Category: Technology

Problems with Google Results Contradicting Your Religious Views

Are you so zealous in your religious beliefs that you get angry every time Google presents you a result from a page that doesn’t specifically agree with your religion? Well there are search engines that cater to you.

Further proving if there is a market it will be filled. I find it amusing to say the least that there are people who actually are so zealous in their belief that they try to remove any outside input that clashes with their beliefs. I wonder if these are the same people who stop being friends with people they find out subscribe to evolutionary theory.

DHS Network Security Failure

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apparently doesn’t practice what they preach. The DHS is tasked with securing the computers and networks of other government agencies but are unable to security their own network. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) found 1,085 instances of security holes.

I guess good enough for government work has an all new meaning now.

It’s Not an Anti-Jailbreaking Patch

I don’t get the iPhone and anti-iPhone communities. Seriously what the fuck do either of these groups of zealots think? Oh that’s right they don’t. One side is rabidly for the iPhone and can find no ill-will in anything Apple does. The other side of the fence has the rabid dogs that can find no good in the iPhone. Personally I’m between the two (with a gun so I don’t get bitten of course) as I’m logical enough to find both pros and cons to the platform (although my main problem is with Apple’s draconian practices I fully admit it’s a very nice device).

Recently an exploit was found that allowed people to jailbreak their phone via visiting a website. A day or two ago Apple finally released a patch that fixed that vulnerability and now the anti-iPhone zealots are claiming they only patched it to stop jailbreaking. That’s bull shit.

The reason they patched it is because of how the vulnerability allowed jailbreaking. Due to a flaw in the PDF reading software included with the iPhone malicious code was able to elevate to root privileges. One on hand this allowed jailbreak. There is of course the other hand which is the vulnerability allowed the running on any arbitrary code as a root user. That means a root kit could be uploaded and installed onto an iPhone by just getting the user to visit a web page.

I’m all for jailbreaking and believe if you buy a device you can do whatever you want with it. I also think Apple are complete assholes for how restrictive they are with the phone (but it is their device and they can make it however they want, I just won’t buy it in this case). But this hole they’re fixing is a major security issue and needs to be fixed. Ironically if you went to the jailbreak website and jailbroke your phone there was a patch already available to correct the vulnerability but could only be installed via jailbreaking. Now that’s irony you just can’t buy!

The EFF’s Review of Verizon and Google’s Net Neutrality Proposal

The EFF has released their review of Verizon and Google’s recent Net Neutrality regulation framework. They have made many good points and I must say I agree with much of the review. I’m glad to see they are concerned about using government regulation as well:

Efforts to protect net neutrality that involve government regulation have always faced one fundamental obstacle: the substantial danger that the regulators will cause more harm than good for the Internet. The worst case scenario would be that, in allowing the FCC to regulate the Internet, we open the door for big business, Hollywood and the indecency police to exert even more influence on the Net than they do now.

Being their in the communist block country of California this mention of potential regulatory abuse shows me that they aren’t going to run to government blindly. The biggest concern the EFF has is the mention in the proposal of “unlawful traffic.” This is a point that has been eating at me in the proposal as well, they mention a difference between “lawful” and “unlawful” traffic but never define that difference. If you’re going to propose a framework for future legislation by Odin you should define all of your terms precisely.

It’s a good and concise read to click the link and read the material.

Net Neutrality Redux

I’ve mentioned the looming war over net neutrality before. The more I look at this problem the more I realize it’s a no-win situation. Regardless of the solution found we lose something. Very recently Google and Verizon announced their legislative framework for net neutrality [PDF]. For those of you unwilling to read the document is boils down to this; Verizon is willing to surrender on the net neutrality battle on their wired networks in exchange for being able to ignore net neutrality on it’s wireless network.

There seems to be two options in regards to this battle; ask the government to legislate net neutrality or allow ISPs to control what goes across their wires as they see fit. No matter what solution is arrived at we the people get shafted.

