Sat, 18 Dec 2004

Hostcentric is cheap, but cheap might not mean good.

This page has been offline for a number of reasons. Mostly because the original server hosting it was compromised by some script kiddie and we all freaked out and got some new hosting. More up to date, cheaper with better hardware. Unfortunately the system the company, named Hostcentric, uses this commercial package called Plesk and explicitly states in their usage terms that we are forbidden to get rid of it. I'd be happy with it if it worked, but it's quite broken. It has graphical interface elements which directly conflict with the configuration files and compiled binaries it claims to have control over. In my case it forbade me to execute the CGI script which generates this blog even though I selected the "execute CGI" option.

So whatever, I'll be slowly getting back to writing copious amounts of rambling prose here in the future. Things are changing quite a lot for me so I guess it's a good idea to document them in public :) -l

posted at: 15:48 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 10 Dec 2004

Wasting time?

I was watching a documentary of the tour of a band named Lightning Bolt. They rock quite hard. Then I started falling asleep. Not because it was late, but because the band was so good live it was just boring to see them recorded since that meant I wasn't at the show. Then I started thinking about my small obssesion with technology, especially of the free type. I started thinking about all the people I want to step up to and just tell them to stop fronting on the "I really agree with the principals but I'm not using it" style. Then I thought, "who cares?"

So that's what this is about, who cares, personal expression, the ability to freak out and not give a fuck so much...a sense of humor. I'm begining to tire of people without humor in their life. Especially people who have such a grim outlook on the world that their humor can make a cheery 6 year old want to die.

I say who cares because it's so easy to fall into the trap of alienation when shit just gets real obscure. Interests go deeper and deeper into speciality that the whole point of getting into that interest is lost. I'm begining to think of not caring as a form of letting go. Giving up that power that comes with feeling compeled to know everything and get involved in every aspect of a project. That place where it feels better to abandon the whole thing if it's not possible to understand everything.

Technology is great. People make wonderful, creative things with it but there's a terminal velocity for technology. And when that speed is reached it's just impossible to go any faster. Besides, is it even possible to get anything done when you've reached the fastest speed you're capable of?

Capitalism moves fast. Capitalism brings commercialism. Commercialism brings convenience. Convenience brings ease. Ease brings function to a form. How is it possible to take Capitalism out of that equation? I think it's very possible but it's so deeply rooted in American culture that any creation isn't taken seriously until it's reached the level of commercialism. Especially with technology, which I'm caring about less and less.

posted at: 02:29 | path: /theory | permanent link to this entry

This post was written from the corner of Delancy and Ludlow in NYC on a pda and uploaded through a public wifi node at a place called Alchemy 106. Nothing more special than the fact that it's possible. Deluxe.


posted at: 02:29 | path: /pda | permanent link to this entry

Scout Nibblet
Odd name. Something about Nottingham. She has a whole record and it sounds good. I've heard her play live three times. Each one made me elated. Here it is.



posted at: 02:26 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Getting back into the Macintosh.
The apartment had a yard sale this weekend. It was the first weekend without rain or bitter cold since last summer. The only things I could find to sell were some old computer equipment so I broke out the old Mac hardware and tried to start it up. Then I found the old software CD's and realized I still had a great graphics workstation and a MIDI sequencer. I'm not going to think too hard about it but I'm kind of excited.

So what does this all actually mean and is it just a geeky adventure in old skool electronic aesthetics? I say no and here's why:

So I'm thinking of this thing as something that'll never play audio...ever. The problem before was I tried to make it use all the fancy DSP features of newer software. I think I'll find out if it's useful anymore by hooking it up as the primary MIDI brain in the studio and syncing the Linux box to record tracks. Could be fun. Of course I'll have to live with any bugs.

posted at: 02:23 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Tuning the audio system for hard disk recording.

So I got the old Mac running as a MIDI sequencer with Logic Audio 4.8 and I'm not interested in ever updating it. Now it's time to tune the old Linux box to record with low latency. Here's what I'm doing right now (writing this while the kernel compiles [too bad my CPU is all fast n'shit because it just finished before I could])

And the moral of the story is that the 2.6 kernel reboots my computer when it gets started. Boo. Fuck.

posted at: 02:21 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

My home desktop computer is named Angry-boomer

update: I got a portable, so angry-boomer's sound card is offline. If you're curious, the portable is an iRiver HP-140 and has a 40 gig hard disk, 15 hour battery live and is the same size as the iPod. It does cool shit.

This is an ogg stream of any sound that comes out of my sound card. Whatever I'm hearing, you're hearing. It's kind of like a webcam but for sound only.

This wouldn't have been possible without the excellent Jack Audio Connection Kit available for Linux and OS X and Karl Heyes's ices streaming client, Jan Gerber's jack plugin for ices and the venerable Icecast.

posted at: 02:12 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

The PD delay sampler adventure continues

So my initial 4 channel looping delay is stable and useable with both the computer keyboard and my pile of MIDI gear. It's alright but it's weird. The tempo is fixed and each loop doesn't really give a good idea of how long it is. There's a fill button but it doesn't really care how much silence goes on the end, it'll just keep the silence there until the buffer's at the end.

