Category: technology

Hollywood Writers Strike

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I know that there are doubtless a lot of people who think that they shouldn’t even be in a union, or strike, but half of these guy’s income is residuals, and the studios are proposing nothing as an amount.

The fact is that the writers should be given a cut of revenues regardless of channel, and there is no risk if they get a percentage.

The fact is that the studios have never, ever, taken a risk on new media. It’s always been someone else shelling out to the for the privilege of seeing if a media will fly or sink. There is no reason for the studios to freeze these guys out.

Hack Allows Apple’s Leopard OS to Run on PCs

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Personally, I’m not interested in Macs, I’m a PC guy, my interest here is that I like to see companies with arrogant restrictions in their licenses get owned,

For those of you who who do care, I’m not so sure how much it would matter that Leopard can be made to run on PCs either. After all, you have the hardware.

In either case, I find this interesting from a purely voyeuristic perspective.

Municipal Wi-Fi and Broadband Bans Overturned in Senate Markup

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There are a number of states in which the pig felching greedheads in the phone companies have managed to make municipal broadband and WI-Fi illegal, and a number of other states where they are trying to.

We have good news, the Senate Commerce Committee has passed a bill out to the floor that overturns these laws with broad bipartisan support.

Bad news is that there is no similar effort right now in the house, so call your congresscritter, and tell them to support the Community Broadband Act.

Ron Paul is a Spammer

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Well, it appears that botnet of compromised machines are sending out email pimping for Ron Paul.

It should be noted that the article does note that the researcher who discovered this has no evidence of any connections between the Paul campaign and the botnet spammers.

Given the genuinely altruistic bent of spammers, it is possible that these people are just acting out of the goodness of their hearts, just like Dick Cheney does.

Appeals Court Puts Small ISPs Out of Business

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It said that the FCC ruling that no requirement for access to the list mile wiring stands.

Ma Bell has lived for years by using monopolistic techniques to ice out competition. It’s more profitable than supplying a better product, which is why the US is behind the rest of the industrialized world in broadband.

The FCC claims that this will give more competition. Why should it, when anti-competitive behavior is more profitable than competing.

Looking for a Laser Printer, Suggestions Folks?

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To be accurate, I’m looking for a printer that fuses toner on paper, so LED, etc would be OK, I just don’t want to get gigged on ink.

My requirements:

  • It should handle B-Sized, which I use for the real (dead tree) version of 40 Years in the Desert.
  • It should do color well (pics of family go in)
  • It should have a print mechanism amenable to home refilling. I have a Panasonic printer where I can crack open the spent toner box, and empty it, and get 5-10x the life out of it.

Nice to haves:

  • Postscript (I convert my stuff to PDFs using Ghostscript to put them on line, and at some point, I may want to offset print again).
  • 2 Sided printing (not so important, I can always flip the paper).
  • Can handle card stock (business cards, etc.)

Probably the hardest thing to figure out is how hard various models are to refill.

AT&T Created a Language to Do Mass Surveillance

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Seriously, if there is a group of people with their tongues more firmly up the rectum of the state security apparatus than AT&T, I would surprised.

They have gone so far as inventing a purpose built language for mass-surveillance. I’ve said it a number of times, don’t use AT&T, they suck wet farts from dead pigeons.

According the article, this was originally developed to find sales leads, and it was developed well before 911. They want to hoover all of our data, and sell it to the highest bidder.

Here is a sort of a schematic of its function:

Here is some sample code:

#include “ipRec.hh”
#include “ihash.h”

hash_table *ofInterest;

int inSet (ipPacket_t * p)
{
if (hash_get (ofInterest, p->source.hash_value) == 1)
return 1;
if (hash_get (ofInterest, p->dest.hash_value) == 1)
return 1;
return 0;
}
void sig_main (ipAddr_s addrs < l:>,
ipPacket_s packets < p:>)
{
/* code to set up hash table */
ofInterest = hash_empty ();
iterate
(over addrs) {
event (ipAddr_t * addr) {
if (hash_insert (ofInterest, addr->hash_value, 1) < 0)
}
}
/* code to select packets */
iterate
(over packets
filteredby inSet)
{
event (ipPacket_t * p)
{
printPacketInfo (p);
}
};
}

So Not Shocked….ICANN is Corrupt

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It appears that someone at ICANN is feeding domain name lookups to people on the outside so that they can hold them for ransome.

If you have ever checked if a domain is available, and come back a few hours later to discover that someone has taken it, you know what I mean.

ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee is looking into suspicions that someone with access to search requests has been using this data to snap up potentially desirable domains, a process dubbed domain name front running.

