Tag: Geek Stuff

Fun With Cell Phone Carriers

In the United States we have four cell phone providers to choose from; Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. OK, there are a few other smaller games in town but being able to sign up for them is generally region dependent and in most cases you’re stuck with one of the big four. If you ask four different people what carrier is the best you’re likely to get four different answers. This is because each service provider has ups and downs. As I’m heading out of the country for the first time in my life I decided to check what my options were for communications.

Currently I have a line with Sprint and another line with AT&T. Sprint, being a CMDA carrier, has almost no coverage outside of the country. Thankfully AT&T is a GSM carrier so I can actually use my phone outside the country. For those planning on leaving the country and planning to use their AT&T (or T-Mobile) phone let me give you some advice: get a roaming voice, data, and text plan. The rate for international roaming is fucking insane without these packages so put them on before you head out. Even with the international roaming packages the prices are still insane but not as insane. Of course if you’re going to be out of the country for some time, or frequently visit a county, I’d advise you to get an unlocked phone and a SIM card in your destination country from one of that region’s local carriers (as I’m only going to be out of the country for a few days this didn’t make sense for me).

Many people outright hate AT&T and previously Sprint was held with with absolute lowest regards. Funny enough I’ve had great service with both so I can’t really complain. Not fitting the usual mold of customers who are dissatisfied with their carriers I thought it would be fun to write up my guide of United States wireless carrier (also I needed a canned post since I’m not around to post material, bear with me).

Verizon: Verizon currently enjoys the position of most beloved carrier in the United States (according to anecdotal evidence obtained by me). There are a lot of reasons for this including their great coverage, established LTE network, and vast selection of phones. On the other hand they are a CDMA carrier meaning your phone is unlikely to work outside of the United States and when you are in the United States the cost of your service is bloody high. Verizon also charges you based on the amount of data you use meaning those using 5GB are going to be paying more than those who use 2GB.

AT&T: Your soul will get you service but they also demand periodic blood sacrifices to maintain that service. What I’m trying to say is that AT&T, like Verizon, is expensive and the cost of data is based on use. As a small data user (I average 200MB a month) this hasn’t harmed me but I know people who like to stream Netflix to their phone and those people are going to feel the pain on AT&T. Being a GSM provider you can actually use your phone outside of the United States… for a price. AT&T also enjoys a very good selection of phones, namely because it is a GSM network and thus phones made for other countries can function.

Sprint: Minus the wide coverage Sprint is very similar to Verizon for a much lesser price. Sprint subscribers can also roam on Verizon’s network when Sprint coverage isn’t available, although you’ll get your line cancelled if you use it on Verizon’s network too much. Once again you’ll be on a CDMA network meaning your phone is unlikely to work if you leave the country but considering the fact that you get unlimited data for a fair price the advantages can outweigh the negatives quickly for most living in this country. Sprint’s phone selection was pretty pitiful but has been greatly improving.

T-Mobile: The smallest carrier of the four but also the one with the cheapest overall plans. While T-Mobile doesn’t charge you based on the mount of data you use they start throttling you when you’ve used more than 5GB. This is a good middle ground between Verizon and AT&T’s method and Sprint’s. Once again you’re dealing with a GSM carrier so you can use your phones outside of the United States… for a price. Unfortunately T-Mobile and AT&T use different bands for their 3G coverage meaning phones made for AT&T will not function nominally on T-Mobile and vise versa. T-Mobile customers can roam on AT&T’s network but without the benefit of 3G data speeds. T-Mobile’s selection of phones is also great being a GSM provider and all.

I didn’t mention coverage simply because that’s entirely region dependent. In the Twin Cities region I have great AT&T and Sprint coverage but in Southeastern Minnesota, where I’m originally from, I have barely any Sprint coverage and no AT&T coverage. Everybody I’ve talked to seems to have a similar experience where one carrier enjoys exceedingly good coverage in their area while others experience little or no coverage at all. This is something you will have to research before signing up for a service provider.

We’ll Just Build Our Own Internet

While various world governments have been conspiring to censor the Internet groups of hackers have been hard at work finding mechanisms to bypass proposed censorship methods. Ultimately there is a limitation of what can be done because governments can force internet providers to comply with any demand so the only effective option is to setup an alternate Internet. Members of the Chaos Communications Congress have made an interesting proposal involved low-cost satellites:

The new plan calls for sending up home-made satellites into space as part of a Hackerspace Global Grid. The project includes low-cost ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.

Anti-censorship activist Nick Farr, bothered by the world’s threats in blocking the free flow of information, started campaigning for contributions to the Grid earlier this year.

Launching communications satellites has been attempted in the past by some amateur groups but low-budget projects have not easily managed the task of tracking the devices.

