Blog Archive: January 2016
Upgrading ports: the pitfalls
The new pkg system for FreeBSD is finally usable, and I've been upgrading my ports like that for some time. But there are still issues: it installs pre-built packages, so it can't respect individual options. After upgrading eureka recently I've had a number of issues. First, my xterms have grown icons again. It's been less than two months since I found out how to hack the source to get rid of them, but the update put them back. Next, mutt developed black spots. That's a bug feature of mutt when compiled the default way using ncurses: it's obviously intended to display in reverse video (white on black), and some of the arrows have a black background no matter what the correct background colour is.
Firefox: new record?
I've already commented on the extreme power hunger of firefox. At the time I considered my machine to be about 60 times the speed of a CDC 7600 supercomputer from the 1970s. Since then I have replaced my machine with one 4 times as fast, so when I look at this I'm looking at the equivalent of 250,000 odd minutes of CDC 7600 CPU time. PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 12236 grog 76 22 0 20950M 1949M uwait 1 18.2H 19.24% firefox That's about 6 months, probably longer than any 7600 ever stayed upthe average uptime was less than a day.
More VirtualBox issues
Why does Virtualbox kill my network? My previous assumption was that it was interfering with DHCP, but today I ran traceroute and confirmed that the external network link was still runningonly the traffic wasn't getting through. Firewall? Somehow, yes. If I allowed all traffic across the link, the problem didn't occur, though others did, since the firewall rules also handle NAT. Spent quite some time trying to get my head around it, without success. In particular, the exact sequence was not repeatable. Sometimes I just needed to stop the virtual machine to get normal connectivity back. In other cases it didn't happen until I stopped the VirtualBox process, and in others it didn't happen until some time later.
Panoramas over the years
Yesterday I committed enblend version 4.1.3. And almost immediately got an automated response telling me that 4.1.4 was available. Coincidence? No. I had made the changes to the port months ago, and was overtaken by other things. In the meantime 4.1.4 was released, some months ago. Reading the release notes shows that this change was significant in a number of ways. The notes go back all the way to 2004 in reverse chronological sequence, and they got me thinking. How much better is enblend now than when I started using it? That proved to be 7½ years ago, and the results I got at the time really didn't look good: A bit of playing around with my current system looks a lot better: ...
Friday Squid Blogging: Polynesian Squid Hook
From 1909, for squid fishing. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
Integrity and Availability Threats
Cyberthreats are changing. We're worried about hackers crashing airplanes by hacking into computer networks. We're worried about hackers remotely disabling cars. We're worried about manipulated counts from electronic voting booths, remote murder through hacked medical devices and someone hacking an Internet thermostat to turn off the heat and freeze the pipes. The traditional academic way of thinking about information security...
Local modifications to ports
I've been hacking on mplayer for over 10 years now, and I'm currently having fun merging the patches to the current version. Last month I made a start, but soon ran into trouble. Made more progress today: it compiled and ran, but my changes didn't work. More searching, and I discovered I had a multitude of versions there, including at least one complete set of patches. For the one file cfg-mplayer.h I had 14 copies and 9 RCS control files. Which is the correct one? They're dated from 3 July 2005 to 22 August 2011. The best guess would be the last, but I'm still not convinced.
VirtualBox progress
More playing around with VirtualBox today. Downloaded and installed a FreeBSD image, which worked out of the box. With that I was able to confirm that host-only networking works, but of course it requires its own network. And bridged mode networking does work after all; presumably my previous issues were due to the lack of the vboxnet0 interface on the host. So I was able to fire up echuca (the Ubuntu box) and install the virtualbox-guest-dkms package. Rebooted as instructed, tried to change the resolution and... nothing. No change. Where do I go from here? I have other irons in the fire, so I tended to them.
Psychological Model of Selfishness
This is interesting: Game theory decision-making is based entirely on reason, but humans don't always behave rationally. David Rand, assistant professor of psychology, economics, cognitive science, and management at Yale University, and psychology doctoral student Adam Bear incorporated theories on intuition into their model, allowing agents to make a decision either based on instinct or rational deliberation. In the model,...
VirtualBox revisited
I'm having difficulties with Hugin 2016.0.0 Beta 1 on FreeBSD. Who's to blame? My port, or Hugin? To find out I need to fire up a Linux version, but I don't have a spare machine. Time to reinstate my VirtualBox installation, which I haven't used for two years, since installing a new kernel on the new eureka. How do you do that again? Found lots of old diary entries, of course, but they're more a blow-by-blow description. Time for a HOWTO. Started up as root, probably a bad idea. And it didn't find my old VMs. How did that go again? Climbed through the menus and found the VM path: /root/Virtualbox VMs.
Horrible Story of Digital Harassment
This is just awful. Their troll -- or trolls, as the case may be -- have harassed Paul and Amy in nearly every way imaginable. Bomb threats have been made under their names. Police cars and fire trucks have arrived at their house in the middle of the night to respond to fake hostage calls. Their email and social media...
Hugin 2016 beta
More work on the new Hugin beta today. First I had to fix the current port, for which a bug report is outstanding. And before I did that, I had to unbreak the enblend port. Surprisingly, all went very smoothly. After fixing the conflicts, both enblend and Hugin Just Ran. On to look at the beta version. First, where's the tarball? According to the announcement: It can be downloaded at sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/hugin/hugin-2016.0/hugin-2016.0.0_beta1.tar.bz2/download OK, how does that compare with the old one? Not much similarity. After a number of failed attempts, discovered that this URL was only for downloading via a web browser, and that the real URL was http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/hugin/hugin-2016.0/hugin-2016.0.0_beta1.tar.bz2without the /download component.
