Uncategorized

Stockholm from above

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At my little party for my 40th birthday, I got a present from a few awesome friends: a flight over Stockholm by helicopter. At August 19th 2011 it was made into reality and I spent roughly 20 minutes in the air. I took a (shaky) movie of the tour that you can see below. Enjoy.

Tack Grönros, Ericsson och Feltzing!

I had the seat to the left of the driver and had a spectacular ability to view everything both forwards and to the left. The ride was “shaky” and you could really feel the wind affect the little thing. The weather was sunny and 20-21 something degrees Celsius, a perfect day for this.

To really make it a day, I also opened up and had a sip from my Smokehead Extra Black that I received at the same time as the helicopter ride. It was similarly super!

I took the video with my simple Fujifilm FinePix F100fd camera, and I edited it with Openshot – which I had never done before. I found it to be a nice experience and I’m likely to use that tool again. I also learned that if you upload a 1.2GB video to youtube that is longer than 15 minutes, it will allow you to waste a long time to upload it, it will convert it, it will give you a link to it and then when you view that link… it says the video was too long so you can’t see it!

Network, Security

What SOCKS is good for

4 Comments

You ever wondered what SOCKS is good for these days?

To help us use the Internet better without having the surrounding be able to watch us as much as otherwise!

There’s basically two good scenarios and use areas for us ordinary people to use SOCKS:

  1. You’re a consultant or you’re doing some kind of work and you are physically connected to a customer’s or a friend’s network. You access the big bad Internet via their proxy or entirely proxy-less using their equipment and cables. This allows the network admin(s) to capture and snoop on your network traffic, be it on purpose or by mistake, as long as you don’t use HTTPS or other secure mechanisms. When surfing the web, it is very easily made to drop out of HTTPS and into HTTP by mistake. Also, even if you HTTPS to the world, the name resolves and more are still done unencrypted and will leak information.
  2. You’re using an open wifi network that isn’t using a secure encryption. Anyone else on that same area can basically capture anything you send and receive.

What you need to set it up? You run

ssh -D 8080 myname@myserver.example.com

… and once you’ve connected, you make sure that you change the network settings of your favourite programs (browsers, IRC clients, mail reader, etc) to reach the Internet using the SOCKS proxy on localhost port 8080. Now you’re done.

Now all your traffic will reach the Internet via your remote server and all traffic between that and your local machine is sent encrypted and secure. This of course requires that you have a server running OpenSSH somewhere, but don’t we all?

If you are behind another proxy in the first place, it gets a little more complicated but still perfectly doable. See my separate SSH through or over proxy document for details.

IT Politics, Network, Technology

Open fibre

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One of the big telecom operators in Sweden, Telia, has started to offer “fibre to the house”- called “Öppen Fiber” in Swedish – and I’ve signed up for it. They’re investing 5 billion SEK into building fibre infrastructure and I happen to live in an area which is among the first ones in Sweden that gets the chance to participate. What’s in this blog post is information as I’ve received and understood it. I will of course follow-up in the future and tell how it all turns out in reality.

Copper is a Dead End

fiber cableI have my own house. My thinking is that copper-based technologies such as the up-to-24mbit-but-really-12mbit ADSL (I have some 700 meters or so to the nearest station) I have now has reached something of an end of the road. I had 3 mbit/sec ADSL almost ten years ago: obviously not a lot of improvement is happening in this area. We need to look elsewhere in order to up our connection speeds. I think getting a proper fibre connection to the house will be a good thing for years to come. I don’t expect wireless/radio techniques to be able to compete properly, at least not within the next coming years.

Open

This is an “open fibre” in the sense that Telia will install and own the physical fibre and installation but they will not run any services on top of it. I will then buy my internet services, TV and telephone services (should I decide that TV and phone over the fibre is desirable) from the selection of service companies that decide to join in and compete for my money.

