One Man's Trash

Last night, after working on the MythTV box for a while, my long-time friend and I plug in a hard-drive that I had sitting on my desk for an indeterminate amount of time, as I really couldn't remember where it came from (this happens when there's more than ten floating around at any given time). New, SATA, 200+GB drive. I had figured that it belonged to the system I built for Elle a while back (who, as a budding Linux acolyte, I am very proud of).

My friend (we will name him Sisco) fires up the tower and prepares to format, but notices that there happens to be an NTFS partition already on the drive. After some discussion, I figured that I had tried to install XP from Elle's HP laptop (another story of frustration and woe), but being unsure of its nature we decide to investigate further, as the partition size isn't consistent with standard operating procedure. Sisco reboots the tower, this time with Archlinux on a USB-drive, and we start scanning the contents of the directories on the drive: Firefox history, cookies, Documents, Firefox bookmarks, etc; nothing matches up with any expectations that we had for our prospective users.

Curiouser and curiouser; we attempt to boot the drive by itself. Nothing. XP is completely borked.

Sisco ups the ante, and starts a Ubuntu Live CD to examine the contents of the drive previously unviewable from the command-line.

The user, who shall remain safely anonymous, had copies of the user's passport (scanned), résumé, and his William D. Ford Direct-Loan disbursement information (which is to say, everything) on the Desktop. Needless to say, there was enough information here to cause all sorts of mayhem with his life, and probably the lives of his references with a little additional phishing.

Finally, a beautiful display of irony: the résumé lists "advanced computer skills" as one of the user's talents.

It turns out that the drive had been given to me some years ago by a roommate that inherited it from another roommate previous to my occupation of the house; I imagine that since XP was shot, they assumed that the drive itself was trashed and subsequently ditched it. Luckily for him, Sisco and I ended up with the drive (the sensitive data will be destroyed, and likely irreplaceable data will be emailed/mailed to him), but not everyone is so fortunate.

Folks, please, if you value your privacy, take some time to either fix or destroy this sort of sensitive information on your hardware when upgrading or tossing your desktops or laptops. It's an easy mistake, but that doesn't make it any less costly in the end; this means using something stronger than Mickeysoft at some point (see here: dd (command)), or physically destroying the drive. Encryption is not only highly recommended, but borderline mandatory. (I'll have some links up in a later post, as this is a rather broad topic.)

Lastly, if you are not joined at the hip to a Windows-only application for work, I would suggest scrolling to the top of the page and giving Ubuntu a try; it runs in memory for those trying it without an install, it's intuitive, clean, infinitely more secure than Windows or Apple, and it's free. FREE. As in, "free beer".

Join us.

An interesting commentary on human nature

If you want to learn to respect a technology, try to build it from scratch... It's a humbling experience. Chances are that if it's in any way electrical in nature, you'll be handling more mathematics than you can shake a system of differential equations at.

"Abby-someone.""Abby-who?"

In the continuing effort to extricate me and mine from the clutches of nanny-statism (despite some of their voting habits), the last week or so here at the farm has been (between polishing up the leftovers and outside maintenance) spent drawing on napkins, reading articles on the Internet, scratching out cost-benefit analysis and conjuring the spirit of Nikolai Tesla to earth-bound servitude in his skull.

Okay, maybe we didn't conjure the angry spirit of Tesla, but there was copious research and scribbling. Long story short, I'm eyeballs-deep in getting an off-grid minimal-power generation system up.

The reasons for implementing such a system may not be readily apparent for those not already in a preparedness-mindset (or those that have never spent five hours on the phone arguing with Pacific Graft and Extortion), so I'll enumerate whilst I elucidate:

First: Life on the farm ain't exactly pleasant when the water won't pump from our well.

Second: Life on the farm ain't exactly pleasant when the sump-pump won't pump to the leach-field.

Third: I hate PG&E.

Fourth: This system is a working prototype for an eventual off-grid house that is somewhere in my future, albeit that system will likely be larger, but with less conventional watt-usage. Like any other exploratory venture into design, it's best to start small, work out the bugs, expand and repeat.

Fifth: I hate PG&E.

Sixth: Producing one's own power is an option that is better to have than have not. For clarification, ask any of the several-thousand without power recently in the frozen north-east. Furthermore, one can always be sure of the placement in the priority-queue when using an off-grid system, and the resulting independence immediately brightens my day, even if it's a little more work in the interim.

Seventh: I hate PG&E.

