Category: Computer

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot????

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The NASDAQ exchange shut down for 3 hours today:

The United States stock market showed again on Thursday that it remained vulnerable to technological breakdowns even as regulators and market operators work to keep up with trading that is increasingly electronic and driven by speed.

The latest trouble shut down trading on the Nasdaq market and its more than 3,000 stocks — including some of the most popular among investors, like Apple and Google — for more than three hours Thursday afternoon.

The disruption on the nation’s second-largest stock market, after the New York Stock Exchange, reverberated up and down Wall Street, affecting other markets as investors cautiously stepped back. Brokers scrambling to trade elsewhere discovered that they could not complete trades while in the dark about prices on Nasdaq.

“It is everybody — nobody can trade,” Manoj Narang, the chief executive of Tradeworx, said during the afternoon. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Some expressed relief that the problems came in August, typically a slow time for Wall Street.

“We didn’t lose any money on the shutdown, but we also made very little money today,” said the chief executive of one Wall Street firm, who asked not to be named.

Nasdaq officials said the halt was prompted by a problem with the data system that disseminates prices and that its cause had been “identified and addressed.”

I’m thinking that high frequency algorithmic trading is somehow tied into all of this.

The fact that this occurred a day after Goldman Sachs reported a major loss from a programming error for such a program further buttresses my suspicion.

Damn!!! Another Tech Support Night!

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The kids spent some gift money from Pappa Ron on laptops.

So I’ve spent most of tonight getting their computers up and running.

More for Natalie, who got a laptop with Windows 8, that we are downgrading to Windows 7, because Windows 8 sucks like a thousand hoovers all going at once.

Still gotta wait for the Win 7 disk to arrive, but I have all the Win 7 drivers located and downloaded.

It also mean that all our primary computers will be running the same OS.

Sigh….

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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The leader of the Anonymous group that acquired (pinched) much of the data used to prosecute the Steubenville football player rapists, has been raided by the FBI:

In April, the FBI quietly [His description is, “12 F.B.I. Swat Team agents jumped out of the truck screaming for me to “Get The F%$# Down” with m-16 assault rifles and full riot gear armed safety off, pointed directly at my head.” This is a definition of “quietly” I was previously unaware of] raided the home of the hacker known as KYAnonymous in connection with his role in the Steubenville rape case. Today he spoke out for the first time about the raid, his true identity, and his motivations for pursuing the Steubenville rapists, in an extensive interview with Mother Jones.

 “The goal of the media interviews is to get the entire nation to say ‘fuck you’ to these guys,” said KYAnonymous, whose real name is Deric Lostutter. He was referring to the federal agents who raided his home in Winchester, Kentucky, and carted off his computers and XBox.

 Lostutter may deserve more credit than anyone for turning Steubenville into a national outrage. After a 16-year-old girl was raped by two members of the Steubenville High football team last year, he obtained and published tweets and Instagram photos in which other team members had joked about the incident and belittled the victim. He now admits to being the man behind the mask in a video posted by another hacker on the team’s fan page, RollRedRoll.com, where he threatened action against the players unless they apologized to the girl. (The rapists were convicted in March.)

He is facing more jail time than the rapists.

This is nuts, between the SWAT style raid, and the excessive nature of the possible sentences.

This lack of proportionality is a feature, and not a bug. Hyper-aggressive policing and sentencing has intimidation (and guilty pleas) as a goal.

This is One Way to Deal with Proprietorial Overreach

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A petition at the White House has Called for the firing of United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz for her wildly disproportionate prosecution of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while facing decades in prison for downloading public documents.

It is now about 80% of the way to reaching the 25,000 signatures to require a response from the Obama administration.

Needless to say, the administration response will be either to do nothing, or to promote her, because they see “tough on crime” as a political winner.

I called it “Murder by Prosecutor” last night, which is (of course) rhetorical excess, but this was proprietorial excess.

