When I think of the Kindle, I think of an awesome device (the big one is wonderful to use) with a free data connection that needs to be hacked to be useful. Hacked to remove the ability to remove books. Hacked to allow browsing of the web. Hacked to allow my own content to be freely placed on the device. The hacking negates the free data plan because the device no longer functions along Amazon’s business model, but it’s your device – so you can use it how you like. You should be able to get your own data plan. ($20/month)

I don’t see why “E-Readers” would have to remove community behind books and libraries. I can argue that “social networks” could work around the devices and books. Especially around trading books – I’ll get into the legality of that–how authors could still get paid and the usefulness and harmfulness of DRM Encryption in that situation–some other time.

I can also argue that libraries are a place for more then retrieving books. You have librarians who are paid experts and curators of knowledge. A Kindle may have a library of books, but it doesn’t have librarians. On a side note, they don’t have quiet work areas or comfy chairs either.

But even though I have a library down the block from my house, I haven’t had the need to be in one for a long while. I have my own comfy chair, and don’t read books that often.

One thing the Kindle does facilitate that a library can’t is that I could write a book and publish it on the Kindle for free, and distribute it worldwide without cost and with an excellent margin. Sites like Lulu allow me to make print copies, but their costs are non-trivial (good rates, but not cheap). That kind of freedom is liberating. I wont argue that publishing companies are worthless, as they are not, but they’ve had a monopoly on publishing for a long time. Devices like the Kindle allowing for self-publishing make me very happy.

In my head, preferring a paper book over a kindle is akin to preferring a small black and white TV over a larger color one. I don’t see the technology being the problem; it’s a tool like any other, and it can be just as enabling for you and me as it can for companies like Amazon and BookSwim.

Comments?

Method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion

No wires just shoes.

It's fascinating to watch these videos, but boy is he ever weird.

I had quite a few Windows XP instalations to do, with new employees soon to arrive at work, new laptops arriving with Vista, and some old desktops that needed 'decrufting' in their OSes. I have a slipstreamed windows xp cd with sp2 that I like to use. I haven't bothered updating it to sp3 because I haven't made the time and for a while I didn't think it was worth it. SP3 seems more for microsoft then it does for the users. I do have a new xp disk with ie7 and a few other updates, but I haven't tested it so much. So I tried it out and it seemed ok but I hit a problem.

Windows Update would fail to install every single update after sp3 was installed.

And once you hit Microsoft Update (which you should) it would fail to install the office updates too. No error codes, no event log messages (well maybe but I didn't look too closely) nothing useful. I figured it was my new disk so despite spending all the time reinstalling windows (my disk does make it easier, setup the partitions and walk away for 20 minutes and you have windows waiting for you when you get back) I tried with my older trusted disk. Same problems.

It took me a while to figure out it was sp3.

Well I have a fix. Run these commands.

::http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943144 for details use on 32bit winxp only
net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll
net start wuauserv

Put that in a batch file or just run it and it will re-register the new sp3 windows update dll file and all your problems will go away. So in an effort to take pride in my work I decided to fix it twice. Once for the problem and again for the cause of the problem. According to the knowledge base article I found to fix it, if you update windows update (which is common after a reinstall) and don't restart before installing sp3 then sp3 will ignore the updated windows update and there will be a version missmatch when you try to update. So restart early and often when installing updates. I haven't tested it but in the back of my head there's a voice saing "I think other updates might cause this problem too!" so maybe even something other then sp3 can cause this, but I don't feel like collecting proof.

That would involve "fixing it" 3 times and twice is enough for me today.

–Francis

UPDATE: So far this has only applied to new installs for me, but if you're worried you wont hurt anything by running those commands.

https://www.wizardcomputing.com/gpg/wizard-roborooter.com.asc

I've had a few others for my roborooter.com address over the years, but somehow I always loose them. The private key that is. It's usually because I don't use them that much. There are only a handful of people out there I communicate with that know what gpg is, know how to use it, want to use it, and most importantly need to use it. That's actually a tall order to fill.

So what happens to my keys that I loose? Well lets look for the public counterparts.

MIT PGP Public Key Server Search Results for wizard-roborooter.com

Public Key Server -- Index wizard at roborooter.com

Type bits /keyID Date User ID
pub 1024D/C556B1A8 2008/09/02 Francis Gulotta
pub 1024D/2B74810B 2005/01/27 Francis Gulotta
pub 1024D/C6677DA7 2002/01/08 Francis Gulotta

The first one I ever published was back in 2002 (Unless I submitted one earlier elsewhere, damed if I know — but a blog search tells me no different — I need a better search). And if I had the tools with me today I could tell you when it expires if at all. I was probably brash and didn't think I'd ever loose the private key. It's not that hard to make a new key so once a year if I'm going to use it, I can. I can even sign it with my old key (if I still have it) to keep the chain of trust.

