Tag: Geek Stuff

One Mighty Circle Jerk

Last night I made a major error in judgment. I attended the Save the Internet rally. In my defense I attended it not because I thought I’d agree with what was being presented (that went out the door the second I heard Al Franken was going to be speaking) but because I thought it would be a good forum for debate. My error in judgment was forgetting to fact that “progressive” liberals don’t like debate and thus do everything they can to squash it.

My dumbass detector went off the second I entered the room. I arrived late but two of my friends were there early and happened to save me a seat. The first thing my friend told me upon my sitting down was “this is a liberal’s wet dream.” That’s one Hell of a comment as this friend is a self-professed communist (not a socialist or democrat but he is an honest-to-goodness communist). When a self-professed communist says an event is a liberal circle jerk you know you’re going to lose braincells just by being there.

One of the constant things being parroted by the speakers was the fact telecommunications companies have a powerful lobby in Washington. This was being brought up as a danger because the lobbies would use their might to coerce government into allowing major ISPs to filter and throttle Internet access as they see fit. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (as evident by me going to this event) but I still can’t figure out the “logic” they were using. In essence the speakers were saying the only way to prevent powerful lobbyists from using government to ruin our Internet was to… make government regulate our Internet. Wow my brain hurts just from remembering that.

That wasn’t all. After some time they brought out a Latino woman to speak. Unlike most “progressive” liberals I’m not obsessed with the race of another person, it’s irrelevant to me so I didn’t realize this would be significant. Shortly into her speech she bring up a statistic saying only a low percentage (she had an actual number that I’ve forgotten) of Latinos in this country have Internet connectivity and the FCC must do something to correct this. What does the percentage of people connected to the Internet have to do with net neutrality? Your guess is as good as mine really. Frankly I think they wanted to play the race card so badly that they were willing to bring somebody on stage to make an entirely different argument just to bring race into the game. Democrats playing the race card always confuses me since traditionally it’s been the Republican Party (whom I hate equally) that’s supported civil rights for minorities. Hell the slaves were freed by a republican. Either way they love the race card and play it whenever possible.

I’m not sure at exactly what time it was but during the speeches Al Franken excused himself from the event. He made a mention that some of his family members were in town so he wanted to go see them. According to his Wikipedia page (I know not an authoritative source, I don’t care) he resides in Minneapolis so it would seem likely his family would be in town. I’m not going to knock the guy because it could very well be they were family members from out of town but either way he ducked out before any dissent (in other words the public) could speak. That’s usually his method of operating so I wasn’t surprised.

Alas the night moved forward. A panel of speakers were brought out whom simply parroted the ongoing theme of the night. This was more bullshit that really added nothing. Finally came the point where people were able to speak. I didn’t realize this but the only way you were allowed to speak was to sign up and receive a number. One of my friends had a number which he gave to me (apparently I’m more entertaining since I don’t care if I piss off an entire auditorium of people). Before anybody was allowed to speak ground rules were being set which was fine by me. Let me rephrase that it was fine by me until one of the ground rules established was not being able to ask anybody on stage questions. This is why “progressive” liberal events piss me off, they don’t want debates they want obedience. Their motto should be “shut up slave.”

The number I had was 53 and each speaker was allowed up to two minutes to speak. This meant in a worst case scenario I’d have to wait 106 minutes before I could go up and make a statement. Two thing occurred to me at this point; what I was planning on doing was asking the FCC chairman a question and probably wasn’t going to have the chance to speak anyways. Only people with numbers one through 40 were asked to come up which is generally a good way of saying everybody else isn’t going to get time. My group and I stayed there for a short while to see what the statements were going to be and left once we realized that everybody was going to use their entire two minutes.

The first, second, and third speakers took half their time rattling of their credentials (at least it seemed like half their time). After they rattled off why they felt themselves to be so great they would make a statement about how the Internet can’t survive without the government regulating it. Needless to say we left after the third speaker opened her mouth, there was just no point in being there.

After that we went and grabbed a couple of beers hoping to numb the brain damage caused by being there. Seriously I’ve never seen such a circle jerk in my life.

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!

iPhone Users are Whores

A graphic has been going around as of late claiming to depict that iPhone users get more sex than Android and Blackberry users. Of course they don’t actually read the y-axis that is labeled “avg. number of sexual partners @ age 30.” Going by what that graph actually says iPhone users are whores while Android users are far more faithful to their significant others.

Game, set, match!

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.

New Kindle Up for Pre-Order

Speaking of competition for Barnes and Nobel Amazon has their new Kindle up for pre-order. The new models share the same improvements of their recently released DX cousin. The new Kindle has the options of either black or white and either Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi with 3G. They screen supposedly has a 50% higher contrast ration and the internal storage has been bumped up to 4GB.

Yes I pre-ordered one; black with 3G. I’m a fan boy of this device and I realize that. But I’ll certainly have a review of it once I have it in my hands for a couple of weeks.

Barnes and Nobel Up for Sale

Well this is sad news. It seems Barnes and Nobel has been struggling as of late and now put themselves up for sale. Considering how much Barnes and Nobel has contributed to the reading industry this really does suck. Yeah a lot of people will harp that Barnes and Nobel killed off more independently owned book stores but that was due to the fact the big retailer had actual selection.

