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Category Archives: Geek Horror

A Bad Apple

17 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by Ed Mahoney in cyber war, Geek Horror, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

all writs act, privacy, tim cook open letter

apple n worm

All you need to know in terms of Tim Cook vs the FBI is Donald Trump’s position on the matter.  Trump believes Apple is in the wrong and should be forced to provide the government with a backdoor hack into their iPhone.  Because he believes national security trumps personal privacy.  This is actually true – in China.  And Russia.  If you already take issue with this self-made celebrity, then you can assume Apple is right.

To be fair, and less political, personal privacy is a complex issue.  The U.S. Constitution references no protections for personal privacy.  The Bill of Rights however references numerous Amendments that allude to privacy.  Privacy of beliefs, privacy in your home, privacy of person and possessions against unreasonable search and seizure.  I think the list goes on but I’m not a lawyer and can’t defend any of them.  I do know Americans expect a certain degree of privacy and the government has the authority and corresponding legal process to transcend our privacy given sufficient warrant.  In this case, the FBI is leveraging the All Writs Act to demand that Apple engineer a new IOS version that disables the feature that would wipe the iPhone data after 10 unsuccessful login attempts.  This would allow the FBI to subsequently hack into the iPhone with a brute force password attack.

Precedent is set that allows the government to do this.  Shoot, there is even a recent case where the U.S. Attorney’s Office forced another smart phone manufacturer to unlock a screenlock.  But Apple is refusing to comply.  Tim Cook wrote an open letter explaining why.  He frames his argument from his customers’ perspective.  But just think about the consequences for his company.  Apple is being forced to weaken their product in a global market and their competitors are not being forced to do this.  They will immediately be at a competitive disadvantage in a global market for their most successful product.  Game over for the iPhone.

And recall, corporations are deemed people by the Supreme Court.  Apple will have all of the same assurances to privacy, to protection from self incrimination, to a right to earn a living.  They have every right to do business as any American as an individual.  They have the resources and will win this battle.

Why is it so hard to take a position on personal privacy vs State security?  The State has laws and legal precedent allowing them to violate your personal privacy.  We have laws and legal precedent allowing us to refuse, assuming we have the financial resources to fight.  But encryption just sort of breaks everything.  Encryption means, even if the government gets their way, they might not be technically able to have their way.  You can’t hand them the keys to your data if you’re dead.  Encryption puts the government in a real pickle.

This will be the data privacy fight of the new millennium.  This will be good.

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Trolling

18 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

1-9-90 rule, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Internet TV, Marshall McLuhan, original content, trolls, Walter Cronkite, you've got mail

Internet-Troll-Pictures

What’s a troll?  Most people understand trolls come from Norse mythology and you probably picture one exacting a toll from anyone trying to cross its bridge.  So then, what is trolling?  The bridge toll metaphor extends to some asshat commenting ugly remarks on your social network.

trolls

Why do trolls do this?  I don’t know but there is extensive information on the psychology of this habit online if you google the topic.  Trump’s tweets border on trolling.  My goal here is to put you at ease with social networking, despite the trolls and seemingly dangerous personal privacy concerns.

internet-trolls-online-provocateurs-troll-ipredator-image

I see this message as important because the vitriolic rhetoric has been increasing lately on the social networks I participate in, and I don’t see the noise abating anytime soon.  Not with us entering the final throws of an election season.  And I don’t want my friends and family psyched out and tuning out.  I know you probably only want to see pictures of your grandkids.  It irritates you to get friend requests from friends of your kids whom you don’t know.  Do what I do.  Accept their requests out of politeness and then immediately unfollow them.  That way you will never see their posts.  They will still see yours’ but only if you actually post stuff and many of you don’t.  This is also important because social networking is not going away.

YOUVE-GOT-MAIL

My comfort level participating on the Internet might be partly my personality but I suspect it mostly stems from my job.  My I/T career put me online.  Before the Internet, I was on CompuServe.  Online communication is the company culture at IBM.  That was curious to me when I joined IBM in the early ’90s because I came from the phone company where we never answered email.  We were all about voice mail.  Now everyone is on email.  Remember “You’ve Got Mail” from 1998?  We’re way past that now and today we are all on Facebook.  1.55 billion of us at last count.  The Internet only has 3 billion users so that’s like saying half the world.  It’s nearly a quarter of the real world.

walter cronkite

Let me digress even further, although I promise this is relevant to my point.  Walter Cronkite is often associated with America losing the war in Vietnam.  The phrase, “the Vietnam War was lost on television” came from Marshall McLuhan.  It’s probably also fair to say that Carter lost the Hostage Crisis on television, to Ted Koppel.  And the first Gulf War was won on television with General Schwarzkopf and CNN.  And then came the Internet.  McLuhan’s other popular phrase is, “the medium is the message.”  I suspect you are way ahead of me by now and I probably don’t need to even say this, but the war on terror will be fought on Facebook.

