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Justin's Linklog Posts

Mobile phone repair at Karol Bagh Market

Published November 11, 2005

I love these pictures:

<img src="http://taint.org/xfer/2005/050330-india-repairmarket.jpg" width=400 height=300 border=0 />

I link-blogged that article ages ago, but I keep thinking of it, so it’s worth a proper post in its own right, to expand on that.

These guys work at an Indian mobile phone repair stall in Karol Bagh Market, in Delhi. The blog entry notes:

As in China, many of the mobile phone shops and street kiosks offer mobile phone repair service. Many of these guys can strip and rebuild a mobile phone in minutes. … a lot of the hyperbole surrounding western hacker culture makes me smile compared to what these guys are doing day in day out.

Also, a commenter notes: ‘in india, for about 1$, you can convert a CDMA phone to GSM !! also, they can unlock phones and do a veriety of hacks for little money.’

There’s so many lessons I’m getting from it:

  1. I’ve had a shoe resoled in 5 minutes for next to nothing at a stall not too different from that — but this is a mobile phone. It’s amazing to think of that level of hardware hacking taking place every day at a back-street market stall.

  2. Those phones were doubtless planned, as a product, with a ‘ship back to manufacturer’ support plan. That clearly isn’t going to fly without that developed-world luxury, Fedex. So this is the developing-world street finding its own uses for things, and working around the dependencies on systems that are optimised for the developed world.

  3. It’s the flip-side of Joshua Ellis’ grim meathook future, where we’re not facing down the barrel of a New-Orleans-style descent into barbarity if the power suddenly cuts out; tech can go on. It may be a little chunkier, though, and with more duct tape, but hey.

  4. It’s also a beautiful demonstration of how those of us in the developed world who assume that developing-worlders cannot find a use for high tech, are talking shit. (cf. Ethan Zuckerman as a good example of someone who gets this, more than almost anyone else I can think of.)

I think this is one of the most important lessons I learned while travelling through India and SE Asia a few years back — the developing world is using high tech, and it’s not using it in the same ways we do — or even the ways we anticipated, and we have plenty to learn from them too.

Found at Jan Chipchase’s site, which is full of great contemplation on this stuff. (The story on Seoul’s selca culture is nuts, too — it’s like Flickr^1000.)

(PS: I have a wisdom tooth extraction scheduled for next Friday… wish me luck. That’s another thing you don’t want to happen in the developing world, although I daresay it’d rock in Bangkok!)

(Update: clarification — my cite of Ethan Z was meant as a compliment ;)

IFSO Seminar In Dublin

Published November 4, 2005

Passing this on for readers in Ireland — this sounds like an interesting event. From the FSFE-IE mailing list:

On the morning of Friday November 18th, IFSO is organising an event hosted by MEP Proinsias De Rossa about preventing software patents in the EU. Topics covered will be:

  • An analysis of the software patent directive;
  • a discussion of Free Software and computer security;
  • an introduction to IFSO/FSFE and their work;
  • the future of legislative obstacles to the development and distribution of software.

The event will be held in the European Parliament Office in Ireland, and spaces are limited. Participants are therefore asked to register their intent to attend. See here for more details.

Urban Dead HUD

Published October 29, 2005

I’ve been playing a bit of Urban Dead recently. Urban Dead is a very low-key, web-based MMORPG — you play a 3-minute turn once every 24 hours. It needs some rebalancing and some new features, especially given the organised nature of some of the bigger marauding zombie hordes, but I’m still finding it fun.

To scratch a couple of itches, I’ve written a Greasemonkey user script for UD called the Urban Dead HUD. It adds several nifty features to the user interface:

  • keyboard accelerator access keys for the action buttons, and your inventory — very handy when you’re attacking an enemy repeatedly;
  • an on-page long-distance map of the surrounding squares;
  • a distance tracker, which tracks the distances to "important" locations for you

There’s screenshots on the download page, so you can see what I’m talking about.

Greasemonkey is a fantastic tool, as is Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Greasemonkey, which has repeatedly turned out to be an excellent, well-written reference while hacking this. Thanks guys!

trueColor() bug in GD::Graph

Published October 28, 2005

Hacking on a new rule-QA subsystem for SpamAssassin, I came across this bug in GD::Graph. If:

  • you are drawing a graph using GD::Graph;
  • outputting in PNG or GIF format;
  • and the ‘box’ area — the margins outside the graph — keeps coming up as black, instead of white as you’ve specified;

check your code for calls to GD::Image->trueColor(1);, or the third argument to the GD::Image->new() constructor being 1. It appears that there’s a bug in the current version of GD (or GD::Graph) where graphing to a true-colour buffer is concerned, in that the ‘box’ area continually comes out in black.

(Seen in versions: perl 5.8.7, GD 2.23, GD::Graph 1.43 on Linux ix86; perl 5.8.6, GD 2.28, GD::Graph 1.43 on Solaris 5.10.)

False Positive ‘Reports’ != FP Measurement

Published October 26, 2005

John Graham-Cumming writes an excellent monthly newsletter on anti-spam, concentrating on technical aspects of detecting and filtering spam. Me, I have a habit of sending follow-up emails in response ;)

This month, it was this comment, from a techie at another software company making anti-spam products:

When I look at the stats produced on our spam traps, which get millions of messages per day from 11 countries all over the world, I see our spam catch rate being consistently over 98% and over 99% most of the time. We also don’t get more than 1 or 2 false positive reports from our customers per week, which can give an impression of our FP rate, considering the number of mailboxes we protect.

My response:

‘Worth noting that a "false positive report from our customer" is NOT the same thing as a "false positive" (although in fairness, [the sender] does note only that it will "give an impression" of their FP rate).

This is something that I’ve seen increasingly in the commercial anti-spam world — attempting to measure false positive rates from what gets reported "upstream" via the support channels.

In reality, the false positives are still happening — it’s just that there are obstacles between the end-user noticing them, and the FP report arriving on a developer’s desk; changes to the organisational structure, surly tech support staff, or even whether the user was too busy to send that report, will affect whether the FP is counted.

Many FPs will go uncounted as a result. As a result, IMO it is not a valid approach to measurement.’

I’ve been saying this a lot in private circles recently, so in my opinion that’s a good reason to post it here…

Wired on the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone

Published October 26, 2005

Via Cory at Boing Boing, here’s a great Wired post-mortem on how all the corporate vested interests (including Apple!) turned a nice concept for a new, music-playing mobile phone, into a useless, DRM-hogtied, designed-by-committee turd.