–Francis

PS Looks like I've discovered a bug in how wordpress automatically makes email addresses hyper links

1. Make the Hacker Crackdown Available as a torrent file. (You can just grab the full download if you like.)
2. Educate about what comcast was doing (blocking torrents)
3. Complain that while the torrent's flowing nicely a bunch of specific people had trouble torrenting it. Specifically the Comcast customers.(Not a complete lie, the torrent had about 250 downloads as far as I could tell and at one point 17 seeds. But if you were a comcast customer using torrents you knew what was going on and wouldn't complain to me.)
4. Come clean, off the full download via http and remark that I actually do have the bandwidth to spare to host a large file. Probably enough to spare to host 10 full and popular audio books, but probably not 100, where torrenting could go into the 10,000's easily. If people were so interested.

For the record as of right now the torrent is still on The Pirate Bay and has 2 seeders neither of them are me.

I had goals.

1. To spread the hacker crackdown by Bruce Sterling.
2. To try to do a story arcing blog post.
3. To educate people about torrents and Comcast.
4. To be crazy like that.

I had poor execution.

1. I got distracted
2. I told people what I was up to and then no longer felt like I had to do it. Almost like success.
3. I didn't do it all at once — I'm not sure if that was practical but it would have gotten it done while I had the drive.
4. I never wrote down my plan until now.

For the record even without my help (ha!) Comcast got smacked around by the FCC. It's not law (and we'll have to fight to make it law) but it's a big first step towards net neutrality.

If only I had the cash to burn…

This would have been the best website ever. But some squatter will pick it up no doubt.

(The video player wont load from the rss feed. So if you're reading from there, you'll have to click though to the post. Also I ditched the crappy flv version — never mind this is crappy quality anyway, it's using some quicktime foolery so it should even be nice on an iphone — unless you're on edge, in which case your iphone will request the extra crappy version)

I just registered for the three day computer security.. well Hacker Conference "HOPE: Hackers of planet Earth". So far they have a few keynote speakers listed including Adam Savage and of course Kevin Mitnick. Adam Savage is well known as a Mythbuster, maker, and lover of wonderful things. I even saw him at last years Mermaid Parade. I've emailed him to find out what he's doing at The Last Hope, because while I'm sure he'll find it cool, I don't know why he'd be a keynote speaker.

Also presenting is a very interesting guy named Barry Wels who when not professionally testing locks for security flaws, (I'd be lying if I said it was about the money for this guy) writes for his blog Black Bag and runs a group called Toool. The saying goes that to get good at lock picking you have to practice over and over and over again. The 3rd O is for that extra "over". Even more noteworthy, he got his government to hold off on electronic voting because of how obviously easy the machines were to hack. The mayor of Anderdam took notice of his groups efforts and made it illegal to use the flawed machines. Bary is another person I widely admire.

Hope isn't as large as Def Con the Las Vegas based annual convention. But I couldn't afford to goto that anyway.

So I've got 3 days for my $75 and I'm sure I'll enjoy the crap out of it. I probably wont spend all three days there, but until they release a schedule I'll have to just assume everything will be interesting and plan for that. I'm going to bring a mostly empty laptop and my camera, and maybe a bag of tricks.

While I'm sure I'll meet people there, is anyone interested in going with me? We've got a home field advantage, most of the people there are staying 7 to a room at the cheapest hotel they can find. We'll be well rested, well fed and not scared of New York.

At least not anymore then we should be.

Update!
Adam Savage wrote back to me. He'll be speaking about

Obsession. The nature of. Subset mine.

Go figure.

–Francis

It was made for a Gizmondo competition by "Noriko" — Composed with sounds of a failing Hitachi hard-disk. I lost his link, but you can probably google for it. It's really quite beautiful and peaceful. Though once I was diagnosing a laptop and this song came on and freaked me out. You never want want to hear these sounds coming from your computer.

Oh and if you ever do hear these sounds coming from your computer, turn it off (pull the plug) and call me. ;-)

–Francis

find . –type f –exec convert {} –resize 970x140 {}.970x140.jpg \;

And that resized everything. I wrote a quick rand with a sprintf to generate the url. It's not automatic — it wont detect new photos but I can take the time to edit the range the next time I take the time to edit hundreds of photos.

