Category: Computer

Someone Needs to Go to Jail for a Very Long Time

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Photo H/t boing boing

And I don’t mean a sysop.

The Lower Merion School District has issued laptops to its high school students, and someone has been activating the webcams to spy on children.

This came to a head, when Harriton High School Assistant Principal Lindy Matsko confronted sophomore Blake Robbins about his suspicious consumption of Mike & Ike candies, they look like pills.

What’s more that Mr. Robbins experience appears not to be unique:

If the allegations of spying prove to be true, Blake may not be the only victim. Other students claim they’ve seen their webcam go live while off school grounds and worry they’ve been spied on too.

“Occasionally a green light would go on, on your computer which would kind of give you the feeling that somebody’s watching you,” Harriton High School student Drew Scheier told NBC Philadelphia Thursday.

Subpoenas have been issued by the US Attorney, and the FBI is investigating the matter as a potential criminal act.

If anyone activated those cameras, there was a possibility that the children who had them might have been in front of the camera, and that they might have been a state of undress, which makes one of the charges something along the lines of soliciting child pr0n.

It doesn’t matter whether it was a pedophile looking for young bodies, or someone looking for funny pix for the office Christmas party, anyone involved in this, and anyone who knew of this and did not go to police, should go to jail.

Sergey Aleynikov Pleads Not Guilty on Charges of High Frequency Trading Software Theft

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So, he is going to trial.

I’m surprised.

In my earlier examinations of this matter, it appeared that Goldman Sachs was considering letting it slide, because Mr. Aleynikov was requesting something that they did not want to provide.

The basics are fairly simple: High Frequency Trading (HFT) is basically a way to front run the entire market, and this guy was their head software guy in the process, so the trial should be interesting.

Not Enough Bullets: PC Edition

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Because what billy wants, Billy gets.

And I don’t mean politically correct. I mean companies involved in the personal computer business, most notably Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, and Dell, who are aggressively lobbying against a proposal to prevent tax evasion through transfer pricing:

Software and computer companies such as Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. are gearing up to fight an Obama administration plan to curb offshore tax avoidance.

The $15.5 billion proposal in President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget targets what the Internal Revenue Service calls the growing problem of so-called transfer pricing. The technique allows companies to reduce their tax bills by transferring intangible property such as patents, trademarks and licenses to offshore subsidiaries.

They use our courts and our law enforcement and our regulators to enforce their IP licenses, and they want to assign that IP to dummy corporations

Additionally, Microsoft has evaded Washington state taxes over the past 13 years, to the tune of $1.27 billion, with a similar shift by opening up a store front in Nevada. (see vid)

But don’t you worry about Microsoft, they are lobbying to have the tax gutted, as well as getting an amnesty in the lege, so they won’t owe anything, and the state will find some way to deal with their $2.8 billion deficit over the next few years.

Silly voter, taxes is for plebes.

This is Just Such a Good Idea

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A company called SarcMark has developed a proprietary punctaion mark to denote sarcasm.

That is like such a good idea.

Yes, that is the symbol, and it’s looks like, but isn’t a bit of Hebrew cursive.

This is clearly an essential part of any repertoire, and well worth the $1.99 the maker wants to charge for its use.

Sorry, but if you need to mark it as sarcasm, something is lacking in either the writer or the reader of the phrase.

Much Better…..

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I’ve been visiting my Mother-in-Law in New York, we saw the Museum of Natural History yesterday, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art today, and I finally managed to give her my Hanukkah Gift to her.

I offered to upgrade the memory on her machine, a Dell Dimension L800r, from it’s current 128 meg to 512 meg of ram.

When she got it, it had Windoze ME, but she had to upgrade to Win XP, and with 128 meg, less a couple for video memory, it was slow, particularly after a nasty bit of spyware, and the multiple passes of various software to fix it, created a spaghetti registry.

