Tag: Geek Stuff

YaCy

I’m a big fan of decentralized technologies. In my quest to decouple myself from the major corporations that seem inclined to wage war on the Internet I’ve been looking high and low for a search engine not run by Google or Microsoft. My quest has finally provided some fruit in the form of YaCy.

YaCy is a peer-to-peer search engine that can be run on Windows, Linux, or OS X (technically, since it’s written in Java, it should also run on other platforms). Instead of relying on centralized entities to crawl and index the Internet YaCy relies on each peer. I’ve setup a test server running YaCy to see how well it works and so far it shows promise. Granted, the search data isn’t nearly as complete as Google or Microsoft’s data at this point but that will almost certainly improve overtime. YaCy doesn’t do as good of a job at ranking search criteria based on how useful it is (at least in the eye’s of whatever search algorithm is being used) but that is likely to improve in time as well.

With those criticisms aside, and considering the limited amount of time I’ve had to play with it, YaCy does have one major advantage over Google or Bing: there is no central authority. State’s rely on central authorities to coerce into removing data when they want to enforce their archaic censorship laws. If no central authority exists it becomes much harder to enact censorship, which is where my primary interest in YaCy derives.

I’m planning to make the search interface publicly accessible in the near future so you guys can test it out. While I won’t promise a replacement for Google or Bing I will promise an interesting technology that’s worth experimenting with.

Minneapolis CryptoParty

Just so everybody knows the newly established, and at this point entirely unofficial, Minnesota Pirate Party is hosting a CryptoParty on Monday, May 13th. The event will be held at 4200 Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis, MN and is planned to go from 18:00 to 21:00.

Although I’m not sure what specifically will be covered I’m going to make an effort to ensure e-mail encryption and, if time allows, Tor are discussed. Being a CryptoParty there will also be key signing and the usual such shenanigans.

I Love Living in the Era Gun Control Died

Gun rights activists are going to look back at this time period as the beginning of the end of gun control. Defense Distributed has announced the one thing that gun control advocates have feared, a handgun that can be printed on a 3D printer:

All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.

Although the state can spend billions of dollars trying to combat printed firearms it, like the billions spent on stopping people from growing cannabis in their homes, will fail to accomplish the intended goal. Once something can be produced by anybody with minimal knowledge controlling that thing becomes impossible.

I doubt this handgun will be very robust or accurate but considering Defense Distributed indicated its intention to build an entirely printed gun last month and we have a working model this month it’s pretty easy to see how quickly this technology is going to mature.

How Companies Protect Your Data from the State

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published its Who Has Your Back? 2013 report, which explains how many of the largest tech companies response to government requests for user data. What I find interesting is the company that best protects the data of its users is Twitter, the company that has a service focused primarily on publishing public information. Google does pretty well but their support for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) doesn’t leave me with a lot of confidence. Apple basically surrenders your data if the state merely whispers to them.

All in all, more than anything, this report justifies my decision to run my own services. My e-mail, calendaring, and web hosting are running on my own server. There is no way for the state to acquire my important data without me knowing about it (even if they steal my server they won’t have the key to decrypt the drive).

The Dwindling PC Market

It’s not secret that the personal computer (PC) market isn’t doing so well:

According to research firm IDC, things are not looking great for the PC industry. The firm says that PC sales saw “the steepest decline ever in a single quarter” this year (excluding tablets and notebooks with a removable screen or keyboard), down 13.9 percent to 76.3 million from the same quarter last year. If you’ll recall, thats more than double the loss the industry experienced in the fourth quarter of 2012, which saw a 6.4 percent decline. Back in January, IDC noted that sales declined year-to-year during the holiday season the first time in more than five years. Today’s newly reported results from IDC mark the fourth consecutive quarter that PC shipments have fallen.