My talk at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE)
Last Friday, I travelled to Pasadena to give the morning keynote at SCaLE; they livecast the whole event, and you can watch it here. No Matter Who’s Winning the War on General Purpose Computing, You’re Losing If cyberwar were a hockey game, it’d be the end of the first period and the score would be... more
Watch us live today: LISA Conversations: Alice Goldfuss on Scalable Meatfrastructure
NOTE: Due to illness, today's LISA Conversations is postponed. More info soon. < !-- Today at 3:30PM PST we'll be recording this month's episode of LISA Conversations. Our guest will be Alice Goldfuss. We'll be discussing her LISA '15 talk about growing a devops team: Scalable Meatfrastructure: Building Stable DevOps Teams * Watch her talk from LISA '15... * [Scalable Meatfrastructure: Building Stable DevOps Teams](https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/conference-program/presentation/goldfuss) * ...then watch us interview her live... * January 26, 2016 at 3:30 pm-4:30 pm PDT ([convert](http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converted.html?iso=20160126T1530&p1=224&p2=179)) * [Watch Live!] (https://plus.google.com/events/c4k77vgipedd8e67gqi6nqtq1dc) * ...or [watch the recorded show](https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/lisa-conversations) shortly after! You won't want to miss this!
SHA-1 Certs should cost $10,000
In my previous blog post, "SHA-1 Deprecation: Pro, Con, or Extend?" , I was a bit sarcastic about an anonymous company wanting to keep producing SHA-1 out of lazy greed rather than helping customers. Here's an update by Symantec about their latest actions. Basically, the proposal to extend SHA-1 certs was withdrawn because during the ballot debate, so many new attacks against SHA-1 were revealed that.... oh the embarrassment. So now companies can request SHA-1 certs as long as they expire on Dec 31, 2016. Luckily one good thing happened: non-legacy browsers are removing their trust for the SHA-1 root certs, which will make them more secure and will serve as a canary in the coalmine.
Shodan Lets Your Browse Insecure Webcams
There's a lot out there: The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores.... Slashdot thread....
Getting lircd running
Back to setting up lirc today. I've already established that the location of the configuration files has changed. Put the correct file in there, started lircd, and... nothing. The daemon didn't even complain when I disconnected the (USB) receiver. It did read the configuration file, though, so it must have been something else. Looking on teevee, discovered that I started the daemon manually with undocumented parameters: /usr/local/sbin/lircd -n --driver=dvico --device=/dev/uhid0 That (finally) worked. OK, the --driver and --device parameters are there, but not dvico, nor any other driver name.
Google Translate: better than dissociated-press
There's a game for Emacs called dissociated-press. It takes a text region and rearranges the words. It's marginally amusing, but it wears off quickly. But the idea of putting the text through the same mill over and over is interesting, so I tried the same technique with Google Translate, using the diary entry I ranted about on Friday, translating back and forth until I got equilibrium: But then there is the text itself: Finally, the package that was sent from Perth in the past week in dignity came Napoleon.
Updating the Hugin port
Hugin 2016.0.0 beta has been released (what does the second .0 mean? I've never seen any other value). Time to start adapting the FreeBSD port. First run make clean on the old port. But it failed while cleaning the enblend dependency. It seems I had a conflict in the Makefile. How did that happen? I maintain enblend too, and I can't recall breaking it. Further investigation showed that the MAINTAINER line in the Makefile, once sacred, is now meaningless. Since I last made any changes, there have been no fewer than 21 commits by other people, many of them sweeping through multiple ports, and none of whom informed me.
Tender Sky Shoehorn
In which I reveal a little life-hack that can get you out your front door noticeably quicker. First, a picture. Thats a really long shoehorn. You can use it standing up, just a slight stoop even for 5'11" me. This one comes from Daiso, a Japanese 100 (think $1) store, which has embarked on world domination. Why you should do this So you dont have to tie your shoes. Slip em off when you come home then use the shoehorn to slip em back on when leaving. Now, we all knw that your Mom told you never to do this, because it would ruin your shoes; theyd get all crushed at the back.
Google Translate improvements
I have a link Translate this page at the head of all my diaries. By default it translates into French for people I know who find even Google Translate's results useful. But today I tried it in German.. The results are amazing! This is a calendar, but Mar has been translated as Beschädigen (damage), and May has been translated as Kann (can). It's barely possible to understand the lack of context that could lead to this kind of translation. But this one boggles belief: Donnerstag, 21.
Friday Squid Blogging: North Coast Squid
North Coast Squid is a local writing journal from Manzanita, Oregon. It's going to publish its fifth edition this year. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
UK Government Promoting Backdoor-Enabled Voice Encryption Protocol
The UK government is pushing something called the MIKEY-SAKKE protocol to secure voice. Basically, it's an identity-based system that necessarily requires a trusted key-distribution center. So key escrow is inherently built in, and there's no perfect forward secrecy. The only reasonable explanation for designing a protocol with these properties is third-party eavesdropping. Steven Murdoch has explained the details. The upshot:...
Reminder: Next week's LISA Conversations: Alice Goldfuss on Scalable Meatfrastructure
This weekend is a good time to watch the video we'll be discussing on Usenix LISA conversations. Our guest will be Alice Goldfuss. We'll be discussing her LISA '15 talk about growing a devops team: Scalable Meatfrastructure: Building Stable DevOps Teams Watch her talk from LISA '15... Scalable Meatfrastructure: Building Stable DevOps Teams ...then watch us interview her live... January 26, 2016 at 3:30 pm-4:30 pm PDT (convert) Watch Live! ...or watch the recorded show shortly after! You won't want to miss this!