I ordered the memory online, but they were out of stock, so today, before going to the museum, I hit B&H Photo Video in Manhattan, and picked up 2x 256M DIMMs.

Still slow, but not glacially so, and the CPU actually maxes out without the hard drive light indicating massive thrashing.

It’s still slow, but no longer glacial.

Pwn36*

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They paid someone to do this?

So, the Republican Party comes up with a URL shortener, the idea being that they would send people to the site, but put banners top and bottom that would advertise themselves and pranksters use it to link to pr0n:

The Republican party took down its innovative link-shortening tool Tuesday for several hours after pranksters had a field day using the tool to associate the GOP with bondage sites.

Having used Tinyurl and bit.ly for almost a decade, this is “innovative” only in the sense that House Minority John Boehner has a “human” complexion.†

As part of its new media strategy, the Republican party launched a new site called GOP.am on Monday. It’s a URL shortener designed to make it easy for conservative web surfers to exchange links to web pages.

This is what happens when people try to be hip and cool when they have not the slightest inkling what it means to be hip and cool.

So quoth the engineer, who has no clue as to what it means to be either hip or cool.

*Owned.
†Truth be told, if I didn’t know that he’s had it for years, I would have tagged it as jaundice.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney Fly to Uruguay, Request Asylum

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No, it hasn’t happened yet, but we have a start.

You see, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive have found some 22 million missing White House emails from the Bush era.

Yes, I know, it still has to go through the National Archives, where it will take years* to catalogue then and screen for classified material:

Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, according to two groups that are settling lawsuits they filed over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.

The two groups made the announcement as they settled lawsuits that they filed against the Executive Office of the President in 2007.

But the public might not see any of the e-mails for quite some time because they will now go through the National Archives normal process for releasing presidential and agency records.

Of course, even if major revelations are present, that Barack Obama and Eric Holder will their do their level best to ensure that the rule of law is not enforced.

*My guess is that this will be finished a little bit after the 2012 elections.

Facebook Founder Completely PWN36* By Facebook Privacy Policy

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Bummer of a birth mark, Mr. Zuckerberg

I check Facebook every day or soo, and I feed my blog there, albeit imperfectly, so when the came up with a privacy policy update, I didn’t pay too much attention, until I heard lots of people complaining.

Management there said it was no big deal, but then about 300 personal photos of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were made public to the general public:

In a not-uncommon development for the social-networking leader, Facebook’s recently released privacy controls are leaving the company a bit red-faced. As a result of a new policy that by default makes users’ profiles, photos and friends lists available on the web, almost 300 personal photos of founder Mark Zuckerberg became publicly available, a development that had gossip sites like Gawker yukking it up.

Kashmir Hill, a blogger for True/Slant, first reported Zuckerberg’s new exposure, noting, “Either Mark Zuckerberg got a whole lot less private or Facebook’s CEO doesn’t understand the company’s new privacy settings.” Under the new privacy regime, user profiles are exposed to the web unless users are proactive about limiting access.

So, what did Morty make public?

  • His wall
  • His photo albums
  • The fact that he is a Taylor Swift fan
  • Graphic (!?!) photos of “The Great Goat Roast of 2009”
  • The time, date, and location of the Facebook corporate holiday party.

Oopsie.

*Owned.

The Death of Stealth

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Click for full size

The shape of anti-stealth

The USAF is expanding a massively parallel supercomputer. It is made from 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles, and its purpose is deriving more resolution from radar imagery:

The U.S. Air Force is looking to buy 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles to built out a research supercomputer, according to an document posted on the federal government’s procurement Web site.

The PlayStation 3s will be used at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s information directorate in Rome, N.Y., where they will be added to an existing cluster of 336 PlayStation 3s being used to conduct supercomputing research.

The Air Force will use the system to “to determine the best fit for implementation of various applications,” including commercial and internally developed software specific to the PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processor architecture. The research will help the Air Force decide where Cell Broadband Engine processor-derived hardware and software could be used in military systems.