Currently, I'm shopping for a hefty modified/pure sine-wave inverter, and a 15-20A charge-regulator for the batteries. The photovoltaic panels are in the living-room, and while they aren't the most massive things, they'll keep the batteries charge relative to the planned usage, including generator use, if necessary.

Naturally, the amount of time spent doodling to time spent doing is about 10:1, the weather being what it is in January. In the course of doodling and doing research on some of the more interesting options involving Stirling-engine co-generation systems (also here), I remembered reading an article some months ago through StumbleUpon about a fascinating wood-burning truck. A quick application of Google-Fu yielded an interesting series of YouTube segments on wood-gasification power applied to a Toyota pickup (the smarmy hippy-speak cuts out with the narrator, hang in there; the entire series is about 47 minutes):



Segments two, three, four and five are here for convenience.

As I see it, this opens up appliances that run on liquid-propane, butane, and other petroleum derivatives for biomass conversion. At the very least, the concept's worth playing with, which is encouraging since I hate paying bills. Especially to PG&E.

"Keen" is something of a misnomer

In which Andrew Keen fails to understand the subtle nature of the medium:

The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies - the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising - to spew their destructive, hate-filled message. What they excelled at was removing the the traditional middlemen like religion, media, and politics, and using these modern technologies of mass communications to speak with reassuring familiarity to the disorientated masses.

Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then. Imagine that universal broadband had been available to enable the unemployed to read the latest conspiracy theories about the Great Crash on the blogosphere. Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his "personalized" YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses. Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.

Well, gosh, it'd be kinda like Digg, wouldn't it? Or perhaps Fark?

The media from the "Fascist Thirties" share a common element: the distribution of the information is unidirectional, straight from a centrally-controlled source to the general public. Radio and cinema existed independently of each other until the advent of television, which is undoubtedly a more restricted format than its predecessors; broadcasting rights require government approval. What could possibly offer a more insidiously invasive method than to have a government-controlled box in nearly every home for the manipulation of information?

Conversely, as John Gilmore observed, the Internet has the peculiar trait that it "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." This has been show time and time again, through the inability of the MPAA/RIAA to stem the tide of file-sharing amongst peers, the development of GPL software, the several varieties of Linux and Firefox, and the rise of the Blogosphere; each of these formed as a response to a centralized monopolistic entity abusing its position at the expense of John and Jane Q. Public. Each entity responded with attempts to crush the opposition, and in each instance they failed, are failing, and will continue to fail in a miserable fashion.

Keen goes on:

Even before the October crash, Americans had become ever-increasingly suspicious to all institutional forms of authority - from traditional political parties to mainstream media organizations to Wall Street executives, educators, and lawyers.

I have an interesting theory: this bleak opinion did not appear ex-nihilo, but as a response to the ever-increasing similarities in candidates from the Democrat and Republican parties, and the institutionalized complicity in the education, financial and judicial systems. But why now? Why at all?

In truth, the advent of the Internet and the resultant magnitude-of-shift in peer-shared information was the death-knell for the halcyon days of central-programming. The people are talking, sharing, creating, and shaking off the fetters of the State and its mewling quislings, and worse yet, they're loving it.

But soft, what fail through yonder comment breaks?

In 2008, the Internet elected Barack Obama; in 2012, in an America with 15 percent or 20 percent unemployment, I doubt that the digital crowd will be quite as wise.

Wrong again, Keen. The Internet elected Ron Paul by way of fundraising, recognition and even as Time's "Man of the Year".

Finally, the pièce de résistance:

For another sneak preview of digital fascism, it’s worth looking at South Korea, another country with universal broadband infrastructure. In April, the new democratically elected South Korean President, Lee Myung Bak lifted a ban on imported American beef. This resulted in an eruption of anger on the Internet-first amongst teenage girls, then on the popular online portal Daum, and finally through teenage "citizen journalists" on blogs, videocasts, and social networks. The rumor spread that all the American beef was tainted with mad cow disease and an online petition for Lee’s impeachment got 1.3 million signatures in a week. And for an even more real-time example of digital fascism, take a look at the way in which this week’s raging anti government violence in Greece by the young and unemployed (already at over 9% in the Greek economy) has been coordinated by Facebook, Twitter and other viral digital networks.

To paraphrase Vox, it's a pity an educated fellow such as Keen cannot muster the presence of mind to open a dictionary:

fas⋅cism
   /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ [fash-iz-uhm] - noun

1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

2. (sometimes initial capital letter) the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.

3. (initial capital letter) a fascist movement, esp. the one established by Mussolini in Italy 1922-43.

Vox has also been kind enough to permanently link this historical reference.

