symbian will be signing applications... (more)

Whole House Audio from the Palm of Your Hand - Part 2 of 3

In Part 1 of this series (JDJ, Vol. 7, issue 6), I showed how I developed an MP3 player in Java, and then added the ability to control that player from a wireless handheld device using a PersonalJava application. While I could only stop, pause, adjust the volume, and select the next track to be played, I still found the application useful, but not yet perfect... The first problem to be add... (more)

Unlimited Encryption on Limited Devices

I have the dubious honor of having written one of the very first implementations of the RSA cryptographic algorithm in Java some years ago, and very badly I wrote it too. With a 4-bit key it worked great, with an 8-bit key it took about 30 minutes to encrypt or decrypt anything, and after three days of trying with a 16-bit key, we had to use the computer for something else. Just to give y... (more)

Bluetooth Revealed & The McGraw-Hill Illustrated Telecom Dictionary

Bluetooth Revealed: The Insider's Guide to an Open Specification for Global Wireless Communications reviewed by Bill Ray Authors: Brent A. Miller, Chatschik Bisdikian, Anders Edlund Publisher: Prentice Hall ISBN: 0-13-090294-2 Paperback: 320 pages Bluetooth is a new protocol designed to replace the tangle of wires that seems to accompany all technical advances.  Operating over radio, it's no... (more)