so much for DRM

As a technologist, I keep trying new technology and applications - be it on my desktop at the office or my Nokia 6600 phone running a 32-bit OS ( Symbian) with a 4 MB Memory and 32 MB MMC.

Half the applications which came on the card were just trial versions which I cudn't use after a few days or after usign a few times. Anyway - the applciations
were totally uninteresting to me - so I never thght of paying to use them or to crack their trial version.

Recently I downloaded Photostore ( www.photostore.se) - It is a photo sharing application developed by Sapio AB ( www.sapio.se). I really liked the application
as it allowed me to upload my photographs to an online repository which I could
access from the web. It gave me the option of moving/copying in case I was running out of space on my phone. Good stuff. - Although the sharing parts sucks as I have to share for public and cannot share for just a few of my friends.
Also, when I try to access my repository from the phone it prompts to download all the pics rather than giving me the option choosing which photos to download.

Although, I dun click that many photos from my phone - i was actively using the application just to use my GPRS if nothing else! - although the speeds in Singapore are quite disappointing - only 40 kbps - thats what the telco Starhub says - but the tests which I ran showed only anr 25kbps. I am waiting for 3G

So, 10 days in to using the application - one fine day, when I fire up the application to show it to my friend, it gives me a prompt - "your trial version has ended - please download from handango.com - I was like -= on no i dun want to pay for this .... and THEN - it occured to me - lets try rolling the dat on my phone by 10 days.... and after doing that - when I fire up the application =- VIOLA it starts happily with no complaits.. I was still a bit skeptical - since sucha big company cannot be that stupid in software protection. So I thght may be, when I connect to the photstore - it'll reject my login - but no its true - they are THAT stupid.... they cud've checked the download date from the server!!! but anyway - I hope other software companies are that stupid and this may be a one-off incident.
Will keep you updated with my experiments.
cheers!
sourabh

GPRS IP address Assignment

These days we are working on a very interesting problem.
We want to establish direct communication between two phones over GPRS.
Its not a problem whe you are sending an SMS/CBS. Things get complicated
when you are trying to open a socket connection directly to the other phone.
because then you need to know the "IP Address" of the peer phone.

In GPRS address assignment is done dynamically - that means a phones IP keeps
changing - how often - I am not sure. So there needs to be a server which keeps
a record of all the IPs of all the phones which are online.

So If Alice wants to send a file to Bob ( excuse me for using the typical names from
computer security - but I love these names! - ) so Alice queries the central server
for Bob's IP. When Bob went online ( opened a server socket connection) it got to
know its IP address and published it to the the central server. Alice gets this IP fromthe server.
The problem is not solved yet.

The next problem becomes more basic one - how is the routing done?
How does my operators GGSN know where to rotue this packet destined
for IP address 203.bbb.ccc.ddd. How does it know whether to send to Vodafone's GGSN
or to send to O2's GGSN or to T-mobile's GGSN.
I dun think it should be an issue because the GGSNs in itself are just just routers in the internet.
We are testing it - lets see how it goes - if it works across operators - then it will rock.
will keep you updated
cheers
sourabhs