Everybody in the industry is scrambling to find the culprit. Some analysts are blaming Windows 8 while others are blaming the popularity of mobile phones and tablets. What few analysts appear to be looking at is the bloody obvious. Most people I know have a computer that is several years old. Hell, I purchased my last desktop in August of 2006. While I did recently upgraded to a new MacBook Pro the only reason I did so was because my old laptop’s memory controller was failing and replacing that (which means replacing the motherboard) was expensive enough to make a new laptop seem like a smarter way to go. In fact I don’t know a single person who has recently upgraded their computer. Why? Because the current system they’re running is good enough.

Herein lies the secret to the declining PC market, most people who want a computer already have one and have little reason to upgrade until their system dies. Modern computers are powerful enough to serve the needs of most users. Who needs an Intel i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a blazing fast graphics card for reading e-mail and looking at Facebook? Nobody, that’s who. The PC market is saturated. People aren’t upgrading as frequently because they don’t need to. The people who are upgrading are usually replacing machines that are so old that they’ve finally broken or are too slow to perform some task or another.

Computers are tools and so long as a tool gets the job done in a satisfactory manner most people aren’t motivated to replace it with something newer. It’s as simple as that.

I Love the Future

The future we live in is great. In my pocket is a device that is able to give me access to the collected knowledge of mankind from almost anywhere in the world. My holster contains a firearm that has a frame made up mostly of plastic with sights that glow in the dark. My truck has oil in it that was developed entirely in a laboratory because dead dinosaurs aren’t thermally stable enough for my likings. The best part about the future though is that it’s constantly evolving. Within a few weeks, as Robb Allen pointed out, gun control will be a thing of the past:

After a panel on how copyright affects the 3D printing industry, he confirmed to Mashable what he had already hinted at before: that what was once unthinkable — a gun entirely made of 3D-printed parts — is actually right around the corner.

Will it work? Wilson thinks it will, and it won’t be just a one-shot wonder it will be able to fire a few shots before melting or breaking.

Wilson didn’t want to reveal too much about what could become the world’s first fully 3D-printed gun, saying he will make the actual announcement soon. He did reveal some details, however.

The gun will be made of 12 parts, all printed in ABS+, a very sturdy type of thermoplastic. There might be, perhaps, just one small metal part — a firing pin. While Wilson and his team are still designing the weapon, it won’t be a reproduction of an existing firearm, but instead a custom design.

Once an entire firearm can be manufactured on a 3D printer gun control will be dead. There is no way to stop the development of a tool when anybody can easily acquire the knowledge and means to create it. As I said, 3D printer technology will only become better and as it does the ability to create more complex devices, such as firearms, will become easier. At this point it’s merely a matter of time until the entire concept of gun control becomes nothing more than a pipe dream of tyrants.

Bitcoin Mining isn’t an Environmental Disaster

I don’t know what possesses people who don’t understand the advancement of technology to write about the advancement of technology. Bitcoin has been headlining many news sites recently. Most of the headlines discuss the recent crash but Mark Gimein had decided to write about another aspect of Bitcoin, the energy requirements of Bitcoin mining. According to Mr. Gimein Bitcoin mining is an environmental disaster:

Most people aren’t used to thinking in terms of the energy it takes to solve math problems; a few minutes of Excel may not take much energy. But make the problems complicated enough, and things change. “Mining” Bitcoins takes so much processor power that it’s often done with specialized computers optimized for rapid repetitive calculations. So how much power can that take?

Blockchain.info, a site that tracks data on Bitcoin mining, estimates that in just the last 24 hours, miners used about $147,000 of electricity just to run their hardware, assuming an average price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour (a little higher than the U.S. average, lower than some high cost areas like California). That, of course, is in addition to the money devoted to buying and building the mining rigs. The site estimates the profits from the day of mining at about $681,000, based on the current value of Bitcoins. So mining, at least for the moment, is a lucrative business.

The trade-off here is that as virtual value is created, real-world value is used up. About 982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact. That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider. If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically.

What Mr. Gimein fails to understand, or at least mention, is that Bitcoin is in its infancy and, like any technology in its infancy, is still running inefficiently. New technologies always start off rough around the edges and improve over time. A majority of Bitcoin mining was originally performed using computer processors. Today a majority of Bitcoin mining is done using graphics cards. Both processors and graphics cards, especially the powerful ones that were and are used by Bitcoin miners, can require a great deal of power. However the technology is improving.