Security Trade-offs in the Longbow vs. Crossbow Decision
Interesting research: Douglas W. Allen and Peter T. Leeson, "Institutionally Constrained Technology Adoption: Resolving the Longbow Puzzle," Journal of Law and Economics, v. 58, Aug 2015. Abstract: For over a century the longbow reigned as undisputed king of medieval European missile weapons. Yet only England used the longbow as a mainstay in its military arsenal; France and Scotland clung to...
HDR Projects 4 Pro
Special offer in the mail today: HDR Projects 4 Pro for a price that I can't refuse. Or can I? I do a lot of HDR processing with align_image_stack and enfuse. It has the advantage that it's fast, and that everything is done automatically. It has the disadvantage that everything is done automatically. HDR Projects is a Microsoft space program, of course, but it offers some interesting features, as this video shows: There's also a German version here, made with a less grating voice.
El Chapo's Opsec
I've already written about Sean Penn's opsec while communicating with El Chapo. Here's the technique of mirroring, explained: El chapo then switched to a complex system of using BBM (Blackberry's Instant Messaging) and Proxies. The way it worked was if you needed to contact The Boss, you would send a BBM text to an intermediary (who would spend his days...
Retiring old PRs
The FreeBSD problem reporting system has been around forever. Some years back we moved from GNATS to bugzilla, but we've ensured that all old reports are kept for posterity (or just for resolution). One of the latter was one I entered 10 years ago. The FreeBSD web site had become modern and rendered terribly. Things have improved since then, so it was time to put this PR to bed. ACM only downloads articles once.
tiwi setup: lircd
Instead, took a look at lircd. That had started last time round and shown no reaction to the remote control. Back to look at what I did last time round, which was inconclusive. But clearly I needed the files /etc/lircd.conf and /etc/lircrc, so copied them from teevee. Start again. No error indication, no function. It didn't even notice when I disconnected the (USB) receiver. And when I restarted lircd, it didn't access /etc/lircd.conf. OK, RTFM time: FILES The config file for lircd is located in /etc/lirc/lircd.conf. Isn't that nice, moving the files elsewhere?
tiwi setup: MythWeb
Spent some time trying to configure MythWeb today. First that required getting Apache24 up and running. These version numbers in file names are getting more and more on my nerves. The only real change I needed to make to the configuration file was: -DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/apache24/data" -<Directory "/usr/local/www/apache24/data"> +DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/data" +<Directory "/usr/local/www/data"> Then looking at /usr/local/www/mythweb/INSTALL: =========== 3.0 Experts =========== If you are not an expert, please skip to section 4.0. Experts, the following commands should be enough for you to figure out what's going on: cp -r mythweb/* /var/www/html/ Clearly the port has forgotten to change the path name, which appears to be a Linuxism.
Next on LISA Conversations: Alice Goldfuss on Scalable Meatfrastructure
On the next episode of LISA Conversations... Our guest will be Alice Goldfuss. We'll be discussing her LISA '15 talk about growing a devops team: Scalable Meatfrastructure: Building Stable DevOps Teams Watch her talk from LISA '15... Scalable Meatfrastructure: Building Stable DevOps Teams ...then watch us interview her live... January 26, 2016 at 3:30 pm-4:30 pm PDT (convert) Watch Live! ...or watch the recorded show shortly after! You won't want to miss this!
France Rejects Back Doors in Encryption Products
For the right reasons too: Axelle Lemaire, the Euro nation's digital affairs minister, shot down the amendment during the committee stage of the forthcoming omnibus digital bill, saying it would be counterproductive and would leave personal data unprotected. "Recent events show how the fact of introducing faults deliberately at the request - sometimes even without knowing - the intelligence agencies...
Well probably never Free Mickey
It’s Copyright Week, and I’ve kicked it off with a post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deep Links explaining why, regardless of copyright term extension, Mickey Mouse will probably never be “free” — but that doesn’t mean that Disney is acting irrationally in its fight as hard as they are for eternal copyrights. Rather, they’re... more
More tiwi installation?
My work on installing MythTV on tiwi has stalled waiting for a tuner. What can I do in the meantime? At least MythWeb, which is one of the best arguments in favour of MythTV. It's been nearly 9 years since I first installed it, and of course things have changed. Do I have copies on eureka? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~ 213 -> locate -i /mythweb|less /home/OLD-STUFF/ports/www/mythweb /home/OLD-STUFF/ports/www/mythweb/CVS ... /home/src/CVS/FreeBSD/ncvs/ports/www/mythweb /home/src/CVS/FreeBSD/ncvs/ports/www/mythweb/Attic /home/src/CVS/FreeBSD/ncvs/ports/www/mythweb/Attic/Makefile,v That's the old CVS based ports tree, one really old, and the other old, but between the two the port was deleted ( put in the attic ).
Reverse-Engineering a Zero-Day Exploit from the Hacking Team Data Dump
Last July, a still-anonymous hacker broke into the network belonging to the cyberweapons arms manufacturer Hacking Team, and dumped an enormous amount of its proprietary documents online. Kaspersky Labs was able to reverse-engineer one of its zero-day exploits from that data....
#Bike2WorkPix
Ive been cycling to work since late last year. Its good, for me and the world. But there are more convenient alternatives, and they tempt. So heres a little incentive: #Bike2WorkPix. Consider joining in! #Bike2WorkPix: From Vancouvers Cambie St Bridge The Hashtag Its like this: You can autopilot a bike commute; but its harder than in a car. You can ignore the world too; but thats way harder. Whats easier than in a car is to stop and take a picture, and everyones got a phone in their pocket, most with good cameras. So Im gonna try and do that every day I ride, and post it somewhere tagged #Bike2WorkPix.
