Tag: Technology

Enable Two Factor Authentication Where Available

This type of news is why I encourage people to enable two-factor authentication on whatever accounts they have that support it:

The massive data breach was a result of keylogging software maliciously installed on an untold number of computers around the world, researchers at cybersecurity firm Trustwave said. The virus was capturing log-in credentials for key websites over the past month and sending those usernames and passwords to a server controlled by the hackers.

All in all some 318,000 Facebook, 70,000 GMail, and 22,000 Twitter passwords were part of the heist. All three of these sites allow users to enable one time passwords for two-factor authentication. Facebook and GMail both use Google Authenticator, which ties to an application on your phone. The application has a token that generates a new six digit password every 30 seconds. When you log into either of these sites you will be asked to enter the current six digit password before you’re allowed access to your account. What makes such a system useful is that you need access to your phone in order to log in, just having the password alone won’t grant access. Twitter uses it’s own system that ties to the Twitter smartphone app. When you attempt to log into your Twitter account a notification is sent to your phone and you have to authorize the log in from there. Once again it requires your phone in addition to your password to successfully log in.

It’s not always clear when your password has been compromised. Hackers have gained access to use password from website databases before. When such breaches are discovered most websites reset all their users’ passwords. But until the breach is discovered anybody with the list of passwords can log into the accounts that appear in that list, unless those users have enabled two-factor authentication.

Writing Circuits

File this under awesome geeky shit:

Good-bye, breadboard. Scientists at the University of Illinois have come up with a conductive, water-based ink that lets you draw working circuits on an ordinary piece of paper. They’ve packaged the product into a rollerball pen, called Circuit Scribe, and if you want to be one of the first to get hold of one, the team is crowdfunding the project on Kickstarter right now.

A pen that can draw working circuit pathways? That’s pretty damn cool. In fact I can think of several practical jokes involving conductive ink. On a less nefarious note, these things would have been a ton of fun in my college electronic classes.

WristCoin

You’re going to notice a complete lack of new material here today. This is due to the fact that I spent last night putting the final touches on the initial design of an application I’m writing. A couple of weeks ago I purchased a Pebble wristwatch. If you haven’t heard of it it’s a wristwatch that connects to your smartphone via low powered Bluetooth and presents notifications in a manner that doesn’t involve digging your phone out. My interest in the device stems from the fact that it’s programmable.

For my first program on the watch I’ve decided to write a Bitcoin price checker. Since I’m horrible with names I’ve dubbed the application WristCoin. Obviously the application is still in the pre-alpha stage, which means it’s riddled with bugs and isn’t feature complete. But I’ve published the source code on GitHub if anybody is interested in following my progress.

WristCoin requires both the 2.0 beta Pebble firmware and the 2.0 beta Pebble smartphone application. In its current state WristCoin grabs prices off of Bitstamp and displays the last price on the Pebble. I will be adding more exchanges in the near future and the ability to bring up more detailed pricing information for each exchange. Progress on the application will heavily depend on my free time but it’s small and shouldn’t take a great deal of time.

The application, as you can guess based on my views regarding intellectual property, is public domain so you can do with it whatever you wish.

3D Printed Firearms and the Undetectable Firearms Act

Talk about a panty wadding combination of events. Firearms that can be printed on 3D printers are becoming more advanced and the Undetectable Firearms Act is set to expire on December 9th of this year. That can only mean one thing. Chuck Schumer is going to step up to the plate and attempt to perform the impossible act of prohibiting the advancement of technology:

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — As the technology to print 3-D firearms advances, a federal law that banned the undetectable guns is about to expire.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer says he’s seeking an extension of the law before it expires Dec. 9.

He said the technology of so-called 3-D printing has advanced to the point anyone with $1,000 and an Internet connection can access the plastic parts that can be fitted into a gun. Those firearms can’t be detected by metal detectors or X-ray machines.