We’ve all seen this war playing out on Facebook over the last couple of weeks.  The online social medium changes our experience from the television in our living room to our mobile device or desktop computer.  Facebook is just another channel like CBS News, but with one important difference.  It’s more immediately participatory.  What do I mean by that?  TV, then and mostly still, is a one-to-many broadcast.  Within a few years, by merging picture-in-picture (PIP) technology with the Internet, it will more closely resemble Facebook, which is a many-to-many broadcast.  A party line.  Know that the speed of the Internet adds velocity to the spread of ideas.  Including bad ones.

google-tv

So the Internet and social networking has extended your living room to a much wider audience.  To the entire world ostensibly although really just to your online contacts factored by some multiplier of your friends’ friends.  Unless of course your big game hunting photos go viral.  And this makes many of you uncomfortable.

Doesn’t matter how uncomfortable you are.  You have a role to play.  Let me explain the 1-9-90 rule.  It’s sometimes compared to the 80/20 pareto principle, although I would argue it’s much different because everyone participates in 1-9-90.  I first read about it as part of teacher education studies.  Let me start with that example.  In a classroom, there is one teacher producing all the content.  A handful, 9%, comment by raising their hand and asking questions.  The point of the teaching studies is that the remaining 90%, sitting contently and following the conversations, are still participating.  They learn by listening to the question and answer.  Maybe they listen in math class, but ask questions in social studies where they have more confidence on the content.

pinterest-content

Do you ever post content?  Are you the 1%?  The teacher?  Do you ever comment?  Are you the 9%, at least on some of your friend’s content if not to every post?  A like is the same as commenting.  I post content.  Much of it is via my blog and I leverage various social networks as distribution channels.  I think I prefer blogging for its ability to format text and pictures.  People quick at observational humor are good on Twitter.  I’d probably pay to subscribe to my sister-in-law’s tweets, she’s that clever.

Doesn’t matter if you aren’t the 1%.  Don’t feel obligated.  My focus is on the 90%.  The 9% are still contributing, perhaps even with original content.  This is where trolls tend to play, although trolls can be found in the 1% too.  I suspect most of them are too dull though to produce original thought.  They are nothing though if not confident and steadfast in their beliefs.  I try to avoid trolls but will find myself in heated debates with marginally more cordial but equally unyielding commenters.

I never actually care about winning a debate with the commenter though.  I don’t expect to change someone’s fundamental beliefs.  Not without hitting them over the head with a hammer.  My audience is always the 90%.  The much larger audience reading the comments.  Some are still forming their opinions.  That’s why they’re reading the comments.  They find it interesting.  And that’s why it’s important to remain respectful and if possible, write well-reasoned arguments.  But for the 90%, not the 9%.  Screw the 9%, they’re a bunch of asshats anyway.  I would know.

DontFeedTheTrolls

Sorry this post is so long.  I have the day off from work.  Do you see where I’m going with this?  You might not be an original content producer.  You might not even comment.  But you are being influenced by online commentary.  I can say that because you’re reading this.  I can even suggest you might be more influenced online than by your television because this year Cyber Monday might just exceed Black Friday purchases.  Don’t be a troll, but don’t get turned off by all the rhetoric either.  Understand that you’re a participant whether you comment or not.  The world is a stage and you’re on it.

 

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Auto Future

16 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

car sharing, Honda Odyssey, ride sharing

future-car-concept

It feels disingenuous to write about running considering I can’t remember the last time I ran.  A good two weeks ago for sure.  I could talk politics, my undergrad was poly-sci, but am a little burned out on that topic.  I’m hoping to be able to lay low on my political views until maybe the Iowa caucuses, when polls start to actually matter and he who shall not be named will begin to fade.  So let me tell you about my new car.  I mean my new used car.

We traded in our mini van for yet another mini van.  Same model – Honda Odyssey.  As unremarkable as that sounds, we bought one that isn’t much newer either, in terms of make.  It has half the miles and the annual service costs will be significantly cheaper.  That’s about it.  We bought used because I’m not certain I can afford a new car.  I could lease one but I’m not totally on board with that concept either.  I’ve yet to come to terms with paying for a car what I paid for my first house.  Am I the only one to feel this way?

We’ve always bought new cars in the past but I just can’t do it anymore.  Actually, I bought my last car used too, for Brittany.  I’m not all that convinced I even need a car.  Right about now you must be thinking I’m a cheap bastard, but I seriously don’t think I need a car.  The mini van is for Karen.  We only have one car.  I’ve been working from home for the last 7 years and most everything I need is within a 3 block radius.  My friends.  My doctor.  My chiropractor.  Restaurants.  Coffee shops.  The bottle shop.  And for anything I can’t walk to, I have wifi.  Suburbs are for suckers.  And car owners.