According to reports, a few small satellites have gone into orbit but usually for brief periods only. Initiatives like space missions have required the big pockets of large public agencies and private companies, but Farr hopes his plan can work.

Farr and colleagues envision a grid of low-cost ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites. They are working with Constellation, which is a German aerospace research initiative. The initiative interlinks student projects.

Attempts to setup an alternative Internet have been proposed but none have succeeded. The main Achilles’ heel has been the hardware side of things. Unless an entirely independent architecture is setup government agencies still have control of the “kill switch” (that is the central points of control such as internet providers, root domain name system servers, etc.). The obvious solution involves wireless of some sort simply because running physical cable is very expensive and it’s unlikely independent entities will be able to get right of way agreements to perform such a task. While satellite communication has a high lag time it’s far better than nothing. You may not be able to play Call of Duty 11 on a satellite linkup but you can certainly communicate with other people in the world.

Mexican Drug Cartels Built Their Own National Radio System

People often complain about the lack of competition in the cellular phone market. For the most part there are only four players; T-Mobiles, Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon. Opponents of capitalism claim this is an inevitable result of capitalism when in truth it’s an inevitable result of government involvement in the free market. New cell phone providers aren’t popping up left and right because licensing spectrum from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is fucking expensive. If it wasn’t for the massive cost of licensing spectrum from the FCC the cost of setting up a national radio system would be so cheap a drug cartel could do it:

When convoys of soldiers or federal police move through the scrubland of northern Mexico, the Zetas drug cartel knows they are coming.

The alert goes out from a taxi driver or a street vendor, equipped with a high-end handheld radio and paid to work as a lookout known as a “halcon,” or hawk.

The radio signal travels deep into the arid countryside, hours by foot from the nearest road. There, the 8-foot-tall (2-meter-tall) dark-green branches of the rockrose bush conceal a radio tower painted to match. A cable buried in the dirt draws power from a solar panel. A signal-boosting repeater relays the message along a network of powerful antennas and other repeaters that stretch hundreds of miles (kilometers) across Mexico, a shadow communications system allowing the cartel to coordinate drug deliveries, kidnapping, extortion and other crimes with the immediacy and precision of a modern military or law-enforcement agency.

With the ever increasing stranglehold our government is establishing over the Internet there may be a day when we have to establish a new network outside of the government’s control. When that day comes we’ll likely have to take a lesson from the Mexican drug cartels in setting up a wireless communication system that is both cheap to create and maintain but robust enough to cover a large portion of the population. It’s also interesting to watch the ingenuity of criminal endeavors. Since criminals aren’t bound by the letter of law they can innovate in ways businesses can not, and many of these innovations don’t involve violence but technological solutions to avoiding government forces.

Vulnerability Found in Wi-Fi Protected Setup

I apologize for being a little late with this news but I’m on vacation, what can you really ask from me? Anyways a brute force vulnerability was discovered in Wi-Fi Protect Setup (WPA):

A few weeks ago I decided to take a look at the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) technology. I noticed a few really bad design decisions which enable an efficient brute force attack, thus effectively breaking the security of pretty much all WPS-enabled Wi-Fi routers. As all of the more recent router models come with WPS enabled by default, this affects millions of devices worldwide.

Ouch, glad I never used WPS to setup the security on my wireless network. Technical details about the vulnerability can be found in this writeup [PDF].

My Dreams of a Write Mountable Dosimeter are In Sight

Earlier this year I blogged about a wristwatch that contains a built-in dosimeter. I’ve been trying to find one of these but so far every company that sells them requires you either make a bulk purchase or they only sell to scientific institutions.

Browsing through Marathon’s website I came across a familiar face, a rebranded PM1208M. Technically it looks to be an upgraded version (the one on Marathon’s website is called the GammaMaster II whereas the one I linked to earlier this year was merely the GammaMaster) but either way I threw myself on the notification list and hope to see a message in my inbox soon telling me the watch is available to order.

What am I going to do with it you ask? Hell if I know, it’ll basically be a conversation piece. The bottom line is I have a love of cramming gizmos into wristwatches and this device does that exceptionally well.

One Major Kindle Headache

While I absolutely love the Kindle there is one improvement I would like to see, a way of copy and pasting a WPA key. I’m a little over the top when it comes to computer security so you know I’m one of those weirdos who uses a 63-character gibberish string for my WPA key. Needless to say this is a huge pain in the ass to enter when I want to attach my Kindle to my wireless network. With my iPhone and iPad I can simply e-mail the key to myself (as I run my own e-mail server the e-mail goes from my system to my system and thus never leaves my control), copy the key from the e-mail, and paste it in the wireless configuration screen on the device.

