Circuit Writer

Version 6.1 - September, 2008

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:32:50 GMT

There is just too much important stuff this month.

Is John McCain good for Us?

Once again, please note that I define "us" as people using computers both professionally and for pleasure; in other words, DACS members like you and me. Last month we looked at Barack Obama. On the Obama website, technology is a major heading under issues. Technology does not make the top cut for issues on the McCain website. Once you navigate to the technology page (ok, it only took two clicks rather than one), the thing that struck me first was that I had to scroll half way down the page before I found anything that dealt with end users like us.

The major technology bullets, followed by my comments, are:

Encourage investment in innovation (this is part of McCain’s policies to lower taxes, particularly on business)
Develop a skilled work force (by increasing H-1B visas, thus reducing opportunities and pay for Americans)
Champion open and fair trade (deregulation and market-based)
Reform intellectual property protection (more funding for the patent office, rather than patent reform)
Keep the Internet and entrepreneurs free of unnecessary regulation (finally! But rather than ensuring net neutrality, McCain would leave it to the market place)
Ensure a fully connected citizenry (the programs mentioned are mostly oriented to rural areas, where Internet and other digital services are poor)

The main difference between Barack Obama and John McCain from our perspective is emphasis. McCain policies seem oriented more toward business with little or nothing to actually protect your digital rights. Instead he relies on the availability of competition to preserve net neutrality. I urge you to read the technology pages of both candidates and judge for yourself. Final comments: John McCain admits he does not use email or the Internet, but he does have an official Facebook page. Anyone want to take bets on whether he has actually seen it himself?

The Is This For Real? Department

With airlines dropping flights and reducing service on all fronts, even removing the magazines from planes to save fuel, Delta Air Lines is actually launching a new service. Yes, soon you will be able to use Wi-Fi to surf the web and talk on Skype at 30,000 feet. The service is planned for the entire Delta domestic fleet by summer 2009. The service will cost $9.95, and lest you think that you might get a better deal on longer flights, it will cost $12.95 on flights longer than three hours. Now, haven’t we been warned for lo these many years, to turn off any device that might emit a radio signal lest we interfere with the plane’s navigation and electronics? I guess at least one airline can solve this sticky technical issue once the marketing guys develop a reason! The eWeek article mentions how the equipment provided by Aircell is “extremely light, requiring minimal space on the aircraft, and can be installed overnight” but says nothing about any testing or modifications to the plane’s avionics to ensure that the planes will not fall out of the sky the first time some guy in business class surfs to a porn site.

Comcast, the FCC and Net Neutrality

The FCC, in a 3-2 vote, found that Comcast violated net neutrality principles when it throttled BitTorrent traffic. While this appears to be a great victory for Internet freedom, we should not jump to conclusions. The vote was narrow to give Comcast a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, Comcast says it is ready to change how it manages its network traffic and the ruling reduces pressure in Congress to codify net neutrality in legislation – something the large Internet providers do not want. Read the New York Times article.

The Could This Happen Here? Department

If I said that this could only happen in San Francisco, I’d be lying because I know that’s just not true. Even if I said that it could only happen in government, it would be far from honest. As you may have guessed, I refer to the situation in San Francisco where a consultant held the city’s network hostage when he set up the security so that he was the only one with access to the top-level administrative privileges.

Terry Childs, a network administrator (or network designer or security expert, depending on what you read) set up the city’s new FiberWAN so that he was the only one with top level security access and then refused to give the key (the password) to the city even when sitting in jail under $5 million bail. The standoff continued for several days while experts (presumably newly hired experts) tried to crack the passwords and other experts speculated that Childs had set up a “logic bomb” that would cripple the city. The network, which contains official city email, payroll, and law enforcement information, continued to function flawlessly while Childs sat in jail. Only a secret jailhouse visit from S.F. Mayor Gavin Newsom finally convinced Childs to give up the password.

Like so many stories, once the juicy parts are resolved, the coverage stops. After nine days of drama, the city regained administrative control of the network. I’m sure there is more to this story. Read this story on the New York Times and on Dark Reading and see for yourself. I cannot fathom how IT management at the City of San Francisco allowed the situation to reach this point.

Russian Gangs and Malware

Malware needs to be taken seriously. It’s not just an annoyance like the virus that deletes your music files but a product of organized crime. Many large businesses think that it’s ok if their network is penetrated once or twice a month as that level of infection is manageable. Now a security researcher has uncovered a Russian gang that is actually using the same enterprise tools used by the corporations themselves to distribute a program called Coreflood. Coreflood captures and transmits keystrokes (to capture passwords) and personal information to a central database.

Attacks can start with a single compromised machine on the network, possibly a laptop belonging to a visitor. Once the gang controls a machine with administrative privileges, they configure Microsoft System Center (an enterprise tool to manage networks with large numbers of servers and end user computers) or another tool to deliver and install the Coreflood program to every computer on the network. Note that this is not a flaw in System Center – it is doing exactly what it is told to do which is to install software. The fact that it is not the authorized network administrator who is in command is another matter. Read more on the New York Times.

This is not the only Russian Gang malware story by any means. Most of the gangs harvest and control botnets of thousands of malware-infected computers. The botnets are often used to send spam, notably phishing attacks which lead theft of credit card numbers at the low end and identity theft at the worst. The gangs do not use the credit cards themselves. Instead they sell the number to other criminals to manufacture fake cards and sell them to petty thieves on the Internet or even on the street. The person who gets caught with the fake card is so far down the food chain, there is no way to trace the transaction back to the gangs responsible.

While most of the database servers used by these gangs are overseas, the gang at the top of this article had a server in Wisconsin. When threatened, they moved it to Ukraine. Now there is new evidence they have relocated to IP blocks in China. If this is not global warfare, I don’t know what to call it. Read more at eWeek where there are links to even more.

Domain Name Tasting Will End, and other Fairy Tales

The practice of registering a domain name, setting up a trivial website and then monitoring the hits during the five day grace period is know as domain tasting. Often the domain names in question are ones that expire accidentally. If the real owner wants to recover his domain, the taster will ask an exorbitant ransom. While legal in the narrow sense, the practice is not ethical, especially when practiced by unscrupulous domain registrars – the very people charged with protecting those domain names for the registrant! ICANN, the quasi-governmental organization charged with managing the Internet infrastructure (domain name registration and IP addresses) has issued a couple of rules changes that may help – or may not, depending on who you ask. A full explanation is beyond our scope here so read more on eWeek and at The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (cadna.org).

Serious Security Flaw In Internet Infrastructure

Several months back Dan Kaminsky, the director of penetration testing for the security company IOActive, found an incredibly simple and thus incredibly serious flaw in DNS. The Domain Name System (DNS) is what translates the user friendly names we type into the address bar of our browser, like dacs.org, into the IP address of the server we want. The flaw, known as cache poisoning, tricks a DNS server into delivering the wrong IP address to a query. The user making the query then goes to the wrong server which could contain a phishing website. When this was first discovered, all DNS servers everywhere, even the root servers at the very top of the Internet infrastructure, were vulnerable because the flaw was part of the original design. Kaminsky acted quickly and privately alerted people at Cisco and other major infrastructure manufacturers. Quickly and quietly people worked to design a patch and to implement it throughout the Internet. The patch was released in early July. After the months of work, Kaminsky planned to give a paper at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas to announce the flaw and the work done to fix it.

As so often happens, the flaw was leaked early, apparently by mistake. Since then Kaminsky has become a celebrity with an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered. It’s really good to read a story once in a while about someone who acted responsibly when confronted with a problem that literally affected the world.

Version 6.0 - August, 2008

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:33:37 GMT

Is Barack Obama good for Us?

Please note that I define "us" in this case as people who use computers both professionally and for pleasure, in other words, DACS members like you and me.

Much of Senator Obama's success in the primaries has been attributed to his "use of the Internet". So if he, or really his campaign, is so technically savvy, will he make the best president for us as computer users and consumers of online media? Will an Obama administration make policy favorable to "us"? So far we have several ways to look at this question.

The Obama campaign was derided by a Clinton campaign official for "looking like Facebook". We know who won that battle, but many people feel that the social networking model has been a key factor in the Obama success. So let’s look at his Facebook page. You will need a Facebook account to view this. [Don’t lie when you sign up, it only causes problems later on. Use your real name and age.]

