Good Video on Economy and Ron Paul's Predictions

It's the philosopher's stone video. Can be found to the left. I tried to embed video, but can't find it on his private channel. It's a good channel anyway.

UPDATE Dec 20, 2008: I am now able to embed the video. See below:

YAL - Young Americans for Liberty

Just wanted to point any who may actually follow this blog over to another called Young Americans for Liberty. There are several writers for this blog, and they are just getting started. I wish them good luck. They are against moving toward a socialist state, because they too understand that for socialism to ever work in theory, there must be some entity who restricts the liberty of individuals (not to mention that in practice this entity always merely takes over the seat of the wealthy of the capitalist system). This entity must exert its power over everyone and force them to participate in the system for it to ever work, and for this reason, it is anti-freedom. It is sickening to all who believe in freedom. They also understand that the right wing, as it has been hijacked, in its zeal to root out terrorists has severely infringed on the rights and privacy of American citizens. The sad part of this is that most are willing to give up their freedom to a paternalistic government that will protect them. In the end, this is a group of people who understand that more government power is never the answer to our problems, no matter what side uses it. Here are some sweet bumper stickers that their blog led me to.

6 Darkfall Gamplay Vids

A raid on a town is repelled:



Naval battles:



Shows various areas and a little of the banking system and inventory screen:



More fighting, and some spells:



A bow wielding chick goes first-person and takes out some players from a tree, until a mage pwns her with a fireball to the chest. Mounted combat, and a dude using some super jump spell to surprise attack.



The only words to express it are "holy shit." Probably the most epic MMO battle ever. Buildings rise from the ground at the beginning. And what the hell are those crazy ass siege vehicles towards the end that punch through the walls of the city? I can't wait for this game.

Darkfall is Coming (And I will be counting the days)

Ron Paul on The Auto Bailout

We better start listening.
Barney tells him time has expired.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

Schneier Echo: Terrorists Using Things

All from his blog. The further indented parts are him quoting, not direct quotes from Schneier:

Mumbai Terrorists Used Google Earth, Boats, Food

The Mumbai terrorists used Google Earth to help plan their attacks. This is bothering some people:

Google Earth has previously come in for criticism in India, including from the country's former president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Kalam warned in a 2005 lecture that the easy availability online of detailed maps of countries from services such as Google Earth could be misused by terrorists.

Of course the terrorists used Google Earth. They also used boats, and ate at restaurants. Don't even get me started about the fact that they breathed air and drank water.

A Google spokeswoman said in an e-mail today that Google Earth's imagery is available through commercial and public sources. Google Earth has also been used by aid agencies for relief operations, which outweighs abusive uses, she said.

That's true for all aspects of human infrastructure. Yes, the bad guys use it: bank robbers use cars to get away, drug smugglers use radios to communicate, child pornographers use e-mail. But the good guys use it, too, and the good uses far outweigh the bad uses.

DNS Attack

A great article from Wired about the events surrounding Dan Kaminsky's DNS hack. I had no idea all of this was going on behind the scenes. It is a long one, but worth it.

Disappearing Acorns

This is too weird. Just read it. Also, the comments are very interesting. The Slashdot reader base is very intelligent, and it seems like more and more people are shunning climate alarmism. This link was supplied by the first commenter.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/11/26/1227491635989.html

Censorship in Austrailia

Why do people want to censor everything? Is it out of a need to feel in complete control of everything? If you don't like it, then you don't have to play it or read it or watch it, and you can "suck my balls" as Eric Cartman would say. This is ridiculous.

Scheme to Detect Steganography in Images

But it can't detect the scheme I used to embed into IPv6 addresses for my honors thesis. Mine is meant to be completely random, unlike the noisy redundant data within images or sound files. New Scientist Article here.

Hacking Online Voting Sites

This is a hilarious article about some students who automated repeated votes for their schools on the Victoria's Secret contest to see who would be the first school with their name on the collegiate ladies' undergarments. This is not something that is hard at all to do, if it's anything like the other schemes I've seen. For instance, when ESPN hosted an online vote for the Heisman trophy that was actually going to factor the public opinion into who received the trophy, I thought about writing an automated Perl script to vote for D-Mac over and over (it's BS that they denied him the Heisman as a sophomore, based on the fact that he was a sophomore, and then gave Timmy Tebow the Heisman as a sophomore no problem). The ESPN site basically just checked a cookie that it set in your browser to make sure you couldn't vote multiple times, and the manual solution was as simple as deleting your browser cache. It would have been trivial to automate this with a program that accepted and used cookies temporarily for each vote and then dropped them. I guess none of the big tech schools' students that the article mentioned have any interest in football though, because that type of attack never occurred. For the right to be the first school with their name on some panties though...

HOWTO: Get Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 Working on Ubuntu 8.04

I just had to jump through a few hoops to get the Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 gamepad to work on my Ubuntu installation, and I wanted to write down how I got it working. This is mainly so I will have a reminder, if I ever have to do this again in the future, but it could help someone.

First, when I plugged the thing in, it was already recognized, which I could see via the dmesg and lsusb commands.


From dmesg (after pluggin in the USB receiver for the cordless controller)

[ 933.085195] usb 5-2: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 933.094885] usb 5-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 933.151596] input: Logitech Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb5/5-2/5-2:1.0/input/input12
[ 933.203335] input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Gamepad [Logitech Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-2

From lsusb

Bus 005 Device 003: ID 046d:c219 Logitech, Inc.

So, from this, I knew at least some default drivers or something were working. This "hid" stuff and the uhci_hcd relates to the driver module, I believe.

I installed jscalibrator, but it didn't recognize any input, and the GUI was poorly presented with words running off the left side of the page and whatnot.

I then installed joystick with

sudo apt-get install joystick

Then I used the following two commands:

jscal /dev/input/js0
jstest /dev/input/js0

I could then see feedback in the jstest program when using any of the buttons on the gamepad.

After all of this, the dpad and analog directional sticks would not work in znes, although all other buttons would. After unplugging the receiver and plugging it into a different USB port, however, all buttons worked in znes. Now I just need to get sound working, but I wanted to log my steps for getting the gamepad working first.

UPDATE: 11-30-2008

I was able to get sound working the other day by installing this package: libsdl1.2-alsa. Then running the command

zsnes -ad sdl

The normal start command wasn't giving me sound. With the '-ad sdl' argument, the sound was there, but it was crackly (yes, I used that word). Setting the sample rate to 48000 seems to have solved that problem, however. Also, I checked out this forum topic on the Ubuntu forums, and acoustibop mentions installing an sdl library package that includes all the different sound architectures (including alsa and oss).

