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GRAFFITI -- September 01 thru September 07, 2003>> Latest: Sunday Morning EDT <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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September 01, 2003 - Updates at 0725 and 1943 EDT
Good morning. Well, good in a colloquial manner of speaking anyway. Not good in the sense that over the last 24 hours I've developed a whopper of a sore throat/cold. I'm taking meds, but how bloody typical - coming down with something that's fairly debilitating on a major holiday. Not only that, but it's likely to keep me from work for the next couple of days, unless emergencies crop up with a client. Sigh.
So I didn't sleep well, and the only good news is there's very little effort required to get through today - we've not much on beyond a little out and about. I'll probably take some Theraflu and try to squeeze in several naps, if circumstances allow. Now for some more vitamin C and a cup of coffee... See you back here later, probably.
1943, Evening Maryland time... We're back in town. All those abbreviated posts happened in Michigan - we went back for a family wedding that took place on Friday afternoon at 4:30 PM. Whoa, yeah, I know, but we were there, along with 2 - 300 family and friends. A couple of those were feeling less than chipper, poor folks. Poorer me, I caught the bug. Did you see I mentioned above that it was a good thing that little effort was required to get through the day? Well, the good news is the long leg saw us upgraded to first class. The bad news is the little energy I had wasn't enough, I was miserable the whole time, so sad.
Everything else is pretty much up to speed, except me. I'll take tomorrow off from work, and re-evaluate my condition tomorrow night before deciding for Wednesday. I don't think anyone I work with would appreciate my bringing this around any of the offices that I haunt. Speaking of a haunting, I'd best hang this up and rest some more. I'll see you tomorrow, later in the morning, with more details of the trip. It was definitely fun. See ya!
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September 02, 2003 - Updates at 1035 EDT
Howdy. I'd say good morning, but it isn't, really. I slept very badly, if at all, last night as I fought the flu bug that bit me over the weekend. I'll still probably do an hour's work, remotely, to keep the wheels of commerce flowing, but mostly today I'm going to try to nap, where and when I can.
The weekend trip to Michigan was fun. Other than catching this bug, the only downside to the trip happened at the very front end. As our flight time approached, the service we retained to pick us up and deliver us to BWI failed to show up. We called once, they said the driver was hung up in traffic behind an accident and would be no more than 10 minutes. After fifteen minutes, we called again, and got voice mail. The same at 20 minutes and 25 minutes past the hour. Then we left a message expressing our dismay and displeasure, threw all the bags into the Santa Fe, and drove ourselves to the airport. There we had to park in short term parking to be close enough to the action to make our flight, as they were already boarding when we approached the airport. That cost us a pretty penny getting back last night.
With that out of the way, the flights from BWI to Cincinatti, and on to Grand Rapids were uneventful and on time. We got there, picked up a car from Avis, and headed over to the hotel so that Marcia could catch a quick nap. That was one of my priority jobs over the weekend - making sure that Marcia didn't tire herself out too much. After nap-time, we headed over to the church to make an appearance at the rehearsal. Yeah, I know, we weren't participating as such, but we were invited anyway. Lots of back and forthing, laughter and miscues. Much fun, as at the dinner that followed. That was catered right there at the church. Very convenient. That was day one.
Day two dawned with us up at some ridiculous hour, to get ready to go to lunch with Sue (Marcia's sister), Bill (their website) and the kids (including the groom). I still don't know why I have to get out of bed three hours before an appointment 15 minutes away. I'm happy to hear any explanations of that one. We ate at a Perkins, and that pretty much settled me for the day. Three hours of brunching is enough for anyone, even me. We went back to the room and rested again, then headed over to the church for the ceremony. Bill (the groom's dad) officiated. Joel and Lynne's wedding went off without a hitch. Marcia cried, what a shocker. At the end of the ceremony, instead of the traditional receiving line, Joel and Lynne came back down the aisle, and greeted people as they came out of the pews, one row at a time. Apparently that's the modern method.