I’m beginning to sense this might sound like a rant that makes me appear poor.  And I understand the Facebook convention is to post content that makes me look rich and successful.  I invented social networking so don’t tell me what to post.  The average price for a new car costs more than a 4 year college degree, and everyone’s complaining about the price of college.  I’m telling you this is an issue.

For my part, I’m holding out for as long as I can to own a single car.  The bus picks up right outside my front door.  I’m a big Uber fan and occasionally I rent a car if the need arises.  Cheaper than a monthly car payment.  I understand there is a trend that forecasts people will stop buying cars.  Uber is termed ride sharing while short-term (as in hourly) car rentals is called car sharing.  It’s an urban thing.  I have a neighbor who lets me borrow her spare car when the need arises.  I’m at the forefront of car sharing.  And I score bonus points for minimizing my carbon footprint.  Am I alone on this?  Or am I just cheap?

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Unlimited

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

AT&T, price increase, unlimited data plan

data plan

I’m not happy about this.  Three of my five iPhones are under the grandfathered unlimited data plan, so my increase will actually be $15 per month rather than just $5.  But the lying marketing doesn’t stop there.

AT&T stopped offering unlimited data plans a couple of years after the initial iPhone launch, and that’s technically a price increase.  It’s why I pay more for my two other iPhones.  My perspective is of a single payment plan, not a single iPhone.

This is technology.  Prices are expected to go down, not up.  So bragging about their first (but not really their first) price increase in 7 years is bullshit.  Network bandwidth and speeds benefit from a phenomenon similar to Moore’s Law for CPUs.  Nielsen’s Law states that bandwidth doubles about every two years, with all else (like price) being equal.

internet-bandwidth-nielsens-law-1983-2914

I don’t know if there’s much I can do about this.  I suspect AT&T is still my cheapest option.  But I can blog my displeasure.  Any thoughts?  Should I switch my five iPhones?

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Cross Border Data Flow

06 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in cyber war, Geek Horror

≈ 4 Comments

education-ukeulitigation

The U.S. completed their Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal yesterday.  If signed by Congress, this will lower trade barriers to the import and export of physical goods.  How quaint in the Information Age.  Today, the European Union Court of Justice declared the U.S. Safe Harbor policy for demonstrating compliance with the EU Directive for Data Privacy to be invalid.  EU 1 : Pacific Rim 0.

I don’t know of the availability of any stats that show the value of global trade in information vs physical goods bought and sold, but I’m willing to guess data is at least more strategic if not already more valuable.  Explaining the details of the EU Data Privacy Directive, Safe Harbor, and this new ruling isn’t my objective here.  Much of it is very legal in nature and over my head.  My goal with my cyber security series is to offer a basic primer on topics I deem of interest.  At issue here is data privacy, specifically personally identifiable data or PI.

My 13 year old daughter is uncomfortable with the notion that data can never be fully erased with any certainty.  I don’t know why or how she developed this very specific concern, likely something to do with the proliferation of online photos.  She is totally aware of the EU’s Right to be Forgotten ruling wherein citizens can demand their online references be deleted by digital firms such as Google and Facebook.  Understand that the EU considers personal privacy to be a basic human right.

The irony here is in the arrogance of any U.S. citizens who think we invented personal privacy.  Indeed, the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”  Or stated more plainly, “Each man’s home is his castle.”  Well that was written over 200 years ago.  Post-911, the U.S. has conceded leadership on the personal privacy front to Europe.

I probably shouldn’t reveal what I really think because I suspect I’m on the wrong side of history here, but I will.  I don’t believe in personal privacy.  I want it to a degree but I certainly don’t think of it as a basic human right.  I can assure you there was little to no personal privacy when humans were living in caves.  Were Adam and Eve not born naked?  And yet I do like the 4th Amendment.  I believe we need a balance between personal privacy and the benefits that the sharing of personal information ascribes to a society – like security.  An example of that is the Patriot Act.  This latest EU ruling impacts a more commercial benefit, such as advertising.

I don’t think I’m alone on this one.  Anyone reading this is online and therefore highly likely also surrendering a large degree of their personal data privacy to social networks.  You’ve probably granted Facebook complete digital rights to more family photos than your parents ever collected in photo albums.  There are benefits to sharing.  And I don’t believe we ever, ever had complete personal privacy; so I don’t think of it as a basic human right.  No man is an island.  In the end, I imagine personal data privacy will be determined more by technological capabilities than regulation.  Your data is only as secure as your encryption.  I’m interested in comments.