My University of Waterloo talk: No Matter Whos Winning the War on General Purpose Computing, Youre Losing
Late last year, the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo (a university I am proud to have dropped out of!) invited me to give a lecture: No Matter Who’s Winning the War on General Purpose Computing, You’re Losing. They’ve posted it in many formats for your enjoyment. http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/csclub/cory-doctorow-f2015.mp4 If cyberwar were a hockey... more
Counterfeit Theater Tickets in New York
Counterfeiters are making tickets for the Broadway show "Hamilton." Counterfeiting is much easier when the person you're passing the fakes off to doesn't know what the real thing is supposed to look like....
Match Fixing in Tennis
The BBC and Buzzfeed are jointly reporting on match fixing in tennis. Their story is based partially on leaked documents and partly on data analysis. BuzzFeed News began its investigation after devising an algorithm to analyse gambling on professional tennis matches over the past seven years. It identified 15 players who regularly lost matches in which heavily lopsided betting appeared...
Daily Microsoft pain
Yvonne took 187 photos today, and the processing showed the typical Microsoft slowdown (memory leaks?) . Time for a reboot. And, of course, when the system came back up, she had the dreaded read-only photo file system. More cursing, but the biggest discovery seems to be that the symptoms are non-deterministic. When I tried to select Properties for the file system, it took me to the Control Panel / System page. Only after I disconnected and reconnected the file system did it take me to the correct page, where it still couldn't do anything useful. As if that wasn't enough, the keyboard went haywire.
On the Nexus 5X
Well, the OnePlus One was a lot of phone for the money but, only a year old, is dying; the GPS has checked out and the pictures it takes look bad. I didnt feel like phone-shopping but when I did, the 5X was an easy choice. Its just fine, but only three features matter. With winter beach pix. What doesnt matter The screens great; the phones thin and light; the GPS is as good as Ive had; the LTEs fast; the OS is contemporary and fast; the battery gets though a day. And these things are true of every phone at every kiosk in every mall.
Investigating vlc
I had too many other things to do today to worry about MythTV, but some time ago I had promised Jürgen Lock that I would try vlc. Did that today. And? It's hard to say. No multimedia software is well documented, and vlc appears to be no exception. But it worked out of the box, something that other stuff doesn't do. The question that I have is whether it can do everything I want. I haven't found a way to save the position in a stream, something that's very important to me. But maybe the save playlist function does just that.
Keyboard evolution
Somehow I'm still not happy with keyboards. For nearly 25 years I used the same Northgate Omnikey keyboard: I've since replaced it with a Sun 7 keyboard, but I'm still having difficulties. How do you position your right hand? Conventional (in other words typewriter age) wisdom is that you place your fingers above the J, K, L and ; keys, and cover the H key with your forefinger. But that leaves a large number of keys to the right. OK, move one space to the key next to ;, whatever that may be, but on the Sun that still leaves two keys unaccounted for, including Return.
dischord pain
So why can't Yvonne write to her CIFS file system from dischord any more? Spent a lot of time investigating today. Clearly the first step is to check what the real permissions are, as this post suggests. But all is well there: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~ 89 -> getfacl /Photos # file: /Photos # owner: grog # group: wheel user::rwx group::rwx other::rwx === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~ 90 -> ls -ld /Photos/ drwxrwxrwx 29 grog wheel 1,024 16 Jan 09:03 /Photos/ Clearly it has something to do with Yvonneagainso tried connecting with my credentials.
Should We Allow Bulk Searching of Cloud Archives?
Jonathan Zittrain proposes a very interesting hypothetical: Suppose a laptop were found at the apartment of one of the perpetrators of last year's Paris attacks. It's searched by the authorities pursuant to a warrant, and they find a file on the laptop that's a set of instructions for carrying out the attacks. The discovery would surely help in the prosecution...
Indias Internet activists have a SOPA moment: no poor Internet for poor people
My latest Guardian column, ‘Poor internet for poor people': India’s activists fight Facebook connection plan, tells the story of how India’s amazing Internet activists have beaten back Facebook’s bid to become gatekeeper to the Internet for the next billion users. They’ve been assisted in this by Facebook’s own stupid mistakes, to be sure, but all... more
More Microsoft pain
So finally I have my CIFS file systems so that they don't require re-entry of passwords every time I boot dischord. And then Yvonne came to me and said she couldn't process her photos. Further investigation showed that she didn't have write access to the file system. Why not? I still have no idea. Lots of messing around showed that from the FreeBSD/Samba side all was OK, but somehow Microsoft (which reports the remote file system as NTFS ) didn't want to know. How I hate Microsoft! ACM only downloads articles once.
BNF meets Bowie
This is floating around teh interwebz and I normally don't post this kind of thing, but since this blog recently discussed the death of Peter Naur, and since David Bowie passed away recently, I thought this was appropriate. This song, Modern Love, was a big hit around the time that I was first getting interested in Bowie. At that time he'd already had more fame and success in the music industry than most could even hope for. As a result, I learned his music in a strange order. First his hits of the day, then going back to his back catalog and learning about his early career and music.
Spamming Someone from PayPal
Troy Hunt has identified a new spam vector. PayPal allows someone to send someone else a $0 invoice. The spam is in the notes field. But it's a legitimate e-mail from PayPal, so it evades many of the traditional spam filters. Presumably it doesn't cost anything to send a $0 invoice via PayPal. Hopefully, the company will close this loophole...
