technology

Blowing up a bridge with 1000 cell phones? 8

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So how do you blow up a bridge with 1000 cell phones? You don’t. Police in Caro, MI arrested three Palestinian born men last week after they bought a whole bunch of Tracfone prepaid cell phones last week. When they were stopped they had about 1000 cell phones in the minivan they were riding in. Someone at the Wal-mart where they bought some of the phones called the police (Yet another reason never to shop at Wal-mart) after they bought several phones. The police and local prosecutor decided they were “soliciting and providing material support for terrorism” which is idiotic. These guys were buying the phones to make a quick buck. Prepaid cell phone providers are notorious for the way they gouge customers. They sell phones at dirt cheap prices with an initial allotment of minutes. The initial price is way below the price that a new phone costs buy itself. Tracfone sells phones for as little as $20. If you tried to buy the same $20 phone without a service contract it would cost you $100-$150. They also make the minutes expire after 30-60 days depending on how many you buy and Tracfone in particular sells air-time minutes at quite high prices.

The same situation applies for if you have a regular monthly contract rather than prepaid service. If you phone gets lost, stolen or broken before your contract is up you have to pay the full unsubsidized price for another one. That’s why when we upgrade phones in our family, I always keep one of our old phones around just in case. If one gets lost of broken out of warranty, I can just activate an old one. To try to prevent people from buying the cheap phones and then activating it on another service the providers lock the phone to their service in the phone software. In order to make it economically viable to provide phones to different providers and make them compatible with networks the manufacturers make the locks in the phone software not the hardware. One thing to remember is that any hardware that you can get physical access to can be hacked. So enterprising people have figured out how to unlock the phones so that they can be activated on any service provider. You can buy these $20 phones unlock them and sell them to people for $40-50. If you have 1000 phones thats $20,000 or very easy profit. The only evidence they apparently have against these guys is that they are of Middle Eastern descent, and they shopped at Wal-mart. These guys will probably be held without bail for months, and then convinced to plead guilty to some lesser charges even though they have probably done nothing illegal.

This is the security that the bush administration is providing. As I have said in previous posts I think that this is getting blown up for political purposes, and we will be seeing many more of these in the coming weeks and months leading up to the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and the mid-term elections in November. Karl Rove and his crew will be playing this up as much as they can. Don’t listen to them. As before this is all bullshit.

More wasted security money

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The US government has decreed that starting later this year all new passports issued shall be equipped with an RFID chip. The premise is that the information in the passport would be electronically stored on the RFID chip, thus making it more difficult to create bogus passports. There is some major flaws with this idea. An RFID chip can be read without actually making contact with it. That’s becasue the RF stands for radio frequency. Most of these chips are passive so they don’t require power, so they aren’t transmitting. But a reader with enough power can detect the data on the chip from a distance. So someone sitting in an airport with a reader could sniff the data from the passport of every traveler walking past them and they would never know it. This might not be such a problem if the data on the chips was at least encrypted. However, the standard for passport RFID chips doesn’t require encryption. That means everything stored on the chip is in plain text.

This week at the Black Hat computer security conference a German security consultant Lukas Grunwald, is demonstrating how an RFID passport can be cloned in a matter of minutes. He will show how an RFID passport can be read, the data extracted and copied to a new blank passport with relatively little effort or cost. The data can also be copied to a smart card like that used by many companies for security. So not only is the RFID passport not helpful it may actually be counter-productive to security. How much do you want to bet a friend of Shrub has a big investment in the RFID business? I would say it is a safe bet that friends of Bush will profit handsomely from this whole e-passport fiasco, while the taxpayers will pay handsomely.

Nuclear Power the solution to global warming? 2

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I think not! One of the problems with nuclear power plants, is that they require some type medium to cool the reactor and keep the nuclear reaction under control. On the majority of reactors they use water flowing around the reactor to manage the temperature. Unfortunately water can only absorb a limited amount of heat energy. The amount of heat that can be absorbed is a function of the temperature difference between the water and the item to be cooled. The higher temperature, the less heat it can absorb at a given flow rate. Now that the heat transfer lesson is complete, here comes the problem. Nuclear plants are typically constructed near bodies of water like rivers and lakes. They draw in cold water, pass it around the reactor and eject the hot water.

Nuclear power has been proposed as a way to produce power without creating green house gases. The problem this week as Europe bakes in a heat wave similar to what we are seeing here, is that the temperature of rivers has risen so much that nuclear plants sitting on their banks can’t be cooled enough to operate. So as the demand for power for air conditioning reaches a peak, many of the power plants are shutting down because they can’t cool down enough to operate safely. So what do you do now? We need to use less energy!!