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Who Moved my Data Center?

30 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cloud, IBM, LoDo, Union Station

data center bookIn case you don’t know, the cloud is a data center.  Blaine Berger misses the opportunity to answer that key question for the billions of mobile users with this book, but he does speak to much more than arcane data centers.  This is a primer for any budding project manager.  In only 160 pages.  Everyone I work with, and the other 400,000 IBMers I’ve yet to virtually meet on a conference call, should read this book.

If we can substitute the term cloud for data center, and we can, Blaine references his experiences sailing through perfect storms.  Because I grew up in data centers, and should have been fired for numerous large scale outages, each story made me anxious.  I found myself wanting a bigger boat before Blaine would get too far into the details of each data center move.

Fortunately, Blaine applied effective humor to calm my nerves.  I wouldn’t say he used repetition per se, but his lessons built on themselves to where I definitely felt more wise by the end.  Everyone who works in I/T knows computers don’t work and that Murphy’s Law is simply a warmup for dealing with the complexities of installing networks.  This book advises you on how to be prepared.  It’s boy scout meets geek.

I attended Blaine’s book publishing party last night at the Lola Mexican Fish House.  It allowed me to network a little, which I rarely do.  Although I eventually ended up ensconced at a table with four retired IBMers.  Go figure.  As Blaine spoke to the crowd to thank everyone, he began by stating, “We are all authors now.”  The self-centered person I am, I took this as a personal dig toward my blogging.  But then I learned he’s been saying this for awhile and has written several other tech books.  And with scores of others in the room, it is possible he wasn’t merely talking to me.

I left the fish house for another restaurant, because I wanted to explore the Union Station area of Denver before going home.  I ate a small plate of lamb tartare at Colt & Gray with a glass of Coté du Rhone, while swarms of runners buzzed past.  Apparently no one runs alone in LoDo, they all belong to huge teams.  I did miss my evening run for this book affair, but it was worth it.  I took an Uber home after a 3 minute wait.  Enjoyable evening.

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Broadband

21 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Marshall McLuhan, net neutrality

RG6 CableI recently blogged in favor of net neutrality.  To be clear, I don’t think regulation is the answer.  In fact, I believe regulation is as much the problem as greedy broadband providers; but I’m against the notion that cable operators charge additionally for content that doesn’t originate on their network.  Pick your poison.

Just when you think you might understand this net neutrality issue, and be honest, you don’t, not really; a story comes out the other day about content providers actually lobbying the broadband providers for guaranteed bandwidth.  The exact same thing, only the content providers are requesting this rather than the broadband providers forcing it on them.  Hmm. Net neutrality was designed to protect content providers from having to pay extra, but apparently some want to.  And make no mistake, these are content providers with deep pockets.  Sony.  HBO.  Showtime.  Note, they are also traditional TV content providers and not a Facebook or YouTube.

Clearly, some trend is underway to explain this.  It’s easy enough to assume these content producers are positioning themselves for the eventual transition of content delivery to the Internet.  That seems to be what’s behind all these related stories.  Marshall McLuhan professed that all new media are destined to subsume and extend all old media, and to use the old media as their content.  I’m fairly certain that if I understand what Marshall meant by this, then it would explain this transition of broadcast television to the Internet.  Not that I feel any dumber than the media companies.  They’ve been positioning themselves for decades with cable companies acquiring content companies and content companies merging with cable companies.  And then they split up.  I don’t think they have a clue how this will play out either.

But that’s their problem.  I thought I would provide some details here to help explain just how certain content could be expedited by your provider.  The original plan by the cable companies was to regulate the flow of Internet traffic.  They can do this by tagging the data packets as they flow through their network switching equipment and assigning more or less bandwidth to the data session.  I don’t know if they do this by leveraging the Quality of Service field of bits in the IP header, but there is an actual QoS field in IP headers, as well as in other transmission protocols, that can be modified for this purpose.  This is how VLANs and MPLS work, if you’re familiar with those transmission protocols.  They know the source and destination of each packet and they tag them to control their flow.  But the recent net neutrality regulations nixed that plan.

The story I linked above is about a proposal to provide media outlets whom are willing to pay, essentially a TV channel.  It would be a data service, Internet traffic rather than television signals, but carved out of a separate slice of bandwidth on the cable.  They term this capability a “managed service”.  It’s not clear yet if the regulators will allow it.  Nor is it clear the cable providers care to offer it.  But just how is this different?