More tiwi pain
On with my software installation for tiwi, the new multimedia machine. Yesterday I stopped with not being able to run mythtv-setup. Tried it today. It didn't fail: it told me that it couldn't access the database that I created yesterday. Further investigation showed that the port had removed MySQL client and server version 5.5, but I didn't notice that it only installed the client for 5.6. On the other hand, it didn't stop mysqld_safe, so I was able to create the database. After this morning's outage, of course, it was no longer present. That's particularly strange when you look into /usr/ports/multimedia/mythtv/Makefile and read: MYSQL_RUN_DEPENDS= mysqld_safe:${PORTSDIR}/databases/mysql${MYSQL_VER}-server But that's another day's head-scratching.
Power failure recovery
Rebooting eureka had some strange side effects. Yvonne came in in the afternoon telling me that she could no longer access the network. She meant firefox, of course, and sure enough, it hung trying to access the home page, and then claimed that it couldn't access 180.150.4.128. I recognize that address: it used to be the address of my external interface to the world while at Kleins Road. What's looking for that? Tried other browsers. Worked. Works from my machine. External sites were accessible from Yvonne's firefox. Wrong proxy settings? cache.lemis.com, port 8080. cache is a CNAME for eureka, so that's not an issue, and anyway, it only affected the home page.
Power failure recovery
Rebooting eureka had some strange side effects. Yvonne came in in the afternoon telling me that she could no longer access the network. She meant firefox, of course, and sure enough, it hung trying to access the home page, and then claimed that it couldn't access 180.150.4.128. I recognize that address: it used to be the address of my external interface to the world while at Kleins Road. What's looking for that? Tried other browsers. Worked. Works from my machine. External sites were accessible from Yvonne's firefox. Wrong proxy settings? cache.lemis.com, port 8080. cache is a CNAME for eureka, so that's not an issue, and anyway, it only affected the home page.
Fighting DRM in the W3C
Cory Doctorow has a good post on the EFF website about how they're trying to fight digital rights management software in the World Wide Web Consortium. So we came back with a new proposal: the W3C could have its cake and eat it too. It could adopt a rule that requires members who help make DRM standards to promise not...
Sean Penn's Opsec
This article talks about the opsec used by Sean Penn surrounding his meeting with El Chapo. Security experts say there aren't enough public details to fully analyze Penn's operational security (opsec). But they described the paragraph above as "incomprehensible" and "gibberish." Let's try to break it down: Penn describes using "TracPhones," by which he likely means TracFones, which are cheap...
Hello tiwi
The new disk has arrived, so started on what I fear will be a slow, painful path to replacing teevee (FreeBSD display machine) and cvr2 (Linux recording machine) with a single machine that I've decided to call tiwi (pronounced as German). Every time I've tried something like this in the past, it has been really painful: On 18 September 2004 I made my first attempts, still with analogue tuners. This was the first teevee. It took me until 4 June 2005 to get the tuner working, using xawtv running on FreeBSD.
Tonight at BBLISA (Boston/Cambridge)
Just a quick reminder that I'll be the speaker tonight's BBLISA meeting (Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 7pm). If you are in the Boston/Cambridge area, please stop by! My presentation is titled "Transactional System Administration Is Killing Us and Must be Stopped". This is the same talk I presented recently at LISA, which was very well received. It includes a preview of material from our upcoming 3rd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration.
The Internet of Things that Talks About You Behind Your Back
SilverPush is an Indian startup that's trying to figure out all the different computing devices you own. It embeds inaudible sounds into the webpages you read and the television commercials you watch. Software secretly embedded in your computers, tablets, and smartphones pick up the signals, and then use cookies to transmit that information back to SilverPush. The result is that...
Fixing Ashampoo
I've had a lot of issues with Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6, and I've complained rather vehemently about the lack of support. But in the last week that has changed. It's still not clear what the problem was, but messing around with administrator privilege drove it into hiding. But there's still more, and now I have a total of four different tickets. I'm also getting mail from the same person about the same issue (I think) both in English and German. How do I sort that mess out? ACM only downloads articles once.
Michael Hayden and the Dutch Government Are against Crypto Backdoors
Last week, former NSA Director Michael Hayden made a very strong argument against deliberately weakening security products by adding backdoors: Americans' safety is best served by the highest level of technology possible, and that the country's intelligence agencies have figured out ways to get around encryption. "Before any civil libertarians want to come up to me afterwards and get my...
NYC SRE Tech talks: A new monthly series
Google NYC has announced a series in monthly tech talks for the Site Reliability Engineering/DevOps community in New York City! The first meeting is January 20th at their Chelsea NYC office and will include a number of short talks by speakers from Google, Dropbox, and StackOverflow.com. I'll be the speaker from StackOverflow. The event will be held on Wednesday, January 20 at Google's campus in Chelsea, at 75 Ninth Avenue. Doors open at 5:30pm, food will be served at 6pm, and talks start at 6:30pm and run until 8pm. RSVPs are required because this is NYC. More info and RSVP information is here at this link.
Spider: found
I suspected that the Huntsman I found a few days ago was on his last legs (though they were all still there). Today I found what might be his remains: I hope his demise is not a comment on the reading material. ACM only downloads articles once.
Olympus focus stacking
I've had the firmware release 4 for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 for over a month now, and with one exception I haven't tried out the focus stacking feature. Since I'm considering buying the only macro lens that supports it properly, it's high time to investigate. The stacking is somewhat primitive, and of course the documentation is almost non-existent. There are two options. In each case you take multiple images, starting at the closest position, and changing focus by a specific increment for each subsequent image. The images are taken with the new electronic shutter feature, which (undocumented) has a total exposure time of 1/13 s, like a very slow focal plane shutter.
