From one house to another… a quick shout-out to my college roommate, Rich, on the relaunch of his sports commentary site, House of Sports Blab.  I don’t know about the name, but the content is first rate.

We spent the afternoon putting some fine touches on the Wordpress template design, tweaking the style sheet, and so on.  The main thing he wanted was a location for Google AdSense advertising.  The spot we dedicated to it is directly below the tagline on the right-hand sidebar.

Speaking of AdSense, for a long time I’ve frowned on such advertisements and vowed that I’d never put such junk on this site.  I’ve got nothing against Google, but we’re bombarded with ads from the time the radio wakes us up in the morning until we go to bed at night.  It’s in our postal mail, email, radio, television, it’s on buses, cars, billboards, pens, packaging, and everything else we touch, see, or do.

But even that doesn’t spur my intense dislike of online advertising.  The crux of the problem is that advertisers are resorting to more dishonest methods for pimping their wares.  Adware, spyware, and outright deceptive advertising — anything to get you to click on that ad.  I’ve no doubt that American enterprise loses millions of hours of productivity to it.

I know I’m not alone in believing that there should be some place that’s free of overbearing communiques on Leptoprin, day trading secrets, and free iPods.

But lately, I’ve been rethinking my aversion to some web-based advertising.  For one thing, AdSense doesn’t stoop to the malware level.  Also, their stuff is highly targeted, so presumably any ads that appeared here would be aviation related.  Flight training, charter, aircraft manufacturing, part suppliers, and so on.

Of course, I’d be remiss in not adding that there’s another reason I’m rethinking things:  money.  Does that make me a bad person?

My site gets thousands of visitors per day, and every time I turn around there are guys getting four, five, and even six figure checks from Google for doing nothing but running their web site.

To be honest, I’m curious about what sort of money a site like this would bring in.  Will I join the AdSense tidal wave?  I’m undecided.  But if you’d have told me five years ago that any small-time web site would be able to generate that kind of revenue without dealing in something a) illegal or b) pornographic I’d have said you were crazy.

I’m starting to think I’d be crazy to not at least look into it.

Grrrrrr.  I really hate spammers.

It’s not bad enough that they send me about 2,000 pieces of junk mail each and every day.  No, they have to usurp my own web site for their nefarious purposes, too.  From my ISP:

We have received a rather large number of complaints of spam being sent in promotion of a URL under your account. Upon further investigation, it appears to be some sort of ‘URL shortening’ tool, used (in this case) to obfuscate the destination of the URL being promoted in the spam.

I have disabled the script in question by moving it into your home directory. If you wish to continue using this tool, we must ask that changes be made to prevent 3rd parties from abusing it in this manner (this may mean modifications made to the script so that only you or trusted associated can use it).

I built the URL shortener so people wouldn’t be dependent on a commercial service for this service.  Sadly, it seems no good deed goes unpunished on the internet.  So I’ve removed the application and the database table.  At least I can take pleasure in the fact that the spammer’s links are now broken.

Some of the most relaxing moments of the San Carlos dive trip were had during surface intervals on the boat. A ’surface interval’ is a period of time spent on the surface in between dives. This time allows the body to naturally rid itself of excess nitrogen accumulated while breathing compressed air at depth. Without an appropriate surface interval, a diver runs the risk of having this nitrogen come out of solution in the blood and form bubbles which can cause pain, vomiting, paralysis, and even death.

Anyway, our surface intervals were typically in the 60-90 minute range. We’d use the time to eat lunch, fish, and just relax. Well one day, David put the new Foo Fighters CD, In Your Honor, in the boat’s CD player. It’s a two disc set — one hard rock, one acoustic. The acoustic side was just mellow enough to fit perfectly with that quiet contemplative time out on the water. I really loved it and made a mental note to pick up the album once we got back to the States.

I finally got around to it today, and the first thing I did was rip it to my hard drive so Retrospect could back it up tonight along with the rest of my data. Few people back up CDs for disaster recover purposes, but who among us hasn’t scratched a CD just enough to turn it into a $14.99 coaster? I also use the local copy to free myself from having to schlep the CD back and forth between the car and house.