First, let’s understand the the current trend in computing is power efficiency. More computing is being performed on mobile platforms, which need to run off of energy stored in batteries. A mobile phone, for example, doesn’t do much good if it can only run for an hour before the battery goes dead. This is why manufacturers are sinking huge amounts of research and development dollars into making more power efficient chips. Consumers always want more. They want more powerful devices and better battery life. Manufacturers want to make consumers happy because making consumers happy is what nets manufacturers a profit. So we are seeing more powerful processors and graphics processors that also consume less power.

The age of wearable computing is also beginning. Google has introduced Glass, the Pebble watch is selling very well, and there are rumors that Apple is planning to introduce a watch of its own. Wearable computers are even smaller than mobile phones, meaning there isn’t as much room for batteries. When wearable computers begin to take off the demand for even more power efficient chips will increase.

Today Bitcoin mining may take 982 megawatt hours a day. Tomorrow it will likely take less. Not just because of more power efficiency processors and graphics cards, but because current efforts are being focused on Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). ASICs are chips designed to perform a specific task. This contrasts with general purpose computing chips such as the processor and graphics card (which are more specialized than processors but still capable of performing other tasks) found in your computer. Because of this ASICs can be designed to use less power. The linked article linked to Butterfly Lab’s website. Butterfly Labs is purporting to build ASICs for Bitcoin mining (I say purported because I know several people who have ordered from Butterfly Labs but have so far received no hardware). ASCIMiner is another ASIC aimed at Bitcoin mining and is powered off of a standard USB port.

Mr. Gimein must believe that Bitcoin miners like sinking vast amounts of money into buying electricity. If that was the case then Bitcoin miners wouldn’t be looking for more efficient methods of mining. But Mr. Gimein’s apparent belief is incorrect, Bitcoin miners don’t like spending great deals of money on electricity, which is why money is being put into developing more efficient mining hardware. Doing more with less has been the trend in human technology. When somebody makes estimations based on current technology they are doomed to fail. One must also predict how technology will advance. The electricity required in Bitcoin mining will decrease as the technology matures.

More Thoughts on the Bitcoin Crash

It appears that Bitcoin hasn’t hit the floor yet. This news has left many members of the Bitcoin community scrounging for a scapegoat. Reading various Bitcoin communities (although the /r/bitcoin subreddit has provided me with the most entertainment) it seems the recent devaluation of Bitcoin was caused by automated trades performed by bots, fake libertarians (I guess you can only be a libertarian if you invest heavily in Bitcoin), and a secret cabal of central banks. While the last scapegoat sounds the most plausible of the three (those central banks are ruthless bastards) I think the community is ignoring the most likely cause: Bitcoin is a new technology.

Bitcoin really is the first notable crypto-currency. Although previous crypto-currenciies have existed none of them enjoyed the prominence that Bitcoin enjoys today. Most people alive today have lived their entire lives using state controlled fiat currencies. Bitcoin is the opposite of what we call money today. It’s a decentralized currency that cannot be inflated past a certain point (only 21 million Bitcoin will ever exist). The decentralized nature of the currency means no single entity can wield monopoly control over it. It is also the first free-market monetary system that most of us have experienced. In other words, Bitcoin is a revolutionary idea and, like all revolutionary ideas, nobody can predict how it will, or won’t, change things.

Speaking in software terms the concept of Bitcoin (not to be mistaken for the network, clients, or services) is in the alpha stage of development. People participating in the Bitcoin community should understand that they are testers and should expect to find copious amounts of bugs that need to be worked out. Is Bitcoin vulnerable to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks? If so, that must be corrected. Is Bitcoin too reliant on single points of failure? If so, that must be corrected. Is it too hard for the average person to acquire Bitcoin or use it in everyday transactions? If so, that must be correct. Growing pains are unavoidable when working with a technology that few, if any, understand the ramifications of.

