abstract thought

I’m taking a computer security class this summer and while that doesn’t make me an expert on the subject, it certanly has made me more aware of security issues. More recently, I’ve been looking at social networking sites and how privacy and security are applied.

Let me simply say that privacy and security are not applied in even the simplest forms on the most popular social networking sites. For starters there is no secure login for either myspace and facebook. Perhaps more troubling is the seemingly innocent information in which folks place on their accounts such as what high school they went to and when they graduated, the name of their pets, phone numbers, etc. It doesn’t take too much creativity to realize this information can be used to gain access to other sites to which the person is a member of as most all password recovery tools ask questions of which the answers are on the users facebook/myspace account.

Whats more is that it is illegal to give false information on social networking sites. Just the other day someone was “charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for signing up for a MySpace account under a fake name.” which, being a felony, is “punishable by up to 5 years imprisonment per count”.

I don’t have any immediate plans to scrap my facebook account but the issue is worth being aware of.

To all those that read beware: Toshiba Satellite M35X-S109 does not like the power settings most linux distributions come with. Several attempts to install linux all ended with the computer turning off and random times and google doesn’t seem to help. After many sighs I finally reinstalled windows on the poor thing.

Despite the above I went ahead and installed Apache with PHP on the thing. I then wanted a way to ssh into it so I could work my pages remotely. OpenSSH worked but the problem was that I had to use windows dos commands and I was too use to typing ‘ls’ instead of ‘dir’. Enter Cygwin. I’ve known about Cygwin for quit sometime but I didn’t quite understand the full capabilities of it until today. It turns out that Cygwin can be used for a whole bunch of stuff including setting up ssh servers. Not only does it allow you to ssh into your windows machine and use linux commands, you can do other things you never thought windows was capably of. I created several symlinks and they seemed to work just fine; Apache seems to have no trouble following the links either.

I also set up a webcam and installed a VNC server on the box. Now I can just throw the computer in some corner of the apartment and control everything from my normal computer. Yey!

Side-note: I know that using Windows XP on a laptop as a server is probably not the best thing in the world but I am a poor college student. Until I can afford a real server, the situation is not likely to change.

The other day Slashdot linked to an article where an anonymous RIAA employee explained how it caught alleged music pirates. One thing I found particularly interesting was they specifically singled out LimeWire in their demo. Maybe this was for the sake of keeping it simple but one can’t help but wonder why they didn’t say “P2P client”. The other thing they said was the word “college”. I’ll let readers make up their own mind based on these two things.

In other news, I was having problems with the sound in Amarok. The sound would just randomly stop working, the program would freeze forcing me to exit and when I would try to restart the program nothing would happen forcing me to log out and log back in. Solution? Apparently Amarok allows you to specify the sound drivers in the program itself instead of using the sound you specify in the OS settings. I just set the driver to use Alsa and all is well again.

A fresh install of Ubuntu 8.03 Hardy Heron (like most linux distributions) does not come with flash pre-installed. When you use Firefox to navigate to a site that has flash, in true Ubuntu fashion, a message will be displayed asking you if you want to install it. The problem is that there are 3 different options to choose from and nothing that really tells you which is what. The choices are:

- Swfdec player for Adobe/Macromedia Flash
- Adobe Flash Player (Installer)
- Gnash SWF Player

Swfdec player is the default player, so I decided to install it without thought. As it turns out, Swfdec is an open source alternative to Adobe’s Flash Player. It installed fine, but has some interesting things to it. For one, it blocks all flash content on a web page and replaces it with a gray box. You must click the gray box before the flash object will load. Youtube videos seem to play just fine, but the volume control doesn’t work. Most other flash objects on the web, aside from basic menus, do not load properly.

Adobe Flash Player is what should be default in my opinion. It is not open source which is probably what kept it out of the number 1 spot but is probably what novice users want. When I uninstalled Swfdec and installed this, everything seemed to load and work as I’ve come to expect.

Gnash is another open source flash player but doesn’t seem as good as Swfdec. I would wait on installing this until the development matures more.

I really wish Ubuntu included some thing that told the user about each option instead of making them research it on their own. So if you are like I was and sitting there wondering what the difference is, I hope this helps.

As I get further into my major, I find it interesting to see what research is being done by others in the same department. Networkworld recently had a post about 25 leading-edge IT research projects from universities across the nation. Here are some of my personal favorites:

Real Bandwidth Management
Computer Scientists at the University of California at San Diego are looking at ways to have a TCP-based bandwidth management system that works across global networks.

With our system, an organization with mirrored Web sites or other services across the globe could dynamically shift its bandwidth allocations between sites based on demand.