So much for simple plans. I discovered that Sony uses a copy protection scheme on the album which prevents the listener from burning an archival copy of the CD. The technology, from Sunncomm International, is called MediaMax. It stops rippers (I tried Winamp, Easy Media Creator, Nero, and Media Player) from doing the deed. Some may appear to rip the tracks, but when you listen to them they skip incessantly.

Got an iPod or use iTunes? Then you’re out of luck, too. As Sunncomm explains it, “Apple’s proprietary technology doesn’t support secure music formats other than their own, and therefore the secure music file formats on this disc can’t be directly imported into iTunes or iPods.” You’re essentially limited to using Windows Media Player or another ’secure’ player that MediaMax can get its claws into.

Needless to say, this stinks. Thankfully, J. Alex Halderman at Princeton University has dissected the MediaMax copy protection system and found an easy way around it.

Basically, MediaMax works by installing a proprietary driver as soon as the CD is inserted. This driver not only prevents ripping of protected content, but won’t even allow said content to be played unless the appropriate licenses are present. So disabling the copy protection is as simple as a) disabling the MediaMax driver, and b) ensuring the Windows auto-play functionality doesn’t have a chance to reinstall it.

For the nitty gritty, check out Halderman’s site. The instructions were stone simply and only took me 30 seconds to accomplish. Since then, I’ve been able to rip, archive, and play the Foo Fighters CD as though the copy protection scheme never existed. Because as far as my computer is concerned, it never did.

To the best of my knowledge, circumventing MediaMax neither immoral or illegal. I’m simply making an archival copy for my own use, and not doing anything I could’t do by simply carrying the CD around with me wherever I go. Reverse engineering the MediaMax software is prohibited by the license agreement, but then, I never agreed to it. And even if I had, I’m not reverse engineering anything. I’m simply removing a driver from my system — something I’d want to do anyway. Windows gets so cluttered up with needless software that it slows boot up times and consumes precious memory. Efficiency and security both dictate that any services not absolutely required for operation be disabled or downright removed from Windows.

If I’d known this copy protection junk was on the album, I never would have bought it in the first place. I love the music, but at the end of the day my money went to support — and therefore encourage — Sony’s adoption of intrusive software which prevents me from using music I paid for in ways which are completely legal.

No, not that kind of change. I’m talking about coins. Loose change, the kind you find in your pocket. You know, the stuff that ends up under the sofa cushions? That mass of flat metal objects that clunks around in your pants as you walk down the street? The very same stuff that once short circuited a 9-volt battery in my pocket and nearly caused it to explode.

It’s nearly useless in modern society. Inflation has ensured that you can’t buy anything with loose coins. And the stuff it is good for, like vending machines, require so many coins that you need a Brinks armored car full of quarters in order to buy a pack of gum. Coins are heavy, loud, and tends to fall out at the most inopportune time. The best thing I can say about coinage is that it keeps you from having to break any more bills than necessary.

I had a friend in college who used to throw all his coins out the car window as he drove. (Yes, I did have some odd friends.) He especially hated pennies and would toss them with great vengence. His eccentricity was good for a laugh right up to the day that one of his offerings skipped across the road, hit a police car, and broke the windshield.

Good times…

For years, I’ve been collecting change at an unbelievable rate, ending up with probably $50 worth each month. If it weren’t for Coinstar I’d have been buried under a mound of copper pennies a long time ago. Coinstar rocks because you just dump your change into this contraption and it counts it all up for you. No rolling, no stacking, no encounters with surly bank employees who’d rather be enduring Chinese water torture than dealing with a piggy bank full of coins.

Coinstar’s fees are a little steep. They take 9%, which some people have equated with highway robbery. They point out that it costs Coinstar the same amount to count 10 pennies as it does 10 quarters, yet they charge a lot more to count a quarter than a penny.

But I forgive Coinstar their hefty fees because it’s hard to put a price on not having to sort and roll 1,000 coins one by one. My time is worth more than that.

Harmonia Baroque Players is a professional early music ensemble based here in Orange County. While I’ve been running their web site on a volunteer basis for a number of years, the look & feel has always made me cringe, especially because their quality of their music (listen) is not represented accurately by the pathetic FrontPage design.

So I took matters into my own hands the other day and brought it into the 21st century.