After talking to a guitar player I met at this great punk show at Asterisk gallery in Brooklyn, he said what I was describing sounds like this guitar pedal called the Boomerang. Sure enough, here it is. It's a pertty lofty goal but I'm up for the challenge. I'm putting the delay line concept away for a bit and using good old arrays. Press record and it starts filling up the buffer. Stop recording and it snaps back to the begining of the buffer and starts playing back. This patch is really gross so I'm not even trying to post anything public yet.

What'll be cool about doing this in software is the playback control can get all crazy-like. The speed is variable and the buffer is just an array of samples. Things like loop point markers and wiki-wiki scratching are just a few possibilities. With MIDI CC's and aftertouch this can get really cool.

posted at: 02:12 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

My First PD Patch

Well, this is the first PD patch I've made that I think is functional enough to share with others. It's a 4 channel looping delay bank and it only uses internal objects! Download it here.

I've been listening to a lot of live music where the performer uses multi-channel delay lines to construct a song. Perhaps the most amazing performer who can do this is Tyondai Braxton. I don't know what brand of gear he uses but I know whatever it is the delay buffers are huge, sometimes as long as 45 seconds to a minute. He'll sample an entire verse of a song (that he's playing live on a guitar), loop it, and start adding more channels. Its kind of fucking amazing.

The other inspiration for this patch is Don Caballero, and specifically, this record which I listen to a lot and think is totally rad.

Not surprisingly, Ty Braxton and Ian Williams (the guitarist from Don Cab) have joined a band named Battles (amusingly enough searching for nothing more than the word "battles" on google returns their site as number two, below American Civil War battle stories) along with John Stanier, the drummer from Helmet and Dave Konopka, the bass player from Lynx.

So yeah, listen to all this music, go see all these folks play live. They are awesome. If you want to make music like them but don't have mad money for the phatty delay gear (but for some reason have money for a computer) use this PD patch and you can do the same. Email me if you're putting it to good use or make some improvements.

posted at: 01:54 | path: /music/pd | permanent link to this entry

One part of the open source community.

I guess this one puts me on the map. For better or for worse.

The above press release is my third foray into a professional services limited company. The first two were fly by night dot coms and didn't leave many traces on the web. The first two times I was always in awe of the guys in the back room with the five workstations and three monitors and crazy graphical desktops I couldn't recognize even though I spent 8+ hours a day using a Macintosh and I was certian I knew how a GUI functioned. I was doing shitty front end programming and never touched the knowledge they lived in. One co-worker went on to write a big inspiring weblog that gets international acclaim. Andy is rad. He clued me into the wonders of Perl and Linux. I never knew what the fuck he was doing. Then there was Daniel Ceregatti, who was doing shit I still can't even dream of. But the day Kick Media went bankrupt I knew I had to get to that back room.

It's funny what Google remembers about Kickmedia. Most of the entries are people who worked there who were posting to email lists or web forums. Everything else are broken links or old press releases.

The first foray into front end web programming was so unremarkable the company hardly even exists andymore except for an office in Hong Kong. They provide "web services" for email and name registration or something like that.

Fast forward to 2004. After some time spent doing technical work with a print and video artist I ended up at Democracy Now! as a full time unix sysadmin.

Openflows is an impressive organization. One part hosting company, one part technology consulting company, one part software development company, and above all open source philosophy evangelists.

Openflows Networks Ltd. is the company that put the Democracy Now! website on the map. The Ltd is defined here as "Limited to any security or purpose." It's a distinction that's really important. The moral of the press release and the Openflows relationship is that building an Internet infrastructure is hard, and working with open source software to do it is also hard, but like Larry Wall says about the Perl programming language, "easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible." It's a phrase that translates to so many things.

Working with UNIX systems and open source software isn't easy if you want to do hard things with what's readily available. It's still sinking in.

posted at: 01:53 | path: /media | permanent link to this entry

Linux can be pretty cool sometimes.

6:09pm up 227 days, 14:15, 9 users, load average: 0.71, 1.29, 1.93

Boo-ya!

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

OpenBSD and old skool unix systems

I installed OpenBSD on a development server yesterday. I've been hanging out in #openbsd on irc.freenode.net and chatting it up with the locals. I'm starting to feel the strong sense of enlightenment surrounding this operating system.

On the user level it's probably one of the the least functional base installations I have ever used. For example, the default shell is csh, which doesn't even do tab completion or save a command history. But on the system level it's probably the most functional. I won't enumerate the wonderful admin-friendliness of it's default installation. Or it's delicate placement of services any good Internet serving citizen should be granted as a right. Linux distros's defaults pale in comparison.

OpenBSD was the origin of the OpenSSH protocol, which is the absolute standard for secure remote access for UNIX systems as well as tons of other swiss army knife applications involving remotely accessing a computer securely. This pride of creating one of the Internet's most fundamental systems really shows in the whole project. It assumes you want to do things well if you are going to do them at all. And it doesn't hold back if you're doing them wrong.

It's funny, but I think it made me feel that UNIX isn't scary at all. Everything is right there. The whole history of the Internet. Apple's choice to use BSD as the basis for Darwin was a good one but they have a lot of catching up to do. I think they'll get there but as long as their marketing monkeys are out there pimping iLife and the lot, their default 1.5 GB installation will pale in comparison the OpenBSD's 100 MB one (and that includes X Windows, SSH and Sendmail configured and running by default).