As a general improvement for sound in games, try installing libsdl1.2debian-all. This will remove libsdl1.2-alsa but don't worry, support for ALSA will be reinstalled as part of libsdl1.2debian-all.

So, I did that as well, and now the command

zsnes

by itself launches the emulator with sound enabled, and everything seems to work just fine.

The Universe as Information or the Expression of an Idea

Here is a good article from New Scientist that is more confirmation of what today's science is telling us about the nature or reality. "What makes up things are not more things, but what makes up things are ideas, thoughts, information," from What the Bleep do we Know

From the article:

Matter is built on flaky foundations. Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum.
[...]
Each proton (or neutron) is made of three quarks - but the individual masses of these quarks only add up to about 1% of the proton's mass. So what accounts for the rest of it? Theory says it is created by the force that binds quarks together, called the strong nuclear force. In quantum terms, the strong force is carried by a field of virtual particles called gluons, randomly popping into existence and disappearing again. The energy of these vacuum fluctuations has to be included in the total mass of the proton and neutron
[...]
The Higgs field is also thought to make a small contribution, giving mass to individual quarks as well as to electrons and some other particles. The Higgs field creates mass out of the quantum vacuum too, in the form of virtual Higgs bosons. So if the LHC confirms that the Higgs exists, it will mean all reality is virtual.

Another Minority Report Human Computer Interface

From the article:

The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

NSA History - Report

A new NSA history report was released. I'd like to read it if I have time. Here is an article about it from the Wall Street Journal. This may be the report, but I just wanted to mark it as something to go back to. I haven't actually read through any of this. No time right now.

New Star Trek Movie

Can't wait for it to come out in May '09.

Geting Files From Firefox Cache - Two Methods

The hard way:
type "about:cache" in the url bar (without quotes). Go to the folder specified, and grab the file.

The easy way:

1) Right-click on page.
2) Select "View Page Info"
3) Click the "Media" tab (for flash files, images, etc)
4) Find your file
5) "Save As"

State of Surveillance

I am going to start a running log of all Orwellian surveillance news called the "State of Surveillance." Not surprisingly most of the news in this log will probably be coming out of the UK. This first article on black boxes that will monitor and record all internet traffic.

Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.

This Slashdot entry says that it would monitor all upstream traffic only.

Threading the Needle

This is a picture just recently taken by the Hubble space telescope after it was switched over to backup systems after the failure of its primary components. It shows two galaxies after the one on the left passed through the center of the one on the right. The red patch in the lower left of the galaxy on the right used to be its nucleus.

Don't Buy Toshiba Products

Just saw this article about a Toshiba with 3 GPUs, and I wanted to say, "DO NOT BUY IT." Do not ever buy crappy ass overheating Toshiba products. Ever. I hope the Google web crawlers find the words in this post, so people can search them. Ever type in something like "fuck mother fucking bullshit toshiba" just to see what comes up? Well maybe you have just found this post. Everyone I know who has owned a Toshiba has had it overheat, and Toshiba also has terrible customer service. Go Dell or go home, as far as laptops are concerned.

Minority-Report-Like Human Computer Interface

This is cool, but as review sites have noted, it does have visible lag. It definitely wouldn't work for games that require quick reaction time to swivel around and bust a cap in a fool that is trying to sneak up and knife you in the back.

Shields Up

Radiation shields.

Prototype This

There is a great new show on the Discovery Channel about making kick-ass things in the spirit of what I was talking about below. It stars Joe "Kingpin" Grand, the maker of the DefCon 15 and 16 badges, among some others. Full episodes are available. Check out the main page here. Watch an episode here.

New XKCD

The newest xkcd comic below. It led me to read this, and this.

Another Example of Why Banning Security Research is Bad

This article comes from Schneier, and it is just yet another example of why banning of legitimate security research, or even condemning it, is bad. This is similar to the Dutch research team that hacked the RFID transit system cards (that were also being used for access to secure government buildings). The company who manufactured the cards tried to sue, while the Dutch courts upheld the freedom of speech and research of the students. The real problem was the flaw inherent in the system itself, and not with the announcement of the flaw. The Chinese had been cloning the cards on the black market for up to a year before the Dutch researcher even found it.

Disclaimer: The information I gave above about the situation in the Netherlands is rehashed from a presentation of that a Dutch reporter (forgot his name) who was deeply involved in the event gave at DefCon 16. No, I will not cite my source. This is a blog.

Scantrons

In honor of all my tests this week.

Message From Slackware

I love Slackware Linux for its little messages that it prints out whenever you log in over ssh or a new terminal is opened. Many times, as in this case, I will be completely absorbed in a task and will be furiously oblivious to everything around while I work. I'll log into my Slackware Linux box and a message will pop up that causes me to pause for a second, reflect, and laugh. These messages are always something clever and usually funny. Something that appeals to the inner geek. One that I remember was a very flowery rewording of several common sayings such as "It's no use crying over spilled milk." I don't remember what they all were, but it was fun figuring out which saying the rewordings corresponded to. I wish I had written them down. In this case, it completely derailed me from my task in order to write about it. Thank you to the creator of Slack (Patrick Volkerding) for thinking of such a cool idea. We need more things like that in the world that cause us to stop and smell the roses.

Here is the one I just read:

What goes up must come down. But don't expect it to come down
where you can find it. Murphy's Law applied to Newton's.

Information Spying, Cyber Warfare, and Hackers as the James Bonds of the Information Age

The romanticized images we all have of the spy from Tom Clancy novels and James Bond films is increasingly merging with the romanticized images of the Cyberpunk. The Hacker is the new James Bond, or at least the new ideas of spies have to include a little of the image of the Hacker. At least that is what the media and pop culture are moving towards, and it is a pretty cool idea, however false it may be. Movies like Die Hard 3, shows like The Wire, and novels like The Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy are all evidence of this trend. Articles like this one reflect the reality of this trend.

