Yesterday evening I was chatting with a few people from ST Micro's research and development team working on security. When I asked what they do in particular, an example they gave was authenticating print cartridges. I tried to imagine the security problems around print cartridges but failing to do so asked what they were trying to protect. They explained that this isn't their business: they just implement a mechanism; how it is used is, in this case, HP's business. What HP wanted to do is detect clones (i.e., compatible cartridges). The reason they wanted to do that is not to prevent competitors from producing compatible cartridges, they reassured me, as that would be illegal. The reason they wanted to do that is that if they detect a competitor's cartridge, they can, for instance, use more ink when printing. Classic.
Posted Fri Apr 25 04:09:04 2008I've recently changed the way that I send mail using Wanderlust. I now connect to a remote SMTP server, which requires that I authenticate myself. Although Wanderlust supports this mode of operation, it prompts for the SMTP server's password. This is a pain as the password was never meant to be entered by a human, but saved into a file and quickly forgotten (easily done using, e.g., Exim). After reading code for a while, I finally found the secret: running elmo-passwd-alist-save will save all of your Wanderlust passwords to ~/.elmo/passwd. When Wanderlust first needs a password, it calls elmo-passwd-alist-load, which loads this file.
Posted Thu Apr 24 09:30:41 2008I recently started using VoIP. My first experience was with Ekiga using a cheap handset, which I bought at Conrad for 20 Euros. I choose DiamondCard.us as my VoIP gateway, it happened to be directly supported by Ekiga.
The quality of the calls made using the VoIP gateway was lower than that which I was used to over a normal telephone line, however, it was acceptable. The reason for the quality degradation was difficult to diagnose given the large number of variables (handset, connection, provider) so I did not investigate very much.
Isabel then changed telephone and Internet providers--from T-Com to Alice. Although Alice is cheaper, the real deciding factor was the lack of a contract: it is possible to cancel the connection with 4 weeks of notice; to get a good deal with T-Com, you have to sign a 24 month contract.
One of the disadvantages of the Alice is that it is no longer possible to use the cheap prefixes (e.g., those at http://www.billiger-telefonieren.de/). Since I call the US a fair amount, it was pretty important to find some solution. We decided to invest in a Linksys SPA-3102, which allows the transparent use of VoIP over a normal telephone handset in conjunction with a traditional POTS connection.
The Linksys come recommended, but with the caveat that it was hard to set up. The solution that I ended up using was to route all calls over the VoIP gateway: in our case, this turns out to be cheaper for every type of call. I do not want to say that this was trivial to set up, however, it was really quite easy. Developing even a simple dial plan (to route calls or rewrite numbers), however, looks like quite a project.
The quality is really excellent and I conclude that my initial poor experiences were due to the cheap handset. I can highly recommend a similar set up.
Posted Tue Mar 25 14:07:06 2008I'm sitting at my desk as I do every day when I work from home. My desk looks onto our terrace. We have a bird feeder, which tends to attract birds throughout the sunny hours. We also have a couple of squirrels, who seem to be pretty good at doing what squirrels do, namely, squirreling. They are amusing and provide a nice background.
This morning as I was working, a flash of green caught my attention. The birds around here are mostly brown. So, this sudden patch of unexpected bright green in the background surprised me. When I focused on the object in question, I was even more surprised: it appears to have been some sort of tropical bird.
I enjoyed the viewed--it just sat on a bush. After a few moments, I decided to get the camera. Unfortunately, the prime was on, which precludes optical zooming. I took a few photos with that lens before the bird few away. In case it decided to come back, I change the lens. And, it came back. With a friend.
They were quite playful and stayed in the area for a good quarter of an hour before flying away. Given that it is freezing here during the day, I'm a bit concerned that may die. Birds are not the sort of pets that return home in the evening, are they?
Posted Fri Nov 16 11:06:06 2007I was reading the comScore report linked to by Slashdot regarding who paid for Radiohead's new album. The most interesting aspect of the report for me had nothing to do with the statistics or the interpretation of the data, but the origin of the data:
The results of the study are based on data obtained from comScore's worldwide database of 2 million people who have provided comScore with explicit permission to monitor their online behavior.
2 million people gave explicit permission to a company to spy on their on-line behavior in such an invasive way? I find it hard to believe.
Posted Tue Nov 6 16:23:29 2007A conflict over the contract for 30,000 train drivers and conductors represented by the GDL union working for the German rail has led to multiple days of strikes over the last weeks. The Spiegel reports that the former currently net between 1970 und 2142 euros per month and want an increase to 2500 euros; and, the latter net between 1775 und 1884 euros per month and want an increase to 2180 euros. Moreover, they note, since the 1994 privatization of the Bahn, the workers have effectively lost 10%. This is due to inflation as well as longer working hours with no additional pay.