I don’t think Schumer realizes how incredibly stupid he sounds at the moment. He states, truthfully, that firearms that are undetectable by metal detectors and X-ray machines can be created on 3D printers. Then he claims that the Undetectable Firearms Act must be renewed to prevent these firearms from becoming available. Of course the law hasn’t expired yet and the plastic firearms are already being created. In other words, the Undetectable Firearms Act is pointless. People are already creating firearms that cannot be detected by metal detectors or X-ray machines even though the law hasn’t expired yet. Renewing the law is a moot point.

To borrow a famous Taoist saying, no one rules if no one obeys. The advancement of technology is leaving the old hierarchy in the dust. We are outpacing their ability to control us. While people like Schumer are arguing for a need to extend the Undetectable Firearms Act people are already creating firearms that violate that act. To make matters better, the people creating the blueprints for these unlawful firearms can remain anonymous. Creating one of these firearms carries little risk since it can be done by a single individual from the comfort of his or her own home. Without a target to attack the state cannot enforce its decrees. Since the threat of state violence is beginning to become less of an issue fewer people are seeing a need to obey, which means the state’s power is slowly crumbling.

Second 3D Printed Metal Gun Unveiled

Solid Concepts, the company that brought us the first 3D printed firearm made out of metal, have unveiled their second 3D printed metal gun:

Solid Concepts announces the successful creation of the world’s second 3D printed metal gun. Our second iteration is composed entirely of Inconel 625, a material that is stronger than Stainless Steel (and a bit heavier) save for the springs which were not 3D Printed. The gun is once again composed of thirty-four 3D Printed components. Our second gun will be stress relieved and post processing will be by hand once again.

Inconel 625 is a harder, stronger alloy than 17-4 Stainless Steel. We modified the geometry for this second iteration to incorporate different tolerances in order to make hand finishing sufficiently easier. With our first prototype, we had to hand sand to perfect a few tolerances, but our tweaks to the design should remove the need for such sanding. Our first gun is now up to 700+ rounds.

Once again I feel that it’s necessary to stress two facts. First, 3D printers capable of working with metal are extremely expensive. Second, as the technology of printing with metals advances it will also become cheaper. It is only a matter of time until 3D printers capable of working with metals become affordable to small groups of individuals. Gun control, never an attainable goal anyways, is now all be entirely dead. Once small groups of people can afford 3D printers capable of working with metals gun control will be entirely dead.

As the technology of 3D printers advance gun control advocates will almost certainly resort to attempted censorship. But that battle is already lost. The Internet was designed as a mechanism to share information. It’s very good at that task. What it isn’t good at is restricting the flow of information. Any attempt to censor information on the Internet is a lost cause from the word go. In other words, gun control cannot succeed because in this day and age the only tool in its arsenal, controlling access to firearms, is a pipe dream.

Healthcare.gov: Defenders of Internet Freedom Need Not Apply

Healthcare.gov has turned out to be quite a fiasco. During the first days of operation I tried to access the site and always received a 403 (unauthorized access) error. I assumed this error was being kicked out because of the site’s general instability. As it turns out, my Internet Protocol (IP) address has been added to Healthcare.gov’s list of banned IP addresses. The reason for this was made apparent on the tor-talk mailing list:

I’ve been running a Tor Relay (not an exit node) from my home for quite a while now, and up to this point have not encountered any issues accessing any sites. However, today I attempted to access https://www.healthcare.gov, and received a HTTP 403 response and a pretty standard 403 message. To test my hypothesis, I also tried accessing the site via the Tor network — and received the same message. In the meanwhile, a friend who does not operate a Tor relay was able to access the site. Could anyone else with a public relay confirm this issue — and if confirmed, would someone from the Tor Project be kind enough to contact the appropriate parties and explain why blocking Tor relays is a silly thing? I’d do it myself… but alas, I cannot reach the site to see who the appropriate parties would be 🙂
Thank you.

In February I setup a Tor relay on a Raspberry Pi, which has been running continuously ever since. The operators of Healthcare.gov have decided to ban any IP address operating a Tor relay, whether it is an exit or non-exit relay, from accessing the site.