Olympus Viewer 3 revisited
I've tried Olympus Viewer several times over the years, and I've never found it to be much use. About the only use I can find is to correct for distortion for lenses that DxO Optics Pro doesn't support. Over two years ago I used it to correct the distortion of the Olympus Zuiko Digital 18-180mm f/3.5-6.3 that I had at the time. It took me another 6 weeks to find out how to save 16 bit TIFF. It offered the choice of EXIF TIFF (8 bit only) or TIFF (8 or 16 bit, with choice of EXIF data if you want it).
Zoner Photo Stud...
Spent most of the day playing around with photographic software and techniques. It's tiring. First up was a free copy of what may be called Zoner Photo Studio 17, but the windows can't be bothered to say so, and it's too much of a mouthful for Microsoft, which calls it Zoner Photo Stud... . It's the previous release, thus presumably the fact that I didn't have to pay for it. What can it do? It's hard to say, since it doesn't say. Firing it up brings up a series of windows that remind me considerably of DxO Optics Pro , and they're relatively intuitive to navigate.
Mac OS X, iOS, and Flash Had the Most Discovered Vulnerabilities in 2015
Interesting analysis: Which software had the most publicly disclosed vulnerabilities this year? The winner is none other than Apple's Mac OS X, with 384 vulnerabilities. The runner-up? Apple's iOS, with 375 vulnerabilities. Rounding out the top five are Adobe's Flash Player, with 314 vulnerabilities; Adobe's AIR SDK, with 246 vulnerabilities; and Adobe AIR itself, also with 246 vulnerabilities. For comparison,...
Cloud Eventing
So, I helped build Amazon CloudWatch Events (blog, AWS console), which just launched. Been a while since my last extended spell of being an actual software engineer. Shipping feels good. What it does The clouds asynchronous; changes happen when they happen. Maybe you called an API a minute ago, maybe a database failed over, maybe your app saw a traffic surge. Assuming you want to know when they happen, the traditional approach is POLL LIKE HELL. Oops, I believe the polite usage is repeatedly call Describe APIs . The idea here is for our services to broadcast Events (OK, theyre really little JSON blobs) and for you to write Rules that match events using Patterns (OK, theyre really little JSON blobs) and route em to Targets , which are often Lambda functions but can also be various kinds of queues and streams and so on.
(Boston/Cambridge) See you this week at BBLISA!
I'll be the speaker at this week's BBLISA meeting (Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 7pm). If you are in the Boston/Cambridge area, please stop by! My presentation is titled "Transactional System Administration Is Killing Us and Must be Stopped". This is the same talk I presented recently at LISA, which was very well received. It includes a preview of material from our upcoming 3rd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration. For more information about the talk, directions to the meeting, and so, on, visit the BBLISA website at http://www.bblisa.org/calendar.html
IT Security and the Normalization of Deviance
Professional pilot Ron Rapp has written a fascinating article on a 2014 Gulfstream plane that crashed on takeoff. The accident was 100% human error and entirely preventable -- the pilots ignored procedures and checklists and warning signs again and again. Rapp uses it as example of what systems theorists call the "normalization of deviance," a term coined by sociologist Diane...
Old computers for sale
Andy Farkas is having trouble with an old MSCP disk in his VAXstation. Well, I can't help there, and if the disk is really toast, it could be difficult to replace. But I do have a MicroVAX II, and it has two disks: Not that I want to use it, but it seems a shame to scrap it. So Andy will take it, he says. He lives near Bundaberg, only 2000 odd km away.
Ashampoo: Fixed !
Another message from Ashampoo support today: maybe a problem with access right's - If you do a right mouse click on the programs icon > Run as Administrator, does it work that way? Interesting idea. Both the users for which it worked had administrator privileges. OK, let's first give Yvonne administrator privileges and see what happens. Crash. But only once, and after that it worked. I've seen that before, too. So what was the issue? Buggy software, of course. You don't crash on a permissions issue, you report the problem. And why should she need admin privileges anyway?
GPS navigator evolution
Over the years I've done a lot of ranting about the quality of GPS navigators. But today I saw one that put things in perspective. It's built in to Melinda's Toyota Land Cruiser, and it is appallingly bad. The car isn't that old, but it makes it clear how quickly navigators age. Probably the biggest pain is that it has an ABC keyboard. Given that everybody uses computers nowadays, this was a poor choice. And though I complain about the user interface of modern navigation software, I've got to admit that, up to a point, it has improved. It took us 15 minutes to input the route back home.
Debugging, Microsoft style
Finally I have a response from Ashampoo support about the crashes in Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6. Edit the registry: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Ashampoo\Ashampoo Photo Optimizer] Why should that help? I had already established that the registry had been cleaned a couple of weeks ago, and I had reported that to Ashampoo. Took another look. Yes, after reinstallation the entries had been added, and there were a number, including the one that this patch was supposed to install: Applied the patch anyway, and of course it made no difference.
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Ink Pasta
Squid ink pasta is not hard to make, and is a really good side for a wide variety of fish recipes. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
Podcast Interview with Me
The Technoskeptic has posted a good interview with me on its website. Normally it charges for its content, but this interview is available for free....
"How Stories Deceive"
Fascinating New Yorker article about Samantha Azzopardi, serial con artist and deceiver. The article is really about how our brains allow stories to deceive us: Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future. Stories are so natural that we don't...
Replacing Judgment with Algorithms
China is considering a new "social credit" system, designed to rate everyone's trustworthiness. Many fear that it will become a tool of social control -- but in reality it has a lot in common with the algorithms and systems that score and classify us all every day. Human judgment is being replaced by automatic algorithms, and that brings with it...