A friend recently asked me to define broadband.  It’s worth understanding.  The term has a very specific meaning to network engineers; but about the time dial up was giving way to DSL and cable, network marketers co-opted the term to simply mean fast.  It didn’t help that the FCC further diluted the term by defining it as a specific data rate.  2 or 4 Mbps initially.  Just recently the FCC redefined it to mean 25 Mbps or faster.  They do this to regulate the providers to be more innovative; prompting their national deployment of faster speeds because regulated companies aren’t thought to be innovative.  That sentence made sense in my head, not sure it actually does now that I wrote it.  Regardless, I can assure you that speed does not define broadband.  Broadband is the transmission of multiple signals on a single medium.

Think of how your radio works.  Or broadcast TV.  Without detailing the entire electromagnetic spectrum, understand that FM radio and broadcast television operate in a frequency range from 30 to 300 MHz.  You might listen to radio station 93.7.  That’s a signal transmitted at 93.7 Mhz.  The allotted frequency would be somewhat bigger, perhaps from 93.6 to 93.8 – I don’t actually know, but a frequency range is provided to carry the signal.  In the open air, this is not considered broadband.  Multiplexing multiple channels onto a single wire would be broadband, and this is what cable providers do.  You de-multiplex the signals with a tuner or remote.  It might help to think of the opposite of broadband.  There is a term called narrowband, but in this context the opposite technology is called baseband.  That is what ethernet is.  A single medium with a single channel.  Sort of.  10Base T on cat 5 cable is 10 Mbps of bandwidth operating over 2 twisted pairs of wire in a 4 pair configuration in full duplex mode.  1000BaseT (1 Gbps) uses all four wire pairs.  This gets complicated but those 8 wires are considered a single medium and transport a single channel.  Take from this that if you have 5 computers in your house on ethernet, they each take turns to communicate.  Very fast turns, but they are sharing a single channel, and the more computers running on that ethernet, the slower your potential speed.

Broadband transmits multiple signals, or channels, on a single medium.  It generally consists of a different type of wire, coax rather than twisted pair (telephone wire).  While technology continues to increase the capacity of cable types, specific medium will always be superior in terms of potential bandwidth.  Ethernet over telephone wire doubled its use of wires from 4 (2 pair) to 8 (4 pair) as it increased its data rate from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps.  There is even a 10 Gbps version now.  Coax has also advanced, but switching to fiber to the home is what will be the medium of choice for gigabit data speeds.

Sony, HBO and Showtime are proposing their television channels be transmitted as data.  TV signals are mostly already transmitted as digital.  The difference is packaging them within the IP protocol, as all Internet traffic is transmitted.  Then you won’t need a TV tuner, simply your computer.  The point is that televisions are going away.  As analog gave way to digital, TVs will be vanquished by computer monitors or TV tuners replaced by computers, because their transmission methods are coalescing.

I took liberties with some of my technical explanations here so I wouldn’t copy paste this into any school essays, but hope this helps as a primer for understanding the very near future.  And by the way, Marshall McLuhan has some great quotes.  “The medium is the message.”  “Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America, not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”  And, unrelated to media but a good one, “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth.  We are all crew.”  Good guy to read up on.

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BYOE

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in cyber war, Geek Horror, Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

BYOD, compliance, email, hdr22@clintonemail.com, Hillary Clinton

email chainI’m not sure whether to file this one under Cyber War or Geek Horror.  The subject matter fits under Cyber War.  My goal with cyber war is to discuss topics of interest while sneaking in a bit of a computer security primer for friends and family.  But Hillary’s Bring Your Own Email to work story also smacks of tech gone horribly wrong.  And I don’t have enough stories in that genre.  I’ll classify this under both categories.

Hillary has yet to respond so it’s premature for me to comment, but this is a blog.  She might surprise us by stating other reasons once she does respond, but the general consensus at this point in time is that the Clintons are private people (no really, everyone is saying this on the air about the most public figures in America) and they have lessons learned from their share of lawsuits and subpoenas.  So I don’t question Hillary’s desire to set up an email server at home before beginning her tenure as Secretary of State to maintain a degree of privacy.  In fact, and I’m still struggling to digest this, it’s common practice for high-level politicos.  Apparently there’s a strong market for consultants to set up personal email servers for public figures.

I can even relate to Hillary, and so can you.  Does your employer support BYOD in the workplace?  You know, Bring Your Own Device to work?  Mine does.  If they didn’t, they would have to buy 450,000 $500 smart phones for us all.  Do the math on that.  This is a real trend.  You use your personal iPhone to access your company email.  You use your iPad to access company databases while sitting on your couch and also drafting your fantasy football team.  The tradeoff is that you install your company’s computing policy onto your phone.  That sets configuration specs such as the complexity of your password and how often you have to change it.  And we’re as okay with this as we are with granting Facebook complete copyright to our family photo library.