Unlike traditional domain speculation, those who buy searched-for domains can be pretty sure of a potential interest when they attempt to sell their domains at a profit.

Damn straight. You already know that someone wants the domain, because they have searched for it.

Suspicions that the sharp practice is happening have not yet been proven, but are fuelled by user experiences suggesting something is amiss. Many people who check to see if a domain is available reportedly find it’s been bought by the time they return a short time later.

But the allegations are true, as anyone who has had this happen to them over, and over, and over again can attest.

If you want a domain, you need to snapit it up immediately after the search.

Snark of the Day, Budget Edition

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It should be noted that some budget budget wonks have uncovered a line item for a weapon to attack Iran.(h/t Attytood)

It’s for a modification to the B2 Stealth bomber so that it can carry the 30,000 penetrating pound bomb

Tucked inside the White House’s $196 billion emergency funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is an item that has some people wondering whether the administration is preparing for military action against Iran.

The item: $88 million to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator, or, in military-speak, the MOP.

The MOP is the the military’s largest conventional bomb, a super “bunker-buster” capable of destroying hardened targets deep underground. The one-line explanation for the request said it is in response to “an urgent operational need from theater commanders.”

Hey, well, I’m sure the federal government has lots of uses for super “bunker-buster” bombs, such as, um, uh, na….

“You’d use it on Natanz,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. “And you’d use it on a stealth bomber because you want it to be a surprise. And you put in an emergency funding request because you want to bomb quickly.”

There is no reason to put this in an emergency request unless you have a target, and you want to hit it soon.

BTW, two snaps up to Will Bunch for this comment, “I’ve long been in the camp that the Cheney-Bush administration isn’t really as incompetent as it looks, that most of the worst stuff they do is 100 percent intentional. Putting your air-attack plans in a budget bill, however, is actually pretty incompetent. Hopefully they’ll get rid of this before Hillary can enthusiastically vote for it.“

Now I have to clean off my screen.

Tell Your Rep That You are a Net Neutrality Voter

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Last week there was news that Comcast was blocking traffic from BitTorrent, Gnutella, and other file sharing operations, Comcast has finally responded to these reports. They say that they are not blocking these applications, they are just delaying them.

Speaking on background in a phone interview earlier today, a Comcast Internet executive admitted that reality was a little more complex. The company uses data management technologies to conserve bandwidth and allow customers to experience the Internet without delays. As part of that management process, he said, the company occasionally – but not always – delays some peer-to-peer file transfers that eat into Internet speeds for other users on the network.

Of course, some of these applications have legal uses, BitTorrent was developed to do online software releases, and almost every Linux distro these days uses it, and it is blocking crippling other applications, like Lotus Notes.

While I think that Notes is one of the worst email/groupware packages ever written, and I would not shed a tear to see it gone, it would be inappropriate for me, as an ISP, to block it.

So, not only is Comcast dishonest and hypocritical, they are also incompetent. Who would have expected that from the cable company.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation noticed the same sort of packet forging that the AP did (and that Broadband Reports readers did some time ago), and continued its testing to see if other applications are affected. The answer is a disturbing “yes.” The results of additional testing done by the EFF indicate Comcast is sending forged reset packets with some Gnutella traffic. When the EFF ran a Gnutella node on a Comcast connection, the forged reset packets disrupted communication between the nodes.

What’s particularly insidious about Comcast’s packet forging is that it’s transparent to both its customers and those on the opposite ends of the connection. Applications such as BitTorrent and Gnutella retain some of their functionality, but they’ll also appear to malfunction for no apparent reason.

Even if you accept the argument that all P2P traffic is inherently evil, and that Comcast has the right to disrupt it in order to put a stop to copyright infringement, Comcast’s traffic-shaping efforts have apparently extended beyond the realm of P2P and into good old enterprise groupware. Kevin Kanarski, who works as a Lotus Notes messaging engineer, noticed some strange behavior with Lotus Notes when hooked up to a Comcast connection last month.

When Lotus Notes users attempt to send e-mail with larger attachments over Comcast’s network, Notes will drop its connection. Instead of a successfully sent e-mail, they’re greeted with the error message, “Remote system no longer responding.” Kanarski did some digging and has managed to verify that Comcast’s reset packets are the culprit. Instead of passing the legitimate e-mail through its network, Comcast’s traffic monitoring tool (likely Sandvine) is sitting in the middle, imitating both ends of the connection, and sending reset packets to both client and server.

So there is more than some arcane issue of people wanting their free music and pr0n, through incompetence (remember, this is the cable company), they are blocking legitimate software too,

What Happens When Authorities Use Criminal Methods

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It appears that researchers at Canegie Mellon are working on schemes to disrupt WaReZ, virus, and hacking markets.

