RFC 2889

RFC 2889: LAN Switch Benchmarking Methodology

I was just discussing this today at work -- and I'll be spending some time going through this in the next few days.

I just cleared my cookies...oh, wait...I missed some!

I'm not one of those uber-paranoid people that wipes out my cookies each time I close my browser. Quite frankly, I just don't care that much.

But little did I know, that little "Clear Cookies" button can miss a few here and there.

According to this article it is possible for websites to use Flash-based cookies to track you, and they aren't cleared out with the normal button.

You actually need a Firefox Add-on like BetterPrivacy, or even an extra application like CClearner.


Yet another bit of proof that the best way to ensure security is to not rely on the "comfort" of the Erase button.

Batteries and how (not) to charge them

Here is an EXCELLENT article about rechargeable batteries. It details how (and why) you should charge and discharge each type of battery in order to get the most out of them.

If you have anything with rechargeable batteries (and who doesn't?) I highly recommend you give this a once-over.

RFID is not secure...surprise surpri--- oh, wait.

No surprise here, RFID chips are not a good place to store secure stuff.

At least, that's what I get from this post.

He claims to have ripped off 2 passports in 20 minutes, and with a device that has a range of only 30 feet!

Keep those things in a Faraday cage!

My N810 Review

Here is my Nokia N810 review.



And a couple of links about it:
Nokia USA
Wikipedia

20 Petaflops is a LOT!

Here is a link to the new supercomputer that IBM is building.

Just a couple of points:

• 20 petaflops = 20,000 teraflops = 20,000,000 gigaflops = 20,000,000,000 megaflops
  
• Over 1.6 million processors (how many does your computer have...1, maybe 2?)
  
• 1.6 terabytes of memory = 1,600 gigabytes = 1,600,000 megabytes (a little more than your 1 or 2 again)

It's a good thing we're all about "going green"... :-/

Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, etc.

This post is about Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, and the like.

A few weeks back I seriously considered switching back from Jaiku to Twitter.
I originally joined Twitter, and it was good.
I then switched to Jaiku because it had a location feature that I thought would be a lot cooler than it turned out to be. I thought it would allow me to update it via GPS, but it turned out that it doesn't really do a whole lot of geographical mapping at all.
I also liked the RSS feature, which allows you to import RSS feeds (like the feeds from my Picture of the Day blog). So it generates a Jaiku entry automatically when I post a picture.

The feature that I immediately missed about Twitter was the "sleep" feature. This feature allows you to tell Twitter to not send you (SMS) updates between two specific times. This means that you can tell Twitter not to send you messages from 11pm to 8am so you can sleep.

As I said before, I almost switched because it wasn't updating the SMS stuff or the feeds. Right before I switched, they fixed it all.

I still miss the "sleep" feature.

Facebook seems to be the deal breaker. (Wow, I never thought I'd say that!)
Facebook used to have a Jaiku app, but it was recently taken down. The owner/manager said that it was "the project that had the least interest, but required the most support". Facebook does have several Twitter apps, including one that allows you to update your Facebook status when you update your Twitter.

So now, if I switch back to Twitter, I can update my Twitter via SMS and it also updates my Facebook status.

Now to get all my friends on to Twitter...

Patent Number WO/2006/068865

Here it is: Patent Number WO/2006/068865.

Yup, that's McDonald's trying to patent the "method and apparatus for making a sandwich".

And you thought that Microsoft attempting to patten the Page Up/Page Down buttons was ridiculous.

Super Computers

Here's the list of the top 500 super computers.

The Sandia/Cray Red Storm system came in at 9th place!

And do you know what took 8th? (of course you do, you're a huge nerd) -- Jaguar, which just DOUBLED it's performance!!!

So what's number 1? That would be Roadrunner.

Just a quick bit about Roadrunner:

Made from Commercial Parts. In total, Roadrunner connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron® chips as well as 12,240 Cell chips (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). The Roadrunner system has 98 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 278 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter® racks occupying 5,200 square feet. Its 10,000 connections – both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet -- require 55 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs.

What's Your Phishing IQ?

Check it here.


(I got a 100%).

