H/T to Register Hardware.
August 8, 2009
August 7, 2009
DDoS attacks target one pro-Georgian user
I find this hard to credit, but CBS says that yesterday’s distributed denial-of-service attacks on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, and LiveJournal were all aimed at one particular user:
The blogger, who uses the account name “Cyxymu,” (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Kelly said. “We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”
Kelly declined to speculate on whether Russian nationalists were behind the attack, but said: “You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet.”
Twitter was down for several hours beginning early Thursday morning, and suffered periodic slowness and time-outs throughout the day.
If it turns out that this is true, I guess it’ll be easier to start looking for the controller of the massive botnet that conducted the attacks . . . and probably has a physical presence near the Kremlin.
Update: The Guardian has more on the story.
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August 6, 2009
Twitter under DOS attack
Twitter users have been unable to access the site for most of Thursday morning, due to a Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack:
The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m. Twitter later posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack.
In a denial-of-service attack, hackers typically direct a “botnet,” often made up of thousands of malware-infected home PCs, toward a target site in an effort to flood it with junk traffic. With the site overwhelmed, legitimate visitors cannot access the service.
“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial-of-service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users,” co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post. “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”
Update: Service is back, intermittantly. More background on the attack here.
August 5, 2009
iPhone annoyances
Jared Newman offers a list of iPhone annoyances and some suggested fixes/workarounds for them:
Even the greatest gadgets have flaws, and the iPhone is certainly no exception. Praise it all you want, but the “Jesus phone” has plenty of little annoyances or nuisances that get under a user’s skin. Fortunately, technology is all about workarounds to common problems. So we’ve not only put together a Top 10 list of iPhone annoyances to vent about, we’re also offering solutions (where we can) to fix those pesky iPhone problems we hate so much.
10. Default Apps Can’t Be Hidden
Yes, that is an annoyance. Certain of the default applications are useful enough to keep, while others are merely a subset of what other third-party apps now offer (the WeatherEye app is much more useful than the default Weather app, even though it does have tiny ads running at the bottom of the window). It would be much more convenient to be able to remove the default app when you’ve found a more congenial replacement . . . but you can’t.
Organizing your apps is a pain in the butt, as there’s no Apple-supported way of creating groups of applications — something that Palm/Handspring had available several years ago. I miss the tabbed organization of my Treo, where I could create named pages to hold my different types of apps. I could tap a tab name to have that tab appear immediately, while on the iPhone, I have to page through all the other pages to get to the one I want. I would have thought functionality like this would be trivial, considering all the other programming wonders on offer, but I guess it’s part of the operating system that Apple doesn’t want to open to third-party development.
8. The App Store Is a Pain to Browse
It’s a victim of its own success: there are so many apps available now that it can take forever to find what you’re looking for. For example, if you check the App store “Photography” category today (on the Apple Canada version of the store), there are 51 pages of apps to view. At 20 apps per page, each of which has to try to sell itself to you — or at least to get your attention — with only a name, an icon, and a price. This is why one of the most commonly asked questions on the Apple-iPhone mailing list is “What apps do you recommend for x?”
Update, 6 August: J.R. Raphael chimes in with a long link-laden list of things Apple is doing that work to alienate their customers:
3. iTunes Control
The days of DRM may finally have ended this past April, but Apple’s practices surrounding iTunes continue to come under fire. The latest complaints center on — to put it simply — Apple’s refusal to play nice. The company recently updated its iTunes software to keep non-Apple devices such as the Palm Pre from accessing the program. Analysts tell The New York Times the move is reminiscent of AT&T’s early attempts to control what devices could be used on its phone lines.
4. That Whole Flash Thing
Folks have been begging for Flash support on the iPhone pretty much since the device’s debut. Yet, every time it seems the unthinkable might actually occur, the hope flashes back away before you can say “Steve Jobs juggles giant jugs of juice.” (Why you’d be saying that, I’m not sure. But still.) Countless Web pages are rendered useless without Flash enabled, and there’s no question it’s what customers want — so why, with each passing update, does it remain conspicuously absent?
