Why Flattr? Well, I looked around, and I really liked the idea behind it. I decide on a fixed amount on money to spend every month, and this amount is shared between all the items that I “Flattr” during a given month. The amounts don’t have to be enormous (minimum is 2€ per month), but the idea is here to regain power over our consumption of information.

Also, Flattr is also getting in the real world, with the possibility to use QR-code tags on physical items, allowing for instance visitors to show their appreciation for a work of art they see somewhere without necessarily buying it. This is supported by an Android application, which is even better.

Now, the question is to know whether what revenue Flattr will bring me compared to Google. My Adsense revenue was really small on this blog, around 20€/year, which basically paid for the hosting. Of course, that’s not the real reason for maintaining this blog. And actually, this is one additional reason to move to Flattr: in addition to the potential revenue, Flattr gives me the ability to get some information about the users who like what I write, share ideas with me, and other “social” advantages.

I’ll keep you updated on this. If I have the courage, the next step is SEO. For some reason, it has always been hard for me to become interested in this, but I would really like to see if this can make me climb up the charts. Also on the stack, the global look and feel of the site is becoming far from perfect, and the latest additions aren’t really well integrated; expect a few experiments in the coming weeks.

Now, the original title is back, and it does not only mean that I am going backwards. Here are a few reasons that led me to bring the title back:

• Java Card Bandol has been released, but we can’t say that millions are being sold every day (whereas millions of Java Card 2 card are actually sold every day). We may not be at the end of the road quite yet.
• Java Card Bandol is about personal Web servers, personal connectivity, and personal security. As a way to host local applications, it competes with handsets and other devices. basically, whatever I have been talking about is in the same ecosystem.
• I like the idea of being on the road, because I don’t feel that the things I am talking about are stable these days, so we should not really act like established people.
• Several people mentioned to me that they liked the original title, and I kind of liked it myself.

I can’t tell what will happen in the future, but I have a strong interest to things related to VRM and other user-controlled initiatives. We (the users) need to free ourselves from the marketers/vendors/stores who have taken control of our personal data.

Java Card will still be around, but there will be other things in here.

Let’s reclaim our data!

Works fine on my iPod Touch. Leave a comment if you encounter problems on some device.

I have been busy in the past week preparing a tutorial and training on Java Card, and this has included learning about JavaScript (yuk!), and a little bit about mashups. And of course, when you talk about mashups, Google Adsense is an interesting idea. So, I decided to sign in to Adsense, to see how it worked.

Well, it is definitely simple to use, and it only took me a few minutes to start, and less than two hours to tune. So now, this blog includes some ads. I also have included a Google-based search on the site, which happens to be work better than the default search, which reminds us of how Google started. If you have strong feelings about it (good or bad), just let me know by sending a comment.

The next question is: could I include such ads in a Java Card 3.0 ad?

Well, maybe, but at least, it won’t be easy. Here are a few of the reasons:

• Adsense wants to analyze your content, and it may not be that easy to analyze the content of a Java Card 3.0 application.
• When using Sun’s RI, the default URI is http://localhost:8019, and cards are quite likely to have a very local address. Not that easy for Google.

Obviously, Adsense has not been designed to work with Java Card 3.0, as Java Card 3.0 cards are a new kind of personal Web servers, with very personal Web applications. So personal that they are actually difficult to analyze with the traditional means. However, there is a potential market here, as these personal Web servers are quite likely to be able to serve very well targeted ads (remember, they are supposed to be used for really personal information).

Maybe the next step for Google.

Geographically, 15-25% of the readers are from France, and 10-15% from the USA. Germany is between 5% and 10%, and UK, Brazil, and India are often around 5%. Over one year, Russia, South Korea, Netherlands, and Spain. Interestingly, China is not in the top 50, and is behind many other asian countries, including Hong Kong and Taiwan. This is a strange contrast with India.

The page most viewed is the home page, with a little over 25%. The entries to the tutorial follow, with around 3% each. In the top 10, the only other posts not related to the tutorial are the one about Android security (which is also the post that is the most often reached through Google), and the one about status words in ISO7816. Over the last month, the post about development environments is the best performer, and I believe that it could remain in the top 10. What does that tell us? Smart card developers are desperate to find tools and information, and they are not really getting them.

I looked at other parameters, but the results are not as fun. The top keywords are quite expected, with many variations on “java card tutorial” (I am good on Google on these keywords). However, unexpectedly, the top search is “security through obscurity smartcard”, with all searches concentrated over a few months (who the hell would use that search repeatedly to get to m blog?).

My visitors are geeks too, with about 60% of Firefox users, but not too much, with 86% of Windows users (almost no Vista, though).

And finally, I am currently on vacation, I will be mostly unconnected for the coming three weeks, and I will have a lot of mail to read on the week after that. So, thanks you for reading this blog, and write to you in September.

As this blog’s title becomes obsolete, I thought that I would seize this opportunity to widen a little bit its scope. You may have noticed in the recent weeks some posts that have little to do with smart cards, such as the one on Android security. Well, these posts are actually related to Java Card 3, because we are here talking about competing/complementary technologies (we still haven’t found out). As I strongly feel that Java Card 3 can only be a success if it finds interesting and valuable use cases, it becomes very important to include some discussions about the security of personal technologies.

The personal aspect is also a direct consequence of one of my strong beliefs. Security can be very good at protecting individual end-users, and it can help companies trust their users and partners. This enables very interesting business models, because trust is paramount in setting up business relationships. On the opposite, when security is used against the end users, we get to things like the Sony rootkit fiasco. This does not mean that DRM is bad, or that DRM should not be around; it simply means that using rootkit-based DRM is bad, and that DRM should be used in other ways, which also take in consideration the interests of the end-user (we’ll get back to that in another post). So, our focus in terms of security should be the end-user: not because the end-user wants it, but because the personal security of the end-user is an enbler of sound business relationships.

Despite all these changes, Java Card will remain at the heart of this blog, and long-term efforts like the tutorial will continue. And of course, the URL does not change, and it will still include javacard in it.

I can’t resist to suggest that there could be a special preview for people, using some data that comes from the viewer’s SIM card. Now that’s a Bandol application …

More seriously, if you loathe these things, let me know.

This tutorial starts with two parallel tracks: one for Java developers, who are supposed to know all they need to know about Java and nothing about smart cards, and one for smart card developers, who function the other way round.

This post will be regularly updated in order to point to the various posts making the tutorial.