Do you think Hillary complied with State Department computing policies on her home email server?  The discussion to date is about her operating within the guidelines (at the time) of leveraging a personal email account for official business.  My point is there is so much more to comply with.  All of us working from home at the remote end of a VPN tunnel understand that we’re the weak link in the corporate security chain.  We have family members accessing our keyboard.  We allow guests on our wifi.  Shoot, I use my personal MacBook Pro as my primary work computer.  I also sacrifice half my CPU utilization to my company’s AV and computing policy auditing software.  Some people use their work computer to host their personal pictures, play their music, and send personal email.  I prefer to subject my personal MacBook Pro to crippling corporate security and compliance software in order to use a single device.  Before that, I used two devices.

No one is talking about this yet but my concern is that Hillary did none of this.  Maybe she ran AV software.  Well of course she did.  Computers don’t run for very long if you don’t.  Point is, how would we know?  How would the State Department I/T staff know?  And AV is just one small example.  There are many essential security practices that must be followed.  Once that home email server is compromised, it can then email malware to heads of state!  I’m trying to remain optimistic.  Maybe this server was supported by a special team of State Department I/T staff.  That’s not unusual at all for C-levels at large corporations.  But stories like this remind us not to be surprised when common sense is ignored by people who should know better.  Lost in this week’s news, General David Patraeus reached a plea agreement for sharing extremely confidential information with his biographer/lover.  Trust no one.

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Net Neutrality

26 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

broadband, Cable, comcastfail, competition, FCC

fccThis isn’t complicated.  The broadband providers are lying.  They are spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt on innovation and privacy.  All lies.  I watched a clip of Mark Cuban recently warning against net neutrality that was so blatantly disingenuous it was comical.  He began by arguing for web traffic prioritization because the Internet won’t work otherwise.  “Bit are bits.”  He ended with a tangent into hacking.  He could not have tried harder to steer people from a real understanding of this topic.

First, cable companies are already regulated.  They were initially granted monopoly control over cable access to your home so their rates and service levels are regulated.  And because charging you $300 a month isn’t enough for them, they don’t want to be regulated over broadband too.  Broadband in this sense refers to your Internet access.  In their defense, their dilemma is that television is migrating to the Internet.  All content is moving to the Internet.  Bits are bits.  But they’re the geniuses who piled data on top of their regulated cable.  Right after they added voice.

My position is I pay for a specific data rate and I expect all content to be delivered at the full rate I’m subscribed to.  Likewise, content providers buy bandwidth from their provider.  Prioritization is a scheme to charge for bandwidth from content providers who are connected to another bandwidth provider’s network.  This is about double dipping.  It’s about greed.  I’m not a fan of regulation, but these guys are already regulated.  I expect the bandwidth I paid for.  In a few weeks, I’ll be switching providers, receiving 20 times my current 50 MB at half the price.  Start using my iCloud email now because I’ll be dropping my Comcast account soon.

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Stuxnet

07 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by Ed Mahoney in cyber war, Geek Horror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cyber war, virus, worm

My favorite story in the news right now is confirmation of sorts that the U.S. and Israel launched a first-strike in cyber warfare against the Iranian nuclear jihad.  One of the more fun debates is political party rhetoric about the importance of confidential information – they want to find the source of the leaks.  Nevermind the stuxnet wiki article at the time of me writing this blog already quotes from Gary Samore as an early White House leaker.  So there are discussions of that nature.

Of course I read blogs on cyber security and anything else I’m currently interested in.  I discovered a pattern with this topic – the industry I work in.  Everything I read takes the position that cyber war is bad.  This only leads to an escalation in cyber warfare.  Stuxnet points to the need for more protection.

I couldn’t disagree more.  I felt compelled to comment on a recent blog but noticed the site was an aggregator.  The blog itself looked well read but I didn’t like the idea of publishing my content to this site that’s nothing more than an index selling advertisement.  It seemed like less of a professional dialog* and more of being part of someone’s business model.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it occurs to me I have my own digital presence.  So rather than comment on that blog – I’ll blog it myself.

My position is this.  These security industry analysts are looking at this from inside the fish bowl.  In the context of a safe and free Internet and online commerce, this is a setback.  This is an escalation of arms and advances the bad guys.  In fact, by definition of cyber warfare, the bad guys are the government.

I look at this from the context of war.  A conventional approach to international conflict is to start out small and progress your actions slow enough so that they can be monitored by other nations and even weighed in on.  Going to the UN first or establishing a block-aid before the actual bombing of humans.  In the context of preemptive strikes, I’d personally prefer getting hit with a computer worm.  Cyber war is good.

Yes, cyber war leads to civilian casualties.  I’d argue maybe the damage is on par with a block-aid.  I understand Iran lost several months of production on their centrifuge operations.  In the context of war, this isn’t nearly as bad as the enemy sinking a passenger ship to stop the flow of supplies.  It’s a reasonable, less harmful approach in terms of human life.