Chatting today with some new acquaintances, we got to talking about what OpenBSD "is". Being the n00b that I am, I have absolutely no claim to it's origins or definitions but I ended up saying this mistake:

<lee> I don't think any operating system is about doing anything. Isn't that the point?"
<lee> wait, that didn't make sense at all
<lee> s/anything/one thing/
<salan> lee, I so get you. openbsd is my anything.

It was very poetic. I'll never forget it.

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Internet security is a scary place

So is getting your apartment broken into. They stole my laptop and my roomate's DV camera. It got me into full-on paranoid hacker security mode. I had trouble leaving the house today cause I thought shit would get broken into again. One of my reactions was to take a look at wireless security. Even though the physical break in had nothing to do with the Internet, a strange coincidence let me pinpoint exactly when the break in happened. Looking at the last post here, you'll find that I recently started broadcasting all the music on my hard disk to the Interenet via an Icecast server. It's a nice way to listen to my 10 gig music collection while I'm at work. It's the next best thing to having a portable player but kind of cooler cause it's public. I noticed the connection got dropped at 12:30. When I got home I noticed that the power strip the cable modem was attached to was switched off. Since none of my roomates were home at that hour I got suspicious. One thing led to an other and the next thing I knew I was calling the cops telling them I had a log file of the exact time the break in happened.

Unfortunately nothing came of it. The boneheads got away clean, no one saw them and they left no prints despite touching lots of plastic stuff in some pretty targeted places. TV fans take note, dusting for prints is hard and rarely yields any useful data, especially for petty theft cause the cops don't really give it much time. It ain't like the movies.

Then I almost fell for this fraudulent email appearing to come from Ebay. The Internet is really freaking me out at this point on both good and bad levels. Now that I'm laptop-less, I'm rediscovering my Linux based PDA, the sharp Zaurus. I spent all day learning how to run Kismet. Since it runs on my PDA and NYC is such a compact place, I decided to take the wardriving metaphor to a more eco-friendly level and did some "warwalking" as I left work, intentionally bypassing two subway stops so I can see what the Wi-Fi spectrum was like between an area of roughly 20 city blocks.

The results were staggering. In 30 minute walk Kismet found 228 wireless networks, most were real access points and were active. A high number were not using a password, some even had factory default settings.

So the combination of the Ebay fraud and the number of open networks got me inspired. I'm doing research now, looking first for any blogs dedicated to publishing any wardriving/warwalking information for the public. Next I found a nice program named KLV that takes Kismet's results file and formats it in nice HTML for easy browsing. Then I'm looking for any clearinghouse websites keeping information about email fraud and which catalogs the story of the scam. I managed to use some unix tools to trace back the source of the Ebay fraud to a South Korean corporation's network where a Windows box was compromised and used as a relay to log people's personal data for later identity theft. I'm sure they didn't have a clue and I can't really do anything because I don't speak Korean.

I'm in the zone, excited at the new world of wireless. I'm trying to turn this blatant violation of my personal space and property into something good, for the benefit of everyone.

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Hacking the Columbia University computer lab part II

It's a shame that I have to describe these actions as hacking when they can be better described as "use". The line isn't so fine, really. Although the difference should be quite clear, other's don't seem to agree.

So here's the challenge. You have a server on the Internet with sshd running. Someone has sent you an email with an attached file that you need to copy from your email box to the server in question. You are nowhere near your own computer but there's a university computer lab within eyeshot. Word, just jump onto one of the workstations and remotely copy that file.

The first computer is running some version of Windows but you can't tell because there's been an attempt to lock it down by the University administration. The only menu options in the Start bar are two applications, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Pressing the "Run program..." key command pops up a box saying "this function has been disabled by the administrator." In fact, any key command using the Windows meta key has been disabled. Right clicking is also disabled...system-wide.

Believe it or not, this is where windows gets really cool. Open up Internet Explorer. If you paid attention to Microsoft's first anti-trust trial you'll remember that Internet Explorer isn't only for the Internet, it has a full-featured filesystem browser built-in! Try typing in the address bar "C:/". Again, "this function is disabled by the administrator." Fuck. Now choose to "view folders" from the menu. If all is good, a sidebar of your local filesystem should appear. Fresh, you got to the C drive! Security by obscurity means more fun for you. Travel to the system folder and find the cmd.exe program. Double click on it. Fuck, again "this function has been disabled by the administrator." This administrator is really annoying. Mind you we haven't even gone on the Internet yet. Just for kicks, find the explorer.exe program and double click on it. This one runs. Not a surprise since it's basically Internet Explorer with more bells and whistles. Word, now we can see the entire filesystem and all removable media.

Of course there is no SSH client on this computer so you have to download one from the Internet unless you planed ahead and have a CD-ROM with some SSH clients on it. You think to yourself, "one of those USB keychain things would be pretty l33t right now." Wrong again, this thing is bolted to the desk and all the USB ports are blocked by wood or iron. The only removable media drives are CD-ROM and floppy. Go to google and search for "putty download". Click on the first hit...