No change?
A while back I was asked to sign a petition about the National Broadband Network on change.org. To do so I had to sign up, but since then I've been bombarded with requests to sign up for all sorts of hair-brained schemes. Time to unsubscribe. But how? There are no links. After much searching I found an explanation. With a link? Of course not, just an explanation of where to go. Went there, and it didn't look anything like the description. I got the distinct impression that they didn't want me to unsubscribe. OK, if that's the way they want it, I have a simpler option.
Resilience over rigidity: how to solve tomorrows computer problems today
My new Locus Magazine column, Wicked Problems: Resilience Through Sensing, proposes a solution the urgent problem we have today of people doing bad stuff with computers. Where once “bad stuff with computers” meant “hacking your server,” now it could potentially mean “blocking air-traffic control transmissions” or “programming your self-driving car to kill you.” The traditional... more
Straight Talk about Terrorism
Nice essay that lists ten "truths" about terrorism: We can't keep the bad guys out. Besides, the threat is already inside. More surveillance won't get rid of terrorism, either. Defeating the Islamic State won't make terrorism go away. Terrorism still remains a relatively minor threat, statistically speaking. But don't relax too much, because things will probably get worse before they...
Expanding the Cloud: Introducing the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region
In November, Amazon Web Services announced that it would launch a new AWS infrastructure region in South Korea. Today, Im happy to announce that the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region is now generally available for use by customers worldwide. A region in South Korea has been highly requested by companies around the world who want to take full advantage of Koreas world-leading Internet connectivity and provide their customers with quick, low-latency access to websites, mobile applications, games, SaaS applications, and more. Weve also been hearing many requests from Korean companies, including large enterprises like Samsung and Mirae Asset. For example, Samsung Electronic Printing used AWS to deploy its Printing Apps Center in a way that didnt require them to invest up-front capital and kept total costs quite low.
Expanding the Cloud: Introducing the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region
In November, Amazon Web Services announced that it would launch a new AWS infrastructure region in South Korea. Today, I?m happy to announce that the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region is now generally available for use by customers worldwide. A region in South Korea has been highly requested by companies around the world who want to take full advantage of Korea?s world-leading Internet connectivity and provide their customers with quick, low-latency access to websites, mobile applications, games, SaaS applications, and more.
More graphics investigation
Why is X support for Intel graphics chips so bad? Why, is X support for Intel graphics chips so bad? I recall it being so in the past, and my current experience (nothing over 1024×768) is in accordance, but the same chips work well under Microsoft. Went looking in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and found no mention of the monitor That rang a bell: this monitor is on the el-cheapo USB KVM that I bought a couple of months ago. I had already established that it doesn't communicate EDID information. But for exactly that reason I have a copy of the EDID on file, and that's what I use for eureka, which also accesses the monitor by the KVM.
SHA-1 Deprecation: Pro, Con, or Extend?
I read Ryan's article about why SHA-1 should be deprecated faster and why we should veto the proposed extensions. It is an excellent explanation of what's going on. I highly recommend it (and look forward to the complete series when he publishes it): https://medium.com/@sleevi_/legacy-verified-legacy-solutions-15eb688716e4#.pc35r37o1 I feel like the cert provider's reply should be this: Dear Ryan: Screw you. You obviously don't understand the business we are in. We are in the business of PRINTING RANDOM NUMBERS AND SELLING THEM FOR UNGODLY HUGE SUMS. You're naive proposal may help the world, but how does that help us profit? Here's an example, Ryan: 4 See?
How the US Is Playing Both Ends on Data Privacy
There's an excellent article in Foreign Affairs on how the European insistence on data privacy -- most recently illustrated by their invalidation of the "safe harbor" agreement -- is really about the US talking out of both sides of its mouth on the issue: championing privacy in public, but spying on everyone in private. As long as the US keeps...
Display cards for new teevee
Gradually I'm getting the pieces together for the new teevee. I have the box, and disk and tuners are on the way. But the on-board graphics chip is from Intel, and for some reason X can't drive it with the required 1920×1080 resolution. And even if it could, there's no suitable acceleration. I had expected this, and I've been planning to install a cheap nVidia card. But choosing graphics cards is a pain, and I've been dragging my feet. Finally today I got round to looking for one. What criteria? The only one I really had was that there should be no fan.
1981 CIA Report on Deception
Recently declassified: Deception Maxims: Fact and Folklore, Office of Research and Development, Central Intelligence Agency, June 1981. Research on deception and con games has advanced in the past 25 years, but this is still interesting to read....
(Boston/Cambridge) See you next week at BBLISA!
I'll be the speaker at next week's BBLISA meeting (Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 7pm). If you are in the Boston/Cambridge area, please stop by! My presentation is titled "Transactional System Administration Is Killing Us and Must be Stopped". This is the same talk I presented recently at LISA, which was very well received. It includes a preview of material from our upcoming 3rd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration. For more information about the talk, directions to the meeting, and so, on, visit the BBLISA website at http://www.bblisa.org/calendar.html
NSA Spies on Israeli Prime Minister
The Wall Street Journal has a story that the NSA spied on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli government officials, and incidentally collected conversations between US citizens -- including lawmakers -- and those officials. US lawmakers who are usually completely fine with NSA surveillance are aghast at this behavior, as both Glenn Greenwald and Trevor Timm explain. Greenwald:...
Windows 10 Whole-Disk Encryption without Key Escrow
On the Intercept, Micah Lee has a good article that talks about how Microsoft is collecting the hard-drive encryption keys of Windows 10 users, and how to disable that "feature."...
IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday
I remember in the 1990s every vendor was saying, "whoa whoa whoa! You have to give us time to roll out silicon that will support this stuff!" and demanding 10 years before deployment. It takes a while to develop silicon, and years to get it into the field. Well, it has been twice your request. No f'ing excuses. IPv6 should be the default protocol on all network equipment. Hey FIOS. Hey Comcast. Hey Time Warner! You have no excuse either. And stop encouraging people to use NAT. That's soooo 1990s. Stateful inspection firewalls do not require NAT. IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment https://t.co/JX4pS1VSjA— John W.
De-Anonymizing Users from their Coding Styles
Interesting blog post: We are able to de-anonymize executable binaries of 20 programmers with 96% correct classification accuracy. In the de-anonymization process, the machine learning classifier trains on 8 executable binaries for each programmer to generate numeric representations of their coding styles. Such a high accuracy with this small amount of training data has not been reached in previous attempts....
Peter Naur, RIP, (1928-2016)
Computer scientists Peter Naur has passed away. He is the "N" in "BNF". If you aren't sure what BNF is, you may recognize it as a diagram like this: or this: You can imagine how error prone it was to specify syntax of new languages and systems before this notation was adopted. Imagine explaining either of those diagrams by writing a paragraph in English. Now imagine dozens of people trying to implement the language based on this description and all coming up with slightly different variations, each slightly incompatible. That was the world. You can see BNF notation all over the place.
Working around Ashampoo breakage
It's been nearly 2 weeks since I reported problems with Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6, and so far I've had no response. To be fair, it is over the Christmas break, but I need to run it for Yvonne. I've established that it somehow depends on the user, so one option would be to delete user yvonne and start all over again. Another would be to get her to run it as a different user. That's easy enough to kludge: --- photoopt 2015/11/20 02:17:12 1.29 +++ photoopt 2016/01/03 21:48:41 @@ -19,6 +19,9 @@ if [ "$OPTDIR" = "" ]; then OPTDIR=/Photos/Ashampoo-`whoami` fi +if [ `whoami` = "yvonne" ]; then + rdesktop -u root -p Braindeath -a 16 -T "rdesktop dischord" -g 1870x1030+0 dischord & +fi OLDDIR=`pwd` # current (source) directory Why not just delete ...
Codes of conduct
It's no secret that I don't like the concept of a code of conduct. With the current noise about Randi Harper leaving the project, there are renewed calls to do something about the state of the FreeBSD Code of Conduct, which is perceived as being out of date. This clearly implies that good behaviour evolves. Maybe it does to a certain point, but that just makes it all the more silly to enshrine it in a document. Summarizing (originally on IRC), I see two reasons that speak against a code of conduct: They're mechanical.
Best and Worst DevOps songs of 2015
Wait... you didn't know there are songs about DevOps? Hell to the yeah! Best DevOps Song of 2015: Uptown Funk (Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars) Uptown Funk is exemplary of good DevOps operations: It encourages being evidence-driven. An important principle of DevOps is that you should base decisions on evidence and data, not lore and intuition. Intuition is great but only gets you so far. With a tiny system is is possible for a single sysadmin to know enough about it to make good guesses. However modern systems are complex enough that we must collect data, analyze it, and base decisions on that data.
Preparing for teeveeNG
I've been planning to replace both teevee (TV display machine) and cvr2 (recording machine, running MythTV on Linux) with a single machine running FreeBSD. I have the machine, a new disk is on the way. Now I need a tuner. What's wrong with the old ones? Not supported, and they're full-height PCI. But nowadays USB tuners are a dime a dozen. Well, maybe not quite, but they're cheap. The question is, will they work with FreeBSD? One of them suggests that it will: 13. Support all systems(up to WIN8.1) except MAC, LINUX The most important thing is the tuner chipset, and many people don't bother to specify that.
Suspend and resume with FreeBSD
Somehow it grates that I can suspend the state of my Microsoft boxes to RAM and then wake them up with a magic package over the net, but I can't do that with my FreeBSD boxen. It used to work, in the Good Old Days before ACPIon many occasions I was able suspend my laptop, fly intercontinentally and resume. On a couple of occasions the joy was lessened by the discovery that I had a file system at the other end of the world mounted via NFS. But with the advent of ACPI, I couldn't get it to work any more.
FreeBSD core team problems
I really don't like Facebook, but from time to time people refer to me, and then I get an informative mail message with a link. This seems to be the only way to I know get a reference to a Facebook post. In this case, Josh Paetzel referred to something that I apparently said to him decades ago: Greg Lehey told me two decades ago I was a part of the "second generation of BSD users" who wanted to get things done with BSD, not hack on BSD. Documentation was written for the latter group.
Perspective conversion with Hugin
I take a lot of photos with my fisheye lens, mainly for stitching with Hugin. As discussed yesterday, the results aren't fisheye projections. But how do I convert a projection? Hugin does this easily enough if it's handling a panorama. But the Assistant refuses to stitch if there's only one image. But you don't have to use the Assistant to stitch; the Stitcher doesn't care how many images there are, so you can use the assistant to display the image, manipulate it, and then go to the Stitcher to produce the result. Just pay attention to the size. In this example, the original image has a resolution of 4608×3456, and the converted trans mercator image has only 768×462: ...
Friday Squid Blogging: Video of Live Giant Squid
Giant squid filmed swimming through a harbor in Japan: Reports in Japanese say that the creature was filmed on December 24, seen by an underwater camera swimming near boat moorings. It was reportedly about 13 feet long and 3 feet around. Some on Twitter have suggested that the species may be Architeuthis, a deep-ocean dwelling creature that can grow up...