As far as the term "hacker" is concerned, however, I think that those who are a part of the culture remain true to the true meaning as society as a whole wrestles with the swirling sea of images and icons. The Hacker Ethic still refers to the culture of information sharing as means of growth for the individual and for society. It is still exists as a principle in perfect accordance with the Liberty Principle as put forth by John Stuart Mill and other libertarian minded thinkers. Figuring out how things work is a passion for us, and learning from one another gives us power and keeps as strong as a people. It leads to innovations that improve our lives, and the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself enriches our lives. To think and explore technology, systems, and physical phenomena, and to be able to do so without artificial restriction, ultimately leads to a more knowledgeable and informed public capable of a greater degree of self reliance. As society becomes more and more specialized, the seekers of knowledge will remain true to themselves in the face of a society that continually encourages more and more laziness and dependence on government along with other institutions that provide everything. Collect knowledge. Find a project. Find a passion. Go out and make something!


http://makezine.com/magazine/
http://revision3.com/
http://www.2600.com/

Intellectual Property and Copyright - An Interesting Proposed Solution from the French

This article talks about a proposition in France that may become law. It is basically a three-strikes rule for violators of copyright laws on the internet. If you are caught three times, you lose all your internet privileges for one year. My question is whether ISPs in the US would have an incentive to help enforce a law like this, were it to be put in place here. Would they want to help shrink their base of paying customers?

This line from the article is a little ridiculous, especially coming from a "conservative":

He added that the internet has become an "essential commodity" that allows people access to social services and that their removal would be "traumatic for a family."

UPDATE 11/23/2008:
The EU has struck down the French law. Article here.

The Dark Side of The Mirror

According to this New Scientist article, dark matter could have its own force for interaction with other dark matter and could give off it's own form of light that would only interact with (be visible to) other dark matter. There could be whole dark worlds in the middle of our universe with dark-life that we would just pass right through if we flew through their area. To them, we could be the dark life forms that they couldn't see. Pretty interesting.

Happy Halloween

Tux Pumpkin

Check out the OSS Linux pumpkin that Kacee and I made below. Also, I entered a picture of our pumpkin in the Wired "Show Us Your Geek-O-Lantern" site here. Look for the post under the name "Bpa" to see the score of our pumpkin. It probably won't fare too well with the other pumpkins on there. There are some really cool ones.

Ron Paul on the Global Financial Crisis and Inflation as a Tax

When are we going to have a presidential nominee that isn't the same old shit wrapped up in a different package. Both Obama and McCain can only offer socialist solutions and more taxes.

On the financial crisis:



Ron Paul vs. Ben Bernanke:



Comments after the fact:

Interview with Zach Anderson

Here is a link to a Popular Mechanics interview with Zach Anderson, one of the MIT hackers whose DefCon presentation on hacking the Boston subway was canceled via a temporary restraining order on behalf of the Massachusettes Bay Transit Authority. The interview goes in depth on exactly what happened. I found it particularly cool that the MIT guys were able to just walk to the Electronic Frontier Foundation booth at DefCon and get lawyers to help them.

Boycott Siemens

I want one of these, but it's still Big Brother's best friend. New Scientist has written a rather long article on this Big Brother In a Box. Use encryption!

Use SSL Whenever Possible

The talk at DefCon simply highlighted a well known vulnerability involved with sending session information via a cookie over unencrypted channels. As a result, gmail's security has been increased for those of us who want to take advantage. This is just another example of increased security as a direct result of hackers making a vulnerability public - or in this case driving the point home by making stealing someone's session credentials easy enough for a 6 year old. The middler is the name of the program written by Jay Beale. I will post on it at a later date perhaps.
Here is a good article detailing the problem.

Justice Served - Sorta

Judge O'Toole threw out the gag order filed by the MBTA against the MIT hackers, but he refused to comment on whether their right to free speech was violated in the first place. Here is the article from Wired.

To the Record Labels

You people are so far out of tune with the times, it is sickening. You are the only industry (if you can be called an industry - in recent times you have been reduced to what is essentially a law firm) that has deliberately and gladly made enemies of your own customers. You want to sue the hell out of the people who made you rich. You think you can solve your problem with lawyers and legal systems. Your imaginary -- er I meant intellectual -- property rights are all you are clinging to and you are failing miserably. Why not get in tune with the times? You simply cannot get around the inherent benefits of digital media, but you idiots simply cannot get this fact through your heads. Because, if you could, you would have thought of innovative ways to take advantage of the digital revolution like any other successful company. Instead, you imbiciles have fought tooth and nail against the tide and have been swimming up river ever since the digital revolution began, because it caught you with your pants down like a deer in the headlights. You never expected that your iron grip on the music industry and godlike powers of decided who and what gets published would ever come to an end, and now you are running scared like a dog with its tail between its legs. If you had your way, you would squeeze as much money as you could out of every single customer. I'm sure your think tanks right now are trying to figure out how to charge someone to listen to a single song one time at a rate of 5 cents per listen. After all, it is your property. It is not the property of the user who paid for the song. We should all pay you for the privilege to listen. Thank you, thank you soooooo much!

The fact is that more and more your DRM attemps are failing as people realize how much it sucks not to be able to use something that they paid for in the manner they choose to use it. The recent Yahoo! fiasco ring any bells? Their DRM servers are shutting down, so all of the customers who used Yahoo!'s service are SOL when it comes to all of the music they "purchased". Without the servers running to unlock "their" songs, these people cannot even listen to the music they paid for. Thankfully Yahoo! has enough sense to give these people credits to another DRM schemed service, so at the very least it is just a huge pain in the ass for these people to have to redownload all of their music from a new and equally locked scheme.

When I buy a song, it is mine! I paid for it, and I should be able to put it on every single one of my computers and digital media players, cds, cassettes, as a tatoo on my ass, etc. Good for Wal-Mart and their decision to sell music in the open and non-restrcted mp3 format. They should have some not insubstantial pull in this issue, and they have always been good at giving the customer what they want, which is why they are the single most successful business in America and the World.

And now you music industry idiots, particularly SoundExchange, are about to put my favorite online radio site Pandora.com out of business because you cannot come up with a fair rate to liscense "your" music to them with. It is unbelievablt that you would rather make a statement and ask for a shitload of money and end up with none, than to ask for a fair rate and make tons of money over time. Pandora has plenty of listeners, but you people are just too greedy and stupid to find a way to make money off of their creative business. You could charge a fair rate that would not put Pandora out of business and would thus allow you to make some liscensing fee money, while having the added benefit of getting music heard by an audience that is increasingly turning to online sources for everything (news, musics, videos, etc). NBC understands this, which is why they will be offering NFL games online for the first time ever this season (with ads on the page). They will be offering extras such as play-by-play action, instant replay control by the user, and multiple camera angles. This is genious on NBC's part and is another avenue for advertising revenue. But, again the recording industry doesn't understand this and seems content to just make their money from sueing people. I will let you idiots in on a little secret: Ever since I have been listening to my music on Pandora, I have not pirated music (well maybe just a little - but only about 1% of what I used to). I don't need to. I buy the stuff I really want, and Pandora offers enough variety in the stuff they stream, that things don't get old - my main impetus for downloading new music constantly. Similarly, ever since I started getting my movies on Netflix, I have not downloaded a single film. Why do I need to? I am already paying $15 a month to netflix, and if I downloaded and watched a movie on my PC, I would be wasting money I pay to Netflix because I could have watched the movie from them, and sent it back to receive another one to get the most out of my 15 bucks - plus, movies take up hard drive space that I could use for other things. A similar effect has happened with my downloading of TV shows and having them available on sites such as NBC.com. If I can watch them instantly via streaming on these sites, why waste the time it takes to download them. This has the added benefit for NBC that I am more likely to watch season 2 of Heros if I can catch up on season 1 first.