...oh double fuck! A proxy error. Somehow this site is blocked on the campus network. Travel to other random Internet nodes. Hmmm, all blocked by the proxy, but google wasn't. Try Yahoo. It loads...alright, they whitelisted some sites and blacklisted everything else. We just have to turn off the proxy setting in IE (this is getting ridiculous, how do these people use the Internet? Like a television?) under the "Internet Options" find the LAN setting option. But lo and behold, "this functions had been disabled by the administrator." It's time to give up.

This was a fun exercise in trying to use a computer that ended up as hacking that computer only to find out that whoever configured it wasn't interested in anyone actually using it in the first place. I was totally stumped about that Internet proxy thing. That was some uber fascist shit. Totally against the whole point of the Internet. Then, my best gal once again dropped the gem of knowledge that made it all work. Fucking Yahoo Briefcase. 30 megs of storage if you register for free with a fake name! Put your ssh clients in there, get though the proxy because it's a yahoo site then run the program from the My Documents folder on the PC. Word up.

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

An IRC transcript of mine I find particularily ammusing and insightful

[16:23] *BOFH1* I'm going to enable packet filters on the server now
[16:24] ->*BOFH2* aight
[16:26] *BOFH1* ok so the server is in full bofh mode
[16:26] ->*BOFH2* yeah!
[16:26] *BOFH1* you can't do shit on it
[16:26] ->*BOFH2* excellent

Sometimes the opposite of what's expected is the best thing.

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Crazy Computer Person.

I was just described to a young adult getting a tour of the control room as a "computer person who does the crazy things with computers." What kind of response do I give to that? For comparison, what if somone is getting a tour of a mental hospital to dertimine if they would like to send their insane child there. The tour guide points to a person working on a computer and says "that is our computer person, he's crazy and he works with computers." Not too different, these two things are. i don't really know what other metaphor to use here. something like "would you call a doctor a crazy medical person" is way too pretentious. mood is an easy thing to pass off as insanity, so that makes it sound even more ridiculous. I think I am trying to express the feeling of alienation by others. When I started all this programming/computer aproachability madness the point was to help people understand that using a computer for useful things is simple if you just get over the initial fear. When things start to click and you're working faster you should feel less confused, not more.

I'm begining to feel the pressure of technological fear in others. I'm starting to see popular technology as an alienating artifact. It goes far deeper than ignorance. In fact I don't believe it has anything to do with ignorance in most cases, since the people who depend on computer technology usually do some sort of intellectual work, which would imply that they have some analitical skills. I believe it's a psychological condition. A refusal to explore something unknown because it is so very unknown.

I also attribute this alienation to Capitalist sales tactics. Capitalism has transformed into a method of alienating individuals from their own culture. By comparison, University computer users are much more accepting of change. Those working within "The Free Market" however, are accustomed to all their products being handed to them in convienient simple packages. They are also acustomed to highly specific objects that perform simple functions in extrordinary ways, ways that make them feel superior with the least amount of effort. This is what technology is all about, right? Due to the extreme care and sensitivity of all the expectations in this model, there is no incentive to learn a new system if the one you already have pleases you and is free of any visible shortcomings. So I can only conclude that these are times of great expectations with a more selfish and cynical twist. It is not, "how can I assist this great creation?" but "give me my great creation, it might work out."

posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Listening test for very low bit rate Ogg Vorbis encodings

The source is Democracy Now from July 20th 2004. It's the first two minutes of the show. It's a decent real-world test because there's music, speech from a studio mic, speech from a telephone and speech/music coming off tape, so you can A-B with a good spectrum of sound. For kicks I posted the times each encode took on my system.

System specs:

Original uncompressed recording (mono, 44100khz, 16 bit)

Ogg Quality 3
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 3 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 09.4s
Rate: 12.8233
Average bitrate: 73.9 kb/s

Ogg quality 0
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 0 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 08.3s
Rate: 14.4509
Average bitrate: 48.3 kb/s

Ogg quality 0, resampled to 22050khz
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 0 --resample 22050 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 05.1s
Rate: 23.4608
Average bitrate: 30.7 kb/s

Ogg quality 0, resampled to 11025khz
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 0 --resample 11025 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 03.6s
Rate: 33.2143
Average bitrate: 20.6 kb/s

Ogg quality -1
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q -1 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 07.4s
Rate: 16.1914
Average bitrate: 37.1 kb/s

Ogg quality -1, resampled to 22050
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q -1 --resample 22050 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 05.1s
Rate: 23.3804
Average bitrate: 23.6 kb/s

Ogg quality -1, resampled to 11025
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q -1 --resample 11025 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav

File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 03.5s
Rate: 34.0317
Average bitrate: 16.4 kb/s

My conslusions are that compared to the original, the -1 qualities sound just as acceptable as the 0 qualities. Since we are shooting for nothing more than intellegibility here, I'd say that the lowest possible quality is recommended for targeting a modem audience in a live stream.

The quality 3 sounds exactly the same as the original to my ears, so I'd say that's a good setting for targeting a broadband audience.

posted at: 01:42 | path: /hacking/audio | permanent link to this entry

This is the first real post in my new blog. While personal, I'm also going to make some guidelines for it, so it doesn't spiral into the common tone of most blogs, which may look nice and professional at first but aren't that interesting when you get to the reading part.

