Computers – Page 11 – Spinor Info

Dvorak on Windows 8

Jan 122013

The name of John C. Dvorak has been known in the personal computer industry for decades. Sure, he didn’t always get everything right (among his most famous missed predictions was predicting the failure of Apple’s Macintosh and the iPhone) but he is right more often than he is wrong.

This time around, Dvorak set his sights on Windows 8. He is demanding nothing less than a complete makeover of Microsoft’s new operating system: get rid of the touchscreen nonsense and give us back a decent, fully functional desktop operating system that is unhindered by the new touch UI that amounts to little more than a useless, misguided splash page.

I couldn’t agree more. However… I do not plan to hold my breath.

Why hackers have it easy

Computer Security No Responses »

Jan 122013

The SANS Institute is one of the preeminent firms in Internet security. I subscribe to their security-related mailing lists for all the obvious reasons, and I also receive their print course catalog on a regular basis.

I was flipping through the pages of the latest when I came across this gem (which should really belong among Jay Leno’s Headlines, assuming viewers of The Tonight Show could actually tell the difference between Unix and Windows):

winlin

Which leaves me wondering if SANS really can’t tell the difference between the two operating systems. (They probably can.) Or perhaps it’s the US Navy that cannot? (I doubt it.) Or perhaps the real problem, apart from careless proofreading, is that these security training courses have become rigid and mechanical, predictable even, which is precisely why hackers seem to have so little trouble penetrating even military networks?

Spam from Facebook friends

Computer Security, Internet No Responses »

Dec 112012

Thank you, Facebook. Now I am getting garbage that is apparently coming from some of my Facebook friends, all because (no doubt in your eagerness to please your corporate sponsors and push your sinking share price up a little) you happened to leave open a gaping security hole allowing spammers to “scrape” friend lists and e-mail addresses.

Worse yet, it is possible that the same spammers are sending garbage to others in my name. And while I may know not to click on an unsolicited link even if it appears to come from a good friend, colleague, or close relative, others may not be so cautious.

One of these days, I’ll find myself a spammer and slowly strangle him.

Not so funny Apple maps

Computers, Transportation No Responses »

Dec 112012

ios6maps I admit I, too, joined the happy chorus of Android phone owners ridiculing Apple’s decision to drop Google Maps in favor of a half-baked homegrown Apple solution in iOS6.

However, those bad maps are no joke. Apparently in Australia, several people found themselves in life-threatening situations when Apple’s mapping program guided them to a snake-infested desert instead of a tourist destination.

Windows 8 strikes again

Computers No Responses »

Dec 082012

Not only is Windows 8 a “weird” operating system (I am trying to avoid impolite language here) but it appears Microsoft is hell bent on breaking the “Windows 7 experience” for those of us who did not jump on their “tiles everywhere” bandwagon.

Today, I found out that in the name of Windows 8 support, Microsoft disabled some basic features in their update to the Remote Desktop Protocol on Windows 7. For starters, they disabled “Aero remoting”, so if you are accessing another Windows 7 computer, you will no longer see the transparency, etc. effects. But at least this “improvement” is documented.

Not so the other change: installing RDP 8 disables the “TSCLIENT share”, which is how Windows XP programs that run in Microsoft Virtual PC access files on the host computer. This is extremely annoying for people, myself included, who rely on Windows XP Mode to run older applications. Yes, there are workarounds (including the obvious one, which is to uninstall the RDP 8 update) but I still don’t understand why Microsoft messed up this feature in the first place. Let me just say that this is not the best way to make people like Windows 8 some more!

Artificial brain

Cybernetics No Responses »

Dec 022012

I am reading about this “artificial brain” story that has been in the news lately, about a Waterloo team that constructed a software model, Spaun, of a human-like brain with several million neurons.

Granted, several million is not the same as a hundred billion or so neurons that are in a real human brain, but what they have done still appears to be an impressive result.

I’ve spent a little bit of time trying to digest their papers and Web site. It appears that a core component of their effort is Nengo, a neural simulator. Now the idea of simulating neurons has been at the core of cybernetics for (at least) 60 years, but Nengo adds a new element: its ability to “solve” a neural network and determine the optimal connection weights for a given network to achieve its desired function.

