Category: Random Ramblings

Anything that catches my fancy as a topic I want to cover. Truly random crap.

Network discrimination simplified

Here’s a simplified write-up by Ed Felton on the topic of network discrimination.  I think this helps non-techies see why there would be a problem with the two-tiered internet so many big companies (baby bells, cable internet providers) want and why it would be bad for consumers.

Focus now on a single router. It has several incoming links on which packets arrive, and several outgoing links on which it can send packets. When a packet shows up on an incoming link, the router will figure out (by methods I won’t describe here) on which outgoing link the packet should be forwarded. If that outgoing link is free, the packet can be sent out on it immediately. But if the outgoing link is busy transmitting another packet, the newly arrived packet will have to wait — it will be “buffered” in the router’s memory, waiting its turn until the outgoing link is free.

Buffering lets the router deal with temporary surges in traffic. But if packets keep showing up faster than they can be sent out on some outgoing link, the number of buffered packets will grow and grow, and eventually the router will run out of buffer memory.

At that point, if one more packet shows up, the router has no choice but to discard a packet. It can discard the newly arriving packet, or it can make room for the new packet by discarding something else. But something has to be discarded.

Read the full article for a description of how this works out when considering high-priority versus low-priority traffic.

[tags]Network discrimination[/tags]

Malware defense – run applications as a limited user

Mark at Sysinternals has an article up on how to run applications as a limited user.  This can come in handy for applications especially susceptible to security problems (I’m looking at all you web browsers, particularly internet explorer).  Most malware depends on getting access to the system through an administrator account.  If you aren’t running your applications as an administrator, you are far less likely to get infected.  Of course, if enough people start doing this, the malware authors will start including privilege escalation code in their malware.  But that’s an extra layer of complexity, and as Bruce Schneier often points out, complexity leads to errors.  For malware protectors, this will increase the signature of malware, making these things easier to detect.

As this eWeek study shows, one of the most effective ways to keep a system free from malware and to avoid reinstalls even if malware happens to sneak by, is to run as a limited user (a member of the Windows Users group). The vast majority of Windows users run as members of the Administrators group simply because so many operations, such as installing software and printers, changing power settings, and changing the time zone require administrator rights. Further, many applications fail when run in a limited-user account because they’re poorly written and expect to have write access to directories such as \Program Files and \Windows or registry keys under HKLM\Software.

An alternative to running as limited user is to instead run only specific Internet-facing applications as a limited user that are at greater risk of compromise, such as IE and Outlook. Microsoft promises this capability in Windows Vista with Protected-Mode IE and User Account Control (UAC), but you can achieve a form of this today on Windows 2000 and higher with the new limited user execution features of Process Explorer and PsExec.

[tags]Malware, security, limited privileges[/tags]

Futurama pinball machine

(via TechEBlog)

I really need to give up gaming so I have more time to do stuff like this:

 

future_pinball1.jpgIt all started when I bought a weathered Superman Pinball Machine for the parts. When I gained access to the head I found the boards to be in good shape. I pulled the PCBs to see which ones worked and after a little fiddling and small repairs, they all fired up and the displays worked fine.

So, I had a fully functioning board set with a ravagedfuture_pinball5.jpg cabinet and playfield. I decided to use the boards to make a design station to experiment with possible playfield toys and devices. The playfield is made of 3/4″ Birch Plywood. This meant the height critical components had to be counter-sunk, but I thought the additional rigidity would be a bonus. At this point I had a full length blank playfield with working flippers and slings to play with. I started sorting through the wire harness and decided, in an effort to avoid trouble, an 8-letter title would be in order. By chance one of my favorite shows “Futurama” had just that. I started buying posters, calendars, toys and anything else I thought might integrate well into a pinball machine.

Of course, I realize the irony in the fact that to have time to build cool gaming stuff like this, I’d really have to give up gaming. But I think I’m starting to have more fun maintaining a couple of web sites and writing about gaming that I have actually gaming most days. So I may finally be nearing the point in my life where I’ll do something like stop gaming to start building things.  More and better pics at the builders site.

[tags]Futurama, pinball, mods[/tags]

Bad buckyball! Baaaaad!

It turns out buckyballs might be toxic.  That’s might be toxic, in the same way that oxygen might be necessary to live.