So here's my guidelines:

  1. Post at least once a day.
  2. Write about technology but don't repeat the same crap that's on the web already.
  3. Stick to free software, because that' when things get interesting. Don't ignore commercial software, but don't take it too seriously either.
  4. Write about music more and give props to the homies.
  5. No gossip

This should be interesting to look at in a year or so.

For those interested, this was typed in the OS X program called TextEdit and uploaded to a server running Linux. It was displayed in your web browser using a Perl script called Blosxom.



posted at: 01:22 | path: | permanent link to this entry

This is a post to show Taryn that it is easy to update a Blosxom page.
pshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh :P

posted at: 01:22 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 04 Aug 2004

Moral youth

I got to talking with my mates about this movie Kids that I saw in 1995 cause I thought I was all hip reading the LA weekly when I was 16. It was great. As I elaborated about the story of how I ended up watching a movie called The Thin Red Line at Leo Fitzpatrick's house in 2000, we all started thinking of his character in Kids, Telly. It took a while until I could remember his big line where he's all like "I love virgins. Call me the virgin surgeon." We were all, "ahhhhhwww shiiiiiit" And the moment was over.

I remember how I idealized that movie when I was in high school. I knew some of my friends acted just like those characters, I knew I tried my damdest to act like them and probably failed. So it ends with any other talk about an individual in a movie, searching the Internet Movie Database. Here's Leo. He's not doing too bad acording to the page.

So then I thought I'd start reading the user reviews of the movie. Among the suspected "these crazy kids ruining their generation" tomes there was an incredibly sweet story of a guy who took the movie's realism to heart and reflected. Here's his quote:

Im a teenager and i think that this movie was awesome. If kids themselves would watch it they would understand the consept of aids and other sexual diseases. after watching this movie it made myself think about how much danger there really is out there. i just thought it was a good movie because it is pretty much how life is out on the streets these days. another thing is i have some friends that are just like the devirginater in this movie and it made me think that maybe he should get tested so that the people he has done s**t with will know whether or not they have stds.cause most people dont get it and it never clicks in their heads that they could be doing some damage to young girls by sleeping around. thanks

You can't get more honest than that. I think Mr. Clark can rest quietly tonight.

posted at: 00:00 | path: /media | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 11 Jul 2004

Hope is a very cool place, here are more notes.

Sunday Panels

18:00 Cult of the Dead Cow hactivism panel

The theme of their presentation (even though I left for an hour because I was tipping over from hunger) was Internet access through out the world. The first country of focus was China.

Hacking China seems like a pretty big deal. Internet access is limited by the government and the web starts with deny all and government approved web sites are whitelisted, essentially making the web no longer public and free. She called on hackers from around the world to devise solutions to this problem and break through China's restrictions and provide a public service to the world, essentially to liberate China's 1.3 billion citizens.

How is the public involved in filtering policy on the Internet? You can trace back who is making the decisions about what content gets filtered and for what reason they can be entered into a networked database. This can map the relations into a traceable system. Policy can be altered and patterns can be identified as the database expands.

University of tornoto has a hactivism lab that anaylizes how different ISP throught the world block and filter their citizen's web access. Many countries in Asia that have dictatorial governments participate in web filtering. Most of these countries buy their filtering software through American distributers, who most likely aren't concerned with their target audience rights.

The commercial blocking software uses flawed automatic keyword categorization from a pre-defined index that has lots of false positives. The moral of the story is keyword blocking systems suck and they will trap your from viewing legitimate content.

20:00 Breaking Corporate Restristions from the Inside

Wrap your outgoing packets with a port that you know is allowed out of the LAN and send it to a second proxy on the Internet that you have set up which is listening on port 80. This can then unwrap the wrapped TCP packet and forward it to it's destination. There are three computers in the equation, whereas no-proxied port forwarding requires two. The thrid in this equation is the proxy server that's shutting you out. htc -P proxy:8080 -F 8000:proxy2:80. Then on the proxy2 server, the unwrapping is done with a server.

21:00 Hacker Radio and Video



posted at: 00:00 | path: /hacking/hope5 | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 10 Jul 2004

HOPE 5 is a very cool place. There are my notes about it.

Saturday Pannels

13:00 What is grid computing

Grids are a collectionof computers that are hetrogrounous platforms and archetectures. It seems like there's a movement to build fast ass clusters over high latency networks (i.e. the Internet). So what the hell can we do with these things and how are they unique?

For one, they can deal with massive supercomputing grids. The speaker is showing specs of 30 + terabyte filesystems and 13 terabytes of RAM. He said this one system that's he logging into is actually composed of 1500 nodes. Obviously there's quite a large security issue here.

Some good ideas I've got from this is software called Globus, which is a java app that is horribly difficult to install. The speaker is using OpenSSL and a certificate server which automates extremely fine-grained comtrol over certificates for each host in the grid. He pointed me to a program named CA.pl, which is a Perl script that is included with the standard OpenSSL library.