The “brain”, then, is a particular Nengo simulation that is designed to model specific areas and functions of the human brain. Their simulation, equipped with a simple 28×28 pixel “eye” and a simulated “arm” with which to draw, can perform some simple activities such as reading and copying some digits and symbols, or memorizing a list.

I am still trying to make up my mind as to whether this result is just a gimmick like Grey Walter’s infamous cybernetic tortoise or a genuine leap forward, but I am leaning towards the latter. Unlike the tortoise, which just superficially mimicked some behavior, Spaun is a genuine attempt to create a machine that actually mimics the functioning of a human brain. Indeed, if this research is scalable, it may mark a milestone that would eventually lead to the ability to create electronic backups of ourselves. Now whether or not that is a Good Thing is debatable of course.

Why Windows 8

Computers, Programming No Responses »

Nov 192012

I am reading articles about the slow sales of Windows 8 and complaints about its user interface. All valid, I think. Indeed, there is an easy way to explain in two points why I would not recommend anyone to upgrade to Windows 8 on the desktop:

Value added by Windows 8 over Windows 7 for the typical desktop user: None. (To be sure, there are some minor improvements, including speedups. But they are more than offset by the incomprehensible removal of the Start button and the equally incomprehensible move away from the Aero interface, which is actually quite nice.)
Difficulties created by the schizophrenic nature of Windows 8 (“Modern” vs. “desktop”) and the cumbersome nature of a touch-oriented interface on a desktop computer: Lots.

In other words, you are paying a huge price (not the dollar cost of a Windows 8 license but price in the form of re-training yourself or your employees, and the inevitable productivity loss due to a very confusing schizophrenic interface) and you essentially get nothing in return.

Maybe Microsoft will fix all this with Windows 9. Maybe Ballmer has to go first.

Surveillance state

Computer Security, History, Politics No Responses »

Nov 152012

The sordid saga around the resignation of Gen. Petraeus continues. It became such a tangled story, Gawker.com actually published a flowchart to make it easier to decipher.

Meanwhile, however, The Guardian raises some very troubling points:

In response to Ms. Kelley’s initial complaint about a vaguely offensive e-mail, the FBI devoted substantial resources and engaged in highly invasive surveillance for no reason other than to do a personal favor for a friend of an agent;
Without any evidence of an actual crime, and without a search warrant, they gained access to Ms. Broadwell’s e-mail account;
Again, without any evidence of any actual wrongdoing, they also got their hands on e-mails exchanged not only between Ms. Broadwell and Gen. Petraeus but also between her and Gen. Allen.

The Guardian comments about the “sweet justice” aspect of all of this: namely that America’s security surveillance system that is running amok is targeting the very people in charge of that system, such as the head of the CIA. However, I do not share their implied optimism; I don’t think the growth in surveillance will stop anytime soon. We are nowhere near close to anything like the McCarthy era’s pivotal “have you no sense of decency?” moment. For that, a lot more good people will have to be harmed a lot more gravely first.

Things from the cloud

Commerce, Computer Security, Food No Responses »

Oct 222012

Think of an essential part of your life. Now imagine relinquishing control over it to others, people you don’t know, people who may in fact be in different countries, providing a service on an industrial scale. Most of the time they do an admirable job; but when they make a mistake you and many others suffer, possibly with life-altering consequences.

No, I am not describing cloud computing. I could have, but I was actually thinking about manufactured foods. When you buy a bag of snacks at a supermarket, for instance. The materials used to manufacture that food come from all four corners of the world. Some are organic in origin, often waste products from the processing of hundreds of animals or tons of vegetables. Others are manufactured at chemical plants, e.g., from petroleum. And when the controls fail; when an unscrupulous manufacturer in China, for instance, introduces an unapproved substitute to boost the measured protein content of a manufactured ingredient, people or pets suffer, even die.

But what I am really struck by are these similarities between cloud computing and “eating from the cloud”: that for the sake of convenience and easy access we willingly relinquish control over something essential, and that we generally trust society to such an extent that we are not the least bit worried when a private e-mail with an intimate personal photograph travels halfway around the world before arriving in our Inbox (which itself may be physically located in another country, perhaps on another continent); or when we put bits of food in our mouths without the slightest worry about the origin of its ingredients produced in distant lands by people we will never get a chance to know.