Installation

They’re promising delivery “before the end of the year”. I won’t even get an estimated installation date until around mid August. If an existing tube doesn’t exist for the copper or electricity that they can use to push the fibre through, they will dig. From the road outside my house to my building, across whatever land that exists there. They need to dig roughly 40 cm deep. The fibre is terminated inside the house (a maximum of 5 meter inside the building) in a small “media converter” box which basically converts from fibre to a RJ45 network plug. It is the size of a regular small switch or so. It is claimed to be possible to get a different “box” that provide a direct fibre plug of some sorts for the people who may already have fibre installed in their houses. I currently have a burglar alarm in my house that uses the current phone connection which I’ll need to get either just dumped completely or converted over to use a telephone-over-fibre concept. I don’t plan on paying for or using any copper-based service once the fibre gets here. (There’s however no way to use the Swedish tax deduction “rot-avdrag”.)

Price

dlink DIR 635There’s no monthly fee for the fibre, I only pay a one-time installation fee of 16700 SEK (roughly 1800 Euros) to get it. I then of course will have to pay for the services if I want to actually use the installation but until I do there are no fees involved. This price is actually fixed and the same for all the houses in my area that got this deal. At August 15th the deal ends and they’ll increase the installation price to 26700 SEK. Given the amount of work they have to put in for each new customer, I don’t really consider this price to be steep. A lot of money, sure, but also quite a lot of value.

Speeds to expect

The physical speed between my house and the other end (some kind of fibre termination station somewhere) will be exactly 1000mbit/sec and no more “up to” phrasing or similar in the contract. Of course, that’s just the physical speed that is used and with this equipment the network cannot be any faster than 1000 mbit. There will then be ISPs that offer an internet connection, and they may very well offer lower speeds and even varying different speeds at different tariffs. Right now, other fibre installations done by Telia seem to get offered up to 100/100 mbit connections. As this is then not a physical maximum, it should allow for future increasing without much problems. The 1000 mbit/sec speed over the fibre is a limitation in the actual installed hardware (not the fibre) so in the future Telia can indeed replace the media converters in both ends and bump the speed up significantly should they want to and feel that there’s business in doing so. My current D-Link wifi router only has 100 mbit WAN support so clearly I’ll have to replace that if I go beyond.

IPv6

Seriously, I believe I may be closer to actually get a real IPv6 offer using this than with ADSL here in Sweden. I haven’t really investigated this for real though.

Update

December 16th: I got a mail from Telia today that informed me that the installation in my area has been delayed so it won’t happen until Q2 2012! 🙁

Rockbox

Rockbox Devcon 2011

Rockbox

Hoards of hackers in similar-looking t-shirts with funny logos having the b in front of the K (see below for some sort of explanation) were seen on the streets of London on Friday June 3rd 2011.

Thanks a lot to  Google UK who hosted our Rockbox developers conference this time in central London.

We had some short-time visitors but we were 16-18 reverse engineering happy persons in a single room most of the weekend, where we hacked away on code, whined on the amount of outstanding patches and bugs and generally made a large amount of bad jokes and Monthy Python references.

The happy core team was caught on a picture:

Rockbox team Devcon 2011

On the Saturday we plowed through a lengthy list of discussion points to really make the most of all of us gathering physically. Among the outcomes from that is that we decided we want to change to git, we think a lot of future of Rockbox lies in the app for Android, we keep the Archos support and more. The Android builds are going to get into the build system ASAP and we’re gonna setup a system where (only) trusted build clients will participate in the building of Android builds that will be distributed to users – this since applications on phones will have a much greater risk of causing harm if some “bad guy” would try to infect our system with stupid things.

Dominik “bluebrother” Riebling brought up the very interesting point that none of us had noticed: we have two different logos being used in the project: one with the K being in front of the b (like the one on the web page) and one with the K being behind the b – which is used in SVG logos and on just about all Rockbox t-shirts made so far! If you zoom in on the tshirts on the group picture you’ll see!

We will also start allowing GPLv3 code into Rockbox in order to be able to use espeak, but all our code will remain GPLv2 or later. I could only find a single USB header file left that comes from the Linux source tree and has a GPLv2 only license.

Even more than this was discussed but I figure the rest of the details will be posted properly on rockbox.org for those seriously interested.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable weekend with a lot of fun and great friends. We stayed at a hotel just a few blocks from the devcon office which was really convenient. even though its wakeup routine was a bit non-standard. Peter “petur” D’Hoye took a lot of pictures as usual.

We also managed to break the Tower of Rockbox record.