The Air Force has used the cluster to test a method of processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and “neuromorphic computing,” or building computers with brain-like properties.

The thing to note is that the PS/3 costs about $250 online, so the cost of buying all these boxes is under ½ a million dollars.

That’s less than most missiles out there, and by fusing the data, you can get a much more accurate picture of position and heading, probably close enough for a targeting solution.

If you assume that each one of the data centers costs about $1 million, even a relatively poor nation could deploy dozens of centers around the country, and use them to detect stealthy attack.

Heck, with a size of 12.8″(W) x 3.8″(H) x 10.8″(L), 0.304 you could fit 2200 PS3s in a box 8¾ feet on a side, so, if you assume that putting them and a rack and cabling them together increases the required volume by a factor of 5, you can fit the system on about 4 flatracks (picture).

If you were just to buy the boxes, and extract the electronics, you might be able to fit this in one flatrack, though at that point, power and cooling get iffy.

Still, the technology for ganging the PS3’s cell processors into a massively parallel supercomputer is very much public knowledge, with most of the requisite software being GPLed open source.

Economics Update (Yesterday Too)

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Click for full size

H/t Calculated Risk


Empire State Manufacturing Index


H/t Calculated Risk


The Power of Computers Over Inventory


H/t Calculated Risk

Sorry about missing yesterday, life intervened.

Well, retail sales rose in October, (1st pic)up 1.4% from September’s anemic post “cash for clunkers” numbers.

September was down 2.3%, so you can do the math.

We also had the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Empire State Manufacturing Index falling in November, though it is still above zero, indicating continued growth. (2nd pic)

This is consistent with the small rise in industry capacity utilization. (3rd Pic)

Additionally, we have business inventories falling September, (4th Pic) and it looks like inventory restocking won’t be the thing that makes this a v-shaped recovery.

One interesting note on this graph: You can see a generally downward trend in the ratio of inventory to sales, and it is likely a result of the increasing computerization of retail.

Once you have a better picture of what you need, and when, you need to keep less as a backup.

In real estate, today’s news was grim, with delinquencies on commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS) rising 28 basis points (0.28%) in October, to 3.86%, or about 1 in 30.

In home mortgages, delinquencies hit a new record, with 6.25%, or about 1 in 16 mortgages being 60 days or further delinquent, which is a very scary number.

We also have the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index flat in November, at 17, which is a pretty awful number. (5th Pic)

Finally, in currency and energy, the dollar rose on comments by Ben Bernanke which imply support of a strong dollar policy by the fed, and oil rose, largely on the expectation of more demand to support retail activity during the holiday season.

Bad News for the Cyberterrorism Protection Racket

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A while back This Sunday, 60 Minutes did a piece on how hackers created a massive blackout in Brazil.

Only it wasn’t any sort of computer problem, it was poorly maintained power lines, where soot (carbon is conductive) created short circuits which took down the line:

Brazil’s independent systems operator group later confirmed that the failure of a 345-kilovolt line “was provoked by pollution in the chain of insulators due to deposits of soot” (.pdf). And the National Agency for Electric Energy, Brazil’s energy regulatory agency, concluded its own investigation in January 2009 and fined Furnas $3.27 million (.pdf) for failing to maintain the high-voltage insulators on its transmission towers.

Also look at their additional links:

So, as it stands right now, the only people claiming this have no proof, but are likely to get contracts, if they are private, or additional government money, if they are public.

The issue here is the vulnerability of the grid, see the 2003 blackout, and the problem is that since privatizing electric utilities, they have skimped on infrastructure, leaving no margin for error.

Someone Was Trying to Steal Money

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Tin Foil Hat Time!

I don’t know if it was insider trading, or just the standard front-running that accompanies the high frequency trading out there, but the fact that the New York Stock Exchange was unable to report trades for much of the morning due to a flood of “erroneous” trades is a byproduct of some thing to do with the seamier side of the markets.