Grace Hopper ca. 1960… but who are the others?

Computers, History, Society No Responses »

Oct 022012

For the past several minutes, I have been staring at a Smithsonian Institution photograph, showing a younger version of Grace Hopper at a UNIVAC console, presumably working on an early version of the COBOL compiler.

No, it’s not Grace Hopper that I was staring at, nor the vintage equipment, not even the prominent ~~ashtrays~~magnetic tape protection rings. It was the three gentlemen surrounding Admiral Hopper (okay, she wasn’t an admiral yet back then): remarkably, one of them is African-American while another is apparently of Asian descent. Such a picture would not be particularly unusual today, but more than 50 years ago? It’s astonishing. Pity the photo credits do not tell us who these gentlemen were whose talent and perseverance allowed them to overcome racist prejudice. Just as Grace Hopper herself overcame sexist prejudice and went on to become the oldest commissioned officer in the US Navy at the time of her final retirement, a few months shy of her 80th birthday.

New Slackware, new Joomla

Computers No Responses »

Sep 302012

Yikes! I am still getting used to Slackware 13.37 and all of a sudden, a new version, 14.0 is available! Same for Joomla… looks like Joomla 3.0 is out.

Neither updates are trivial. For Slackware 14.0, at the very least I must be mindful of properly updating the multilib packages to ensure that all 32-bit programs on my 64-bit server continue to run. As for Joomla, the update may be straightforward but will it break my customized templates? Perhaps I’ll stick to 2.5.x versions for now; they will remain supported until sometime in 2014, so I have plenty of time to test things. This is why I have test systems I guess…

Slackware, incidentally, is not only the oldest surviving Linux distribution still in active maintenance, but the second oldest of all distributions. It was a direct replacement of its predecessor, SLS, and I have been using Slackware ever since the demise of SLS. In other words, for about 18 years. In fact, I switched to Slackware not long before I established my domain name and first permanent Internet connection in 1994. My server back then? Why, an old 386SX desktop computer with 4 megabytes (yes, mega) of RAM and two MFM hard drives: one, a 70 MB drive, the other, a 40 MB one.

Mapping, Apple style

Computers, Transportation 1 Response »

Sep 212012

It is not nice to laugh at the misfortune of others, but I found the weird maps of the new Apple mapping app in iOS6 quite hilarious. Once I was done laughing at misplaced or missing landmarks, a flattened Eiffel tower, roller-coaster freeways, flattened and extruded cityscapes, I came across two of the best images yet.

One uses the new Internet meme, the unfortunate attempt of a Spanish lady to touch up a deteriorating fresco, to illustrate the point.

The other? Why, it’s just a photograph of a sign at a British railyway (?) station somewhere, informing hapless iOS6 customers about the availability of old-fashioned paper maps at the ticket office…

Alien technology

Computers, Science, Technology 2 Responses »

Sep 182012

The other day, I purchased a 32 GB USB stick for fifteen dollars. 32 GB? That is four DVDs. Some 50 or so CD-ROMs. Almost 500 times the hard disk space that I had in my first IBM compatible PC. More than 22,000 3.5″ floppy disks. More than 200,000 single density 5.25″ floppy disks that I used to use with my Commodore 64. More than half a million times the RAM of that Commodore 64. More than 30 million times the memory of a Sinclair ZX-80 from 1980. For less than one tenth the price, I might add, even before adjusting for inflation.

Some people, when they contemplate these numbers, conclude that such leaps could not have just happened; surely, there is alien technology involved. The government knows.

Then again… if we had access to alien supertechnology, don’t you think that the capacity of electric storage batteries would have advanced more than the pitiful factor of 5 or so that distinguishes a modern Li-ion battery from its 150-year old lead-acid cousin?

Samsung security breach

Computer Security, Internet No Responses »

Sep 072012

So recently, I got a nice new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S II.

When I set it up, I realized that Samsung chose to replace the built-in Google e-mail application with their own. This was a bit of a disappointment as the Samsung version seemed a tad less flexible and less configurable than the (also pedestrian) Google program, so I opted for the open-source K-9 Mail instead, which works very well indeed.