Let us look at option one, government legislation. Anybody with a grasp of history knows government legislation doesn’t every work out as planned. The most dangerous outcome of legislating net neutrality is it will give the government precedence to further legislate Internet traffic. Sure this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal at first right? Wrong. With this precedence all we’ll need is one self-righteous politician wanting to “protect the children” or one politician in the pocket of Comcast to introduce additional legislation. For instance since the government now gets to state what traffic will be neutral (you can guarantee they won’t write a bill saying all traffic, they’ll set a committee in place to decide these things) they will get to change the rules. Maybe one religious zealot will decide pornographic websites must be filtered, throttled, or blocked and change net neutrality to add an exception for said traffic. Another politician might listen to Comcast and claim since BitTorrent is mostly used for illegal file sharing that ISPs have the right to outright block the traffic. It’s a deep and dark hole and we don’t want to travel down.

The other interesting problem with government regulations is their desire to hand out bailouts. How so? Well the newspaper industry has been chomping at the bit for a bailout and the government has been thinking about doing so. One proposal put forth was to charge bloggers a fee which would be sent to the newspapers. The reason? Well according to those proposing this bloggers only steal newspaper articles anyways so they should pay for them. What’s to say such a newspaper bailout isn’t included with any net neutrality legislation? You can guarantee such legislation will have hundreds of pet projects, pork, and other unrelated crap in it. What should take a paragraph will end up being 500 pages with nobody know exactly what’s in the bill.

Then we have option two, allow ISPs to control what goes over their wires. This is equally dangerous as the above because now each company will decide what sites their customers have access to. If you need an example of this just turn to AOL when they were an ISP first getting started. AOL did their best to create a walled garden providing a cleansed Internet experience for their customers. This wasn’t that surprising as when the Internet amounted to bulletin board systems you were mostly restricted to talking to people using the same ISP as you had. Alas this problem is even bigger due to the fact there are a handful of very powerful ISPs. Let’s say Comcast, America’s biggest ISP, decide they are going to block all BitTorrent traffic. Since most traffic crosses a Comcast line at some point they would effectively block BitTorrent traffic for most American users regardless of the ISP they used.

I haven’t answered one question yet, why do I feel net neutrality is a needed thing? Why do I think we have any “right” (I’m not claiming any rights here but it’s a word the better reflects my idea I’m putting forth) to uncontrolled Internet traffic? How can I believe companies can’t control what is going across their wires? Well the answer to all those questions is one simple fact, the Internet was created from public funds. I glossed over the history of the Internet in my previous net neutrality post. But the Internet evolved from ARPANET which was a government funded (in other words tax money funded) research project during the Cold War. Everything from the protocols to ICANN (who control allocation of IP addresses) was created with American tax money. Heck much of the physical infrastructure was paid for through public funds. Because of this I feel we have some say in how the system we paid for is used. We can bitch, whine, moan, and otherwise complain because we paid for it. It wasn’t created by a private company and thus is a public system. That’s why the rules here are different, plain and simple.

The ironic thing is what we have right now is the best option. Currently the government wants to legislate net neutrality but need an case to point to for justification. On the other hand ISPs want to begin charging customers more money via tiered (as in site access not connection speeds) Internet access but are know that will be exactly the case the government wants. It’s a stand off. So long as this stand off continues to exist we’re OK and everything is peachy. The second this stand off stops we’re going to start losing.

I Don’t Think the Pentagon Understands How the Internet Works

Read this headline and tell me if you think the Pentagon has a basic understanding of the Internet:

Pentagon demands Wikileaks return Afghanistan documents

Wikileaks can return whatever the Hell they want but that doesn’t stop the harsh reality that thousands of copies have already been made. Welcome to the present.

Tethering Your Android Phone

I love my Evo 4G. One of the most useful features of the phone in my opinion is the ability to tether other device’s to the Evo’s data connection through it’s Wi-Fi card. But Sprint wants to charge you $30.00 a month for this feature. Being a cheapskate I’m going to show you how to save money by getting Wi-Fi tethering working on your phone for free.

Enter androind-wifi-tether a free application that allows you to tether your laptop to the Evo’s data connection. This means anywhere you have data connectivity on your Evo you have Internet access on your laptop. The newest version of android-wifi-tether now supports WPA-PSK2 encryption which fixes my main criticism with the previous versions I’ve seen. Now I feel that android-wifi-tether is ready for the big leagues.

In order to use android-wifi-tether you must root your phone. Enter Unrevoked 3. Unrevked 3 is an application that runs on your computer (be it Windows, Linux, or Mac) and roots you phone. It also flashes a custom recovery partition to it. What’s a custom recovery partition? If you don’t know don’t worry about it, you don’t need to know what it is.

