While I support encryption in a lot of applications, this is not one of them. When you need your data back, the last thing you need to worry about is where you wrote down the password. Because of course, the drive that contained that batch file that was doing the encryption is now destroyed.
Go to the bike store and get a big lock. Make sure the spindle hole of a CD will fit over the locking bar. Then simply impale your backup set on the lock. Physically securing a key is something we're all trained at doing.
Of course, you could just write your encryption key down in a safe place and secure that physically, but sometimes a big hunk of metal is easier.
Very nice. I tend to avoid the "Drive letter access" packet-writing schemes because the resulting discs aren't 9660 compliant, which could make restoration awkward. I suppose that's not an issue now that most common OS's can read them, but a few years ago when packet-writing schemes were new, they were proprietary and risky.
There's also a space penalty for formatting a CD in packet format, but intelligent drivers can minimize that. I guess using CD-RW's, that's really minimal, whereas with CD-R's it can be significant.
Still, I'd prefer to make the zip into temp space on the hard drive, and then burn it in a regular session onto a 9660-compliant CD. This also keeps the drive idle so in case the Zip process encounters an error you don't interrupt a burn.
I know PKZip can "span" across media when it fills up the first disk. Is this compatible with current packet-writing schemes? If so, that would be a compelling advantage for users with larger amounts of data, but you'd have to babysit the machine and swap disks. (Too bad spanning can't hop drive letters.)
Alternately, you could use Rar and give it a volume size argument, so it would produce several 650 meg chunks. Then if you have multiple burners, you could make your batch file burn chunk-1 to f: and if chunk-2 exists, burn it to g: and if chunk-3 exists, burn it to h:, etc...
Your scheme sounds excellent, it's the pinnacle of simplicity and elegance. I'm only suggesting modifications to prove its versatility, not to imply imperfection.
Having just completed a 4200-mile roadtrip, I can attest to the dramatic differences in road surfaces. There's a particular stretch of I-70 that drops to, I believe, 35MPH for a few miles. The pavement also changes, and becomes unbelievably noisy. I wonder if the intent was to emphasize your speed, and increase the "reward" for slowing down?
Going from state to state, or county to county, you can tell that different contractors use different mixtures and surface preparations. It's utter bliss to experience the washing machine effect you describe, just as one's favorite song comes on. Why can't they use this stuff everywhere?
I don't believe cost could be an object. Some of the quietest roads of the trip were in the middle of Kansas, miles away from anything. (not even butter and syrup!)
I was at the tire store today, getting a new set of all-seasons to replace the poor old tires that gave their last gasp on the aforementioned roadtrip. The salesdude and I talked tread patterns for a while, about how some tires are simply quieter with no penalty in handling, just snow traction. I never thought I'd regret living in Michigan, but if I could live with non-snow-capable tires, I could get a quieter ride.
I wonder if anyone's ever done a study on stress levels of drivers who're forced to crank their radios to overcome noisy roads and tires. I bet the public health benefit of quieter road surfaces would far outweigh the cost. (Now if only we could get serious about noise pollution tickets for the asshole in the next lane with the kilowatt subs.)
Aha, the italiancarparts version is the one I picked up at Murray's for ten bucks a few summers ago. It's actually got a very good handgrip, and it's held up fine under plenty of torque.
What failed on me was the switch mechanism, which is a very cheap plastic tailcap type. I still keep the screwdriver around for the grip, despite the fact that it no longer lights up.
For some reason, I always want to call it memchk86, but it's memtest86, and it's indispensable. Memtest86 boots from a floppy and begins running immediately. It's got several types of test, and runs in a loop so if you have an intermittent problem, you can just boot it and leave it for a while.
The author has finally given in to popularity and set up a site for the program, MemTest86.com. I encourage anyone who's found bad ram with memtest to throw a few bucks his way. ("Professional" memory testers are nowhere near cheap!)
There's also a bootable CD.ISO for machines without a floppy drive. Some of my favorite machines don't have CDROMs either (subnotebook with a network card and nothing else), so I'd love to see a version I can download and invoke with Loadlin, but hey, there's only so much I can ask.