16:00 Kismet pannel with the author

Kismet is far cooler than I thought. It can capture raw packat data from a variety of wireless cards. This means that you can grab a bunck of packets and decrypt them later, essentially getting on an encrypted wireless network. It's also good for getting more detail out of the available networks your card can see. Kismet will compile on OS X but if you don't want to install custom drivers and use the Ncurses terminal interface, there's Kismac which crashed on me the first time but looks good. There's also Macstumbler which is a much smaller simpler stumbler.

Kismet has some very specific hardware requirements since his development platform is Linux many cards don't want to open their drivers since WI-FI is big business and thei're scared of the "crazy hackers".

So now the big question is getting an integrated graphical system for joining and storing networks like Apple provides in OS X. While no where near as powerful as iwconfig and kismet in the terminal, Apple made it butt simple to scan, view and join all the networks in your antenna's range. If it doesn't like the network you just joined, it'll tell you why and prompt for a password if it's using WEP.

posted at: 00:00 | path: /hacking/hope5 | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 16 Jun 2004

Sentimentality.

I'm getting it for things that aren't even over yet. Sometimes people talk to me and I feel sentimental that the conversation will be over even though I'm still having it. I have a hard time describing this feeling without sounding trite. But here are some links talking about stuff that makes me sentimental for the present:

Not what I expected actually. But there's lots to be sentimental about these days.

posted at: 00:00 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 10 Jun 2004

Modest Mouse has a new record. It's not that new but a friend passed
it to me and I'm totally pouring over this song Bury Me With It. I didn't get it at first but the 2nd chorus/refrain thing sounds so good I couldn't stop listening to it. I found the lyrics online, read through them and realized it's a song about the end of the world told with this amazing bittersweet language and sung all desperately. Like pukeing love for the world because you remembered that it's really a good place in the end.

posted at: 00:00 | path: /music/modest_mouse | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 10 May 2004

112 days until the Republican National Committee meets in NYC.
Their asses will be rocked!

In other news, I'm finding lots of cool blogs through blosxom. The web is fun again. Riding on tons of information is the theme for this weekend. I wish there was a plugin that took my browser history and posted a transcript of it to a blogpage. That would be mega-fresh. Until then I'll just have to keep track manually from my inferior human memory.

That's all I can think of for now. The web...making boredom fun since 1994

posted at: 00:00 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 08 May 2004

Bus to Ohio.

It's really late. Not really from the perspective of when I usually go to sleep but this bus ride seems far different than all the others. Too bad I don't have a camera because this trip to the midwest is going to be a whole lot different, I can fucking feel it. It kicked off yesterday, actually, when I saw a screening of a documentary called Off To War about a National Guard regiment in Arkansas that got shipped to Iraq to defend freedom. The families were so, so, so very devastated about losing their husbands, fathers and sons (there were no women in this particular regiment) which made up for their lack of perspective on why The War is a bad idea and unknowingly investigated that topic just by speaking honestly about their family members going away for what could very likely be forever.

So this sets the tone for the new era of America. Four years later. Working class midwesterners are getting family members coming home in body bags, the president is ignoring them (he hasn't attended any of the hundreds of dead soldier's funerals) and a bunch of mothers, daughters and teenage sons who are pissed off their dad or brother died for no reason (no to mention the fat wallets of oil families). I read a Vice Magazine Don'ts submission of a plump redneck looking guy with a shirt on that said "Hasta La Vista Bin Laden" with a drawing of a anthropomorphized dog standing in front of an American flag eating a hot dog bun with a fretting turban'd brown man inside. Then I go into this TA truck stop in some dark spot in PA and go pee. To my glee, I find bathroom graffiti asking us to "fuck sand niggers" and claiming "alah sucks."

Is any of this that surprising? Well yes. Two years ago I went to the midwest and it was mostly I'm Proud To Be An American playing in the truck stop snack store and an abundance of American flags on interstate overpasses. This time it's war. The patriotic, patient and dutiful sentiment has long but worn off and it's time for some good old racism, hate and religious intolerance. Fuck yeah! That'll help the Arkansas convoys in Iraq that are driving American trucks from WWII that just broke down and now they are getting ambushed with Kalishnakovs and rocket propelled grenades. Go team! Good thing I play video games enough to know exactly what a Kalishnakov looks like so I can spot one when an angry Jihadi takes a stroll into my subway stop next week.

Then I open up the New York Post and flip past the front page news of Jennifer Aniston guiltily kissing her unmemorable former cast member from Friends, I find a tiny article in the middle reporting on a Republican representative who foresees a national draft being called to fill the absence of troops in Iraq. Politely mentioning this may have something to do with them either dying or other "coalition" forces pulling out when they realized they don't have a fucking chance. Go team!

I can't believe among all of the amazing things that have happened to me in the last four years I will always remember this era as "the years of heavy drinking and hopelessness." It seems the industries that are doing well now involve vice, political dissent, petroleum (go figure) and getting the fuck out of America (if that is an industry, although I hear "entertainment" is doing pretty good too...ummm can anyone pronounce UFA correctly for a free tour of the Reichstag?)