MDR (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk) provides a concise summary that clarifies and puts in perspective the demands of the workers and the costs to the Bahn:
Das Durchschnittsgehalt der Lokführer bei der Deutschen Bahn beläuft sich dabei gegenwärtig auf 1.500 Euro netto. Zudem gibt es keine Staffelung der Gehälter. Im Prinzip geht der Lokführer also mit dem Einstiegsgehalt in Rente.
A train driver employed by the German Bahn currently nets, on average, 1500 euros per month. Further, the pay does not increase with age and experience. That means that train drivers of retiring age earn the same as those who are just starting.
Nach Berechnungen der Gewerkschaft kommen bei einer Lohnerhöhung von 31 Prozent auf die Bahn Mehrkosten von etwa 22 Millionen Euro zu. Zum Vergleich: Die Gehaltserhöhung des Bahnvorstandes im Jahr 2006 betrug immerhin 60 Prozent und schlug mit satten acht Millionen Euro zu Buche.
According to the union, a pay increase of 31% would mean an additional cost to the Bahn of 22 Million Euros. To compare, in 2006, the board of directors received a 60% pay increase amounting to 8 Million euros.
Seit der Privatisierung 1994 hätten sie einen Reallohnverlust von 9,5 Prozent erlitten.
Since the 1994 privatization, the workers have an effective loss of 9.5 percent.
The 60% raise to the board of directors was only in 2006, however; Focus reports that between 1999 and 2005, the 8 directors saw a 300% increase in pay going from a combined pay of 3.6 Million Euros in 1999 to 14.7 Million Euros at the end of 2005. The added 60% from 2006 brings that total to 20 Million euros for an average salary of 2.5 Million Euros.
But even with these increases to the directors' pay, the Bahn is hardly struggling. In 2006, the Bahn posted earnings of 1.68 Billion EURs.
Posted Sun Oct 21 13:08:48 2007Im vergangenen Jahr hatte die Bahn unter dem Strich einen Rekordgewinn von 1,68 Milliarden Euro verbucht.
Aldi-Süd is selling a Strommessgerät (electricity monitor) this week. This is something that I have wanted for a while and for 9.90EUR, we invested.
When on and otherwise idle, my ThinkPad X40 consumes 25 Watts. Turning the LCD off, it uses just 18 Watts. Our DSL modem from Deutsche-Telekom requires 15 Watts. That is, it is using approximately as much power as the laptop when the screen is off.
The most interesting results are how much electricity devices use when they are connected but turned-off. My ThinkPad power-brick without the laptop connected uses 6 Watts. The 19" LCD uses 6-9 Watts. The biggest offender was our printer: when an HP OfficeJet 6510 is plugged in but off, it consumes 11 Watts. This is the same amount that it uses when it is on and idle.
Posted Mon Oct 15 15:06:48 2007In his September 20th column, Dan Savage provids a concise explanation for why "Bible thumpers" and other conservatives are often sexually intolerant: they shift the focus away from their own "improprieties."
Posted Fri Oct 5 11:38:11 2007Your friend, like a lot of Bible thumpers, needs to feel morally superior to someone. And looking down his nose at you in your little-girl dresses and me in my big fag relationship allows him to feel morally superior at absolutely no cost to himself. He doesn't have to refrain from fucking hookers or cheating on his parade of spouses to get right with his make-believe God. He need only refrain from doing things he has no desire do to--sucking dick, dancing around dresses--in order to go to his wholly imaginary God's entirely fictitious heaven.
I recently bought a couple of new hard drives for a new RAID-1 setup. An important criteria was that the drives be quiet as the computer is not in a server room.
While researching different products, I noticed that the same manufacturer was offering what initially appeared to be the same drive at different price points. After a closer examination, it turned out that the difference was in the size of the on-board cache. Here is an example of two 500GB Western Digital drives currently being sold by Newegg:
- $104.99 - Western Digital Caviar SE WD5000AAJB 500GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive
- $109.99 - Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKB 500GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive
The former has 8MB of cache and the latter 16MB. The additional 8MB cache thus cost $5 or represent an approximate %5 increase in cost.
All major operating systems implement a disk cache to absorb the very high costs of reading from secondary storage. According to Newegg, a 1GB stick of Kingston DDR2 RAM (KVR667D2) costs $30. That is a cost of $30 / 1024 = $0.03 per MB. The hard drive cache costs $5 / 8 = $0.62 per megabyte. That is, it is 20 times more expensive.
Intuitively, this can't be worth the cost: the OS has (1) so much more RAM for the same cost, and (2) much more semantic information to use in determining the caching policy. According to "Disk Built-in Caches: Evaluation on System Performance" by Yingwu Zhu and Yiming Hu published in Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer Telecommunications Systems, 2003, more than 512kb of cache is not worth the additional cost.
Posted Fri Oct 5 08:24:01 2007On May 25, 2005, Nokia released a press release announcing the Nokia 770 and promising an open development platform and collaboration with the FLOSS community: "[t]he maemo development platform (www.maemo.org) will provide Open Source developers and innovation houses with the tools and opportunities to collaborate with Nokia on future devices and OS releases in the Internet Tablet category." On June 7, 2005, the Linux Journal interviewed Ari Jaaksi, the head of Nokia's open source software operations. He asserted that "[i]t is important that Linux for the 770 is not controlled by any company."
