| Our new LED sign at the HackLab! |
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| 11:55pm 31/01/2009 |
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The LED sign is basically a Blinkenlights display, just like the building in Berlin and City hall in Toronto was. Just a different backend, but driven by the same proxy and UDP packet
format.
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Read 6 - Post |
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| Anyone have lots of DNS traffic they can send my way? |
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| 07:05pm 24/01/2009 |
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I am doing some stress testing for our DNSSEC appliance. Two weeks ago, I pointed all my machines at it, and its been running great. I've also fired "resperf" at it with high query rates and it worked fine. But I'd like to have a more real sustained load on it.
Anyone here can send me lots of dns traffic? |
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| inauguration gatherings? |
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| 12:08pm 18/01/2009 |
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Are there are local gatherings on Monday night or Tuesday during the day (with tv streams) happening? Apart from the 44 useless hypothetical facebook events, I have nothing in my schedule so far :P |
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| Neon Sign! |
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| 10:26pm 16/12/2008 |
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Our HackLab now has a neon sign! It just needs to flicker and make zooming noises now :)
Our logo is a merge between the CN Tower, and the schematic of an LED. |
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Read 1 - Post |
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| Woah, what happened to today? |
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| 07:48pm 23/10/2008 |
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mood:  bouncy
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Holy server migration batman!
Started rack move at 8am. It's now 8pm. I left my chair once to get some food and once to get more coffee. WTF happened with the day?
The old rack in Amsterdam only contains old junk servers now, and the core router/IPsec gw. The new rack is filled with all the new servers that got moved. IPsec tunneling glues it all together until the uplink gets moved next week. Phased out some 32bit VM's for 64 bit ones. And then technobabble technobabble technobabble technobabble hate NETKEY technobabble technobabble
Why isn't there more Heroes now?
I want more Heroes! |
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| Palintology |
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| 11:09pm 10/10/2008 |
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"I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110 (a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act," investigator Steve Branchflower concluded in the panel's 263-page report.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7662820.stm
Isn't it best (for GOP) that Palin is sacrificed now for another running mate? Or is there some legal reason he can't change it anymore? |
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| Bike light question..... |
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| 03:41pm 10/09/2008 |
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Yesterday, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) secretsoflife and me were biking home in the dark. She prefers a blinking back light, while I prefer a solid back light. I know in The Netherlands, blinking lights are not allowed, but I was not aware of the situation here. So I used the intertubes instead of working and found blinking lights are legal, though no preference is mentioned anywhere of one over the other.
I ended up on Wikipedia which only has this one section, amusingly marked with [citation needed]:
Flashing lights have been shown to be three to five times more visible than a steady light of equivalent brightness. But it has been found that people tend to underestimate the distance to flashing lights and that drunken drivers are attracted by them, and there is evidence that they are harder to place than a steady light.
So I'm now more tempted to go with "what most other cyclists are doing and car drivers are expecting". But our own statistical sample was low that night. Two were blinking, one was not.
What are other people's experiences and thoughts on this? (both as a cyclist, and as a car driver) |
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Read 10 - Post |
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| Drinks on Flickr this Friday at C'est What |
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| 02:13pm 07/08/2008 |
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http://www.blogto.com/tech/2008/08/drinks_on_flickr_this_friday/
The Flickr team is in Toronto this week and will be buying drinks and snacks for anyone who shows up this Friday at C'est What between 6 and 8pm.
I emailed with National Flickr product manager Katheline Jean-Pierre who suggested the meetup was simply an informal get-together where she and a bunch of Flickr/Yahoo! folks hope to meet up with some Toronto Flickr fans. She also hinted that they might be giving out some new, free Flickr t-shirts to those who stop by.
Better get there early. |
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| OLS ticket, plus VIA tickets, plus shared room available |
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| 12:12am 22/07/2008 |
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My friend Hugh is going to go to OLS (and present there too). His friend, with whom he was sharing a hotel suite with can't make it anymore. Therefor, there is a free OLS + train + accomodation available for someone. I myself am too busy with family visiting me, so I cannot go either. I've asked some friends, but they didn't get back to me.