Bittorrent test for the debate 6

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I am going to be recording and then posting audio and video of the Ypsilanti Mayoral debate tomorrow. In order maximize availability and conserve bandwidth (video is large especially when you are talking about a 90 minute debate) I’m going to make it available by as many channels as possible. This includes ourmedia.org, google and bittorrent. If you are not familiar with bittorrent it is a peer to peer file sharing technology that works extremely well for very large files. It is perfectly legal and ideally suited to distributing something like this. This will be my first attempt at hosting a torrent tracker. When you use bittorrent you download a small torrent file that points to a tracker site. It then gets the information about the file to download and starts getting pieces of the file. As more people download pieces they also share those pieces. The more people who are downloading and seeding a file the faster everyone can get it. I would like to request your help in testing my setup.

If you are already setup to use bittorrent then please download this torrent file for Azureus, a very good bittorrent client. The file is only 7.6 MB. If it downloads OK please let me know.

If you are not setup for bittorrent and you are running windows, and you want to get the debate this way, please download this setup file for Azureus, install it and then download the torrent file and test the setup. If you are not running windows you can find Mac and Linux versions of Azureus here

Please let me know if this works or if you have any problems. Once I post the video and audio files I’ll put the links here. thanks

Open source and free software in ypsi

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If anyone in the Ypsi area is interested in learning about some of the free and open source software applications that are available let me know. There are a lot of great free tools available that I think most non-geeks are probably not aware of. If there is enough interest I’ll look into maybe getting a room at the Library or somewhere where I could do a little seminar. You don’t have spend 100’s of $ buy software like MS Office or Photoshop and you don’t have to download such software from file sharing sites. You can use programs like OpenOffice or GimpShop. Even if I don’t get enough interest for a group I’d still be happy to give individual advice if you have any questions about programs to use for various tasks. You know where to find me if you’re reading this.

Brain Age

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I recently got a Nintendo DS Lite for fathers day. ds lite I also got the game Brain Age. Let me first say that I have not traditionally been a big video game player. I have played various games over the years and not found most of them to be particularly compelling. There are certain exceptions, like tetris and sudoku which I could play for hours. What was I just writing about… Oh yeah Brain Age. This game (along with the similar but slightly different Big Brain Academy) has been a huge seller since being released some months ago in Japan and now selling very well in North America. The premise of this game is that you take a daily brain age test. You initially set up an account and provide your birth date information. There are a variety of tests that the game randomly picks three of everyday. You take the test and based on your results the game calculates a brain age for you. As you get older your brain naturally tends to slow down. The calculated brain age can be anywhere from 20-80 years old with 20 being the best. Most people tend toward the higher end of the scale as when they first start taking the tests. As you train and improve mental agility your brain age tends to decrease.

The tests are designed to exercise your brain in various ways. The DS has a microphone and speech recognition built in as well as wifi capabilities. One of the tests is called the Stroop Test. In this test, the words Red, Yellow, Blue and Black are randomly flashed on the screen. However, the text may be in a color that does not correspond to the word. For example Red may come up in yellow text. In this case you have to say yellow. The different visual stimuli are processed in different parts of the brain. Most people’s brains would process the text faster than the color. Another test is the word memorization test. In this one the game shows you a list of 30 random four letter words. You get two minutes to memorize them. This test checks your short term memory…

What the hell was I just going to say?

Oh yeah, you have to memorize the 30 words. Then you get three minutes to write as many of the words as you can remember. As you may have guessed if you have ever spoken to me, my short term memory is probably my worst mental skill. I typically only get about 11-12 words or less. The game can show you a graph of your progress over time on the brain age test as well as all the individual training tests. My overall brain age has been trending downward over the past 5 weeks or so. However, you can always tell from the graph the days that I have gotten a short term memory type test. On those days my brain age tends to spike upward although I am starting to see some improvement. Along with the brain age test, there are a variety of individual training exercises you can each day. The program only lets you do each test once per day. Trust me this game is a lot more addictive than my description makes it sound. The same goes for most of the other DS games I have tried.

