- A lot happened while I was down in Taos, and I’ll do my best to catch up a little here today. But as you’ve seen from my two entries about the workshop, it was tough to pay attention to anything there but the challenge at hand.
- More photos from the workshop: Christie Yant has established a single page linking to all four of her Flickr albums from Taos Toolbox 2011.
- Several people sent me invites to Google+, and I established an account several days ago. (I already had a Google account, so it was no big deal.) Google being insanely paranoid about how real your name is, look for me as…Jeff Duntemann.
- In the wake of Tuesday night’s epic natural gas leak here, I discovered that the ethyl mercaptan molecule resembles a balloon animal weiner dog with its hindquarters on upside down. Hey, I wonder if a balloon artist has ever done balloon hydrocarbons? (Google comes up empty.)
- Motorola is finally rolling out an Android upgrade that enables use of the Xoom’s SD slot. Guys, why was that so hard?
- Only a handful of people ever make it to 114 years old. And, weirdly, that’s when virtually all of the oldest of the oldest of the old actually die.
- Here’s a photo of the largest cannon ever built. No points for guessing who built it.
- And while you’re browsing Gizmodo’s Monster Machines category, don’t miss the largest Diesel engine in the world. Your flip-flops got paddled across the pond by something very like that.
- This SSD might well make that seven-year-old PC a little bouncier…but I still recommend maxing out RAM to 4 GB, cleaning the registry, and getting rid of crapware. I’m less convinced than some people that hard drive speeds are a serious bottleneck when your registry looks like an empty lot in a war zone.
- QBit, who on beach walks favors dead fish but will gladly settle for seaweed, has refused to answer the question: Why do dogs roll in stinky stuff?
- I doubt that this would ever work, irrespective of its cool halfway-to-dieselpunk looks. It does make me wonder what other cool stuff might have been drowned out in the racket coming from WWI. (Thanks to Gary Kato for the link.)
- And I know damned well that this wouldn’t work, but it goes all the way to full-bore, balls-out dieselpunk fantasy. (Thanks again to Gary Kato.)
- Perhaps you’ve seen the Dyson Fan on TV ads. Here’s how they work.
- The site is in German, and is well-known in Europe for high-end licorice. Pete Albrecht assures me that the name of the company really does translate as “Bearshit Pharmacy.” Wow.
software
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Strahinja Markovic, the chap who created the very good Sigil epub editor while he was a CS undergrad, now has a master’s, a good job, and…a life. (How dare he? ) In a recent blog post, he’s asked for prospective maintainers of the code (which is open source) to introduce themselves and make a case to him as to why they should be trusted to carry on the work. He doesn’t know me; I’m just spreading the word, because I use Sigil and I want it to continue to evolve.
- We have the same problem with the Kompozer WYSIWYG HTML editor; poor Fabien “Kaz” Cazenave has a new job and very little time to devote to the product. I like Kompozer but it has some rough spots, and I hope someone will take over and keep the wheels turning.
- In the meantime, I’ve installed and am testing BlueGriffon, and so far I like what I see. The editor incorporates the Gecko rendering engine used in Firefox 4, so if it looks good in BlueGriffon it’ll look good in Firefox. It has HTML5 and CSS3 capability, and an interesting business model: The editor is free, and the developer sells various add-ons. That doesn’t bother me at all; the whole suite of 9 add-ons can currently be had for $35 Euros, or about $50US. If BlueGriffon performs well on my existing Web documents, I’d pay that like a shot, even if I don’t use the add-ons.
- As brilliant as the original Turbo Pascal was, it wasn’t alone. From Andrew Stuart comes a link to the deep history of Nick Gammon’s G-Pascal, an enviable piece of assembly-coding work that put a potent Pascal compiler for the Commodore 64 in…16K. If you used G-Pascal back in the 80s, this is a must-see, especially the links at the end, to the sorts of ads and programming newsletters that were the lifeblood of personal programming in the early 80s.
- I don’t know if you’ve ever needed an 18″ USB A-B cable, but I did, and after a great deal of looking around, I finally found them at Other World Computing. It’s mostly a Mac shop, but has the short A-B cables for both USB 2 and USB 3. The cable connects the USB hub on my Dell 20″ monitor to the GX620 USFF machine mounted immediately behind it, and keeps cable clutter down behind the monitor.