That’s worth a read, in itself. However, what really blew my mind was this:

Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia and head of its multimedia group, has bad news for the [music] labels. … He pushes a couple of buttons on the [phone’s] keypad. Up pops Symella, a new peer-to-peer downloading program from Hungary. As the name suggests, Symella is a Symbian application that runs on Gnutella, the P2P network that hosts desktop file-sharing apps like BearShare and Limewire. It was created earlier this year by two students at a Budapest engineering school that for four years has been exploring mobile P2P in conjunction with a local Nokia research center.

Symella doesn’t come installed on the N91; Vanjoki downloaded it from the university Web site. "Now I am connected to a number of peers," he continues, "and I can just go and search for music or any other files. If I find some music I like and it’s 5 megabytes and I want to download it – the carriers will love this. It will give them a lot of traffic."

I had no idea the platform was that open, at this stage. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next…

Ouch!

Published October 25, 2005

my new ipod.jpg
Originally uploaded by jmason.

Yep, they really are that easy to scratch, it seems.

UK ATM fraud in the 1990s

Published October 24, 2005

The Register: How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking. This story is mind-boggling; it claims that UK ATM security had two major issues that have been kept secret since the 1990s:

  • An insecure data format used for the data on the magnetic stripes in one bank’s cards;

  • Another bank’s computing department "going rogue", "cracking PINs and taking money from customers’ accounts with abandon" as the story puts it. Yikes.

The latter problem is scary, but in my opinion the former problem is more interesting from a computer security point of view.

This is a classic example of bad data format design, as it left the PIN and the account details individually rewritable — in other words, an attacker could (and did) change one while keeping the other intact.

This British Computer Society abstract provides more details on the who, how and where:

… it was revealed that UKP 130,000 had been stolen from Abbey National cardholders during 1994 and 1995 with counterfeit cards. Andrew Stone, a bank security consultant who had been advising Which?, the magazine of the Consumers’ Association, was jailed for five and a half years for the theft. This fraud involved spying on Abbey customers as they used their cards in automated teller machines (ATMs) or cash dispensers… [Stone] recorded card details and personal identification numbers (PINs) using powerful video cameras. The details were then encoded on the magnetic strips of other cards.

Finally, another quote from the Reg story:

why is he telling this explosive story now? Because chip and PIN has been deployed across the UK ATM network. "The vulnerability in the UK ATM network was still there to be exploited — if someone had chanced upon it."

I wonder if other banking systems worldwide are still vulnerable, however? Did any other banks elsewhere license the vulnerable systems from UK banks, without knowing about these vulnerabilities? How long did it take for them to be fixed, if they were fixed?

Avian Flu, Health vs. IP Protection

Published October 22, 2005

Over at O’Reilly Radar, a question came up as to whether Roche’s patent on Tamiflu should be respected if, in the event of a pandemic, people were dying on a large scale due to an inability for Roche to produce Tamiflu in sufficient quantities.

James Love of cptech.org recently pointed out that the WTO made an exception for a situation like this, allowing importation of medicines from foreign countries in violation of local patent licenses in the case of an emergency, in a 30 August 2003 decision:

Your country would benefit from importing generic medicines produced under a compulsory license, in order to build up adequate stockpiles or to obtain needed medicines in the event of a crisis.

However, many developed-world countries have explicitly made a commitment never to use this limited TRIPS waiver, namely the following:

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the US.

Another 10 countries about to join the EU said they would only use the system to import in national emergencies or other circumstances of extreme urgency, and would not import once they had joined the EU: Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovak Republic and Slovenia.

So there you have it; the trade representatives for many developed-world countries took some kind of ‘strong IP’ high moral stand, and gave up this ability. I’ll bet national health authorities are, right now, wandering government halls around the world, looking for trade representative asses to kick…

‘Internet Stamps’: ‘Sender Pays’ Is Back From The Dead

Published October 22, 2005

Jeremy Zawodny mentions that Tim Bray has proposed something he calls ‘Internet Stamps’ to solve the blog-spam problem; here’s Tim’s description of how it works:

An Internet Stamp is an assertion, signed by a Post Office, that some chunk of text was issued by someone who paid for the stamp. At least one major Post Office will be required by government statute to sell stamps to anyone in the world for either US$0.01 or EUR 0.01, and no stamp-selling organization will be recognized which sells stamps for less than this amount. For this to work, the number of stamp-selling organizations needs to be small and the organizations stable; another reason why Post Offices are plausible candidates.

It works like this: if you want to buy stamps, you sign up for an account with your Post Office; it works like paper stamps, you buy a bunch at a time in advance, in small amounts like $20 or EUR 10. Then the Post Office offers a Web Service where you connect to a port, authenticate yourself and send along some text; the Post Office decrements your account and sends back the stamp. There are a variety of digesting/signing/PKI techniques that could be applied to implement the stamps; a standard is required but should be easy.

Apparently himself and a few other guys chatted about it at the first Foo Camp, back in 2003. Funnily enough, in the anti-spam community, we were having our own chats about it, but it sounds like our paths didn’t cross for some reason…

We call this idea ‘sender pays’. Earlier in 2003, in June, John Levine published what I’d consider the canonical wrap-up of why it will not work, in ‘An Overview of e-Postage’.

That report demolishes the use of ‘sender pays’ for e-mail anti-spam, on three main counts:

  • Creating a transaction system large enough for e-postage would be prohibitively expensive. The nearest parallel is the credit card transaction system, which deals with 1% of the transaction volume per day, and with much larger profit margins to make it worth their while.

  • The true financial, administrative, and social costs of e-postage are completely unknown. What do you do when a ‘bad guy’ steals the e-postage stamps off Aunt Millie’s hard disk, without her knowledge? How much is the Fraud Handling Department going to cost? Is she just going to be out of luck when this happens? Will you need to use whitelisting and a content-based anti-spam filter as well, to filter out the messages sent using valid, but stolen, stamps?

  • Users hate micropayments. In short, see Andrew Odlyzko’s research.

Now, using it on weblog spam is a little more practical than e-mail spam, for one because it has a lower daily volume of transactions; but these objections still stand, in my opinion.

John Levine is one of the foremost authorities in anti-spam, and this report has been a mainstay of the anti-spam canon for two years. Anyone discussing a new anti-spam concept really ought to know this report backwards and forwards by this stage, and go into some detail as to how their proposal deals with the issues raised, if it’s to be taken seriously.

‘I Go Chop Your Dollar’, the video

Published October 21, 2005

Wow! videos.antville.org (via robotwisdom) came through with the goods. Go check out the video for Nkem Owoh (aka Osuofia) singing "I Go Chop Your Dollar", which turns out to be pretty catchy!

