technology

Floss weekly and a really cool Firefox feature.

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I was just listening to a new podcast called Floss Weekly with a guy named Chris DiBona (who works for google) and long-time radio guy Leo Laporte (who does a whole slew of podcasts including This Week in Tech). Floss stands for free, libre and open source software and the show focuses on topics related to this. I just listened to episode 2 where Leo and Chris interviewed Ben Goodger. Ben Goodger is the chief engineer for Firefox, the wonderful open source browser that everyone should be using. If you are not using Firefox, why not? Get Firefox!
The show is definitely geared toward the more geek minded. If you don’t already know what slashdot is you probably won’t be that interested in this show. However, at the end of the interview Leo asked Ben what his favorite unknown feature of Firefox was. If you are on any web page with a search box, such as the one in the side bar of this blog, you can right -click on the box and on the context menu you will find an item labeled “Add a keyword for this search”. If you select this a dialog will pop-up where you can enter a label and keyword and save it. For example I set a keyword for the search box on this page and called it “sam”. Now if you go to the address bar and type the keyword and search term it will automatically search for that term on the page linked to the keyword. For example if I type “sam drm” it now automatically searches my blog for posts with the term drm. You can do this for any searchable site, like google, yahoo or imdb. If you set “imdb” as a keyword for imdb.com, and then enter “imdb donald sutherland” in the address bar, it will search imdb for Donald Sutherland. Very cool feature.

SSH Setup guide

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Over the past six months I’ve been messing around with setting up a secure connection to my home network. If you’ve ever used a public wireless connection, unless you are connecting to a vpn at work or elsewhere , your computer is wide open to anyone else on the same hot-spot. Anything you send such as passwords or user-names can be sniffed by a malicious character. However if you have a home broadband connection, you can setup a secure server that you can access from anywhere via an SSH tunnel. SSH stands for secure shell, and is a communication protocol. An SSH tunnel will provide you with a very strongly encrypted communication stream, that no one monitoring you is going to be able to crack. It took me a while to put together all the correct pieces to do what I want, but I have it working really well now. I have put together a draft of a setup guide that compiles information from a variety of different sources I have found. There are quite a few steps, but it is actually not very difficult if your just follow the guide and do each step. I will be refining this guide over the coming weeks. If you decide to try this give me some feedback on the guide. If you find any errors or have problems let me know. You can find the guide here. Except for the router, all the software elements I reference are free and open source and won’t cost you a dime.

SAE Congress

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Yesterday I attended the 2006 SAE World Congress in Detroit. SAE is the Society of Automotive Engineers of which I have been a member for 17 years. The congress is basically the annual convention of the organization. The gathering includes dozens of technical sessions on all kinds of automotive engineering related topics. There is also an expo for car makers, suppliers, tool providers and other vendors. The big theme this year definitely seemed to be hybrids. There were hybrid vehicles and power-trains on display at many of the car-maker booths and hybrid components and systems on display at various supplier booths. GM had their hybrid power-train that is coming next year on their full size SUVs. Honda had their new Civic hybrid. Ford had the Escape hybrid. Toyota of course had the Prius and the new GS450H hybrid. Aisin showed a new automatic transmission with 2 motors built in that is designed for rear wheel drive applications.

Probably the most interesting thing I saw was from a company called Ovonic. Ovonic started in the early 90s developing advanced batteries for all-electric cars. They made the batteries for the GM EV1 electric car. Unfortunately for GM and Ovonic they didn’t really make much real progress in improving the energy storage capacity of batteries. Chemical batteries in general continue to be a very poor means of storing energy. In terms of energy storage capacity per volume and and weight batteries remain at the bottom of the list by a long distance. Just try picking up the battery in your car and see how heavy that is and all it can do start your engine. Compare that to a gallon of gas which depending on your vehicle can move it anywhere from 10-50 miles.

Ovonic has a new subsidiary that has been developing hydrogen storage systems. Hydrogen is great for use as a fuel because the only combustion byproduct is water vapor. One of the problems with hydrogen besides producing it is storage. Hydrogen gas needs to be stored at extremely high pressures. Ovonic and other companies have been working on methods of storing hydrogen in solid form, which is much safer. They showed a Prius that had been modified to run on hydrogen and used their metal hydride storage system. The hydrogen powered Prius gets the same mileage as the gas powered version and has a range of about 200 miles. Thats more than 3 times the range of the EV1 ( which went about 60 miles under ideal conditions). The fueling system they have developed can fill up the car in about 8 minutes right now. So Ovonic has pretty reasonable hydrogen powered car that unlike the EV1 is actually a practical mid-sized car that can carry four people in comfort and get decent range and doesn’t need to be plugged in when it’s not being used.