His Facebook page is typical for a politician (one of the page types you can select when opening an account). There is little real information about policies and it appears that the page is really just an anchor for Facebook members to become “supporters” and a convenient place to read news and comments. Becoming a supporter sends a notice to your Facebook friends that you have done so, which is how social networking works. For information the Obama Facebook page has links to the official campaign Facebook group, to the campaign’s mySpace page, and to Michele Obama’s Facebook page. I suspect that all this is exactly what the typical obsessive Facebook user wants. To see more information in the form of news clips, videos, etc., you can add Barak Obama to your Facebook page. Without extensive experimentation, I have no idea what this might entail.

The “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)” Facebook Group has more information; however most of it is about how to volunteer for the campaign at several levels. Once again, this is what social networking is about but does not answer my question.

So back to the official campaign website we go for a quick dose of policy platitudes. There is a PDF, The Blueprint for Change, that has more detail than the website and I urge all of you to read it thoroughly.

From our standpoint he does address several issues:

Net Neutrality – an open Internet. This is paramount and most of the right words are in the statement. As always, the devil is in the details, but at least he has it as the top technology issue.
Patent Reform – Basically he suggests giving the Patient Office the resources needed to do a better job. Nice, but how about eliminating trivial software patents?
Copyright protection at home and abroad – Here he does a nice job of defining some problems without much on the solutions side. He seems to be dancing on the fence here although at least he is not railing about digital downloads and trivial software piracy while ignoring the factories that pump out fakes in quantity.
Protecting children versus the First Amendment – this has been a tricky issue since the nineties. The statement says Obama will “give parents the tools to prevent reception of programming that they find offensive on television and on digital media.” No on can be against this, but how to do it?!
Broader broadband – This is interesting. He notes that the FCC “defines ‘broadband’ as an astonishingly low 200 kbps. This distorts federal policy and hamstrings efforts to broaden broadband access. Obama will define ‘broadband’ for purposes of national policy at speeds demanded by 21st century business and communications.”

This is a very narrow look at some of the computer user issues I’ve talked about here over the months. Obviously there are many, many more issues that touch all of us like voting machine technology and immigration reform (H1B visas), to name just two. There are position statements on these and more, so I urge you to take a really good look.

Next month we will look at Senator McCain.

WiMax is the Next Big Thing - maybe

You can think of WiMax as Wi-Fi on steroids with a potential range measured in miles rather than feet. As the market for Wi-Fi subscription services like T-Mobile and Boingo disintegrates (have you noticed?), WiMax is a new way for an ISP to get you on the Internet. There are two forms – fixed and mobile. The mobile version works like a cell phone as you move about, transferring your session from one tower to the next. I see no reason for anyone to offer the fixed version. Sprint, the only cell phone provider without a “high” speed data plan, planned to implement WiMax, then backed down, then did a deal with Clearwire and WiMax is back on. Intel is has been really pushing this for some time <pun>(they got the chips!)</pun> so it is bound to happen eventually, even here in the USofA.

Another Next Big Thing

The SSD or solid state drive will become standard for laptops any day now. An SSD is essentially a really big flash drive that replaces the hard drive. Battery life gains will drive the change as costs for such devices drop. Capacities are already there with Dell offering a 128GB SSD in selected notebooks. Much smaller SSDs have been standard in ultramobile notebooks like the OLPC XO-1, ASUS EeePC from the beginning. The XO-1 used a SSD for durability as well as battery life. Many pundits predicted the technology in the XO-1 would become mainstream. It has begun.

They Said It Couldn’t Be Done Department

Seagate has introduced a 1.5 terabyte hard drive. Just a few years ago, you bought this kind of capacity from one of the high-end enterprise storage specialists like EMC who sold you an cabinet full of drivers configured in an array. The new drive is the regular 3.5” size that has been standard now for about fifteen years. The new drive uses PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording – not Pimp My Ride) to increase the areal density (bits per square inch) of the drive platter.

Equally amazing is a 500-gigabyte notebook drive. Yes, you can now walk around with one-half terabyte of whatever amuses you in your laptop. Soon it will be possible for one lost laptop to contain personal information about every person on earth.

As you can see from the version number in the title, this begins my seventh year writing monthly for DACS.

Version 5.11 - July, 2008

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:40:53 GMT

Tim Russert

As I write this on Sunday morning, NBC is paying tribute to Tim Russert, the longtime host of Meet the Press. There is no way to tie this into DACS or computing so I won’t try, but Tim has been an important part of my Sunday mornings for many years. In this column, I often try to associate tech issues with the political players who make or influence those decisions. Each week Tim brought those players into our homes in a way that made issues understandable. He got answers to tough but fair questions while holding his guests accountable for past statements. Two things made Tim a standout: his humility, the show was always about politics – not him, and his loyalty to all things Buffalo. Sunday mornings will never be the same.

The Browser War Returns

The best evidence that Microsoft intended to kill Netscape is how the intervals between versions of Internet Explorer got longer and longer once there was no Netscape Navigator with which to compete. Would there be an IE 7 if there were no Firefox? I think not.

There is some evidence that the next browser war will be over JavaScript, the scripting language (tinyurl.com/6f9uea), however I think the issue of the moment is standards compliance. Microsoft trumpeted IE 7 for better performance against HTML standards. Unfortunately IE 7 retains most of the “quirks” that have driven web developers nuts. The quirks (some would call them bugs) have remained in the product so long as Microsoft thought that developers would code to the quirks rather than the standards. The ever growing market share of Firefox has changed all that. So, once again, Microsoft is promising “interoperability and compatibility” in IE 8.

Digital Rights in Canada

While our Congress does whatever it has been doing (nothing productive lately), the Canadian Parliament is addressing copyrights in the digital age (tinyurl.com/5ca23k). A new bill introduced by Industry Minister Jim Prentice would allow Canadians to copy legally acquired music to a computer or iPod but they must not circumvent any DRM applied by the copyright owner. The new bill continues existing protections for ISPs from liability for their customer’s transgressions and does not require that an accused violating website be taken down immediately as in the U.S.

An interesting provision allows consumers to time-shift radio and television broadcasts but prohibits retaining the recordings in a permanent personal library. So basically, the proposed law gives consumers a few ‘privileges’ with the copyrighted materials they purchase and then takes everything away if the content happens to be digital. From the eWeek article:

In drafting the new legislation, the government said it faced the delicate task of balancing the rights of content creators with the realities and needs of everyday life in a digital world, and also realizing the difficulty of policing possible personal infringements.

Prentice said of the issue: "It touches each and every one of us, and it is no surprise to find so many different points of view with respect to copyright."

My reaction is “Ha!” The bill gives everything to any business entity involved and screws the consumer. Another group compares this new bill to the DMCA in the U.S.

Reaction to the bill has come from an online group called Fair Copyright for Canada (www.faircopyrightforcanada.ca – many, many fascinating links) which seems to have most of its activity in a Facebook group (tinyurl.com/2r6z6q – you must have a Facebook account to view this page). The social networking model seems to work quite well for this issue. The Facebook group has over 61,000 members and there are many more Facebook groups for local chapters presumably to concentrate lobbying on a particular MP (Member of Parliament).

Canadians take pride in being different from their neighbors south of the border (that would be us). They are certainly to be commended for the activity they have generated over this issue.

Truly Interesting Department

Did you know that on June 17^th and 18^th there is (was as you read this) a conference in Seoul, Korea, on the “Future of the Internet”? Well, I didn’t either. Several organizations have requested input to this process via YouTube. You can begin your YouTube surfing at the video channel (www.youtube.com/futureinternet) created by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD.org), the organization sponsoring the event. No matter what I try to write here, everything seems trite. What is the future of the Internet? I haven’t found anything from John Patrick, yet.

The Could This Work Department

This morning at breakfast (where I read eWeek and Information Week), I came across an article on Open Source Hardware – yes, hardware (tinyurl.com/55ejw9). Actually this concept is not new and I’ll tell you why in a moment. The article talks about how the OpenMoko Project (openmoko.org) and VIA Technologies have released CAD files for several products. OpenMoko released CAD files for all of its mobile phones. You really need to go to the OpenMoko websites to understand what it is all about. The VIA Technologies release is easier to grasp as the product involved is a prototype ultra-mobile notebook computer. VIA did not release everything needed to make the entire computer but just the design for the outer shell. The idea is that OEM manufacturers can customize the outside to produce a unique version.