One of the cool features of the DS is the built in Wireless networking that allows you to play games against other DS users in the area or over the internet. The Sony PSP also has this, however the DS has an important difference. On the PSP each person must have a copy of the game in order to play. On the DS many of the games allow you send a copy of the game to other users who don’t have it. This is usually a simpler version of the game. This way if one person has a copy of Mario Kart DS up to eight people in an area can play against each other. This is a very cool and money saving way to have fun. Nintendo has done a superb job of creating a new kind of game play experience with the DS. Instead of focusing on powerful processors and fancy graphics like Sony has they worked on ways to make the games innovative and fun to play for all ages. Plus the DS only cost $129 compared to the $250 for the PSP. If the new Nintendo Wii (stupid name but great concept) console works half as well as envisioned, it will be a huge hit.

The real costs of the broken IP system

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The other day I wrote about the Supreme Court dismissing an important patent infringement case without ruling on the merits of the case. This whole case got me thinking. I have been speaking to people for several years about the problems with the intellectual property system. To most people this seems to be an arcane subject that has no real bearing on their lives. After all they’re not inventors getting patents, or writers or film-makers or artists worried about copyright. But as technology advances, and more and more people write blogs, post there photos and videos on the web, and record podcasts these become real issues. My son Max recently started doing a music podcast called MewzikCast. I had to explain to him why he couldn’t play some of his favorite songs on his show. Big record companies pay millions of dollars a year to companies like Clear channel to get songs played on their radio stations. But if someone doing an independent podcast wants to play the same songs, there is no way to do it. And if you do, they will come after you. And the reality is that podcasts are helping to sell music.

However, another very real cost of this system is one that we all (at least in the United States, less so in more enlightened countries) have to pay every day. The vast majority of Americans are familiar with the skyrocketing cost of health insurance. After a brief respite in the the latter part of the 1990’s when HMOs started to catch on, the rate of inflation of health care coverage has been on a very steady climb for last 5-6 years. Probably the single biggest driver of this inflation is the cost of prescription drugs. One of the reasons for these costs is the patent system. When the pharmaceutical companies develop a drug, they patent it. This gives them a monopoly for a limited period of time for that drug. When you have a monopoly on a product you can charge whatever price you want. The premise of patents and copyrights as defined in the constitution is to promote progress by giving inventors and artists a period of limited monopoly in exchange for disclosing their discoveries and works publicly. In this way the creators get make some money from their works while ultimately the works pass into the public domain so that others can build on it. This premise is one of the contributors to the incredible technological and cultural advancement of the last two centuries. However, as these monopolies have helped to create fortunes, the fortunes have led some to do whatever they can to preserve the cash flow, without necessarily creating anything new or useful.

This has been manifested in several ways. In the entertainment industry, copyright holders (and not that these copy right holders are not necessarily the creative people but the holders of the copyright), there has been continued drives to extend the period of copyright, and greater restrictions on what can be done with copyrighted material. In the area of patents, patent holders have tried to tweak their patented products to get new or extended patent protection. They have also tried to get broader less specific patents. An example this would be a drug company developing a new treatment for some medical problem. After getting a patent and getting the drug on the market for some number of years, they develop a new variant with the same drug in a new form. For example, the drug may initially come in a tablet form. Then it is developed in a capsule form. Now having a drug in a capsule form may be an innovation in itself and patentable. However once this has been done, putting other drugs into this form is no longer innovative. Similarly developing extended release versions might also be patented, even though it really shouldn’t be. In this way pharmaceutical companies have manipulated the patent system in order keep drugs under their control. By keeping a patent in force on brand name drugs, they keep generic versions off the market.

If you have ever compared the prices of generic and brand name medications you know how huge this gap is. For example, I take loratadine which is sold under the brand name Claratin for my allergies. The brand name stuff sells in a box of 40 tablets for about $16 I bought a bottle of 120 at Target for $17 for the generic version. It is the exact same drug for 1/3 of the price. This example is available over the counter now, but similar comparisons apply to must prescription drugs. The pharmaceutical companies do everything they can to preserve their patent protection as long as they can. Other examples of abuse of the system are of the type by Metabolite to patent a basic chemical relationship. They get patents on overly broad or general ideas. Health care systems are then forced to pay exorbitant fees to conduct tests, or pay for medicine. This affects each and every one of us. If we can afford health insurance we end up paying much more. More people than ever cannot even afford insurance. For the rest of us we end up paying for all the un-insured either through the taxes we pay to support Medicaid or through the higher fees charged by hospital to cover the costs of the emergency care they have to provide to un-insured patients.

The patent system need to be fundamentally changed with the onus put on the applicants to demonstrate the true innovation of their “invention”. There should also be an open comment period after an application is published so that people can shoot holes in it and demonstrate prior art before a patent is granted. It needs to be easier to show that an idea is not valid for patenting before granting a patent. I will be discussing this last thought more in another post I am working on and will publish shortly.