The real joy was finding a 97x14 swash of image I wanted to show. I'm not being sarcastic either. Everything looks different when put though constraints. It highlights parts of the photo that would otherwise be lost. Street signs stick out the most, I'll have large photo of trees and I'll have picked out a swash of photo I want to show and the street sign will be sticking up off to the side, but it stands way out where I didn't even know it was there before. There is even one photo where I took two swashes out of, there were two different photos I wanted to show.

Enjoy =)

Social Graphs

Last night over dinner I was given an idea about graphing social graphs. I'm not sharing that with you here yet.
Wait, what?
Thanks to all the new interest in Social Networks, i.e. Facebook, MySpace (which is evil and must be destroyed), LinkedIn and even flickr there's been some interesting developments.

All those sites in one way or another are considered Social Networks they provide a way to link people to other people either by friendship, admiration (of their photography for example), business relationships or any other idea they deem relevant. These connections are called your "Social Graph". And while ever site differs on what exactly links two people they all deal with managing and using your graph for both your benefit and theirs.

People are starting to take this idea a little further by displaying their social graphs on their own blogs (akin to blogrolls or just linking to friend's websites) by using microformats (a way to put info on a website so it is both human and machine readable) such as XFN (The Xhtml Friends Network) which can be considered an improvement because it puts them in direct control over their graph, they can take it down, delete it, share as little or as much as they want and use that information anywhere they want. They can also share things about trust, which can go a long way but is a topic for another discussion. A problem is that most social networking websites do not allow you to take your graph and leave them. If you quit you usually don't get to take any of your data with you. And they don't usually delete everything either.

Facebook decided to take your data, the social graph, and allow you to share it with made for facebook applications. They do a reasonable job at protecting your privacy while still allowing apps full access to who your friends are, where your photos are, what groups are you in, and more. Most things are shared not by name but by an id number, and while anyone who runs an app can still keep a copy of every one of your photos on fb if they wanted to I have to tell you your personal photos aren't that interesting while the applications can be interesting even though most are not.

Google being the benevolent overlords that they are created something called Open Social. Which is a set of API's that allow websites to talk to each other. Facebook release their api's so people could make applications for facebook, open social isn't for google, it's for everyone to use. So I could make an application and have it work on many different social websites. Google's real plans are a lot more complicated, they're doing something their excellent RSS reader which allows you to share RSS feed items with the click of a mouse. A few of my close friends are using this and it's cool. They're leveraging the google reader to be the core of google's own social networking platform whatever it may be. (Though, I'd argue, that Gmail, Gtalk, and google reader are already a fine social networking platform. Buddy lists and address books are not so different from "social graphs") The more people who use open social the more access they'll have to information.

I've shared a lot so far and you're probably not still with me. Let me share two more links.
The coining of the term social graphs which is the post that caused most of what I've talked about to happen, and a nice easy to follow write up about Social Graph's Concepts and Issues by ReadWriteWeb.

So what's the point of me sharing all this? Besides this being an interesting new direction technology is leading us to, it's allowing me to play with Graph Theories and I like learning new stuff and making cool things with it.

More later!

–Francis

Cold boot attacks on Encryption Keys

The best fix I could think of would be to wipe the key from memory (overwrite actually) immediately after you're done using it. Also maybe keep it scrambled, but that wouldn't be fool proof. Another idea would be to try to put the encryption key where it would be overwritten by the dump program. But you can't rely on that either, you could easily transfer the ram into another computer where it wouldn't be the only ram.

This doesn't make disk encryption useless, its just something to be aware of. As long as you turn off your computer (and now you know to wait a minute for the ram to clear) your data should be ok.If you're computer is unlocked when it gets stolen, then you're screwed anyway. This research just found out that the lock closes a little slower then we thought.

It's also very cool.

–Francis

1. Large amount of protected storage. Raid 5
2. Ability to play somewhat recent games. I don't play often but the occasional title catches my eye and I'd like to be able to try it out.
3. Large amount of protected storage. Raid 5, having a single disk, actually bothers the hell out of me.
4. I want to be able to play movies over the network from my server. Yes that's a requirement. Though by now it should be filled

Scratch that. I've got some thoughts on my computing setup in total. First off, what I currently have.