- Little things sometimes matter: The Toshiba Thrive has a full-sized SD card slot. Not micro. This means that I can use the SD cards I already have. A mini-USB adapter will also allow me to use my existing thumb drives. Ports and card slots have been the deal-killer so far on tablet after tablet. This one (though it won’t be in stores until July) still has an edge. (Bill Roper reminded me that I needed to post about this.)
- From Smithsonian comes a long and detailed article on what amounts to beer archaeology. (Thanks to Rich Rostrom for the link.)
- For those who asked: Simple Simon’s formal name (from my entry for June 26) is Factory Automation Real-Time Supervisor, and yes, the acronym was highly deliberate. His robotic factory is the Automated Reprographic Fabrication Facility, and (as you’ll learn in the novel) the project had always been a dog.
- WUTZ 4 DINR?
Waiting for Godot…No, Make That s-static.ak.facebook.com
Not much about this to be found online, but for the past couple of days, Facebook has been waiting eternally on one of several servers after displaying the first page of entries. The commonest address it hangs on is:
s-static.ak.facebook.com
Any thoughts about this? Chrome does the same thing, suggesting that it’s not a browser issue but a local configuration issue…except that I haven’t done anything to the router configuration or the XP network configuration for a long time.
Javascript is enabled, and unloading NoScript doesn’t help. If this doesn’t get fixed soon I’m going to simply stop reading the damned thing. Software that breaks itself without provocation is not generally welcome around here. Not for long, anyway.
UPDATE: The fix (for me at least) was to enable the MTU setting in my Linksys router and set the MTU value to 1454. That’s a sort of “golden” value that appears to be the optimal packet size on PPPoE connections. I’m still puzzled as to why this would alluvasudden be a problem (I’ve had the MTU setting disabled and the default value of 1500 in force for years) unless Facebook were doing some tweaking on the server side. That said, modernmechanix.com now works as well, and I had pretty much given up on it. If you have problems with Web sites hanging unpredictably, this is an easy fix (assuming your router provides the option) and should be the first thing you try.
Skype and EasyBits: Mistake or Attack?
After a strange reluctance to jump on the issue, the major news outlets have begun covering the excitement of this past Saturday morning, when untold numbers of Skype users suddenly found new software installed on their Windows PCs, without so much as a notification or request for permission from Skype. Skype has been almost silent on the issue, as has the firm that originated the software in question, EasyBits GO. EasyBits is not obviously malware, but there were some weird EasyBits/Skype connections with malware last year, and Saturday’s install certainly acted like malware. So was it a mistake? Or was it an attack? The greatest weirdness of all is that we still don’t know.
My take? It looks like a mistake. It smells like an attack.
I set up an old XP machine with Skype on it Saturday afternoon, and left Skype running in a window. It’s still running as I write, and there’s no trace of the EasyBits installer. I thought the fact that it was still at SP2 might have made a difference, but I’ve heard from people who got the install on SP2 machines. This suggests that Skype immediately stopped pushing installs once the crap started to fly online, which further suggests that Skype was in control and that it was a mistake rather than an attack.
There’s a tendency to love a great story, and we have to be careful not to read more into things than reality warrants. I’m an SF writer, and the futures I’ve tried to predict (as have many other, far more notable SF writers than I) have turned out to be a lot more dramatic and colorful than the future that actually worked itself out over the years. We underestimated small things (computers) and way overestimated big things, like space travel and (yes indeedy!) flying cars.
Here’s an example of wearing your SF hat too much: Some years back, I was predicting that malware authors would create trojans that very quietly installed file-sharing nodes behind the screen of rootkit techniques, which would then search for sharable content on the machine and then open LimeWire-style P2P connections to the Net at large. Because it was a trojan, it would provide plausible deniability in copyright infringement lawsuits–and because it provided plausible deniability for file-sharing, people would deliberately infect their machines with it. The trojan would soon be on over a billion machines, and Big Media could do nothing at all about it.
