Discourse.net

Is Your Aftermarket Cellphone Charger Phoning Home?

Risks of USB chargers for cell phones from Paul Pomes writing in The Risks Digest Volume 25, Issue 90:

My wife recently purchased a no-name third-party USB charger for her Droid cell phone. When the included cable is connected to the USB port of her laptop, the phone charges normally albeit somewhat slowly. Connecting the cable to the included voltage-sensing wall transformer starts a menagerie of interesting effects: opening applications, creating garbled text messages, changing settings, etc. No doubt this is due to floating signal lines with induced voltages that is triggering this storm of activity.

It takes little imagination, however, to visualize more sinister applications. A very small amount of logic, specific for each cell phone model the charger is marketed for, could be embedded inside the plastic transformer block. After a few minutes delay the phone could be probed for sensitive information and the results sent to an electronic dead-drop. The risk is a classic trade-off of security vs convenience. Having a single charger for our Kindles, cell phones, PDAs simplifies the number of ancillary chargers we need to tote around. Mixing the mission of power supply and data conduit opens a covert channel.

Paul Pomes, DVM (formerly a network and computer security engineer until I got tired of meetings)

I suspect phone hacks of one sort or another could be the tech privacy story of the next two years. Phones are getting more powerful; they're minicomputers now and used for drafting email and short documents and even spreadsheets. Plus, there's just a lot less anti-virus tech available and in use than for PCs. Most importantly, people don't yet think of their phones as soft targets.

2010 - the Year of the Beeps - Part Five

Fast forward to January 7. It is about 8am. Before she tied me up, the young lady who is ordering me about gave me a very silly hat, one that I would not be caught dead in on the street, and told me to put it on. When I didn’t put it on quite right, she adjusted it just the way she wanted. By now, however, I can’t defend myself: I am tied down in an uncomfortable chair – it would probably be much more comfortable for someone about three inches shorter – all trussed up like a gourmet bird about to be roasted. Food is on my mind, as is coffee: I have not been allowed any food or water since last night.

I cannot escape. My left arm is tied to my right leg; my body is held onto the chair by a series of thick straps. A clamp grips my right index finger. Every so often a painful contraption chokes off the circulation in my left arm. People pay good money for this sort of treatment. Indeed, I was forced to pay in advance. And it wasn’t at all cheap.

The chair to which I am tied is in the center of a large room. There is a lot of ominous-looking stuff just out of reach, including a series of large plastic articulated arms which might be movable lights, although they are angled so one could imagine them to be all sorts of things. All but one of the lights are turned off. Earlier, before they all left me here all alone and went off somewhere where I can neither see nor hear them, there was a young woman in here, dressed in a sort of uniform, pointing one of the objects right in my face – it is a bright light – explaining that in a few minutes they were going to stab me with something sharp, and make me bleed. Along the wall to my left is a nozzle a bit like what one would use to plug a garden hose to the outside of the house, but this one is inside and nothing is plugged into it. (Do they use it to sluice down the blood?)

There is a loud beeping noise, like the sound of my own heart, coming from behind me, but I can’t move my head to see what is making it. The woman explains that after they have taken all the blood they will want will feed me my own blood – inject it, actually. After that they have done that, she says, a man (for she is just an assistant, I am going to attended to by a veritable team) is going to take a series of very sharp and nasty-looking implements casually displayed at eye level for my viewing pleasure – and their easy reach – and cut a nice hole into me. Foreign substances will be introduced. The metal bits look nasty. There are a lot of shiny implements with sharp bits, in all different sizes, all laid out in rows. (I asked for this. I am paying for this. It is probably not too late. I could ask them to let me go and they surely would.)

As all this is explained to me in an incongruously cheerful manner, the beeps matching my heart rate go up a bit. Eventually the man comes. To add insult to imminent injury he is wearing a big Florida Gator’s hat that covers all his hair. He asks disapprovingly if I am nervous. He attacks my arm. Blood goes everywhere – “a gusher,” he says. I don’t find it as funny as he does. “We’re going to feed you a little cocktail now,” he says.

I want to protest that I don’t drink before lunch, but they inject it intravenously and very soon I am unconscious. Two hours later I’m awake again and my dental surgery is pronounced a success.

Now I can only eat mush for a week, which really puts me a good mood. Then again, they did prescribe some strong stuff.

Is this the right frame of mind for grading, or an excuse to put it off?

2010 - the Year of the Beeps - Part Four

Think of this as an intermission, as no beeps were directly involved, but on the January 5th the downstairs heater lost the plot. It didn't beep. It didn't in fact seem to want to do anything.

Florida, coincidentally, is enjoying it longest cold spell in recorded history.

2010 - the Year of the Beeps - Part Three

The third set of beeps started going off on January 3rd. They were most audible from in my study but it wasn’t clear if it was the smoke detector in the study or at the top of the stairs. I said one, my oldest said the other. Fine, I told him, replace both.

Being a teenager he preferred to just stand there until he figured out which it was. Being a dad, I had him change the other one anyway, on the theory that having all been installed at the same time, they are all about to go. He's tall, and the ladder is right there.

2010 - the Year of the Beeps - Part Two

January 1st. Too early in the day. Downstairs something was beeping.

That alone isn't saying much, it seems like every time we bring something new into the house it wants to beep at us. The programmable coffee pot beeps when the coffee is done dripping, and again when the hot plate turns off. The microwave, the washer, the dryer (but not the dishwasher) beep when they are done. The dryer even has an option to keep tumbling clothes every few minutes for a few more hours at the cycle is done in service of the idea that they will get less wrinkled, but that only makes it beep all the more.

But this wasn't one of the usual beeps, it was surplus. And it came and went. Beep. Delay. Beep. Delay. Beep. Very very very long delay.

The noise seemed to come from the kitchen. Or as it the dining room? By the time I'd get over there, the beeps would stop. And then start again some twenty or thirty minutes later.

Eventually I decided it was coming from the garage (which has a door to the kitchen). That made the leading suspects the garage smoke detector and its neighboring carbon monoxide detector. Neither was blinking. Both are installed right next to each other, in very high in a hard-to-reach location about ten feet off the floor. I can get to them by standing on a large object to the left of the four stairs leading down from the kitchen, then taking a very long stretch to stand on the small edge of the little platform that holds up our air pusher. It's rather precarious there, although there are walls to push against to keep from falling. It's very hard to get down again. I wasn't going up there until I was sure I needed to.

It wasn't until Saturday, the 2nd, that I caught the carbon monoxide detector in the act. Climbing up revealed that the alarm meant the backup 9V battery was low, not that I was about to asphyxiate – that would have rated four beeps in quick succession. A quick battery change, some more gymnastics, and peace.

Temporarily.

2010 - the Year of the Beeps - Part One

Very early January 1st, something in my study, which is right next to my bedroom, started beeping very loudly. I dragged myself out of post-New Years revelry bed (Ok, nothing wild, but this year we actually celebrated instead of our normal pattern of sleeping off jet lag), to find that my UPS for my computer was unhappy. Which was odd, since the computer was off, and there wasn't much drawing power from it.

So I tried to turn on the computer. It wouldn't start. This woke me up, since I was just finishing up a short paper that was already a bit overdue, and had no backups of the most recent draft, the product of several days furious typing, outside the RAID mirror in the computer itself.

There didn't seem to be any obvious power issues. The lights worked. The sockets, including the dedicated line into which I plug the UPS, worked. But the UPS was unhappy. And every attempt to get it to something made it beep more.

Finally I got another UPS into range (we have a lot of computers), plugged the computer into it, and it started right up. I felt a bit better. No lost work.

The UPS comes with some software that … if the USB cord will just reach … tells me what it is thinking, and it tells me that the UPS is running off the battery because of overvoltages on the line. And the battery is so low that it won't let the computer start up.

So now I know the cause of the problem. Moving the cord around to other outlets doesn't help much, although the voltage does seem a bit less on the shared (not dedicated) plug. So I reset the sensitivity to allow a higher voltage, and hope my equipment will be OK. The battery starts recharging. Soon the UPS is allowing my computer to go on. But over the next three days, even at the higher level it trips repeatedly, and finally I turn off the beeps. Which means that yesterday my computer tries to go into hibernation mode all of a sudden when the battery has dropped to 50%, something I haven't noticed since I have turned off all the other warnings.

Why, you might ask, is FP&L delivering 132+ volts? As best I can figure, our current cold snap means that people are not running their air conditioners. And I suppose heaters just take less power. In any case, there must be a lot of surplus capacity all of a sudden.

Anyway, by the time I figured all this out and checked that my document was OK, I was far too awake to go back to sleep.

Just as well, really. The next set of beeps were downstairs…and no, not the UPS that powers the network. That one was suspiciously quiet for some reason which will need investigation….

2010 Starts With a Beep

2010 started with a beep. Actually lots of beeps.

Full story later.

Cool Stuff in the Pipeline

Prof. Ed Lazowska's highly plausible Exponentials R Us: Seven Computer Science Game-Changers from the 2000's, and Seven More to Come.

Spengler Meets AT&T

Via the horrifically erudite and urbane Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Making Light: The Swindle, a link to the must-read faux Steve Jobs's blog rant, A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T.

I loved it and I don't even have an iPhone…

The Future is Looking at You

I have seen the future, and it is looking at me with Google Goggles.

Interestingly, “Google Goggles” was part of the title of a good 2005 dissertation on search engine bias by Alejandro M. Diaz, Through the Google Goggles: Sociopolitical Bias in Search Engine Design. I doubt he gets a cut.

Finally, An iPhone App I Could Want

Mostly I've seen no reason to even want an iPhone. Expensive. Eats battery life. Wants to sell you things.

But this…this…I could actually imagine wanting if I had an iPhone: Brian Eno Releases Second iPhone App.

7/10

Lifehacker lists its Top 10 Computer Hardware Fixes and Upgrades - Hardware.

I give myself seven out of ten. In my defense, I don't want a Hackintosh, by the time my laptop screen died (2 laptops ago), it was a computational relic in every other way, and it's not that I don't ever solder, I'm just not that good at it.

All SSD Drives Are Far From Equal

I had not originally planned to consider buying an SSD drive for my new laptop. There are lots of reasons not to, including the high price, and the relative immaturity of the technology. (The relatively low capacity doesn't bother me much, I've been living fine with a 40GB drive on the current machine.

But three things have led me to consider an SSD: it's standard on some of the machines I'm thinking of; it's not as expensive an upgrade on the others; and the T400s uses 1.8” drives, which I gather are substantially slower than the standard 2.5” disks found in most laptops. Indeed, since drive speed is in substantial part a function of rotational speed it only stands to reason that for any given number of rotations per minute, a disk with a smaller radius will move less information past the read/write point (2πR will be smaller at its greatest point, and the mean will be smaller too).

Thinking about SSDs led me to this marvelous article at AnandTech, The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ. It may be more than most people want to know, but the takeaways are clear:

• Lots of first-generation SSDs look great at first, then work poorly. Their performance “degrades.”
• Benchmarks of new laptops with SSDs in them that in any way rely on hard drive performance cannot be trusted unless the test suite has been tweaked to fill up the SSD with data before the testing begins.
• SSDs vary enormously in quality. The really good ones are insanely expensive.

It also seems that the Lenovs and probably the Dells (at least for their more expensive choice) use Samsung SSDs which get relatively horrible initial benchmarks compares to the leaders, but it seems don't degrade as much as some others.

The sensible thing to do would be to get a conventional disk, and maybe upgrade in a year or two if prices get sensible. But some of the laptop makers do give you a break on prices, so that's less obvious than it might be. Plus, to the extent I'm considering the T400s, the 1.8” form factor may severely restrict the update options. At present almost all the SSD drives on Newegg are 2.5” form factor drives.

I suppose I'm overthinking this, but I enjoy it.

The Hunt for A New Laptop Continues

My laptop search is now in the decision phase. It's fairly clear that I've not only passed the point of diminishing returns on the scouring of the online reviews and benchmarks, but that it is fast becoming a distant memory.

I've more or less narrowed the choices to the Lenovo X301 (refurb) or the Samsung X360 34P (do they do refurbs?), with the Lenovo T400s (refurb) an outside contender — although it has a bit more weight, its processor benchmarks are about double the other two.

As between the X301 and X360, the Samsung weighs less and seems to have a much better battery life; despite a slower clock speed the Lenovo may be a little faster (although the T400s blows them both out of the water). The other benchmarks I can find are broadly comparable. The Lenovo has an unparalleled reputation for standing up to mistreatment; it is hard to get a sense for how sturdy the Samsung is, other than it's not flimsy.

The Lenovo X301 has a slightly smaller screen than the Samsung (and the T400s has the biggest); the Samsung comes with a bigger SSD for the money (not that I really need it). The Lenovos have optical drives; the Samsung doesn't. The X301 lacks the media card reader and Express Card slot found on the Samsung. (The absence of a docking bay for the Lenovo is not something I care about, as I don't use those.)

Here's a table with more details:

Now how do I decide? Not to mention that given the existence of substantially cheaper and adequate — but not as light or as powerful — alternatives it seems a lot of money, even for something I'll probably use frequently over the next several years.

I wish I could see them before buying…

The Hunt for a New Laptop Begins

I have spent a chunk of the past few days looking at what I call “laptop porn” — enthusiast reviews and critiques of new laptops. Because I can't put off buying a new one much longer.

My trusty nearly five year old Dell 300m is in its death throes — not only is the body a bit damaged, and the battery good for only about 20 minutes, but the machine's 1.4 Ghz Pentium M chip will no longer go over 599 Mhz. I've turned off speedstep in the BIOS, put the power settings to their most greedy, I've downloaded various utilities to make sure the fan cools it (it's getting hot under there), and the chip is asked to give its all. To no avail. It's a slug. It's slooow. And I worry it may decide one day to slow itself further. So it's got to go.

I use my laptop a great deal, both on the road and in meetings at work, so for a combined birthday and 20th anniversary gift, I'm going to get a good one. But what is that exactly?