Scientists already realized buckyballs could be toxic. Studies at Duke University in 2004 showed that when buckyballs were introduced to laboratory aquariums they damaged the brains of largemouth bass and may also have prevented certain water-borne bacteria from reproducing.

Until then scientists had theorized that the strong attraction that buckyballs have for each other would cause the molecules to clump together and safely sink to the bottom of any body of water, be it a test aquarium or a lake.

. . .

The buckyballs break apart vital hydrogen bonds within the DNA molecule’s double helix and they can stick to grooves on DNA’s surface, causing the molecule to bend. Not only do the buckyballs damage the DNA, Cummings says, they cripple its ability to heal.

“The buckyballs insert themselves in a way that prevents the DNA from self-repairing,” Cummings told LiveScience. The buckyball actually forces a piece of nucleotide from one of the DNA’s double helixes and takes its place, preventing the strands from reuniting.

Ouch.  That sounds bad.  And I’m sure someone will bring up Michael Crichton’s novel Prey, but this isn’t quite the same thing. That book was about nano-particle entities that were bad as a cooperating system, while this article is about a specific nano-particle that happens to be very bad all on it’s own.

[tags]Buckyballs, nano-particles[/tags]

Cell phone gun

This is not the first time I’ve seen something like this, but I suspect folks who don’t work in a security field (my previous life’s work, kinda) might not have. You can check out a video and more details on cellular.co.za.

At first sight it looks like a regular cell phone — same size, same shape, same overall appearance.

But beneath the digital face lies a .22-caliber pistol, a phone gun capable of firing four rounds in quick succession with a touch of the otherwise standard keypad.

(via boingboing)

cellgun.jpg

[tags]Cell phone gun[/tags]

RIAA kills WKRP on DVD hopes

This is old news, but I just read this tonight.  Apparently, the high cost of licensing music for TV shows is making the release of WKRP on DVD unlikely.  I wonder why so many people feel the RIAA as an organization is just a big greed monster?

For many TV shows, costs to license the original music for DVD are prohibitively high, so rights owners replace the music with cheaper tunes, much to the irritation of avid fans. And some shows, like WKRP, which is full of music, will probably never make it to DVD because of high licensing costs.

[tags]WKRP, RIAA, greed, DVD[/tags]

Take your pants off

Here’s a very funny photochop contest at Worth1000. Here are the details.

Everyone forgets occasionally. You arrive at work, and as you climb out of your car, you notice a draft. My pants! I forgot again!! Well, celebrities do this all the time.

The rules of this game are thus:
You are to take any famous person or character and make them “forget” to wear pants or any other important article of clothing. (shirts, shoes, etc…pants preferred). The rest of their attire should be completely normal though. Absolutely no nudity or genitalia. Just underwear. As always, quality is a must. You’ll have 48 hours for this contest, so make your submissions count.

Pantsless cowboy
[tags]photochop, Pants off[/tags]

Cory Doctorow podcasts “Return to Pleasure Island”

I’ve mentioned a few times before how much I like Cory Doctorow’s stuff. Here’s Cory podcasting his short story “Return to Pleasure Island” for download under a Creative Commons license.

This is the story of the ogres who run the concession stands on Pleasure Island, where Pinnocchio’s friend Lampwick turned into a donkey. Like much of my stuff, this has a tie-in with Walt Disney World; the idea came to me on the Pinnocchio ride in the Magic Kingdom, in 1993.

[tags]Cory Doctorow, podcast[tags]

Australian copyright office as greedy as American big business

A nice little show of greed, as ripped from boingboing.

Australian schools may have to pay a copyright fee every time a student is told to look at the web, if a plan from the national collecting society is successful. The Copyright Agency pays Australian authors for the photocopying that takes place on schools by randomly sampling the schools annually, collecting $31 million in fees and dispersing them to authors.

Now they say that they deserve to collect for the use of the Web. Despite the fact that there’s an implied license to read Web pages that goes along with publishing them (who puts up a web-page without expecting it to be read?) and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages online weren’t created by Australians, and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages created by Australians weren’t created by professional authors, the agency proposes that it should be able to collect a tax on behalf of all those authors in the world in order to line the pockets of its few lucky members.

And the unfortunate but realistic response from a school representative.

“If it turned out we’d have to pay them, we’d turn the internet off in schools,” the council’s national copyright director Delia Browne said.

[tags]Australian copyright, greed[/tags]