The author, Serdar Yegulalp, speculates that hardware design could increasingly move to the open source model which would lead to whole market segments based on common, open designs. This could really simplify finding a part for your washing machine and it could lower production and repair costs for many products, both electronic and not.

Open source hardware has been around for many years, primarily in sports. My first thought was one-design sailboats. There is a standard basic design. How you implement that design could give you an edge in a race or allow for a lower sales price. Sit for a minute and you’ll think of others.

Version 5.10 - June, 2008

Tue, 20 May 2008 19:56:19 GMT

Water Cooling is New?!

Once again we start with IBM and the headline, “IBM Ships First Water-Cooled Supercomputer”. I remember when all “serious” computers were water cooled. That’s still true, but now its serious gamers who use water cooling to keep their over-clocked chips cool. The new supercomputer in the article is called Bluefire and will replace three older systems that are no longer quite so super. Remember when we talked about computer performance in terms of MIPS, or millions of instructions per second? The new Bluefire is claimed to offer 76 teraflops, or 76 trillion floating point operations per second. Keep in mind that each floating point operation requires several instructions to execute.

The customer is the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR - www.ncar.ucar.edu/) which reminds me of an interesting factoid. Weather prediction was the application that first got John Mauchly interested in building an electronic computer. That was in the late 1930’s and he went on to co-invent ENIAC, the first all electronic digital computer. The Bluefire will be used to study the effects of climate change.

Net Neutrality

Our Congresspeople in the House of Representatives have taken up the issue of Network Neutrality (See eWeek article) once again. Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA), and Chip Pickering (R-MS) have introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008. The act seeks to enshrine the principals of net neutrality into law as national policy. Email your Congressperson today and tell him you want him to support this bill.

HealthVault

Could Microsoft have its heart in the right place here? I mentioned HealthVault here several months ago when it was first announced by Microsoft. I created an account immediately. An eWeek article suggests that the healthcare industry has been focusing on the needs of providers and payors (insurance companies) rather than consumers (you). Duh! Microsoft seeks to change the way we access our healthcare records by giving us a place to store (and control) those records. As this resource builds, Microsoft hopes that if they build it, consumers will come with their data and developers will come with applications to analyze the data and make possible collaboration between patients and their healthcare providers. The idea is to give you the same access to healthcare records that you get to your financial records at the bank. Only this time, you don’t need to get all your services from one provider to centralize your data. What happens then is anybody’s guess, but the key is that you will be involved in the decision.

Desktop Virtualization

Before the main presentation at the May General Meeting, I tried to get the presenters to start with the very basics and explain everything. Instead we got a time-compressed version of their regular sales presentation. I was disappointed. Well there is a nice eWeek article that explains what we missed.

While they totally missed explaining it, Citrix has a product called ZenApp. It used to be called Presentation Server which at least gives a clue to its function. Like Microsoft Terminal Services (aka: Remote Desktop), Presentation Server runs on a big central box that is shared by many users. Both Terminal Services and Presentation Server turn Windows into a multi-user system by creating virtual desktops in the central server that you view remotely using client software on your local PC. Since you don’t need a full PC to run the client software, a thin client device can replace the local PC. This is the Windows version of the old mainframe model with the OS and applications running on a shared server with the user sitting at a terminal device. There is only one OS and one installation of the applications to maintain. This technology has been around since the days of NT 3.5 and thus is pretty mature. Presentation Server (ZenApp) adds the ability to make an application running on the central server look like an application running on your normal PC. In other words, the application on the remote server appears in a window on your local PC. This middle ground offers central management of major applications like SAP. Network managers use Remote Desktop to remotely manage servers. I use it eliminate travel to client sites to fix most problems.

The next stage of desktop virtualization is a different way to share that big central box. Rather than many virtual desktops within one OS, this time many virtual machines run in a hypervisor on the big central box. The user views the desktop using a remote desktop technology like VNC (Virtual Network Computing) or Microsoft’s RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). Now each user gets his own, separate OS that he can reboot as needed – something that is not so easy when rebooting means closing down every user on the central box. The tricky part to this plan is to store and save each user’s personal settings while still centrally managing the application environment. Much newer, this technology is much less mature.

The third type of desktop virtualization is called client-side virtualization. One of the presenters talked briefly about this technology when he described a scenario where a bare-metal PC can boot to a copy of Windows that is passed down to the PC on an as-needed basis. What he didn’t mention is the possibility to put the virtual desktop on a USB key that the user can carry from PC to PC as they move about during their workday. Your personal computing environment becomes a sort of personality module that you can plug into any PC.

Version 5.9 - May, 2008

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:59:40 GMT

Network Neutrality is Still an Issue

It is truly a sorry state of affairs that network neutrality is still an issue. Back in 2005, the FCC issued some net neutrality rules that allowed carriers some exceptions for “reasonable network management”. In a recent Senate hearing, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin gave some guidance on what the agency considers appropriate broadband network management practices. He also told the assembled Senators that the FCC can enforce net neutrality without the help of Congress. Even while the FCC investigation of Comcast continues, he said that throttling specific applications like BitTorrent is not likely to be among acceptable management practices. You can read the eWeek article at tinyurl.com/6dxchx.

When Congress or any part of the government is involved, the devil is always in the details. These details begin with the very definition of "Network Neutrality" - who and what is neutral and to whom? Is this an issue with charging certain users extra, throttling BitTorrent, or applying a surcharge for selected content like video? And, of course the biggie, who decides? No matter what your opinion on the looming election (is it over yet?), our Congresspeople need to be reminded that net neutrality is an issue we care about. [See also the WikiPedia article on net neutrality.]

Security thru Obscurity

Before I jump into this, allow me to point out that this article comes from something called “Dark Reading”, a website under the TechWeb (techweb.com) umbrella which bills itself as “the industry's most comprehensive security site for IT pros”. The articles include all sides of computer and network security. There are even some videos for a change of pace, but this article caught my eye. “Proprietary Security Through Obscurity” is a short article about pacemakers – yes, those things that keep some people’s heart beating properly. This started in a New York Times report about an article on an obscure website about how a heart device was found to be vulnerable to hacker attacks. It seems that a team of researchers was able to reverse engineer the wireless interface for a combination pacemaker and defibrillator. Using this knowledge they were able to change the programming in the device to adjust it’s “pace”, shut it down, read patient data, and even to give a potentially lethal jolt.

Certainly patients (including Dick Cheney) with these devices are under no imminent threat; however, newer devices are being developed that can connect to the Internet to allow doctors to monitor a patient remotely. This could mean better, more frequent monitoring with fewer trips to the doctor’s office – a win-win, except for what should be obvious. Of course, we (you and me) understand the need for security on the Internet. In the type of statement we hear all too often, the manufacturer of the “hacked” device said, “To our knowledge there has not been a single reported incident of such an event in more than 30 years of device telemetry use, which includes millions of implants worldwide.” Obviously if they don’t know about it, it doesn’t exist.

One manufacturer said that it used “proprietary techniques” to protect the security of its implants – and here is where we get to what I call the “head in the sand” approach to security, or security thru obscurity. Back in the day, Ma Bell used obscurity to secure its long distance trunk lines from unauthorized use. John Draper, aka Captain Crunch, demonstrated that this is not a good approach with the 2600 Hertz tone produced by a whistle packed in breakfast cereal. His discovery led to a cottage industry making “blue boxes”, “red boxes” and devices of other colors to make free long distance calls. According to legend, Apple Computer may have been funded from such sales.

So which is better, proprietary security or security based on published protocols? The Open Source community argues that only when the source code is published for peer review can we be reasonably assured that any protocol works as advertised. The Internet protocols are the best example. Openness is especially required for encryption. Proprietary or “secret” encryption algorithms cannot be verified by the community of experts. How do you know that a proprietary encryption program doesn’t have a hidden key or back door that lets the author or manufacturer – or some other organization or government – read the encrypted data? For an in-depth look at this issue, I recommend the book “crypto” by Steven Levy (2001, Viking Penguin). See my review in January, 2002, DACS.doc (dacs.org/archive/0201/feature3.htm). Read the articles and see what you think.

Version 5.8 - April, 2008

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:21:35 GMT

A New Mainframe! Long Live the Mainframe!