Some people and industries are smart enough to see the direction that things are going, and they find a way to use it to their advantage instead of fighting against it. It is still survival of the fittest, and the law may be making it easier for the less fit recording industry to survive and flounder a little bit longer than would otherwise be possible naturally (similar to the way the law allows people who cannot take care of themselves to live off of those of us who can), their idiotic behavior will eventually be their doom.

The LHC firing up

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland has begun running some preliminary tests of some of some of tis sectors. The first experiements are due to run in October. Here is a nerdy rap video about the LHC that is surprisingly informative as to what the thing will be doing and what it is looking for:

MIT Hackers Suffer Another Blow to Their Right to Free Speech

It is a sad day for free speech as another clueless idiot judge lets the gag order stand against the hackers for MIT working for a project under Ron Rivest (the 'R' in RSA encryption) barring these guys from exposing a flaw they found in RFID and magstripe cards used in Boston's subway. Maybe George O'Toole will get it right on Tuesday. From another article, here is a letter signed by 11 Computer Science professors from across the country speaking out against this. Here is the article the letter is from:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/computer-scient.html

And here is the letter (Bruce Schneier was one of the signers):

We write to express our firm belief that research on security vulnerabilities, and the sensible publication of the results of the research, are critical for scientific advancement, public safety and a robust market for secure technologies. Generally speaking, the norm in our field is that researchers take reasonable steps to protect the individuals using the systems studied. We understand that the student researchers took such steps with regard to their research, notably by planning not to present a critical element of a flaw they found. They did this so that their audience would be unable to exploit the security flaws they uncovered. . . .

The restraining order at issue in this case also fosters a dangerous information imbalance. In this case, for example, it allows the vendors of the technology and the MBTA to claim greater efficacy and security than their products warrant, then use the law to silence those who would reveal the technologies' flaws. In this case, the law gives the public a false sense of security, achieved through law, not technical effectiveness. Preventing researchers from discussing a technology's vulnerabilities does not make them go away - in fact, it may exacerbate them as more people and institutions use and come to rely upon the illusory protection. Yet the commercial purveyors of such technologies often do not want truthful discussions of their products' flaws, and will likely withhold the prior approval or deny researchers access for testing if the law supports that effort. . . .

Yet at the same time that researchers need to act responsibly, vendors should not be granted complete control of the publication of such information, as it appears MBTA sought here. As noted above, vendors and users of such technologies often have an incentive to hide the flaws in the system rather than come clean with the public and take the steps necessary to remedy them. Thus, while researchers often refrain from publishing the technical details necessary to exploit the flaw, a legal ban on discussion of security flaws, such as that contained in the temporary restraining order, is especially troubling.

DefCon 16

This was my second year at the largest hacker/security conference in the world, and I had a blast. After a 22 hour drive, I'm back home. Here are some articles covering the event:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/multimedia/2008/08/gallery_defcon16?slide=1&slideView=2

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/a-first-ever-lo.html


http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/eff-to-appeal-r.html

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/injunction-requ.html


http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/exclusive-defco.html


http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/medeco-locks-cr.html


http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/081008-covert-operation-floats-network-sniffing.html?hpg1=bn

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10012612-83.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Suck it you Frenchie Bastards!!!

Eat shit! http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/share.html?videoid=0811_HD_SWB_HL_L0194

Ron Paul on the Higher Education Opportunity Act

Madame Speaker, anyone in need of proof that federal control follows federal funding need only examine HR 4137, the Higher Education Opportunity Act. HR 4137 imposes several new mandates on colleges, and extends numerous mandates that previous Congress imposed on colleges. HR 4137 proves the prophetic soundness of people who warned that federal higher education programs would lead to federal control of higher education.

Opponents of increasing federal control over higher education should be especially concerned about HR 4137’s “Academic Bill of Rights.” This provision takes a step toward complete federal control of college curriculum, grading, and teaching practices. While this provision is worded as a “sense of Congress,” the clear intent of the “bill of rights” is to intimidate college administrators into ensuring professors’ lectures and lesson plans meet with federal approval.

The “Academic Bill of Rights” is a response to concerns that federally-funded institutions of higher learner are refusing to allow students to express, or even be exposed to, points of view that differ from those held by their professors. Ironically, the proliferation of “political correctness” on college campuses is largely a direct result of increased government funding of colleges and universities. Federal funding has isolated institutions of higher education from market discipline, thus freeing professors to promulgate their “politically correct” views regardless of whether this type of instruction benefits their students (who are, after all, the professors’ customers). Now, in a perfect illustration of how politicians use the problems created by previous interventions in the market as a justification for further interventions, Congress proposes to use the problem of “political correctness” to justify more federal control over college classrooms.

Instead of fostering open dialog and wide-raging intellectual inquiry, the main effect of the “Academic Bill of Rights” will be to further stifle debate about controversial topics. This is because many administrators will order their professors not to discuss contentious and divisive subjects in order to avoid a possible confrontation with the federal government. Those who doubt this should remember that many TV and radio stations minimized political programming in the sixties and seventies in order to avoid running afoul of the federal “fairness doctrine.”

I am convinced that some promoters of the “Academic Bill of Rights” would be unhappy if, instead of fostering greater debate, this bill silences discussion of certain topics. Scan the websites of some of the organizations promoting the “Academic Bill of Rights” and you will also find calls for silencing critics of the Iraq war and other aspects of American foreign policy.

Madame Speaker, HR 4137 expands federal control over higher education; in particular through an “Academic Bill of Rights” which could further stifle debate and inquiry on America’s college campus. Therefore, I urge my colleagues to reject this bill.

Ron Paul on Marijuana

A Defeat for Privacy

Well, typical of a Democrat running for office, Obama is trying to please the middle and even he reneged (flip-flopped) on his original position of saying he would vote against any bill that gave amnesty to telcoms for illegally wiretapping Americans. The unconstitutional wiretapping bill has passed the Senate, and Bush will sign it into law. Hopefully the courts realize that the legislative branch has overstepped its authority and strike down this unconstitutional law. Here is a Wired article.