Of course, we don’t know why he committed suicide, he did have a history of depression, but it’s fairly certain that this did not help.

On the bright side, I think that this is driving a discussion of overzealous prosecutors, and even if Ms. Ortiz keeps her job, her political career beyond this, she is/was seen as a rising star in the Massachusetts Democratic Party Establishment, has been detoured if not ended, which should hopefully make prosecutors think twice when they decide to destroy someone just to make an example.

Over the past 30 years, US laws have been changed to grant enormous power to prosecutors.

Based on how they file, and what they choose to present at sentencing, they now have the ability to dictate sentences to an unprecedented degree.

This has been corrupting the operation of the federal justice system for decades.

Murder by Prosecutor

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Aaron Swartz, age 26, suicide.

We cannot know all the reasons behind this, but his harassment by prosecutors was likely a contributing factor.

He was probably targeted because of his high profile opposition to SOPA (see vid). (To its shame, the New York Times does not mention this in the obit)

We have developed a regime where anyone can be harassed, and likely convicted, basically for being “troublesome.”

The term I used a while back, “Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen,” describes this phenomenon.

I Don’t Know Whether to Feel Schadenfreude, or to be Appalled

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I’m not q big fan the USPTO’s tendency to grant a patent to everything these days, and I’m even less of a fan of Apples use of its patent portfolio as an alternative new ideas, but the folks at Cuppertino just got hit with a completely bogus patent claim:

An apparent shell company has filed a $3 million patent infringement lawsuit against Apple for including headphones with its iPhones.

 A company called Intelligent Smart Phones Concepts sued Apple last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Apple infringed on U.S. Patent No. 7,373,182. The abstract for “Wireless Mobile Phone Including a Headset” describes an interface that allows a removable headset “to receive at least telephony audio signals from the phone, and to provide audio signals to the phone.”

Seriously, keep patent examiners away from toilet paper, because they will sign off on anything.

An Open Letter to Anonymous

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Anonymous, or someone purporting to be Anonymous is claiming that they thwarted attempts by Karl Rove and other Republican activists to hack electronic voting systems in swing states.

Let me make this clear: I would like to talk to you, or to a representative.

I do not know if this legitimately from anonymous or not, and I’d like to get clarification.

If true, I’d love to have the goods on whoever attempted to hack the vote.

You could contact email, Skype, some form of secure chat, stretched string and a paper cup, or a f%$#ing carrier pigeon.

Obviously, I have no way to know if the claims are true, but I’d love to hear from you.

And yes, I know that this is serious tinfoil hat stuff.

Full letter follows.

This is F%$#ing Nuts!

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The Department of Justice has charged Aaron Schwartz with 13 felonies for violating the terms of service TOS of a web site:

Federal prosectors added nine new felony counts against well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz, who was charged last year for allegedly breaching hacking laws by downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database via an open connection at MIT.

Swartz, the 25-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. He surrendered in July 2011, remains free on bond and faces dozens of years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted.

Like last year’s original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, (.pdf) the superseding indictment (.pdf) unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public.

………

In essence, many of the charges stem from Swartz allegedly breaching the terms of service agreement for those using the research service.

“JSTOR authorizes users to download a limited number of journal articles at a time,” according to the latest indictment. “Before being given access to JSTOR’s digital archive, each user must agree and acknowledge that they cannot download or export content from JSTOR’s computer servers with automated programs such as web robots, spiders, and scrapers. JSTOR also uses computerized measures to prevent users from downloading an unauthorized number of articles using automated techniques.”

It gets better.

The DoJ lost big in the 9th circuit court, which said that a violation of the TOS was a matter for civil court, but Obama’s DiJ decided not to appeal, so that they could continue to use their bogus vendettas in other jurisdictions.

Prosecutors have an obligation to represent the people.

This obligation goes beyond fishing for a suitably technically illiterate jury and using multiple indictments and the threat of decades in jail to extract a plea bargain.

This is a despicable case of prosecutorial overreach.