It’s not often that IBM, the only company still making “mainframes”, announces a new one, but that is exactly what happened February 26^th. Predictably named the z10, the new machine is equal to nearly 1,500 x86 servers according to the IBM press release (http://tinyurl.com/3bw4lx). Someone who actually has those 1,500 x86 servers could realize significant energy savings of “up to 85%” – whatever that means. Of course IBM and virtualization have been synonymous for 40 years so maybe you could actually partition a z10 into 1500 virtual machines.

Vista at Bargain Basement Prices

Microsoft dropped the price of Windows Vista Home Premium from $159.95 to $129.29. So, will you upgrade now? Was the price really the reason holding you back? It wasn’t for me either. Instead, Vista has the reputation of a being a pig. (No offence intended to swine fans.) Jason Brooks of eWeek did some simple tests (you can’t call them benchmarks as that upsets Microsoft) comparing Vista with and without the new Vista SP1 service pack (http://tinyurl.com/ywy8fu) and comparing the results to XP, all on identical hardware. One of the features touted for SP1 is improved file handling performance. To test this, Jason copied a large block of files from one partition to another and zipped and unzipped the files using Windows Compressed Folders. From the article on the eWeek website:

During my tests, the 476MB set of test files took a minute to copy from one partition to another on the original Vista RTM; the same operation took 50 seconds on Vista SP1. On the same hardware running Windows XP SP2, the operation took 43 seconds. Copying the same set of files from one folder on a notebook to another folder on the same notebook took 49 seconds on Vista RTM, 43 seconds on Vista SP1 and 38 seconds on XP SP2.

Microsoft has cited much larger performance differences copying files into and extracting them out of ZIP archives using the Windows Compressed Folders tool, and my tests bore out these differences. It took Vista RTM 1 minute and 44 seconds to compress the test 476MB file set into a ZIP file, compared to 1 minute and 7 seconds on Vista SP1. With Windows XP SP2, the same operation took 1 minute.

I recorded the greatest disparities between Vista RTM, Vista SP1 and XP SP2 while measuring the time it took Windows to decompress my test archives. Vista RTM averaged 3 minutes and 39 seconds, Vista SP1 averaged 2 minutes and 49 seconds, and XP SP2 averaged a much lower 46 seconds to decompress the test files.

He goes on to say that the XP user interface may make it appear to be finished while some cashed I/O continues in the background. Unfortunately for Microsoft, perception is reality and that is what the user sees. Does this make you want to “upgrade” to Vista?

Personally I think there is another reason for Vista’s failure and that is the lack of apparent progress in hardware performance. New machines are just not that much faster. Years ago people realized that they really only need so much performance for the typical tasks like email and web surfing. As long as that’s all they do, their old machine is “just fine”. I’m a perfect example of this as I still use my old 800MHz P3 Winbook laptop for casual web and email. I bought the machine in 2001 just before XP shipped and it is still running the same copy of XP I first installed. I even moved that installation to a new hard drive when I ran out of space on the one that came in the machine. Yes, I tell people that three years is what they should expect from a PC, and after four years I bought the Acer Ferrari laptop that is my main computer today. But even after countless software installs and uninstalls, the Winbook still runs acceptably for the simple stuff nearly seven years later. Thru the 90’s we saw processor upgrades every year or so. Moving from a 486 to a Pentium produced a visible change in the way programs opened and ran. As we moved from a 386 running DOS and Windows 3.x to a 486 running Win9x and on to a P2/3 running Windows 2000, we used the available performance to run multiple programs so we could do more in less time. The hardware and software upgrades brought demonstrative benefits. Now it appears that any performance gains available in the hardware are being eaten by things we don’t want or need – like digital rights management and the Aero graphical interface. I guess I just don’t understand the benefits that a 3-D view of my very 2-D open windows brings to my computing experience. After one good “gee wiz” I’m content to return to Alt-tabbing thru the icons – just like we did in Windows 3.1!

And one more thing: I touched on it earlier – DRM and other under-the-covers “security” features. We know that these are “better” in Vista; but better for whom? Microsoft is dialing back one of the more onerous features of Windows activation in SP2. The Windows Genuine Advantage will no longer disable Vista installations but will return to the more thoughtful nagging used under XP.

Remember the Microsoft initiative called “Trusted Computing”? While it no longer has a name in the feature list, parts of it are in Vista and the people it trusts are the movie studios, not you. Known as PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path-Output Protection Management) and COPP (Certified Output Protection Protocol), these “features” enforce video digital rights management all the way from the PC hardware to the monitor connected to it. This is the PC version of the same feature in HDTV equipment. Now, isn’t that worth an upgrade?

Microsoft Patent Lets Your Computer Watch You

I saved the best for last. According The Times (that would be London, not New York), Microsoft has filed for a patent for software “capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.” (http://tinyurl.com/23t5m6) Are you happy, tired, blood pressure a little high? The new Microsoft technology goes way beyond counting keystrokes or even monitoring the number of emails or phone calls you make. This system could take all sorts of monitor inputs to determine if you are frustrated and then take appropriate action. One can only imagine what such action might entail! No, this is not science fiction. Read The Times article; you will either have a nice chuckle or get a cold chill and then read the really excellent blog where I found the reference at http://tinyurl.com/yqfksd. If you think your boss is watching you now…

Version 5.7 - March, 2008

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:02:58 GMT

Telephone companies get retroactive immunity or we all die?

Our Congresspeople never fail to amaze me. It looks like sufficient Congresspeople will cave into President Bush’s fear mongering and pass legislation giving the telephone companies retroactive immunity from lawsuits over their role in the warrantless wiretapping authorized by the Bush administration following the September 11^th attacks. The truly unfortunate situation is that these suits are the only wedge available to bring out the truth of the extent of the wiretap programs.

So let me see if I understand where we stand. If Congress does not include retroactive immunity in the FISA reauthorization bill, the President will veto the bill that presently allows him to do whatever it is that he is doing now. So he’d stop doing whatever that is, right? Sure he will! So our President is telling us that he is willing to risk all of our lives in another terrorist attack rather than have the telephone companies tell us about the secret spy programs he has been running to protect us from those terrorists. Do I have that right? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) is one of the co-lead counsels in many suits against the telephone carriers. EFF is also busy defending your right to use the digital entertainment you purchase where and how you wish. They deserve your support.

In case you haven’t noticed, this is a political year. I will try to limit my incursions into politics until we get into the actual campaign – you know, the one that didn’t start fourteen months ago.

Try a new Web 2 application

Remember the Zoho applications I demonstrated at the January general meeting? I used Zoho Show (http://show.zoho.com/public/jscheef/WhatsHot) and Zoho Wiki (http://littlegreenlaptop.wiki.zoho.com/) to make a short presentation on the XO Laptop – a two for the price of one super productivity effort, if I do say so myself!

Now you get to try something right along side me – Zoho Notebook. This is a web-based version of Microsoft OneNote. If you have tried OneNote, you know that it is a fabulous way to take notes and accumulate research material from the web. I intend to see if Zoho Notebook can be as useful and you can to. So far I know only what I read in a quick review. Try it at http://notebook.zoho.com/.

Palm Treo users rejoice

A news item caught my eye and I pass it along. I prefer cell phones that are primarily phones but I know many of you like your smartphones. Apparently many people who purchased the Palm Treo 600 and 650 Smartphone had trouble. In fact there was so much trouble that there have been several class action lawsuits against Palm, Inc. One of these has been settled. From treocentral.com: “The Palza Action alleges that the Treo 600 and Treo 650's had many defects, including poor sound quality, buzzing, choppiness, speakerphone problems, defective screens, camera problems, MP3 player problems, defective headset jack, SIM card problems, freezes, crashes, and electrical surges. Also alleged is that Palm replaced defective units with refurbished phones that were subject to identical problems.” This settlement covers six actions against Palm. I had no idea so many people could be so unhappy!

Nevertheless, if you are one of these unhappy people, Palm, Inc. will send you a rebate! See www.palzasettlement.com to see if you qualify as sufficiently unhappy to be a part of all this.

Is Wi-Max the next big thing?