Who modded that up? The memory effect only exhibits itself in situations of very regular charge/discharge cycling. Regular deep discharges damage the electrodes and shorten the cycle life of a battery. All rechargeable chemistries will last longer if they're not discharged too deeply. Lead-acid ("car") batteries are particularly sensitive to deep cycling, but it applies to NiCd and NMH too. Don't flatten them if you can help it!
It's important to differentiate between batteries and cells when talking about deep discharge, too. An individual cell can be taken down to 0v without major damage. Once in a while it can be beneficial, to reform the electrolyte. However, in a battery pack, which has several cells wired in parallel, discharging until "flat" can cause serious damage: The cells in the pack are not identical, some of them hold slightly more charge than others. As the pack voltage drops, some of the individual cells near zero, cross it, and actually get reverse charged by the other cells in the pack. Reverse polarity destroys cells very effectively. Packs should never, never, ever be discharged below 0.5v per cell.
As to the parent post: Lithium-ion chemsitry produces 3.6 volts per cell, which is fine if you're designing a new device, but it makes them unsuitable for retrofit or use in standard AA applications. Lithium secondary cells are also tremendously sensitive to current and voltage limits during charging. Exceeding their specifications can cause pressure buildup, violent cell rupture, damage to the device and possible injury to the user. Because of liability, manufacturers don't sell bare lithium secondary cells to Joe Hobbyist. You can buy packs, with the appropriate overcharge protection circuit already wired in series.
Lithium primary (non-rechargeable) cells, on the other hand, are very handy in certain consumer applications: They produce 3.0 volts per cell, exactly double that of the traditional carbon-zinc and alkaline chemistries. They're also very light. The CR-V3 battery is designed to drop into compartments that would normally hold a pair of AA's. Certain digital cameras are designed with the CR-V3 in mind, giving the user a lot of flexibility in battery selection: My Olympus C-2100 can take four AA's of any chemistry (although alkalines don't last very long), or a pair of CR-V3's if I want to travel light and don't mind the price premium.
Since 9 volts is an even multiple of the Lithium primary cell's 3-volt output, lithium-based 9-volt batteries are now available for applications like smoke detectors. They're also ideal in certain LED flashlights, where the low discharge current is well-suited to the lithium chemistry, and the light weight means that many such flashlights will float, which they wouldn't do if heavier alkaline batteries were used. However, none of this is relevant to rechargeable applications.
One thing I've heard is that lower amp-hour batteries are actually BETTER in some applications. In increasing the electrode surface area that goes into a battery, manufacturers encounter a tradeoff with reliability, internal resistance, and longevity.
A lower capacity cell will have thicker electrodes, which conduct more easily and will last through more charge/discharge cycles. Ideal for applications like camera-flash units that draw very heavy current. You'll just have to charge them more frequently.
The higher-capacity cells would be more suitable for low-drain devices, like portable music players, or cameras that don't see much flash use. Their higher internal resistance doesn't pose a problem when the power draw is low.
Another thing to be aware of is that many chargers go into a blitz charging mode on startup, blasting heavy current into the batteries for the first hour, before backing off, taking a reading, and determining how much further charging is needed. This makes sense if the charger is plugged in constantly, and only drained batteries are tossed into it. It only becomes a problem in situations like mine: I was running a little 4xAA charger from the inverter in my vehicle, which would cycle on and off with the engine. Leaving batteries in the charger would cause them to get blasted every time I turned the car on, shortening their life dramatically. Don't do that. Now before I shut off the engine, I peek at the charger to see if it says they're charged. If so, I take them out and toss 'em in a cupholder, so they don't have to endure further charging. Keeping a spare set in my vehicle has proven indispensable though.