I thought hard about getting an ultralight Atom-powered machine. My wife's MSI Wind is a wonder of portability. It doesn't feel as slow as the specs suggest it should given the Atom chip and the 2GB RAM limit imposed by Microsoft. I hate the MSI keyboard because the “.” key is in the wrong place, but some competitors don't have that problem. But the deal-breaker, I've decided, is the screen just isn't deep enough — you just don't get enough lines of text on the screen to work well with a footnoted legal document.

So I'm going up a size for a bigger screen and a speedier computing experience. I still want as light a machine as I can afford, because airports are not getting any more convenient (have you seen what they did to MIA??? but I digress). That said, I don't want one that is flimsy and won't stand up to the abuse I seem to subject laptops to. I need a fullsize or very-close-to-fullsize keyboard so I can touch type. I figure, might as well get a core2 duo, so it will take everything I throw at it, but I don't have to have the very fastest clock speed. I won't play games on the machine, so I don't need a superfancy graphics chip. I will need an optical drive, but not every day, so it can be external, although a very light bulit-in would be nice. I want lots of ports, but don't need HDMI output.

It turns out that most of the brick and mortar shops that stocked the kind of laptop I am looking for either don't exist any more, or don't stock them any more. So I'm going to be even more dependent on reviews than for previous purchases. Being risk-averse, that tends to push me to established brands like Dell or, to my surprise, Lenovo — an idea planted by a commentator on my earlier post on this self-indulgent subject, It May Be Time for a New Laptop.

There doesn't seem to be a Dell available right now that meets my specs and gets good reviews, although I find their site hard to use and may have missed one. The closest might be the Adamo, but it seems to be glitz over performance and weighs 4lbs without an optical drive. (And before you ask, I'm a PC, not a Mac. I run wordperfect.)

The Toshiba Portege R500 & R600 have very impressive specs and low weight, but the reviews have scary words like “flex” and “loud fan”. The review of the Fujistu Lifebook P8020 didn't make it sound attractive at all. T

I need to learn about Sony's offerings, although at first glance the high-end Sonys Vaio seem expensive.

Lenovo has a trio of high-priced attractive machines offering a different mix of features and compromises. The list prices are mostly too steep, but there seem to be good prices sometimes on refurb jobs and I've had good experiences with those: both my laptop and my desktop are refurbs from Dell.

So I'm looking at the X200s, the X301, and the T400s.

The X200s is the lightest, in part due to the external optical drive. It's 2.47 lbs (!!!) with the 4-cell battery and a very attractive 3.0lbs even with the six cell I'd likely get. The problem is that there is no trackpad, and I've gotten pretty used to them. My experiences with that little red stick on the Lenovos hasn't been great — they seem hard use to make small adjustments as one often needs to do in documents.

The X301 might be perfect, at 3.3 lbs with a 6 cell and internal DVD, but it is expensive even refurbed, even with the smaller SSD drive — which I think will be enough for my needs. It seems to come mostly with various flavors of Vista, which is a bit of a problem as I'm still in XP land, and plan to stay there until I graduate to Ubuntu or am forced into Win7 or maybe Win8. I could get a regular drive, but I think I would very much benefit from the increased disk speed from solid state (and the modest weight savings) whatever model I get. My only worry there is that a future windows operating system, if I have to use one, might be so bloated as to fill the smaller SSDs….

The T400s refurbed isn't quite as expensive, although it's still up there, but the weight is getting up to 4lbs. I like its looks, although online X partisans sneer at its T-ness. But it weighs 4lbs, which is more than my current machine. Shouldn't progress mean things get lighter? (Although to be fair the T400s has a full 14” screen, and I'm used to the 12.x” variety.)

I'm thinking this isn't going to be easy. Or cheap.

Every Day is April Fools?

Wired.com, Danger Room (no kidding), Company Denies its Robots Feed on the Dead:

POMPANO BEACH, Fla.– In response to rumors circulating the internet on sites such as FoxNews.com, FastCompany.com and CNET News about a “flesh eating” robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (Pink Sheets:CYPW) and Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian.

Surely this deserves a special place in the annals of PR damage control?

Oh-oh

The designers of your new 'smart' electricity meter are as dumb as a rock:

New electricity meters being rolled out to millions of homes and businesses are riddled with security bugs that could bring down the power grid […]. The so-called smart meters for the first time provide two-way communications between electricity users and the power plants that serve them. Prodded by billions of dollars from President Obama's economic stimulus package, utilities in Seattle, Houston, Miami, and elsewhere are racing to install them as part of a plan to make the power grid more efficient. Their counterparts throughout Europe are also spending heavily on the new technology. There's just one problem: The newfangled meters needed to make the smart grid work are built on buggy software that's easily hacked, said Mike Davis, a senior security consultant for IOActive. The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid.

(From The Register via !='s Absolute power shuts off absolutely (with emphasis added))

Anyone seen one of these yet? This part doesn't sound fun:

To prove his point, Davis and his IOActive colleagues designed a worm that self-propagates across a large number of one manufacturer's smart meter. Once infected, the device is under the control of the malware developers in much the way infected PCs are under the spell of bot herders. Attackers can then send instructions that cause its software to turn power on or off and reveal power usage or sensitive system configuration settings.

Three Key Questions About the Kindle

It would be cool to have all my work materials on a little platform like the Kindle (or, heck, just on pdf so I didn't have to carry them!). But so far the Kindle doesn't seem for me. Cory Doctorow gets at some of the reasons in Amazon releases some Kindle source-code when he says he can't warm to the Kindle until he understands what he can do with it.

1. Is there anything in the Kindle EULA that prohibits moving your purchased DRM-free Kindle files to a competing device?

2. Is there anything in the Kindle file-format (such as a patent or trade-secret) that would make it illegal to produce a Kindle format-reader or converter for a competing device?

3. What flags are in the DRM-free Kindle format, and can a DRM-free Kindle file have its features revoked after you purchase it?

No one at Amazon will answer these questions. I've asked them of my contact there, a manager who wrote me to tell me about the existence of Amazon's DRM-free option for Kindles, and he hasn't replied to my questions over a period of several months and several re-asks. Then, an O'Reilly exec asked Amazon to clarify this, as O'Reilly is releasing all its books as DRM-free editions for the Kindle, and he, too, has been stonewalled. Then I wrote to their press office, on behalf of the Guardian newspaper, and they didn't even deign to reply with a simple “no comment.” Just radio silence.

Someone should start a betting pool on when we get the answers.

Figures

I bought a GPS not so long ago. So I wasn't happy to read that the GAO is fretting GPS may stop working next year,

U.S. GAO - Global Positioning System: Significant Challenges in Sustaining and Upgrading Widely Used Capabilities: It is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption. If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected. (1) In recent years, the Air Force has struggled to successfully build GPS satellites within cost and schedule goals; it encountered significant technical problems that still threaten its delivery schedule; and it struggled with a different contractor. As a result, the current IIF satellite program has overrun its original cost estimate by about $870 million and the launch of its first satellite has been delayed to November 2009—almost 3 years late. (2) Further, while the Air Force is structuring the new GPS IIIA program to prevent mistakes made on the IIF program, the Air Force is aiming to deploy the next generation of GPS satellites 3 years faster than the IIF satellites. GAO's analysis found that this schedule is optimistic, given the program's late start, past trends in space acquisitions, and challenges facing the new contractor. Of particular concern is leadership for GPS acquisition, as GAO and other studies have found the lack of a single point of authority for space programs and frequent turnover in program managers have hampered requirements setting, funding stability, and resource allocation. (3) If the Air Force does not meet its schedule goals for development of GPS IIIA satellites, there will be an increased likelihood that in 2010, as old satellites begin to fail, the overall GPS constellation will fall below the number of satellites required to provide the level of GPS service that the U.S. government commits to. Such a gap in capability could have wide-ranging impacts on all GPS users, though there are measures the Air Force and others can take to plan for and minimize these impacts.

It May Be Time for a New Laptop

I'd hoped to put off replacing my aged Dell 300m until fall, when the new generation of netbooks would be out, but now I may be in the market very soon. I knew its days were numbered because it had stopped recharging the battery some time ago (apparently a common motherboard problem on this model).

I want lightweight, with a great keyboard at least near regular size, and doesn't break the bank. I will sacrifice speed, and screen size (and even screen resolution if I have to).

Any suggestions?

Really Useful and Obscure Computer CPU Info

I'd say this is one of the most useful posts ever for people thinking of buying a PC: How many Intel CPUs will fail the XP Mode test in Windows 7?.

What Ed Bott has done is go through the somewhat obscure Intel info and identify which chips will run XP in virtual mode under Windows 7. There is no method to the Intel madness: more expensive doesn't inevitably mean that your CPU will have the needed virtualization extensions (Intel VT), nor does more cores. You just have to know. And now you can.

By blind dumb luck, the computer I'm writing this on, a Dell Precision T3400 — a sort of stopgap refurbished machine I bought in a hurry when my old one croaked a few months ago — has a E6850 on it, so I'm OK in the unlikely event I upgrade from XT.

That said, my plan if and when I get a RoundTuit, is to test out the really nifty-looking new release of Ubuntu, with a Virtual Box, and see how that box handles Wordperfect. If it's fast and smooth, that's where I'm headed if the guest can share the clipboard with the host.

Clipboard sharing works great with XP as host and Ubuntu as guest. Only complaint is that sharing a directory doesn't work out of the box, and sharing a USB drive runs into hardware issues. (I gather you lose 3D in the guest, but I am not a gamer, so I can live with that.)

3GB Is Still Enough RAM

Tom's Hardware : Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?

Not much has changed since 4 GB of RAM became the “sweet spot” for performance and price in the enthusiast market. While 32-bit operating systems previously limited those 4 GB configurations to around 3 GB of useful memory space, today's test shows that 3 GB is still usually enough.

Which is good, as 32-bit versions of popular operating systems can't actually address much more than that anyway. They do say you might go to double that if you have a 64-bit OS which can take advantage of it, but more on some future-proofing theory than anything else. Note, however, that it's far from costless,

Every time we doubled memory capacity, idle power consumption increased by around 10 W. Using the Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmark, load power consumption for the entire system increased by around 10% for each increase in memory capacity.

Surveying the Wreckage

Despite the post's title, this has nothing to do with the election. Rather, I will attempt here to describe the high points of an unfolding, even-worsening, personal computer disaster brought to you by some eldritch combination of Microsoft, Symantec, Western Digital, Samsung, and (maybe) Diskpeeper, with cameos by Mozilla, and the idiots who defined the original SATA hardware disk standard. My objective, dear reader, is not to engage your sympathy, that might have had value back before I was a gibbering wreck some days ago but no longer, but rather to trigger your schadenfreude, in the hopes that the computer disaster you had last week, or will have next week, will not seem so terrible. Let something good come of all this.

(Note: Above does not apply to reader Ed Bott, I'm sure this stuff never happens to him.)

This is, to my eye, a ridiculously complicated story, and even as it is, I'm sure I'll be leaving out parts as the mind dulls pain, and what the mind fails to dull, lack of sleep probably takes care of. The only things I can promise the reader who perseveres through this long sad geeky tale, is that things only get worse until the end, at which point they are very very bad and remain unresolved.

Let us begin.

I'm runing Windows XP, service pack 2 on an aging Intel Pentium 4 system. I tried SP3 at work, it hosed my machine, and I've been afraid to try it at home, at least until I got my backups sorted out better.

Recently, the system has been a bit weird, with very slow file access times (windows explorer would take forever to open, ditto with file dialogs in programs), and I also was worried that my copy of Firefox was compromised, at it (1) always opens connections to places it shouldin't when I start the program (even in same mode) and (2) every so often something would apparently get firefox to try every port number in sequence trying to make a connection out of the machine. Fortunately, Spybot had modified my localhots file (making it rather suspiciously enormous, in fact), so all these connection attempts ended up at local host. But it was worrying. I decided I had to do something, or several somethings.

First, I decided to take the plunge and migrate to a larger disk, and ordered up a “green” WD7500AACS. (Three quarters of a terrabyte! Whoohoo!) About three or four weeks ago, I copied my files on to it using using XXClone, a nice piece of freeware that basically makes an entire copy of Drive A (including operating system) onto drive B. But the cloning program is very slow — 12-16 hours slow for me. It didn't help that I have to jumper my drives to run at SATA 1 speeds instead of SATA 2: my ASUS P4C800-E deluxe motherboard is old enough that it will not recognize a SATA 2 drive, and without a PCI-E slot there's as far as I can tell no point in getting a new sata drive controller card.

But once that was past, my new environment was much better. I had lots of spare disk space. But things were still slow sometimes. I decided it was time to kill the trojan, or whatever, that seemed to be infesting my system. I also decided that I should go back to hardware RAID, since I don't back up my files enough.

But first things first. I called the help desk about my virus. We get our virus software from the University, which sensibly decided that it would better protect its network, if it also protected the computers that most often interact with it — the students' and the staffs'. They first upgraded me from our old Symantec software to the new “Symantec Endpoint Protection”. But that didn't seem to do anything. Using a netstat agent I could still see from time to time firefox working its way down the series of ports. So I called back, and the UM help people sent me on the Symantec help people.

Contacting them took a little time, but once done a very competent sounding tech walked me through a few things, then announced I had an old version of the software, and should upgrade — by uninstalling my version and then installing a new one. He guided me to downloading the uninstall tool, and the install tool. These were big files, downloading veeery slowly, and I had to go to a meeting, so we ended the call. He warned me that the uninstall might take a couple of reboots.

When I got back, the files were there, and I ran the first one. It duly called for a reboot and I did it — only to get error messages and a lockup. I called back, and they said to reboot again. I did, it unfroze the machine, and they said to run it again. Which I did, at which point the disk wouldn't boot any more.

