Dilithium

The Congress finally manage to pass the recent FISA Amendments Act in spite of serious opposition from the EFF and a lot of other concerned citizens and organizations all across the country. Fortunately, even though it’s been passed, the fight to get the telecoms held accountable for participating in illegal, warrantless domestic spying is continuing. This immunity isn’t even old enough to need acne creams and already the fight is renewed.

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston was invited to guest-blog at The Hill.com’s Congress Blog about the EFF’s plans for mounting a ‘Repeal Immunity’ Movement that is going to continue the fight to hold telecommunications companies responsible for their participation in illegal, unconstitutional, warrentless wiretapping and domestic spying. They are planning a continued effort in Washington, including a constitutional challenge to the immunity provisions

We have shown that there is a constituency — a loud, organized, and active constituency — that will passionately defend the Constitution, privacy rights, and the rule of law. Lawmakers risk their offices in ignoring this principled, tireless, permanent movement. — From a recent EFF Deeplinks blog posting

Technorati Tags: electrontic frontier foundation., unconstitutional, domestic spying, telecoms, warrantless wiretapping, immunity, illegal spying, eff

The folks at ASUS have come up with something that I’m certain is going to go a long way in the downfall of Windows. The new P5E3 Deluxe motherboard has a Boot Rom that allows it to boot linux in an “Instant on” mode. This mode will take you from hitting the power switch to surfing the Internet in a Firefox browser in five, count ‘em, five seconds!

Oh, it’ll also be able to boot windows for whatever needs it, and this linux is burned into the boot ROM, configuration changes & such can be saved between sessions. It’s the kind of thing that will give linux a lot more exposure to mainstream users.

Picture this: Joe Sixpack needs to check in on his fave blogs and online news but he hasn’t got the time to wait for Windows to boot. He flips on his computer, five seconds later he’s got a browser running and is getting up to date while the guy next to him is still looking at the Windows logo, waiting for his machine to boot.

This is the kind of thing that’s going to help take some of the mystery out of linux for mainstream user types and put Windows farther and farther into the back seat.

This “Instant on” OS will probably be somewhat limited, but it’s also going to be a real safety advantage too… since the software is running from a read-only device, malware-laden sites won’t be able to do squat to the system.

Later, I would expect many more users to opt to have Linux as their main OS with Windows running in a Virtual Machine for the very few apps or games that still don’t run in Linux.

I know one thing for certain, the next time I go shopping for motherboards I’m going to be looking for this kind of feature! Way to go ASUS!

Technorati Tags: five seconds, motherboard, asus, boot rom, instant on, operating system, linux, windows, 5 seconds

I just read a story that’s going to be of interest those who like to be on the bleeding edge of speed capacities… Some physicists at the University of Sydney have come up with an optical chip that’s reportedly capable of speeds up to a hundred times faster than Australia’s current networks are doing.

What’s cool about it is that the chalcogenide glass photonic chips are based on plain glass and are supposed to be really cheap to make with some really awesome capabilities.

He adds that these chips could be scaled to operate at data rates approaching 640 Gb/s — the equivalent to transmitting approximately 17 complete DVDs per second!

This technology could be commercially available within 5 years or so.

Here’s hoping, this could go a long way toward easing people’s concerns about available bandwidth.

Technorati Tags: CUDOS, Signal Processing, Network Technology, Chip, Semiconductors, Glass, Networking, Hardware, Internet, Network

I’m wondering what the deal is with memory. No, I’m not asking for a price quote, I’m talking about the increase in times when I find that programs I use all the time are running into “out of memory” errors a lot more than they ever used to.

The programs that are encountering that error the most are written in Java. In fact, anytime I have an “out of memory” error, it can almost always be traced back to a Java app, Freenet 0.5 build 5109 and several related utilites, that’s running into memory errors. Generally, if I stop the utilities and restart freenet, that takes care of the problem for a couple of days and then I’m seeing “out of memory” again.

I’m running Sun Java 1.6.0_05 on an ASRock KVM?? Motherboard with an AMD Sempron 2400+ 1.67Ghz cpu with 512MB of ram. Windows XPPro service pack 2. These out of memory errors have only cropped up in the last three months or so.

Yah, I’ve done the sensible things… malware scans, uninstall stuff I’m not using anymore, not run processes that I don’t need to run and so on. I suppose that in the end it’s going to be attributable to memory leaks in the current build of Freenet .05. In the meantime, I’m thinking that I need to start shopping for a couple gigabytes worth of memory sticks.

I’m thinking though that this might be more related to changes in Sun Java’s 1.6.x_xx branch than the Freenet 0.5 version. The reason is that with the last couple of builds, Freenet 0.5 hasn’t changed overly much. Java on the other hand has gone through several updates in that same time. I wonder if it’s possible that some of those changes broke something that Freenet uses?

Technorati Tags: freenet 0.5, freenet, java applications, memory, java, out of memory, memory management

Looks like the RIAA is going to take another loss because of it’s tactics. Recently some students at North Carolina State brought to the attention of the court the illegal nature of the investigations the RIAA has been conducting through unlicensed investigators (can you say mediasentry scandal?)

Now, the judge who had been just routinely signing the RIAA’s ex parte discovery orders has decided to take a fresh look at the tactics being used by the RIAA. She’s issued a stay of the most recent subpoena, ordering NC state not to answer it.

Now there’s motions to dismiss the case which has been referred to a Magistrate Judge who will re-examine what’s been going on. There’s No telling exactly what’s going to happen next but it sure looks like this one’s going to sting more than a little.