Did I mention that it was a 4:30 PM ceremony? Yeah, on a working Friday. Very ... interesting timing. A number of people who couldn't be there for the wedding proper were present at the reception, in a hall at a nearby country club. Hosted bar, good food, good conversation, a kissing box, and lots of dancing ensued. The kissing box is a pass-around thing. Plop a dollar in, and drop it in front of a couple that needs to stand up and smooch publicly. It was very popular. And speaking of dancing, is there anyplace else (besides Michigan) where the wedding DJ's make people do the chicken dance and the Hokey Pokey? I didn't think so.
Saturday we went to P J Hoffmaster State Park, along the shores of Lake Michigan. Bill, Sue, Natali, Marcia and myself rode up together, meeting Karen (Marcia's sister also), Ron, Faye, and their campsite friends for lunch, beach, dinner and gab. A nice, nice day.
Sunday we met with Marcia's cousin Barb and her husband Leon. Barb is a sewing, embroidering and quilting person, as is Marcia, so they covered that topic pretty well. Meanwhile Leon and I nattered about their summer camper trip to Alaska. They came back with some stunning pictures. Then, after another round of naps, Marcia and I joined Sue, Bill, Natali and Faye for supper at the Beltline Bar and Grill. Specialty of the house: Wet burritos, which are basically standard (okay, huge) burritos drenched in enchilada sauce and cheese. Yummerlischious.
By the time we got back to the hotel, my throat seemed pretty scratchy, and it stayed that way, making me and my sleep both miserable. We breakfasted once more with Sue, Bill and Natali after checking out of the hotel, then said our goodbyes. Bill and Sue are likely not to be back up from Brazil for at least three or four years. We dropped into the airport just in time for the check in desk to shoe-horn us into the current flight out to Cincinati. Apparently the next flight, on which we were booked, was running late, and might cause us to miss our connection. So we hustled up to the gate, they put us on the plane, closed the doors a couple of minutes later and we flew. Then we had a three hour layover in Cincy. When we boarded the 757 back to BWI, we got a surprise upgrade to First Class. The only good thing about that from my perspective was that I had more room to squirm, trying to stay comfortable with a then-mild fever and aching joints and muscles. That was a boon, I suppose, but I certainly didn't appreciate it much.
Okay, now you have our holiday weekend in a nutshell, and I can go back to bed for a while. See ya!
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September 03, 2003 - Updates at 1102 and 1513
Good morning, sorta. I got perhaps five continuous hours of sleep last night, which is far better than I did the night before. I've got a little wireless project I'm trying to finish up with right now, then I'll be back with more to post - the problem is my powers of concentration are positively pathetic at the moment. Oh, I managed to remember to fix the "Last Week" link above, which was previously pointing to some unknowable non-existant mystery page in month zero. Sigh. My temperature has ranged between 101 and 97.5 over the last 48 hours, with aches and pains commensurate, sore throat, congestion and lack of appetite. It's that last item that's the kicker - when I'm not interested in food, what is life? I'm hopeful that this backs off of me right quick, which is why I'm not pushing hard. My old pattern would have been to get into work, even yesterday, for a while, and again today. But that would get people around me sick, and slow my recovery to boot! If there were a real emergency, of course I'd be there... I'll be back in a while.
1513 - Hi, I'm back for a minute... I made the supreme effort and drove down to Best Buy to pick up the water filter that our Maytag fridge has been whining about for the last month. While I was at it, I carried along with me my Zaurus SL-5500, running Kismet (http://www.kismetwireless.net/), a wireless network sniffer. It doesn't pick up the encrypted and apparently stealthy home network at all, except as the occasional random packet that's discarded as noise. At right you can see a screenshot thumbnail off of the Zaurus - that links to a one-to-one image. Click here to get a 2x image so that you can actually read what the display says.