It’s not uncommon for websites to block IP addresses operating Tor exit relay. Malicious individuals wanting to attack a site anonymously can and have used the Tor network. But I’m unaware of any website that has blocked IP addresses operating non-exit relays. There’s no reason for doing so since anonymized Tor traffic never exits from a non-exit relay. The only function non-exit relays have is to forward traffic from one node in the Tor network to another node.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), and by extension Healthcare.gov, are as much political messages as they are laws. By blocking every IP address that is operating a Tor relay the message is effectively this: defenders of Internet freedom need not apply for health insurance. In all likelihood this decision, like most of the decisions revolving around Healthcare.gov, is the result of incompetence, not outright malice. But I also believe this problem is unlikely to be addressed since the current government (from Congress to the presidency to the appointed bureaucrats) has demonstrated an opposition to Internet anonymity.

The Beginning of the End for Pharmaceutical Monopolies

My love of 3D printer technology expands far beyond the firearms field. Being able to build complex things in the comfort of our own homes stands to upset the balance of power in many markets. One of the most valuable aspects of 3D printers is their ability to put an end to many monopolistic practices. If you’re able to download designs for an item and print it in your own home then patents become irrelevant, which is why this story about 3D printers capable of making drugs interests me:

He shows me the printer, a nondescript version of the £1,200 3D printer used in the Fab@Home project, which aims to bring self-fabrication to the masses. After a bit of trial and error, Cronin’s team discovered that it could use a bathroom sealant as a material to print reaction chambers of precisely specified dimensions, connected with tubes of different lengths and diameters. After the bespoke miniature lab had set hard, the printer could then inject the system reactants, or “chemical inks”, to create sequenced reactions.

The “inks” would be simple reagents, from which more complex molecules are formed. “If I was being facetious I would say that to find your inks you would go to the periodic table: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on,” Cronin says, “but obviously you can’t handle all those substances very well, so it would have to be a bit more complex than that. If you were looking to make a sugar, for example, you would start with your set of base sugars and mix them together. When we make complex molecules in the traditional way with test tubes and flasks, we start with a smaller number of simpler molecules.” As he points out, nearly all drugs are made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as readily available agents such as vegetable oils and paraffin. “With a printer it should be possible that with a relatively small number of inks you can make any organic molecule,” he says.

The real beauty of Cronin’s prototype system, however, is that it allows the printer not only to control the sequences and exact calibration of inks, but also to shape, from a tested blueprint, the environment in which those reactions take place. The scale and architecture of the miniature printed “lab” could be pre-programmed into software and downloaded for use with a standard set of inks. In this way, not only the combinations of reactants but also the ratios and speed at which they combine could be ingrained into the system, simply by changing the size of reaction chambers and their relation with one another; Cronin calls this “reactionware” or, because it depends on a conceptualised sequence of flow and reorientation in a 3D space, “Rubik’s Cube chemistry”.

Large pharmaceutical companies enjoy an advantage in the medical field. They can patent chemical compounds and effectively enjoy a monopoly on producing that compound for two decades. During that two decade period the consequences of monopolies afflict everybody who wants or needs that drug. Namely the pharmaceutical company enjoys the ability to jack the price up to whatever it desires since no competition is allowed to enter the market until the patent expires. 3D printers capable of producing drugs could overcome this issue. Suddenly people capable of reverse engineering the drug (say, by looking up the patent and going from there) could post blueprints online for all to download.

Another potential for these printers is the ability to drastically lower the cost of developing new drugs. Individuals with the proper background could develop new drugs on their person computers and perform tests by printing the new drugs. The overall costs would likely drop considerably, which would almost certainly cause a major leap in innovation.

