Henrik Lantz

Bored? Create a South Park-version of yourself (or your friends, or your boss, or anyone else) at SP Studio.

Here’s your’s truly:

As I write this, I am listening to my first ever iTunes Music Store purchase; The Pet Shop Boys‘ magical new album “Fundamental“ - the extended version (including the remix CD “Fundamentalism” plus two demo songs and the video for the single “I’m With Stupid” - total 24 tracks + 1 video) is priced at a reasonable €11.99. I created my iTunes account, submitted my credit card details and clicked the “Buy Album” button. After a brief warning telling me I was about to spend money, the songs started downloading, and I had the whole album before I’d finished listening to “Psychological”, the first track. Wow. Really impressed with this.

Then, of course came the big, and I mean ELEPHANTINE, stumbling block. I tried transferring the song to my MP3 player, which was a - in the words of Jack Slater - Big Mistake. You see, I am one of the non-believers who chose to go for a player of another make than Apple; and since people like creating their own monopolies, they of course were not compatible. Apple’s M4P files are only recognized by iTunes, and this FINE application refuses to convert them. It does, however, allow me to burn them on an audio CD. Windows Media Player 10, then, was kind enough to let me rip this audio CD into MP3:s, which could then be transferred. Not anywhere near impressed by these limitations.

I do like gadgets, I really do. But I am NOT buying an iPod until I really, REALLY need a video player. And I don’t.

…the massive backend system used for your intranet falls over (and it’s not your responsibility to fix it) and the error message presented to the user is actually visible in the URL of the returned page; like

https://……./error.aspx?ErrorText=Unable+to+connect+to+database.++Check+database+connection+information+and+make+sure+the+database+server+is+running.

This really inspires people to be creative in tweaking the error message to endless hilarities. I prefer the subtle changes (inserting a single word or changing some tiny detail), but the one that said “Your boss gave you 3 minutes to fix this 5 minutes ago, you are FIRED!” was good too!

• Rocketboom - daily (weekdays only) news style podcast with information about… well, anything. Somewhere between 3-5 minutes per episode, and ALWAYS interesting. (watch online)
• Photoshop TV - weekly (Mondays) podcast from the National Association of Photoshop Professionals about Photoshop. Tips, trick, news, tutorials. Around 30 minutes per episode with Scott Kelby (the biggest selling IT author two years running), Dave Cross and Matt Kloskowski. (watch online)
• Photoshop Killer Tips - daily (weekdays only) bite-sized tips-only podcast for Photoshop. Averaging just over a minute per episode, Matt Kloskowski delivers a snappy tip every day.

• The Blue Ball Machine - turn on the sound for the full experience.
• The Falling Sand Game - change the namekuji to “vanish” and play with the elements.
• Hapland - see if YOU can figure this one out. It took me an hour and a half.

Everytime you sign up for some new service, register an account with a web shop, join a community or want to download something from somewhere, you have to register your email address. One possibility could be to register temporary email addresses unique for each site (which is handy if you have your own mail server, not so handy if you need to register a new webmail account for each site) and then drop that alias once you start getting too many emails from a given site. Problems with this method still include mass-mailings that don’t show you which alias it’s going to (in case you’ve got several similar ones) and it also does not protect you if someone hijacks a site’s email database and uses it for spam; you still need to figure out which alias they are using.

Enter Mailinator. Mailinator is a new kind of webmail site - one that doesn’t require registration or loads of tricky setup. It’s basically a receive-only temporary email address; emails sent to [anything]@mailinator.com are accessible via the web page for a few hours and then automatically deleted. You cannot send emails from Mailinator or reply to ones you have received, and all sorts of fancy formatting and attachments are stripped immediately.

When registering an account on a website, give as your email address xuxufufifdff@mailinator.com. Later on, go to the Mailinator website, enter “xuxufufifdff” in the Check your inbox! field and hey presto - there’s your welcome message. You don’t need a password to open the mailbox, so choose your address very carefully and don’t use it for secret information. (Mailinator graciously provides random 13-letter prefixes that could be used for your correspondence.)

Cool idea. Hope it works, that they don’t harvest the source addresses for their own spam and that people don’t try to blast it off the air just to prove themselves. Good idea? Definitely. Worth donating a couple of bucks? Quite possibly.

On routers from Juniper Networks, there’s an easter egg command that can provide hours (well, minutes) of joy; the show version and haiku command. Apart from the normal version information, it also prints a haiku. Some examples, for the geekier of us:

TTL down one
the end nearer with each hop
little packet, poof.

…and my favourite…

Amazing photons
carry our data worldwide,
never seem to stop.

(Note of interest: At one point it mentions that “’show version and blame’ / gave away too many names / now you get haiku.” - this is a reference to an earlier version of the easter egg which not only printed the version information, but also a list of names and email addresses of the engineers that built the software. Apparently the poor engineers were bombarded with emails so they had to remove it.)

On Thursday last week, Swedish ISP Bahnhof was “visited” by police, the Enforcement Administration (see summary) and the Anti-Piracy Association (hereafter the APB). They had a warrant to search the company’s servers for illegal copies of four movies and eight music albums - they found no trace of these particular works; however the four servers confiscated during the raid contained several hundred thousand other illegal files (movies, software and music). Now, the APB are planning to file another lawsuit against the ISP for these files. The company claims it knows nothing about these servers (rumoured to be some of the largest in Europe), but has suspended two of its employees pending an investigation. Anyway - that’s just a bit of background, that’s not what this post is about. Other people have been writing about this for days. Nor do I intend to discuss the ethics of file sharing, there is legislation that deals with that.