That would have made a great cyberpunkish story; maybe I should still write it. But it didn’t happen, and I think it won’t happen. Malware authors are well past this sort of Merry Pranksters stage. Malware happens for one reason only: Money. If there’s no way to monetize a malware scheme, it won’t be written. So with anything like the Skype Affair, you have to look for the money. Crapware still seems to be the likeliest explanation: EasyBits could have paid Skype by the install to push down a new version of its games platform, and make it look like a normal Skype update. Stupidity intervened, which happens all the time. (Google “Sony Rootkit” to see only one example, and certainly the stupidest. Bruce Schneier has what I consider the last word.)
That said, there’s still the possibility that a server-side infection was behind the push, and that what we got was a compromised version of EasyBits that may at some later time (patience, patience!) download the Real Deal, whatever that Real Deal might be. And whatever it is, it’ll be about money.
The end of the story hasn’t been written yet. Keep your virus checkers handy. Consider Skype alternatives. (Look into Jitsi.) And stay tuned.
EasyBits GO, Skype, and The Crapware Problem
This morning at 9:59 AM local time, a dialog from an unknown app popped up and asked me if it could install Adobe’s Flash player. My reaction is the one everyone should have in response to things like this: Don’t click. Stop and think. I’ve been around for awhile and I’m not stupid. I’d never heard of EasyBits Go and certainly hadn’t installed it on my system. I brought up Windows Task Manager, and sure as hell, there was a process running called easybitsgo.exe. Worse, there was an icon on my desktop that hadn’t been there a few minutes before. And the dialog had a blatant misspelling on it. “Do you wan to install it now?”
Talk about red flags!
I immediately did a search for EasyBitsGo.exe on my system, and found the executable at Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Easybits GO/ There are several subfolders as well. There was an app listed in the Add or Remove Programs applet. There was a folder (dated a few minutes later) called “go” in my user tree under Application Data. It contains some kind of a log. Last and worst of all, there were Registry keys in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER subtree under Software/EasyBits.
Only after gathering that data (and taking a quick look on Google, which showed almost nothing) did I begin removing it. Online postings just a few minutes old verified my suspicion: It had ridden in on Skype. I was using Skype at 10 AM when the dialog popped up. I did not have a browser open, and in fact was not doing anything unusual. (I was editing an Odd Lots entry for Contra.)
EasyBits is a real company, and they created and have been running Skype Game Channel for some years now. I’m not a gamer and hadn’t run across them before, but they have some history, and don’t appear to be malware vendors. (This does not mean that malware could not impersonate them.) Nonetheless, however they had pulled it off, what they’d done was utterly unacceptable: They’d installed a whole app with no obvious connection to Skype without any warning, much less any request for permission.
Too, too much. I may be done with Skype. Still thinking about that. In the meantime, if this happened to you as well, here’s how to fix it, at least under XP:
- In Skype, select menu option Tools | Options | Advanced, and un-check Automatically Start Extras. Click Save.
- Shut down Skype.
- Bring up Task Manager. If the EasyBits GO dialog is still visible, EasyBitsGO.exe is probably running. Kill it. The box will vanish. (Kill the process even if you’ve already closed the dialog.)
- Make sure the SkypePM.exe process is not running. If it is, kill it.
- Go to the Add or Remove Programs applet and uninstall EasyBits GO. It uninstalls almost instantly, which suggests that nothing is actually being uninstalled. This was the case as best I could tell.
- Find the folder tree at Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Easybits GO/ and delete it.
- Go to the Application Data folder tree under the user that was active when the damned thing installed, and find the go folder. (It contains some kind of log file.) Delete it.
- Go to the Windows/Prefetch directory and look for the file EASYBITSGO.EXE-364DAFD6.pf and delete it.
- Search for and delete all instances of ezPMUtils.dll. They may be in different locations depending on your version of Windows.
- If you’re comfortable editing the Registry, get rid of the keys at Software/EasyBits as shown in the screenshot above.
- Reboot. Theoretically that should do it, but if Skype could push this thing down to countless users without their knowledge once, it could do so again.
- After rebooting, I think it might make sense to update your virus scanner signature database and do a full scan on your system.