Instead of playing the blame game I believe the Bitcoin community would be better served by noting the failure and thinking of methods to utilized the currency’s main features to overcome that failure. For instance, I’ve seen a lot of blamed aimed at Mt.Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, why was one exchange allowed to gain so much influence over the exchange rate of the currency? Having a single point of failure is always a bad idea. Trusted members of the Bitcoin community should start developing more exchanges. More Bitcoin exchanges would mean more resiliency as it would be difficult for attackers to bring down or manipulate all of them simultaneously. Members of the Bitcoin network should put more work into developing easy methods for the average person to buy Bitcoin. In today’s world people like the convenience of credit cards. Credit cards, due to the ability of a purchaser to perform a charge back and the inability to recover sold Bitcoin, don’t work well for purchasing Bitcoin so some other convenient method must be created. The idea of Bitcoin Automated Teller Machines (ATM) is a good start, but they need to be located in high traffic areas such as grocery stores and gas stations. Until people can acquire Bitcoin as easily as they can buy things with their credit cards they won’t adopt the currency.

Another feature that should be leveraged more is the mostly anonymous nature of the currency. I’ve seen a lot of comments from Bitcoin advocates trying to refute the claim that Bitcoin is most heavily used in the drug trade. Stop that. Embrace it! Expound the fact that Bitcoin is used by drug dealers and purchasers because transactions cannot easily be tied to physical individuals. As the world governments continue to wring more and more money out of their people those people are going to look for a place to hide their wealth. A currency that is outside of the state’s control, can be used to store wealth in a mostly anonymous fashion, and allows individuals to perform transactions in a manner that that state can’t record for taxing or prosecution purposes should be huge and will be necessary as the state’s rate of expropriation increases. By denying that Bitcoin is used for “black” market purchases members of the Bitcoin community are downplaying its most valuable feature. Don’t try to control its image, let its image develop freely.

As an agorist and a crypto-anarchist I want to see Bitcoin succeed. In order to succeed I believe the Bitcoin community needs to understand that Bitcoin is a revolutionary idea, will have growing pains, and must be rid of state dogmas against the “black” market. Trying to shoehorn it into mainstream monetary and political principles will relegate it to always being an interesting idea that never gets widely adopted.

The Great Bitcoin Crash

Yesterday my prediction based on the utmost scientific research came true. Bitcoin, which has seen a remarkable increase in value compared to dollars, began to crash. Supposedly the cause of this crash was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack:

We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what happened. But another San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill is saying that the crypto-currency is falling because of apparent distributed denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox and Bitstamp. A denial of service attack happens when an attacker overwhelms a target with external requests, so that it can’t honor regular requests from legitimate users.

All commodities are vulnerable to some amount of manipulation and Bitcoin is no different. The sudden drop in value demonstrates a potential exploit that can be used to make a great deal of money off of Bitcoin. Let’s hypothesize that the DDoS attack was planned some months back. Planning to execute a DDoS attack against several prominent Bitcoin trading sites individuals decided to first buy a large number of Bitcoin as the then current price and then move to manipulate the price by bringing the currency to the media’s attention. After generating a good deal of interest those same individuals begin to trade some Bitcoin for larger amounts of dollars, which raises the high point trade value. Seeing an increase in the high point trade value people uninvolved with the plan begin trading at higher prices. Eventually the system becomes a sort of Ouroboros, a self-feeding cycle that causes the price of Bitcoin to continuously rise. Once the value of Bitcoin has been manipulated high enough the manipulators sell off all of their Bitcoin and begin their DDoS attack. With the most prominent Bitcoin trading sites down the perceived value of Bitcoin tumbles along with it. After that the cycle can begin again. Buy low, manipulate the price higher, instigate a DDoS attack to drop the price, buy low, and so on.

The scenario I just explained is hypothetical, I’m not implying that it is fact. But the scenario is a possibility.

It will be interesting to see what the price of Bitcoin does over the next several days. Will is drop in price? Will it return to the pre-DDoS high? Will it climb even higher?