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Print me a gear
3D printing was really cool when it was just wax or plastic. This moves it to the next level:
The future of fabrication is here: Shapeways announces stainless steel printing
Sure you’re not going to make a Hatori Hanzo sword — yet — but Shapeways, a 3D fabrication service, has just announced stainless steel printing, allowing you to make steel objects as easily as you would made resin or plastic prototypes. That’s right: something that took our ancient ancestors generations to perfect is now available to anyone with a CAD/CAM program and some Red Bull.
All-purpose material replication is still a long way down the road, but it’s closer . . . it is cool to be living in the future.
H/T to Virginia Postrel.
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Blotting out Rorschach tests
Colby Cosh examines the furor around James Heilman’s posting of the original Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia:
It is probably no great loss. Critics of Heilman complain that “decades” of research will have to be abandoned if the Rorschach test becomes impossible to use. But most of this research has been shown, in the last 20 years, to be flapdoodle. As soon as the test became popular — so much so that it became a staple of comedy routines about Freudian psychotherapists, along with couches and thick German accents — it had critics who pointed out that there was little or no statistically validated basis for its interpretation. After the psychiatric profession got around to trying to establish such a basis — and this happened disgracefully late in history — there was little or nothing left of what had once been perceived as the broad general usefulness of the Rorschach.
Much of the folklore that had grown up around specific elements of the test had to be thrown in the trash. It appears to have modest predictive or diagnostic power for a few very specific aspects of personality, and even this surviving foundation is shaky. Yet supporters gave, and some are still giving, the same indignant defences that pseudoscience always receives. Interpreting responses to Rorschach blots is more “art” than “science,” they have insisted. (The mating call of the quack.) Only those who are intimately familiar with the test — i. e., those who believe in it and have come to depend on it — are really qualified to judge whether it “works.”
But can the thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists who have considered the Rorschach test a useful item in the healing toolbox for generations really all have been wrong? Keep in mind that the same practitioners were eagerly recommending and performing lobotomies throughout the same period, and you have your answer.
July 30, 2009
Latest threat to world civilization
OMG! Everybody panic!
It’s bad enough that the iPhone can, according to Apple itself, be used to crash cell towers, but apparently they can be very easily hijacked, too:
If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.
That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Using a flaw they’ve found in the iPhone’s handling of text messages, the researchers say they’ll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone’s functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device’s camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.
The researchers say they’ve notified Apple about the vulnerability, but that Apple had not provided a fix.
Everybody sing: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, it’s the end of the world as we know it . . .”
Update, 31 July: Apple has announced that it will be releasing a fix to this problem on August 1st.
Update, the second, 31 July: The folks on the Apple-iPhone mailing list say the fix has escaped and is now available through iTunes. I’ll be downloading the update as soon as I get home . . .
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July 28, 2009
Boeing’s Dreamliner woes
The amazing sales record set by the Boeing Dreamliner (866 on order, more than any other wide-body passenger aircraft) is now being overshadowed by the technical problems holding up production:
[. . .] thanks to one technical glitch after another, the new plane is running way behind schedule. Today, it is known increasingly as the “Dream-on-liner”. Originally due in 2007, its initial delivery (to All Nippon Airways) won’t now take place until 2011 at the earliest.
The latest delay looks like the most serious yet. In May, routine bending tests in the workshop showed the wing structure to have separated from its skin (“delaminated”) at 120%-130% of the load limit. To pass muster with the Federal Aviation Administration and other certification bodies, wings have to sustain at least 150% of the load limit without rupturing.
Then, in late June, Boeing announced it was postponing the plane’s maiden flight — originally scheduled for June 30th — while it found a way to reinforce the structure where the wings join the fuselage. The 787 Dreamliner’s first flight has now been put off until this autumn or later.
Boeing declared at the time that the fix was relatively simple. Scott Fancher, the Dreamliner’s programme chief, said all that was needed was “a simple modification” using “a handful of parts”. But Gulliver thinks Boeing is in bigger trouble than it admits — and is having to rerun fresh batches of its computer simulations of the wing’s design.