So whatthehell is going on here? There’s still not a great deal online, but I’m seeing more and more angry people posting every hour. I have a guess: EasyBits paid Skype for the install. This is the crapware business model, in which a company pays a hardware or (less often) software vendor to install stuff that the customer did not ask for, and pays by the install. This is typically trial version software, and the crapware vendor benefits when customers cluelessly upgrade to paid versions.
The crapware business model is why I no longer buy retail PCs, which come so clogged with crapware that they can barely move. I buy either custom-built machines or used corporate machines like the SX280 USFF, which were never retail machines to begin with and came with no crapware at all.
Cheap or free stuff is often less cheap or less free than its vendors imply. Crapware is one reason retail PCs are as cheap as they are. Dell, HP, and the others take a certain profit on each retail PC selling crapware slots. Absent the crapware, the machine would cost more. I buy new custom locally or used on eBay, and the machines are as cheap as new retail PCs and work a lot better. (Why does a four-year-old P4 2.6 GHz corporate box go so much faster than a current Core 2 Quad 3 GHz retail PC? Crapware.)
This is a guess, but it makes sense. Why else but money would Skype do something so absolutely certain to get them crucified in the blogosphere? With my tinfoil hat on I could imagine that certain parties at Skype aren’t happy with being assimilated by the Borg and are getting some parting shots in. It’s too late to foul the deal, but anything that makes Ballmer itch in bad places might be worth it to them.
Finally, if this happened to you, let me know in the comments or by email. It seems like a lot of people got hit with this, at least those running current versions of Skype. What if the entire installed base of current Skype instances pushed EasyBits Go down the pipe and onto user desktops? That would be a freaky thing indeed, and will make them a Mordor horde of enemies. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: I cranked up an old XP SP2 machine with Skype 5 installed this afternoon and so far, the EasyBits install hasn’t happened. Will leave it on tonight and check it in the morning. It may be that the install requires SP3, Vista, or Win7.
Lazarus, Stay Where You Are!
…because when you came forth, you stepped on my bootloader.
I’ve tried to like Lazarus. I’ve tried for years. I can only assume that (as also evidenced by its similarly screwy cousin, Kylix) there is something in the Linux platform that makes Pascal compilers go a little bit whacko.
A few days ago I installed the KDE Fedora Spin in a new partition on my Linux box. It’s been a good education in the Plasma desktop. Plasma is all very blue and cold looking (way too blue for me, in fact, though the default wallpaper is striking) but unlike my first taste or two of KDE 4, it actually works.
So I started installing the software I’m familiar with to begin using it, and somewhere down the list was Lazarus, the Delphi-ish GUI front end for FreePascal. The package available from Fedora was V0.9.28.2, which is considerably newer than the one I have installed on Ubuntu Lucid, and only a little older than the one you can get from the project Web site. After it downloaded and installed all of its enormous pile of stuff, it asked me to restart Linux. I did.
And grub failed to run.
All I got was a blinking text cursor in the upper-left corner of the screen. This is the first time I’ve ever seen grub fail, apart from the well-known habit of Windows to overwrite grub with its own bootloader. (This is why Windows goes in first, if you’re going to have it at all.) I booted the Ubuntu 11.04 live CD I’d burned a few days after it was released, just to see if my MBR had been damaged. As best I could tell it had not, but I’m not good enough at grub’s internals to really be able to tell what was wrong with the software itself. Since I had plenty of free space on the 750 GB drive, I just installed Ubuntu on yet another partition, hoping that its update of grub would put things right. And it did.
So why would installing a compiler and an IDE mess up the OS bootloader? (Anybody?) I don’t have a lot of clues. The copy of Lazarus I installed looks like it works as well as Lazarus ever does, so I can’t assume that something in the installer or the package glitched and overwrote something unrelated. None of the other partitions on the disk were affected, as best I can tell. I’m tempted to install Lazarus under Ubuntu, to see if it will stomp on Ubuntu’s copy of grub as well…but that will happen another day, when I’m not as busy and not so grouchy.