Technorati Tags: lawsuits, riaa tactics, north carolina judge, illegal investigations, mediasentry, subpoena, riaa, unlicensed investigators

I’m wondering something. Y’see, for several years now in keeping our little home LAN running I’ve been using Cat5e cables to link everything together. Recently, as part of my never ending effort to keep from falling behind on things technical, I find that the Cat5e cables that I’ve been using for so long are no longer the standard and haven’t been for quite a while now. Apparently, somebody changed the standard to CAT6 without checking with me first.

Ok, I don’t suppose they really <grin> needed to check with me but I have to say that while I’m nowhere close to the most technically current, it IS embarrassing to discover that something I thought was a current standard has apparently been out of date since not very long after I adopted the use of it myself.

Now it leaves me with a question. Do I go ahead and continue using the Cat5e cables I’m using until there’s a bigger need to replace ‘em or is there any benefit to changing at all?

Technorati Tags: home lan, standard, network cable, cat6, cat5e

AVG’s version 8 of their software has a new “feature” called Linkscanner. It sounds like a nice idea on paper but in reality it’s been a nightmare for webmasters because it’s requesting the pages that get listed in search engine results in order to scan them and warn the user in the event of a page loaded with malware. Thing is, up until a recent software update, it was doing this for every link that appeared on a search engine result page.

Their recent changes have apparently cut down on the problem, but linkscanner is still more trouble than it’s worth. The best thing to do is get rid of it and use sensible judgment in your search engine habits.

To disable it in Firefox go to Tools, click Add-ons, then find the AVG Safe Search add-on. Of course, even with it disabled, it’s still running in the background using cpu cycles. The best solution is to remove it completely.

The way to do this is to re-run the installer program and when it starts up select the “Add or remove components” option and pay attention to the dialogs that follow. When you see the one that tells you what components will be installed, UN-Check Search Shield. It’s also a good idea to UN-check any toolbars that the installer offers to put in.

Once search shield is removed from AVG, you can go back into Firefox’s Add-ons and uninstall the AVG Safe Search add-on to get it out of your browser completely.

This procedure will also work with a fresh install, just pay attention to the dialogs and be sure to UN-check the parts of it that you don’t want, such as “Search Shield” or any toolbars.

I personally also don’t bother with the email scanner. The reason is that the email gets written to disk as it’s received and the “resident shield” already scans all files that are opened, written to, or read. Scanning the email as it comes in is a redundant waste of cpu cycles.

I haven’t used an email scanner in years and have never had one problem because of it and dispite all the scare tactics used to promote things like Linkscanner, it’s not necessary. All you need is to learn and use safe, sensible habits. The first and most important of which is LOOK at a link before you click on it… does it really point to what it looks like it is?

Technorati Tags: avg, bandwidth, uninstall, malware, firefox, cpu, search shield, safe search, how to, anti malware

This is one of those things that makes you wonder, “if they can get away with something like this there, how long before it can happen here?” It makes you wonder how much privacy you really have. Is there a hidden transmitter in your television? How easy is it for your phone or email conversations to be snooped? Is there a secret transmitter built into your shiny new patio furniture?

What happened was the Bavarian Parliament passed a law that allows their police to plant “Remote Forensic Software” on the computer of anyone they consider a suspect AND on the computers of all of that person’s contacts. They’re allowed to break into houses in secret to install it if remote installation isn’t possible and while they’re there, they get to do a physical search as well.

The RFS can be used to read, alter or delete data… which means it’s an open window to anything on the computer and privacy is nuked. Login information, passwords, web surfing habits, emails, IMs, everything is wide open to them.

Thing is, do we already have something like this in the Homeland Security act and the Patriot act? Do we dare not assume it to be true?

Technorati Tags: malware, trojan, privacy, government trojan, remote software, surveillance, police trojan, domestic spying, spyware

A while back, EBay announced that they were going to switch to a system that would ONLY accept Paypal for payment. They then started to implement this in Australia to kinda try out the idea and find out how users businesses and the government would feel about it.

Well, they found out all right. There was an almost violent reaction from sellers, who didn’t want to be locked into a paypal only situation because of the fees that paypal charges them for each transaction.

Then the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission got into the act and held a conference in Sydney to decide if they were going to allow this new policy. Just when it looked like the ACCC was going to nuke the idea, EBay backed down and decided not to go ahead with the plan.

Of course, they didn’t back quite all the way down. Apparently since then, regardless of what other payment options the seller want’s, paypal is now always offered as a payment option.

I think it’s interesting that they decided to try this in Australia instead of the US. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if they had? Would they have been allowed to get away with it?

By the way, don’t forget that ebay bought paypal a few years ago.

Technorati Tags: payments, paypal, ebay, monopoly, auctions, online payments, auction payment

I just saw an article about how Bell was recently required to release some of it’s data that was supposed to prove how torrents and P2P in general was causing so much network congestion that it was necessary to throttle P2P connections to keep it under control

Funny thing, the data they release, scant though it is, has proved the contrary to the point where the proponents of throttling should just pack their Delsey bags and head for the highway and not stop until they get to a little place I like to call reality. BitTorrent transfers in particular and P2P in general turns out to be responsible for congestion of a measly 2.6 to 5.2 percent of their network over a period of two months before they started throttling BitTorrent and P2P connections.

I think that this is just the beginning of the end of being able to justify throttling BitTorrent and P2P connections (or any other connections for that matter). Besides, the more that ISPs try to throttle such connections, the more that software developers are going to come up with ways to defeat that throttling. The ISPs really ought to save themselves a whole lot of time, money and aggravation and just give it up now.

Technorati Tags: p2p, throttling, throttle bittorrent, bittorrent connections, bandwidth throttling, network congestion, p2p connections, bittorrent