But no problem, I had my backup, the 160GB version. Nervously, I copied that version onto another 160BG disk I had spare (the old hardware raid I used to run), then back on to the 750GB disk. But now that the two disks are in the system, with the 750Gb disk on the second pair of SATA ports, which are RAID capable (but were properly set for ordinary non-RAID use in the bios), the Windows system on the first 160GB disk decided they needed to be reactivated. And windows didn't give me a code to input or use when I called. And I couldn't fnd the Widows media. So that was a disaster, it seemed.

But the 750GB version worked. So that's good. But now I'm nervous, things seemed jinxed. So I order up a second WD7500AACS, and plan to RAID mirror them.

Diskeeper version 9 doesn't work on big disks. I get the 2008 edition of Diskeeper and install it. It says my MFT tables are almost full, I should grow and defrag them, so I tell it to go ahead. Nothing bad seems to happen as a result.

Now, time extra backups. I'm a little nervous about hardware raid, in part because I'm a little dyslexic. I have this nightmare that I'll take the real disk and copy the blank on to it and lose my data. I've never actually done this, but the raid setup isn't a very friendly dialog, and somehow it feels like something I could do.

So I decided to make a software clone onto the new disk with XXClone, so that whichever way I copied the data would be OK. Both disks would have the right data, so whichever gets deleted, it wouldn't matter.

The new WD7500AACS arrived the other day, and this weekend I got around to formatting it preliminary to running xxclone to stuff it full of my data. I installed the disk, started up the format, and went of to do some stuff. When I got back, I found a blue screen of death, a 0024 failure (that I gather means a loose wire, something version one the sata hardware standard made all too easy). When I tried to reboot, I got a smart drive error - the disk is bad. I flip some disks around. One of the 160GB disks won't boot either — “Disk error”. When the dust settles I have some very high-tech paperweights.

• WD7500AACS #1 - Smart drive monitor says the disk is BAD
• WD7500AACS #2 - disk error if I try to boot from it (which is hardly surprising, since it's probably not even formatted), but unrecognized by the machine if I put it as a second disk (which I don't understand, and yes I tried a wire I know works).
• Samsung HD160JJ #1 - disk error.
• Samsung HD160JJ #2 - boots up just fine (no Microsoft Activation issue perhaps because the other disks are all, from the OS's point of view, not there?).

I've lost 3 weeks or more of personal data, only most of which can be reconstructed. My work files, on the other hand, either on a unix server or on a USB stick, which I religiously back up at home and work, so that's OK. My personal financial info, which isn't backed up for the last 3+ weeks, I can recreate: the sad prospect of reclassifying a month of credit card transactions in Quicken will be followed by the fun of reliving the crash of my 403(b). There are a few other miscellaneous notes I've lost, I hope there's nothing really major.

I'm still on the old version of Symantec Endpoint protection, and SP2. Having gone back in time, hard-disk-wise, I also again have the flash 9 that hangs all the time instead of flash 10 which doesn't. And a Quicken update. And varous firefox plugins. And don't let's even talk about when I'm going to install Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The WD's are brand new, so I guess there's warranty replacement, unless I want to schlep a long way to the good computer repair store, and see if they can pull my financial records and some other notes off disk #1. I gather if smart says “BAD” there generally isn't much one can do.

I'm not sure about the warranty status of the Samsungs.

The more important question is what I do next. I'm worried. As it happens, I do have one more large unformatted hard drive in the house, a WD50000AAKS, that I was going to use for a different machine. When I get my courage back, I think I'll try formatting that and cloning this last working drive onto it.

Meanwhile, diskeeper version 9 (we're back to that) says I'm using 92% of my MFT and this is bad. But I'm afraid to touch it.

A Useful Rule

Joi Ito says,

You know when you lose your connection and both sides frantically try to call each other back and cross paths? Richard Wolpert has a new rule:

1. if you initiated the call and it drops you call the other person back.
2. if you received the call and it drops you just wait for the call back.

Pass it on.

False Alarm

Over the weekend, someone called my office voice mail and left a 228 second message that sounds like a muffled pro tennis match play-by-play.

For a minute there, I thought I had a new social trend spotted in the wild: voice mail spam.

So I called the number from the caller ID.

It's not a social trend. It seems a former student took his young daughter to the tennis match this weekend, and during the match he gave her the cell phone to play with. She happily pushed buttons, it called my office, and I got a recording of a bit of the match.

But I had a nice chat with the dad, who's now a partner in a big local firm and seems to be doing very well.

Ultra-Light Notebook Wars

This very funny ad skewering the Macbook Air actually made me want to buy the Lenovo product — until I saw the price tag.

(via Ed Bott)

Looks like I'll be waiting for that Atom-powered Asus eee after all.

The Future of Car Doors

Is this the future of car doors? Looks good to me:

Don't RAID Western Digital Drives

It seems that ordinary Western Digital (WD) hard drives have an “advanced” feature that makes them unsuitable for either hardware or software RAID. Since I like to mirror the family's hard drives for security in the event of hard drive failure — we had one fail on my wife's machine last week so this is hardly paranoia — this is something I am glad I found before placing an order.

Answer

Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically in either a desktop computer environment or on RAID controller.

If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly unless jointly qualified by an enterprise OEM. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.

When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).

I think the box should have a warning sticker about this…

Meanwhile, back to the hunt for reliable, very quiet, low-heat-producing, mass storage.

Blackwater's Ideal Employee

Norbert Wiener Award winner Bruce Schneier points us to a new 117-page paper by Ronald C. Arkin on Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture.

Looks like a must read - after I get caught up…

Hard Disks Spying For the Chinese

Here's a new twist on an old method of stealing data.

Taipei Times: Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.

Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said.

The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner's knowledge …

The bureau said that the method of attack was unusual, adding that it suspected Chinese authorities were involved.

Of course, in the USA, we use more subtle means to get your data.

How Did You Spend Your Vacation?

Monday was Labor Day, a federal holiday in these United States, making a three-day weekend.

I spent quite a lot of it looking at a computer that kept saying this:

We're sorry; the installer crashed. Please file a new bug report at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+filebug (do not attach your details to any existing bug) and a developer will attend to the problem as soon as possible. To help the developers understand what went wrong, include the following detail in your bug report, and attach the files /var/log/syslog and /var/log/partman: Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity”, line 210, in
main()
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity”, line 205, in main install(args[0])
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity”, line 58, in install
ret = wizard.run()
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py”, line 358, in run
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py”, line 989, in process_step
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py”, line 743, in progress_loop
RuntimeError: Install failed with exit code 139; see /var/log/syslog

Mind you, I was doing something that may be fairly silly:

• take a moderately ancient machine with a tiny ISA drive with Windows on it,
• shove a low-budget SATA card into it, a Rosewill RC-209
• ignore the fact that the BIOS will see the drive but won't offer to boot from it
• leave Windows XP on the ISA drive
• install a massive (half-terrabyte!) drive on the SATA card
• partition the drive to give Windows a little more room to play
• install Ubuntu to the bulk of the SATA drive.

It was the last step that kept croaking. Even thought the CD I burned passed all integrity checks.

So I filed a bug report. Currently, I'm downloading the alternate Ubuntu installer, and doing a full scan of the (brand new) disk's integrity in case it has some physical fault. Takes a long time to scan half a terrabyte.

Earlier, a similar install using the same model card and a similar SATA disk alone on a similar computer (without the attempt to dual boot on two drives) went swimmingly.

But this one would croak even if I unplugged the ISA drive with windows on it. So There's Something Funny Going On….

Update: disk checks out fine.

Meanwhile, thanks to the Super Grub Disk I managed to rescue Windows from a non-functioning entry I'd put into the MBR. Three cheers for the Super Grub Disk! I'm now back to where I was 40 hours ago!

(Lest anyone feel too sorry for me, this isn't my main machine, and I actually like solving problems like this, even (especially?) if I caused them.)

IF

If I had a TV, I might have a satellite dish (or cable, I have no idea which is worse).

If I had a satellite dish, I'd definitely want to use the Satellite Alignment Calculator 2.0 to aim it.

One Laptop Per Child Review

Freedom to Tinker has the perfect One Laptop Per Child Review — written by a 12-year-old. He likes it a lot, but identifies a couple of issues.

Cool Travel Phone (But You Can't Have One)

This Spice D-80 Dual Mode Handset looks like a cool GSM phone for traveling with both a domestic and a foreign SIM. Pity it's not a flip phone…and that it's only going to be sold in India.

I think US carriers will be forced to unlock all their phones and accept some competition…eventually. Maybe some day they'll even start selling phones like this. (But in the long run we are all dead.)

Phone Frenzies

We were driving in downtown Coral Gables last night a bit before seven pm, when we saw something very unusual: a long line of people queuing on the sidewalk. Understand that people just don't stand around much outdoors in South Florida in late June. It's too hot. And yet, here was a line halfway down the block, curving around to something we could not see. A book signing? Supermodels? Miami Dolphins? No. After we turned the corner, all was revealed: The AT&T/Cingular store. I'm guessing a horde of folks came by after work to buy an iPhone and were still there an hour or two later. (The looked too fresh to have been there all day.) When I came back around 8:30 pm there were still over a dozen people in the queue. Amazing.

More to my taste is this feature from AnandTech, Apple's iPhone Dissected: We did it, so you don't have to. Not that there's anything terribly surprising in there…

The Real Problem with USB Flash Drives

Someone should write about the REAL problem with flash drives: they break too easily at the connection between the usb male plug and the body of the drive. The otherwise wonderful Flash Voyager is by far the most vulnerable I've encountered, but many others share the same Achilles Heel too.

Reviewers always seem to write about running a car over the drive. That mean putting pressure on the case. This isn't, in my experience, a common real-life scenario. In contrast, the real-life damage case is torque when your laptop bumps into something with that drive sticking out. It snaps easily. And no one ever talks about that.

The best drives I've had for performance (I want to be able to copy lots of small files quickly; reported tests usually concentrate on large file transfer, so my preferences may not be your preferences) were also the most delicate at that critical point: the Corsair Flash Voyagers. I've broken two. Second-fastest, the OCZ Rally2, were not as fragile, but were not exactly tough either. I bent one. It still works, but I don't trust it.

I've currently moved to a Cruzer Titanium, which not only looks a bit stronger, but has a nice retractable head so I don't have to worry about losing the little cap. The performance is good, although I don't think it is quite as good as the other two.

Unfortunately, the Cruzer came with the dreaded U3 software. I used the control panel to disable it, but haven't had the heart to delete it on the theory that this might be irrevocable (online opinions vary), and anyway it didn't take much space. But I may delete it soon, as it seems my Asus motherboard absolutely won't boot up with the drive plugged in, even though the BIOS is set to boot from the hard drive first.

GPS Urban Navigation: Still Some Bugs in the System

A walk with GPS reveals some of the problems with the system.:

In retrospect, what's really interesting is this: when the technology failed us, we didn't look around to see where we were and search for street signs. Of course, at that point we were standing in the middle of a barren junkyard wasteland.

Technical Expert Needed Please

Could someone who understands hardware marketing speak better than I please translate the following into plain English?

What makes this sound card a bit special is the presence of a secondary music processor, which allows legal “ripping” of music you've bought onto regular MP3, WMAs and so on. The trick is called Analogue Loopback Transformation, or in technical terms, the redirection of outputs from a physical output to secondary audio processor which will then record the file in the format you want.

Here's what I want to know: Does this mean that if one has a 'trusted' computer and/or a Vista-like 'trusted' OS that is designed to prevent the user from copying data without permission from Mom, that this sound card will rip it anyway? Is this a DMCA killer? Or does the word “legal” in the quote above mean “DRM inside”?

Why I Love Slashdot (Wok Edition)

Links to stories like the New Zealand Herald's $10 wok keeps TV station on air are a big part of why I love slashdot.org. It seems that rather than by a satellite dish, this TV station just rigged up a reflector using a NZ$10 wok. And, yes, it seems to be wokking perfectly well.

• “Is a wok parabolic in cross section or is it circular?”
• “The reflector does a couple of thing. The most obvious is that it catches the signal and focuses it on the antenna. The bigger the dish and the closer it is to a parabola, the more signal to the antenna. The other thing it does is to shield the antenna from noise. The antenna in the article seemed to be nested right inside the wok. So, the wok probably improves the signal to noise ratio (SNR) by at least double and maybe by a factor of three or four (or more if it's done right). That's very important. If your signal to noise ratio is good enough, you can use amplification to get the signal you need. If the SNR isn't good enough, then almost nothing helps.
  
  “The wok will give a useful increase in signal strength but a more significant improvement in signal to noise ratio.”
• “More to the point, why pay to watch “45 South” when I can, more cheaply, scoop my eyeballs out with a rusty spoon from Honest Al's Hardware store.”

All very much in the spirit of the place.

I Didn't Know That SATA II is a Myth

The Inq can be educational: There is no such thing as “SATA II drives”, stupid. Once in a while.

P.S. As far as I know UK tech webjournal “The Inquirer” has no relation to the US tabloid journal of that name — other than a bad attitude.

It's Getting Hard to Tell

Real life or Second Life? It's getting hard to tell. Consider this video advertising the personal blimp.

Enjoy Your Presents

Genuine user review of a wireless repeater:

Experience with product: 1 Weeks
Strengths: THE COLOR IS SILVER
Weaknesses: EVERYTHING ELSE

Full User Summary
THIS PRODUCT SIMPLY DOESN'T WORK. SAYING THIS PRODUCT SETS UP WITH SIMPLY A PUSH OF A BUTTON IS LIKE SAYING YOU CAN BUILD CITY IN 30 SECONDS. IT'S JUST NOT TRUE. THIS PRODUCT MAY WORK FOR A FEW MINUTES, BUT THEN YOU MUST RESTART EVERYTHING IN YOUR ENTIRE HOUSE, INCLUDING YOUR LIGHTS AND WATER, IN ORDER FOR IT TO PICK UP A SIGNAL AGAIN. IF YOU BUY THIS PRODUCT YOU WILL KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. I TRIED TO SET UP FOR DAYS, TALKED TO TECH SUPPORT (DUMBER THEN A RAT) AND STILL DIDN'T WORK. I AM VERY COMPUTER LITERATE AND HAVE SET UP MANY ROUTERS AND EXTENDERS BEFORE--THEY ACTUALLY WORKED THOUGH. SAVE YOUR MONEY, INSTEAD OF BUYING THIS, OR ANY OTHER LINKSYS PRODUCT FOR THAT MATTER, JUST GO OUTSIDE, FIND A STICK, AND PLACE IT IN A POTATO-bc that wil extend your range of your network much more than this silver box of nothing.