Here’s the lyrics so all us oyinbos can sing along:

I don suffer no be small
Upon say I get sense
Poverty no good at all, no
Na im make I join this business
419 no be thief, its just a game
Everybody dey play am
if anybody fall mugu, ha! my brother I go chop am

Chorus
National Airport na me get am
National Stadium na me build am
President na my sister brother
You be the mugu, I be the master
Oyinbo I go chop your dollar, I go take your money dissapear
419 is just a game, you are the loser I am the winner
The refinery na me get am,
The contract, na you I go give am
But you go pay me small money make I bring am
you be the mugu, I be the master… na me be the master ooo!!!!

When Oyinbo play wayo, them go say na new style
When country man do im own, them go de shout bring am, kill am, die!
Oyinbo people greedy, I say them greedy
I don see them tire thats why when them fall enter my trap o!
I dey show them fire

Lyrics from here; there’s a few other funny comments there too:

just saw the "i go chop your dollar"……i am glad we are blessed with a natural comedian as good as Nkem Owoh…..thank God say oyibo (sic) no sabi pidgin if not dis song for give them small panic……..

Heh, looks like the ‘small panic’ is now underway ;)

‘I Will Eat Your Dollars’

Published October 21, 2005

An excellent, eye-opening interview with Samuel, an ex-419 scammer.

There’s even a theme tune:

Their anthem, "I Go Chop Your Dollars," hugely popular in Lagos, hit the airwaves a few months ago as a CD penned by an artist called Osofia:

"419 is just a game, you are the losers, we are the winners.
White people are greedy, I can say they are greedy
White men, I will eat your dollars, will take your money and disappear.
419 is just a game, we are the masters, you are the losers."

Reportedly, Lagos inhabitants paint "This House Is Not For Sale" in big letters on their homes, in case someone posing as the owner tries to put it on the market.

Regarding the workings of the scam:

[Samuel] sent 500 e-mails a day and usually received about seven replies. Shepherd would then take over. "When you get a reply [to a 419 spam], it’s 70% sure that you’ll get the money," Samuel said.

(via Nelson.)

‘Life Hacking’ and Metacity

Published October 17, 2005

The NY Times story on "life hacking" is a pretty good one, and an excellent intro for anyone who hasn’t been religiously reading the changing transcripts of Danny O’Brien’s talk and so on.

This line:

Mann has embarked on a 12-step-like triage: he canceled his Netflix account, trimmed his instant-messaging "buddy list" so only close friends can contact him and set his e-mail program to bother him only once an hour.

Reminded me of something I ran into recently.

Last month, I switched from Sawfish, the venerable UNIX window manager, to GNOME’s Metacity, which is the new(ish) GNOME standard window manager. (I was tired of some long-standing Sawfish crashes, and didn’t want to be the last Sawfish user on the planet, which was seeming increasingly likely.)

One interesting UI change is that application windows no longer ‘pop up’ — if an app wants to notify you of some important change, it instead can only cause its taskbar button to subtly pulse in the corner of your screen.

Initially, this threw me for a loop, and I rudely (albeit accidentally) ignored my friends on IM and suchlike. But I quickly got the hang of glancing at the taskbar once in a while when I wasn’t concentrating on a task; it’s now second nature, and has significantly reduced the number of interruptions I find myself experiencing in a typical day.

BTW, in passing: switching WMs is a big deal, user interface-wise. One of the key gating factors, for me, was a feature I use to control windows without laying hands on the dreaded rodent — namely, a ‘move window to screen corner’ keyboard shortcut. This patch implements it for Metacity.

I implemented this last year for KWin, too, to resounding disapproval and bitchy comments about how I’m using the mouse all wrong. Meh. I fully expect the Metacity maintainers to throw it out, likewise, leaving me hand-patching WMs for a while yet ;)

Update, Nov 2006: they applied it! yay.

The Adelphi Charter

Published October 17, 2005

I’ve just finished Sir John Sulston’s inspiring book about the Human Genome Project, The Common Thread, in which he discusses how he found himself on one front line of the battle between intellectual ‘property’ maximalism attempting to grab ‘property rights’ over the human genome, and the common good, preserving such rights for all humanity and unfettered research. (Thankfully, he — and therefore the latter side — won.)

I’ve been meaning to post a few choice quotes here about it at some stage, but haven’t had the time — I’ve had to just limit myself to correcting the Wikipedia entry for the Human Genome Project instead. ;)

Anyway, Sir John is in the news again, as part of a new international initiative — the Adelphi Charter:

Called the Adelphi charter, it is an attempt to lay out those principles. Central among them are the ideas that policy should be evidence-based and that it should respect the balance between property and the public domain, not eliminate the latter to maximise the former.

Coverage:

Very encouraging to see something taking off at this level. I hope it does well, and I hope Ireland and the EU’s lawmakers take note, since I’ve been hearing a lot of IP maximalist party-line from there recently…

Daniel Cuthbert’s Travesty of Justice

Published October 12, 2005

The Samizdata weblog posts more details about the Daniel Cuthbert case, where a UK techie was arrested for allegedly attempting to hack a tsunami-donation site. Here’s what happened:

Daniel Cuthbert saw the devastating images of the Tsunami disaster and decided to donate UKP30 via the website that was hastily set up to be able to process payments. He is a computer security consultant, regarded in his field as an expert and respected by colleagues and employers alike. He entered his full personal details (home address, number, name and full card details). He did not receive confirmation of payment or a reference and became concerned as he has had issues with fraud on his card on a previous occasion. He then did a couple of very basic penetration tests. If they resulted in the site being insecure as he suspected, he would have contacted the authorities, as he had nothing to gain from doing this for fun and keeping the fact to himself that he suspected the site to be a phishing site and all this money pledged was going to some South American somewhere in South America.

The first test he used was the (dot dot slash, 3 times) http://taint.org/ sequence. The ../ command is called a Directory Traversal which allows you to move up the hierarchy of a file. The triple sequence amounts to a DTA (Directory Traversal Attack), allows you to move three times. It is not a complete attack as that would require a further command, it was merely a light ‘knock on the door’. The other test, which constituted an apostrophe (`) was also used. He was then satisfied that the site was safe as his received no error messages in response to his query, then went about his work duties. There were no warnings or dialogue boxes showing that he had accessed an unauthorised area.

20 days later he was arrested at his place of work and had his house searched.

(His actions were detected by the IDS software used by British Telecom.)

In my opinion, this is a travesty of justice.

His actions were entirely understandable, under the circumstances, IMO. They were not hostile activities in themselves — they might have been the prelude to hostility, in other cases, but, as his later activity proved, not in this one.