I picked up eight wireless networks during the course of a three-mile round trip. Because I retraced my path coming back, I only picked up one new link on the way home. The T-Mobile link I've put down to the Starbucks that I crossed by on my way out of the mall. The data collected by Kismet looks like this, one or more links found per datafile written:
# cat Kismet-Sep-03-2003-2.network
...
Network 7: "tmobile" BSSID: "00:40:96:57:45:B6"
Type : infrastructure
Carrier : 802.11b
Info : "None"
Channel : 06
WEP : "No"
Maxrate : 11.0
LLC : 287
Data : 0
Crypt : 0
Weak : 0
Total : 287
First : "Wed Sep 3 13:59:29 2003"
Last : "Wed Sep 3 14:01:00 2003"
...
There are undoubtedly other fun things to learn from this tool, but I want to draw your attention to one thing from the last datafile written:
# grep -i wep Kismet-Sep-03-2003-2.network
WEP : "No"
WEP : "Yes"
WEP : "Yes"
WEP : "No"
WEP : "Yes"
WEP : "No"
WEP : "No"
WEP : "No"
Out of eight wireless networks detected, only three were running WEP encryption. Now maybe all they do is connect via VPN or SSH connection or something. Yeah, right. Please note that if you run wireless without encryption, anyone can wander about and capture your traffic, email passwords, network information, everything. Someone could probably garner enough information to drive into the neighborhood, bring up a laptop computer, use networking (Windows or Samba) to connect to your windows shares, and pull your Quicken data off onto their hard drive. Would that be enough information for someone to do some really effective identity theft? How about those Turbo Tax return files laying on your hard drive unprotected? You simply MUST use at least WEP encryption. It's not very good, but it's good enough that anyone trying to target random people will move on to an easier mark. USE ENCRYPTION!
Unfortunately, that ate all my energy. Now to rest again for a while. Ta-ta...
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September 04, 2003 - Updates at 0822
Good morning. Look to yesterday afternoon's post for some (I think) interesting info on wireless connections. Now, well, here I am. The fever seems finally to have broken, and I'm going to do my best to be restful today, then put in a good day tomorrow for a one-day work week. I so do not love being ill.
I've nothing else exciting to report, at least I managed to be up early enough to get the trash and recycling out before pick-up this morning. I missed it, Monday a week ago. Then we lost the Thursday and this Monday to travel. So it was really time. Mmmm. More later as events warrant.
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September 05, 2003 - Updates at 0652
Good morning. I feel better than I have anytime since Sunday, so I'll count that as a good thing. I'm perhaps not at 100%, but I'm certainly good enough to go to work, and far enough past having had a fever, sneezing and other symptoms of an active, contagious bug that I'm reasonably sure I won't infect my cow orkers or clients.
The only useful bit of news from yesterday is that we think (fingers, toes and eyes crossed) that it's time to start house-hunting for real. It's been a long road, and there are still a few dots to cross and tees to eye, but in another week or so we'll talk to bankers and see just what we qualify for. Our real estate agent, the lady who helped find us this place on very short notice and a good friend now, thinks we can afford just about anything in Bowie. Almost everyone I talked to about this yesterday seemed excited for us.
Now I should get on the road and see what trouble I can get into at work. Later!
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September 06, 2003 - Updates at 0914
Good morning. Eight hours of sleep for the first time in a week sure is a nice feeling. Of course, I woke first at 0700, looked around, and said to myself, "Self, it's too early to break out the lawnmower. The neighbors will be pissed." So I put my head back down. Then all of a sudden it was two hours later. Now I have mucho chores to get done, a late start, and a bunch of web-work to follow. I probably should have gotten up, but my healing body also probably needed the rest.
On the drive to Gaithersburg yesterday morning, I left running the Zaurus in network capture mode. Now this is mostly freeway, so I really didn't expect to pick anything up. Lo and behold, I got 12 networks other than my own. Of those only three had WEP enabled, and one of the unprotected WAPs (Wireless Access Points) was actually named "pimped". I have the distinct feeling that someone's been owned.