Good thing I was shopping for an access point, not a repeater.

Nice Graphical Internet Connection Speed Tester

Speedtest.net is a snazzy graphical Internet connect speed test service.

Here are my results from home:

My results from work look as if they are much faster:

But in fact the delay before anything happens (latency?) feels much larger at work, so the office computer feels slower. I don't know if that's a DNS issue or what, but it's very noticable.

Geek Humor

“A 20-inch laptop might sound perfect for a game of Grand Theft Auto on the way to work, or navigating a mammoth spreadsheet. But are they really usable as laptops, or are they just luggable desktops? This week CNET attempted to work on the super-sized 20-inch Dell XPS M2010 laptop while travelling across London on the subway. The resulting video review is hilarious. This is not your typical tech video review — it's actually funny, and, refreshingly, completely advertising-free. The reviewer is in constant fear that anti-terrorism police are about to swarm him.

Could easily have been a parody. But in fact the laptop seems to exist, for just under $4,000.

Lauren Weinstein Can't Believe His Eyes

Air Force chief: Test weapons on testy U.S. mobs,

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

Lauren Weinstein posted his reaction to Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list,

I kept hoping that I was getting it wrong.

But no, it means what it says. Our own Secretary of the Air Force is concerned that new "non-lethal" weapons systems might injure foreigners on the battlefield, with devastating negative PR as a result. His suggested solution? Test the stuff on U.S. citizens first! You know the type -- unruly crowds, protesters, perhaps folks trying to crash large Bush rallies (are there still large Bush rallies?)

In any case, I suppose that the Air Force chief's theory is that it would be so difficult for U.S. citizens to successfully sue the government if their brains, eyes, or gonads are fried by the latest microwave weapon, that our own populations are a less risky target -- rather than tempting global condemnation if something goes wrong outside the country. You know how distracting global condemnation can be.

I'm all for appropriate and complete empirical testing of novel systems that are being pushed into deployment -- be they computers, non-lethal weapons, or the "alternative" interrogation techniques that we're told render the Geneva Conventions obsolete. But perhaps a rule when it comes to the latter two categories should be that those persons who propose these so-called "safe" technologies and techniques should be willing to test them on themselves first, before placing other citizens into the crosshairs.

As for the Secretary of the Air Force -- Rumsfeld must love this guy.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein

I suspect that what the Secretary really meant was that by using the weapons here, we could demonstrate how fundamentally harmless they really were.

At least, I hope that's what he meant. Of course, the trouble is that "high-power microwave devices" and other Active Denial Systems have not been demonstrated to be all that harmless, especially if used outside laboratory conditions.

He did mean that, didn't he?

Geeks Review Coffee Makers

What happens when geeks rate coffee makers? You get something like this at neweg.com (currently my favorite computer supply store due to the reliably low prices and superb user reviews of the goods):

Customer Reviews Of MR. COFFEE DRX20 12-Cup, White, Programmable Coffeemaker - Retail

Good work again Mr. Coffee

Pros: I've owned another Mr. Coffee maker and it was so good I stayed with this company. For the price it's very good. I can't complain

Cons: Mr. Coffee is very hush-hush about the technical specs. I had difficulty removing the cover so I can't comment on what kind of processor this thing is running. I don't even know what kind of RAM it takes so future upgrades are questionable. This is definitely a standard def/analog coffee maker, so as far as brewing hi-definition coffee, you are out of luck.

Also note that it does not play DVDs. It does play CDs, but not that well. These are minor details since these features aren't even advertised.

Other Thoughts: For the price go for it...but if you are into tasting 3D/Hi-def espressos, you may want to pass. But for basic coffee this one is fine. Note that this thing's cooling system is completely silent. Once again I'm at a loss as to what kind of cooling is being used.

Nice Little Unit

Pros: Fast perk time. Good overclocker.

Cons: Incompatible with Folgers Decaff. Beige.

Other Thoughts: Makes good coffee but be warned that it runs hot. I attached a zalmaan 7000 and it fixed the problem right away.

The Worm in the Machine

The home network situation remains somewhat weird. Last Friday, Bellsouth's Indian outsourced tech support promised to ship me a filter to make the new modem go, one that they had neglected to include in the original packet. They swore it would go out Monday and arrive Tuesday. It did not, and the tracking number they provided when I called to complain made it clear that it didn't leave their hands until Tuesday morning. The Indian help desk line person was amazing Tuesday night, though, and kept insisting that his computer had better access to the United States Postal Service computer than mine did, and his display showed it had shipped Monday.

So after that fruitless and frustrating telephone experience I thought I'd try the network again. Friday morning I'd turned everything off and let it cool down. Friday night I'd turned it all on again but it remained dead as a post - couldn't even reach the router. I'd left it all on since then...but Tuesday night I discovered it was working again once I resaved the router's login info, which had been erased by the hard reboot. Had the Alcatel 1000 risen from the dead? Was it the router? Or was it an upstream issue after all? I had no idea, but who cared so long as it worked... In an abundance of caution, I turned of all logging on the Linksys router -- even though it has been on for months -- as I'd read that my version of the firmware got unstable sometimes with any logging tunred on.

And so all went fine ... until this evening when one of the kids fired up the family room computer and found that it could not access the internet. Oddly, and differently from the earlier symptoms, the other computers in the house still could. Was this a different problem or a symptom of the same one? Was it relevant that the last thing he'd done was to start up the Stagecoach Island download?

I did my usual round of diagnostics. IPCONFIG /ALL showed normal. Ping was dead. Other computers on the network were fine. We rebooted. No change. But I'd noticed that this machine, unlike the others in the house, didn't have Microsoft's IPv6 implementation even though it is running Win XP (Sp2) (dual booting with SUSE 10, but that's another story). So, grasping at straws, I installed IPv6. And immediately it was happy again, without even rebooting.

I find that odd -- as I understand it, IPv6 is supposed to co-exist happily with IPv4. And the router is old enough not to expect IPv6 anyway. I've rummaged around a little online and haven't found anything that speaks to this problem, which may mean it is just a coincidence.

But my search did disclose the some mundane facts and one delightful one: It seems that Win XP uses its own IPv6 implementation rather than the standard one called 6to4. The Windows version is called Teredo tunneling. Indeed it was seeing the references to a Teredo tunneling adapter on my computer plus some DNS gunk of the form fec0:0:0:ffff::1%1 fec0:0:0:ffff::2%1 fec0:0:0:ffff::3%1 which put me on to this issue in the first place: On investigation that gunk proved to be an IPv4-encoded IPv6 address ... whose absence elsewhere later alerted me to the absence of IPv6 from the family room machine.

So here at last is the delightful fact, straight from the Wikipedia:

The initial nickname of the teredo tunneling protocol was shipworm. The idea was that the protocol would pierce holes through NAT, much like the shipworms bore tunnels through wood. Shipworms are pretty nasty animals, responsible for the loss of very many wooden hulls, but Christian Huitema in the original draft noted that the animal only survives in relatively clean and unpolluted water; its recent comeback in several Northern American harbors is a testimony to their newly retrieved cleanliness. Similarly, by piercing holes through NAT, the service would contribute to a newly retrieved transparency of the Internet.

Christian Huitema works for Microsoft, and was obviously pressed by Microsoft's public relations to pick a slightly less offensive name. Teredo navalis is the latin name of one of the best known species of shipworm. At least, the name Teredo does not immediately evoke computer worms.

Meanwhile, the DSL modem line filter has arrived -- a day late -- but I haven't yet installed it, or re-installed the 'new' Westell modem. If it ain't broke...

Software Upgrades!

Firefox 1.5.0.5 (and while you are at it, get the new version of the scrapbook plug-in now with the ability to highlight and edit web pages before you save them!).

And, an update giving some long-needed entry into heretofore secret MS Office internals.

Intelligent Carpet

More from the Inq., but this time I'm hoping it's April Fools come early,

Intelligent carpet can autodiscriminate: A NEW FORM OF automated prejudice is set to make business decision-making far more efficient.

The intelligent carpet, invented in Japan, can tell bosses the age, sex and weight of the person walking across it. Experts predict that in business recruitment ... the process of snap decision-making could be streamlined to achieve faster judgements.

Will being called on the carpet ever be the same?

AMD+ATI=?

My favorite chip maker bought my favorite graphics card company. In AMD has to buy ATI to survive, The Inquirer explains the strategic context of AMD's acquisition of ATI and argues it's all for the best:

The net effect is good for ATI, good for AMD, and good for everyone else, including all the current AMD partners. For all the analysts, deep breaths, think of your happy place. This is not bad, not bad at all, in fact it is very good. Breathe.

..And Then Your Laptop Explodes

No, it's not the punchline to a joke. It's real: Dell laptop explodes at Japanese conference.

As the article, illustrated with photos of a brightly burning laptop, helpfully points out, "It is only a matter of time until such an incident breaks out on a plane." And it even more helpfully concludes, "In light of the evidence, however, we'd suggest you avoid actually using a laptop on your lap."

Technical Difficulties

My home PC -- not even two years old yet! -- has decided to die. Either that it wants to kill me.

First the power supply fan started making a grinding noise. Blowing out a pile of dust didn't fix it, so I got a new power supply. That seemed to go in unusually well. I should have known that the Fates were marking me for trouble.

While installing the power supply I stuck in the replacement for the backup disk which had gone bad a few months ago. Then I fired up the hardware RAID to mirror the main disk. It wouldn't. I tried a lot, lot, lot of things, finally finding a software product that told me the old disk didn't want sector 1 read. That is potentially very bad - sector 1, if I recall, is where the disk keeps its partition info. The first step in a solution, if solution there be, was to run CHKDSK /r (scanning for bad sectors).

So I ran CHKDSK /r. Took a while. Found a bad cluster in one old file, otherwise was no excitement.

Rebooted. And now my display is all funny. The text is corrupted even during the bootup process. Once I get into Windows XP, there are funny lines everywhere. Not good.

So turn it all off, unplug, reseat the ATI 9800 AIW video card, check wires, change the oil (no, wait, that was last month when I was fixing the generator, different story). Fire it up again.

Now there are blocks of rainbow along the bottom half of the display when I boot up. And, once in Windows, the entire display is corrupted with a sort of moire vertical line pattern at every resolution except 1024 in which only the right half of the display is corrupted.

I've checked the monitor and the cord and they display perfectly off a different computer.

So I think my AGP video card is fried. And even though it's probably inside the warranty period, I bought a modded one with a silent Zalman heatpipe and fan, and I would imagine that this just might void the warranty.

I will call ATI help soon, but they've never been any use in the past ("reinstall the latest drivers" "but I did that twice before calling" "reinstall the latest drivers"). So now I have to find a reasonably fast AGP video card that doesn't make too much of a racket.

And then I can go back to worrying that my disk is about to crash.

Too Horrible to Contemplate

The classroom applications of this device are simply too horrible to contemplate.

Life's Little Disasters

Disaster struck late last night, just after I finished reviewing my slides for my second presentation at FC06 (I got roped in as a substitute for Stephan Brands in the panel on Identity Management; would that I were a real substitute for one of the word’s top crypographers!).

I’d started preparing my talk at home, and had six pages of notes that I was gradually turning into slides. After I finished the last slide while sitting propped up in the hotel bed, I got out of the bed. In the process I slipped, and while flailing around my arm caught the neck strap (laniard) that is attached to my USB drive. The force wrenched it out of its slot on the side of my laptop, ripping it into two parts: the memory part came apart from the metal tongue, which remained in the usb slot of the laptop, complete with dangling bits of metal strip that had formerly joined the RAM to the tongue. I got the metal out of the laptop, but that was it for my data.

Humpty dumpty was not going to be put back together again. And what backups I have are on my desktop in Miami, not on my laptop. (I do hope I have a recent backupl of my calendar, or I'm going to miss some meeting or deadline...)

So, starting around 11pm, I had to reconstruct an hours’ talk from memory and redo about thirty slides. The resulting version had, I’d guess, about 85% of the content of the original and only a few of the cute pictures. And of course I was pretty tired when I gave the talk in the morning. The audience was kind, but the subject is fairly depressing and I think we had more fun yesterday.

On the bright side it didn't actually rain yesterday, and the sky looks OK now, although it seems a little hot and sunny out right now to go walking anywhere, and we're a ways from the beach.

Two Neat Things I Learned from Ed Bott

Two neat things I've learned from Ed Bott recently:

1. What refresh rate should you use with an LCD monitor?
2. In private e-mail Ed pointed me to Openwide:

   OpenWide was written to avoid a few [more] minor annoyances with Windows. This program allows you to specify the position and size of Windows' Open and Save dialog boxes, and also to specify where the initial focus should be and which view will be the default.

So far it works flawlessly and fixes one the most frustrating features of Windows.

Service Offers to Spoof Caller ID

Fake Caller ID, Change Your Voice, Record Calls Spoof Caller ID - SpoofCard.com: SpoofCard calling cards offers you the ability to change what someone sees on their caller ID display when they receive a phone call.

Key Benefits: Make calls truly private, Ability to record calls, Change your voice, Fun and inexpensive, Easy to use and fast to set up.

Locks (As We Know Them) Are Obsolete?