Universities could benefit from this technology greatly as they could have main campuses unused bandwidth of the evenings be shifted over to their residence halls and then reallocated in the morning. This would give students living on campus an extra boost of bandwidth and it wouldn’t cost a thing.

Finding pictures of needles in haystacks
Researchers at Penn State have created software that tags your images for you as you upload them to Yahoo’s flickr. These automatically generated tags change depending on how users interact with your photos.

“Tagging itself is challenging as it involves converting an image’s pixels to descriptive words,” said James Wang, lead researcher and associate professor of information sciences and technology, in a statement. “But what is novel with the ‘Tagging over Time’ or T/T technology is that the system adapts as people’s preferences for images and words change.”

People have a lot of photos online and I think this would be a really neat solution to tagging all those photos. Uploading photos wouldn’t be such a pain and searching for the photos you have uploaded would be even easier. Plus it would be interesting to see how people interact with your photos.

No its not another cellphone, it’s a new web browser. Thats right, AT&T has decided to enter the world of web browsers throwing a very 3Dish feel to the experience. The name is Pogo and while the Beta release is currently closed from the public, they have an interesting flash preview on their site. From the looks of it, it seems very resource intensive but depending now how its implemented it should be very exciting. The demo shows it running on Windows XP, no word about other operating systems though. Speaking of no word, their site has no system requirements listed either. It is still in Beta though so we shall see. Something to keep an eye on anyway.

I find it interesting how most operating systems (read: Windows/Mac) try to hide files. For example, when you install a new program, do you really know what is going on? Sure you can specify a path for the main components but the shared DLL (Dynamic Link Library) files are thrown all over the place, registry keys are added, and in the end you are just amazed the program actually works. Sometimes this is good as the novice computer user probably shouldn’t be modifing these files, but if you are like me then it bugs you to not know where stuff is on your own computer.

The good folks over on the Defensive Computing blog recently made an interesting post about how to find Firefox plug-ins. This is definitely good information when you are trying to uninstall a plug-in and it leaves files behind. I would also suggest taking a look at it even if you don’t really need to modify these files. Knowing how to access key components in Firefox can only help your understanding of the browser.

I’ve had several people ask me what my favorite text editor is. For those that are new to the field, there is some what of an incessant war over “the best text editor” between those in the IT field. The two main contenders are Vim and Emacs. This post isn’t meant to be a comparison between the two editors as there are plenty of those pages already on the internet. Instead I’d like to take a minute and explain why I choose Vim, and hopefully enlighten those that are new to the topic.

First of all, I’m sure there are those that are wondering who cares. It’s just a text editor after all. It’s not like you are writing a paper or editing full blown documents right? To most people this may be very true but to a programmer it’s not “just a text editor”. I do all my programming (no matter what language it is) in my text editor. This means almost all school work, ResTek work, and leisure programming. So for a program that is so often used, you might start to see how there could be some debate about which is better than the other.

For me, I choose Vim. Vim does take a little getting use to, I wont lie. You move the cursor around by the H, J, K, and L buttons. There are editing modes, and more options than anyone could possibly memorize. I’ve been using the program for over a year now and I probably know less than half the commands. The main thing I do like about it is that its terminal based (there is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) version if you are interested though). This means that I can open it and work when in SSH (Secure Shell) sessions. Vim also has syntax highlighting for most programming languages and a built in spell checker.

Vim may not be the editor with the most friendly learning curve but if you are looking for a lightweight, powerful editor then you should give Vim a try.

Our System Administrator here at WWU has a blog that I was browsing earlier and he pointed to an interesting article about Generation Y in the work place. As I am part of this generation I found it to be particularly interesting. In a nutshell the article talks about how we are entering the workplace with more information, greater technological skill and higher expectations of ourselves and others than prior generations, and yet at the same time we have an inability to take criticism. We are the product of positive thinking where “everyone is a winner”.

With the attitude that my generation has, it will be interesting to see how company paradigms will change to reflect this new way of thinking.

Blogging attempt number 4: Abstract thought

Why am I creating a new blog and disbanding my old one(s)? Well for one I payed no attention to them. With the lack of updates, they eventually became ghost blogs and yet here I am ready to repeat the process. I claim this blog will be different due to one main reason: This blog has a purpose. My past blogs where just my ramblings and lets face it, its hard to just sit down and write about something. There must be a goal behind every post and I’m afraid my past blogs were lacking in that department.

This blog is called ‘abstract thought’ and will be my attempt to create a public outlet for my learnings as I continue to grow. Dictionary.com defines abstract thought as, “thinking that is coherent and logical”. As mentioned above, blog posts must have a goal behind them and it is my goal for all posts here to be coherent and logical.

Welcome to abstract thought.