Why is FreeBSD So Awesome?

That's a good question.

Especially after reading this post.


"The problem is, that most of these companies do not really realize how many people would use their product if there were FreeBSD versions too, and most continue to only develop for Linux."

It is just curious to me why, if there are so many FreeBSD users ready to use the software from these companies, do the companies not develop FreeBSD versions?

Wireless != Security either!!!

Welp, apparently I'm going to have to find a way to operate without my keyboard or my wireless connection!

I taught myself how to hack wireless connections when I had some extra time on my hands one summer in Albuquerque, NM. I figured out that it took me about 5 minutes to crack a wireless network with 64-bit WEP and about 2 hours to crack a wireless network with 128-bit WEP. Cracking networks with WPA were a bit harder, and required some more computers to act as people using the network, so I didn't fool with that much.

However, it appears that cracking the wireless networks may have just become 10,000 percent faster, and using nothing more than a fancy video card.


Oh, and by the way, that 64-bit encryption that takes me about 5 minutes to crack -- yeah, that's what HIPAA says is "OK" to use when running computers on the same network that hold your medical records! -- It's just a scary day here at 10nerds!

Wire != Security

Welp, after this post, I will no longer be using a keyboard. These people have found a way to pick up (and decode) the electromagnetic emanations of the signals that run through the wire in a wired keyboard from the next room!

Here's the non-engineering version (engineers probably shouldn't read this):
Your computer and your keyboard are connected with basically what amounts to two cups and a string. When the keyboard wants to send a signal, say an "f", to the computer, it picks up the cup and screams "f!" The computer hears this, and puts an "f" on the screen. The problem with this is that the screaming makes noise all along the string and someone who is standing near the string can hear it.

So what does that mean for you? Well, if you type your password on your wired keyboard, someone with know-how can hear the screams of each letter and in effect listen to your password.


Here are a couple of videos showing it in action.

Man this stuff is scary.

Have you been "hooked"?

First, watch this video.

Second, check out this website.

Third, say "Wooooow."

You must admit, that's pretty cool.

Google doesn't even know its own power

In a recent article on Slashdot it was revealed that one of Google News' spider bots crawled an outdated story (from 2002) about United Airlines being on the brink of bankruptcy. It turns out that the article did not have a time stamp and thus Google's spider bot assumed "today" (why not?).

The story was published on Google News, which was then crawled by several other news spider bots and the story spread like wildfire.

Pretty soon, everyone heard of the "breaking news" that was actually from 2002. This news caused the United Airlines stock to plummet from $12 to $3. This was obviously not good times.

Eventually the cause of the disaster was discovered and the United Airlines stock rose back up to $9.62. But this still left a $300 million hole.

A $300 million hole and all Google can say is "Tough luck, Chuck."

Google Owns You

Continuing on the saga of Google may be not-so-nice...

You may or may not remember a week or so ago when Google's internet browser Chrome was released.

Someone read through the EULA and found that Google claimed to have "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through" Google Chrome.

Oops.

Google responded by saying that they created the EULA by pasting together parts of other EULAs, and leaving this in was simply an oversight.

An oversight that they left it in? or an oversight that they made it so easy to find?

Anywho, they went ahead and amended the EULA, making it retroactive for all users of Google Chrome who operated under the previous EULA. So, no harm, no foul...right?

This whole situation got some people thinking...and looking. It turns out that Google Chrome isn't the only product where Google claims "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

Google also has similar language in their EULAs for Blogger, Picasa, Google Docs, and Google Groups.

So, what does this mean for you?

In a post by one of Google's lawyers, Mike Yang speaks of how this language is a legal way of stating:

You retain the ownership. Google retains the rights to use the content.

This seems harmless...but it makes me want to scoot a little further away from Google.

An introduction to Google Books...

This is the first of what will probably be many posts about Google.

I (like many people) have been fascinated with Google for quite some time. I even did a report on them (Google Books) in one of my engineering classes on intellectual property.

The Google Books project is a project where Google has teamed up with many libraries across the world and begun scanning all of the books they have available. Once scanned, these books are OCR'ed and become text, which we all know is searchable. Google then indexes these books and allows people all over the world to search them.