If this video is to believed, the traditional lock and key is an obsolete security system: something called the "bump key" opens most locks in seconds. More details in this paper by Barry Wels and Rop Gonggrijp, whose abstract reads,

How to open Mul-T-Lock (pin-in-pin, interactive, 7x7), Assa (6000 Twin), DOM (ix, dimple with ball), LIPS (Octro dimple), Evva TSC, ISEO (dimple & standard), Corbin, Pfaffenhain and a variety of other expensive mechanical locks without substantial damage, usually in under 30 seconds, with little training and using only inexpensive tools.

Cheap Motherboards Can Be Just as Good

Tom's Hardware Guide -- the Internet authority on computer hardware, compares a budget and premium motherboard. The result is surprising, even given they're both made by the same well-regarded manufacturer:

The low-budget and the premium motherboard provide exactly the same performance when using comparable components.

Mobile Jokes Project

The marvelous Captology Notebook updates us on Current and Ongoing Projects, including the Mobile Jokes Project:

In our increasingly mirthless world, it's sometimes difficult to know what's funny. Relief is on the way. Our lab is creating a free service that will play jokes for you over the phone - any phone. Waiting in line? Stuck in traffic? Need to appear busy? Just call in, listen and (we hope) laugh. However, the project isn't just fun and games, it's hard research. Once callers listen to a joke, they're asked to rate it. Once we have enough ratings, we'll start to analyze the data to determine which jokes are funniest to people in general, which jokes college students like, what jokes do women prefer, and more. You get the idea.

So what's the point? First, we're exploring how humor can persuade callers and/or reward them for specific kinds of behavior. The second purpose is to create a new system for evaluating content. Our first evaluation system was deployed on the web last year and it's proved extremely useful. As a result, we've decided to extend this evaluation to capture data from mobile phone users.

When our joke engine service is ready, we'll send out the phone number.

Posted by Michael at 12:00 AM | Link | Comments (2)

I Love Google Translate

Jessica, Ari and I are going to be in Japan a little later in the summer, and we thought we'd visit a buddy of mine who has a hole-in-the-wall restaurant/bar on the northern outskirts of Tokyo. It's been a bunch of years, though; we weren't sure if he was still in business. So we googled his old phone number on www.google.co.jp, and — sure enough — we got a hit. It appears (my Japanese isn't what it could be) that the page is some sort of listing of businesses in his neighborhood (I believe on a single street); we were happy to see that my friend's restaurant was included in the listing (and thus, presumably, is still there).

We wanted to know more, though, and ran the page through Google Translate, which generated this. It turns out that in this very neighborhood, I can shop at businesses including “The circle of the umbrella it is clear,” “It increases and,” and “Love raw hall pharmacy.” I can cut my hair at the “Seeing and it is dense haircut store”; I can buy blue fruit at the “Eguro blue fruit store”; and, most enticing of all, I can eat spirit meat at “The meat it is astringent and.” I'll be there in a couple of weeks. I can't wait.

It's a Feature

Slashdot reports on the Cockroach-Controlled Robot:

The latest issue of Make Magazine volume 2 from O'Reilly publishing has an article on a cockroach controlled robot. Roboticist Garnet Hertz has mounted a Giant Madagascan Hissing Cockroach that drives a small mobile robot around by walking on top of a Kensington trackball. There is a row of proximity sensor triggered LEDs that shine light in the roach's eyes, making him steer the robot since roaches instinctively avoid light. Garnet's web page 'Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine' details the project with several images of the roach in action. Debugging the project is inherently impossible.

Does this means that Miami will be come the world leader in robotics? We certainly have a very large supply of one of the raw materials.

Handmedown Laptop Reborn Under Ubuntu Linux

Recently we came into possession of an old Dell Latitude laptop that my mother finally replaced with something more functional. By the time it came into my hands it was not doing too well. Loading a browser and trying to get to a web page took several minutes. Slow doesn't begin to describe it. That was a shame, as I'd kind of hoped to give it to the eight-year-old as a homework machine, which would have allowed me to give my equally creaky old laptop to the eleven-year-old for the same purpose.

The laptop was running Windows 2000, but the chip was a hardy PII/400, so that shouldn't have turned it into such a slug? Poking around a bit, I learned that it had only 128Mb of memory, which seemed like the likely culprit. Fortunately the 128Mb was all in one bank, leaving the other free. Last week I filled the empty bank it with a 256Mb SoDIMM, and all of a sudden the machine came to life. Sprang to life would be an exaggeration, but it was functional instead of a doorstop. But it didn't run win98 games or run fast, so it didn't seem the ideal machine for an eight year old.

For my next trick, I got a copy of the Ubuntu Linux Live CD. Ubuntu is an especially user-friendly Linux distribution built on the solid foundation of Debian. A Live CD is one you can run as a program, instead of as an install, to see if your devices will be recognized and to see what the look and feel will be like.

Ubuntu seemed to recognize everything out of the box except the wireless cardbus card. Unfortunately, there is no Ethernet connection on this elderly model, and I was a little nervous on relying on my limited nonexistent Unix configuration skills to make the wireless card go. A little Internet shopping revealed that the docking stations that used to sell for well over $100 now are being dumped, used, for peanuts, so I got one of those. Ubuntu saw the docking station port off the Live CD without a hitch.

Providentially, this week my kids both decided to learn HTML (I have studiously avoided prodding them to get interested in computer stuff; either they do or they don't). So when I told Younger Son that I could turn the machine into something that was “very good for web pages” and which had this fun worm game on it too (“Gnibbles”), he liked the sound of it.

So this weekend I installed it. No dual-boot, the hard drive is too small, just pop it in and go. The install took a long time, there was one error message about fonts, but everything seemed to Just Work when it was over — including recognizing both the Ethernet port AND the wireless card.

It's pretty cool. So far there have only been four minor problems:

• There was no documentation that I could find on how to get the laptop to see my network printer that runs off a print server. I finally guessed it was a “Linux printer” (not the default choice), entered the IP number as the “host” and the obscure queue name in the queue, told it I had an HP1200, and bingo! up came a list of drivers, with the first on the list marked “recommended”. That didn't work. Choosing the second on the list, the first one with an “hp” name, did work.

• Somehow, the eight-year-old managed to drag one of the menu bars off to the left side of the Gnome desktop, where they blew up into giant icons which chewed up a third of the desktop real estate. I was utterly unable to drag it back. Some googling found that someone else had this Gnomish issue, and that the only fix is to copy the icons to the main desktop, where the shrink to normal, delete the icons on the left, then create a new menu bar on the top. I did that, and it worked, but it was a very frustrating experience until I found the fix in a discussion group online.

• Synaptic is a powerful and (relatively) friendly package manager, but it's not perfect yet. I tried to install a bunch of things onto the machine, and I have no idea where half of them went. They claimed to download fine, but when the install was over, for half of them there were no icons on the desktop, nor in the applications drop-down menus. Maybe if I install them one at a time….

Update (5/4): I think the problem has something to do with this Desktop file thing. But what if anything I can do about it remains opaque.

• None of the firefox internal upgraders like “get more extentions”, “get more themes” or the firefox updater itself seem to work at all. They start up a window, but it stays resolutely blank. How do I install firefox extensions under Ubuntu?

But the eight year old seems very happy.

Checkout the Customer Reviews on This One

Don't quite know how Amazon got advance ordering on the VIEWSONIC TPCV1250S PM-1G 40GB ( TPCV1250S-1303 ), but the specs are very impressive:

• Processor: 10.00 GHz AMD Athlon
• Number of Processors: 1
• RAM: 2000 MB
• RAM Type: DIMM
• Operating System: DOS
• Hard Drive - Size: 30000 GB -Type: IDE
• Weight: 14.00 hundredths-pounds

And don't miss the customer reviews.

Update: sigh Amazon has corrected the specs…but at least they haven't (yet) deleted the comments…

What the World Needed: Wide-Awake Drunks

As someone who tends to fall asleep after a couple of beers, I can see how caffeinated beer seemed to make sense. For a few seconds, anyway.

Bartender, Pour Me Another Cup: America's largest brewing company, Anheuser-Busch, released its latest product last week — a beer that contains caffeine. …

The beer is called B{+E} — with the E raised up, like an exponent in math, which is why the name is pronounced “B to the E.” (The B stands for Budweiser. The E stands for extra.) Sold in 10-ounce cans, B{+E} contains 54 milligrams of caffeine — about half the dose found in an average cup of coffee. B{+E} also contains ginseng, the fabled herb, and guarana, an Amazonian berry frequently found in Brazilian soft drinks. …

At first, beer with caffeine sounds like a terrific idea. With caffeine in your beer, you can stay awake longer and do many delightful things, such as drink more beer. …

But wait:

Alas, there is a potential downside to this great breakthrough. Drinking too much beer sometimes makes people do stupid things, … Until now, beer guzzling was a self-regulating activity. Sure, drinking too much made you do stupid things. But drinking too much also tended to make you fall asleep before you got into trouble.

And I don't see why they needed these other adulturants. Maybe to hide the taste of the caffeine? Or was there some unholy coalition of forces that had sought to produce separate caffeinated beer, ginsenginated beer and, who knows, Amazonian berry beer (from the people who brought you that awful Cherry Wheat beer). They didn't have the corporate clout to bring out as many varieties as there are Cokes, so they all gnaged up?

Oh, wait, they're copying someone else.

Sparks, a malt-based energy drink … contains many of the same ingredients as B{+E} — alcohol, caffeine, ginseng and guarana.

Rolling Stone magazine raved about Sparks last year: “The wave of the future is getting invigorated and wasted in one go with Sparks, the energy drink that has thoughtfully already added booze for you.”

OK, what does it taste like?

But Rolling Stone did not rave about the flavor of Sparks: “It tastes like cough syrup.”

B{+E} beer does not taste like cough syrup. It doesn't taste much like beer, either. It tastes like … something else.

Never mind, then.

Phone --> Skype Box

This looks like an interesting way to do skype calls from a regular phone: rapidBox.

Trouble is, I do so little long-distance calling, and it's so cheap, and none of my family use skype, that I doubt I'd actually break even. Plus you need one for each phone. (Please don't comment by saying “Asterix”, ok? Gotta get some Linux boxes up and running first. And that won't start until the home renovations are long over.)

Fascinating Article in NYT on Road Design. Yes, Road Design.

A Path to Road Safety With No Signposts. This profile of Dutch road safety engineer Hans Monderman is the most interesting article I've read in the New York Times in quite a while. At least in civilized countries like the Netherlands, roads in suburbs are safer without many signs and without sidewalks. It doesn't work for highways, and it may not work for the most built-up urban centers, but in mid-density areas,

To make communities safer and more appealing, Mr. Monderman argues, you should first remove the traditional paraphernalia of their roads - the traffic lights and speed signs; the signs exhorting drivers to stop, slow down and merge; the center lines separating lanes from one another; even the speed bumps, speed-limit signs, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view, it is only when the road is made more dangerous, when drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people, that driving becomes safer.

“All those signs are saying to cars, 'This is your space, and we have organized your behavior so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you,' ” Mr. Monderman said. “That is the wrong story.”

Instead of a regulated, dirigiste system, Mr. Monderman promotes roads that permit a decentralized self-organizing traffic system.

“This is social space, so when Grandma is coming, you stop, because that's what normal, courteous human beings do,” he said.

Spain, Denmark, Austria, Sweden and Britain are trying it out, and the EU is doing a Europe-wide study.

The idea of running traffic a bit like the Internet — a self-organized anarchy working within the guidelines of set basic standards — is intensely appealing. It's also safe, at least in Europe: “there has never been a fatal accident on any of [Monderman's] roads.”

Of course, whether this could work in lawless Miami, where as Dave Barry once said 'everyone drives according to the laws of his home country,' is a different question.

A Bit Late

This useful piece of information from Ed Bott about a laptop holder that looks like it does what I wish a laptop holder would do, would have been even more useful about two weeks ago. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, as I was given the totally indulgent gift of one of these!

Today's Tech Question: Partition Managment With RAID 1

Following the near-debacle of the previous post (see the comments), Ed Bott makes the following very kind offer:

I promise to chat with Professor Froomkin before I write about complex legal issues here. In exchange, I offer my technical expertise on Windows and Windows security advisories to my favorite law professor the next time he thinks about writing another Windows-related post.

Alas, he didn't send along his email address. But I'm never one to pass up the chance of free advice from a real expert. So, Ed, here's a question that's bugging me:

My home computer runs Win XP, with RAID 1 provided via the ASUS motherboard [for the non-techies, RAID 1 is when your hard disk is mirrored by another identical hard disk]. The machine came from the suppliers with XP on one huge partition, and I'd like to repartition my hard drive(s) into several smaller partitions — not necessarily all for Windows — without losing any data.

I had thought to use partition magic to do the job, but apparently Partition Magic 8.x doesn't' support RAID 1 .

Can it be done? How about if I

1. Turn off RAID mirroring.
2. Use Partition Magic or something else like it.
3. Start RAID mirroring from scratch (will it catch all the partitions? will it faithfully copy all the changes to each one?).

I did a Google search, and all I know now is that I'm not the only one who wants the answer to this one…

Eric Muller's Laptop Is Possessed

Eric Muller's laptop is acting up in a novel way:

Twice today my laptop has said to me, a propos of nothing, “What would you like me to say? You may type anything.”

I haven't the faintest idea why this is happening.

If the voice coming from my computer were John Ashcroft's, it might make some sense, but in fact the voice is that of a British woman.

Virus? Prank? Emergent, lonely AI? Demonic Possession? Surely if it were a mere virus, Google would have something on this by now….

I Want One of These

Their website is slashdotted, but Wired's article Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark, is enough to make me want a TV-B-Gone. (spotted via Boing-Boing, natch)

It fits on your keychain, “looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.”

Some people will say it's antisocial, but so is the problem it solves. Wonder how much it costs?