In La Crosse there was a small bookstore I often when to with my mother back when I was young. Yes they could order you almost anything but there were two majors issues that ultimately killed the store. The first problem was their inventory, although good for a small bookstore, was still pretty pitiful. Every book I wanted to read had to be special ordered which meant at least a week until I could start reading it. Their second problem lied in the fact that this was before widespread Internet access and hence there was no efficient way to search for titles. If you wanted to order a book you had to know what the title was and who wrote it. Ultimately this second problem was the biggest because it meant you had very limited ability to discover new books.

Enter Barnes and Nobel, a massive bookstore that stocked everything. The first time I walked into one of these stores I just about jumped up and down for joy. See Barnes and Nobel had something no other bookstore at the time did; an honest to God full sized science fiction section. Barnes and Nobel really did help science fiction titles get more recognition just by the fact that they actually stocked them. This is how I discovered some of the lesser known stuff that I read. For example I would have never heard of the Vampire Earth or The Lost Fleet series if it wasn’t for the fact I stumbled into Barnes and Nobel one night and spend some time browsing through the sci-fi section.

But it wasn’t just science fiction that Barnes and Nobel helped. Pretty much any specialty subject could (and still can be) found in Barnes and Nobel. Do you want a book on programming in some semi-obscure language? If so check the programming section by the other computer books. Yes that’s right they have a section dedicated to computer programming. This was a big benefit to me in the days before having reliable Internet access as it allowed me to learn new languages (back in the day when said programming books came with CDs containing the needed software to start programming). If you wanted a book dealing with astronomy, paleontology, auto service, or any other niche offering chances were high Barnes and Nobel had a section for it.

Of course it seems more people are moving back to the old model of buying books, stores not dedicated to book sales. According to the Slashdot article (which is sourcing the New York Times and thus requires you register) one of the primary killers here are today’s equivalent to the general store; Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, etc. I can’t fathom this because I’ve browsed through all three of those stores’ book sections and they don’t stock shit. If those stores were the only sources I had of quality reading material I’d pretty much have to give up reading.

Of course the other competition for Barnes and Nobel comes from electronic books which they tried to get into in the past but failed (pretty miserably I might add). Now they are trying it a second time around and having better success but in a market populated by some pretty stiff competition (namely the Kindle and now iPad).

I afraid the next owner of Barnes and Nobel isn’t going to be so good as to keep the wide selection of titles and awesome reading environment. Hopefully I’m wrong but I’m certainly not an optimist by nature.

Defcon 18 News Roundup

If you pay attention to any technology news websites you’ve probably heard all sorts of horrible news involving four horsemen and a valley in the Middle East. Let me reassure you that all the news you’re hearing is overblown but with some kernels of truth. So here is your official Defcon news roundup.

First Wired has a nice assortment of pictures from the event. The first one you see are a sample of some of the badges. Unlike most lamer conferences Defcon doesn’t use paper badges (for those who get there early). For the last five years they’ve used electronic badges that were custom made and have all sorts of nice built in features. This year’s was no exception. If you look at that first picture the silver badge that says Defcon on the screen was the one given to most attendees. There were quite a few neat little features packed into that thing. First the screen is a new technology similar to e-paper in that it doesn’t require power to maintain the image. Of course its refresh rate is 1.7 seconds making it painfully slow. The badge also has a USB connector and a place to solder on a JTAG interface for debugging. A good overview of everything dealing with that badge can be found here.

GSM “security” is dead. One of the demonstration at Defcon 18 was a device that can intercept phone calls made from GSM phones. It’s not quite as apocalyptic as it sounds since the device only works for outgoing phone calls (at this point). The device also doesn’t work for phone using 3G but with a little ingenuity a device can be used to overpower the 3G towers in the area causing the phone to drop to 2G again.

A rootkit was released for phones running Android. From what everybody has been reporting you would thing this vulnerability was in the wild. Truth be told the only way to get it installed onto phones at this point is to trick the user into downloading and installing the rootkit. In other words it’s the same “vulnerability” that exists on all PCs, you can install software. Either way this will become a big deal when it’s tied with an actual vulnerability in the Android operating system allowing for remote installation of said rootkit.

At the conference I also learned that people are still stupid in regards to security. One of the competitions at Defcon 18 was the Social Engineering contest where contestants contacted people working for companies and attempted to gleam information that would be valuable in a attack against said company. A surprising amount of information was obtained through simple phone calls simply because people don’t realize how important seemingly meaningless information is.

No security conference would be complete without tutorials on lock picking. The Lock pick Village was the place to go to learn how to pick locks and obtain tools to practice your new found skill. The staff there held seminars ranging from introduction to lock picking to the inner workings of high security locks. Anybody was free to attend (for free) any of the seminars and sit down with staff and learn how to turn those picks into lock bypassing devices. A competition was also held titled Gringo Warrior where contestants had to pick through a series of locks as quickly as possible. I was not allowed to partake in the competition as my lock pick is a .45 auto.

These are just some of the highlights from Defcon. Much more information was presented and made available to attendees. I learned quite a bit in my short few days there. Of course everything I learned didn’t make me feel much better about the current state of security as a whole.

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!

A Trackpad for Your Desktop

Do you have a laptop with a trackpad? Do you wish you could take that trackpad and hook it up to your desktop instead of having a real mouse available? If you answered yes to the second question Apple has you covered now. Oh and I question your sanity.

But I also think this could be kind of useful. On one hand I’m not a huge fan of trackpads but on the other hand I’m a huge fan of the multi-touch features of my MacBook Pro’s trackpad.