• A Macbook Pro, 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 3 gigs of ram and a 200 Gig hd. I back this up to a 300 gig external every so often. It's my primary machine by far. I program and do unixy things on it mostly. I constantly wish it had more hd space mainly because it houses my 60 gig music collection too. Leopard and XP in bootcamp and via Parallels (Even though I own VMware and I trust it more. Also XP has 20 gigs of hd.)
• A recently deceased Intel P4 with 2 gigs of ram and two hard drives 80 and 120 gig, running windows xp. It was old enough not to play new games. (No bioshock, but Portals ran just fine.) Lately I mostly used it to play movies and be a synergy server for my laptop (keyboard and mouse sharing).
• A low end AMD server with some ram (512?) and a 1.5TB raid 5. It runs uTorrent, tversity (to stream movies to an xbox 360 which isn't mine) and does it all in Windows 2003 server. I had a plan to host offsite backups that required windows 2003 server, but I've long since abandoned that stupid idea. It wasn't worth it. Now because of the windows domain the server is in my mac wont smb mount it's massive data storage reliably and I'm using ftp/http for file transfer.
• The router is an even lower powered amd box with some ram and an underused 80 gig hard drive running IPcop. It works as a router just fine. It's also a caching transparent squid proxy with logging disabled to protect the guilty users who use it (sorta — not from authorities but from my other roommates). It's got shit vpn capabilities and it doesn't do anything else, but it doesn't need to.

Some things I'd like to do.

• Run a lamp/svn stack at home not on my laptop and with a decent amount of storage available.
• Have a vpn that I can connect to on my mac and on windows with no extra software. And little fuss.
• Have my movies mountable on my mac. The fact that they are all sitting on a 1.5 TB raid formatted NTFS that's almost full makes portability tough.
• Still stream movies to the xbox, that is a wonderful feature.
• Not spend hours and days of my life dealing with the nitty gritty of linux.

I haven't tried ubuntu, It's supposed to be a lot better then linux was 5 years ago during my debian days. Five years seems like a long time too, but I for some reason refuse to believe anything has changed. I need to go get a live cd. OSX lets me run apache, mysql, and php. I can compile anything I want fairly easily, and it's pretty. Long ago it replaced linux in my life.

But linux might come back. I'm attracted to keeping things partitioned. I've had a lot of servers hacked and learned I don't want to be a security expert. It's tough and nothing is impossible to break into. You just have to keep backups, keep things separate, and have a few layers between you and anything else. There's a limit to the defense in depth in my opinion. If you're letting packets into a program, regardless of how firewalled it is. If it's exploited it's exploited. I'm a little too paranoid to run public services from home anyway.

Back to partitioning. I'm attracted to virtual machines, which while they run on the same hardware they are separate (enough). And you can run more then one at once. It used to be that virtual machines were slow and slowed everything else down. They sucked a lot. Now they've got built into hardware instructions on how to operate at a virtual level, while looking like you're working at a normal level. Long story short, You can boot up an operating system on it's own, or inside another operating system and it wont be the wiser.

I'm still learning exactly what that means. How do two os's use hardware? Sound cards? Video cards? Obviously somethings need to be put on hold, or switched between OS's. Also they got something they call Paravirtualization, which instead of the OS running on your hardware totaly, it runs on some virtual hardware (sorta like what VMware does with the graphics hardware). With that you can get near native speeds and reduce a lot of the overhead involved in running a virtual os.

I would like to be able to take care of some of my wants and needs by using virtualization, but I'm not sure if the technology is mature enough for me to play with it. (by all means, this stuff works, and it is being used a lot) It's got to be easy and I got to be able to play my games. I also don't want to invest hundreds of hours into it.

In the end I'll probably just dual boot. For gaming virtualization is stupid. I'd want it for multiple dev environments. But honestly I'd want it for multiple servers mostly.

Grr… I guess I just talked myself out of playing with Xen for my desktop machine. I still got to figure out a way to migrate my server to linux.

Hope Some of that is useful to somebody.

The Buddylinks service (read: Virus) swarmed the nation last night. Sending unsolicited IM's with links to trick people into installing the program that sends out the IM's. Apparently it also leaves computers open to run any software buddylinks wishes you to run. Bad news I say. (Link goes to slashdot post on buddy links not the actual buddylinks it's self.)

The wonders of technology has brought us Self powered LEDs that light up when you tap them. These babies can be put in/on/near anything and will light up when moved. The Company that produced them say they look cool when put in water and swirled around. I'd like to note that kids would think everything from books to backpacks with LED's is cool, and that we're going to see a lot of these.

And lastly my favorite childhood game GoldenEye for the N64 had a major development today. After 6 years someone found something new in the game. A hidden and incomplete level that nobody has ever seen before. Its cool looking imho but its quite unplayable. I loved that game, I battled many of my friends in front of it too. Perfect Dark (not a sequel but a succedent game) was fun too but the blurry graphics made multiplayer a headache imho.