I wish Amazon would put in an easy workaround such as letting the user drop a plain text file containing their key in the root directory of the device. Anything would be better than having to enter in 63-characters of gibberish. With all of that said it is much easier to type in the key with the new touch screen Kindle than it was with the old Kindles.

Besides that the Kindle Touch is pretty awesome. I’ll eventually get a full review of the device up that better expresses my thoughts.

A Trojan that Generates Bitcoins

It was bound to happen eventually but a trojan is now circulating for OS X that syphons a victims computing power and uses it to mine Bitcoins:

“This malware is complex, and performs many operations,” security researchers from Mac antivirus vendor Intego warned. “It is a combination of several types of malware: It is a Trojan horse, since it is hidden inside other applications; it is a backdoor, as it opens ports and can accept commands from command and control servers; it is a stealer, as it steals data and Bitcoin virtual money; and it is a spyware, as it sends personal data to remote servers,” they explained.

The Bitcoin mining program that DevilRobber installs on infected computers is called DiabloMiner and is a legitimate Java-based application used in the virtual currency’s production.

The one flaw in this trojan (besides requiring manual intervention by a user to get installed) is using a Java-based application to perform Bitcoin mining. Mac OS 10.7 doesn’t include Java by default and the user must manually install it if they want to run Java applications. While a prompt will appear asking the user if they want to install Java when they try to use a Java applet those are fairly uncommon at this point so the chances of a user running 10.7 having Java installed is actually pretty low.

Still the application appears to also seek out and steal Bitcoin wallets. I’m rather shocked that we didn’t see this kind of trojan come to the attention of network security sites before now. When I first looked into Bitcoin one of the first ideas that popped into my malicious thought filled head was how easy it would be to use a massive botnet to mine a great number of Bitcoins.

The First Electric Car I’d Consider Buying

While I see a great potential in electric cars from a performance standpoint I don’t give two shits about them from an environmental standpoint (thanks to you fucking enviro-nazis, if it weren’t for you I’d have no issue with the environment). I also have a soft spot for one of the most famous pieces of crap that has ever been released, the DeLorean DMC-12. Well the DeLorean Motor Company has unveiled a fully electric prototype of the DMC-12 and I really want one.

Of course I’ll make sure to recharge it with a big soot spewing coal power plant just to piss the enviro-nazis off. Seriously, if you assholes weren’t in my face constantly telling me how to live I’d have no issue driving a “green” automobile. Thanks to you my current vehicle is a Ford Ranger and my next one will likely be a Ford F-150.

My First Apple Computer

I guess being in the technology field I should have expected the immense amount of news regarding Steve Jobs’s death to flood every channel of communications I have available to me. This news has actually interrupted my process of finding, reading, and writing about various articles of interest so you’re dealing with less than optimal posts today. In luie of having normal A Geek With Guns content to post I’m going to perpetuate a meme that’s been going around, I’m going to talk about my first Apple computer.

While others can talk about their experiences with an early Apple II or one of the first Macintoshes, I only jumped on the Apple ship after they shipped OS X 10.4. Before that I really had no use for Apple computers as I found their operating system lacking and the available software sparse. When 10.4 shipped I finally believed the operating system to be a competent and fully featured UNIX system and I had been looking for a good laptop running some flavor of UNIX for some time by then. At the time Linux was still unusable as far as I was concerned for laptops (suspend never worked correctly, battery life was usually half of what you could get in Windows, driver support for various Wi-Fi cards was non-existent, etc.).

Needless to say I ended up buying a PowerBook G4. My first PowerBook was one of the last in the line (model identifier was a PowerBook5,6) and came equipped with a measly 1.67GHz processor and an 80GB hard drive. The bloody thing ran though and gave me few headaches. I used it for most of my school work and eventually it filled the role of everything except gaming (which I used to do far more of when I was young). While I still own the machine it really is of little use considering how woefully underpowered it is. Still, it’s fun to bring it out of storage once in a while and power it up for nostalgia sake.

Still, from that humble laptop I eventually purchased the first model Mac Pro to replace my aging desktop. While I spent most of my life vehemently hating Apple computers the quality of their new operating system and hardware won me over. Now most of my machines are Apple manufactured and I can say they have given me far fewer headaches than previous machines I have owned. Hell Apple won me over in the phone market even though they perform practices that I find detestable (yet their phones do what I need which is what is really important in my opinion).

Odd OS X Lion Server Bug

Since I was beating my head against the wall for several hours last night trying to figure this out I’m going to give a piece of advice to everybody working with OS X Lion Server in a virtual environment.

You can not set your virtual server to be an Open Directory Master unless there are at least two CPUs attached to the virtual machine. No errors indicating as such will be given, apparently you’re just supposed to know this intuitively. It’s a very strange bug and thankfully somebody figured it out.