Out with the old…

… and in with the new:

I’m pretty happy with the new site, especially considering I whipped it together in about six hours from start to finish. Goodbye FrontPage, hello CSS.

Harmonia Baroque is far from the only organization out there with a lousy web presence. In fact, I’d say that most 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organizations have poor web sites. Cluttered, infrequently updated, poor user interface, lack of content, and so on. It’s especially sad when you consider that arts organizations are tailor made for the web due to their multimedia nature. Visual arts groups can post photos of their exhibits, music groups can put up sound clips, etc.

So while I can’t fix them all, at least the early music strata on the World Wide Web is looking a little prettier. And I can admit to working on the Harmonia site rather than suddenly pretending I don’t speak English when asked about it. Now that’s what I call a win/win.

I’m not anti-Microsoft, but the folks at Apple and Sun must be smiling about this:

Forget trying to flood Bill Gates’ e-mail inbox with junk.

The Microsoft Corp. chairman receives 4 million e-mails a day, but practically an entire department at the company he founded is dedicated to ensuring that nothing unwanted gets into his inbox, the company’s chief executive said Thursday.

“There are two people who probably are the number one spam recipients in the world,” Steve Ballmer said.

“Bill Gates (is first) because he is Bill Gates. Bill literally receives four million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it spam.”

Spam or junk e-mails are unsolicited messages, generally advertising goods or services and usually sent to many e-mail accounts simultaneously, often indiscriminately.

Ballmer said Microsoft has special technology that just filters spam intended for Gates.

“Literally there’s a whole department almost that takes care of it,” he said.

Four million pieces of spam per day? That means he’s getting spammed an average of 46 time per second, every minute of the day non-stop. Think of it this way: if you’re watching full motion video, you’re typically seeing 30 frames per second. So for each frame that goes by, Bill is getting one and a half pieces of spam. In the time it took me to write this sentance, he received more than a thousand pieces of junk mail.

I wonder how much bandwidth gets used receiving all this junk. Even if they’ve got the best filtering software known to man, the email server still has to receive the message before it can be filtered. And much of the spam these days contains attachments.

But the real irony is that most of it is in HTML format. You might recall that Microsoft was the prime mover behind adding HTML elements to email messages because it would make them more ‘friendly’. Plain text messages are quite compact. Once you start adding images, backgrounds, fonts, javascript, sounds, and other junk to it, an email can grow to more than a thousand times its plain-text size.

Between Gates and current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the company probably has the equivalent of several OC3 circuits dedicated to receiving all this crap just so they can delete 99.9995 percent of it.

Sounds like poetic justice to me.

The financial markets have been on a tear lately. Those who supported President Bush will tell you that it’s all due to his electoral victory last Tuesday. But my own feeling is that the markets were just happy to have a clear winner. They probably would have performed well even with a Kerry win as long as it was unchallenged, but that’s just speculation on my part.

If conventional wisdom holds sway, we’re in the opening years of a secular bear market that, despite the recent gains, will see stocks headed downward over the long term. But for the moment, I’m doing pretty well, and to celebrate I took some of the money and bought myself a new laptop computer.

I haven’t owned a laptop since the mid-90s. It was a Compaq Armada 1100T powered by a 90 MHz Pentium processor. I think it had 64 megabytes of RAM and about an 800 meg hard drive. At the time, it seemed downright ‘pimp’. Eventually the hard drive died and I never got around to getting it fixed.

Eventually I donated it to charity for the tax write-off, but I’ve wanted another laptop ever since. The thought of being completely out of touch for two weeks during my flight training session in Las Vegas was a convenient excuse for taking the plunge. Besides, laptops are far more useful today. It’s such a piece of cake to setup a wireless network and just sit outside or on the couch and take care of writing emails, browsing the web, etc. Battery life is improved, the screens are larger, and the price has come down dramatically.
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I’m starting to think an e-mail etiquette booklet should be required reading before anyone receives access to a mail server.

There’s no dearth of annoying customs in cyberspace, but this latest one really takes the cake. It’s almost worse than spam. There, I said it. Worse. Than. Spam. At least I understand spam. Like it? No. But I understand the purpose behind it.