New Planets Everywhere

We eventually need to escape the Earth to avoid the inevitable self destruction of our Sun. We are the only species in the history of the Earth and life (as far as we know) to have the ability to escape our own destruction, and I believe we are exactly what life knew that it needed. I will always support government spending on NASA. More and more planets are being found with advances in telescopic technology. Check out this cool Article.

An Idiotic and Ineffectual Attempt at a Noble Goal

Here is Another huge fucking idiot poking his nose into things he knows nothing about in an attempt to gain the support of stupid people who just want to feel good and feel that the government is looking after them. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, you, sir, are an imbecile. What you have pushed the ISP's like Verison to do will accomplish nothing toward your actual goal, and will do tremendously more harm than good to legitimate users. We don't like censorship in America, you dumbass, and anyone who has the money and balls to challenge this legally will win. I hope and pray for that person/organization (come on EFF), and I hope you lose your job and then go to hell for all eternity. Don't censor my internet. Blocking the offending groups would have been sufficient for Verizon to stay out of trouble with the law, and would accomplish the same goal as blocking the entire network (absolutely nothing). The child pornographers will just find another way to distribute their trash, and only the legitimate users will be inconvenienced, not to mention the hackers and crackers that bring me free music/movies/games (just kidding, FBI, NSA, CIA, etc)...

DDoS - Internet Warfare

Another massive DDoS attack coming out of Russia. One of my favorite talks at Defcon last summer was by Gadi Evron an can be seen below. It is very interesting what wars of the future may hold. My Linux servers throughout the past have constantly been logging attempts by Chinese hackers to break into them. Nearly 90% of the banned IP's I have in my hosts.deny file are from China, and I have heard rumors of the Chinese government actually subsidizing hackers to try to break into U.S. computers and sending students to college specifically for the purpose of learning how to hack so that the Chinese government may use their skills. Here is the video. Gadi is an Israeli I believe and throughout the video you will hear him cussing out some drunk Russians in the front row until they are escorted out by security to everyone's applause.

Finishing Up a Semester - Cox Communications == Assholes

I have nearly finished up the Spring 2008 semester. I have taken my AI final, my Formal Languages final, and our group has presented a power-point style overview of our senior-design project. I think that out final project has gone over well both with the professors of the class, and with our fellow students.

Our project is a mobile device application that will be able to use optical character recognition on images and then translate the text that is extracted from the image, if needed. A simple use case situation would be someone traveling in foreign country and needs to read a sign in that language, but they are not fluent. They would be able to pull out their phone, take a picture of the sign and our app would translate it. The mobile device would need internet connectivity because it actually sends the image file to my home Linux server through XML-RPC (eXtensible markup language - remote procedure call) which runs GNU ocrad (an open source optical character recognition tool) on the image, It then sends the resulting text through Google's translate URL and pulls the little piece of translated text out from the resulting HTML document that the call the Google's URL returns. It then sends the resulting translated text back to the mobile device application that called it. We implemented the mobile device portion of the software in Java and built the GUI using only AWT (abstract windowing toolkit) instead of the more feature rich swing library, because even the higher end mobile devices will only run AWT and not swing. The server side remote procedure is all written in Perl using the Frontier::Responder XML-RPC module.

This is one of the oldest XML-RPC implementations in Perl, and it is very easy to use. Although I have developed Web Services using SOAP on a very high level through Microsoft's Visual Studio that hides all the details from you, this is really my first experience developing XML-RPC's, and I have to say that I am a fan. It allows you to connect programs written in different languages running on different operating systems that could be very far apart geographically, because everything is "encoded" and "decoded" using XML and the XML documents are sent over HTTP. One book that helped me out tremendously is Programming Web Services with XML-RPC written by Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, and Edd Dumbill and published by my personal favorite publisher of technology books: O'Reilly.

That brings me to another point (guess I have a lot of things to say after such a long dry spell). I have over the last semester purchased 5 O'Reilly books from Amazon.com for very cheap prices. I have always gotten used books, and they have always been in excellent condition. I'll put it this way, the shipping is always the most expensive part. I get books that would cost anywhere from $45-$80 dollars new, for about $1.50-$8.50 on Amazon, and I have seen books for less than $1.00. I have also bought 4 Fiction Sci-Fi books for a couple of bucks or so each. I will never buy another book from Barnes and Noble.

But I digress. The reason for the Second part of the title for this post is because I was troubleshooting why our senior design application would not connect to my home Linux server from campus. This troubleshooting was not made easier by the fact that campus did not allow outgoing pings, but that isn't the real problem. After trying everything I could think of (putting holes in my router to let HTTP traffic route to my Linux server, etc) and still having no luck, I became very frustrated. I was almost to the point of re-flashing my router's ROM with a newer version of the firmware, because I was sure that it had top be malfunctioning; I mean, I had it configured correctly! Suddenly, however, I decided to try changing the port number that my Apache server was listening on, and having the mobile application call this new port instead of just letting it use the default port 80.

The app then connected and ran as it was supposed to, no problem. So what was the problem? Cox fucking communications blocks all incoming traffic to port 80 unless you pay the fee for a business account. For any who don't know, networked applications communicate over ports. These are "virtual" animals but can be likened to actual physical shipping ports. They are entry and exit points for information like shipping ports are entry and exit points for goods or people. The Web (i.e. any site you can get to through your browser) runs on port 80, except when you are logging into a secure site (such as your bank, or any other kind of account that accepts a username and password) as this uses port 8080 and you will see a little pad-lock on the bottom right of your browser; additionally the url will have https instead of just http. This is usually transparent to most users as their browser just automatically uses port 80. If you wanted to use your browser to connect on a non-standard port, you would type the url with the port included after the domain name but before the path portion, like so:

www.mywebserver.com:90/docs/index.html

The above URL would connect to port 90 instead of trying the default port 80. SO anyway, Cox doesn't want anyone at home hosting a web page that will be easy for others to get to unless they pay for the premium service. So I would like to send a big "Fuck You!" out to Cox Communications for causing me extra grief.