There's more to share, but you'll excuse me if I want to get the outside work done while it's cool and the sun isn't right overhead. Yeah, after another week of rain, at least the sun's out. I'll see you back here later.
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September 07, 2003 - Updates in the morning
Yep, morning is all I'll commit to... That's especially true since yesterday's "later" has also turned out to be now. I did get much of what I wanted to do, done yesterday, from the yard to a fair spot of time spent working on ETS's web. I'm going to be working on more of the latter today, too.
In the meantime, I saw on Jerry's Mail page for Saturday that someone is finally paying attention to his Thor weapon system idea. It's written up in this article at the Post-Gazette. It's been one of the tenets of campaigning that the high ground has great value. There's no higher ground than the top of the gravity well.
"P2P stands for Piracy to Porn" according to Andrew Lack of Sony Music. This is why the record labels are backing yet another round of efforts to legislate peer-to-peer software out of utility, if not existence. Slashdot brought this to my eyes, and a search on Thomas for HR2885 brings up the text of this remarkably warped bill. The RIAA hasn't had much luck with selling their crap, and continue to blame the world for not emptying their wallets into their coffers. So it's time to make their sock puppets in Washington raise a hue and cry about kiddie porn in connection with P2P software and services. The justifiable fear that Doc Searls expresses time after time is that what certain large corporate interests want is to turn the Internet into a one way channel for crap corporate content to pour into our computers. I'm pretty sure about all of you, and I sure don't want my 'net turned into the same 500 channels of crap that TV has become. Let your representatives know what you think about this latest RIAA attack. Mine is the Honorable Steny Hoyer...
Dear Representative Hoyer,
I am writing today to register my disapproval of HR2885, Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act of 2003.
I am no fan of pornography, although I support the right of others to view materials of their own choosing. And I am strongly against child pornography. Current US laws address both of those issues. Nor do I actually use peer-to-peer software to download music or movies from the internet, legally or illegally.
This new bill, HR2885, is a notably transparant continuation of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) attacks on the Internet. Their belief is that their revenues should be guaranteed, and any route by which someone might listen to music that doesn't put money in their pockets should be made illegal. The Internet *has* changed the rules, and businesses need to adapt, or they go out of business. Note the lack of publically traded buggy-whip manufacturing companies.
The RIAA's activities over the last several years seem to have been pointed towards criminalizing any activity that doesn't make them money, and treating their customers as theives. This is not the customer service one sees from a growing, thriving industry that provides what people want. No, it is the thrashing and throes of an industry on the ropes, unable to cope with the changes of the day.
The RIAA has put their money and their lobbying might behind the groups that are pushing HR2885 because they believe it serves their goals.
There are several technical and factual flaws in HR2885 as well. The biggest problem is that this bill appears to be another "make baseball bats illegal because they might be used to hit people with". Next, It appears that web browsers and web servers meet the definition of 'peer-to-peer file trading software', the way I read the bill's text. Next, Item 2B specifies a "do-not-install beacon" that is yet to be developed. This would have to be downloaded and installed by parents to protect their children. But as we've seen in recent weeks, people won't download important patches to protect their computers from known threats (worms and viruses).
When there are legal and illegal uses for a product (software or physical), I believe Congress should tread very lightly. I see HR2885 as an attempt to get another tool into the RIAA's belt in it's ill-advised war against the Internet. Should HR2885 be passed and signed into law, I believe it would be ineffective for the purposes stated, but instead would be used as a cudgel by the RIAA to attack P2P software and services.
Thank you for your time and attention. Please remember that at least one of your constituents stands against the RIAA's repeated attempts to legislate their continued existence. Specifically at this time, I am against HR2885.
Best Regards,
Brian Bilbrey
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2003 Brian P. Bilbrey.