Clearly, a popular movement to recall a politician is in no way a fascist activity. If anything, advocating the restriction of information to media that have been shown to be propaganda-dissemination mechanisms by authoritarian governments is itself a fascist viewpoint, considering the intimate nature of the relationship between the "approved distributors" and said government.

I did not have a high opinion of the Daily Beast before this, and it has not improved.

Feeding frenzy

Evidently I broke something while playing with Feedburner; if your subscription feed is malfunctioning, odds are that I did that while tinkering with the options.

Here's a link for the updated subscription: Subscribe!

I apologize for the inconvenience, but it's my nature to tinker... Which is precisely why I never want to hold public office.

When in doubt, empty the clip

- A simple yet effective RFID hack.

- Delicious, delicious irony, brought to you by the United Faildom.

- Yet another argument against the supposed need for regulation and licensing of fundamental rights.

- The conceptual realization is there, as is the sense of justice. Now, if only the two together in a single philosophy, perhaps where the jury could have some sort of "veto power"...

Concealment does not equal cover

From the technological front:

- An ounce of prevention:

If you are logging in to your Gmail account from different locations and you would like to benefit from this option only when you are using unsecured networks, you can force it by manually typing https://mail.google.com before you log in. This will access the SSL version of Gmail and it will be persistent over your entire session and not only during authentication.

Just a word to the wise for all the Gmail users out there.

- An argument about the conditional-application of the Fifth Amendment:

... U.S. v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach. (A U.S. Justice Department attorney wrote an article in 1996, for instance, titled "Compelled Production of Plaintext and Keys.")

My advice: Use Linux. (Yeah, I couldn't help myself.) Grab TrueCrypt. Use it, use it, use it. Of course, I don't condone using this for evil purposes, but use of it is to exercise and to affirm the inviolable right every citizen has:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Use a strong password, and it is unlikely that even an fully-funded government cracking-attempt would recover the key before the next millennium.

Prototype: "Roy Bean"

Do want, even if just for the novelty value.

Here's a video from Taurus with it in action.

I'm not sure about how well the .410 shot-shells would stack up against a comparable sidearm in .40SW or .45ACP at varying distances, but it'd be a hoot to try out.

To Do: Find Bin Laden Find Sarah Connor

Judging from the current flow of military technology to the civilian sphere-of-influence, how long will it be before SWAT teams, FBI, DEA and BATFE have access to exo-suits? The thought of any of these agencies with anything more powerful than a popgun is frightening enough.

Furthermore, if these exo-suits can be programmed, it can be hacked. Certain countries have already shown a talent for duplicating technology within hours of release, in which case we could expect to see Israel and China with development programs soon after deployment. From there, Russia and Saudi Arabia. With the addition of the AI element to promote autonomous function, how long would it take for a disastrous combination of firepower, willpower and intelligence to emerge? Imagine the fun that could be had with a viral control system.

I am certain that it's only a matter of time before we destroy ourselves; our behavior as a species hasn't improved enough to keep up with our ability to really screw things up.

Bright ideas

Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler, to borrow a phrase:

Most U.S. homes with solar panels feed electricity into the power grid during the day, but have to draw back from the grid at night. Nocera said his development would allow homeowners to bank solar energy as hydrogen and oxygen, which a fuel cell could use to produce electricity when the sun was not shining.

"I can turn sunlight into a chemical fuel, now I can use photovoltaics at night," said Nocera, who explained the discovery in a paper written with Matthew Kanan published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Now, I love clean air and water, and the great outdoors. I also believe that Man was given a delegated responsibility for the Earth, and we should behave and ultimately live in such a way that facilitates that charge (I'm such an inveterate optimist, I know).

However, I'm most enthused to have seen this been developed for those that desire or are required to be self-sufficient in small groups. Power generation for those "off-the-grid" is spotty (at best), and can be prohibitively expensive due to the fuel-cells that are needed for the off-hours. This seems like it could serve as a long-term power-storage solution for those homesteads or communities, and I am glad to see it.

My hat is off to you, MIT.

Do Want

It's an ugly little beast, but consider this:

According to the designers, it costs less than 50 rupees per 100Km (about a tenth that of a petrol car). Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 to 300 km or 10 hours of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km. The car has a top speed of 105 kmph. Refilling the car will, once the market develops, take place at adapted petrol stations to administer compressed air. In two or three minutes, and at a cost of approximately 100 rupees, the car will be ready to go another 200-300 kilometers.

Sign me up. Which probably means that there's an impending legal slap-down for owning one in US.