Sounds great! What could possibly be bad about this??

Well, Google got greedy.

While Google started scanning books, some authors decided that they didn't want their books to be searchable. And, seeing as how the contents of the books were the intellectual property of the authors, this was certainly their right to keep from having their books searchable via the internet. So, Google created an "opt-out" program whereby authors would be able to opt-out of the Google Book project.

(Here's where it gets interesting)...

Even if the authors had opted out, the books were still scanned and archived. Why? -- Who knows, but I bet you have a pretty good guess.

But wait, that's not right. You can't just walk into a library and photocopy an entire book. Just like you can't borrow a CD or movie and go home and copy it. That's illegal. The library paid a higher license fee than an individual user so that they could lend the intellectual property to others, but they didn't pay to "resell" the content for nothing. And, when you check out a book, CD, or video from the library, you don't have the rights to copy that media.

So, while the authors argue that it is their right to have Google not scan their book at all, Google maintains that the author only has rights to keep the information off the internet.

So, how did Google Books get away with it?
You tell me.

Jaiku or Twitter

Recently I got into Twitter and eventually (when they started allowing invitations again) Jaiku.

These mobile blogging platforms appealed very much to me as I have been struggling for quite some time to find the time and (more importantly) motivation to keep up sizable, respectable, worth-while posts on any blog.

These led me to understand just how important blog posts containing more than 140 characters (the limit on Twitter and Jaiku) really can be, especially when attempting to rouse up discussion on deserving subjects.

Perhaps this is why the introduction video to Twitter suggested that the service is simply a gap-filler for between-post events that are not large/important enough to merit an entire post (i.e. mowing the lawn, seeing the Oscar Mayer Wiener-mobile on the highway, etc.).

Well, it just so happens that both platforms were undergoing a bit of a face-lift when I was getting into them.

Leo Laporte (whom I have never heard of) apparently was a Twitter user, and decided to move from Twitter to a small company called Jaiku. Apparently Leo had quite a following, as his switch made news headlines over much of the internet. Not only that, it caused "the Leo Effect" whereby many Twitter users also abandoned Twitter for Jaiku. This overwhelmed the Jaiku servers, and they struggled for quite some time to regain control of their bandwidth and increase their capacity.

Well (as always) someone at Google was apparently paying attention, and lo-and-behold, Jaiku soon announced that it was being absorbed by Google.

Then, just in the past day or so, Twitter announced (or denied, depending on what article you read) that it is experimenting with adding advertisements to its Tweets. It also release that it's tired of "footing the bill" for you to send Tweets via SMS in some countries.

So, one one hand, you've got Twitter going with ads and retracting SMS features from some countries, and on one blog I saw I noticed that there were rumors of them creating a corporate product.

On the other hand, you've got Jaiku supporting RSS feeds (kind of, I'm having some issues with it right now), and being absorbed by Google, which was good for Blogger, Picasa, and others. Jaiku also does icons, which I can take or leave, and they don't support sleeping the SMS delivery like Twitter, so I just turn my phone down when I sleep.

I'm switching to Jaiku full time for now. We'll see how it goes...

Th3 Nam3 0xf th3 Gam3

"The 10 Nerds" -- inspired by the saying "There are only 10 kinds of people in this world: those that understand binary, and those that don't."

Binary ("bi-" indicating two), for those of you who don't know, is a method of counting using only two unique values (0 and 1) for each digit.

Decimal ("deci-" indicating ten) is the standard method for counting that we are all familiar with. In decimal, each digit can be one of 10 unique values (0-9 inclusive).

So, here is how to count to ten (from zero, so 11 digits) in each:

Decimal: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Binary: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010

Note that in decimal it is not necessary to use a second digit until we have exhausted all of the unique values with the first digit.

Also note that the same is true for binary, it just happens much faster.

Thus, the title "The 10 Nerds" is to be interpreted in decimal as "The 2 Nerds".

Welcome to our world...

Slow Motion Lightning!

How sweet is this!?!

http://www.todaysbigthing.com/2008/08/07