You see, I always considered it intuitive that e-mail is primarily for conveying a message, not transferring a file. But lately I’ve been receiving a fair amount of empty e-mail. Messages with nothing in them.

Except an attachment.

The sender will write the message in Microsoft Word and then attach that to an otherwise blank e-mail. Usually the .doc file is a complex piece of letterhead with a background or company logo at 600 dpi. So basically I’m recieving a 1.5 megabyte file in order for the sender to say “call me”.

As if that’s not bad enough, I’ve had clients create a message in Word, then ouput it as a PDF file and attach that.

It’s only a matter of time before I get a body-less e-mail message with a PGP encrypted zip file containing a PDF of a Word document that, unless it contained next week’s winning lottery numbers, could not possibly be worth the effort it takes just to open it.

I think the booklet idea is a good one. It wouldn’t have to be very long. Just enough to convey the fact that some of us are using dial-up, not a dedicated T3 line. Some don’t have Microsoft Word (hard to believe, I know), probably because the macro features give any 13-year old the ability to completely commandeer your computer. Some are using slow computers with less than two gigabytes of RAM and can’t open PDF files in less than a week. Some are using text-only word processors like Pine. Some are reading your message on a cellphone or PDA that has a small, oddly-sized screen. Some are behind firewalls that block attachments or have account quotas that are eaten up with two megabyte Word documents.

So please, people. We’re trying to have a society here.

I had no idea that eBay was a topic on the presidential campaign trail.

Earlier this month, Vice President Dick Cheney was stumping in Cincinnati when he brought up eBay as an example of why economic data isn’t fully factoring in a robust recovery. “That’s a source that didn’t even exist 10 years ago,” he said, pointing out that the data munchers aren’t accounting for the fact that “400,000 people make some money trading on eBay.”

Sensing that it was something worth pouncing on, the person angling to replace Cheney as the country’s VP took aim. “He said people are selling a lot of stuff on eBay,” John Edwards said. “When we count the bake sales and lemonade stands, we’ll have a roaring economy.”

Nice sound bite, Senator. I can almost hear James Carville in the background, madly scribbling away on little yellow post-its and shoving them to the guy running the teleprompter.

Unfortunately, it’s a very inaccurate sound bite (again, Carville comes to mind). Bake sales and lemonade stands are run by PTA members and children. eBay, on the other hand, has moved $30 billion in merchandise over the past twelve months. It boasts more than 114 million registered users, 48 million of whom have been active in the past year. The Motley Fool also reports that sole proprietors and small companies have opened up more than 121,000 domestic eBay stores.

But wait, there’s more.

Let’s not forget to sing the praises of eBay’s PayPal, either. The financial-transaction specialist claims 50.4 million accounts, and this past quarter it helped speed up $4.4 billion in payments. Closing on deals and transferring funds faster and safer mean that the proceeds are being made available sooner. Do you think that kind of monetary turnover is helping the economy? You bet.

Yet one of eBay’s greatest contributions to this country is that it is such an efficient high-margin machine that it will pay out more than $300 million in income taxes this year.

If that’s Sen. Edwards’ equivalent of a bake sale, perhaps he should take a hint from Dan Rather and use the internet instead of just mocking it.

Well, it’s official. God has forsaken the civilized world. I know this because I just saw the first Christmas decoration of the 2004 season in a store.

On July 7th.

To be fair, it was an online store. Specifically Hallmark.com’s free e-card section. But if it’s being done online today, you know it’s only a matter of time before early July becomes the accepted start date for holiday merchandising in the malls.

You know the little miniature advertisement you have to watch while your e-card “loads”? This was an ad encouraging the viewer to be the first to get a look at the highly coveted, must-have, don’t-care-that-Christmas-is-as-far-away-as-it-ever-gets freaking keepsake ornaments. The Hallmark marketing guru who ok’d this ad probably never considered how it would raise my blood pressure by 50 points, but there it is.

Feh. Perhaps I’m overreacting. After all, there are only 168 shopping days left until Christmas…

Palm Pilot, that is. For years, I’ve had a Palm Vx [see it], a PDA renown for its ruggedness and reliability. I literally would toss the Vx around the house, stuff it in my back pocket, etc. I even sat on it a few times, but it soldiered on with nary a complaint.