Instead of making parallels with "rattling the doorknob" or "lurking around the back door of a bank", a better parallel would be looking through the bank’s front window, from the street!

If only law enforcement took this degree of interest in genuine phishing cases, where innocent parties find their bank accounts emptied by real criminals, like the unprosected phisher in Quebec discussed in this USA Today article!

Appalling.

Harpers: The Uses of Disaster

Published October 12, 2005

In this month’s Harpers — The Uses of Disaster contains a passages that rings bells, post-Katrina:

You can see the grounds for that anxiety in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which was the beginning of the end for the one-party rule of the PRI over Mexico. The earthquake, measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale, hit Mexico City early on the morning of September 19 and devastated the central city, the symbolic heart of the nation. An aftershock nearly as large hit the next evening. About ten thousand people died, and as many as a quarter of a million became homeless.

The initial response made it clear that the government cared a lot more about the material city of buildings and wealth than the social city of human beings. In one notorious case, local sweatshop owners paid the police to salvage equipment from their destroyed factories. No effort was made to search for survivors or retrieve the corpses of the night-shift seamstresses. It was as though the earthquake had ripped away a veil concealing the corruption and callousness of the government. International rescue teams were rebuffed, aid money was spent on other programs, supplies were stolen by the police and army, and, in the end, a huge population of the displaced poor was obliged to go on living in tents for many years.

However, there’s a happy ending there:

That was how the government of Mexico reacted. The people of Mexico, however, had a different reaction. ‘Not even the power of the state,’ wrote political commentator Carlos Monsivás, ‘managed to wipe out the cultural, political, and psychic consequences of the four or five days in which the brigades and aid workers, in the midst of rubble and desolation, felt themselves in charge of their own behavior and responsible for the other city that rose into view.’ As in San Francisco in 1906, in the ruins of the city of architecture and property, another city came into being made of nothing more than the people and their senses of solidarity and possibility. Citizens began to demand justice, accountability, and respect. They fought to keep the sites of their rent-controlled homes from being redeveloped as more lucrative projects. They organized neighborhood groups. And eventually they elected a left-wing mayor — a key step in breaking the PRI’s monopoly on power in Mexico.

Photo Update

Published October 12, 2005

Photoblog! We recently ticked off another of California’s national parks with a trip to Joshua Tree, and saw this:

Scary desert people. Also, I got to be in a fractal:

Beardy progress continues, as you can see!

In other pics, Catherine cooked me an amazing birthday cake:

Also: I ate the most sacrilicious food ever — mochi that tastes like green-tea-filled Eucharist wafer!

Ah, the blessed sacrament of the (green tea) body and (red bean) blood. The textural resemblance really was phenomenal; I guess it never came up in product taste tests. Quite funny. Very tasty too, by the way.

Bruce Sterling on J. G. Ballard

Published September 28, 2005

Ballardian.com just posted an interview with Bruce Sterling about J.G. Ballard by Chris Nakashima-Brown. One of my favourite authors talks about the other — it’s amazing!

A couple of highlights:

… The assumptions behind The Crystal World were so radically different and ontologically disturbing compared to common pulp-derived SF. If you just look at the mechanisms of the suspension of disbelief in The Crystal World, it’s like, okay, time is vibrating on itself and this has caused the growth of a leprous crystal … whatever. There’s never any kind of fooforah about how the scientist in his lab is going to understand this phenomenon, and reverse it, and save humanity. It’s not even a question of anybody needing to understand what’s going on in any kind of instrumental way. On the contrary, the whole structure of the thing is just this kind of ecstatic surreal acceptance. All Ballard disaster novels are vehicles of psychic fulfilment.

….

My suspicion is that in another four to five years you’re going to find people writing about climate change in the same way they wrote about the nuclear threat in the 50s. It’s just going to be in every story every time. People are going to come up with a set of climate-change tropes, like three-eyed mutants and giant two-headed whatevers, because this is the threat of our epoch and it just becomes blatantly obvious to everybody. Everybody’s going to pile on to the bandwagon and probably reduce the whole concept to kindling. That may be the actual solution to a genuine threat of Armageddon — to talk about it so much that it becomes banal.

To me these late-Ballard pieces, these Shepperton pieces — Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and so forth — really seem like gentle chiding from somebody who’s recognized that his civilisation really has gone mad. They’re a series of repetitions that say, ‘Look, we’re heading for a world where consensus reality really is just plain unsustainable, and the ideas that the majority of our people hold in their heart of hearts are just not connected to reality’. I think that may be a very prophetic assessment on his part. I think we may in fact be in such a world right now — where people have really just lost touch with the ‘reality-based community’ and are basically just living in self-generated fantasy echo chambers that have no more to do with the nature of geopolitical reality than Athanasius Kircher or Castaneda’s Don Juan.

Kitty vs. International RFID Standardisation

Published September 27, 2005

So, I’ve just bought myself an RFID implant reader.

However, don’t jump to conclusions — it’s not that I’m hoping that possession will put me on the right side of the New World Order 21st-century pervasive-RFID-tracking security infrastructure or anything — it’s for my cat. Here’s why…

Many years ago, back in Ireland, we had an RFID chip implanted in our cat, as you do. Then 3 years ago, we entered the US, bringing the cat with us, and started looking into what we’d have to do to bring him back again.

Ireland and the UK are rabies-free, and have massive paranoia about pets that may harbour it; as a result, pets imported into those countries generally have to stay in a quarantine facility for 6 months. Obviously 6 months sans kitty is something that we want to avoid, and thankfully a recent innovation, the Pet Travel Scheme allows this. It allows pets to be imported into the UK from the USA, once they pass a few bureaucratic conditions, and from there they can travel easily to Ireland legally. (BTW Matt, this still applies; we checked!)

One key condition is that the pet be first microchipped with an RFID chip, then tested for rabies, with those results annotated with the chip ID number. Once the animal arrives in the UK on the way back, the customs officials there verify his RFID implant chip’s ID number against the number on the test result documentation, and (assuming they match and all is in order) he skips the 6 month sentence.

So far, it seems pretty simple; the cat’s already chipped, we just have to go to the vet, get him titred, and all should proceed simply enough from there. Right? Wrong.

We spent a while going to various vets and animal shelters; unfortunately, almost everyone who works in a vet’s office in California seem to be incompetent grandmothers who just work there because they like giving doggies a bath, couldn’t care less about funny foreign European microchips, and will pretty much say anything to shut you up. Tiring stuff, and unproductive; eventually, after many fruitless attempts to read the chip, I gave up on that angle and just researched online.