Avoid Rayovac. I got a Rayovac "3 in 1" desktop charger, which advertises the ability to charge NiCd, NMH, and rechargeable alkalines. Then I threw in a set of four Rayovac NMH AA's. A few hours later, I discovered that they'd gotten so hot during charging, their labels had warped and peeled, exposing the bare metal can underneath. They still work fine, holding plenty of charge to be useful, but the bare metal means I can't use them in certain devices' battery compartments because of shorting concerns. I put a set of ancient Radio Shack NiCd's in it, and it cooked them too. They were probably dead anyway, but the point is, the Rayovac charger doesn't have a thermal cutoff, which it should! Curiously, this charger works just fine on my other batteries, even AAA's never get more than warm during charging.
Ironically enough, another set of Radio Shack "high capacity" NiCd AA's from the same era work just fine, in the Rayovac charger and others. Because the NiCd chemistry has a lower self-discharge than NMH, they're ideal for occasional-use standby duty. Those old cells sit in my Mag Lite.
Really, for standby jobs, the best chemistry is rechargeable Alkaline. They have almost no self-discharge, so they can sit for months on end and still be ready for service. I've got a pair of Renewal AAA's in my laser pointer, I think I've charged them 5 times in the 5 years I've owned them. (BTW, it's worth the extra bucks for a laser that takes standard batteries. After you've replaced those button cells 2 or 3 times, you begin to see why.)
You should check out Isidor Buchmann's excellent book on the subject. After a free "who are you?" registration, you can read the whole thing on line.
P.S. Anyone know an outfit that rebuilds Lithium-ion laptop batteries?
You're exactly right that the memory generates a lot of heat. This is one reason not to have more memory than you need in a laptop. Heat produced is battery consumed! Get only enough to keep from swapping too much.
Honestly, I don't see why we have such obscenely powerful laptops anyway. I'm more than happy with my 300MHz Celeron. I'd love to see a laptop with yesterday's CPU as long as it got 20+ hours on a battery.
I think at that point, the screen becomes the major power sucker, and we have to go back to transflective displays. I'd be fine with that. One of my favorite laptops is an 8088 with a monochrome screen that's perfectly readable in ambient light with the backlight off. It gets 12+ hours on a charge and I use it to this day for that reason.
Why on earth would you want a portable machine that kicks out enough heat, and has poor enough thermal dissipation, to need a fan? Not only do they suck extra power and fail frequently, they require openings in the case that can introduce dust and moisture. That's fine in a server room with a controlled environment, but you'd never take such a delicate machine on the beach, or into a machine shop, or anywhere else that real people might need to compute.
One reason good laptops have metal cases is so they don't need fans. It also helps with the durability just a bit.;)
My Toughbook experiences haven't included any millitary service, but they're similarly positive. I picked up a CF-25 at a computer show a few years back, and a CF-17 on eBay. Both have been great machines. I love any computer that goes "clank".
I've used the 17 as an umbrella more than once, and after seeing the filthy water that ran out of the keyboard tray after the first time, I've taken to rinsing it regularly with tap water. Try that with your favorite titanium fruit!
The 25 has served as a wheel chock, vise, and hammer, all while operating. I'm presently preparing it for service as a terminal server on Defcon's lan. Barf-resistant laptops are good to have at parties.
Another favorite feature of the Toughbook line is that all models use the same power supply. They want 15 volts, but will operate from the 13 you find in a vehicle, they just won't charge the battery. (My brother hacked up a connector using paperclips and gray tape when we were on the road and needed to run some mapping software.)
Every major release I set up a node and run it for a few days to see if it's gotten any better, but I end up shutting it off.
You're part of the problem! The reason Freenet sucks for a little while after each release is that there's a huge influx of empty datastores joining the network. The network bounces back pretty quickly, as data gets passed around and as routing tables hone themselves, the network gets a lot better.
Then a day or two later, you and 90% of the other slashdotters drop off, and leave holes in everyone's routing tables. All the contribution that your nodes were just starting to make, gets undone. All the copies of content that got replicated into your datastores vanish. All the routing optimizations that were just sorting themselves out get broken again.
Tourists hurt the network. If you're judging Freenet based on it's performance the day after a slashdotting, you're not getting a full or fair picture. Come back and stay a while! Let your node run for a week and I think you'll be impressed.