The battery life in the Vx has been declining over the past few months, but I’ve been reluctant to let it go. It’s like throwing away a friend, stupid as that sounds. Funny how we get attached to every little inanimate object, isn’t it?

But the other day I bit the bullet and sprang for a new Sony Clie PEG-TJ27. Moore’s Law proves true once again, as the Clie was procured for only $199 while the old Vx cost nearly $500.
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As if the world needed another “make a shorter link” tool.

http://www.rapp.org/url/

I prefer not to use 3rd party services for this kind of stuff because you never know when makeashorterlink.com or tinyurl.com will go down for the count. Or when the service will go to hell. Or, more realistically, when they’ll start charging for their services.

I suppose URL shorteners are so common now that they can’t charge money. But they can resort to banner ads, pop-up ads, or require registration. At that point, any emails or web links that go through them are fubar’d.

Plus, when sending out shortened URLs to others, I prefer to send them links from my own domain. Those who are less technically inclined won’t have to worry about what’ll happen if they click on a link to some web site they’ve never heard of.

So there it is.

Party on, Wayne.

Reason #1845 Not To Own A Macintosh

I’ve never been a huge Macintosh fan. It’s not that the computers themselves suck, though I must admit I’ve used the Mac a lot over the years and in my experience it crashes more often than the Windows boxes I’ve owned. My dislike of the Macintosh has more to do with the irritating attitude displayed by so many Apple fanatics. You know the type. They wear black all the time, attend poetry readings in burned out buildings in the bad part of town, and make it perfectly clear to anyone within earshot that you are nothing unless you own a translucent computer that says “Hello” when you turn it on.

Add to this the fact that Apple Computer continually runs ads with the same holier-than-thou attitude, and it really becomes a turn off. It wouldn’t matter if they had the fastest, cheapest, most crash-proof computers ever created. I still wouldn’t buy one.

The last straw was this idiotic “Switch” campaign. Who came up with the idea of a marketing campaign based on telling 90% of computer users that they were idiots to buy their current computer? If Apple put half as much effort into their products as they do to trashing Wintel technology, the Macintosh would have cured cancer years ago.

Apple should really be careful about making such lofty claims of stability (”It Doesn’t Crash”). The hype has been out of control in Cupertino for a long time.

That’s part of the reason I read articles like this one with a certain warped glee. I hate to see users lose their data, but shouldn’t they have had it backed up, especially if they were performing a major upgrade to the operating system? I love the guy who bemoaned the loss of his kid’s baby pictures. If they were that important, why weren’t they backed up? Are blank CD-Rs too expensive?

I especially liked the part where they had to tell Macintosh owners that if the Firewire drive was not connected to the computer, your data wouldn’t be affected. Nice.

If the day ever comes when Apple markets the Macintosh line based on its own merits instead of trashing Windows from dawn to dusk, I might give it a second look. But I’m not holding my breath.

In 48 hours I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic on my way to London. Three weeks without web or e-mail access is going to be strange. I haven’t been without e-mail that long since…. well, since I got my first internet e-mail address in 1989 (ronrapp@f940.n103.z1.fidonet.org). Man, that brings back some memories!

My first online experience was when I started college in ‘89. I had a cheap Intel 8086-based machine made by Tandy (aka Radio Shack). It had a 40 meg hard drive, a 13″ color CGA monitor, ran at 4 MHz, and probably cost about $2,500. And yet it was worlds above my old Apple II. Anyway, one of the first things I did was add a modem to the computer. My roommate Paul has purchased a 1200 baud modem for his Amiga 500, and I really topped him with a 2400 baud screamer.

We both used to dial into BBS’s–independent computer systems. They literally had one line. If you dialed in and someone was already on the board, tough luck. You’d get a busy signal. Anyway, one night Paul and I were on his Amiga, and he dialed into a board called Axios. It turned out to be a board run by a Catholic priest. Just for kicks we posted a screwy message on the system, and all of a sudden the sysop (system operator–the priest) broke in to chat with us. We had no idea he could see what we were doing! We could have just hung up, but for some reason we stayed online for hours with this guy, debating Catholic vs. Protestant theology. We pulled out Bibles, religion books, and all sorts of stuff to quote to him. He was probably doing the same thing on the other end.