Now we just need a hydrogen fuel infrastructure. Hydrogen cars aren’t much use if you have nowhere it fuel it up. We need to develop a cost effective means of producing hydrogen and distributing it. In the coming days and weeks I plan to write some more stuff on hybrids. Hybrid vehicles as we know them now have some very good points but they really are not all they could be.

Newsvine 2

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I recently started using newsvine.com. It’s a new news site that includes a lot of reader interactivity. You can clip articles for later reading, vote up good articles so they move up the rankings on the front page, comment on stories, submit stories and even write your own stories and columns. Stories are tagged and you can added tags and authors to your watchlist. The watchlist page becomes your own personalized newspage. By adjusting the watched items you can create a news page that is customized to your interests and trusted sources. Newsvine is still relatively new and requires an invite to register. If you are interested and want an invite, just leave a comment and I will e-mail you one. Don’t forget you have to register to comment so I will already have your e-mail in the system. You don’t need to put your address in the comment so it doesn’t get harvested by spambots.

Using DRM more expensive than losses it’s supposed to prevent?

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In case you haven’t heard, last week Sony officially announced a six month delay in the launch of the Playstation 3. Who cares you might ask? Well as far as the game console itself is concerned I don’t because I have no intention of buying one. However, from another perspective this case demonstrates again that the cost of trying to protect content with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM, and that is what it is regardless of the fact that the manufacturers call it digital rights management) may actually be greater than the privacy losses it is supposed to prevent. One of the most touted features of the PS3 is that it is equipped with a Blu-Ray drive, one of the two new competing but completely incompatible high-definition dvd formats (think VHS vs Beta for the digital age). I am not going to get into the whole HD-DVD BluRay fiasco in this post, other than to say that both new formats have been repeatedly delayed by disagreements over many factors including the DRM schemes to be used on the disks. When Sony made their announcement last week they stated the delay in finalizing the drm standard for Blu-Ray disks as the main reason for the delay. Sony said that the introductory price of the PS3 would be about 50,000 Yen in Japan (about $425US). They also expect to sell about one million units a month. So a six month delay means 6 million lost sales at that price amounts 20 over $2.5 billion in lost revenues. Game console makers also get a significant royalty from the game publishers (about $10-15 per game copy) for every copy of a game sold. Add to that all the extra revenue (and huge profit margins) on all the accessories like extra controllers, multi-taps, etc. Sony is looking at somewhere between $3-4 billion in lost revenues just from the 6 month delay. When you consider that this November will be a full year after the introduction of the XBOX 360, the real losses are probably closer to twice that much.

So Sony is willing to sacrifice somewhere between $3 and $7 billion in sales just so they can implement a stronger DRM system. Interestingly, the actual number of game sales lost due to piracy is actually very small because playing copied games on a PS2 requires actually physically modifying the console. The number of people actually willing to do this modification, is likely in the thousands at most, with the potential lost sales actually in the low millions of dollars, several orders of magnitude less than what the drm system is costing them.

Sony is shooting themselves in the head to avoid a purse-snatcher. Real Smart!

Yet another reason to avoid anything with DRM

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I spotted an interesting article today via Boingboing. If you have a digital audio player such as an ipod or other mp3 player, and you listen to music that has been copy protected, your battery life can be drastically reduced. When music stores add drm to a song they encrypt it with a digital key. In order for a device to reproduce the music it must first decrypt the file and then play it. Every digital audio player has a microprocessor embedded in it, the device is basically a small computer. The process of decrypting is actually very processor intensive. The harder a processor is working, the more power it is using. If you are listening to a song purchased from iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, Sony, or any of the other stores that sell copy protected music. In an article over on CNET they discovered from testing various music players, that devices playing songs encoded with Microsoft’s WMA 10 drm they lost up to 25% of battery life compared to playing un-protected mp3 files. Apple uses a different drm scheme called Fairplay on there AAC music files. Only ipods can play these files and are optimized for them. Compared to straight mp3 the ipods had about 8% less battery life.