Today, I noticed that all of a sudden, my server is showing IMAP logins using my user ID from a strange IP address, occurring like clockwork, every five minutes. The IP address belongs to Samsung in Germany, Frankfurt to be precise. This was odd because my phone was actually connected to my home Wi-Fi, so there was no reason for it to go through a distant proxy server. Suspecting that something was afoul, I turned the phone off. The IMAP logins from the German IP address continued.

At this point, I immediately changed all relevant passwords. The login attempts (no longer successful) continued for a while, then stopped.

But what was this? A bit of research showed that the IP addresses are characteristic of Samsung’s “Social Hub” program. Apparently when I entered my login credentials using the Samsung version of the basic e-mail app, it passed on that information to Samsung’s Social Hub servers. So without my knowledge and my approval, my password to my personal account on my Linux server was sent to, and stored on, a server in a foreign country. (And no, I don’t want to hear that I actually gave my approval by clicking the Accept button on a 50-paragraph unreadable user agreement when I started using my phone. This kind of potential security breach must require up-front notification of the user and explicit approval.)

I have since kind of confirmed it by noting that Social Hub indeed shows my e-mail account as being registered, even though I deleted my login credentials days ago from the Samsung e-mail app proper. Worse yet, it seems impossible to delete this account from Social Hub; when I try, I just get a “Loading…” screen that stays on forever.

I still like this phone, but my opinion of Samsung just sank several notches all at once. A high technology company should be much more conscious of its users’ security needs and much more proactive in protecting them. Indeed it leaves me wondering if, perhaps, it might have been possible for a smart hacker to use social engineering and trick Samsung into revealing this information… which Samsung should never have obtained without my explicit permission in the first place.

IEEE Spectrum on the origins of DOS

Computers, History, Intellectual Property, Programming No Responses »

Aug 082012

I am reading with astonishment an article in IEEE Spectrum on the origins of DOS. The author, a self-proclaimed expert on software intellectual property analysis, describes his attempt at a forensic comparison of early versions of MS-DOS and CP/M, to prove or disprove once and for all the allegation that MS-DOS was a result of theft.

But I find the article poorly researched, and also a thinly veiled attempt to plug the author’s company and analysis tools. Childish comparisons of identifier names and code fragments… really? The issue was never verbatim copying but the extent to which QDOS (which is the operating system Microsoft purchased and renamed) was derived from CP/M. It is clear that it was heavily influenced by CP/M, just as CP/M was heavily influenced by its predecessors, including operating systems written for the PDP-11. Does this constitute infringement? I certainly do not believe so. Indeed, something very similar (albeit more formal) occurred a little later, when the first IBM-compatible “clones” hit the market, and companies like American Megatrends, Award and Phoenix created binary-compatible versions of the IBM PC BIOS using “clean room” reverse engineering.

Some online commenters went so far as to ascribe ulterior motives to the author and question his sincerity. I think that is uncalled for. However, I do believe that this article should not have been published in its present form. At the very least, the author should have been advised by competent editors to tone down the plugs; to do a little bit more research on the topic; and to shift the emphasis from meaningless code comparisons to an analysis of the functional similarities between the two operating systems, the possible origin of these similarities, and the question of whether or not they might constitute infringement (and the extent to which the law may have changed, if at all, in this regard between 1982 and 2012).

IMAP miseries

Computers, Internet, Programming 1 Response »

Aug 062012

Today, I spent an inordinate amount of time messing with IMAP.

IMAP is a protocol that allows e-mail clients to access e-mail stored on a server. Unlike the more popular POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3), IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) allows the messages to stay on the server, and allows clients to establish a folder structure on the server.

This makes it possible, in principle, to access the same mailboxes from multiple client devices like a desktop computer, a smartphone, or a tablet.

Don’t we already have this with any Webmail provider, such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or the new Outlook.com? Well, yes, but… with all these services, your mail actually physically resides on computers that do not belong to you. I’d be less concerned about this were it not for a case that happened just the other day, a hacker using social engineering to gain access to a journalist’s iCloud account and through that account, everything else (including the journalist’s phone, laptop, and other accounts.)