Soon after, Paul suggested I start a BBS of my own. He probably didn’t think I’d actually do it. But I did. It was called the Christ College Irvine BBS, and damn if some people on campus didn’t get all bent out of shape because of the name. They thought everyone would think the board was officially sanctioned by the college. I put up a clear disclaimer, but that didn’t satisfy them. I ended up changing the name to “Moving & Shaking BBS” but was pissy for a long time over all the hubbub. I spend my own time and money to put up a board for the college, and the only thing they can do is bitch about what I called it. Whatever the name, they’ll never be able to change the fact that the first electronic communication service offered at that university was founded and run by yours truly. It’s not exactly on par with founding Apple or Microsoft, but it had a bit of excitement to it nonetheless.

I connected the board to FidoNet, a world-wide amateur network of computers founded in 1984. I was assigned node number 1:103/940, and as part of Fido I could make use of a “gateway” between Fidonet and the Internet that allowed users of my board to, in effect, have a free internet email address. At the time, Fidonet actually had more users than the internet. That quickly changed once the World Wide Web was developed. But there it is.

I finished college in 1994, and the board didn’t last much longer. For one, most people were file leeches. They wanted to download all your files, but weren’t interested in contributing to the message bases. And my interests had turned to the Web as well–by this time I already had accounts on Compuserve and Deltanet, and had established my first web site. So “Moving & Shaking” closed down in late ‘94.

Believe it or not, BBS systems are still around. My friends Dave Bogard, Warren Bonner, and Joe Jared who started their boards at the same time I did, are still operating their BBS’s. The user activity is but a shadow of the late 80’s and early 90’s heyday, but it’s still a kick to dial into their systems on occasion and reminisce about the good old days.

I wish I would have saved some screen shots of Moving & Shaking, just for posterity. The screens were made with ANSI graphics–very crude, but extremely compact in terms of file size. Despite the primative graphics and limited capabilities of these BBS systems, I often look back with fondness on those simpler times.

I sometimes get a bit overeager when it comes to high-tech toys, even if they are justifiable ones. A recent example is the At Home cable modem service. I’m finally getting it installed on Friday. I’ve wanted cable modem or DSL service since the first time I surfed via a T-1 line. There is just no going back once you’ve experienced that kind of thing. Plus, I spend so much time online that it’s going to be a major contributor to increased efficiency and a better bottom line.

But mostly it’s just plain fun.

It literally was not available on my block until this week. I’ve been calling the friendly folks of “At Home” for months, asking when it would be available. First it was “late 1997″, then “early 1998″, then “mid July”. I called August 1st and was told it “it will be available in late July, sir… er, well… hmmm. Let me check on this again. Please hold…”

I’ve called these people so many times that they don’t even have to look me up on their maps. As soon as they answer the phone I just ask for an update on node IR-46. I know their network as well as they do. Only I don’t need a map. Sad, huh? I really don’t feel like a guy who has nothing better to do. Hmm. You know, I wonder what I’m going to do with all this bandwidth. It’ll be great for multimedia, but the time I really needed it was about 2 years ago, when Netscape and Microsoft were coming out with new versions of their respective browsers every other week. I bet they’ll wire my neighborhood just to get me off their backs.

“… sir? Yes, it’ll definitely be available soon. Sorry, that’s all the information I have available.”

At Home uses the coax for bidirectional transfer of information, whereas some lousy cable modem schemes actually use a traditional modem for outgoing data. Talk about cheesy. That kind of setup would seriously interfere with the many legitimate, tax-deductible, profit-generating, Third World-saving tasks I plan on using my cable modem for. Heady stuff like network games of Doom II, spamming those who continue to bombard me with humor e-mail or obscenely sized attachments (please don’t read anything into that, people), or downloading the sum of all human knowledge and history to see if it’ll fit on my hard drive.

In the absence of the new toy, however, I’ve been getting my butt out of this seat and into another kind of seat. What kind, you ask? Let’s just say it cruises at about 120 knots two miles above the ground.

I got a call from the network administrator at Pacific Blue Micro today. PBM is a client of mine, and apparently somebody with too much time on their hands decided to hack into one of their Silicon Graphics machines using my account.