Fedora Spin: KDE Desktop
Sometime back I ran into a concept called Fedora Spins, which are customized Fedora installs with different desktops (KDE, LXDE, XFCE) or a slant in some direction like security, graphics, or games. I downloaded the KDE Spin ISO earlier today, burned it to CD, and this evening (having burned out on ebooks) took it for a…ride. I had 300 GB of free space on my Linux box, so there was no reason not to, and I’d like to get a little better at the KDE Plasma desktop.
Some reactions:
- The Fedora partitioner is very good. I did a manual partition operation, and created a new 60 GB partition for Fedora, and a 12 GB swap partition. It helps to know a little bit about partitioners generally, but overall it was intuitive and gave me no trouble.
- For some reason, Fedora installs grub with grub’s hiddenmenu option enabled. (It’s conceivable that I accidentally chose that somehow, but I don’t recall being asked.) This means that at boot time, grub’s menu isn’t displayed, and the system boots directly into Fedora. (The system already has Ubuntu Lucid and Windows XP on it.) You can get the boot menu by pressing F10 during grub’s timeout period, but otherwise you aren’t presented with an OS menu at all.
- Fedora recognized the existence of my XP partition, but didn’t know what it was. In grub’s menu, XP is therefore listed as “Other.” However, if you select it, grub boots it just fine.
- Fedora has a GUI bootloader configuration utility that allows selection of the timeout value and the default OS. However, the utility’s sole window does not have a Save or Apply button. You can make changes, but closing the utility throws them away. Wow. This is a bug, and not a brand-new one.
- Unlike Ubuntu, Fedora does not automatically add the initial user account to the sudoers list. So try to do anything rootish like editing grub’s config file gives you that inane message “jduntemann is not in the sudoers list. This incident will be reported.”
- Adding yourself to the sudoers list is seriously unintuive, but the best way is probably to use the visudo command, which opens a vi edit window with the sudoers list ready to change. Add USERNAME ALL=(ALL) ALL to the end of the file and save; it’s done. Details here.
- Fixing grub requires editing the grub.conf file and commenting out the hiddenmenu option. While I was there, I also changed the description of the XP partition from “Other” to “Windows XP.”
- A 2.8 GHz Dell SX280 does not have sufficient graphics chops to run Plasma’s desktop effects. I wanted to see just how slow they were, but within seconds of enabling desktop effects, Fedora disabled them again. I knew that the SX280 wouldn’t run them well from my online research (it’s one reason I’m getting a more powerful Linux box shortly) but I didn’t know the system would simply refuse to run the effects against my wishes. Interestingly, Ubuntu’s GNOME desktop effects subsystem works on the same machine.
Overall, getting to a usable configuration with Fedora is a lot more screwing around than with Ubuntu. But once done, it works well. More as I experience it.
Odd Lots
- Here’s a nice graph of the smoothed sunspot number for the last four solar cycles (21-24.) Our current Cycle 24 is still young, but it stands fair to be the weakest solar cycle in 200 years. It may mean nothing, but 200 years ago we saw cycles like that frequently and were in the worst part of the Little Ice Age.
- Darrin Chandler pointed out Maqetta to me: an HTML5 WYSIWYG Web editor, free and open-source. And from IBM, yet. Haven’t tried it but hope to in coming days. Has anybody else played with it at any length? I use Kompozer for Web work right now, and it’s not evolving very quickly, let’s say.
- And what we may need more than Maqetta for Web pages is Maqetta for epub ebooks. I remain appalled at how much kafeutherin’ it still takes to do an epub with a cover image and even the simplest forms of paragraph differentiation. (Like no first indent to indicate a new scene in a story.) People continue to hand-code ebooks. This is idiocy to the seventeenth power.
- Sometimes you read a short, casual mention of something in a book or article, and the weirdness of it doesn’t really hit you. So stand ready for some pretty boggling astronomical weirdness: A 400-meter asteroid that moves in a horseshoe-shaped orbit. And guess who’s in the gap of the horseshoe?
- At our most recent nerd party, my new friend Aaron Spriggs mentioned Chisanbop, a method of finger arithmetic created by the Koreans and little known here in the US. This is very cool, and would be extremely handy on fictional planets (like my own Hell and the Drumlins world) where electronic computation either doesn’t work and hasn’t been invented.
