Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

I’m very grateful for the free Wi-Fi on the train, the coffee shop or the municipal free Wi-Fi, but the content filter they have on their proxies is sometimes really weird – for example it may blocks one of my favorite podcasts website (the Jupiter Broadcasting network) under the category “streaming media” even though they don’t actually host their video files, but they do let through YouTube and Facebook (where most cat videos are posted these days). So apparently Israeli Rail has an aversion to streaming media so they won’t let me send an email to a small podcast, but I can watch all the cat videos I want. Weird. Also, most VPN services are blocked by default, so no help will be coming from that way¹.

So, to fix that, here’s a small workaround using an external proxy – this is rather simple, but it does assume you have all kinds of tools that most users won’t have just lying around – but if you’re a Linux geek you should do just fine.

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1. I’ve checked the OpenVPN ports are blocked, as well as all web-based proxies I could find, such as FoxyProxy and Hola. I’ve encountered in the past a weird VPN software that does not use standard UDP or TCP sockets, but instead using GRE packets and I have no idea if that would work, but I’m assuming it won’t as well. [↩]

[This is mostly a summary of a discussion on Google Plus, that you can find here]

Recap: The world (or at least clueless tech journalists) was surprised to learn (once they bothered to look it up) that Microsoft will not extends Windows 7 end of “mainstream support” – which is scheduled for January 2015 (about 6 months from now). This was all planned way in advance – Microsoft basically committed to end “mainstream support” in 2015 by not releasing any service pack for Windows 7 since the beginning of 2010, instead they want people to move to the next version of their software. In most normal software markets, this is a no-brainer – who have heard of a Macintosh user still clinging to Mac OS X 10.7? or an Adobe Photoshop user who refuses to upgrade past CS3? But instead you now hear calls for Microsoft to extends Windows 7 an artificial life line, like it did with XP.

And here’s why XP will never happen again:

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There is one thing that really troubled me about the Microsoft dynamic DNS fiasco that no one seems to talk about, which I really wanted to raise, but first here’s a short recap for those not in the know: Microsoft “cyber-security” department convinced a US federal court to issue an order to transfer 22 internet domains owned by the popular No-IP dynamic DNS service into their custody, in an attempt to remove specific hosts under those domains that are supposedly used as malware control centers.

The issue I have is very simple – under what conditions can it be possible for a private company, to ask a court to transfer ownership of a property from another private company? This sounds seriously like private policing and somehow it is endorsed by the judicial system ?!? Under what authority can something like this be allowed?

This situation is massively more grievous because the court order was given “ex-parte” – legalese for “without the other party appearing to defend itself”, but even if everything was over the table and in the clear, and the defending lawyer incredibly incompetent, what kind of argument a private entity can offer to get a court to simply transfer control of another private entity?¹.

Related articles

• Microsoft Cybercrime Shutdown Hit Users Says DDNS Provider(techweekeurope.co.uk)

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• No-IP regains control of some domains wrested by Microsoft(pcworld.com)

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• Microsoft’s “draconian” No-IP takedown hits millions(pcpro.co.uk)

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• Millions of dynamic DNS users suffer after Microsoft seizes No-IP domains(arstechnica.com)

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1. except obviously arguing that the property was stolen, which is clearly not the case [↩]

Summary of the events of the Code Space break-in: Code Spaces was hosting their services on Amazon Web Services VPS infrastructure. An attacker managed to gain access to their AWS administration console account and after his demands for ransom were not answered, proceeded to delete all the data in the account.

The disaster recovery plan for Code Spaces was based on having machine images and data backups stored in AWS, everything was gone, and Code Spaces basically had to shutdown.

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Canonical have last week announced that they are developing their own display server to replace the ubiquitous X display server, a project called Mir, and the shit storm has begun anew(as what happened after Unity, Ubuntu Touch and other Canonical announcements). Contrary to popular belief, I think that this happening is a good thing for the Linux community in whole.

There are many reasons why I think this is good, most are not really concrete technical things, but I can list a few:

• X11 is showing its age. There were some internal efforts to modernize it (e.g. kdrive which have mostly merged into the existing code) and some external efforts to replace it (Fresco and Wayland to name a few), but none have made much of an impact on the current state of Linux display.
• From first look, Mir is a modern code base written in C++11 and Boost, which I like.
• Diversity is generally a good thing.

If we go over the last point in a bit more depth, I think we can see why Mir would generally be a good thing for Linux developers and users and why people should stop being negative.

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I just “love” this quote from this PC-Magazine article:

… the amazingly enduring Windows XP—easily Microsoft’s most successful enterprise product ever…

Which is a really cock-eyed way to look at the operating system market, which completely ignores purchasing decisions by millions of users world-wide. A better description of Windows XP might be:

The last reasonably well-made operating system that Microsoft made

Users aren’t migrating from Windows XP because its so good¹ – they keep using Windows XP because every later OS is really bad.

1. hint: it isn’t [↩]

A pseudo analysis of the issue that was brought to my attention by Eric Klien’s post here. The following text is slightly edited version of my comment on the post, reproduced here because I think its important for my readers to be aware of the issue.

A new CA kerfuffle has broken out yesterday, and here are some of the headlines:

• Google detects fake website ID certificate threat
• Fake Turkish site certs create threat of bogus Google sites

The information for the discussion below was sourced from these, more technical, articles¹:

• Rogue Google SSL certificate not used for dishonest purposes, Turktrust says
• SSL Certificate Authority Puts Google at Risk (Again)
• Errant Google Domain Traced To CA’s Mistakes

To summarize, the problem was a botched test process in TurkTrust CA (as part of an external security audit) that caused a CA profile to be set up to generate “sub CA” certificates, and following that the profile was copied to the production system and subsequently used to generate two certificates before the problem was discovered and fixed (I assume the test profile was removed from the production system), but only 1 of those certificate was revoked. (more…)

1. I applaud BBC for trying to present a complex security issue in “layman terms”, but as someone who is familiar with the technology in question, it gave me quite a headache, trying to “reverse translate” the text [↩]

This was on the bus stop bench outside my work today:

The note under the memory modules (3 sticks, 512MB each, either PC100 or PC123) says “please take”.

I never thought about trying that. Do you think I can do the same with my old CRT?

International Business Times has published an article with some features made available by iOS 6 that is likely iPhone 5 will offer:

Answering/Declining Calls – Users will now have the option to answer or decline calls. Users may send a text message from a choice of pre-programmed options if you wish not to be disturbed at the moment. Users will also be able to remind themselves to return the missed calls later.

Really? That’s a new feature? Having used these features constantly since, like, forever on Android, I’m actually very surprised that iOS didn’t have those up till now.

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Please go to Google’s Home page right now to look at the Google Doodle for Robert Moog‘s¹ 78th Birthday – its a fully functional synthesizer that you can play on and record yourself!

It works slightly better in Chrome although the latest Firefoxes can also handle the moogdoodle. I wouldn’t count on anything else being able to play this demo that uses the experimental Web Audio API for HTML 5 that looks to aiming to bring to the web, all the capabilities of a Commodore 64 SID ;-).

Things you can do (The knobs are unfortunately unmarked, so I had to guess what each knob does):

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1. Inventor of the analog synthesizer [↩]