Despite what all the grannies claimed, as this page describes, the US doesn’t actually use the ISO 11784/11785 standard for pet RFID chips. Instead it uses two alternative standards, one called FECAVA, and another FECAVA-based standard called AVID-Encrypted. They are, of course, entirely incompatible with ISO 11784/11785, although, to spread confusion, the FECAVA standard appears to be colloquially referred to in parts of the US vet industry, as "European" or even "ISO standard". I think it was originally developed in Europe, and may have been partially ISO-11784-compliant to a degree, but the readers have proven entirely incompatible with the chip we had, which is referred to as "ISO" in the UK and Ireland at least. They don’t even use the same frequencies; FECAVA/AVID are on 125 KHz, while ISO FDX-B is on 134.2 KHz.

(BTW, a useful point for others: you can also tell the difference at the data level; FECAVA/AVID use 10-digit ID numbers, while ISO numbers are 15-digit. Also, "FDX-B" seems to accurately describe the current Euro-compatible ISO-standard chip system.)

Now, a few years back, it appears that one company attempted to introduce ISO-FDX-B-format readers and chips to the FECAVA-dominated marketplace, in the form of the Banfield ‘Crystal Tag’ chip and reader system.

That attempt foundered last year, thanks to what looks a lot like some MS-style dirty tricks — patent infringement lawsuits and some ‘your-doggy-is-in-danger’ FUD:

what we have here is a different, foreign chip that’s being brought in and it’s caused a lot of confusion with pet owners, with shelters, and veterinarians.

(Note ‘foreign’ — a little petty nationalism goes a long way.) The results can be seen in this press story on the product’s withdrawal:

Although ISO FDX-B microchips are being used in some European countries and parts of Australia, acceptance of ISO FDX-B microchips is not universal and the standard on which they are based continues to generate controversy, in part due to concerns about ID code duplication.

FUD-bomb successful!

Anyway, this left us in a bad situation; our cat’s chip was unreadable in the US, and possibly even illegal given the patent litigation ;) . We had two choices: either we got the cat re-chipped with a US chip, paying for that, or we could find our own ISO-compatible reader.

We sprung for the latter; although the re-chipping and re-registration would probably cost less than the $220 the reader would cost, we’d need to buy a US reader in addition, since the readers at London Heathrow airport are ISO readers, not FECAVA/AVID-compatible. On top of that, this way gives me a little more peace of mind about compatibility issues when we eventually get the cat to Heathrow; we now know that the cat’s chip will definitely be readable there, instead of taking a risk on the obviously-quite-confusing nest of snakes that is international RFID standardisation.

Anyway, having decided to buy a reader, that wasn’t the last hurdle. Apparently due to the patent infringement lawsuit noted above, no ISO/FDX-B-compatible readers were on sale in the US! A little research found an online vendor overseas, and with a few phone calls, we bought a reader of our very own.

This arrived this morning; with a little struggling from the implantee, we tried it out, and verified that his ID number was readable. Success!

PRNGs and Groove Theory

Published September 23, 2005

Urban Dead is a new browser-based MMORPG that’s become popular recently. I’m not planning to talk about the game itself, at least not until I’ve played it a bit!, but there’s something worth noting here — a cheat called Groove Theory:

Groove Theory was a cheat for Urban Dead that claimed to exploit an apparent lack [sic] of a random number generator in the game, [so] that performing an action exactly eight seconds after a successful action would also be successful.

Kevan, the Urban Dead developer, confirmed that Groove Theory did indeed work, and made this comment after fixing the bug:

There is some pattern to the random numbers, playing around with them; "srand(time())" actually brings back some pretty terrible patterns, and an eight-second wait will catch some of these.

So — here’s my guess as to how this happened.

It appears that Urban Dead is implemented as a CGI script. I’ll speculate that somewhere near the top of the script, there’s a line of code along the lines of srand(time()), as Kevan mentioned. With a sufficiently fast network connection, and a sufficiently unloaded server, you can be reasonably sure that hitting "Refresh" will cause that srand call to be executed on the server within a fraction of a second of your button-press. In other words, through careful timing, the remote user can force the pseudo-random-number generator used to implement rand() into a desired set of states!

As this perl script demonstrates, the output from perl’s rand() is perfectly periodic in its low bits on a modern Linux machine, if constantly reseeded using srand() — the demo script’s output decrements from 3 to 0 by 1 every 2 seconds, then repeats the cycle, indefinitely.

I don’t know if Urban Dead is a perl script, PHP, or whatever; but whatever language it’s written in, I’d guess that language uses the same PRNG implementation as perl is using on my Linux box.

As it turns out, this PRNG failing is pretty well-documented in the manual page for rand(3):

on older rand() implementations, and on current implementations on different systems, the lower-order bits are much less random than the higher-order bits. Do not use this function in applications intended to be portable when good randomness is needed.

That manual page also quotes Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing (William H. Press, Brian P. Flannery, Saul A. Teukolsky, William T. Vetterling; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992 (2nd ed., p. 277)) as noting:

"If you want to generate a random integer between 1 and 10, you should always do it by using high-order bits, as in

j=1+(int) (10.0*rand()/(RAND_MAX+1.0));

and never by anything resembling

j=1+(rand() % 10);

(which uses lower-order bits)."

I think Groove Theory demonstrates this nicely!

Update: I need to be clearer here.

Most of the Groove Theory issue is caused by the repeated use of srand(). If the script could be seeded once, instead of at every request, or if the seed data came from a secure, non-predictable source like /dev/random, things would be a lot safer.

However, the behaviour of rand() is still an issue though, due to how it’s implemented. The classic UNIX rand() uses the srand() seed directly, to entirely replace the linear congruential PRNG’s state; on top of that, the arithmentic used means that the low-order bits have an extremely obvious, repeating, simple pattern, mapping directly to that seed’s value. This is what gives Groove Theory its practicability by a human, without computer aid; with a more complex algorithm, it’d still be guessable with the aid of a computer, but with the simple PRNG, it’s guessable, unaided.

Update 2: as noted in a comment, Linux glibc’s rand(3) is apparently quite good at producing decent numbers. However, perl’s rand() function doesn’t use that; it uses drand48(), which in glibc is still a linear congruential PRNG and displays the ‘low randomness in low-order bits’ behaviour.