NASA's Cool World Viewer

From Slashdot:

Nasa has released a comprehensive world viewing tool that allows you to zoom from planetary resolution down to where you can pick out individual streets. Really cool, but it needs a good internet connection and a decent graphics card. There's all sorts of interesting features, such as the ability to tilt your view for a flight-sim like experience and a data display feature that shows current natural disasters, political boundaries, weather patterns, and landmarks on the Earth's surface, all while providing a dynamic satellite's eye view of the planet.”

Of course it's already Slashdotted.¹

¹ A site is slashdotted when its server dies under the weight of the flash crowd suddenly and unexpectedly directed there due to a link on slashdot.

25GB 'Paper' Disk Invented

Even if the slashdot headline was slightly misleading, an optical disc made 51% of paper is still pretty impressive:

TOPPAN PRINTING CO., LTD (TSE: 7911) and Sony Corporation (TSE: 6758) today announce the successful development of a 25GB paper disc based on Blu-ray Disc technology. Details will be announced at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference to be held from April 18th to April 21st at Monterey, California.

Using the disc-structure of Blu-ray Disc technology, the new paper disc has a total weight that is 51% paper.

Form Factor Matters

I am the very happy user of a Lexar secure Jump Drive. I love not having to carry a zip drive back and forth from work as I kept forgetting to put it in my backpack. (We can't access our office hard disks from home. The functionality was promised ages ago, was installed some time ago, but we are not allowed to use it.)

My first beef with the Lexar was that it was so small that I kept misplacing it, but a snap-release keychain from the hardware store fixed that, and now it lives in my pocket when not in use.

But I have a second problem: the thing is too fat for my Tripp-Lite ultra-mini USB hub The hub has two USB ports on each side, very close together, and the short ends of the rectanguar USB ports are almost touching. When I put in the Lexar, there's no room to put anything next to it.

The Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness

Via Slashdot, the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness.

(Also via Slashdot, how carrier Pigeons transfer data faster than networks)

Unerasing Data as a Hobby

My friend Simpson Garfinkel, the award-winning journalist and author, had, it seems, a fairly odd hobby. It started when he spotted piles of cheap used hard drives on sale in a local computer supply store:

I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.

Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm. Last summer, I started buying drives en masse on eBay.

In all, I bought and analyzed the content of more than 150 drives with the help of Abhi Shelat, another graduate student at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. We found that between one-third and one-half of the drives still had significant amounts of confidential data, even though many had been through a Format or FDisk operation. On another third, someone had deleted the document files but left the applications behind. It was a simple matter to undelete the data files and retrieve their secrets as well.

In fact, only 10 percent of the drives I purchased had been properly sanitized.

Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year's worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he's really into pornography.

Don't panic, though. Simpson, ever helpful, offers a simple solution. (spotted via boingboing, that directory of wonderful things)

Toys Are Not Just for Kids

I used to think that the next time I was in a silly mood I'd order a few pounds of brightly colored Dilatant compound. I certainly don't want 100 lbs of it, and even $12/lb seemed steep.

But now I'm thinking the black stuff would be nice. Except that it's $24/lb. Would just one pound really be enough? And then there are all those other neat colors….

(Other problem: the stuff seems to melt in Florida, even indoors under air conditioning. I bunch it up and two hours later it has ooozed out into a flat boring ameboid shape. Could it be the humidity? Or does it do that everywhere?)

Report from the Front Lines of Electronic Voting

My day as an election judge is a very interesting first-person account of a day as an election judge baby sitting electronic voting machines—written by Avi Rubin, a leading critic of Diebold's Accuvote machines. (Spotted via Ed Felten blog.)

Truer Than Truth

There's something you've gotta love about this sort of inaccurate but fundamentally true coverage. In this case it happens to be of an industry press conference, but the method surely has other uses.

Lexmark takes wrap off user friendly printers: Fearlessly breaking the mold of IT marketing, the printing giant boldly commissioned a study into consumer attitudes towards printers late last year. By an enormous slice of luck, the findings just happened to confirm all Lexmark’s prejudices about the printer market.

…

Lexmark CEO Paul Curlander introduced a morale sapping day of inconclusive speeches about printers to an audience of journalists from all over Europe and South Africa. Some presenters spoke in their second (or third) language, in a move to make already turgid material even more palatable to a jaded audience. Having lost the will to live by mid morning, The INQUIRER was unable to take note of the figures produced by this study, despite their enormous gravity. For the same reason, we neglected to write down the solutions to the continuing challenge of making printers more user friendly.

But here goes. The printer market is going to be worth seventy quadrabezillion dollars, according to our memory of this event. Lexmark's projected growth could be as much as 116.9 per cent every quarter, or something, we seem to remember someone saying. In a near future timeframe, we may or may not see a day when printers can obey voice commands, such as 'Just fsking print will you' and 'no I don't want fsking letter paper. But in the meantime we'll continue to be confused by a bewildering array of features we'll never use and instructions only a seasoned photocopy engineer could understand.

The Day the Print Server Died

For a long time the home network was fine. Then yesterday nothing would print. The problem seems to be the print server. I've proved that the printer cable from the print server to the printer works. The printer self-tests fine. I've tried two different cables from the Netgear PS111W print server to the Linksys BEFW11S4. The print server also has a wireless card in it (free if you mail in the coupon, but it took six months to turn up), so even if the cable were bad, it should work.

None of the computers on the network see the printer any more. After I reset the print server to the factory defaults, the administration software was able to tell it was there…sort of. Although it comes up as the sole item on the list of print servers when I do a survey, and I was even able to rename the print server from the default name to 'P2', the configuration software was initially unable to do any other sort of configuration, or even to read the settings. Yet the config settings are there: I can get the print server to print them out to the server.

In desperation, I read the manual and downloaded the binary file to re-flash the firmware. The manual does not list the error message I get from the administration software. But it does have instructions on how to configure the print server via FTP. I try that (I know the IP number because that's on the printout when you dump the config file). The print server will not respond to FTP—I get a 10060 (timeout) error. I can force my win98se computer to “find” the printer on the network if I give it the name, but I can't get it to install a new printer to that name (or take existing printers back online) because the printer installation system thinks the printer is not found or offline. I bet Linux users don't have these problems.

Having downloaded the firmware flash binary, I look for instructions on how to apply it. There are none in the manual, and none in any evident place on the support page .

Basically, the print server is not responding to tcp/ip requests. Maybe flashing the firmware would help, maybe it's hardware. I think it's just out of warranty, so it may be planned obsolescence. I've spent about three hours debugging this, and I didn't fix it. I've emailed my story to tech support, and if they don't have useful ideas, then I suppose I give up and buy a new print server.

I think I know a fair amount about computers, and usually feel proud that I can debug most of the domestic problems that come up on MS products, PC hardware issues, and the home network. But this experience makes me wonder: was this knowledge helpful here? If the right answer is, buy a new print server, a complete tech ignoramus could have reached that conclusion much more quickly….

Aerogel - Weird Stuff Indeed

Using the Right Bait to Catch a Comet describes Aerogel—super light weight, least dense material, hard to see straight, yet a great insulator and hard to crush. It sounds cool. I want some.

At around 0.003 grams per cubic centimeter of material — only about three times as dense as air — aerogel is pure silicon dioxide. Not only is it the least dense solid in existence, it is also such a remarkable insulator that a layer of it surrounds the most vital electronics on the Mars rover Spirit. But the most striking feature, at least to the naked eye, is that up close, the cube looks like a blurry hologram.

“When you look at this,” says Dr. Tsou, holding the aerogel up, “you don't know where to focus. That's why some people call it solid smoke.”

Made of 99.6 percent empty space, the little cube is indeed barely there, with a density one-hundredth that of the hand that holds it.

To make this strange material, scientists start with a liquid alcohol like ethanol and mix it with silicon dioxide to form a gel. Then, through a process called supercritical drying, the alcohol is forced out of the gel, typically with high-pressure carbon dioxide. With this drying process, the gel does not collapse or lose its volume. It appears holographic because the silicon dioxide scatters shorter wavelengths of light much like air in the daytime sky.

…

“It has 14 Guinness Book of World Records-type properties,” Dr. Tsou said. “It's the lowest density of any solid, and it has the highest thermoinsulation properties. Though it would be very expensive, you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house would become too hot.”

Additionally, aerogel slows soundwaves to about 10 percent of their speed in air, and because it has such a vast surface area for its volume, its use as a filtration agent could increase the capacity of desalination plants a thousandfold.

Because aerogel is transparent and releases light when struck by certain high-energy radiation, it provides an excellent means of counting atomic particles. It also has incredible compressive strength. “It can take 2,000 times its body weight without damage,” Dr. Tsou said. NASA's Web site shows a 2-gram cube of aerogel (less than 0.1 ounce) supporting a 2.5-kilogram brick (about 5.5 pounds).

What a shame it's so expensive.

Posted by Michael at 05:05 PM | Link | Comments (2)

A Device That Could Revolutionize Politics (and Dating)

Lie detector specs soon available to all points to the more serious if nevertheless slightly vaporwarious Lie-detector glasses offer peek at future of security.

A U.S. company using technology developed in Israel is pitching a lie detector small enough to fit in the eyeglasses of law enforcement officers, and its inventors say it can tell whether a passenger is a terrorist by analyzing his answer to that simple question in real-time.

The technology, developed by mathematician Amir Lieberman at Nemesysco in Zuran, Israel, for military, insurance claim and law enforcement use, is being repackaged and retargeted for personal and corporate applications by V Entertainment (New York).

“Our products were originally for law enforcement use — we get all our technology from Nemesys-co — but we need more development time [for that application],” said Dave Watson, chief operating officer of parent V LLC. “So we decided to come out sooner with consumer versions at CES.”

The company showed plain sunglasses outfitted with the technology at the 2004 International CES in Las Vegas earlier this month. The system used green, yellow and red color codes to indicate a “true,” “maybe” or “false” response. At its CES booth, V Entertainment analyzed the voices of celebrities like Michael Jackson to determine whether they were lying.

Besides lie detection, Watson said, the technology “can also measure for other emotions like anxiety, fear or even love.”

I won’t actually believe in such a device until it is tangible and subject to serious double-blind testing. But it is delicious to imagine how useful a pair of lie-detector specs would be for, say, watching the State of the Union. Or candidate debates. (Imagine a meter running in a box under the speaker on TV…). Or diplomacy.

Of course, I’m prepared to believe that, to the (greater or lesser) extent he thought about it, Ronald Reagan believed everything he said. And I suspect Jimmy Carter tried hard to tell the truth. But they were unusual.

Big Changes Under the Hood Coming to PC's Real Soon Now

The Inquirer, a fairly reliable source, says that PCs to change radically in 2004. While USB, SATA drives, Ethernet and probably SCSI won't change, just about everything else you plug into a motherboard will, plus the motherboard itself and even the power supply. Oh yes, the case may need to change too.

Sure there are real technical reasons for all these changes, but is it just a coincidence that PC and component sales are flagging a bit as people find their old hardware is Good Enough? Plus, that all of the old (i.e. current) kit — except those USB devices — will be completely incompatible with the new standards, new pin configurations, and new slots?

Worse, I was sorta thinking that it would be time to replace the 400Mhz win98se desktop machine I do most of my work on some time this year. But I'm getting a little tired of the bleeding edge on hardware, and I'm not that likely to want to get version 1.0 of a new motherboard configuration. But buy the last of the old, and it's stable, but also orphaned before its time…

Lego Goes Back to Its Roots (And About Time, Too)

Driven by huge losses, Lego is going back to the basic product (spotted at Slashdot). The market gets a lot of criticism, but in this parent's view anyway on this one the market has spoken and it's right.

Lego toys that are designed to let you make a particular structure, like say a Star Wars craft, are basically horrible. They sound like a great idea, and the kids clamor for them, but they are expensive and have limited play value. First, although there's a great dog-on-its-hind-legs quality about the finished product, the assembly is usually too complicated for younger kids. Second, the result is fragile and anyone who tries to play with it finds it falls apart in their hand. Third, you can't take it apart and mix it with anything — you'll never be able to put it back together again without that one critical weird piece you can no longer find. Fourth, there aren't as many other things you can make with the set as you'd expect given the high (licence-fee-driven?) price.

Despite all this, at least in our area it's been remarkably difficult over the last six years to find large collections of just generic lego to make, say houses and garages even though there's much much more play in those. It would be really nice if that changes… Although there will still be stiff competiton in our household from the number one toy: Playmobil. (Well, number one non-electronic toy anyway.)

'Dire' Predictions About the State of the Network in 2004

A regular poster to the North American Network Operators Group (Nanog) mailing list going by the moniker of “batz” (a surname? a nickname? a comment on mental stability?) has posted some fairly dire predications about attacks on the network in 2004. All but two of them seem all-too-plausible to me. In weighing the reliability of these predications, consider the fairly good scorecard for Batz's predictions for 2003. In the extended entry, I've reformatted the original and added my comments in italics.

Of course, despite all this, the Internet will be even more bound into the fabric of daily life a year ago than it is today, and on the whole we'll be better off for it..

Nanog, incidentally, is having its 10th anniversary meeting in Miami in February!

2004 network predictions.

• From: batz

• Date: Tue Dec 30 06:46:17 2003

Here are some dire predictions for 2004. With Froomkin's comments added.

While it would be easy to say that the world will end, I think these are all things that reasonably could happen, and we could act pre-emptively to mitigate their effects.

- Virus infections of handhelds and mobile phones causing widespread problems for cell networks similar to worms that flood out IP networks.
I'd rate this likely
- Bonus points for a bluetooth infection vector.
- Extra bonus points if it floods newly minted VoIP telecom networks. Grim.
But I'll say no extra points due to limited size of installation base (VOIP will show very high percent gains from its tiny base).

- E-mail whitelist technology gains mainstream acceptance as spam hits critical mass. Spam recieved by astronauts in space.
Yes and no.