So there's a chance I'm could get drafted. It's entirely un-funny. I don't know what to do. Canada? Lame (although Montreal sounds really cool these days, but that's all Frenchy n'shit). Iceland? Sounded good when I was a scrub. It's cold there. Germany? Damn, furious German women are hot in Fasbinder's movies but that's not exactly a good reason to go to a country. Spain? Perhaps, they're all Socialist now and they just pulled out of Iraq so they get Cojones Grandes points, and Spanish women are hot and the Basques blow shit up like al-Qaida. Scandinavia? They make really fucking intense depressing movies, have a stable society and created the best computer operating system in existence. But it's fucking cold and dark so I'd probably just get all h4x0r death metal and lose touch with all my friends.

Nope, America I will stay. Clawing at the ground and biting the feet of whatever armed forces fuck face who is trying to drag me into his convoy. They will lose if they ask me to join them.

posted at: 00:00 | path: /war | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 16 Apr 2004

America's army is a first person shooter 3D video game created by the
American Army to recruit young volunteers.

The game claims to acentuate the organizational elements and teamwork of being in the Army and downplays the reality of the deadly situation of the soliders in Iraq, or any war zone at that. In order to convery both sides, I would like to see a more specific version of America's Army released with the title Operation Iraqi Freedom, where the user can choose to participate in a massive online game as a American solider, Iraqi militant or innocent civilian. This will put the players in a more realistic environment where they have to make decision like wether killing a civilian is acceptable, which is an area of the war that was almost completely neglected in non-military publicity.

Subversive video games are a contradiction as far as I can see. While amazing and engrossing and well made, most video games represent a condensed version of mainstream society, with all of it's biggotry and intollerance. I see this as a purely financial decision. It's in the best interest of the game makers to appeal to the widest audience possible. And more often than not the individuals funding the game want to make as much money as possible, and I assume taking an overtly critical viewpoint on any subject relating to nationalism would alienate lots of people.

So I would be curious if the non-profit model could apply to subversive video game design. The production would have to be on par with for profit commercial games. All too often when video games are used as an artistic medium with a message beyond entertainment, the quality of the game suffers. So the non-profit woule have a budget and production plan but there wouldn't be a profit motive so the content can be more free.

posted at: 00:00 | path: /war | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 08 Apr 2004

Today, I heard from an old friend.

He's graduating from college in less than a month. Strange part is we both entered together...I left, he didn't. I don't really know which of us made the better decision, or if it was even a matter of being better. I hear Antioch College isn't doing too well these days. It'll be interesting to see what this former bastion of revolutionary thought is doing for graduation...and how punk rock it is.

posted at: 00:00 | path: /pda/antioch | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 04 Apr 2004

The Arcade Fire is a band I saw play recently.

They are probably the best band I've seen perform in a long time. While writing about technology is something I can do, writing about music is a skill I don't think I have. As they say, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I bought their CD after the show. It's not on a record label so here it is:

  1. Old Flame
  2. I'm Sleeping In A Submarine
  3. No Cars Go
  4. The Woodland National Anthem
  5. My heart is an apple
  6. Headlights Look Like Diamonds
  7. Forest Fire



posted at: 00:00 | path: /media/the_arcade_fire/us_kids_know | permanent link to this entry

Okay. This obsession with technology is coming to a close. I'm pretty much comfortable with using computer interfaces of any kind although I have been ignoring certain commercial interests at an almost absurd pace. All the while I was contradicting myself. An avid OS X user for simple desktop stuff, I talk shit on Apple. An avid Windows user for Internet streaming stuff, I talk shit on Microsoft. An avid Linux user for everything else and I can't remember what key commands do what because each app has their own. And now BSD, the final frontier...more on that later, I'm sure.

There was a time when operating systems were interesting. They were this mysterious ether that you're not supposed to pay attention to but somehow play the most important part in your personal feelings towards your computer. I got obsessed with MacOS, then Linux, then Windows. Operating systems were presented to American customers like myself as "the computer". If you didn't have your operating system you didn't have your applications and you couldn't work. And it all boiled down to the mantra of capitalism...brand loyalty. But it got funny because the marketeers used the myth of technology to mask their true intentions, which are to take as much of your money away from you as possible and make you dependent on their product. So you had these convenient definitions like "Mac people" and "PC lamers" and "PC gamers" and "UNIX nerds" and "Linux weirdoes" and my personal favorite "computer geniuses". Operating systems defined the person using them and the big commercial companies picked up on that in a second. Now you can get "home additions" and "gamer PCs" and "pro Macs" and "Enterprise servers" and "mobile workplaces". And in reality they're the same thing, just with more or less included in the package and that package is software so it's not like you have to unscrew anything to change it. But fuck that, I thought I said I wasn't going to talk about operating systems.

I don't want to talk about operating systems anymore for one simple fact...they are fucking boring to talk about. I can't believe my girlfriend kept a straight face for so long while I would drunkenly wax poetic about the virtues of open application standards and a free kernel. Oh, how about the lack of a flexible cross-platform filesystem? What about Window's inferior memory management? That one is fascinating.