Buying Music From iTMS in Linux

Published September 20, 2005

On saturday, I spent a little time trying to work out how to give Steve Jobs my money; more accurately, I wanted to get some way to buy music from the iTunes Music Store from my Linux desktop, and this isn’t as easy as it really should be, because the official iTMS is a mess of proprietary Mac- and Windows-only DRM-laden badness.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of how this went:

  • install iTunes in my VMWare Windows install
  • sign up for iTMS, and give Apple all my personal info, including super-s3kr1t card verification codes, eek
  • buy a song
  • find the DRM’d file in the filesystem; it’s an .m4p file, and xine doesn’t seem to like it
  • do some googling for ‘iTunes DRM remove linux’; that leads to Jon Lech Johansen’s JusteTune
  • download and run JusteTune installer
  • get obscure hexadecimal error code dialog. hmm! what could that mean?
  • download and run .NET runtime, link on JusteTune page
  • rerun JusteTune — it works this time
  • select Account -> Authorize, enter login info
  • drag and drop file — it’s decrypted!

So, that yields a decrypted AAC file, which I can play on Linux using xine. That’s the hard part done!

However, I want to play my purchases in JuK, the very nice iTunes-style music player app for KDE.

While the gstreamer audio framework supports playback of AAC files with the gstreamer0.8-faad package (‘sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-faad’), JuK itself can’t find the file or read its metadata, so it doesn’t show up in the music collection as playable. I don’t want to go hacking code from CVS into my desktop’s music player — possibly the most essential app on the desktop — so transcoding them to MP3 seems to be the best option.

Somebody’s already been here before, though — that’s one of the benefits of being a late adopter! Here’s a script to convert .m4a files to .mp3 using the ‘faad’ tool (‘sudo apt-get install faad’).

During this work, I came across Jon Lech Johansen’s latest masterwork — SharpMusique, a fully operational native Linux interface to the iTMS. Building on Ubuntu Hoary was a simple matter of tar xvfz, configure, make, sudo make install, and it works great — and automatically de-DRMs the files on the fly as it downloads them! Now that’s the way to enjoy the iTMS on Linux, at least until Apple’s engineers break it again.

Update, May 2006: Apple’s engineers broke it. Thanks Wilfredo ;)

End result: a brand new, complete, high-quality copy of Dengue Fever’s new album, Escape From Dragon House. Previously I’d only had a couple of tracks off this, so I’m now a happy camper, music-wise.

BTW, I was also considering trying out the new Yahoo! Music Store, but it too uses fascist DRM tricks and is platform-limited, and I’m not sure how breakable it is. On top of that, the prospect of not being able to try it out before handing over credit-card details put me off. As far as I can see, I can’t even look up the albums offered before subscribing. All combined, I’ll stick with iTMS for now.

Don’t Dumb Me Down

Published September 20, 2005

A great Guardian ‘Bad Science’ column by Ben Goldacre, Don’t dumb me down. An excellent article on how mainstream journalists fail miserably in their attempts to report science stories accurately, and how this fundamentally misrepresents science to society at large.

Being a geek (of the computing persuasion) who hangs out with other geeks (of various science persuasions), I would up discussing this problem myself a month or two ago. This paragraph sums up where I think the failure lies:

There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well – it’s a small middle-class world after all – and I know that until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon. Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely – since they’ll be the ones interested in reading the stuff – people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it’s edited by a whole team of people who don’t understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given "science communication" chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.

I’d throw in the extra step of a paper in Nature. Apart from that, in my opinion, he’s spot on.

Other disciplines don’t have this problem:

Because papers think you won’t understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them – that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word "biophoton" on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn’t about something being true or not true: that’s a humanities graduate parody. It’s about the error bar, statistical significance, it’s about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it’s about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.

Fingerprinting and False Positives

Published September 19, 2005

New Scientist News – How far should fingerprints be trusted? (via jwz):

Evidence from qualified fingerprint examiners suggests a higher error rate. These are the results of proficiency tests cited by Cole in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (vol 93, p 985). From these he estimates that false matches occurred at a rate of 0.8 per cent on average, and in one year were as high as 4.4 per cent. Even if the lower figure is correct, this would equate to 1900 mistaken fingerprint matches in the US in 2002 alone.

This is why I’m so unhappy about getting fingerprinted as part of US immigration’s US-VISIT program and similar. My fingerprints have been collected on several occasions as part of that program, and as a result will now be shared throughout the US government, and internationally, and will be retained for 75 to 100 years, whether I like it or not.

As a result, with sufficient bad luck, I may become one of those false positives. Fingers crossed all those government and international partner agencies are competent enough to avoid that!

Update: oh wow, this snippet from the New Scientist editorial clearly demonstrates one case where it all went horribly wrong:

Last year, an Oregon lawyer named Brandon Mayfield was held in connection with the Madrid bombings after his fingerprint was supposedly found on a bag in the Spanish capital. Only after several weeks did the Spanish police attribute the print to Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian living in Spain.

eek! Coverage from the National Assoc of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Washington Post.

ToorCon

Published September 15, 2005

ToorCon this year looks good. I’m not going, but I wish I’d gotten it together. There’s a couple of spam/phishing-related talks, and a data-visualisation talk by Christopher Abad; hopefully he might diverge into some of this phishing data he talks about in this First Monday paper. Dan Kaminsky’s talk looks interesting, too —

Application-layer attacks against MD5

We will show how web pages and other executable environments can be manipulated to emit arbitrarily different content with identical MD5 hashes.

Sounds like fun!

TiVo Co-Opts Anti-Spam Terminology

Published September 15, 2005

This is pathetic. As noted in the link-blog a couple of days ago (as well as everywhere else), TiVo’s new DRM features have been spotted ‘in the wild’, protecting the valuable Intellectual Property that is Family Guy and Simpsons reruns.

The icing on the cake is that TiVo have come up with a hilarious hand-wavy explanation — apparently it was line noise. Marc Hedlund of O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow are having none of it, and rightly so; as a bonus, Cory asked a group of DRM experts, who ‘burst into positive howls of disbelief’ that line noise could corrupt the DRM bits and the corresponding checksums to match.

From my angle, though, there’s another noteworthy factor:

"During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals. We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives." (– Jim Denney, director of product marketing for TiVo)

Interesting use of the term ‘false positive’ there. Sounds more like a good old-fashioned bug if you ask me ;)

Anyway, I’m glad I went for the home-built option. It was pretty obvious that TiVo are in the cross-hairs, and their product is only going to get worse as the DRM industry push harder…

DnsblAccuracy082005 – Spamassassin Wiki

Published September 11, 2005

Do you use anti-spam DNS blocklists? If so, you should probably go take a look at DnsblAccuracy082005 on the SpamAssassin wiki; I’ve collated the results from our recent mass-check rescoring runs for 3.1.0, to produce have up-to-date measurements of the accuracy and hit-rates for most of the big DNS blocklists.

A few highlights:

We don’t have accurate figures for the new URIBL.COM lists, btw — only the rulesets that are distributed with SpamAssassin were measured.