When they say Freenet is slashdot-resistant, they refer to content within the network. Any piece of data, be it a single file or a whole freesite, will simply propagate more as more people request it. The network itself definitely labors a bit as empty datastores dillute it. The best way to improve Freenet's performance is to encourage those tourists to stick around, so they and the network will benefit the most.
The only problem is that there's no one-click tool to mirror a website into Freenet, yet. Freenet's gateway has an anonymity filter which prohibits out-of-freenet links, and it also disallows a lot of things. If someone wanted to write a simple tool to clean up a site and hack the links to work in Freenet, it would make this a lot easier.
By the way, using the http://127.0.0.1:8888/KEY@whatever style links is discouraged, because not everyone's freenet node is localhost, and not everyone runs it on port 8888! The preferred format is freenet:KEY@whatever which can then be handled appropriately by your browser.
That's what I mean, I'm sure the tracker could be replaced with a Freenet interface. Technically Freenet is only for static content, but there are tricks around that. Frost is messageboard software that uses Freenet as its data store.
From a quick look at the BitTorrent protocol, it looks like the tracker simply serves as a repository where peers tell each other about their existence. That could be easily modified to look for data within Freenet.
This still leaves the peers wide open to prosecution though, and it doesn't solve much. It would be much better for all the users to abandon BitTorrent, run Freenet permanent nodes, and get their dose of techarchy that way. *sigh*
I don't see why it surprises anyone that a network with centralized servers and plaintext transfers is running into problems with that architecture. BT was intended for things like linux ISOs, which are supposed to be free.
Even if you don't want to share your content on Freenet, which it might not be big enough to handle yet, you could always share your torrent files. Replacing the centralized part with a totally decentralized network.
It's right there at the top of Geek settings: "Allow changes to node address, port, and availability settings (on Normal page)"
Just put a checkmark there and go back to Normal settings. Put your static IP in there, set it to Permanent, and watch your CPU melt! No, actually the NIO builds are much better about that. A month ago, it was bad.
How to make Freenet suck less: Leave it running!
on
Freenet 0.5.2 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
For the Freenet newbie: This is NOT your plain jane filesharing program! You don't just point it at files and say "let people leech these". Freenet is a transport layer. Most users access it through a browser, retrieving HTML and images stored within Freenet. It's also possible to use it as a messageboard, file repository, and more.
When you start up Freenet, you give it some disk space to use as a "datastore". This starts empty, and fills itself up over time as your node participates in the network.
When you click a link in Freenet, your web browser requests the key (sort of like a url) from your local node. Assuming your node doesn't have the key, it asks another node for it, which then asks another and another until the key is located. The data is then passed back up the chain to your node, and along the way some of the intermediate nodes keep a copy.
In this manner, popular content propagates in Freenet. By leaving your node running (and making sure it's actively participating in the network, serving requests) you'll allow it to store some of the keys that make up Freenet's content. When you use your node, it's likely that some of the keys you want are already stored there.
Routing is similar. When you first install Freenet, it has knowledge of a few "seed nodes", and that's all it knows about. As your node talks to the seed nodes, they tell it about other nodes, and your routing table grows. This makes you less dependent on the seed nodes (which are probably melting today).
A new system in Freenet called "probabilistic caching" results in a certain amount of specialization, and a significant performance improvement. It's based on keys (which are cryptographic hashes of content) and node IDs (which are crypto keys). Both are fairly randomly distributed, numerically. Here's how PCaching works:
If your node ID ends in 0x3F, then when your node participates in the chain for a piece of data whose key ends in 0x3F, it's very likely to keep a copy. When your node handles other keys, it might still keep a copy but it's not as likely. Likewise when you request a key that ends in 0xD3, that request will be passed, if possible, to a node whose ID also ends in 0xD3. This is a simplified explanation and I'm not a Freenet coder, but that's how it's been explained to me.
Obviously, the larger and more up-to-date your routing table is, the more easily your node can find the pages you request. Being an active part of the network is the best way for your node to keep a healthy routing table and a relevant datastore.