These remarks have proven deceiving: the Maemo platform appears open because it uses many FLOSS components and many FLOSS applications run on it, however, the 770 distribution contains a number of essential closed source components controlled exclusively by Nokia. This prevents a free platform from appearing for two reasons: first, the closed components are not easily replaced with free components; and second, it would cause a split in the community. I contend that the result is that it is more difficult for a free platform to appear for the 770 than it otherwise would be for a similar proprietary device.
Given market pressures, it is understandable that Nokia relicenses a number of closed source value added components that have no free counterparts, e.g., their support for Real Audio and Flash. Yet, this is not the extent of the proprietary software which comprises the platform. Jaaksi notes that they "keep some limited parts of the software that are very close to [their] hardware close (sic). Examples of such components are the boot loader and battery charging." Additionally, "[v]arious application user interfaces that provide the Nokia user experience are closed source." By retaining control of these components, Nokia provides a technical barrier to competing platforms.
Jaaksi provides the key to preventing similar power-grabs in the future:
It is important that certain components are licensed under an open source license, such as LGPL, that allows us to integrate also (sic) proprietary components on our platform.
Thus high level proprietary components can be integrated in a FLOSS-based stack. As long as the stack allows such proprietary components, it will be difficult to prevent such selfish behavior. If libraries that implement new interfaces were instead licenced under the terms of the GPL rather than the LGPL, proprietary vendors would not be able to gain value from the work of the FLOSS community without also contributing their enhancements back to the community. Stallman further explains when not to use the LGPL.
The disadvantages of proprietary software are, however, clear to Jaaksi:
We often requested bug fixes or modifications to the commercial closed components on our platform. If the vendors didn't have the capacity or will to fix the problem on time, we had few options. We could not fix problems ourselves because the companies using closed source didn't want us to access their source code.
Yet, the same critique has been systematically leveraged against Nokia: this past April, May, August here and here, September and October. But a stronger critique can be made as well: because Nokia, not the community, controls the distribution and has made it difficult to create a competing one, they do not have to listen to the community: their interests prevail and, as Murray Cumming has observed (local), community members have a difficult time getting even simple and correct patches integrated when these do not directly forward Nokia's interests. Nokia clearly understands this frustration and wishes to avoid it but they do not want to afford the same independence to those who use their product; they want to impose restrictions on their users which they do not want imposed on themselves.
Nokia's openness is hypocritical. It may, perhaps, be tolerated if their contributions prove, on the whole, to be an asset to the FLOSS community.
Nokia has contributed to the FLOSS community. They have hired developers to not only adapt mainstream components to their environment but to also improve them for the general community, e.g., Matchbox, D-BUS and Scratchbox.
As the device has been largely welcomed by the FLOSS community, unlike, e.g., the Zaurus, they have demonstrated a desire for such a platform. Given the rejection of the Zaurus, this may also suggest that Nokia has provided the leadership and resources required to realize such a platform which the community otherwise could not have. On the other hand, the 770 and n800 are significantly more affordable and more readily available than the Zaurus. Given that there are three non-general purpose platforms which the FLOSS community has developed which have exceeded their respective vendor's distribution, OpenWRT for Linksys' WRT54G, RockBox for a growing number of portable audio players and Slug for Linksys's NSLU2 network storage appliance, it seems plausible that Nokia simply developed the right hardware for the right price at the right time, i.e., they found a market niche.
If the platform is as open as Nokia claims and if it is correct that the community to develop a platform independently exists, then if Nokia abandons the device, it should be possible for the community to continue its maintenance as has happened for so many other devices. This litmus test has recently been started: Nokia announced the end of life for the 770 only a year and a half after its introduction. Yet the question has been asked: given the amount of proprietary dependencies how far will the community be able to continue developing the device? It is unlikely that we will find out, however, as Nokia has provided approximately 500 developers with n800 discount codes to ensure that the community adopts the new device.
Nokia should be thanked for their contributions to the FLOSS community, however, I contend that Nokia's half-openness presents a greater liability to the FLOSS community than a typical closed platform. Like the Sirens, the song of the 770 and n800 has allure: they support free software applications and their platform appears to be based on free software. Yet, they are not free software and the community has little influence over its development. Indeed, continuing development after abandonment appears problematic as Nokia does not support the four freedoms.
Nokia has put on a likeable mask, yet they wish to continue to play by the same rules that proprietary companies play by and retain control of their platform. If Nokia continues to ignore the desires of the community, sufficient momentum will eventually build and their platform will be abandoned and their influence made redundant. If Nokia wishes to remain a member of the FLOSS community in the long run, they should remake themselves as an authentic community member. In particular, they should release their proprietary software under a free software license and provide community members more control over the development of the platform.
Posted Mon Jan 29 12:44:22 2007