- ISP's search for new business models realizing that wireless providers are making a mint charging by the kilobyte, and more users just surf at work.
Yes, but the ISPs won't find it. And, users will rebel on the fees for wireless, unless they come down. ISPs will also increase their efforts to kick off heavy users from home broadband. Whether they succeed, and wether we see the start of 'by-the-kilobyte' instead of 'all-you-can-eat' home broadband will depend on the extent to which regulation ensures we have competition at the last mile.

- Wireless network “terrorism” or “porn” incident galvanizes legislators to force hotspot operators to get ID or credit card numbers from customers.
Too plausible for comfort.

- Really Bad instant-messenger worm that we can't do anything about because it doesn't use consistant tcp/udp ports.
Ditto

- ISP's use managed anti-virus/security to sell new managed services to users. Birth of the fully provider managed home PC?
Apparently, this is already happening.

- Affinity networks/six-degrees site privacy boondoggle. One is caught selling access data to airlines or transport security or something. Everyone feels sick as Friendster acquired by Equifax?
Also darned plausible.

- Private crypted networks used for P2P. Call them blacknets, darknets, or in true arrr-pirate fashion, booty-nets. yo-ho-ho.
I bet this is already happening.

- Successful virtual worm network forged after a worm spreads its second phase and installs an onion routed virtual network. Maybe a new P2P network?
Actually, I think this prediction is premature — just a little too complex for now.

- Linux kernel made illegal, somewhere, for a minute. Presidential candidate may admit to using it once, but didn't look at the source. RIAA/MPAA/DMCA a surprise US election issue.
It's a nice one-liner, but I don't think that Linux will be made illegal anywhere this year. On the contrary, Linux will get critical mass. I also don't think that RIAA/DMCA will be much of an election issue, much as I wish it would be.

- LEA access to ISP's formalized, spearheaded by Cisco and its “lawful interception” capability. Court gag order placed on participating ISP's, disgruntled admin leaks details to Cryptome or Phrack.
Yup.

- More end-to-end control connections that identify/validate/authenticate end users. Eg, VPN's, SSL, PPP. An assault on anonymity and stateless protocols, or technologies that interrupt the statefulness of the connection between user and their primary providers. (eg, WiFi, P2P, UDP, VoIP).
Double yup.

- P2P on the road to obsolescence caused by higher metered bandwidth charges to home cable users in line with wireless costs. While there is a glut of bandwidth capacity available for transit, this is not the case for end-user consumption. Cable providers will lower bandwidth caps under the auspices of combating piracy, enabling them to actually make money.
Yes, as noted above.

Given these sort of predictions, I don't mind being wrong. Have a good year, I'll post again then. ;)

Too True: "The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing"

Peter Deutsch's classic is reprinted by the always entertaining Risks Digest

Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.

1. The network is reliable
2. Latency is zero
3. Bandwidth is infinite
4. The network is secure
5. Topology doesn't change
6. There is one administrator
7. Transport cost is zero
8. The network is homogeneous

Truth hurts. And having unplugged at home from the direct ethernet connection and returned to relying on wireless…from a new desk position that is just at the edge of its range for decent signal strength…let me tell you that latency can get much bigger than zero.

Cruise Missle Built in Garage from 'Parts Bought Off the Internet'

Apparently, if the BBC is to be believed, this DIY Cruise Missile is not a spoof, but a real project.

A New Zealand man who built a cruise missile in his garage claims the New Zealand government forced him to shut down his project after coming under pressure from the United States.

Bruce Simpson says he built the missile using parts bought off the internet to show how easily it could be done.

OK. This is not what I want as a present. But it's impressive.

Disposable Anonymous Mobile Telephones Come to the USA

They've had them in Europe for years. Several European police forces have tried to ban them on the grounds that it makes both retail and mass surveillance more difficult. And now it looks as if “they are finally coming to the USA.

Say hello to the disposal cell phone. Buy it for cash at retail, throw it away when you are done with it, and make calls that while not untraceable are certainly going to be much harder to link back to you. The phone of choice for the tourist, for the young and poor without credit histories, for when you need an extra phone because someone in the family is going out of town, but the tool also for every dissident and whistleblower, and perhaps for drug dealers too. Pity the web site gives no idea what they'll cost. And amusing that the web site markets the phones with a clip from CSI Miami in which the disposable phone “provided a crucial clue.”

No doubt we'll be hearing about attempts to ban these pretty soon.

What Puts Holes in Abrams M1A1 Tanks?

'Something' Felled An Abrams Tank In Iraq - But What? Mystery Behind Aug. 28 Incident Puzzles Army Officials. This story hasn't gotten nearly enough media. The M1A1 and M1A2 tank are mainstays of the US Army. And this M1A1 appears to have been holed by something new and somewhat mysterious.

Shortly before dawn on Aug. 28, an M1A1 Abrams tank on routine patrol in Baghdad “was hit by something” that crippled the 69-ton behemoth.

Army officials still are puzzling over what that “something” was.

According to an unclassified Army report, the mystery projectile punched through the vehicle’s skirt and drilled a pencil-sized hole through the hull. The hole was so small that “my little finger will not go into it,” the report’s author noted.

The “something” continued into the crew compartment, where it passed through the gunner’s seatback, grazed the kidney area of the gunner’s flak jacket and finally came to rest after boring a hole 1½ to 2 inches deep in the hull on the far side of the tank.

As it passed through the interior, it hit enough critical components to knock the tank out of action. That made the tank one of only two Abrams disabled by enemy fire during the Iraq war and one of only a handful of “mobility kills” since they first rumbled onto the scene 20 years ago. The other Abrams knocked out this year in Iraq was hit by an RPG-7, a rocket-propelled grenade.

Experts believe whatever it is that knocked out the tank in August was not an RPG-7 but most likely something new — and that worries tank drivers.

Mystery and anxiety

Terry Hughes is a technical representative from Rock Island Arsenal, Ill., who examined the tank in Baghdad and wrote the report.

In the sort of excited language seldom included in official Army documents, he said, “The unit is very anxious to have this ‘SOMETHING’ identified. It seems clear that a penetrator of a yellow molten metal is what caused the damage, but what weapon fires such a round and precisely what sort of round is it? The bad guys are using something unknown and the guys facing it want very much to know what it is and how they can defend themselves.”

…

The soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor Regiment, 1st Armor Division who were targets of the attack weren’t the only ones wondering what damaged their 69-ton tank.

Hughes also was puzzled. “Can someone tell us?” he wrote. “If not, can we get an expert on foreign munitions over here to examine this vehicle before repairs are begun? Please respond quickly.”

His report went to the office of the combat systems program manager at the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command in Warren, Mich. A command spokesman said he could provide no information about the incident.

“The information is sensitive,” he said. “It looks like [members of the program manager’s office] are not going to release any information right now.”

While it’s impossible to determine what caused the damage without actually examining the tank, some conclusions can be drawn from photos that accompanied the incident report. Those photos show a pencil-size penetration hole through the tank body, but very little sign of the distinctive damage — called spalling — that typically occurs on the inside surface after a hollow- or shaped-charge warhead from an anti-tank weapon burns its way through armor.

Spalling results when an armor penetrator pushes a stream of molten metal ahead of it as it bores through an armored vehicle’s protective skin.

“It’s a real strange impact,” said a source who has worked both as a tank designer and as an anti-tank weapons engineer. “This is a new one. … It almost definitely is a hollow-charge warhead of some sort, but probably not an RPG-7” anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade.

…

OK, the M1A1 is a little long in the tooth (mid-80s mostly), overweight, and drinks fuel like crazy. In contrast, M1A2 is vintange 1993, overweight, a fuel hog, but carries improved armor.

Both types of tank have been deployed to Iraq. The idea that the tank has some vulnerabilities is not utterly new.

Coincidentally, another Abrams — the latest model this time — was taken out, a couple of days ago by a “roadside explosion”.

'Knee Defender' Is Actually Air Aggression

The next air war will not be over Iraq. It will be over the Knee Defender which advertises itself as a way to “protect against reclining seatbacks on airplanes - save more legroom - can help you guard against economy class syndrome - thrombosis - DV”. It's a little piece of plastic that air passengers can slip on the seat in front of them, and freeze it in place — turning every seat potentially into one of those awful immobile ones sometimes found just in front of the exit row.

Already, one airline has banned it in response to traveler complaints. What drives people to carry a plastic block onto a plane to reduce the comfort of the folks in front of them? I'd wager that in most cases it is not a concern with proper posture, nor the supposed health advantages. Rather, it's to make room for that laptop—on which it so often seems the business traveler plays solitaire and watches movies…

Actually, this would make a decent law school exam question: does the deployment of Knee Defender in order to prevent the other passenger's seat's from reclining amount to the commission of any sort of tort? [I'll bet there are no contract claims against the airlines—they have their boilerplate down to an art form.]

[PS: this lawtechguru site is worth a visit.]

Super Light Laptop Choices

For years, I've been lugging an aged and heavy Dell around, hoping it would break so I could replace it with something lighter. But they build them tough. And I had a good warranty. The first major collapse came a month before the 3-year warranty lapsed, and they came and fixed it almost as good as new.

Then one of the Alt keys died. But you can't replace a laptop just because one redundant key goes.

But now, finally, I've run into a problem I can't solve, which means I need a new laptop.

Even stripped down to the minimum software I need to feel equipped for foreseeable contingencies, the hard drive is full. Mostly this is due to bloatware, but sometimes you need to use the bloatware to be compatible with your editors.

I could strip out the win98se operating system and replace it with something nicer and smaller, but it turns out to be remarkably hard to run my favorite wordprocessor—WordPerfect—under linux. So although once supplanted, the Dell may become a linux machine, it won't do for my work-travel machine.

So I need a new laptop. And as a recovering sufferer of a repetitive strain injury caused by too much typing, I want a decent sized keyboard, and I want it light. To keep down the weight, I'll sacrifice processor speed, video card, size of screen, pretty much anything, except I need a decent keyboard, 20mb hard drive and at the very minimum 256 MB of RAM.

What I can't decide is whether to get a machine that I hope will last four or more years, or get one with a shorter obsolescence trajectory. After all, it could be that my next 'laptop' after this one won't be a laptop at all. It might be a PDA with a keyboard. [I don't yet have a PDA. I'm convinced I would lose it. But I've thought about it.] Already I have some students who take their notes on them, and wireless connect to look up definitions of words, even find cases illustrating something we're talking about — quite a weird sensation when it happens. But, even with this innovation the browser capabilities of the tiny screens are too off-putting for now.

If money were no object, I'd go for the Toshiba Portége R100, which weighs in at 2.3 pounds, using a Pentium M Processor at 900Mhz. Throw in a CD-Rom, and you are up almost another pound. Add maybe a small memory upgrade, a carrying case, a USB flash drive so you don't have to carry the floppy drive, tax and shipping, and it's $2,800. Plus any fancy warranty extensions.

A second nearly as expensive top of the line choice would be Dell's Latitude X300, which weighs almost 3 pounds, and sports a Pentium M Processor at 1.2GHz. Throw in the same upgrades, and it's about $2100…and it comes with an amazing “complete care” warranty that protects against spilling a drink on it. Which I am capable of doing.

But this sounds like an awful lot of money. I have desktops at home and at work, but I go through occasional periods of work related travel for which I really want a laptop. Plus we tend to go away for several weeks in the summer, and then I want a portable office. So this is something that I'll use most intensively for a chunk of the summer, plus the occasional conference. At home, I'll most use it when the kids take over my desktop to do their homework, as they increasingly do on a daily basis….

At the other end of the spectrum from the fancy toys are the refurbished and repossessed toys of yesteryear. An attractive example is an old Dell Latitude once listed at $3299. It has a Pentium III at 500 Mhz — so it will have much less battery life than the newer models. It weighs in at a bulgy 3.4 pounds, although this is still much better than what I have now. With 256 MB of RAM, a 20GB drive, and a 90-day warranty, is $729, plus tax, shipping, and the cost of wireless card (wireless is built into the two fancy models above). It comes with Win 2000 Pro, but I can get XP for nearly free via the University. Call it $850 all in with the card.

So, there is a workable solution, although it's a bit light in the warranty department, that should last me at least two years for $850. Or I can buy a really cool, really light, really shiny toy, for three times that.

In the past, I was keen on the toys. Now, with visions of college fees dancing in my head, I'm leaning to the refurbished model. Am I getting old?

How NOT to Install Computer Hardware

Anyone can put out a small, incomprehensible, and illegible sheet purporting to explain (in a language vaguely like English) how to install computer hardware. But only Hardware Analysis had the forethought to write a crisp, clean, manual on How NOT to install computer hardware. (Found via Slashdot

While an excellent and clearly presented exposition of the basics, this account does not include some of the more advanced subjects serious tyros might expect to see covered. For example, I did not see any discussion of the powerful advantages of bleeding on motherboards, subsequent to cutting onself on the sharp edge of the removed side of the computer case.

Furthermore, too much attention is paid to the dramatic effects caused by removal of large parts which should stay fixed. As a result, insufficient attention is paid to the magnificent effects that can be achieved by dropping a very small screw into invisible and inaccessible crevices. The process of picking up, shaking, and turning over the computer in an attempt to make the loudly rattling screw appear can, I recall, threaten to cause injury not just to the internals, but to the operator and to surrounding furniture as well.

Simon Higgs Phones In the Latest From Phone Hell

The Simon Higgs saga continues. Some things are getting resolved, but bad customer 'service' seems to be eternal.

I left off yesterday (Day 6) saying something about going off and trying to find a life. Well, that got interrupted about 30 seconds after I pressed the send button.

I got a phone call from a manager at Comcast saying that they were going to fix everything that afternoon. That they were going to send a tech around to check that everything works. And, of course, I had to be home when they showed up. Well, OK then. I can postpone getting a life for a few more hours.

Then about half and hour later I got a call from Ed at Comcast's executive offices. I filled him in on the previous phone call, and he sounded rather upset that he hadn't been told about it. Especially, as he was supposed to be calling me with the latest information. He said he was supposed to be updated on what the local office was doing. Anyway, he assured me that everything was going to get taken care of.