Daniel "Bagder" Stenberg Rockbox Devcon 2011

The group picture was taken by a Google person I don’t know the name of who helped us out, and the one of me was taken by Peter D’Hoye.

Rockbox

Rockbox bridge and tower

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Keeping to the tradition and subtle arts of Rockbox Towers, but doing it with a twist to celebrate the place we have Rockbox devcon 2011, we decided to make a Rockbox bridge.

We started out by gathering all devices we had in the room that can run Rockbox and distributed them on the construction floor area. As the Android app runs fine on tablets now there’s actually a rather good way to get some solid base into the construction…

Many Rockbox devices

Once all material was known, the construction started with a large amount of eager engineers contributing with good and bad ideas and at times very shaky hands:

constructing a Rockbox bridge

(wods, scorche, gevaerts and paumary)

The result, involving an iRiver beneath the bridge catching the digital flow, became what might be the longest Rockbox construction done so far:

Rockbox bridge

Rockbox bridge closeup

After the bridge, the work started on the real stuff. Building the tallest Rockbox tower ever made. After a couple of accidents and crashes, the tireless team managed to break the previous 104 cm record and the new Rockbox tower record is now officially 117cm:

Rockbox devcon 2011 tower 117cm

(Pictures in this post were all taken by Peter D’Hoye.)

Uncategorized

Binary mittens

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Binary mittensI just want to show off my awesome new mittens that my dear mother gave me as a present when I turned 40 (at least at the party I held for my birthday, I actually turned 0x28 already back in November). To help you decode them I’ve framed a line of digits. The left one is supposed to be read before the right one.

As a bonus design detail, the digits on the thumb are made the same as on the part which the thumb covers on the photo.

The backside has nothing to decode but instead features a tux image, the same one on both mittens so the enclosed picture only shows the left-hand one.

Binary mitten backsideI’ll admit that I didn’t immediately decode the mittens myself when I gave it a first glance, and I blame the fact that no lowercase letters were used!

I used my mobile phone to take the pictures, so they’re not really top-notch quality.

This will make the coming winter much more appreciated and I hope to impress a lot of friends when the few warm days of the Swedish summer have passed.

Open Source

foss-sthlm, the sixth, the controversial one

I’m happy to say that I was the main planner and organizer of yet another foss-sthlm meetup, the sixth. Last week we attracted about one hundred eager FOSS hackers to attend to this meeting to which I had found and cooperated a somewhat controversial sponsor.

We have had a discussion within foss-sthlm now due to this event’s sponsor: what kinds of companies are acceptable as sponsor for FOSS events and what are not? It is obvious that we have a lot of different opinions here and several people have expressed that they deliberately didn’t go to meetup #6 simply because of the sponsor’s involvement and relationship to the Swedish defence industry. Do you think a defence manufacturer or weapon systems creator can also have its good sides and sponsor good activities or should we distance ourselves from them?

I’m honestly still interested in more opinions on this. We have not formed a policy around this subject because I simply don’t think that’s a good idea. We’re not a formal organization and we all have our different views. I think we have our members hand around and participate as long as we stay within a reasonable “boundary”. If we would get involved with the wrong kind of companies, a larger portion of the group would boycott the meeting or just plainly leave foss-sthlm. But why would we ever? I’m the one who’s mostly been in touch with sponsors and I would certainly not get involved and ask for money from companies that I believe have crossed the magic line in the sand.

The meeting was perhaps the most techy and most advanced of them all so far, and I found the talks very inspiring and educating. I’ve not had time or energy to put up a page with pictures or descriptions of them, and I think I’ll just skip it. You should probably try harder to attend next time instead!

Mail

Remove your software

Your software needs to be removed from my work computer. I did not install it,
do not want it and did not request it.

Another one of those emails arrived in my inbox today:

Subject: Remove:

Your software needs to be removed from my work computer. I did not install it, do not want it and did not request it.

[name redacted]

No mention what software or indication of what platform or what might’ve happened when my software allegedly ended up in the person’s computer. Not very friendly either.

Again I suspect that there’s some software that uses curl in some way, but I can’t tell for sure…

I replied to it, saying that I didn’t install anything on his computer.

curl, open source and networking