Have you heard of Wi-Max? (See Wi-Max Forum, Wi-Max.com, WikiPedia) The technical name is IEEE 802.16. To get your bearings on this, Wi-Fi is 802.11. The simple description is Wi-Fi on steroids and HGH. Wi-Max is a service you buy from a provider and currently has two flavors under discussion- fixed and mobile. With a potential range of 30 miles and speed up to 70Mbps (equivalent to wired Ethernet), Wi-Max could be an alternative to buying your Internet access from the cable or phone company. I say ‘could’ because almost no one is even talking about deploying Wi-Max in the US. In parts of Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and the Far East, Wi-Max is already making a difference. In remote areas, Wi-Max can substitute for both data and voice telephone infrastructure. This, of course, is why our telephone carriers consider it such a threat. I was all set to invest in Wi-Max equipment makers before the latest stock market slip. Intel has been pushing Wi-Max for some time and now Motorola is jumping on the bandwagon. Check Wikipedia for basic information and eWeek and other sources for current events. The barriers to entry (spectrum costs and infrastructure investment) in this country will likely prevent Wi-Max from ever becoming real competition to existing Internet access technology (DSL, cable, 3G cellular), but in parts of the world without such incumbent technologies, Wi-Max could be a real winner.

The growing tangle of wires behind your TV

Remember when all you needed to connect your TV was to plug in the power and attach an antenna. In the flat terrain of the Midwest where I grew up, many people used the “rabbit ears” antenna that was built into many televisions. Now you need a degree in Component Connection Technology (an area of advanced study I just created) to buy and set up even a basic high definition “home theater”. The New York Times Circuits section on Thursday, February 7th is a case in point. One of the feature articles is about cables - actually just one type of cable, the HDMI or high-definition multimedia interface. And this article is listed under “Basics”!

The June general meeting is listed as “HDTV/DVD/Home Theater” and your board of directors is working hard to ensure that this program has real answers to real questions. Reading the NY Times article (http://tinyurl.com/3x2k7r) is required reading for video neophytes like me before the June meeting. The board has even prepared a set of questions for the speaker to address and included is the complexity of connecting the various parts of your “home theater”. One of my questions is what are the advantages and disadvantages of the various types of cables? For example, if I want to buy a high-definition DVD player (now that the format war is over) what cables are needed to play movies at HD resolution? The NY Times article touches on this question:

“The cost of a single additional HDMI connection can be significant,” said Dan McCarron, a display product manager for JVC. Mr. McCarron said that unlike other types of connections, HDMI required a special set of microchips to enable its built-in copy protection. “In addition, there’s an HDMI licensing fee that’s paid on a per input basis,” he said.

Note that HDMI includes “built-in copy protection”. What does this mean for different types of source video? Ok, the movie studios will prevent you from diverting a video stream from a movie to an unprotected device like a computer where you might make a copy. My understanding is that the DVD player will automatically downgrade the video stream to analog TV “standard resolution” if the target device does not provide the same level of copy protection. Ok, so what if the video source is a HD camcorder? Will the video of my granddaughter’s birthday party also be downgraded if I want to edit it before I burn it to a DVD?

HD TV is no longer a simple matter of technology, the legal issues are as tangled as the cables behind the set and more difficult to understand than programming a universal remote control. This is why your digital rights need protecting. Remember the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Check out their website at EFF.org.

Version 5.6 - February, 2008

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:53:09 GMT

More on the One Laptop Per Child

Those of you who attended the January general meeting had the opportunity to see, touch and even play with an XO-1 laptop. John Lansdale and I passed our machines around the room. The politics and intrigue aside, several hundred thousand little green laptops are already on their way children in third world countries. I have had little time to actually work with it. At our board meeting, John was showing me features he had found or are documented on the Wiki. The actual user documentation is a work in progress using a Wiki (wiki.laptop.org/go/Home) like Wikipedia where actual users can add details.

Net Neutrality

If you don’t think that net neutrality is important or that it could affect you, then read this: The FCC is investigating Comcast for blocking customer access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent and Gnutella, as well as business applications such as Lotus Notes. Is Comcast your Internet service provider? What ports might they block next? See the eWeek article here. If Comcast had their own music service, would they block iTunes?

Voting Machines Déjà Vu

Remember all my rants about voting machines four years ago and then again two years ago? Well their baaack!!!! Here in Connecticut we have as high a likelihood of having our votes count as anywhere. After some false starts our voting laws require all towns to use a voting method that provides a voter-verified paper trail and that electronic counting be audited in at least 10% of all precincts. My only concern with this method is that the ballots are stacked neatly in the bin below the scanning machine. The ballots could later be compared to the voter check-in lists to determine how individuals voted. In a busy voting place with multiple check-in lines, this is a small concern. In a very slow precinct, or a town election with low voter turnout, this could be a serious concern. I have yet to hear of a perfect system.

Electronic voting machines were used in the last general election and many of the worst fears were realized. As a result California, Florida and Colorado have decertified all or part of their touch-screen voting machines. You can learn why by reading the article in the New Your Times Magazine section from January 6, 2008. The next day, he NY Times carried an op-ed piece about an intriguing system that allows individual voters to audit election results.

Sorry this is so short but I’m in northern Vermont at Craftsbury Ski Center, a really great touring center. This year they installed Wi-Fi to allow shared access to a satellite Internet connection. It’s working well enough for me to file this column! One last note: I’ve started to include tiny URL’s in the print version of this column. They are created by a service at (can you guess?) tinyurl.com. The service takes one of those typical long URLs and crunches it into something short enough that you have some hope of typing it correctly. Also this column will be available on the CircuitWriter blog (you're here) where your comments are welcomed.

Version 5.5 - January, 2008

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:04:34 GMT

The name of my column changes slightly this month. The reason for the change will become apparent at the end. [Blog note: Since you are reading this here, one way or another, you found my new blog. Add a comment or just let me know by email. Thanks!]

A Taste of Armageddon

In Star Trek episode 23, two planets wage war by computer. Each planet plans their attacks and countermeasures in a computer (a large box with blinking lites, of course). The computers then determine an outcome using what we now call a simulation. When the results of an attack are determined, the “casualties” – anyone in a region “destroyed” in the simulation – voluntarily go to a center of some sort where they are executed. Since we have yet to make any (known) interstellar enemies, for now, we need only worry about cyber warfare with other countries here on Earth. Do you think this is rather far fetched? I have a hard time imagining that people would voluntarily agree to be executed, and so did Captain Kirk.

Gen. James Cartwright, of the U.S. Strategic Command, is quoted in an eWeek article that China is already actively engaging in cyber-reconnaissance through the probing of the computer networks of U.S. government agencies and private companies. "I think that we should start to consider that regret factors associated with a cyber-attack could, in fact, be in the magnitude of a weapon of mass destruction," Cartwright told the U.S.-China Economic Review Commission, referring to the psychological effects that would be generated by the sense of disruption and chaos caused by a cyber-attack. The commission submitted its report to Congress in November.

The same article quotes James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies that cyber-attacks are more likely to strengthen the resolve of the targeted population than to cause real damage. "The effect is usually to solidify resistance, to encourage people to continue the fight, and if you haven't actually badly damaged their abilities to continue to fight, all you've done is annoy them, and what many of us call cyber-attacks [are] not weapons of mass destruction but weapons of mass annoyance," Lewis said.

I think they are both right. A denial of service or other attack of such a scale that it affected the use of the Internet for government or financial functions would be very serious world-wide if it lasted long enough. Gen. Cartwright says that such an attack would be part of an armed conflict, so one must also weigh the likelihood of an armed conflict with our largest trading partner, but this does point out that the Internet is vulnerable to large scale attack and both our friends and our enemies know this. Last month I mentioned the coming change to IPv6. IPv6 includes several security features baked in right from the get-go. It also opens up some new security concerns as peer-to-peer (P2P) is also inherent to IPv6. Whether our national government’s switch to IPv6 is altruistic or to drive profits at Cisco and Microsoft is open to discussion. Whether you are a Star Trek fan or not, Internet security should be a national priority (via standards organizations, not legislation) and IPv6 is coming so be prepared to replace your router within the next two years. Tell the home router manufacturers that you will not buy their products until they support IPv6. [In the interest of full disclosure, I own stock in both Cisco and Microsoft, so I love the prospect of a new Internet equipment and software boom as we transition to IPv6.]