3D Printed Metal Gun

Once again zerg539 was kind enough to forward some excellent information to me. Most of are aware of efforts to produce firearms using 3D printers. The biggest limitation so far has been materials. Plastic isn’t the best material to build an entire firearm out of. Nobody has reported printing a firearm with one of those fancy, and every expensive, metal printers until today:

Austin, TX – Solid Concepts, one of the world leaders in 3D Printing services, has manufactured the world’s first 3D Printed Metal Gun using a laser sintering process and powdered metals. The gun, a 1911 classic design, functions beautifully and has already handled 50 rounds of successful firing. It is composed of 33 17-4 Stainless Steel and Inconel 625 components, and decked with a Selective Laser Sintered (SLS) carbon-fiber filled nylon hand grip. The successful production and functionality of the 1911 3D Printed metal gun proves the viability of 3D Printing for commercial applications.

And it works quite well:

As you can guess, some people are unhappy about this. I think advocates of gun control realize their movement’s days are numbered. 3D printers are only going to become more affordable and widespread. It’s possible, and I would argue likely, that a majority of homes in this country (and others) will eventually have some kind of fabrication unit. These fabrication units will start off as simple 3D printers capable of working with plastics but will eventually become sophisticated units capable of working with various materials, including metals. Once that happens the entire concept of gun control will be dead. Just as the Internet has effectively killed censorship, 3D printers will eventually kill prohibitions of physical objects. Heck, as the prices of 3D printers capable of working with metals come down they will eventually reach a point where a handful of individuals will be able to pool their resources and buy them.

Decentralized systems are notoriously hard to shutdown, which is why I advocate setting up decentralized firearm manufacturing groups. Having the ability to manufacture firearms outside of the state’s control would do a lot to tip the balance of power from the state back to the people.

Call It Cynicism But I’m Calling Bullshit

Several sites are reporting about a tool aimed at performing denial of service attacks against Healthcare.gov:

Researchers have uncovered software available on the Internet designed to overload the struggling Healthcare.gov website with more traffic than it can handle.

“ObamaCare is an affront to the Constitutional rights of the people,” a screenshot from the tool, which was acquired by researchers at Arbor Networks, declares. “We HAVE the right to CIVIL disobedience!”

My gut tells me that this is bullshit. In fact, being the cynical person I am, I wouldn’t be surprised if this tool was written by somebody involved in the development of Healthcare.gov. They’re on the hot seat at the moment and probably trying to find anything to blame besides themselves. Developing and releasing a tool aimed at performing a denial of service attack against Healthcare.gov would give the developers of the website something to blame.

I do have some reason to believe this tool wasn’t developed by opponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). I have connections to numerous communities including groups that oppose the ACA. If this tool was really written as an act of civil disobedience against the ACA I would thinking the developers would want as many people to download it as possible. That would mean spreading the word to groups that oppose the ACA. I can’t find any mention of this tool in any of those groups.

So, for the time being, I’m calling bullshit on this.

Colossal Disasters

I don’t know people appreciate the sheer size of the failure that is the Affordable Care Act (ACA) online marketplace. The website cost somewhere between $170 million and $292 million and the only thing the government has to show for it is proof that simply throwing money at a development team doesn’t result in a quality product. On the website’s first day there were only six people able to sign up for an ACA insurance plan:

Just six people were able to successfully enroll in health insurance through Healthcare.gov, the government’s online marketplace, during the first 24 hours it was live. Just 242 people were able to enroll on the second day.

That’s according to new documents released by the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating the website’s bumpy launch. Slow loading times, bugs, and errors prevented an unknown number of Americans from shopping for health insurance. The website had 4.7 million visits in the first 24 hours, the administration says.

Only six people out of 4.7 million visitors were able to sign up. That’s an approximate success rate of 0.0001 percent. From a purely technical standpoint this kind of failure is hard to quantify as far as scale. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a website should get you sometime like Google or Amazon, both of which provide almost 24/7 up time while servicing more customer in a day than Healthcare.gov is likely to see in its lifetime.

Were Healthcare.gov a private sector website this failure would have likely resulted in a flurry of firings and lawsuits. But since it’s a government website the only thing we’re going to see is even more money dumped into it.