I can’t interpret a blog written by someone in the computer security industry well enough to say what the blogger’s motives are.  I just know it’s bullshit taking the position this is bad for the industry.  Any company making security products or providing security services benefits from this.  The Cold War didn’t hurt the Defense Industry.  They say even art excels during times of war.  Innovation explodes in times of conflict.

Whatever your qualms over cyber warfare, get over it.  It beats real attacks against humans.  It promotes growth of the industry.  Turn your focus to lessons learned.  How successful was the attack at mitigating Iran’s nuclear development.  How fast did production return to normal – what was the downtime?  Was this effective in the context of international conflict?

* Poetic license on “dialog” because in social networking it’s really a broadcast.  A many-to-many discussion.  A party line.

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We Are Marshall

06 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Domain, MoPac

I bought these Marshall iPhone headphones knowing I’ll be using my iPhone for conference calls all day long for the next few weeks rather than a land line.  And after first using them for music, I was a happy boy with their quality.  I just knew I would not want a bluetooth ear piece or ear buds stuck in my ear all day.  I’ll wear ear buds running – although rarely these days – but I’m generally dissatisfied with that experience.  I like the big ole comfy headset.

Today was their first run in production and turns out comfort wasn’t the issue – echo was.  I never heard echo myself but I had people complain on several conference calls.  I could go on mute and solve the problem although I wasn’t sure it was me.  People would hang up and redial to try to solve the problem – apparently it was pretty annoying.  Then I called Karen later in the afternoon and discovered it was me.  Funny thing is she didn’t hear it from her iPhone, but her signal was weak and she called me back from a land line.  Then she heard it confirming I was the culprit.  I unplugged my headset and the echo went away.  But I was devastated.  I really liked my Marshall headphones.

So what does a guy like me do next?  I googled the heck out the situation.  Turns out it’s not the headphones per se, but my iPhone 4s.  A good number of iPhone 4s owners are reporting this problem.  And here’s where it gets weird.  You can mitigate the echo by cycling through the speaker phone.  Your call participants hear an echo, hit your speaker button on and off.  Unfortunately this might only fix the echo temporarily.  The good news is it appears Apple will replace the iPhone.  There’s an Apple Store at the Domain off MoPac.  I’ll be setting up an appointment for this weekend.

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Search Results

02 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

istock, stats, voyeur

If you’re a web voyeur, and most of you are, I think you might enjoy this.  Click on the picture to the left to view a large enough image to read.  This is a partial list of the searches people have entered into Google, or Bing or whatever search engine which has lead them to my blog over the last 30 days.  While I get a few regular hits from friends and family, most of my readers come from searches.

Don’t be insulted by the term voyeur.  It’s a general term ascribed to people who read blogs, forums, facebook etc. but rarely if ever produce content.  Information on this topic I’ve read indicate 90% of participants in basically anything are voyeurs, while another 9% participate – leaving 1% as the original content producers.  This (assuming you even believe it) can be mapped to facebook users as well as the typical classroom where there is one teacher, a handful of students who ask questions, and the remaining class sit and listen.  It’s the remainder that sit and listen whom are referred to as voyeurs.  But the point of the studies I’ve read is that even the voyeurs contribute by means of learning and perhaps later sharing in other forum.  So the term is not intended to be derogatory.  And there’s a name for this ratio but I forget what it is.  Whatever, I may have digressed.

Back to my search results.  I am as voyeuristic as anyone.  I get such a kick out of reading some of these stats.  I don’t know who actually reads my blog because like in facebook readers are anonymous, but I do get some fun stats like these search terms.  Because I didn’t capture the entire list above, you won’t see many of the search terms that include the word “porn”.  It’s unbelievable what some people are looking for.  And they can be so specific.  Like “cross country runner porn”.  Seriously?  Still, other terms are pretty boring.  I get a lot of hits on the term “iStock” because I buy many of my pics from that site and the word iStock is in the file name.  You might think searches only find blogs that have the term listed in the tags, but search engines actually index the entire web page.  Tags are a bit superfluous nowadays.  If you’re curious, click on the image and take a peek.

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Web Security

12 Saturday Feb 2011

Posted by Ed Mahoney in cyber war, Geek Horror

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

botnet, comcast, computer security, cyberwar, gnutella, illegal file sharing, pwn

This was annoying.  I received an abuse letter (email) from Comcast, my ISP, last night.  For copyright infringement related to the illegal file sharing of some inane Kanye West song.  I’ve appended their email to the end of this blog.  The first thought that ran through my mind was, “Really, I have a Kanye West song?”  So my first action was to query my iTunes library of over 5000 songs and sure enough, I have exactly one Kanye West song – Gold Digger featuring Jamie Foxx.