Freenet is unique among p2p apps in that your user experience actually improves if you contribute more bandwidth and space. (Bandwidth is much more important than drive space. 100 nodes with datastores of 1 gig each will make a much bigger impact on the network than 1 node with a 100 gig datastore!)
Part of how Freenet works is that your datastore (which starts empty) fills itself up with data that passes through your node. Your routing tables also continue to refine themselves as time goes on. A virgin node has an empty datastore and little knowledge of its neighbors, and will therefore have a hard time getting much at first.
Leave your node running for a while. Set it up as permanent, make sure it's got a publicly accessible IP, and after a few hours, use the node status interface to make sure that "local queries" is nonzero (i.e. your node is serving traffic).
The longer your node runs as an active part of the network, and the more you use it, the more relevant information your datastore contains. Your routing table also gets a better idea of where to go for certain types of keys. (That's probabilistic caching, it's weird but it works.) After your node's been up and active a few days, it'll become more responsive and usable.
This is a very unique property of Freenet. The more bandwidth you give it, and the more disk space you give it, and the longer you let it run, the better your user experience becomes.
There are at least half a dozen reliable index sites within Freenet itself, and several of them are linked to from the gateway page.
Why would you want an index outside of freenet anyway? Holding such a thing on a regular web server means your access can be tracked and logged, which defeats the purpose!
There's plenty to look at in Freenet. I'd bet a significant sum that you haven't tried it recently.
Packetstream Gold is the name of the plan, it's all-you-can-eat for $45 on top of whatever voice plan you've got.
My speeds have been ~30kbps very consistently. Under poor signal conditions it occasionally drops to 25k or so, probably because of packet retries. The phone appears as a plain old modem plugged into the serial port, unless you get the USB version in which case you get to play driver-go-round until you get it working. Argh!
Once you're able to say AT and get an OK from the phone, a simple ATDTS=2 causes the phone to start a PPP session with you. It then chops the packets up and sends smaller ones over the air, which is optimal for an interface with high interference and loss. The equipment on the tower side requests retries of air packets, reconstructs your IP datagrams, and puts them onto the back-end WAN, where they ride to Texas for some serious NAT-fu.
The reason I got the serial cable in the first place was that the USB cable does not charge the phone from your laptop, so you're limited by the battery. Plus if I'm sitting still with the laptop and phone, I'd like to use the time to top off the battery anyway. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I've been trying to find a full-pinout cable that I can hack up and make my own usb data-and-charging cable.
The RS232 cable has a jack on the side, where your regular charger plugs in, and the power is then passed through to the phone. Plugging in the charger during a session doesn't interrupt your connection, but unplugging it does. This effectively prevents opportunistic charging, as it's a major inconvenience to reopen whatever connections I had, following a charger yank. (Or worse yet, using the car charger, the power hit from twisting the ignition switch back and forth is enough to kill the ppp session!) Nextel claims that this stupidity is behavior-as-designed, which I think is corporate speak for "we don't care, neither should you."
There's another issue that the phone seems to reset itself during intense upload activity. Forget throwing a few photos into my gallery while on the road! Upload half a meg and *beep* oh look, the phone's rebooting and I've been disconnected! At least FTP restart works sometimes. The rest of the time, there's Zmodem-resume. (Ironic that we'd revert to decades-old technology to overcome today's crap networks.)
I agree with krangomatik that Nextel's IP assignment bites the bag. There's a $20 setup charge for an IP when you get Packetstream, but I'm still behind their braindead NAT system. Where's my public address, guys? I think I'll raise some customer service hell this week. Going PASV for FTP uploads bites, especially if the server's behind a firewall and can't make outbound connections either!
All in all, it's fairly workable and worth the money. I'm still a customer after all. There are some stupid little issues that Nextel could work harder to resolve, though.
Ricochet sure would be nice, but it looks like Aerie's growth plan only includes the few markets where they think they can make a profit. That makes sense I guess, but what of all the equipment in the rest of the country? It's powerful DSP-based radio equipment with FPGA's for packet logic, the closest thing we've yet seen to software-defined radio, and it's all sitting there idle because nobody in the community knows how to program it.