They are saying that, for example, lying about my appearance on a dating site would be a felony.

Prosecutors want to make their job easier, but their method, creating a world where everyone can be thrown in jail for a felony, because there is some law that they are in violation of, is repellant.

It is the hallmark of a police state.

My Computer is (Sort of) Working Again

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I can start it now.

The power switch wasn’t dead, the power button, the bit of plastic that hits the switch, was.

After removing about 5x as many parts as I needed to in retrospect (it all went back, no left over bits), I pulled the button, and so now I directly tap the switch ……… I just need to use a screwdriver or eraser end of a pencil.

I’m going to set up an appointment with the computer shop, so that I don’t have to wait a week for parts.

Might have them add some memory too.

How to Know When You’ve Pissed off a Judge

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One hint is when he asks if you are smoking crack:

Tempers boiled over in court this morning, with the judge in the case between Apple and Samsung flat out yelling at Apple for trying to book too many witnesses in its last few hours.

“I am not going to be running around trying to get 75 pages of briefings for people who are not going to be testifying,” U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh told Apple’s lawyer Bill Lee.

“I mean come on. 75 pages! 75 pages! You want me to do an order on 75 pages, (and) unless you’re smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called when you have less than four hours,” Koh said.

“Your honor, I can assure you, I’m not smoking crack,” Lee replied matter-of-factly.

It’s never good to piss off a judge, but the fact that it’s Apple playing bullsh%$ patent bully does infuse in me a bit of Schadenfreude.

Best Siri Prank of Last Year

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Someone programmed a display model Apple iPhone to cuss out anyone who attempted to talk to it“

A LAD of 12 who tried out the new iPhone 4S in Tesco was stunned when it told him: “Shut the f*** up, you ugly t***.”

The phone’s Siri system, which answers spoken questions, came back with the foul-mouthed insult when Charlie Le Quesne asked: “How many people are there in the world?”

Charlie’s horrified mum Kim said: “The phone was a demo version and was low enough on the shelf for Charlie to have a go with it. He asked it a simple question and we couldn’t believe the filth it came out with.

“I thought I must be hearing things. So we asked again and the same four-letter stuff blared out.

“I asked for the manager and after staff heard it they agreed to unplug it.”

Apologetic staff at Tesco in Coventry told Kim pranksters had tampered with the phone’s set-up instructions.

The Siri system refers to the phone’s user by name — using information stored in its contacts system. The jokers had entered the rude seven-word phrase as the user’s name — so the phone blurted it out when it answered a question

Heh.

This is Literally the Worst Idea I Have Ever Heard

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The Department of Justice is seeking to expand anti-hacking laws to make it a criminal offense to violate the terms of a click-through license on a web site:

A commonly invoked anti-hacking law is so overbroad that it criminalizes conduct as innocuous as using a fake user name on Facebook or fibbing about your weight in a Match.com profile, one of the nation’s most respected legal authorities has said.

This came to prominence when the DoJ decided to prosecute the infamous (and unsuccessful) Lori Drew Myspace cyberbulling prosecution.

And the Response of the USDepartment of Justice?

In fact, quite the opposite: Downing and the Justice Department want to expand the law’s scope and impose harsher sentences on cybercriminals.

As CNET reported, the Justice Department is after an expansion of its powers under CFAA because of what happened when the agency attempted to prosecute Lori Drew, a Missouri mother who created a phony MySpace account to harass her 13-year-old neighbor, who later committed suicide. Drew was in 2008 convicted under CFAA of felony conspiracy and three counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization.

What you have to understand here is that the goal of the DoJ is to have another “arrow in their quiver”.

They want to have a world where everyone can be criminally prosecuted for something, because that way, they can go after anyone that they find inconvenient.

The fact that the Obama DoJ is in full throated support of this is why I refer to him as the “The Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever”.

When you give the state security apparatus the power to manufacture criminality, which is the desire of most agents of the state security apparatus, you create a blueprint for tyranny.