This can only get worse so I plead to event organisers: get your Wi-Fi act in gear, because even software that doesn’t need to be online will try to go online anyway. It’s bad enough leaving it all to chance without actively inviting the internet devils to dance around your motherboards.Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, told The Register that converged devices – phones that can also be PCs – are the future of personal computing.Shuttleworth was at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona last week, where Ubuntu exhibited to show off its phones, tablets, and IoT (Internet of Things) initiatives.Among the displays was BQ's Ubuntu tablet, which has both a tablet mode and a windowed mode that can be enabled when attached to an external display, keyboard and mouse.We’re showcasing Ubuntu as a converged OS, said mobile product manager Richard Collins. It’s one codebase that can go onto any device that has some kind of need for a display, one SDK that developers can use. We’ll do the magic to make sure that apps scale for the display. All of that has been engineered into our first tablet product. If you connect a mouse and keyboard, it is running a full Ubuntu PC.

Ubuntu smartphones were also on display, destined for the Chinese market, from brands well-known in China, such as Meizu. Collins said that Chinese vendors wanted to build their own ecosystem, and that Ubuntu gave them freedom to do that.At MWC Microsoft, along with partners such as HP and Acer, were pushing the idea of Windows 10 Mobile as a converged phone and PC, using the feature called Continuum. Shuttleworth said he was delighted.“We’re quite lucky because HP made this big announcement that they were going to do a convergent device, a phone that could be a PC, and we’ve already got it. It really shifted people’s mood. We’ve been saying that we could build, as an open source project, a single device that could run across all these form factors. People have said that’s a little crazy, and now suddenly we’ve got some of the biggest companies in the world saying that’s a great idea,” he said.There’s stuff coming down the pike in terms of changes to personal computing form factors which I think will take this and make it the standard way everybody works. It’s hard to see now, but I’m convinced that’s the future, he added.

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Shuttleworth also talked up Ubuntu's Internet of Things credentials. Running Ubuntu Core on devices improves security, he said, thanks to easy updates.We’re just a common operating system, but the way we’ve structured that solves one of the key problems for the world, which is the security of the internet of things. That means for example that last week’s major global compromise of Linux libc, which affects pretty much every home router in the world, all the carriers in the world could have fixed that problem if they were using this mechanism, because they would just have pushed the update, and they wouldn’t have to wait for the device manufacturers or do it independently, he said.If you imagine a world where everything has a little bit of Linux in it, this is a much healthier world because the core Linux piece can be updated independently of the piece running the fridge, or the piece running the home router.What are the advantages of Ubuntu over Google's Android, which is also Linux-based?In the devices space the key question is, is that a small server running that Uavia drone, or is that a phone? If you think of it as a server, then people’s natural inclination is to use a server operating system. If you are the developer thinking, I’m going to write that software on my laptop running Ubuntu and I’m going to test it on the cloud with Ubuntu, so the natural place to run it on the drone is Ubuntu, he said.

In phones Android has a phenomenal position. We serve the needs of people who want a very secure personal computing platform, and that’s enough for me. If personal computing gets reinvented again, who knows, we could be in front of that next wave.We are certainly at the front of this [IoT] wave. The Google car, the Tesla car, the Audi car, all of those self-driving cars, they all run Ubuntu. A bunch of the leading drone manufacturers, they all run Ubuntu. Robots run Ubuntu, and so on. In the Internet of Things, Ubuntu is the Android. In phones? We’re small but feisty, he told me.In tablets and phones, Ubuntu has the same issues as any mobile OS that is not iOS or Android, which is lack of applications. In this respect, even Windows 10 Mobile is ahead. Libre Office is no fun on a tablet, because it is not designed for touch.We have a new generation of apps that have been designed for touch and convergence, Shuttleworth assured me, but added, You’re right, we do need to create a new set of apps.The convergence idea is also an open question. While smartphones now have the computing power to equal basic desktop computers, the difficulty again is whether converged apps, that run seamlessly both as mobile and desktop software, really make sense.

HP's solution is that you use Windows Mobile as a client for cloud-hosted remote applications when docked to an external display. At MWC, Intel showcased another idea, with Android and Linux stacks side by side, running different sets of applications.A WordPress site? I ask Configured with every plugin under the sun? Loosely 'administered' by the PR team? Hosted on a cloud server in who-knows-where, chosen with the same care and attention you'd use in picking a toilet to use after seven pints and a bad curry and a half hour tube ride which only gets you half-way home.So it's not secure?Never updated, never vetted, protected by what's probably a one-bit self signed SSL key?So it IS secure? he asksWith content that was just sucked out of our old web server and sports massaged into the new server by someone who left their A-Z of IT night course just before C, when Butchery came up?So it's not secure?Nah, it's safe as houses, I say.The Boss has his sarcasm-proof hearing aids in so I'll have to spell it out plainly.It's insecure, I say.How insecure are we talking?

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It is so insecure that the hosting company remirrors it every hour.So... it takes an hour to be compromised? he asks, using a word he must have recently heard at an IT Manager's round table somewhere.No, it takes about 30 seconds to compromise, but on average it takes about an hour for the robots to find it. I reply.Well what are the vulnerabilities? he asks – again with the technical words. (It's possible he's had a stack upgrade somewhere along the line)I could tell you – but the quantum rule of insecurity applies.The what?The quantum rule of insecurity – which states that the act of observing how vulnerable a host or service is changes the insecurity level of the service. Have you not heard of Schrödinger's Laptop?Schrödinger's Laptop?There's a laptop, in a box, with a bomb. The bomb is actually timed to explode at some unknown time in the future – BUT if you lift the lid there's a switch connected to the lid which will make the bomb go off immediately. So the question is, is the laptop working or not?Is it powered on? Is it open? the Boss asks, like a helpdesk savant.You're missing the point – the point is that you might not KNOW if the laptop was working or not, but as soon as you open the lid it will DEFINITELY not be working.

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