Nothing is Free

With the demise of Google Reader those of us who depend on Really Simple Syndication (RSS) for collecting and reading news articles have been scrambling to find a replacement. A couple of prospective replacements that have take on Google Reader refugees are Feedly and Feever. My primary concern in finding a replacement has been compatibility with Reeder, which I use as my RSS client on my iPhone, iPad, and Macs (Yeah, I’m a bit of an Apple whore, want to make something of it?). Via Reeder’s Twitter account I found out that the developer was planning to include support for Feedbin. When I looked into Feedbin the thing that immediately caught my attention was the subscription fee, in order to use Feedbin you need to either pay $2.00 a month or $20.00 a year. The part of me that has become accustomed to free online services was quickly taken aback. Would I be forced to pay a monthly or yearly fee just to use my preferred RSS client? Why should I pay money to use something that’s free?

Most of us use online services and most of us pay nothing for them. My reaction to seeing that Feedbin charges a monthly fee is mirrored by other Reeder users and that really woke me up to something I seldom think about: we denizens of the Internet have become so accustomed to free services that we become upset when somebody has the audacity to charge money for an online service. We often fail to remember that there are no free lunches. Providing an online service isn’t a costless endeavor. Servers, electricity, Internet connectivity, development and maintenance time, and providing enough infrastructure for users are all costs associated with providing an online service. This blog, if anything, is a loss for me. I don’t count the costs of the server and electricity when calculating the costs of running this blog because that server is providing other services I use (Virtual Private Network (VPN), e-mail, CalDAV, etc.). But it does costs me time in writing blog posts and maintaining the website. Since I enjoy writing and server maintenance (to a point) neither of these are a higher cost than the blog is worth. However, if I was offering a service with a decent number of subscribers, I would need to charge money in order to make providing the service at least break even.

When an service provider offer its “product” free of charge it is almost always recouping costs elsewhere. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and most of the other major online service providers recoup their costs by selling data. Specifically your data. When dealing with these service providers you must think of yourself as the product and the entities buying your data as the customers. If the collected data isn’t purchased by the customers it isn’t useful to the service provider and will likely be discarded. I’m sure Google dropped Reader because its customers weren’t interested in the data collected by the service. I understand that and don’t hold it against Google, they’re in business to make money and there’s no point for Google to maintain a service that isn’t making a profit.

For some time I’ve become less accepting of being a product for Google. Part of this stems from my innate desire to control my data. If my data is hosted on Google’s servers I have no control over it. There is no way for me to know if that data will be preserved or who will be given access to my data (we know the United States government periodically demands user data from Google). I do know that Google is selling my data to its customers. The only way a service provider has any motivation to keep its user data private is if its users are also its customers.

The other method for a service provider to monetize its services is to charge money for its services or provide another product that ties into its services. Apple chooses the latter. iCloud isn’t provided free of charge out of the goodness of Apple’s heart, it’s provided free of charge (at least for the first 5GB of storage) because it’s a feature that allows Apple to sell iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Feedbin has chosen the former. Instead of offering a free service and monetizing user data the people behind Feedbin are asking users to pay a monthly or yearly free. There are two advantages for users under this model: as a user you are also a customer and Feedbin has motivation to keep your information private and Feedbin is more apt to keep the RSS service running since its business model relies on it.

While my initial response to Feedbin was one of distaste I’m beginning to realize it may be a better model for me. I want three things: an RSS service that works with Reeder, motivation for my RSS service provider to keep my information to itself, and an RSS service that won’t suddenly disappear overnight. Being a customer instead of a product will takes care of desires two and three.

Since the costs of providing an online service are generally hidden from users it’s often difficult for a service provider to charge money. This is why most service providers monetize user data. Trying to charge users money for a service is usually met with outrage. Unfortunately there are no free lunches. If you don’t pay money directly you’re going to pay by being a product. Since I’m concerned with control over my data I would prefer to be a customer. Due to this services that directly charge me money instead of monetizing my data are appealing. For most people, those who think little about their data, services that monetize their data are likely more appealing. Either way it would do well if denizens of the Internet stopped responding in outrage when a service provider asks for money from its users. Scarcity is the ultimate law of economics and ensures nothing is every entirely free.