Discourse.net

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’s 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 se