I’ve taken some time today to look into the discussions that have followed this event, especially in the Swedish discussion forums. Naturally, most of the voices raised are critical. (Interestingly enough; after a while all the people seem to be critical of each other and completely forgetting the issue they are discussing, but this is just normal ‘net behaviour.) Some take good old-fashioned drunken-footballer approach ("All authorities are bastards, I think we should all go and get our baseball bats out and wreck the mall."), others adopt the academic stance ("Well, in fact, according to section 34 of European Union statute 140:03a, also backed up by the third paragraph of the Geneva convention [2nd revision], paragraph 15A, a figure of authority may not seize, confiscate or in any other way refuse access too, any information that may or may not potentially have life-saving properties for children under the age of 14."), yet others use cryptic the cryptic language of script kiddies all over the globe ("u R S0 1am3 - wh0 u5e5 p2p aNyWaY? pwnd!!!"), while others still simply chip in for the hell of it ("If you’re going to post to this forum, you should at least learn to spell properly!"). Others, like me, sit back and don’t interfere - it’s not going to help anyway.

One of the themes that does seem to come back in this discussion (and any other discussion even remotely touching the Holy Grail of the Internet community; “Information wants to be free”), is that the authorities are acting like some form of Big Brother figure (the Orwellian kind, not the TV series), just because they are meddling with what people are doing. Some people accuse (and I have to stress that this is only rumours) the APB of trying to break into any computer that visits its webpage (currently defaced/DNSjacked so I won’t link to it) to see if there is any illicit material on there. OK, so fair enough, I don’t want the authorities to snoop through everything I do or listen in on my phone calls either, but this is about breaking laws. For investigations, I understand that police may need to tap a phone or emails ISPs have a legal obligation in many countries to provide this service), confiscate material and sift through it, I buy that.

A lot of people, in this particular case, are also critical of the methods used for this raid. Some of this may be rumours, but most things are substantiated in the media coverage, so I’ll accept that for fact - at least until someone proves me wrong. It appears that the APB (who is a private organisation and does not have a legislative or enforcing task) staff was present during the raid and walked freely in the ISP premises. Also, it is claimed that someone infiltrated the Bahnhof staff and blew the whistle - something this person probably is going to end up regretting, no matter how proud he feels about having “done good". There are several other turns to come here, I’m sure.

My angle, after all that preamble, is that the APB webpage has been hijacked and now points to another page which names the whistleblower. After all the discussion about how Big Brother interferes with our civil rights - these people (who call themselves Arga unga hackare - Angry young hackers) have proven that they themselves do just this! They post copies of internal / personal emails; they even track back his IP address to find his address and social security number (information that I know for a FACT that they shouldn’t have access to), they track him down on IRC by using what they refer to their “back doors planted on IRC servers in several networks” and send him threatening messages. They claim to have had the passwords for the APB and other organisations for more than four years, meaning that they can effectively intercept everything.

So when you’re on the Internet in the future, remember: Big Brother is watching you, but he may not be who you think he is. The chances are that he is a lot younger than that, and that he doesn’t work for a government agency or any of the kind. He could very well be just someone who’s happened to stumble onto your password or other information and is just waiting for the right moment to use it. Be very careful with who you upset out there.

Some people have too much time, I think we can all agree. I work, as some of my readers will know, within the field of IP networking; my employer is a European MSO, and the Internet service is one of our flagships. The team I manage is responsible for the operations of our backbones and other networks; needless to say, I am confronted with nerds for much of my waking life. (I use the term “nerd” affectionately here, don’t get me wrong - I used to be one myself until very recently.)

Back in 1990, perfectly on time for April 1st, an RFC was issued, entitled A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers (RFC 1149). This document was written by David Waitzman and it describes, in spite of its grand title, a method of carrying IP packets (the small bits of data that make the Internet work) across the world, using not electricity on copper wires and not by propelling photons down strands of optical fibre at the speed of light; no, this method uses homing pigeons to transfer data. (This RFC was actually sent to all the major manufacturers of network equipment, asking them if they supported these standards, and scaringly enough - a staggering majority of the manufacturers actually claimed that they did, for sure without reading the document in question…)

In 1999, Mr. Waitzman updated his RFC - and, again, strangely enough on the same date as the original RFC, April 1st. This time, the document (RFC 2549) also included aspects such as Quality of Service (a way of prioritizing certain kinds of traffic over others) - how you could increase the transfer rate by loading your pigeons onto air planes (if you use a Concorde, an extra plus is that your data frame (ie. the pigeon) would earn double frequent flyer points) and how the use of pigeons compared to, for example, the use of ostriches as carrier frames. All in traditional, very theoretic RFC-style language. For any nerd, these documents are a sheer joy to read.

And if you think David Waitzman is the one with too much time on his hands, listen to this:

The Bergen Linux User Group in Norway has actually taken it upon themselves to not only read the RFC (the original one), but in 2001 they actually constructed the first ever (recorded) RFC 1149-compliant network and used it to transmit data. They even built specific protocol stacks for their Linux boxes, and teamed up with Vesta Brevdue Forening, a homing pigeon organisation close to Bergen, and tested it out for real. OK, so transfer speeds weren’t all that amazing; you might even want to say terrible. But at least it works, and that’s what counts to any nerd.

(On a related note: we’re always talking about transfer speeds that we see on the internet; megabits and kilobits per second. Transfer speeds of course depend on a lot of things, such as the media used, the geographic distance between the endpoints and the load on the network. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that the transfer speed you can extrapolate from FedExing a DVD across the Atlantic is actually faster than downloading it over a dedicated fibre connection. After all; whether it’s a streaming download or a posted CD - you can still break it down into how many bits are transferred per second.)