The preceding advertorial is brought to you by Airbus Industries.
Okay, not really . . . as far as I know. But I’m sure it’s music to the ears of Airbus sales folks.
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July 26, 2009
I’ll take his word for it
. . . but it looks like a random collection of bits to me:
It may not look like much to the untrained eye, but to those of us who are Warbird afficionados, it is incredibly complete. There have been rebuilds to fly from wrecks recently dragged out of the Russian wilderness which were found in worse condition that this.
July 25, 2009
A blast from my past
I was reading Charles Stross’s blog the other day, and noticed that he’d nicely compiled all his “How I got here in the end” blog entries into a single post. I’d not read the whole thing, so a quick bookmark and I was off to other things. Today, while going back to the bookmark, I discovered that we may have crossed paths in our respective previous lives:
I spent nearly three and a half years working on technical documentation for a UNIX vendor during the early 90s. Along the way, I learned Perl (against orders), accidentally provoked the invention of the
robots.txtfile, was the token Departmental Hippie, and finally jumped ship when the company ran aground on the jagged rocky reefs of the Dilbert Continent. At one time, that particular company was an extremely cool place to work. But today, it lingers on in popular memories only because of the hideous legacy of it’s initials … SCO.SCO was not then the brain-eating zombie of the UNIX world, odd though this may seem to young ‘uns who’ve grown up with Linux. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, SCO (then known more commonly as the Santa Cruz Operation) was a real UNIX company. Started by a father-son team, Larry and Doug Michels, SCO initially did UNIX device driver work. Then, around 1985, Microsoft made a huge mistake. Back in those days, MS developed code for multiple operating systems. Some time before then, they’d acquired the rights to Xenix, a fork of AT&T UNIX Version 7. SCO did most of the heavy lifting on porting Xenix to new platforms; and so, when Microsoft decided Xenix wasn’t central to their business any more, SCO bought the rights (in return for a minority shareholding).
SCO is one of the stops on my resumé that I rarely call attention to, as it was an unhappy and eventually unpleasant stop along the way. Charles says “late 1991”, so perhaps we didn’t actually meet . . . I visited the SCO Watford office in August.
Still, I’d like to think that I met one of my favourite authors before he became famous . . .
Later on in that mega-post he says:
During this process I discovered several things about myself. I do not respond well to micro-managing. I especially do not respond well to being micro-managed on a highly technical task by a journalism graduate. Also, I’m a lousy proofreader. Did I say lousy? I meant lousy.
Dude. You want to talk micro-managed? My (Toronto-based) manager wanted twice-daily meetings where I needed to show my progress since the last meeting. I got so paranoid about “showing progress” that I stopped writing altogether, just showing a list of emails I’d been involved in since the last 4-hourly meeting occurred . . .
Do I need to say that my employment at SCO didn’t last much more than a few months after my visit to the Watford office?
Reading further in Charlie’s memoirs:
Here is an example of a Terminally Bad Sign for any organization in the computer business:
… When you discover that your line manager’s recreational reading is the 1980 edition of the IBM Staff Handbook.
Oddly enough, I had a few co-op work terms with IBM in the mid-to-late 1980’s. There were few books that could strike fear in the hearts of technology sector workers like official IBM publications. My very first official IBM staff meeting had the head of R&D in IBM Canada saying things like “There is business out there that we’re not getting. Business that GOD HIMSELF wanted us to have!” For some reason, I thought he was making a joke. I laughed out loud. My IBM career didn’t exactly go upwards from there . . .
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Vista laptops co-ordinate glitches
When I got up this morning, Elizabeth mentioned that her laptop had BSODed. Not something you normally see under Vista. When she rebooted, it told her that her ATI video driver was faulty and needed to be updated (there was, of course, no updated driver for her specific card available on the ATI website).
After a bit of carping and complaining, I went to the kitchen, where I leave my work laptop most days. On reboot, I got a warning that the sound card drivers for my laptop were faulty and needed to be replaced. I probably don’t need to say that there were no updated drivers available for that, either, do I?
