Matt's Blog

So I ordered the Dell yesterday. Not the notebook but an ordinary black box. The little machine for fun and the desktop for work. It was a good price, C$359 for a low end Core 2 Duo box --- strictly business, 2GB RAM, 160 GB disc, DVD reader, wired ethernet, plethora of USB, basic onboard graphics, basic audio, a keyboard and that's it.

Yes, I liked the dell, but the Acer had great reviews, was selling C$299 with Linux, and I all I had to do was walk into the Future Shop and lay down cash and it was mine. The clincher was that the Linux version was cheaper than the Windows version. To get the same specs on the dell machine I would have paid more for the Windows version then I would have for the linux version --- dell discounts Windows boxes so much that it is almost always the cheaper alternative, despite the nominal C$30 premium for Windows.

The dell mini looks very cool.

Don't know why I've overlooked it before. I had read that it was a language associated with Second Life and primarily intersting because of its multithreaded support. Well I have always hated multiprocessors and their get, and assuming this was something like like a Java scripting language gave it a miss. A big mistake, it doesn't support multiprocessing but rather coroutines which are a favourite of mine.

I have added a lua to my compendium of implementations of the sieve of eratosthenes.

Google's Chrome web browser is very good.
...The browser is rock solid. Very much release quality. I am using it to write this post. Highly recommended.

The book is "Pro Drupal Development --- 2nd Ed." It's time I learned how this blog really works.

I'm thinking of a drupal module to replicate the functionality of gitweb. That way I can get rid of my static projects page.

So Dan Kaminsky's attack really isn't that sophisticated after all. It's not a birthday attack --- per request (on unpatched servers) it still requires throwing 2^15 spoofed packets at the server before the real reply arrives for a reasonable expectation of success. Getting that many packets on target in time is difficult. The weakness is in the way recursive (i.e. caching) name server accepts in-baliwick glue records thrown at it for any domain that kind-of looks like it belongs. Each potential in-baliwick name becomes a potential point of attack so there is a very broad front for a mass spoofing session to attack. Each point could alone reliably defend against many packets but with a small chance of failure across a very broad front a storm of packets still leads to a quick failure (about 2^16 points of request and spoofed packets to match).

However, by making a recursive name server instead throw away those in-baliwick responses and only accept glue when it (subsequently) is actually asking for the A record for an in-baliwick name-server a mass attack is suddenly collapsed to a single and more easily defended attack.

I just added SPF records for my draisey.ca domain. I added a neutral "?all" as the last condition so hopefully my mail delivery wont be any worse than before --- I strangely doubt that however, and cringe to learn I put a one week lifetime on these records --- what was I thinking? Some mail I sent to Japan, through the otherwise reliable Google Apps, seems to be going astray so I was hoping a little added SPF spice might improve its chances of arriving. Fool I am.

Copyright came into existence when making copies was expensive, and in its very successful application until this century has remained expensive. Physical publishing of books is becoming cheaper all the time as a result of improvements in xerography but still the initial outlay in hardware required to achieve the lowest costs per page are still significant. Copyright in these situations encourage investment that mightn't occur otherwise; not because copying is cheap for any unauthorized reprints but because it is expensive for the authorized ones and the publisher wants to assure a return on his investment before he makes a significant outlay in printing hardware. The same can be said for optical disks which are cheap individually but mass production requires the use of extremely expensive priniting facilities. The marginal costs of an optical disc are almost nothing but the vast initial costs must be amortized over all optical discs in order for their manufacture to be profitable. A strong copyright regime made such investments easily warrented.

The Canada government wants to gut our property law and entrench digital squatters rights to wealthy American Oligarchs in all our personal electronic devices, be they computers, music players, televisions, book-readers for the blind, telephones, mapping and positioning devices, ... --- in short, anything containing electronics that will be manufactured in this century. The proposed new copyright law by the Federal Conservatives will encourage (nay, virtually mandate) all of our property to contain permanently running embedded agents of an oligarchy of rights-owning interests; agents that may not be removed by the property owner without threat of the severest criminal penalties and crippling fines. These agents will works against our interests to enforce the arbitrary will of these oligarchs in the supposed interest of copyright holders, with powers that vastly exceed that of copyright, and not even directly benefitting the actual producers of original material worthy of copyright. The agents will strictly control the day-to-day use of digital media, and deign such allowances as they permit.

If you own an old and valuable book that the pages are falling out of you can get it rebound. There is no copying going on so no copyright statutes apply. Not so with digital media. Old worn out devices will simply perish and take all your media with it. I can still play old vinyl LPs that I recorded onto magnetic tape years ago; the record player died years ago but tape players are still commonplace. In a nice compromise those magnetic cassettes I bought had a small surcharge that was shared out between recording companies. Even though the majority of the blank tapes I bought contained no copied music on at all, I didn't mind the surcharge and took advantage of the ability to move music onto the more convenient tape format. The records belonged to me; the record player and cassette recorder belonged to me; the cassettes I recorded belonged to me and I never gave them to other people; the cassettes played without my having to ask permission. The law respected my discretion and I respected the law. Civil law that is. Civility being the key.

The word "rights" was gentrified in the eighteenth century. The word entered the english language along with the Norman Conquerers who exercised such rights as to "the right to squash any peasant", "the right to Harry the North" (i.e. kill all Northumbrians). Such rights were always followed by mounted cavalry and sharp swords. By Elizabethan time rights were handed out to royal favourites such as "the right to 10% tax on the imports of wine". Gentler but still enforced with a stick and the common man was always on the receiving end. Using the word in the sense of "human rights" was a cleverly crafted reversal by the reform minded until nowadays the word "rights" is surrounded by a warm fuzzy glow. The introduction of "Digital Rights Management" will bring back associations of royal favour and the sword.

We are to be subjugated to Encryption. It sounds harmless at first --- who really cares that your DVD is encrypted or not; after all, it plays just the same. The rub lies in the DVD player --- we can't decrypt the DVD directly but the DVD player can and that player belongs to us and obeys our instructions. Except of course when it doesn't. The proposed law will ensure that we no longer control the decrypting agents embedded in our own property. They will carry on their work for interests not our own, using hardware we bought and consuming electricity we pay for, communicating as they choose to their own masters, monitoring all aspects of our devices and applying their secret decoder keys only as they see fit, controlling our devices and disabling them on demand. All for interests south of the border. This is the gross assault on property laws that our Conservative government is contemplating.

In the absense of this hideous proposed legislation, I might have occasionally permitted my property to be controlled by a foreign commercial interest, granting their agents sufficient control that they can apply their decryption keys with assurance that I am not covertly copying media for which they hold copyright. I would not begrudge them their needless suspicions --- if the convenience of enjoying the music or movie or whatever digital media on my electronic gizmo was great enough I might even have recommend it to others. But I would reserve the right, my property rights, to charge their agents rent.