This blog is usually about technology, but this is a threat to all the good things that have come out of Western society's belief in free speech and freedom from oppression without which, nothing I talk about here would be possible:

The Net Neutrality Debate

It's been a while since I've posted. I have been working hard on my senior design project and my honors thesis, and I will have lots of new Perl tidbits as well as a few Java code pieces (mainly having to do with XML-RPC or eXtensible Markup Language - Remote Procedure Call) to blog about here pretty soon. In light of the Thursday (April 17) on-campus debate that Stanford held the other day, to which the ISPs failed to even show up, I wanted to write a bit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good insite into why programmers and application developers like Net Neutrality. Stanford's Larry Downes has some good points from the opponents of Net Neutrality that make a lot of sense. In particular, he doesn't like the idea of government regulation in the private sector (particularly on a technical topic that few politicians can comprehend) that could lead to negative consequences and the law being interpreted in ways not imagined when it is put in place. He even makes what I think is probably a generally true assesment:

Privacy concerns aside, my guess is that many people who are in favor of net neutrality also think of themselves generally as libertarians, at least when it comes to the idea of government entities micromanaging information technology and its applications, especially the Internet

He also doesn't feel that the FCC has the capacity to regulate the ISPs, which is probably true.

I have drafted up an 8-page proposal on Internet Neutrality that I will post on here in some way when I have completed it. I fall into the libertarian category that Downes refers to, and I don't want to have legislation that will prevent the ISPs from operating their business effectively; however, we do need to keep them honest. I believe that a very limited form of government interference is necessary to keep the Internet functioning as consumers have come to expect it. This legislation would not have to in any way regulate the ISPs into an inflexible business model, nor would it require the FCC to monitor the ISPs. It would, however require that we enact law that legally defines the term "Internet access" as access to a 100% neutral network that will indiscriminately route information from and to any host that is also connected to the Internet. This along with some other non-government actions such as getting the word out on the benefits of a neutral Internet will be sufficient to allow market forces to shoot down a non-neutral Net. ISPs may freely offer whatever type of network they wish and discriminate all they wish; they simply can't call access to those networks "Internet access". If consumers know that they aren't on a free and open network, and they do have access to another truely free network, they would surely choose the open network. This may also require further miniciple goverment action to use tax dollars to build up Internet infrastructure so that consumers will have a choice of a free network when only 1 or 2 disciminatory ISPs offer service in their area, but once the infrastructure is in place, it could even be sold to private ISPs for management in the agreement that it remain a neutral network.

A note on getting iwlwifi drivers to work on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy

Okay. Big thanks to Jun for getting me started on getting rid of my buggy ipw3945 driver that started crashing on me out of nowhere and installing the iwlwifi drivers to support my Intel 3945 wireless card. I am very appreciative of his helpful walk-through, however, I ran into several hitches along the way, so to save myself, and anyone else who may encounter the problem considerable time in the future, I am making a note of it. As an aside, I have my Dell Inspiron 1420 laptop dual booting into Backtrack, and I have previously gone through the installation of the iwlwifi drivers to get my card to do injection on that distro.

From Jun's blog:

1. Download the linux-ubuntu-modules source package

sudo apt-get source linux-ubuntu-modules-`uname -r`

2. Edit the iwlwifi download script to fetch the latest drivers from http://www.intellinuxwireless.org
cd linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.22-2.6.22/ubuntu/wireless/iwlwifi
edit the BOM script file, set the correct versions and fix the firmware move, here is my diff:

@@ -4,10 +4,10 @@
# only need to do this when you are updating from one version
# if iwlwifi to the next.
#
-IVER=1.1.0
-MVER=10.0.0
-FW3945_VER=2.14.4
-FW4965_VER=4.44.17
+IVER=1.2.23
+MVER=10.0.4
+FW3945_VER=2.14.1.5
+FW4965_VER=4.44.1.20

if [ ! -f iwlwifi-${IVER}.tgz ] ; then wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-${IVER}.tgz; fi
if [ ! -f mac80211-${MVER}.tgz ] ; then wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/mac80211/downloads/mac80211-${MVER}.tgz; fi
@@ -24,13 +24,13 @@
# Note the '-1' in the new firmware file name.
#
tar xzf iwlwifi-3945-ucode-${FW3945_VER}.tgz
-mv iwlwifi-3945-ucode-${FW3945_VER}/iwlwifi-3945.ucode ../../../ubuntu-firmware/iwlwifi/iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode
+mv iwlwifi-3945-ucode-${FW3945_VER}/iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode ../../../ubuntu-firmware/iwlwifi/iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode
rm -rf iwlwifi-3945-ucode-${FW3945_VER}

#
# Note the '-1' in the new firmware file name.
#
tar xzf iwlwifi-4965-ucode-${FW4965_VER}.tgz
-mv iwlwifi-4965-ucode-${FW4965_VER}/iwlwifi-4965.ucode ../../../ubuntu-firmware/iwlwifi/iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode
+mv iwlwifi-4965-ucode-${FW4965_VER}/iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode ../../../ubuntu-firmware/iwlwifi/iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode
rm -rf iwlwifi-4965-ucode-${FW4965_VER}

3. Run the update script so it will fetch and patch the files.

./MUNGE

4. Rebuild the linux-unbuntu-modules, then reinstall the package.

fakeroot debian/rules binary-modules-generic
dpkg -i ../linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.22-14-generic_2.6.22-14.37_i386.deb

Now my wireless is working flawlessly.

Not so easy for me.

First off when running the debian/rules you have to make sure you are in the top level directory "linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.22-2.6.22/". This is probably obvious to some, and trivial, but it did trip me up so I am including it. (Also sudo before running "./MUNGE").

Next, I ran into a hiccup after the modules compiled when it tried to run a "dh_testdir". A quick google of the name, and I found that I needed to install the debhelper package which I remember from something else I did a while back is essential for building debian packages. I installed with

sudo apt-get install debhelper

and re-ran the debian/rules binary-modules-generic. This time, it created the .deb package smoothly (and it did not have to recompile all the modules).

The install of the deb package went fine as well, but then I ran into more problems.

1) You have to blacklist your ipw3945 drivers in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to keep it from starting every boot.
2) You need to add iwl3945 to /etc/modules so that it inserts the module on boot
3) To get rid of the funky crap you see when runing ifconfig (like eth1 showing up as Link encap: UNSPEC, and having the wlan0_ren as an additional interface) you need to open up /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and delete the two lines for the old interface using the ipw3945 driver. Mine looked like:

# PCI device 0x8086:0x4227 (ipw3945)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:13:02:4c:12:12",NAME="eth1

(Except for the mac address =P )

4) Unload and reload you iwl3945 module like:

sudo rmmod iwl3945
sudo modprobe iwl3945

Now you should have a new entry in your 70-persistent-net.rules file like:

# PCI device 0x8086:0x4222 (iwl3945)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:13:02:4c:12:12", ATTRS{type}=="1", NAME="wlan0"

And an ifconfig will show no more eth1 interface, but a wlan0, which should show up with the correct mac address. You will also have an additional entry called wmaster0, but this is normal. It is the same way for my Backtrack installation using the iwl3945 drivers. I have now spent quite a bit of time writing this as since I got the drivers working and I haven't had any problems. The ipw3945 drivers surely would have crashed by now, and I would have had to reboot.