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July 24, 2009
There are spinoffs, and then there are spinoffs
The space program has lots of detractors (and, to be fair, lots of starry-eyed, er, boosters), but here are some spinoffs from the space program that may not be obvious:
Or: more accurately, in strictly economic terms — what has the space program done for us?
Well, for starters: without the space program we’d probably be dead. Spy satellites are the very keystone of arms verification; without spysats the cold war would quite possibly have turned hot by the early 1960s, due to misinformation and fear permeating the chain of command on either side. Subsequently, gamma-ray detector satellites such as the American Vela constellation and its Soviet equivalents gave some reassurance to the superpowers by giving them the ability to know with a degree of confidence in whether or not nuclear explosions were taking place anywhere on the planet — a prerequisite for nuclear deterrence without a launch-on-warning policy.
But the cold war’s over. So what else?
* Weather satellites. We tend to forget how primitive weather forecasting was before we could look down on developing weather systems from above; the evidence is on your TV set every day.
* Communications. The first live trans-Atlantic TV transmission took place as recently as July 23rd, 1963; go back even a few years before that, and intercontinental TV was an element of science fiction. Today, you can buy a premium-priced mobile phone that gives you coverage from the middle of the ocean, by way of satellite services such as Inmarsat and Iridium, and see news from the far side of the world in real time. It has quite literally shrunk the world.
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Think at least twice before emulating these folks
It’s a joke I’ve told many times, and based on current trends, I’ll be telling it for many more years: we should have invested all our retirement savings in tattoo removal research:
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong: This is not the first tattoo on the “worst” list just because it’s an Apple tattoo. In fact, PC fangirl though I am, I’d much rather be walking around with an Apple image tattooed on my body than I would a Microsoft logo (like the infamous Zune guy). A little black apple might even be cute, and iconic enough that people would know exactly what my tattoo meant…which brings us to this lovely creation. Can we say overkill? The apple, well, fine. Even the power symbol in the middle, while a bit much, is acceptable. But “Think different” underneath? And to top it off, the fuzzy blue glow around that? This person could definitely take a leaf out of Apple’s advertising book: Understatement is key.
Whole story here.
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July 23, 2009
Trend interpretation
From today’s “PC World High-Tech at Home” newsletter:
The Digital Entertainment Group recently reported that consumer
spending on Blu-ray discs was up by 91 percent over last year.
More consumers have been renting Blu-ray Discs, too. This news
comes in spite of another report that says consumers aren’t
interested in adopting Blu-ray. What gives?
Easy answer: if you start from a small enough installed base, small increases appear to be very significant percentage-wise.
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July 22, 2009
Hurrah for Alex Nolan
I’ve had a bunch of Microsoft Access database files kicking around for the last several months, but due to version incompatibilities, I’ve been unable to open them. I didn’t want to buy a license for the program, just to pull my data out, so I’d looked for alternative ways to free my data from the proprietary clutches of Access.
I’d tried using Open Office, which includes a database program, but ran into the consequences of my own bad planning: Base (the OOo database component) could open Access files, but couldn’t do anything useful with them if they didn’t have a primary key. Most of my files were pretty basic flat files with a single table, so I’d never bothered to add a primary key (yes, I know: bad database practice).
Base would also let me export individual tables or queries to Calc (the spreadsheet component), but the process seemed pretty dicey — it locked up on me three times as I tried to save a new Calc spreadsheet as a .CSV file. I wasn’t comfortable that all the data in the table had been properly captured in the output, either.
Enter Mr. Nolan’s neat little MDB Viewer Plus utility (downloadable from here). It’s just a simple viewer for Microsoft Access files, but it worked a treat on extracting the tables I needed out of the proprietary MDB format to a .CSV I can import into something else (after this experience, something open source by preference).
Update: Aagh! Not quite as clean as I first thought. It appears that any date that has a value of greater than 12 for the day has been dropped. I wonder if this is an artifact of the difference between British and American usage (D/M/Y versus M/D/Y). Data normalization looks to be a lengthy task after all.
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