Supreme Court Blows a Chance

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Last year the US Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal on a patent infringement case. This was a prime opportunity for the court to take a stand on rule on the limits of the fundamentally broken US patent system. For at least the last decade the USPTO (US patent and trademark office) has been granting patents on all kinds of obvious concepts seemingly without even reading the applications in most cases. They have issued such legendary patents as the sideways swinging patent and the Amazon One-click patent. This term the Supreme Court agreed to hear a patent infringement case involving Metabolite Laboratories Inc patent on the relationship between homocysteine levels in the blood and vitamin B12 levels. Metabolite had sued Laboratory Corporation of America (where do they come up with these brilliant names anyway?) for infringement. LabCorp had claimed that the patent was too broad and and did not actually cover any invention. Metabolite had determined that there was a correlation between B12 levels (which are difficult to measure directly) and homocysteine levels which are relatively easy to measure. They were essentially granted a patent for determining that A is proportional to B and if A goes up or down so does B. For some ridiculous reason two lower courts had sided with Metabolite and agreed that LabCorp was infringing but evidently didn’t look at the actual validity of the patent.

The court agreed to hear the case last fall just after John Roberts joined. Apparently the Bush Administration didn’t want this case heard however, because they filed a brief asking that the case be rejected. As usual the court bowed to King George’s crew. Yesterday they issued a dismissal of the case stating only that they erred in taking the case without any further explanation. Roberts had recused himself apparently because his old law firm had been involved in the case. Justice Stephen Bryer along with John Paul Stevens and David Souter wrote a strong dissent stating that the patent should have been invalidated.

Writing for the three dissenters, Justice Stephen Breyer said the patent amounted to “no more than an instruction to read some numbers in light of medical knowledge.”

Failing to decide on the merits of the case “threatens to leave the medical profession subject to the restrictions imposed by this individual patent and others of its kind,” Breyer wrote. He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter.

The court had a prime opportunity reign in the out of control patent system. They blew it big time. Just like the Pledge of allegiance case they dismissed it on a technicality. These are not trivial cases. The patent system can have a major impact on our economy. It affects how much people have to pay for things because a grants limited monopoly power to patent holders. Abuse of the patent system is one of the big reasons why prescription drug costs are so insanely high. Pharmaceutical companies keep making minor tweaks to their drug formulations without actually coming up with anything fundamentally new, just so they can extend their patent protection. This is one of the major drivers of skyrocketing health care costs in this country. Those health care costs in turn are one of the biggest pain points for American manufacturing companies, especially the automakers. This is one of the things that is driving all manufacturing to other countries and leaving us with low paying, low benefit jobs at places like Wal-Mart. Lets hope another patent case comes before the court soon and they actually address it next time.

Google books

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Google made their reputation by indexing the content of the the internet. They’ve done some truly remarkable things with search. Their pagerank system although far from perfect does provide some great results. Some time ago they announced a project in conjunction with five of the largest university libraries including the University of Michigan to scan all the books in their collections and index the content. This project has been highly controversial. It has been attacked by publishers because some of the books to be scanned are still under copyright. It has also been attacked by librarians and others because this project is being undertaken by a private company (I know google is a public company, but I use private here to distinguish from a public entity like a government). Their is a lot of concern that a project like this will have a negative impact on physical libraries. I don’t think that is a really legitimate concern. There will will always be a place for actual libraries with with physical books. People like to read books. They like to sit on the beach, or deck, or under a tree or in bed and hold a book and read. There is also a social aspect to libraries that can never be completely replaced by the virtual world of the internet. Although the net can bring together communities of people who are widely geographically dispersed, people still need physical interaction with other people in the community and with librarians and teachers.

There is also concern about a private entity like google controlling all this data. This is, I think a more legitimate concern. If something were to happen to google what happens to all the scanned books? I like the idea of this project. Google has evidently developed some amazing scanning and character recognition technology as can be seen in this image from 1984. They have developed a mechanism that allows them to scan the pages without damaging some of the very old and rare volumes. The idea of a digital version of the great library of Alexandria would be a great way of preserving human culture. Perhaps if google were to put the raw data into the public domain, allowing anyone to access and index it, this concern could be addressed. Beyond the actual scanning technology, one unique thing that google adds is their indexing and searching capability. If the raw scans were available to everyone, than other companies could develop and apply their own search and display engines. I don’t agree with the idea of a private entity controlling so much of human culture. Their is a very interesting discussion on this whole topic on a recent Open Source, that included Siva Vaidhyanathan and a rep from Google.