‘Tis the Season of Lists

If you take a moment to think about it, you know that I’m writing this in early December. I haven’t even made my Christmas list, let alone done any shopping. [I hate shopping.] But every year, I have a list – predictions, good stuff, bad stuff. So here is this year’s list of random thoughts:

Windows Vista may surpass the Microsoft Bob user interface as Microsoft’s biggest failure.
Someday technology writers and cell phone reviewers will understand that the quality of the call is a most important attribute in a cell phone – not the megapixels in the camera.
In the “there is no free lunch” department, “free” citywide Wi-Fi is fading fast from the news and future reality. First it was never free, and then someone figured out that citywide means big! Hotspot is more like it. When it gets warm again, try sitting with your laptop outside the Danbury Public Library.
Will the government mandated Real-ID = RFID? The sort-of aborted New York driver’s license plan will use RFID. The only part aborted was the plan to allow undocumented immigrants to have a document. Will the libertarians in New Hampshire be willing to carry RFIDs in their wallets? Time will tell. As NY Gov. Elliot Spitzer will tell you, there are more issues to this that meet the iris scan of your eye.
New acronym – PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair).
Most of my objections to desktop Linux have been eliminated. Soon it will be as easy to use as Windows. The major applications are already available. All that’s needed is someone to explain this to the masses.

Blogging for DACS

The content in DACS.doc is not as easily available on the DACS web site as I would like it to be. Right now if you want to read an article from a past issue of DACS.doc, it can be pretty hard to find. If you know exactly what issue had the article, you can see it with just a few clicks. However if all you know is the author or subject, you could have a hard time. Yahoo and Google often return a tangled mess of items as the search engines pluck words from the pages of the website plus the PDF files. There must be a better way. I would like to see easy to use indexes into our newsletter content.

Beyond just finding the articles, wouldn’t it be nice if there were an easy way for you to comment on an article? As more of our content as become commentary, a two-way discussion becomes even more appropriate. I think I’m describing a blog.

To test this concept, I’ve placed this column plus the last 12 in a blog at http://circuitwriter.spaces.live.com. Yes, this is Microsoft’s sort of reaction to FaceBook. I tried Yahoo 360, but it’s quite obvious that Yahoo is loosing interest in 360. “Spaces” is part of Microsoft’s newly expanded Live.com, so the site may have some staying power. This location may prove to be a temporary if we decide to consolidate on a DACS blog site, so stay flexible as we work this out. For now you can find and comment on my columns all in one place. Over time I’ll add categories and tags to make the content easier to find. The column name change was needed because someone already has “Circuit Rider” in Spaces. Hey, I can adapt.

Version 5.4 - December, 2007

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 21:02:34 GMT

One Laptop Per Child – Get yours now!

You have a unique opportunity right now to make a difference and at the same time acquire a groundbreaking piece of technology. What began as the “$100 Laptop” is now called the XO Laptop and costs $200. Manufacturing economies of scale is expected to bring the cost back down to the original target, but even at twice the original goal, this is an amazing piece of technology. Will it replace your current notebook? Of course not. It was never intended for the mass market in developed countries, but the XO does contain some interesting technology, none-the-less, particularly in the screen, power management, and the automatic wireless grid networking. [See David Pogue's review in NY Times Circuits.]

By the time you read this it may be too late. Between November 12^th and the 26^th, the OLTP Foundation is offering a “Give One Get One” (tinyurl.com/yseuyf) opportunity, but I’m going to write this as if the offer will be extended. This is the first, and possibly only, time the XO laptop is available to the general public. For $399 you get to send an XO to a child in a developing country and, at the same time, receive one for your own inner child. When mine arrives, I’ll bring it to the next general meeting. The donation part ($200) is tax deducible and as an extra inducement, T-Mobile is giving a one-year subscription to each “Give One Get One” donor/buyer. In theory the T-Mobile HotSpot subscription is worth nearly as much as the whole deal. I hope some of you will take advantage of this opportunity. If you have no interest in your own XO, then consider making a simple donation. This is a worthy project.

One reason I think OLTP has some chance of success is the reaction from Intel. The XO uses an AMD processor and with the potential for sales of hundreds of millions, Intel is finally taking notice. After snubbing the project in beginning, they have now joined the board. Intel has also designed a product called the Classmate PC, which they claim costs $200 to manufacture. From the one picture I’ve seen, this is a more traditional laptop.

Please consider buying one so mine will not the only one around. We really need three to get the networking running in a meaningful way. So please let me know if you buy one.

Server Virtualization

As the economy falters, there will be increasing pressure to use VM technology. This is bad news for Microsoft as they cannot use their monopoly to shut this down. Their only defense is to do VMs better than anyone else. Such competition, like we have not seen in the personal computer space for years, will benefit all of us. Server 2008 (Longhorn) is claimed to have built-in virtualization (believe it when it ships), but it will be another 6 months after the OS ships before this technology will be available. That may be too late for Microsoft. Microsoft’s traditional approach to anything new, the three E’s (embrace, extend, extinguish), will not work here as hypervisors will replace the OS in many cases. Eventually much of the hypervisor will be in the motherboard as BIOS extensions just as some of the virtualization is already in the processor silicon. Much of this is for servers only where video is irrelevant. Desktop virtualization is further off (I think).

The 30-year mark

While we may not have appreciated it at the time, 1977 was a seminal year for the computer industry. That year saw the introduction of the Radio Shack TRS80 Model 1, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II. My “other computer club” celebrated the anniversary of the Commodore PET by having the designer, Chuck Peddle, speak at our Vintage Computer Festival East event last summer. Almost unnoticed was the 30^th anniversary of Digital Equipment Corp’s PDP-11/780, the first VAX computer and its operating system, Virtual Memory System (tinyurl.com/2fp3wc), which you probably know as VMS. Did you know that Windows NT was designed by one of the same guys that designed VMS? As relations with IBM grew worse, Microsoft hired Dave Cutler from DEC. He became the program leader on NT. The first few iterations of NT bore a striking resemblance (internally) to VMS. Now in its sixth (depending on how you count) version, it is said that NT has lost much of its VMS-ness, but the security model of NTFS with the very granular access control list (ACL) for each file or object came right out of VMS as did many other features. Only the newest Linux filesystems offer the same control.

VMS became OpenVMS in the early 90’s when open standards first became so fashionable. It remains far more popular today than you would ever imagine – both as a vintage OS and among current commercial users. DEC’s crowning achievement for VMS was probably clustering. This allowed a group of VAX machines of varying sizes and configurations to work as if they were a single, much larger, system. This allowed a company to grow their computing power as needed without discarding older machines, which bred loyalty that has outlived Digital itself.

More than a few years back, a few of us were lucky enough to see and hear Ken Olsen speak at a special meeting. I believe we were still the WCMUG at the time. Even if he did screw up when he said no one needed his own computer, his concept of the “minicomputer” was the right one for the time.

Domestic Spying Immunity

Should our Congresspeople give the telephone companies a get out of jail free card on domestic spying? You know my opinion: Congress must hold their feet to the fire so we can learn the real story about all of the communications-based domestic spying. We certainly will not get the full story by asking the Whitehouse. Are we a country of laws or are some people and by extension entire branches of government above the law? What do you think? Let me know at jscheef@dacs.org.

Version 5.3 - November, 2007

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:47:22 GMT

This month’s column will be a long one – there is just too much good stuff.

Sputnik celebrates Golden Anniversary

This news was hard to miss as it was covered everywhere from the computer press, to The New York Times. Fox News might have even mentioned it. Most reports made the launching of Sputnik in 1957 the beginning of the “space age”. I was twelve and remember seeing it and trying to tune in the signal on my short wave radio. The real significance was how it affected our education system. An emphasis on science and engineering filtered all the way down to the junior high grades. It would sure be nice if we could get that same sense of urgency back in our priorities. Our schools could sure use the lift.

Computer Virus celebrates Silver Anniversary

In 1982, Rich Skrenta, a ninth-grader in Mt. Lebanon, PA, near Pittsburgh, decided to play a prank on his friends. The result was the first computer virus “Elk Cloner”. It replicated itself by copying its code into RAM during boot up and then writing itself to the boot sector of any other disk written while the computer was running – what became the classic operating procedure of a boot sector virus. All this was on the Apple II. According to the article I read in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, he still has that Apple II. The article also says the first virus for the PC, now called “Brain” came from two brothers in Pakistan. Like the Apple virus, the payload was a simple text message on the screen displaying the phone number for the brothers’ computer repair shop. The message from Elk Cloner was actually much cleverer, every fifty reboots it displayed a poem written by Skrenta. One line was, “It will get on all your disks; it will infiltrate your chips.” For something so eloquent, the term malware hardly seems to fit.