How do you avoid this extra battery drain? Don’t give your money to music stores that sell copy protected files. There are plenty of stores that sell unprotected mp3 files (usually at higher bit rates too) like emusic.com, mp3tunes.com and magantune.com. Of course you probably won’t find the likes of Britney Spears and other current top 40 hits at those stores, but I personally consider that to be a positive. Go check out these stores. Browse around and listen to the samples. Discover some new music. Support the artists (because itunes and other drm stores sure don’t). You also get the benefit of being able to play these mp3 files on any device rather than being locked into a specific brand.

More RFID tag problems

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RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are being used increasingly as a means to track people and stuff. Walmart for example is demanding that all their suppliers embed rfid tags in every item they ship to walmart. Walmart can then use this track inventory. Of course they can also this track the stuff you have in your shopping cart to offer you other deals. Another use of RFID tags that has been proposed is in passports. The US government has demanded that all new passports issued by October of this year have to have rfid tags embedded in them. The reason given is try and prevent counterfeiting of passports and to speed processing. An rfid tag is a basically a chip with information programmed into it that can be read remotely by a radio frequency reader. The problem is that anyone with a reader can pick up the information from such a passport if they are within 30 or so feet of you. The passports are supposed to come with a sleeve to shield them but you know that people will not always use it and the passports have to be removed to go through security. At these times anyone could pluck the information and grab your identity. Bad guys that use technology are usually a lot smarter than the government officials who mandate these changes. It is a given that if you provide a doorway like this for someone to sneak through they will use for something bad long before officials ever figure out what hit them.

Well now there is another new problem with rfid tags. Viruses. I just found this item via digg.com. Researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands have created a self replicating rfid tag virus as a proof of concept. In order for rfid tags to be useful there needs to be some back-end database software running connected to the readers. The researchers demonstrated that they could create virus code small enough to fit in the limited memory of an rfid tag. When the tag is read the code is copied back to the database, and fro there it is copied to other tags that are read. This could can be used to cause all kinds of havoc. They give an example of an airport baggage handling system.

For example, airports are considering using RFID tags to track baggage. But Tanenbaum warned that this application could pose a large problem if an RFID tag is read and delivers a much larger set of data in return. A false tag on a piece of baggage could exploit a buffer overflow to deliver a virus to the RFID middle-ware. Once the virus code is on the server, it could infect the databases and corrupt subsequent tags or install back doors — small programs that allow for the extrication of data over the Internet, Tanenbaum said.

“You can hide baggage,” Tanenbaum said. “You can reroute baggage to the wrong place — all kinds of mischief. That’s I think a very, very serious thing that even has national security implications.”

Rfid tags definitely fall into the category of new technologies that create a lot of unintended consequences. With most new technology the unintended consequences aren’t discovered until after the fact. Here we have an example that we know about as the technology is just being rolled out. It is not too late to stop some of these implementations until we come up with some solutions before something really bad happens. Using technology to make things easier is not always a good idea. Let’s slow down and think about we are doing for a change.

EPIC 2015

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Have you ever seen the short film EPIC 2015? It was originally published in the fall of 2004 as EPIC 2014 and updated last year. It’s only about 8 minutes long and definitely worth watching. It is told from the perspective of the year 2015, looking back to 2004 and reviewing the series of events that occured during that time interval. It culminates in the formation of an entity known as GoogleZon (google + amazon merge) operating the google grid, and the NY Times decides to go offline and become a print only newsletter. Some very interesting sites have already come into being since this film first appeared that definitely fit into the landscape described by the creators. The film describes online news sites where the readers are editors, and social networking technology tailors the news delivery, to the individual reader and their interests. To get a look at what this is like check out digg.com and newsvine.com. Both of these sites have come into being since EPIC was published. As for the google grid, Google is already offering gmail with vast amounts of storage, and there are hacks that use the gmail interface to provide large quantities of free online storage for any kind of file. With some recent concerns about Amazon’s profitability, a google takeover in the not to distant future may actually be a real possibility. Another site that already exists and that could fit into the media landscape described by epic is Ourmedia.org where anyone can upload and store any and all media files for free forever.