One tactic involves bad mouthing buyers or sellers in order to eliminate their verified status, discouraging others from engaging in trades with them. The other attacks the effectiveness of the markets themselves by undermining the cybercrooks’ verification or reputation system, creating a deceptive sales environment.

One technique developed by the team involves establishing fake verified-status identities that are difficult to distinguish from other-verified status sellers, making it hard for buyers to identify “honest” verified-status sellers from “dishonest” verified-status sellers.

“Just like you need to verify that individuals are honest on eBay, online criminals need to verify that they are dealing with ‘honest’ criminals,” explained Jason Franklin, a PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon.

Ummmm….You want to develop this stuff, and you don’t expect it to fall into the hands of the black hats?

You know, the guys who have compromised a few million network computers that could be used for password cracks to infiltrate a place like eBay?

This is a one-D-ten-T problem (spell it out with the numbers).

One Orc in New Zealand Kills Amazon’s 1-Click Patent

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Peter Calveley of Auckland, New Zealand, after receiving poor service from Amazon, took it upon himself to document the prior art on Amazon’s one click patent. The USPTO review his research, and invalidated 21 of 26 of the claims in the patent.

Mr Calveley, whose previous claim to fame is having “worked as a motion capture performer and appeared as part of the evil armies in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings”.

It’s amazing what disgruntled customer, his blog, and a few thousand customers can do.

What is even more amazing is that the USPTO didn’t punt this whole thing.

There May be No Winner in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Wars

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I’ve been posting off and on (here, here, here, and here) about the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray wars, and I have not really covered what might be an increasingly likely outcome, that both formats may lose.

While I think that HD-DVD may do better in the long fun, given Sony’s (and not Disney’s) anal retentive and counter productive licensing and marketing strategies, it may very well be that these will be irrelevant in a home entertainment context, though they might still duke it out in areas like backup formats and software distribution.

Given technologies out there, I got FIOS a month ago, and one of the side benefits is a digital TV tuner which allows for on-demand content, which is about the same price as going to the Video store, I’m wondering whether online high definition will be the eventual winner.

Given that the additional resolution is hard to notice on a typical TV, and that much of the motivation for the higher definition DVD formats is content control, which from an end user perspective is basically screwing the consumer, perhaps these two formats will simply be bumps on the road to digital distribution.

While there are a lot of people on without online access, or on dialup, who have DVDs, the overwhelming majority of those who would go with a high def DVD format already have broadband, so why bother with media at all. One can go with a digital library.

The Fight Over White Space

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Microsoft and Google, on the same side for once, are in in a tussle with commercial TV stations over “white space”, the unused channels in broadcast TV.

Basically, Microsoft sent a prototype to the FCC which was supposed to automatically detect white space, and use the spectrum for (very) high speed connectivity, but it failed because Microsoft never gets anything right the first time.

Broadcaster’s heads are exploding over this proposal, with claims of severe interference, technical problems, and that it will make your daughter date a biker.

While part of this is no doubt a result of the proprietary feelings that broadcasters have regarding “their” (it belongs to all of us) spectrum, I think that another part is that they do not want to have a competing use.

If there is a competing use, at some point regulators might give priority to that use, as opposed to broadcasting reruns of “my mother the car”.

Is Bands Moving to Online Distrubution of Their Music Part of a Trend?

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I hope so, as the record distributors are a group of contemptable greedheads who rip off both the fans and the artists, and who should be the first ones agaisnt the wall when the revolution comes.

As it stands now, Both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have dumped record distributors completely.

Certainly, getting their tracks on iTunes®, or some similar service should be pretty easy, as the marginal cost of keeping a track in a virtual “warehouse” is fractions of a penny.

Considering the number of hits out there from 40 years ago that are still “not recouped” by the record labels, there is no reason today for bands to go with the lables.

Opposed Piston Engine to Enter Test

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It’s an interesting technology, and they are putting two of these engines in an FMTV truck. (Full disclosure, in 1992-1993, I worked at Stewart and Stevenson, Tactical Vehicle Systems on the FMTV trucks.)

If you look at the picture (below) it appears complex, but there are no valves, just ports (look closely at the bottom of the cylinder.), so all in all, it’s likely no more complex than a conventional engine.

It also has a high power to weight and power to displacement ratio because it is a two stroke, though this leads me to wonder about pollution levels, as two stroke engines are typically more polluting (GM’s locomotive division, EMD dumped it’s very reliable and mature two stroke diesels about a decade ago for this reason), which may put a stake through the heart of this concept.