I can sum this up with two examples. The first is about a PC warez nerd. Not too long ago, I was offered a copy of Windows XP from a friend. He had the best key gen program that can get 10 keys in a couple of hours. Then he had all the hot new XP compatible apps. I asked him why he thought XP was worth upgrading to at all. He sort of looked confused for a second then said, "it has hyperthreading support built in." I asked if he could explain what that meant because I honestly didn't know what hyperthreading was. He honestly admitted he didn't know either. Which is where most conversations about operating systems end up: with one party claiming some hot new feature is the shit and another asking what the hell it really does. Usually both parties don't really know what their talking about and they end up arguing about the virtues of the hot new features's television advertisements.

The second example is from an American media activist going to South America to document indigenous struggles and empower low-income communities to make their own media using low-cost high-tech digital multimedia equipment. Again, I was asked for not just "some software for PCs" but for a specific list of expensive Windows applications for media production. At the time I was collecting MacOS 9 software but it was getting old because I was about to move all my media work to Linux. I offered what out of date Mac software I had. "They don't have Macs in south America, they're too expensive," I was told. That's why I need you to get me this PC software and maybe a copy of Windows just in case. This is the other place where most conversations about operating systems end up: with one party asking "the computer guy" (who is usually just someone who has used a computer for more than word processing once before or actually clicked their mouse on an "advanced" button and happens to do something useful) if he "has this software program" because it's really good and they can't work without it. Then the other party says something about an operating system and said software program does or doesn't get installed on their computer.

I think both these examples illustrate how little both parties are thinking about the actual facts and details surrounding the operating systems they have already made judgments about, and come to rely one for their work. It's not that they are incapable of making informed decisions, it's that they don't care. The argument isn't on the merits of each operating system or what hardware it may be running on, it's a question of "is this Mac or PC." And it's going to stay that way until the argument gets more interesting. And the Linux community sure as hell isn't going to make it more interesting. And neither are the "mac people". I won't even go into the "Windows lamers." What's going to make it interesting is when things get cross-platform to a point where the operating system isn't an issue anymore, except for the rare case where you need your apps to be real close to the hardware in which case you are probably using Linux already and you are very aware how you came to this decision. Or you are Nvidia and you are getting fat cash from Microsoft and Apple.

So that's it. From now on it's all about applications. My wonderful roommate and girlfriend told me that's what it's all about and I haven't forgot it since. I'm not sad about abandoning my obsession with operating systems and it's probably not totally abandoned anyway. But at least I know they aren't that important for what reall drives the technology industry, which is obviously people. And those people, no matter how brainwashed by advertising, will respond to something that works well. If that thing happens to be well made and last for decades, even better, we all win.

posted at: 00:00 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Hacking public computer labs. It has been four years since I graduated from college. In technology time that is quite long.

Granted, shit was pretty hi-tech in 2000 but my college wasn't exactly cutting edge on the cyber-tip. For me I viewed this as an advantage. There were two public computer labs with about 40-50 Macs spread between the two. There was a Windows box or two for the weirdoes who complained so much that they "didn't know macs" they couldn't get anything done. There wasn't really any protection on these computers until 1999, when they implemented this big system called MacAdmin for authentication and printing quotas. In retrospect it was pretty neat since it's authentication was done against the UNIX (of the Solaris variety) systems and everyone had the option of a shell account for email and their www homepage. This meant one login and password for everything.

But before that it was free reign. You could do anything you wanted on the desktops and the network was 10baseT with an un-proxied T1 line to the Internet. When they installed RJ-45 wall plates in all the dorm rooms which was on the same subnet as the whole entire college...fuck, we rocked that shit. You could print on any of the laser printers anywhere on campus directly from your dorm room. There was no NAT system so each dorm had it's own static IP address. We weren't UNIX nerds so we didn't really understand the gravity of that situation. Since we were all Mac weenies Hotline was the app of choice and mp3 downloading was fast as shit. Then software started coming in and we were pretty much hooked up with any kind of digital information we needed.

This was between the years of 1996 and 1999 and we were by far in the minority since we actually knew what the fuck to do with a high speed LAN and fat Internet connection. When they installed MacAdmin on the public computers, I was already situated with my desktop right in my room which wasn't subject to these restrictions. They never got wise to the printing thing and I kept doing it, printing out manuals of downloaded software I knew I was going to use when I graduated. And even though the MacAdmin thing had print quotas, there was still a guest account with open access to the still un-proxied Internet pipe and a nice little home directory where you can download and run any app you like.

Cut to April 2nd 2004. I've been working in Internet related jobs since I graduated and now I'm a sysadmin for a daily news show on radio, television and the Internet. I've pretty much stopped taking MacOS and Windows seriously, becoming a bonafied Linux dork with all the baggage than accompanies that statement.

I was in the situation where the show's web site needed updating ASAP because there were typos on a new section of the site and it was already live. I happened to be leaving an art opening at a large University. Fresh! I can just hop on the University network from a public terminal and ssh into my Linux boxen and copy those files. WRONG! In the next hour I would embark on an adventure that made me feel extremely fucking nostalgic for the good old days of my undergrad campus network.

And this is where the story really starts...

next entry...

hacking public terminals at Columbia University

It's a shame that I have to describe these actions as hacking when in reality that can be described as "use". The line isn't so fine, really...read more



posted at: 00:00 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

About

I work with communications, open source software, sound and video. I'm the most happy when I work on all of these things at once. Sounds, Systems, Robots, Rocking Tigers.

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