They took advantage of a weakness in IRIX and gained access via a brute force type of attack. It would have gone unnoticed but for Super Eric, a former PBM employee and programmer extraordinaire. Eric noticed that I seemed to be logged in at 3 am, a rather odd time. He also noted that I was connecting from UU Net in Salt Lake City, not Deltanet in Orange County. Either I had moved to Mormon country or something was afoot.

So Eric did a “cd /usr/ronr” to see what was in my directory. Lo and behold, it was a C compiler, files for a network sniffer, and other Naughty Stuff. Clue #2.

At this point he decides to make an inquiry:

talk ronr Who are you?

What could have been a stimulating conversation was abrupty ended when Mormon Ron kicked Eric off the SGI. A lesser person might have just called it a night, but not Eric. Eric obtained the superuser password, logged back in and halted the machine.

Game. Set. Match.

You know that advice your mother is always giving you about changing your passwords frequently, choosing hard-to-guess passwords, and never ever using the same password on more than one system? Well I ignored… um… let’s see… yep, all of that advice. So the Mormon Hacker had all my important passwords, because they were all the same. Not good. I had them all changed in a big hurry, and now instead of a simple English word, each of them is a random mixture of numbers, punctuation, and upper/lowercase letters.

We’ll see how long I can keep that schtick up.

Even worse, if Eric hadn’t happened upon this guy (who already had root access on the SGI) when he did, the network sniffer he was about to install would have revealed the passwords of anyone who logged into the network.

But the story has a potentially happy ending. You see, logs are our friends. They tell us where people came from. Like this guy. He connected to Pac Blue from UU Net in Salt Lake City. And even though he was a dial-up user and we don’t know who he is, UU Net will be able to find out. Because they have logs telling them who was logged in to which POP at what time. So our Mormon Hacker is going to get a visit soon from someone with a badge and a gun.

It is such perfect timing for Pick Up Ax, I tell ya. This Department of Justice lawsuit against Microsoft for anti-competitive practices is fascinating. Strangely enough I’m actually on Microsoft’s side on this one, even though I love Netscape.

I was watching Burden of Proof on CNN today and they had lawyers for both sides arguing their respective cases. It’s maddening how few of these attorneys understand the technology they’re condemning. So many of the players in this case (and on today’s Burden of Proof) said, almost proudly, that they couldn’t install Netscape’s browser without the help of their nine year old kid. That essentially makes them computer illiterate. I mean, how hard can it be to point your browser to www.netscape.com? Stop me if I’m wrong, but there are “Download Netscape Now” links on almost every site on the Internet. What kind of difficult questions do you have to answer once you get there?

Let’s take a look at that, shall we?

What language do you want?
Swahili, German, or English?

What O.S. are you using?
Macintosh, Windows NT, Windows 95, or UNIX.

Which version of the software do you want?

Do you want industrial strength encryption?

What add-on software do you want to go with it?

You could literally make wrong choices for half these questions and the software would still be fine. As long as you know you’re using Win95 and want English, you could pick an older release or the wrong encryption type by mistake and it wouldn’t make a difference. You download one file and have to double-click on it once. That’s it.

Admittedly, things could get more complicated if you, for example, ran out of disk space during the installation. But for 99% of people, this should be a no-brainer.

The irony to all this is that if the DOJ suit is successful, products like Linux will gain market share. That’s good right? Maybe. But then these same attorneys who couldn’t figure out how to download a browser under Windows 95 will be faced with recompiling Linux kernels, tweaking archaic Xwindows configuration files, and figuring out why they can’t read the Windows 98 disk they were just given on their bitchin’ BeOS system.

Replace Linux, Windows and Be with Commodore 64, Apple II, and Atari and you’re back in 1985. I remember 1985, it sucked. What I dreamed of was the day when if someone said they had a computer, you didn’t have to ask “What kind?” It took a long time to get here. I, for one, don’t want to go back.

A continuation of what I was talking about yesterday.

Today I changed internet service providers. I was drawn in by the amazing stats capability that Deltanet has, plus they are so freaking reliable that I bet if The Big One came along (that’s the big-scary-gonna-getcha earthquake, for those of you that don’t live in California), Delta’s servers wouldn’t even hiccup. They’ve got so many redundant lines and systems that they probably couldn’t shut themselves down if they tried.