Microsoft as a protector of your health records

Does this make sense to you? Microsoft, our dear and benevolent friend, will host all of your medical records for free. You know, I can’t make this stuff up! According to an article in The New York Times (10/5/07), the system will be called HealthVault. Microsoft has some worthy partners in organizations like the American Heart Association, Johnson & Johnson LifeScan, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and MedStar Health, a network of seven hospitals in the Baltimore-Washington region.

Now before you completely dismiss this, the concept is good. Presently there is no central place to keep your medical records where they won’t get lost and you control who has access. I like the idea enough to give it a try. So far, with no records in my account, it’s hard to see how the access controls and security will work. Of course there is the concern of whether you really want Microsoft to manage all this.

One must keep everything in perspective as HealthVault is “beta”. My experience creating an account had some interesting moments. Naturally HealthVault uses Microsoft’s ‘Live Passport’ for authentication. So the first step to create a HealthVault account is to log on to your Microsoft Passport. Passport (aka: MSN Account Services) asked that I create a more secure password (8 characters was not enough) so I did. It then wanted me to add a secret question, which I did. In a John Patrick-esque moment, Passport told me that the name of my first pet was too short; it had to be 5 characters! No people, I really can’t make this stuff up. After choosing another question that required a longer answer, I was able to complete changing my password and was promptly take to… Windows Live. Close, but no cigar. So back to the original link, and this time, HealthVault accepted me (and my passwords) and allowed me to enter the actual HealthVault account creation screens. The Beta Version Privacy Statement is six pages, the Account Service Agreement is 4 ¼ pages. I printed both to read them later. So far, of course, I have nothing to enter into the site or have not found where I can actually enter more than my name and address. Obviously you will hear more about this over time.

Niagara 2

This past month Sun Microsystems (remember them?) shipped a new line of servers based on their new UltraSPARC T2 processor (code-named Niagara 2 – Niagara is a better name for a large steam locomotive than a computer chip). This may be the only RISC processor still shipping in a system larger than a cell phone. Yes, Intel still has the Itanium in their price list, but does anyone actually buy it? It seems like only yesterday when RISC processors were going to take over the world. It’s too bad that didn’t happen because our world would be a much more varied and interesting place. The first versions of Windows NT ran on the MIPS, Alpha, and Itanium processors in addition to the i386. I hope Sun succeeds, and not just because I own a few shares of their stock, but we need someone to keep Microsoft and Intel in their place and Sun may be our last hope.

Virtual machines, yes, but where?

I am now a virtual machine convert; in fact I may even be a VM junkie. Virtual machines are not just for servers. Want to try out some new software or even a new operating system without risking your existing setup? Maybe you just want to see how a website appears on an older browser, like I did. If you wax nostalgic for your own mainframe of yore, or would like to play your favorite arcade game again, you can do all of this and more using virtual machines. In my very limited and cursory examination of what is fast becoming a new industry, there are three major players for the market on PC hardware – Microsoft, VMWare and XenSource. However, this can change in a heartbeat. Every new operating system has virtualization built in, including the Solaris that runs on the new Sun UltraSPARC T2. Windows Server 2008 will have it built in or bundled. That was the strategy used against Netscape. There is even talk that the hypervisor – the program that manages the virtual machines running on one physical computer – will be built into the hardware, like the BIOS. This will be fun to watch. Naturally we’re using virtual machines in the DACS Resource Center where you can learn all about it in the Virtual Computing SIG. For my experimentation I’m using Microsoft Virtual PC. Its “free”, a price point Microsoft likes when competing in a new market against more established products.

Climbing rapidly on my list of things to do (as opposed to the list of things that actually need to be done) is SIMH, the Computer History Simulation Project. As the name implies, SIMH is actually a simulator that allows one to “run” a historic computer on one’s PC. SIMH will let you simulate (syntactical nuance different from emulate) many historic machines, such as an IBM 1401, or a MITS Altair 8800, or just about any DEC from the PDP-1 to a VAX. Another emulator is Hercules, an emulator that specializes in IBM mainframes from the 370 to the zSystem.

These emulators create virtual copies of hardware to give you the opportunity to do truly silly things. The Nokia N800 is a pocket size Linux-based wireless Internet appliance intended for web surfing and email while sitting in Starbucks. It has a high coolness quotient right out of the box. Some dude ported SIMH and Hercules to the N800 so it can pretend to be a VAX or an S/370. Just think you can IPL VM/CMS in your shirt pocket and the guy at the next table can log in using TN3270. Is this a great country or what?!

Banning mandatory RFID implants

Back to more serious concerns. Should an employer be allowed to require an RFID implant as a condition of employment? California has already had the good sense to ban such a requirement. As Dr. Paul Moskowitz, our general meeting speaker this past June pointed out, an imbedded RFID tag as a security device is hazardous to the wearer. When the bad guys want the tag, they must remove it with a knife. The California law should be Federal. I wish this was a joke, but it’s not.

Now we’re really getting scary

Picture this scene: you’re at Disney World and the kids want to ride all the fast rides while you want to check out the English Pub. Hours later how will you find the kids? What if you could get an accurate, continuous location of each kid, say on your cell phone? Would you feel more secure and allow them to go on the rides while you have a leisurely lunch in the pub? A technology originally developed for the military to track soldiers may be offered to parents in a few years to find their kids in an amusement park.

This potential product is called a Radar Response Tag by Gentag, Inc., the company trying to commercialize the technology. The tag can be located over a range of 12 miles with accuracy within 3 feet, according to Gentag. The ZDNet article goes on, “Because the military has been using the technology for years, much of the field testing is already accomplished. Gentag now hopes to fine-tune the consumer product and come out with credit-card-size devices that would exchange signals between each other. Ultimately, Gentag would like to cut deals with phone makers to incorporate the chips into cell phones.” Interesting. Put one of these tags in a drivers license (Real ID) and the scenario starts to get rather scary. Remember how “they” have been saying that the RFID tag in your passport can only be read within inches? Maybe not; and this has been in use by the military for years? Now combine this with the previous item about implants and think about it for a while.

Version 5.2 - October, 2007

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:33:31 GMT

Good News – Again, we’ll see

As I write this on Friday nite the day before deadline, I noticed a posting on Slashdot that SCO has filled for bankruptcy under chapter 11. The news is confirmed by a press release on the SCO website. From the press release: "We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their business critical operations," said Darl McBride, President and CEO, The SCO Group. "Chapter 11 reorganization provides the Company with an opportunity to protect its assets during this time while focusing on building our future plans." Does that mean they don’t want to pay their lawyers?

While this may be the beginning of the end to the SCO onslaught against Linux, open source is not out of the woods quite yet.

Sony Root Kits – Déjà vu all over again?

Nearly two years after the first Sony root kits were exposed, apparently Sony is at it again. This time it’s not music CDs, but certain “MicroVault” storage drives that use fingerprint authentication. Sony’s reaction this time is different as well, saying that the problem memory sticks have been discontinued and “No customers have reported problems to date” and they are “taking the issue very seriously.” From the New York Times, 9/1/7.

Microsoft Open Source – Wha!?

Yes, you heard right, there is such a thing. CodePlex.com, hosted by Microsoft, is the website home to many interesting projects. Of the 2271 projects currently on the site, most are aimed at software developers, but I found a few of more general interest:

Windows Product Key Finder – find that magic set of codes you need to reinstall Windows XP or Vista.
FlickrSync – a tool to keep your Flickr photo sets synchronized with the photos files on your local disk.
GetSysInternals – scripts and tools to simplify keeping your set of SysInternals tools and utilities up to date. (The SysInternals Tools are a bunch of incredibly useful utilities and tools for diagnosing problems in Windows.) Using this seems a bit obsessive to me, but you will always be up to date!
Computer ID – reads all sorts of information about your computer from the Windows Management Interface (the tool Microsoft uses to determine what is installed on your machine). This can save tearing your machine apart when you call for support.
Ruler – an on-screen pixel ruler. Ever want to know how big picture or graphic or piece of text is on your screen? Well now you can measure it. Run two instances if you need both horizontal and vertical rules.

There must be many more gems among the 2271 projects. If you are a developer, you will have an easier time finding cool stuff because most projects are aimed at SharePoint, SQL Server, .NET and other Microsoft development platforms.