Bogus Challenge-Response Bounces: I’ve Had Enough

Published September 11, 2005

I get quite a lot of spam. For one random day last month (Aug 21st), I got 48 low-scoring spam mails (between 5 and 10 points according to SpamAssassin), and 955 high-scorers (anything over 10). I don’t know how much malware I get, since my virus filter blocks them outright, instead of delivering to a folder.

That’s all well and good, because spam and viruses are now relatively easy to filter — and if I recall correctly, they were all correctly filed, no FPs or FNs (well, I’m not sure about the malware, but fingers crossed ;).

The hard part is now ‘bogus bounces’ — the bounces from ‘good’ mail systems, responding to the forged use of my addresses as the sender of malware/spam mails. There were 306 of those, that day.

Bogus bounces are hard to filter as spam, because they’re not spam — they’re ‘bad’ traffic originating from ‘good’, but misguided, email systems. They’re not malware, either. They’re a whole new category of abusive mail traffic.

I say ‘misguided’, because a well-designed mail system shouldn’t produce these. By only performing bounce rejection with a 4xx or 5xx response as part of the SMTP transaction, when the TCP/IP connection is open between the originator and the receiving MX MTA, you avoid most of the danger of ‘spamming’ a forged sender address. However, many mail systems were designed before spammers and malware writers started forging on a massive scale, and therefore haven’t fixed this yet.

I’ve been filtering these for a while using this SpamAssassin ruleset; it works reasonably well at filtering bounces in general, catching almost all of the bounces. (There is a downside, though, which is that it catches more than just bogus bounces — it also catches real bounces, those in response to mails I sent. At this stage, though, I consider that to be functionality I’m willing to lose.)

The big remaining problem is challenge-response messages.

C-R is initially attractive. If you install it, your spam load will dwindle to zero (or virtually zero) immediately — it’ll appear to be working great. What you won’t see, however, is what’s happening behind the scenes:

  • your legitimate correspondents are getting challenges, will become annoyed (or confused), and may be unwilling or unable to get themselves whitelisted;

  • spam that fakes other, innocent third party addresses as the sender, will be causing C-R challenges to be sent to innocent, uninvolved parties.

The latter is the killer. In effect, you’re creating spam, as part of your attempts to reduce your own spam load. C-R shifts the cost of spam-filtering from the recipient and their systems, to pretty much everyone else, and generates spam in the process. I’m not alone in this opinion.

That’s all just background — just establishing that we already know that C-R is abusive. But now, it’s time for the next step for me — I’ve had enough.

I initially didn’t mind the bogus-bounce C-R challenges too much, but the levels have increased. Each day, I’m now getting a good 10 or so C-R challenges in response to mails I didn’t send. Worse, these are the ones that get past the SpamAssassin ruleset I’ve written to block them, since they don’t include an easy-to-filter signature signifying that they’re C-R messages, such as Earthlink’s ‘spamblocker-challenge’ SMTP sender address or UOL‘s ‘AntiSpam UOL’ From address. There seems to be hundreds of half-assed homegrown C-R filters out there!

So now, when I get challenge-response messages in response to spam which forges one of my addresses as the ‘From’ address, and it doesn’t get blocked by the ruleset, I’m going to jump through their hoops so the spam is delivered to the C-R-protected recipient. Consider it a form of protest; creating spam, in order to keep youself spam-free, is simply not acceptable, and I’ve had enough.

And if you’re using one of these C-R filters — get a real spam filter. Sure they cost a bit of CPU time — but they work, without pestering innocent third parties in the process.

Beardy Justin

Published September 9, 2005

Yes, I’ve been growing a beard. Strangely, it seems to be going quite well! Here’s a good pic of beardy Justin, standing on a bridge over the Merced river in Yosemite:

Lots more pics from the holiday should be appearing here shortly, if you’re curious.

Mosquitos, Snakes and a Bear

Published September 7, 2005

Well, I’m back… it appears that Google Maps link I posted wasn’t too much use in deciphering where I was going; sorry about that. Myself and C spent a fun week and a bit, driving up to Kings Canyon and Yosemite, backpacking around for a few days, then driving back down via the 395 via Bishop, Mammoth Lakes, Lone Pine and so on.

Kings Canyon: Unfortunately, not so much fun; we had the bad luck of encountering what must be the tail end of the mosquito season, and spent most of our 2 days there running up and down the Woods Creek trail without a break, entirely surrounded by clouds of mozzies. Possibly this headlong dashing explains how we ran into so much other wildlife — including a (harmless) California Mountain King Snake and, less enjoyably — and despite wearing bear bells on our packs to avoid this — a black bear…

We rounded a corner on the trail, and there it was, munching on elderberries. Once we all spotted each other, there were some audible sounds of surprise from both bear and humans, and the bear ran off in the opposite direction; the humans, however, did not. We were about 500 feet from our camp for the night, so we needed to get past where the bear had been, or face a long walk back.

Despite some fear (hey, this was our first bear encounter!), we stuck around, shouted, waved things, and took the various actions you take. It all went smoothly, the bear had probably long since departed, but we took it slow regardless, and had a very jittery night in our tent afterwards. After that, and the unceasing mozzie onslaught, we were in little hurry to carry on around the planned loop, so we cut short our Kings Canyon trip by a day and just returned down the trail to its base.

Yosemite: a much more successful trip. There were many reasons, primarily that the mosquito population was much, much lower, and discovering that the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge — comfortable tent cabins, excellent food, and fantastic company — provided a truly excellent base camp.

But I’d have to say that the incredible beauty of Tuolumne Meadows and the Vogelsang Pass really blew me away. I don’t think I’ve seen any landscape quite like that, since trekking to Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal. I’m with John Muir — Yosemite and its surrounds are a wonder of the world.

Lee Vining: had to pick up a sarnie at the world-famous Whoa Nellie Deli. Yum! After all the camping, we stayed in a hotel with TV, got some washing done, and watched scenes from a J.G. Ballard novel play out on NBC and CNN. Mind-boggling.

Mammoth Lakes: A quick kvetch. Mammoth is possibly the most pedestrian-hostile town I’ve ever visited. They have a hilarious section of 100 feet of sidewalk, where I encountered a fellow pedestrian using those ski-pole-style hiking walking sticks, and entirely in seriousness. Was the concept of walking so foreign in that town that long-distance walking accessories were required? I don’t know, but it didn’t make up for the other 90% of the streets where peds were shoved off onto the shoulder, in full-on ‘sidewalk users aren’t welcome here’ Orange County style.