Additional links I used in this process:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=579742
http://wiki.debian.org/iwlwifi#head-c9ab967d827d9e5de52656b78edab5f349bc70f6

Performance Enhancing Drugs

Athletes aren't the only ones doing it. A WebMD article covers a poll by the Nature magazine whos readers are mostly scientists says that 1 in 5 of the 1400 responders admitted to using cognitive enhancing drugs to boost mental performance. Drugs included were Ritalin, Provigil, and Inderal. I've never tried any of those, but I have taken an Aderall before to gear me up for 12+ hours of working chemistry problems to prepare for a final. The only side affect I didn't like was that it made me clench my jaw hard the whole time I was zoned in. It didn't seem like the same affect as coffee gives; it lulls you into an almost zombie-like and passive state, yet extremly focused at the same time. Not as jumpy or alert as coffee. It actually made working chemistry problems fun, in the sense that I was not at all easily distracted or uninterested, so I was super-productive.

Caffeine from very strong coffee, is all I really need.

Pwning the Power Grid

It's been common knowledge in the security arena for some time that our power grids have been vulnerable to attack. This article definitively proves it. The reason these SCADA systems have become so vulnerable is because they were not originally designed to be networked to the internet. If you are networked to a machine that is connected to the internet through a gateway, then you are also accessable from the internet. The number one culprit in this attack, as in most others, was a social engineering attack. Well, that, and vulnerable software that hadn't been upgraded. Specifically, a phishing email was sent that directed employees of the power company to a website that exploited a vulnerability to install some malware on their machine. From that point, the pen testers had full access to SCADA. "We had to shut down within hours," Winkler says, "because it was working too well. We more than proved that they were royally screwed."

We might be royally screwed if we don't pay attention to this, and some Islamic extremists exploit the vulnerability. This brings up a good point however, the penetration testers' highlighting of the problem is very important. Note, that it does not alert terrorists to the fact that they can do this; you can be sure they have thought about it. What this does is get the rest of us aware of our vulnerability so we can start to take steps to correct the situation.

1) Train employees to not open up bogus emails, or at least check the headers to see if it was actually sent from where it claims it is from, and also check out any url for links before clicking them. Just be suspicious (paranoid) and smart.

2) It might also help to disallow Javascript, java applets, or other forms of client side browser controllers. They could have used an exploit in flash or some other browser plugin. That information is not included in the article, probably for safety reasons.

3) Make sure software is up-to-date on security patches.

SELinux

I found this article through Bruce Schneier's blog. He asks, "So, do you trust it or not?" implying that perhaps the NSA has put some sort of backdoors into the distro, or perhaps included some flavor of encryption algorithm to which they possess a master key. Schneier has covered topics like this before on the NSA's "recommended" encryption algorithm.

Getting Programs to Run Automatically when Slackware Starts

I have recently cannibalized my old Linux server that was running Ubuntu Linux on a P3 933MHz machine and moved some of the parts over to a new machine with dual 800MHz P3 processors. I made the switch because my old machine just started acting weird, and got to where I could not even boot from a CD-ROM. I backed up all my files, bit the bullet, and got to work. I decided to install Slackware Linux on my new box. This was the first Linux distribution I ever used, and it is one that will teach you the most, because it does the least for you. Slackware is a hard core, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-down-to-the-nitty-gritty-details distribution of Linux, with the added benefit of being very stable and very fast, even on limited older hardware.

After setting up sshd server for remote login, I naturally wanted to harden it against attacks. A quick check of my logs after just 2 days of going live revealed that a host in Plano, Texas had already been attempting some basic dictionary attacks against my sshd server. They were just trying the usual bullshit, attempting to log in on names such as "user", "admin", "webmaster", and other typical names that no one with security in mind would ever actually set up on their server. The IP address of the offender is: 67.64.222.74, and a "whois" on www.dnsstuff.com will reveal that it is an IP address from Plano. A little more research told me that this IP belonged to Beaulieu Marketing Inc, so it is probably just a compromised box that they don't even realize has been hijacked.

Moving on, there is a great script out there written in Python by Phil Schwartz that scans your sshd log file for failed login attempts to your machine. You can configure it in different ways to ban the IP address of hosts that try to log in on different users. For instance, I have my denyhosts configuration file set up to ban immediately any user who attempts to log in on root (the superuser/administrator) and fails 1 time (this is a moot point anyway, as I disallow remote root login from my sshd config file). If they try to log in on an invalid user name, they only get 3 tries before they are banned. If it is a valid user name, then 10 tries. The script can be configured to run as often as you want in the background, e.g. every 10 minutes.

Another great program that I needed to get up and running is one called inadyn, which allows you to update you IP address with DynDNS service whenever it changes, so you can have a DNS name (e.g. google.com, telegraph.co.uk, etc) even when you don't pay your ISP for a static IP address. It will work behind a NAT router as well because it pings you from the outside. This is also a program that runs in the background and will connect to the DynDNS service and cause it to ping you from the outside , and if your IP address has changed and is different from what DynDNS has stored, it will update it in their system. This means that I can always access my home Linux server by using a dnsname like http://www.yourservername.com/ instead of having to remember my IP address whenever I leave my house. Plus, your IP address could change between the time you leave your house and try to access your server remotely leaving you SOL.

So, these two programs are great, but I needed to have them run automatically on boot, so I would not have manually restart them every time I reboot. Slackware uses a different system of starting programs and services at boot, than I was used to from Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, you simply make a symbolic link to the executable file you want to run in /etc/init.d/ with the appropriate prefix to dictate the order the programs are run at startup. Slackware, however, uses a BSD like system of rc.d, and this requires one to write shell scripts (#!/bin/sh NOT #!/bin/bash) to start your program up.