So, if you want or know someone who wants to go to OLS, expenses paid from Toronto, for next weekend, mail me, and I'll pass it on to my friend. |
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Post |
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| Looking for non-crappy 1u chassis - harder then you think |
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| 12:15am 12/07/2008 |
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For our appliances, we have been looking at 1U chassis'. It's amazing how much bad metal is out there, and even more amazing what bad jobs people can do cutting a custom hole.
So, to my geeky friends, where can I find a nice looking 1U chassis with a 3 1/2" opening (for an LCD display we have), that takes a mini atx with one PCI via riser card.
The only non-crappy thing so far I found is the petabox, but it has its own LCD without buttons, and the LCD we have has a few buttons which we need for one of our appliances' functionality. |
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| It's time for CHANGE |
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| 07:21pm 09/07/2008 |
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Or so people thought when they decided to favour Obama. Unfortunately, he has reversed his previous policy on immunity for illegal wiretapping done by telco's for the Bush government, using the same fear for terrorists rhetorics as the Republicans/ Neocons.
Failure to live up to your own expections: -1 for Obama |
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Read 3 - Post |
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| OLPC paper (at PET I assume) |
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| 11:17pm 06/07/2008 |
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Len gave me to interesting links. One to his paper Chilling effects of the OLPC XP Security model and a New Scientist article quoting him and others.
Thanks Len! Now for my comments to this paper......
I don't understand 2.4. unless the original server with usb key is compromised, how is the user's private ecc key compromised by a 'rogue backup server'?
2.5 How can there be both "easy theft of private key" and "no way for the user to repudiate"?
If you proof the first, you disproof the second. But also more in the context of rogue governments, the need for proof is not that strong - anyone will get intimidated (eg see recent Zimbabwe voting)
2.5 using https on the XO will still not compromise privacy, it does not matter that ip,tcp or udp is unsigned or wether a low level application adds a signature. same for OTR on top of IM. Granted,
it would have been better to have these work out of the box, or do some tor/onion routing.
One might hope that dissidents whose lives depend on their anonymity, will be able to either use the XO with that additional layer of IM or https. Or that they find other means. I find the theory of 12 year old dissidents 'because there are 12 year old children soldiers' weak. It's easy to force kids into a militaristic regime where they cannot think for themselves, even about joining or not. It is quite something else to go actively against a regime.
The XO is not a voting machine, sounds like Chaum's personal ax to grind Just creating 40.000 fake ID's for XO's to activate and vote would be easy for any fraudulent government anyway, no matter how secure the individual voting protocol. Though it is good to think of the XO's as more then just learning toys for kids, the focus is on them being learning toys for kids. Having these toys not stolen outweights having them be potential voting machines.
2.6 valid concerns, but what it misses is a viable alternative for the intended feature - how to prevent XO's from being removed from the children. That danger is much more imminent when the de-activation is removed. And with the additional theft without this feature, at the next earthquake, there won't be any XO's in the country to begin with.
3.2 IT security professionals hand picking socilogy theories is a very weak argument. The "scarring" argument of a laptop shutdown is pretty meaningless in countries where everyone, including children,
get their hands chopped off on a regular basis, or where diseases rampage a village and hunger happens regularly. Quoting psychologists in the conclusion does not lead me to diminish these thoughts at all) This section is a conclusion looking for a reason which you cherry-picked.
The second part of the paragraph reads much better, stating the potential monitoring is something that should be eliminated.
My conclusion
The paper feels too much like the authors have a personal agenda. It would have been much better if it had offered a better solution for the measures taken that negatively affect user's privacy - anti theft protection in countries with very scarce electronic resources where OLPC laptops are very valuable. Theft is the biggest threat to the OLPC project, forget having users without having an anti-theft method in place. If one has to choose between giving young kids under 12 a laptop with a potential for abuse (in so far any rogue government really needs to track its citizens under 12) versus not being able to give those kids a laptop, I think the choice is easy, and the OLPC project made the right choice. Of course, that does not mean there is no room for improvement. There is, and improved privacy should definitely get more attention then it got so far. Whether that is likely in this highly politicized and commercialized project, is left to be seen.
I think the project is seeing a much bigger threat of being invaded by commercial software vendors. I might be called a Stallmanite, but showing kids they can copy and share software is as important as giving them access to information.
I wish I could have made it to PET...... |
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