On top of that, the single pedestrian crossing in the main street spans five lanes of traffic, with no lighting, warning signs, or indeed any effective way for drivers to know whether peds were crossing or not. Unsurprisingly we nearly got run over when we tried using the damn thing. Best avoided.

I’m amazed — it’s like they designed the town to be ped-hostile. Surely allowing peds to get around your town is a bonus when you’re a ski resort for half of the year? Meh.

Anyway, back again, a little refreshed. Once more into the fray…

Faster string search alternative to Boyer-Moore: BloomAV

Published August 26, 2005

An interesting technique, from the ClamAV development list — using Bloom filters to speed up string searching. This kind of thing works well when you’ve got 1 input stream, and a multitude of simple patterns that you want to match against the stream. Bloom filters are a hashing-based technique to perform extremely fast and memory-efficient, but false-positive-prone, binary lookups.

The mailing list posting (‘Faster string search alternative to Boyer-Moore‘) gives some benchmarks from the developers’ testing, along with the core (GPL-licensed) code:

Regular signatures (28,326) :

  • Extended Boyer-Moore: 11 MB/s

  • BloomAV 1-byte: 89 MB/s

  • BloomAV 4-bytes: 122 MB/s

Some implementation details:

the (implementation) we chose is a simple bit array of (256 K * 8) bits. The filter is at first initialized to all zeros. Then, for every virus signature we load, we take the first 7 bytes, and hash it with four very fast hash functions. The corresponding four bits in the bloom filter are set to 1s.

Our intuition is that if the filter is small enough to fit in the CPU cache, we should be able to avoid memory accesses that cost around 200 CPU cycles each.

Also, in followup discussion, the following paper was mentioned: A paper describing hardware-level Bloom filters in the Snort IDS — S. Dharmapurikar, P. Krishnamurthy, T. Sproull, and J. W. Lockwood, "Deep packet inspection using parallel Bloom filters," in Hot Interconnects, (Stanford, CA), pp. 44–51, Aug. 2003.

This system is dubbed ‘BloomAV’. Pretty cool. It’s unclear if the ClamAV developers were keen to incorporate it, though, but it does point at interesting new techniques for spam signatures.

Tech Camp Ireland

Published August 24, 2005

Irish techies, mark your calendars! Various Irish bloggers are proposing a Tech Camp Ireland geek get-together, similar to Bar Camp in approach, for Saturday October 15th.

Ed Byrne and James Corbett are both blogging up a storm already. I’d go, but it’d be a hell of a trip ;)

I would say it needs a little less blog, a little more code, and a little more open source, but it does look very exciting, and it’s great to see the Bar Camp spirit hitting Ireland.

More on ‘Bluetooth As a Laptop Sensor’

Published August 23, 2005

Bluetooth As a Laptop Sensor in Cambridge, England.

I link-blogged this yesterday, where it got picked up by Waxy, and thence to Boing Boing — where some readers are reportedly considering it doubtful. Craig also expressed some skepticism. However, I think it’s for real.

Check out the comments section of Schneier’s post — there’s a few notable points:

  • Some Bluetooth-equipped laptops will indeed wake from suspend to respond to BT signals.

  • Davi Ottenheimer reports that the current Bluetooth spec offers "always-on discoverability" as a feature. (Obviously the protocol designers let usability triumph over security on that count.)

  • Many cellphones are equipped with Bluetooth, and can therefore be used to detect other ‘discoverable’ BT devices in range.

  • Walking around a UK hotel car park, while pressing buttons on a mobile phone, would be likely to appear innocuous — I know I’ve done it myself on several occasions. ;)

Finally — this isn’t the first time the problem has been noted. The same problem was reported at Disney World, in the US:

Here’s the interesting part: every break-in in the past month (in the Disney parking lots) had involved a laptop with internal bluetooth. Apparently if you just suspend the laptop the bluetooth device will still acknowledge certain requests, allowing the thief to target only cars containing these laptops.

Mind you, perhaps this is a ‘chinese whispers’ case of the Disney World thefts being amplified. Perhaps it was noted as happening in Disney World, reported in an ’emerging threats’ forum where the Cambridgeshire cop heard it, and he then picked it up as something worth warning the public about, without knowing for sure that it was happening locally.

Update: aha. An observant commenter on Bruce Schneier’s post has hit on a possibly good reason why laptops implement wake-on-Bluetooth:

On my PowerBook, the default Bluetooth settings were "Discoverable" and "Wake-on-Bluetooth" — the latter so that a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse can wake the computer up after it has gone to sleep.

Emergent Chaos: I’m a Spamateur

Published August 23, 2005

Emergent Chaos: I’m a Spamateur:

In private email to Justin “SpamAssassin” Mason, I commented about blog spam and “how to fix it,” then realized that my comments were really dumb. In realizing my stupidity, I termed the word “spamateur,” which is henceforth defined as someone inexperienced enough to think that any simple solution has a hope of fixing the problem.

I think this is my new favourite spam neologism ;)

How convenient does the ‘right thing’ have to be?

Published August 17, 2005

Environment: Kung Fu Monkey: Hybrids and Hypotheses. A great discussion of the Toyota Prius:

Kevin Drum recently quoted a study which re-iterated that there’s no "real" advantage to buying a hybrid. It’s only just as convenient — so if you’re driving a hybrid, you’re doing it for some other reason than financial incentive.

That made me think: what a perfect example of just how fucking useless as a society we’ve become. We can’t even bring ourselves to do the right thing when it’s only JUST as convenient as doing the wrong thing. And that’s not even considered odd. Even sadder.

Box Office Patents

Published August 15, 2005

Forbes: Box Office Patents.

It’s the kind of plot twist that will send some critics screaming into the aisles: Why not let writers patent their screenplay ideas? The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office already approves patents for software, business methods — remember Amazon.com’s patent on ‘one-click’ Internet orders? — even role-playing games. So why not let writers patent the intricate plot of the next cyberthriller?

So in other words, a law grad called Andrew Knight actually wants to see the world RMS described in his ‘Patent Absurdity’ article for the Guardian, where Les Miserables was unpublishable due to patent infringement. Incredible.

He himself plays the classic lines, familiar to those who followed the EU software patenting debate:

Knight agrees, up to a point. He won’t reveal the exact details of the plots he’s submitted to the Patent Office, other than to say they involve cyberspace. And he says patents would apply only to ideas that are unique and complex. But he worries that without patent protection, some Hollywood sharpies could change ideas like his around and pass them off as their own.

”I’m trying to address a person who comes up with a brand-new form of entertainment who may not be a Poe, may not be a Shakespeare, but still deserves to be paid for his work,” Knight says. ”Otherwise, who will create anything?”

A perfect pro-patent hat trick!