The execution chain starts with inittab still, so you have to make sure that, after you create your scripts in the /etc/rc.d directory, there is some chain of execution that eventually causes them to execute. And DO NOT add "exit 0" at the end of your scripts, as this will cause anything executed after them not to run because it closes the shell. Also the scripts must be made executable and must be owned by root:

$>chmod +x rc.inadyn
$>chown root rc.inadyn

and

$>chmod +x rc.denyhosts
$>chown root rc.denyhosts

These are the shell scripts I created:
rc.inadyn
**********************************

#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
'start')
/usr/bin/inadyn
;;
'stop')
pkill inadyn
;;
'reload''restart')
$0 stop
$0 start
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $0 startstoprestartreload"
exit 1
esac

*********************************
rc.denyhosts
*********************************

#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
'start')
/usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control start
;;
'stop')
/usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control stop
;;
'reload''restart')
/usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control restart
;;
'status')
/usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control status
;;
'debug')
/usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control debug
;;
'condrestart')
/usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control condrestart
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $0 startstoprestartreloadstatusdebugcondrestart"
exit 1
esac

*****************************

The following, I added to /etc/rc.M file which is run by init when multiuser mode starts:

# Start denyhosts.py to start scanning /var/log/messages
if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.denyhosts ]; then
echo "Starting Denyhosts daemon"
. /etc/rc.d/rc.denyhosts start
fi

# Start inadyn to update DynDNS
if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.inadyn ]; then
echo "Starting inadyn daemon"
. /etc/rc.d/rc.inadyn start
fi

Deep Packet Inspection - An Assault on Individual Privacy and on the Purity of Internet Protocol

Here is a Washington Post article on deep packet inspection, a practice by which ISP's will actually open up internet protocol packets as they traverse the ISP's network and look inside at the data portion of the packet. You can think of internet protocol packets as wrappers, with metadata information, that tell internet routers where to carry the data that is inside the packet that is actually used by end applications such as a web browser or email client. An analogy that is often made is that the data portion of the packet is like a letter and the metadata wrapper is like an envelope. Deep packet inspection, then, is equivalent to the mail carrier opening up your envelope and reading your letter. The purpose of ISP's using this technology now is for targeted advertising. This is not so bad by itself, especially as it seems from the article that the companies providing the DPI take great pains to not actually include any personally identifying information. And it seems that they do allow a customer to opt out of the DPI, although it is stated that most customers don't even know that this is happening because the information is burried in a 27 page sign-up agreement with the ISP.

"Each company allows users to opt out of the monitoring, though that permission is buried in customer service documents. The opt-out systems work by planting a 'cookie,' or a small file left on a user's computer. Each uses a cookie created by NebuAd."

The main problem I have with this is that it can and will eventually be used for giving priority to certain packets based on what is inside them. I have a problem with this, because for one, the protocols that make up the internet were designed in a tiered manner, where each tier is designed to function completely independently of any layers that are on top of it and that depend on it. Internet Protocol is layer 3 and deep packet inspection is peeking at layer 5, or the application layer: also the highest layer. Tier 3 is just designed to get the packets where they need to go. It does not care what is inside them. Deep packet inspection blurs the well-defined line between the layers and pollutes a pristine protocol that was designed in a tiered manner for very good reasons. Upper layer protocols can rely on the lower layer protocols to do their jobs correctly every time. They do not need to implement or even understand all the complexity and details of having it function correctly. This functionality is abstracted and the higher levels trust the lower levels to "just work," and therefore, the higher levels can be much more productive because the wheel doesn't need to be reinvented for every application. The writer of a letter does not need to know exactly how his letter is transported from source to destination. The writer just trusts the mail system. Also, as any programmer (or anyone who has ever had to solve a problem) knows, abstraction of details into discreet and separate components helps in debugging and troubleshooting problems because the exact location of an error or problem can be much more effectively isolated than when everything is just garbled together in an unintelligable mass. It just makes it harder to deal with!

Secondly, deep packet inspection is evil because it threatens Net Neutraility
in a big way. Eventually, if not already in practice, ISP's will start giving lower priority to internet traffic based on content. They will slow down the packets transporting internet game data, torrent data, and possibly even any type of traffic that is negative toward, cable, if you use cable, or satellite, if you use satellite.

The point is, do you really want your ISP spying onto you by reading your traffic? I would suggest that everyone call their ISP and find out if they use deep packet inspection techniques, and if so, find out how you can opt out of this discraceful privacy infringing practice.

TSA

This is ridiculous. I don't know about the rest of the world, but it really doesn't make me any less stressed out in an airport to know I am being carefully scrutinized by Behavior Detection Officers. What would happen if I fart in the middle of a crowd and start looking around nervously to see if my chemical release has been detected by the cute airplane screener lady? Will the Behavior Detection Officers notice this shifty behavior and arrest me?

An Analogy or a Metaphor

I am currently in my senior year of my undergraduate curriculum and I have been taking a substantial load this semester. I am developing a project for my Senior Design class, one for Honors Thesis, and another for AI (I will possibly post on these at a later date). In addition to these senior level courses, I am also taking a freshmen level course. That's right, I did something I will not recommend to anyone entering college: put off freshmen English courses until the last minute. I often think of a metaphor to describe my current course load.

"I am ascending a large hill at the apex of which is my goal: graduation and my BS in computer science. My honors thesis is a heavy backpack full of books. It would not be hard trying to climb this hill with only the backpack. But alas, I also have my Artificial Intelligence project which is a large duffle bag I am carrying under one arm. This slows my progress slightly, but it is not a journey-ending hindrance. Then my Senior Design project is a large ball and chain straight out of a Bugs Bunny episode clamped firmly around my right foot, and I am just dragging that son-of-a-bitch with all my might. Now I am still creeping up the hill, making it one inch at a time. On top of all this, my English course is this really fucking small dog that keeps running up and biting the shit out of my left Achilles tendon. This would just be an annoyance, but with all the weight I am carrying up the hill, it is threatening to topple me over."

Moral of the metaphor:

Don't put off your freshman English courses, boys and girls. I am not intending to imply that these courses are unimportant; simply that it is not an ideal situation to be taking a class that, while not necessarily difficult, requires substantial outside time to invest in writing papers, etc. This is time taken away from working on projects. It seems like every time I turn around, I have another assignment in English.

Regular Languages

This will be a blog containing my thoughts on programming techniques, languages, and projects, as well as my random thoughts on science of all kinds (mainly physics of the really small and really big). I will cover some aspects of information security, as I am very interested in the subject. I may also cover politics from time to time as it relates to my other interests. I will probably also post current events that I am experiencing and feel like writing about at any given time.

The reason for the title is that I will express myself in a regular fashion, much like a regular language. For any who don't know what a regular language is, it is a language that can be accepted by a DFA, an NFA (as in my display name), or an e-NFA. It is also a language that can be expressed by a regular expression or generated by a regular grammar. That is as far as I am prepared to go into that subject at this time. Wikipedia is great if you want to learn more. I often find myself recursively searching wikipedia; digging down into tangential subjects before coming back to the original thing I was reading.