In an ideal world a lot of the stuff that is actually happening along with some of the things that EPIC describes might not be a bad thing. Ubiquitous access (through universal wi-fi) to all your data, could be very useful. However, given the actions our increasingly big brother-esque republican government, including open-ended requests for search records from google, yahoo and microsoft, and warrentless spying on Americans, I am becoming more and more dubious about storing everything online under the control of someone else. I am not a conspiracy theorist, I don’t believe in alien abductions and I don’t think any omniscient being exists. But I do see increasing signs that a wealthy corporate elite rapidly trying to grab control of everything important. I will probably continue to use free services like gmail and gdrive and digg to provide remote backup of a lot of non-private stuff that I nonetheless don’t want to lose track of. I will use sites like ourmedia to publish media files that I want to make available to people without having to incur huge bandwidth expenses. But I will also maintain my own personal private servers with encrypted connections so that I can have the ubiquitous access that I find so useful.

There is definitely a tremendous amount of potential in the personal media revolution that is happening today. I will do everything I can to promote it. But I think that people need to maintain personal control over at least some of their data. If we don’t, then we may find that we will lose it all at some point.

update: I forgot to mention, that although I have been following the development of internet services along the lines described by EPIC 2015 for over a year, this particular post was prompted by reading this item on techcrunch this morning.

What a Dumbass 2

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I just spotted this on Om Malik’s blog. So Shrub is putting forth a budget plan for the coming fiscal year that includes $2,770,000,000.00 (that’s almost 2.8 trillion) in spending. That is almost $400,000,000.00 more than he proposes to take in in revenues. He has come up with a brilliant way of trying to make up some of that deficit. He wants to tax unlicensed spectrum. For those who don’t know most radio spectrum is licensed so that you have to have a license from the fcc to broadcast on those frequencies. Radio and TV stations and cellular phone companies all have licenses to broadcast on the frequencies they use. The cellular companies have to pay for their frequencies. There are certain frequency bands that are set aside as unlicensed spectrum for use by lower power devices. The most common of these are 900 MHz and 2.4 and 5.8 GHz. These frequencies are used by devices like cordless phones, garage door openers, microwave ovens and in recent years wireless networking gear. Devices that operate at these frequencies are not required to be licensed by the fcc and users don’t have to pay any fees to use them other than buying the gear in the first place. But now shrub wants to tax unlicensed spectrum. How that would be implemented is not clear, but it just seems like a really bad idea. What are they going to do, tack extra fees on wifi gear and cordless phones? or are they going to cruise around sniffing for unlicensed frequencies and then knocking on doors with invoices for taxes?

Turn Down the volume! 4

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In the past couple of weeks there have been several stories about ipods causing hearing loss. The problem is that excess sound volumes can damage your ears. Well Duh!! Of course excessive volume can make you deaf. This is not a new phenomenon. This has been known for decades. That’s why for example when you walk into noisy factories you will find boxes of ear plugs everywhere. Your hearing can damaged by turning up the volume in a car with dozens of speakers and a trunk full of amplifiers. It can also happen when you listen to a 25 year old walkman at too high a volume.

But there is a really simple solution to all of this. Every one of these personal audio devices, from the ipod to the creative zen has a remarkable mechanism to prevent hearing loss. It is commonly known as the volume control. All you need to do is turn it down a bit, then you are good to go. Of course this “problem” primarily affects owners of ipods because upwards of 80% of all digital audio players sold to date happen to be ipods. Microsoft and there hardware partners have been utter commercial failures in this market.

Now however a lawyer has filed a lawsuit against Apple claiming that the ipod is defective because it can damage hearing. The suit doesn’t target any other manufacturers. All the other manufacturers with any market share at all happen to support Microsoft’s audio file format. They are just as capable of causing hearing loss. So why aren’t they being sued? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the lawyer in the case is on retainer to Microsoft? From Ipoding.com comes this:

What the Washington Post fails to mention in their story is that the attorney, Steve W. Berman, is on retainer at Microsoft:

More recently, Microsoft recognized Mr. Berman’s experience and expertise when the company retained him to be part of the core national team representing the company in antitrust class actions arising from Judge Jackson’s Findings of Fact in the Department of Justice antitrust case against the company.

Naw! No lawyer would ever do anything that slimy would they?