Okay, so maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. I don’t know what the deal is, I mean after all this is just a web site. And not all that great of one at that! I’m on this mailing list now of insanely ingenuitive web designers at New Dream Network. I only have to browse around for a minute to see how much I don’t know.

A lot of people seem obsessed with making sure that no one “copies” their designs. Now, I don’t support plagerism or copyright violation in any form, but this is the web. Browsing is how people learn to design, to code. And people are going to be affected, inspired, motivated by what they see. Maybe it’s just because I don’t feel I have a lot to offer, but you wanna borrow something from the House of Rapp? Be my guest.

Just be sure to return it when you’re done.

I bought a CD-R drive a several weeks ago, but other than backing up my data (which there is a lot of–over 160 meg just in data) I haven’t had any heavy uses for it.

I originally got it because a) I don’t trust Zip disks for long term storage, and the drives are prone to a problem called the “click of death” which can take your data with it, and b) I have too much data to fit on a Zip, which means that automated backups become and impossibility. But it really paid for itself this week.

Howard Johnston, sound designer for Pick Up Ax, created our sound design on mini-disc. He brought his player over and we hooked it up to my computer via the audio input on the sound card and dumped all that data to my hard drive digitally. Then I burned ‘em to recordable CD-ROM discs, and voila! It was fun.

What wasn’t so fun were the rejection notices I received in the mail from New York University and the University of Washington. But that’s okay. I’m keeping the faith–I just do my best and leave the rest to God. I’ll get accepted at the time and to the school I’m supposed to.

With each passing year it gets harder and harder to imagine what the world must have been like without computers, films, television, telephones, powered flight, and cable modems. Okay, maybe not the cable modem.

Every time I think I have a handle on the power of 20th century inventions, something else comes along to widen my short-sighted perspective. It’s like an baseball record which is constantly being broken–logic dictates that eventually there’s going to be a point of diminishing returns, a place where you’ll simply run out of room. But that point is nowhere in sight.

The thing that’s got me so sketched this time is a web site called distributed.net. Distributed.net is dedicated to solving incomprehensibly difficult problems using the collective power of computers hooked up to the Internet. The idea behind this is that there are millions of computers on the ‘net, and almost all of them are sitting idle 90% of the time. No one is using them. My own computer, for example. I’m on it probably 6 to 7 hours a day. What is it doing the other 18 hours? Nothing. It sits idle, and the number crunching power of the Pentium Pro processor in it is wasted. The guys at distributed.net write software to allow an idle computer to help solve problems far too large for even the most advanced supercomputers. Distributed.net bills itself as “the fastest computer on earth”, and my lowly desktop is part of that.

Right now they’re using this power to try and crack DES (the government’s Digital Encryption Standard) and RC5 encrypted messages. It’s part of a contest to try and determine just how safe certain encryption levels are. For example, distributed.net took less than 24 hours to crack a 56-bit key last week. So 56-bit encryption is no longer terribly safe.

How powerful is the concept of distributed computing? During last week’s DES-III contest, over 250 billion keys (possible codes for decrypting the encrypted message) were being checked each second.

To put this in perspective:

At this rate, if keys were dollars, you could pay off the entire U.S. debt twice every minute.

If keys were sheets of paper and you stacked the sheets up, the stack would grow 1,530 miles (2,460 kilometers) every second.

If keys were drops of water our flow rate would be 9.52 million gallons (35.7 million liters) per second. That rate could fill (or drain) Lake Erie in 136 days.

During the course of the contest, they checked enough keys to make a stack of paper 980 million miles (1,580 million kilometers) high, and would have flowed 605 billion gallons (2,290 billion liters), enough to flood the city of Chicago to a depth of 12.7 feet.

The software is very cool. The program is written so that it only makes use of unutilized clock cycles, so it doesn’t slow your computer down or rob it of horsepower. In fact, since I installed the distributed.net software, I haven’t noticed any change in its performance. But I have seen it checking an average of almost 480,000 keys per second.

There is a financial incentive in all this as well. RSA is offering $10,000 to the ones who decode the message. If your computer is the one that generates the key, you win a hefty chunk of that dough.

Giddyup.