Before you start here is a big warning. Using Unrevoked 3 will almost certainly void the warranty on your phone.

Anyways Unrevoked 3 is going to be pretty straight forward and will tell you exactly what steps you need to take to root your phone. Once that’s done I advise using nandroid (you’ll see it when the phone boots) to backup everything on your phone (another advantage to rooting) to your SD card.

Once you’ve done that navigate your Evo’s browser to the android-wifi-tether download page and grab the latest version that will work with your phone (the phones each version works with is listed next to the download link). Once the file is downloaded install the .apk file and you now have an application called wireless tether. Run that application to turn on Wi-Fi tethering. The options to set the SSID and WPA key are in the menu under the settings section.

Congratulations you now have free Wi-Fi tethering!

Here I’ll Save You Evo 4G Owners Some Money

Let’s say you purchased an Evo 4G and decided you wanted a spare battery because the phone drinks fuel like a Ford F350. If you go to the Sprint store they want roughly $40.00 for it and that’s only if they have it in stock. Yes just finding a spare Evo 4G battery in stock is like pulling teeth. So what do you do? You buy a spare battery for the HTC Touch Pro 2.

The battery in the Evo 4G has the model number RHOD160. It’s the same 1500 mAh battery that HTC used in a few other phones including the Touch Pro 2, CDMA Hero, and the Snap S511. The only difference is the OEM battery included with the Evo 4G has a red case on it instead of a black one. Since the battery cover hides the battery I’m more than willing to live with the fact that my battery is the “wrong” color when I’m saving $29.00. Yes the exact same battery can be had, brand new, for $11.00 plus shipping.

I ordered one and have it running in my Evo 4G right now. And it’s a good thing I did because when I pulled out the OEM battery I noticed it’s swelling which means it’s probably getting ready to go boom. That’s the other lesson today, check the batteries on your electronic devices for bulges and swelling periodically. For lithium-ion batteries that’s an indicator that somebody really bad is likely to happen in the near future.

Why I Chose Android

Long time readers here know I was quite the Palm fan for a while. Now you hear my touting my Evo 4G and hear nothing more of Palm. So why did I jump ship? Well the answer is pretty simple. I still believe WebOS is the best of the current mobile operating systems hand down. But Palm itself was in a financial quagmire until recently when they were bought by HP. I didn’t want to purchase a phone that could face irrelevancy due to the manufacturer going bankrupt and hence I decided to go with an Android phone. Now that Palm is in the hands of HP I’m even more glad I went with Android as HP doesn’t have the greatest track record of using acquisitions well.

Let’s look at HP’s biggest fiasco, the Compaq acquisition. This is what I label as the beginning of the end for quality HP products. I had an old HP Vectra buisness computer which to this day is bullet proof (it still runs perfectly even though it’s old enough that it game with EDO RAM and Windows 3.11). We have some of their diagnostics equipment here at work that functions flawlessly even though some of it is from the early ’90’s. The problem is shortly after the Compaq merger the only PCs HP put out were shit. And the only decent thing Compaq was making at the time, the iPaq (Their PDA), was bastardized into oblivion. Likewise it was around this time that their calculator division went into life support (I still love HP calculators, RPN is a great system in my opinion). In the past HP calculators were heavy and well constructed. Now they’re plastic and the buttons have a habit of breaking over time. The bottom line is HP isn’t a company I can trust to do anything well these days.

The other reason I didn’t get a Palm Pre was the hardware. By the time I was ready to get a new phone the Pre was long in the tooth and I was expecting a new model to be released soon. That soon never came and the Pre has been out over a year now without any major upgrades (and since I’m on Sprint I can’t even get those meager upgrades).

Android on the other had has several things going for it. First it’s open source and thus not dependent on a single company for continue existence. The main company developing for Android, Google, isn’t looking to go away anytime soon. Android is also a pretty fucking awesome operating system with good developer support (there are actually third-party applications to purchase for example). The hacker scene is lively as well with custom ROMs being released for most of the popular Android devices. Finally the released hardware is pretty amazing (seriously this Evo 4G is just amazing).

So that’s why I ended up with Android instead of WebOS.