Silverlight from Microsoft

Some people say this is the “Flash killer” from Microsoft, or maybe not. We’ll see. I’m really decisive on this one. The interesting thing is that the Redmond folk have provided run-time engines for both IE (6 and 7) and Firefox (1.5 and 2.0) on Windows, Safari on the Mac, and on Linux. Yes, Linux! The Linux version is (or will) result from Microsoft’s cross-licensing agreement with Novell and will run on “all Linux distributions” using the Mono (mono-project.com) runtime. Called “Moonlight” on Linux [oh, so clever!], this is the first visible support from Microsoft for the open source Mono project which implements the .NET runtime on non-Microsoft platforms. So far all I’ve seen is regular video running in IE6, and it looks just like Flash. Go figure.

As when the .Net development platform was released, Microsoft has provided free development tools (called a SDK or software development kit) for Silverlight. I hope to find time to try this in the next few weeks. If I do, you’ll be among the first to know. The fact that Silverlight runs in the .NET Framework means that developers will have a lot of flexibility to integrate Silverlight objects into other applications.

While many people speculate on the significance of the name, I think it is named for Brad Silverberg, a Microsoft Senior VP who argued in the mid-90’s for a more open, all operating system approach as opposed to the single platform, Windows-centric model. Guess which won?

Microsoft more and more

There is just too much to write about this month. Like today’s European Court of First Instance decision upholding the lower court and ordering Microsoft to pay the $600 million fine and continue to sell a version of Windows without Windows Media Player. The New York Times article in tomorrow’s paper (Tuesday, 9/18) will speculate that the ruling may “bode ill” for Apple, Intel and Qualcomm who are “also being scrutinized by the European Commission.” Back in 2001, Microsoft got off with barely a slap on the wrist after loosing the antitrust trial of the century but winning on appeal.

Quote of the month

From a Jon Udell (blog.jonudell.net) conversation with Bill Buxton about user interface design thinking, Bill Buxton makes the point that GUI design has changed little in 25 years, “If Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep in 1983 or 1982 having used the Xerox Star workstation and woke up today to a Vista workstation, he would be just as able to use a Vista workstation…” To put this in context, download to the entire podcast at http://tinyurl.com/3clm3y. Bill Buxton is a user interface design guru at Microsoft, but his career goes back to Xerox PARC, so he has some credentials.

Version 5.1 - September, 2007

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:32:34 GMT

Good News – I Think

Did you see the news item in last Saturday’s New York Times (August 11^th)? You had to look below the fold on the business section so you might have missed it. The SCO saga has taken a turn and possibly for the better, but I’m not quite convinced yet. The decision by Federal District Court Judge Dale A. Kimball says, in 102 pages, that Novell, not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of the UNIX copyrights. Basically this cuts SCO off at the knees. The ruling even stipulates that Novell can force SCO to drop its claims against IBM. The Times article goes on the say that this decision removes the cloud hanging over the Linux community based on SCO’s claims of copyright infringement.

Why am I not convinced that this is all wonderful and the battle is over? Because Microsoft is on both sides of this case. Remember how Microsoft helped “fund” SCO about two years ago when SCO was about the go under? And more recently there is the “interoperability agreement” between Novell and Microsoft from late last year. Is Microsoft playing both sides against the middle? Quite possibly. If Microsoft can find a way to hobble the Linux movement, they will. Linux is currently the biggest single threat to Windows and this case is but one poke at Linux. Also looming is the FUD about how Linux infringes on more than 200 Microsoft patents.

The only sure bet in all of this is that SCO will appeal and the fat lady has yet to sing in this courtroom battle.

New on my summer reading list is a 2001 book by Ken Auletta, World War 3.0, Microsoft and its Enemies. It chronicles the battle between the U.S. Department of Justice and Microsoft. Right now I’m only in the second chapter, but the author is good and the book is extremely well researched. I’ll have a review in a few months.

Version 5.0 - August, 2007

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:31:36 GMT

Linux on the Desktop

There are two reasons Linux has not been successful in the home or business desktop market. The first I have complained about for years and it’s finally getting better – there is no easy, automatic way to keep your Linux machine fully patched and up to date. If I’m wrong, please come to a Server and Networking SIG meeting prepared to show me such an update service.

The second reason is that most of the software we all know and love (to hate) is not available on Linux. Well, a resent news item made me think that might be changing. Last week Intuit released a new version of QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. The news item made it sound like there is a Linux version. When I dug into the Intuit web site, I found that this is a multi-user version of QuickBooks and the database part is now available to run on a Linux server. Big deal! The client part still requires Windows.

If you know of any mainstream software that offers versions for both Windows and Linux, please let me know. Someday I’d like to be wrong about this.

While on this topic, I noticed that version 2.2 of Open Office has been released. OO continues its broad platform support (Windows, Linux x86 and PowerPC, Solaris x86 and SPARC, Mac OS X and FreeBSD). The article did not mention whether OO runs on 64-bit x86 under Windows or Linux. With the new user interface, Microsoft Office 2007 is no longer the familiar product we all know and love. This might be the chance Open Office needs to make real inroads in the business market. Remember, user friendly is what you know and OO may be closer to “user friendly” that Office 2007. We’ll see.

The FCC is at it again

The FCC is trying to measure the degree to which Americans have access to “broadband” Internet in a timely and reasonable fashion as required by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. As you recall, that act was intended to open our telecommunications industry to the rigors of competition. Ten years later we are beginning to see competition in some areas, but what the bill was intended to produce (widely available, inexpensive, fast Internet access for all Americans) has not happened. So, the FCC does what it does best and issued “things” – a Request for Information and a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

The following is from an eWeek.com news story: In a statement, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said, “While we have made progress recently, as I have said before, there is more we can do,” and “For example, the Commission is committed to obtaining the best information possible about the deployment, access and affordability of broadband services nationwide.” Meanwhile FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, agreeing with Martin, asked, "Can we finally agree that something drastic needs to be done?" Noting that the United States is 15th in the world in broadband penetration, and said the road was littered with "commercial and regulatory missteps."

"We can start by facing up to our problem and doing our level best to diagnose its causes. We need to know why so many Americans do not have broadband, and why those who do, or think they do, are paying twice as much for connections one-twentieth as fast those enjoyed by customers in some other countries," Copps continued in his statement. "This is not just an exercise in self-flagellation, though we certainly deserve that by now. Rather, it is the first step in coming up with some solutions that can start to reverse our nation's slide into technological and communications mediocrity."

Copps also suggested that the FCC's data gathering left a lot to be desired. In his comments about the NPRM, Copps said, "For several years now, I have been greatly disappointed by the Commission's broadband data-gathering and presentation. As scholars, industry and the [GAO] Government Accountability Office have documented, our semi-annual statistical reports currently fail to measure even basic concepts such as the extent of broadband deployment across the country, including in rural and tribal areas, and the degree of competition among broadband providers and modalities," Copps said.

Furthermore, Copps said, "Our statistical methodology seems almost calculated to obscure just how far our country is falling behind many other industrialized nations in broadband availability, adoption, speed and price…. Indeed, the lack of reliable government data on the present state of our broadband market is a fundamental obstacle to developing a national strategy to reverse our inexcusable broadband performance. Until we know where we stand today, how can we possibly build the broadband future that our nation deserves? And if the FCC doesn't gather this data, who will?"

Ok, now, if you read between the lines, you might get the idea that these commissioners do not see eye to eye on a few issues. Can you guess who is the Republican and who is not? If the FCC commissioners can’t agree on whether they actually have the information they need, then we get what we get – slow and expensive communications products offered by local monopolies. Certainly it wasn’t the FCC who concluded that our Internet access ranks 15^th in the world!

FCC and the 2^nd Circuit

In other news regarding the FCC, a recent decision from the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals slapped the agency on the wrist for a “capricious and arbitrary” change in it’s rules (without any notice) regarding indecent speech on television when it fined the Fox network after Cher and Nicole Richie used the words f*** and s*** as casual expletives on live primetime broadcasts. I’m not sure who Nicole Richie is, and Cher is certainly everyone’s role model, and the program was on Fox, so why would anyone care? You can read the full story (and get a few chuckles at the irony) at http://tinyurl.com/25jf3e. The story includes links to the FCC statements as well as the decision from the 2^nd Circuit.

DACS Financial Health

Elsewhere in this issue you will read much about our club’s financial future. Your board of directors has discussed this issue for many months with every director involved and participating. I support the decision to raise the dues. As President Rob Limbaugh explains, it is necessary if DACS is to survive. I hope you will understand and continue to support the club with your membership.

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