I figure if two people call me from Comcast that regularly don't talk to the public, they do intend to take care of this. The problem has left the dysfunctional realm of the customer service people who answer the phones and is now in the hands of someone with the authority to a) listen to the customer and b) take some action. More on my thoughts on this later.

About noon I noticed that, indeed, something was being done. For those not following this from the beginning, my Verizon number has been active on Comcast's network since Day One. Which is what I want. It was also still up and running on Verizon which is what we were trying to fix. Now, what is the most logical thing that Comcast can do at this point? Remember, their billing system said the work hadn't been done and that the old number was still active. So instead of correcting their billing system, they made sure that their billing system was correct by changing the physical line plant to match. They did this by disconnecting the old number. Except they didn't disconnect the old number because, remember, that disappeared on Day One. Yup. They disconnected the new number. The one that I was porting from Verizon to Comcast which, all along, had been working. Poof. It was gone.

If that wasn't bad enough, at exactly the same time, Verizon's pair with the same number on it went dead. OK. So I got 48 volts out of the line but no dial tone. And it's supposed to be going away anyway.

I now know they're working on this. But the number is now dead on both networks. I'm sure that if it wasn't my number I would be laughing. Really. This whole experience has been like finding a new episode of Monty Python or Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. But it is my phone line and it's supposed to work. So I'm really bummed in a semi-bemused state of unbelief. I resign myself to waiting for the tech to show up because I know this guy has the magic numbers to the people who can fix this.

Three hours later, I'm in the garage putting some varnish on a coffee table I'm building, and the phone rings. Randy from Comcast's NOC was on the phone. After I explained the whole saga to him, he told me about other problems with this port that I didn't know about, including the obligatory communication errors between Comcast and Verizon which had compounded the problem. Yet another comedy of errors triggered by an incomplete port. After explaining to him that my working number (that had not been correctly documented in the billing system) had been disconnected, he surprised me by telling me he just called me on it. Well, that's a rather good sign. I guess this was the opposite solution to yesterday's referral solution. Disconnect and reconnect.

While I was on the phone with Randy, two Comcast techs showed up. They were able to confirm directly with the Comcast NOC that the port had finally been done and was working. They made some additional test calls from other networks just to verify the incoming routing wasn't getting hung up in Verizon land. So, now my number works on only one network. Yay!

The people that I've dealt with at Comcast have been great. Mostly. The two techs that showed up were friendly, knowledgeable and very professional. Randy at the NOC was exceptional for the few minutes that we talked. The people that called me from the executive office were courteous, friendly and professional. These people I'll classify as “engineers”.

Who else? Ah yes, that leaves customer service. Um… how do I politely say this. These people have serious problems. Several times, those answering the 611 calls were downright rude and copped serious attitude problems before I was able to explain the situation. Several flatly refused to provide the level of customer satisfaction that every company requires of it's staff. The bottom line is that I've been called a liar every single day of this ordeal by customer service staff. Even by trained supervisors. It leaves a really sour taste. NONE of the engineers did this.

I feel I am qualified to talk about this. My background includes some help desk experience. Fortunately, I'm a tier 3 person, like Randy, and don't have to field calls directly from the public. Having said that, one of the programs I've worked with in the past for fielding calls from the public was “Apple Voice”. Like most things at Apple, it's supposed to be a company secret, but it's really just documented (and Apple-branded) common-sense. Sorry, that just sounded really bizarre, but anyway, the program has the potential to solve a bunch of ugly problems. The basic concept is that the customer service people adopt a friendly sing-songy voice to talk to the customer. I hated the idea at first. It's very “up” and “Disney”. But I've discovered that it creates a non-threatening connection with the customer which actually turns out to be very important to long term customer retention. The other part of the concept is that the customer service people actually listen and take note of what the customer is saying. Like I said, it's really common-sense.

It's a significant contrast to how I was dealt with. The customer service staff were unable to deviate from what they saw in front of them. I understand this, but several of them were completely bloody minded about enforcing completely wrong information. Nothing annoys me more than someone telling me something that I know is wrong and then going out of their way to refuse to listen to what I have to say. This happened on several occasions because Comcast's billing computers were wrong. And you've seen through my experience what it looks like from the outside world when they attempt to fix the problem with wrong information.

So my phone number is ported and now works properly. At last! Day 6! Like I told Ed yesterday, that will make me a happy camper.

I would like to thank all the people who have helped with information and suggestions. And also to those that have forwarded this message to other helpful people that remain behind the scenes and who I may never know about. Thank you.

But… it's not over. I've just noticed that they still haven't put the referral on my old number like they promised.

Oh my God. I've just had a customer service person, a very curt/rude one with a bad attitude, tell me that they're not going to put the referral on after all because they gave my old number back to Verizon. They're totally adamant about it too. As in “I don't care if you ordered this, you can't have this and I'm not budging on this, ever”. This person also can't find a work order in the system for this. You've got to be kidding me. There are at least two work orders, a repair ticket, and several escalations that I know about… and, of course, they can't find a supervisor for me to talk to and so we escalate this once again into never-never land. This formally concludes Day 6.

So now it is Day 7. Sorry, I've got to have a life today. I'm booked mixing some music today, and having lunch with some friends. Hopefully the referral will be working when I get back.

Well, I'm back and it isn't. And it's after hours and too late to sort out today.

Remember what I said about being left with a sour taste? A number of people from Comcast have spent the time and gone out of their way to try and make me a satisfied customer. I know what this took and I do appreciate this. But one idiot customer service rep has managed to undo it all. I know how to solve this customer service problem at Comcast, but I just don't know which is more appropriate to recommend - .45acp or .357magnum?

Copyright © 2003 Simon Higgs, reprinted with permission

Simon Higgs Reports From Telephone Hell

Simon Higgs is having a surreal experience trying to move his cell phone service from Verizon to Comcast. All he wants to do is (1) keep his same telephone number (this is the much-vaunted “number portability” that we are supposed to be able to enjoy; and (2) have working reliable phone service. It's not that easy.

Here are his reports from the front:

Day 4

So far the process has been a nightmare, but the impossible has recently happened which is still really annoying but is also a little amusing. Everyone says what has happened can't be done, but since I used to work for a Telco and know what I am seeing in front of me, I don't believe them for a minute.

This particular number of mine is currently stuck mid-port whereby it rings on both the Verizon and Comcast networks totally independently of the other network. I've been told this is totally impossible but I've verified this with both Comcast and Verizon's people by dialing 611 on each physical line pair. Verizon's line comes up as owned by Verizon. Comcast's line comes up as owned by Comcast. Both line pairs are working independently for exactly the same physical number within exactly the same area code.

What this means is that if I call my number from a Comcast number, the Comcast pair rings. If I call my number from a Verizon number, the Verizon pair rings. Yes, I know it's not supposed to do this but it is.

Day 5

Well. Comcast have a problem with denial. It works like this. I can call Comcast on the phone line that their records say does not exist. I just dial 611 (611 is the number that shows which telephone company owns a number). They then proceed to tell me I can't do that because the line doesn't exist. The fact the conversation is taking place proves to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the line is working. No, it's not says Comcast. This gives you some idea of what I have been putting up with for the last few days…

…

At this point in time we have a working phone line inside Comcast's telephone network appearing at a phone jack inside the house. The same number is also working at Verizon's jack inside the house because it hasn't been disconnected from Verizon's network yet. For those with doubts about this, my house has a couple of 66 blocks inside and has separate Cat 5 cables coming from each providers demark point. From the 66 blocks, I can see exactly what is coming in from each provider's demark. This is how I can see two separate dial tones for the same telephone number.

Let me clarify this again. Two telephone providers, two physical line pairs, two dial tones, but only one physical phone number which is simultaneously working on both telephone providers jacks. Impossible say Comcast! Hah!

…

Back to the story. Today they tell me the port can't be completed because they don't own the line. I ask them why not. They said they needed 7 days. I asked them just how many 7 days waits this would take. Then they said they had the number and gave it back to Verizon when the work order was cancelled. So now they've cancelled the work order they can't tell Verizon to drop the line from their network.

The result on my 66 blocks? Both companies are routing the number. No, we're not, say Comcast. Oh yes they are, says I. The Comcast line pair rings when dialed from inside Comcast proving, again, that it exists and is being routed by Comcast. No, it doesn't do that, say Comcast.

Now that Comcast has resorted to calling me a liar, I ask them they can't send someone out here to prove me wrong. Nope. They won't do it. They need to investigate the problem without actually looking at the evidence on hand at the customer's premises.

Finally we turn to Comcast's customer records. Denial is the overwhelming part of the problem here. These records are woefully WRONG now. Because the port was not completed their records indicate that the number/pair was never turned on. But out here in the real world, it was turned on, and I keep telling them this. No, it wasn't turned on say Comcast. Remember, I'm calling Comcast by dialing 611 from the Comcast line pair that doesn't exist in their records.

Now it gets better. It turns out Comcast can't open a new work order because their computer won't accept the number to be ported. I tell them that's because the number already exists inside Comcast and they can't port in a number they already route. They keep telling me it doesn't exist and Verizon own the number. Yes, they do. But so does Comcast if I can dial 611 and Comcast answers. You see what I mean? We've been here before. Several times.

This work order business is apparently rather important to Comcast people. It's exactly what is required to have Comcast actually do something. Like call Verizon to have them drop the number from their network. Without this work order, Comcast will do exactly nothing about the situation. Also Comcast tell me that while Verizon owns the line, they can't open a work order to fix this. Huh?

So after taking much abuse by inept Comcast supervisors and my patiently asking why I am continually being called a liar (I'm only telling them exactly what I see at my house on their lines), Comcast has escalated this to somewhere beyond the reach of mere mortals. Somewhere beyond where normal people are allowed to call. That's the story they're now spinning for me. OK but… Whoa… why am I so dizzy…

Well, we must be pretty high up now because there have been 4 escalations for this in 5 days. And, every time I call Comcast back, they have precisely nothing new to tell me. But they're working as hard as they can on this. Right. Of course they are.

Earlier today I called the California PUC in San Francisco. They transferred me to Evelyn Souse's voicemail at Comcast's executive offices. I haven't received a call back yet. Or maybe I did get called back and it didn't get routed to my Verizon voicemail because the call originated from a Comcast number…

Day 6

Just after I filed the last update, I was given the local engineering test numbers. These numbers are used by field engineers to verify the identity of a particular phone line. After you call the test number, a robotic voice from the switch replies with the phone number assigned to that pair of wires. I now have MP3 recordings of both the Comcast and Verizon switches responding with the identical telephone number. They are completely different female voices telling me the same identical number. Verizon's switch responds with an extremely mechanical, low bit rate/old codec voice, almost Dalek like. Comcast's switch responds with a much smoother overall feel indicating a much newer and better compressed recording, yet is still somewhat mechanical.

…

I'll complicate things by now telling you that prior to all this happening I was an existing Comcast telephone customer and that I already had two working Comcast phone numbers when all this started. I'd been satisfied with the service so far so the entire exercise here was to drop one of those existing numbers and replace it with my last remaining Verizon number. Literally all that had to be done here was to change the number coming in on that pair of wires.

The Comcast field engineers did do this part right. That line now responds with the Verizon number (and, of course, so does the Verizon pair). The people answering the phones say this work was not done and all their behaviour is based upon this incorrect assumption.

One of the other “items” on the work order was to refer people calling the dropped number to the other pre-existing number. i.e. “xxx-xxxx has moved - the new number is yyy-yyyy”. You'd think this would be simple. But, alas, the work order was cancelled, remember?

So, on Day One, they physically disconnected the xxx-xxxx number, like they were supposed to. But, because their records show it is active, I am still being billed for it. I mind that less than the fact that they won't put a referral on that number like I've asked because it shows up as an active number in their computers. I finally managed to get a trouble ticket opened for this. I've just been told this morning that, because it is showing as active in their computers, the only way they can open a trouble ticket is to open it for having no dial tone. The number has been correctly disconnected. It shouldn't have dial tone, it should have a referral message. Comcast actually told me that in order to put the referral message on the line, it needs to be reconnected so they can disconnect it. There just aren't the words…

Also, I should tell you of the real time-frame involved here. I originally called in this request on 9/17/2003. The tech showed up at my house 7 days later (there's a 7 day wait, this is OK) on 9/24/2003 but couldn't complete the port because the work order was cancelled by someone inside Comcast. Who did this? No-one will tell me.

I called Comcast after the tech left, to find out what was going on, and they assured me that someone would come back in 7 days. I made an appointment. Two days later (9/26/2003) I called back just to double check. Sorry sir. This work order was cancelled. No one is coming out to you. What the…?

So I somehow got them to issue a new work order on 9/26/2003. After my second 7-day wait, October 3 2003 rolls around and that is where my Day One starts dealing with this fiasco. This isn't really Day Six. Today is actually the 22nd day since I put in a request for this job. Today is Day Six of having one phone number routed on two seperate phone networks. It's also Day Six of the second work order, which also has been cancelled.

While I'm writing this, Comcast's repair department called me. They tell me that the number is active on both Verizon and Comcast networks. Hey, they deal with real engineers who know a thing or two about this. Finally! Then they told me it would definitely be fixed by Friday. So far I've been told every single day that it will be fixed in two days. All the deadlines have been missed. So I'm skeptical, and not going to hold my breath.

Then the repair person said something really ugly. They told me the truth about the situation. But the truth is sometimes ugly and it was a ballsy thing to do, but I'm OK with it. Sort of. We are going to be experiencing dropped and misdirected calls while both phone companies route the same number. I knew that already. Maybe I'm still in denial over it, because I just don't want to think about that. I believe this can be fixed…. I believe this can be fixed…. I believe this can be fixed….

Unless something drastic happens to report later today, I'm going to spend the rest of the day getting a life.

All quotations © Simon Higgs, 2003, reprinted by permission