My guesses:

  • A software glitch on a machine doing computerized trading.
  • Someone trying to capitalize on inside information using high speed trading (which, BTW, the NYSE does not do HFT, so it gets odd).
  • A deliberate attempt to take down reporting so some sort of funny business could get done in the dark.

In any case, a lot of people were trading blind as a result, which makes for much potential for mischief:

NYSE Euronext (NYX.N)(NYX.PA), the parent of the exchange, said the delays followed “an inordinate influx” of orders received as Friday’s session got under way. Later in the session, the company had to temporarily transfer quote processing to a backup system before the problem was resolved around noon.

The exchange’s quote delays caused some tickers to be locked, but a NYSE spokesman said trades were continuous throughout.

“It was an influx of erroneous orders which were caught before they were executed,” said Ray Pellecchia. He could not say where the orders came from.

Yeah, and it could just be an ordinary f%$#-up, and I’m being a conspiracy nut.

Comments

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OK, I dropped Haloscan/JS-Kit because it created a hit on loading time, and went back to blogger comments, which killed my old comments, and that could not do trackbacks,or edit my comments, which I do occasionally to correct my spelling.

Well, it appears that the removal of the old haloscan comments, and the reinstallation from JS-Kit, as opposed to the old Haloscan, restored everything, and eliminated the performance hit.

HTML magic of some kind, I guess, or perhaps it’s just because the JS-Kit folks were not upgrading the old Haloscan servers, or the hand-off between Haloscan and JS-Kit was slow, or maybe just some old code.

I don’t know, and I don’t care, but for now, at least, Haloscan is back, and so are all the old comments.

Sorry for any confusion.

The Generator’s Gone

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An amusing story about network management, right out of John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing.*

It appears that there was a small bit of civil unrest, and a client lost connectivity, and they were unable to contact the client for some time.

When they finally managed to get an engineer over to reboot the network, the network was gone…as in GONE…the copper taken by looters, stripped right out of the walls.

The pertinent quote from the movie:

Garry: The generator’s gone.
MacReady: Any way we can we fix it?
Garry: It’s “gone”, MacReady.

Just go read it, it’s funny.

*Except, of course for that whole human replica producing alien thing, of course.

About Bloody Time!!!!

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If you own a licensed version of MicroFlaccid’s Windows operating system, you have no doubt encountered the nagware program on Windows Genuine Advantage, which serves no purpose but to prevent unauthorized copies of the operating from being installed.

It should be noted that it also frequently locks people out with proper licenses, after they do things like replace a motherboard of a hard drive, and the installation of the upgrade is deceptive, saying that it provides system security, when what it really provides Microsoft with is revenue protection.

Well now, after discovering that the software phones home, a lawsuit has been filed against Microsoft as a purveyor of spyware:

A US lawsuit has alleged that Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), Microsoft’s controversial anti-piracy software, is little better than spyware.

A lawsuit (which seeks class-action status) filed in Washington district court last week also cries foul over false advertising as well as allegations of privacy law violations, Electronista reports. More specifically, the suit alleges that the XP version of WGA was offered to users as a security update rather than as an anti-counterfeiting technology.

WGA phones home to Microsoft daily with IP address and other information on users. The latest lawsuit, like others against WGA before it, takes exception to this behaviour.

The case here is pretty easy to understand, so let’s look at what the program is and does, and compare it to spyware:

What WGA Does Is it Spyware
Does it install on your system without notifying you of what it does? Yes, it calls itself a security upgrade 
                               
Does it contact the “mother-ship” regularly and without your approval? Yes, it does.   
  
                                                            
Does the Removal of the program require extraordinary measures? Yes, the only removal mechanism is reformat and reinstall the system
Does the program have interfere with the system function? Is this intentional? Yes
Yes
 

Dude, you’ve got spyware!