I immediately suspected my tenants since they’re fairly young.  Although I knew it could also have been from Brittany – she always brings her MacBook whenever she comes home from college.  I doubt I could prove the source of the Gnutella file sharing.  I turned off my web filtering half a year ago when I was trying to install Lo-Jack on Brittany’s new laptop.  It required some call home function that my firewall was blocking.  Unless I’m specifically blocking something, my firewall won’t log the traffic.  It can, but I didn’t have it configured to do that either.  So the Kanye West download could have been from any computer in my house – or carriage house which I rent out.  The Comcast abuse letter only lists the IP address of my cable modem and it doesn’t provide the DHCP address from my home network(s).

My second action, after reviewing my iTunes, was to turn web filtering back on.  I have an old IBM Proventia FW that I have setup between my cable modem and my home LANs.  One network is for my tenants, and they have their own WiFi server.  I allow that LAN access to the Internet but not to my home office LAN (network 2) or my home LAN (network 3).  My home office network has access to all three networks in order to manage the WiFi servers.  With the web filtering running, I setup two FW rules to block traffic to the Gnutella service.  One rule for TCP ports 6346 to 6347 and another for UDP ports 6346-6347 – both at 202.0.0.0 with a 28 bit mask.  Then I asked my tenant if he was using Gnutella and informed him about the abuse letter and my new web filters.  He was pretty humble about it and apologized.

I’m relating this in my blog, and probably FaceBook, because it occurs to me many of my friends could use some advice on computer security.  I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and I just got in trouble from my ISP.  Maybe I should be embarrassed – I’m not.  I do appreciate the irony.  But I know that many of my friends have kids – with their own computers – whom run these illicit and dangerous file sharing applications.  The last link above shows you how to block some of the more nefarious sites.  Understand that I’m not judging.  I support some copyleft arguments as they juxtapose certain tenets of innovation against the precepts of copyright protection.  But these applications put your computer and home network at extreme risk of being compromised.  These apps are favorites of hackers and are as likely as visiting free porn sites to result in your machine becoming pwned into a botnet.  Forget fears of Comcast cutting off your access – be afraid of being pwned.

I’m serious.  I’d rather blog on my running themes, but you need to know this stuff.  My YouTube instructions on protecting your texting privacy was originally intended in jest when Tiger Woods got clubbed by his wife after she saw his text history.  I was just having fun, but it’s turned into one of my most watched YouTube episodes.  Likewise, my commentary on the Google vs China cyber story last year continues to receive 4 or 5 views a day based on people searching on the terms cyberwar and cyber warfare.  So I figure this is good information.  I hope so.  Or if not, I hope you get a chuckle from knowing that Comcast is on to me.

————————————————————————

Notice of Action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Abuse Incident Number:      Not Applicable
Report Date/Time:           Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:31:02 -0600

ED MAHONEY
1805 S COFFMAN ST
LONGMONT, CO  805047568

Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Subscriber:

Comcast has received a notification by a copyright owner, or its authorized agent, reporting an alleged infringement of one or more copyrighted works made on or over Comcast’s High-Speed Internet service (the ‘Service’).  The copyright owner has identified the Internet Protocol (‘IP’) address associated with your Service account at the time as the source of the infringing works.  The works identified by the copyright owner in its notification are listed below.  Comcast reminds you that use of the Service (or any part of the Service) in any manner that constitutes an infringement of any copyrighted work is a violation of Comcast’s Acceptable Use Policy and may result in the suspension or termination of your Service account.

If you have any questions regarding this notice, you may direct them to Comcast in writing by sending a letter or e-mail to:

Comcast Customer Security Assurance
Comcast Cable Communications, LLC
1800 Bishops Gate Blvd., 3rd Floor East Wing
Mount Laurel, NJ 08054 U.S.A.
Phone: (888) 565-4329
Fax: (856) 324-2940

For more information regarding Comcast’s copyright infringement policy, procedures, and contact information, please read our Acceptable Use Policy by clicking on the Terms of Service link at http://www.comcast.net.

Sincerely,
Comcast Customer Security Assurance

Copyright work(s) identified in the notification of claimed infringement:

Infringing Work : Graduation
Filename : Kanye West – Graduation – Stronger.mp3=20
Filename : Kanye West – Graduation – Stronger.mp3=20
First found (UTC): 2011-02-10T12:21:17.61Z
Last found (UTC): 2011-02-10T12:21:17.61Z
Filesize  : 7583872 bytes=20
IP Address: 76.25.159.42
IP Port: 17677
Network: Gnutella
Protocol: Gnutella    =20

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