If Apple can fall victim to social engineering, so can Google or Microsoft. So for this reason alone, I prefer to keep my e-mail on servers that I physically own. But I still like the convenience of accessing my e-mail from anywhere without having to copy bulky mail files or worry about synchronizing them.

This is where IMAP comes in. Except that it turned out to be a much more difficult task than I anticipated.

The basic setup is easy… enable IMAP and go. But then… the University of Washington IMAP server that is included with Slackware Linux has some quirky settings (such as showing all my folders on the server, not just my mail folders) that can only be corrected by recompiling. It took a while before I realized this, and therefore I wasted a lot of time with bugs in the various Android IMAP clients I tried, bugs that just went away once I recompiled the IMAP server. Outlook (which I plan on continuing to use on my main desktop computer) has its own quirks, not the least of which is the insanely difficult nature of seemingly trivial tasks, such as relocating built-in folders like the junk e-mail folder.

In the end, I won. There are still some quirks to be worked out, but I can now access my e-mail from Outlook, the Web (with Squirrelmail) and from my Android phone and tablet just fine. Still, it was a much harder battle than it should have been. I honestly expected this technology to be more mature in the year 2012.

Has Microsoft gone berserk with Windows 8?

Computers, Programming No Responses »

Aug 062012

It looks like Microsoft is absolutely, positively determined to make it hard for long-time users of Windows to continue using their computers productively.

For instance, they actually went the extra mile to disable hacks that allowed Windows 8 to boot directly to the classic desktop and reinstated the Start menu.

What on Earth is going on in Redmond? What are you guys smoking?

Steve Ballmer’s lost decade

Computers, Internet, Programming No Responses »

Aug 022012

I just finished reading a very interesting Vanity Fair article about the decline of Microsoft. It paints a devastating picture leaving one to wonder why Microsoft’s shareholders continue to tolerate Ballmer’s (mis)management.

I have been wondering the same thing for many years, for pretty much the same reasons mentioned in this article: the Vista fiasco, the squandering away of the IE lead, Windows CE and Windows Phone, the Zune misstep, and last but not least, the disaster that is yet to happen, which is called Windows 8.

Think about it: how often did you type “google.com” into a browser lately? How about “facebook.com”? Or “twitter.com”? Or “amazon.com”?

And how many times did you type “microsoft.com”?

And I actually happen to like Microsoft.

The Comments section is also interesting, but mainly because of the bias and misinformation. My all time favorite: the story about how Word became the dominant office product because of “secret APIs”. Perhaps there were secret APIs, perhaps there weren’t. But none of that had anything to do with the then market leader, WordPerfect, jumping on the Windows bandwagon several years late, and with a crappy product that crashed even more often than Microsoft Word for Windows 1.0. And by that time, Microsoft was up to version 4.x and frequent crashes were no longer considered acceptable.

WordPress problem solved…

Computers, Internet No Responses »

Jul 122012

A while back, I ran into a problem with WordPress, the blogging software that I use. I was unable remove posts from categories. In particular, blog posts that were not explicitly added to any category were automatically added to the “Uncategorized” category; it was impossible to remove them afterwards even as I added categories to the post. Unchecking a category made no difference.

Now I know why. For some reason, the WordPress account on my MySQL server lost table lock and (more importantly) delete privileges.

USE mysql;
UPDATE db SET Delete_priv='Y' WHERE User='wordpress' AND Delete_priv='N';
UPDATE db SET Lock_tables_priv='Y' WHERE User='wordpress' AND Lock_tables_priv='N';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

I really like it when I am able to resolve a long-standing problem with such little hassle. I just hope that this privileges issue did not corrupt the database in other ways, causing grief later on.

Hijacking a drone

Aviation, Computer Security, Technology No Responses »

Jun 302012

Last year, many people debated whether or not the Iranians had the wherewithal to hijack that US military drone which they were so proudly displaying afterwards.

Well, wonder no more. Apparently a team from the University of Texas at Austin showed how it can be done using equipment that cost no more than a thousand bucks.

OK, you say, but this drone was using the non-encrypted civilian GPS signal. True… except that if you simply jam the encrypted signal, many military drones fall back (or at least, used to fall back) to using the civilian signal. (As designed, the encryption was primarily about preventing an adversary from using the high accuracy military GPS signal, not about preventing spoofing.)

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