- A brilliant new method of imaging underground structures like magma plumes shows that the Yellowstone supervolcano is bigger than we thought. The imaging is done by measuring electrical conductivity in the rock rather than the transmission of physical (seismic) vibration. The images give us no additional information on how close (or far) we may be to another eruption, but it may help us to interpret what little data we already have.
- Hoo-boy, here’s a problem I don’t think anyone anticipated in the wake of Japan’s recent catastrophic tsunami: Safes full of (soggy) money washed out of individual homes are now washing up on the seashore.
Odd Lots
- Printed book sales fall, and ebook sales rise by 115%. Something’s Going On Here.
- I bought an iPod Touch from Jim Strickland and am currently figgering it out. Although I was surprised that it won’t display .mov videos, this article makes much clear about Apple’s video formats.
- Michael Covington’s 2008 tutorial on reading email headers to spot phish and phakes is worth reading again.
- Richard McConachy sent me a link to The Great Wetherell Refractor, a hand-made 200mm F9 with some of the guldurndest metalwork in it.
- There was a horned gopher during the Pleistocene. Really. It is the only horned rodent known, and the smallest horned mammal.
- From Henry Law comes a reminder of an xkcd item from a while back. For heavenly performance, ground your receiver in a jar of holy water!
- And that led to this one, which (Ben Franklin groupie that I am) has always been one of my favorites.
- I haven’t had a monster zin in some time, but last night I opened the bottle of Klinker Brick 2007 Old Vine Zinfandel that’s been sitting on the rack for almost two years. About $18 if I recall. At 15.8% alcohol, it’s among the strongest reds you’re likely to find that aren’t port. Dry but not bitter, with strong spice and enough fruit to balance the buzz. I had about 100ml. Puh-lenty!
- A cool hack and great visual humor. I have a couple of these little KingMax USB sticks (courtesy Eric Bowersox) and although it would be a bad use of my time, I’m sorely tempted.
- Accidental visual feast: Search for “steampunk jewelry” on Google Images. My favorite would be this one, which I would title “Time Flies.”
- In addition to bathroom heaters like the one I bought the other day, the Fitzgerald Manufacturing Company was well-known for making vibrators, (PDF) albeit not the kind that generated plate voltage for car radios! (Could this have been the original killer app for mains electricity?) Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.
The Inexplicable Pirate Box
I’m still on the long climb back to functionality and can’t do much computing because the current bug has hugely irritated my eyes. However, I did want to call quick attention to one more thing in the pirate universe before going back to bed: David Dart’s Pirate Box. I got the tip from the Jolly Pirate a couple of days ago, and most of the gadget blogs have now picked up the story. It’s a make-it-yourself wireless filesharing node in a pirate lunchbox.
Lesse here: You carry this into a crowded coffee shop so that people can connect from their laptops and smartphones and download whatever pirate goodies are in the box, at least until somebody calls the Bomb Squad.
Ok, I’m just funny that way. But read through the DIY, and ask what I’m asking: Isn’t this a lot of fooling around just to create a wireless file-sharing node? Even a five-year-old beater of a laptop can run Debian and a file server, and software router apps are routine. Furthermore, a laptop looks like a laptop, and when there’s a dozen people at Panera running laptops, it’s a little less easy to tell who’s the pirate.
Unless that’s the idea. This certainly seems to be more about cachet than practical piracy. I’m reminded of warchalking, a silly near-hoax that was getting people’s twickers in a nist back in 2002 or so: marking the locations of wi-fi networks on the sidewalk in chalk, god help us, as though there were no other way to know something was there.
I have the late Harry Helms’ books about pirate radio and I think I understand the psychology. It’s about being a Merry Prankster more than actually getting anything accomplished. And I’m good with that, especially since the 17 people on Earth who will actually build this thing and hang out with it are unlikely to do much damage. (I do grant them points for creativity.)
The Pirate Box reminds me a little of AirStash, which has the advantage of being able to hide in your pocket. The notion of hidden local physical filesharing is an interesting one, and I’m sure that there are better concepts for it hiding out there somewhere. (A USB thumb drive mortared into a brick wall is just one of the gonzo notions I’ve seen recently; something like geocaching with data.) If you know of any more, send me links.
And now it’s back to bed for me.