For quick file transfers in urban areas, nothing beats the trusty old Pringles can, I've got to admit. If only deliberate hotspots were as common as accidental ones! Oh wait, they are.
The problem with the camera phones and such, as they presently exist, is interception. The government already has the infrastructure to monitor your mobile phone's calls and messages. When something happens, it'll be very easy to see which subversive free-thinkers are sending pictures of the event. Forget about having anything like the Zapruder film next time something big happens. Accounts of the event will be instantly censored for quick coverup by big brother.
For blogging to be useful for any news more controversial than your pet's latest chew-toy, we need a mechanism for censorship resistance. Communications between phones and internet hosts should be strongly encrypted, and users should be able to choose anonymity for publishing sensitive material.
Freenet is nearly perfect for this. It's a little too bulky for the current generation of Java-capable phones, but in a year or two we should see handsets with very powerful JVMs. Freenet 'blogs, or flogs, will become increasingly important as awareness of government eavesdropping increases. Being able to update a flog and instantly add pictures, right from your phone at the scene of an event, will vastly improve the reporting of important news. At the moment this would require carrying a laptop, which is not only bulky, it's conspicuous.
Bloggers need to embrace Freenet en masse, to secure their right to uncensored, optionally anonymous publication and communication. If you could say anything at all, what would you publish? You can, please do.
Let's be serious here, Apple laptops aren't all that durable. Two of my friends have had the screens break, one in a bookbag and one in a laptop bag. With a few exceptions, I'd say the average laptop now is a lot less durable than 10 years ago.
I've picked up two used Panasonic Toughbooks on eBay and they've been attention-getters ever since. How many laptops can you stand on, throw across the room, use as hammers, and use in the rain, all while your favorite mp3s are playing?
I'm a big form-follows-function guy. The Toughbooks are all black, magnesium alloy with rubber covers over the ports. They're elegant in the same way a Beretta pistol is a work of art.
I've taken to keeping my Tougbook in a bag lately, not to protect it from the outside world, but to protect the outside world from it. The rubber feet came off the bottom some time ago, and the metal case has a tendency to mar floors if I drop it. I do that sometimes just for effect.
I presently own two Toughbooks: a CF-25, which is a full-size machine (comparable to any other laptop). It's a Pentium 150 with a nice comfy keyboard, 1024x768 screen behind a polycarbonate sheet, three(!) PCMCIA slots, and a gel pad surrounding the hard drive, which I upgraded from 4 gig to 10. The lack of CardBus and USB finally forced me to upgrade to my present machine, which is a...
CF-17, a Celeron 300 subnotebook. It's petite, the (touch)screen is only 800x600, and the keyboard takes some getting used to. With 128 meg and the 20 gig drive I dropped in it, it's more power than I need. (My desktop is only a 300MHz machine, for comparison.) It's got a single USB1.1 port, and I occasionally stick a 480Mb/s "hi speed" USB card in the slot when I need to use an external burner.
There are of course more recent Toughbook models, up to Pentium III and probably faster, but my budget and needs are more modest. Lately Panasonic's come out with a few "semi"-rugged models, which translates to "beats the crap out of your Dell, but won't survive a 10' drop onto concrete like the others". They're worth looking into if you're not the type to occasionally toss a load of 2x4's into your truck without noticing the laptop sitting there.
P.S. I'm not affiliated with Panasonic in any way, just a loyal customer. I could've probably sold a dozen of these machines to people who've been impressed by mine, I should see about becoming a dealer.
Getting the data back home the easy way.
on
Cybercafè Travel Kit?
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you're just keeping a travelogue, try the telephone. A few minutes per day of international calling is still cheaper than the risk of having your laptop stolen. Arrange to have a friend house-sit, and while they're in each day or two bringing in the mail and watering the plants, have them check your answering machine and jot down the messages so it doesn't overflow.
If you dictate 2 minutes of travel notes onto your own machine, your friend can easily transcribe that onto your weblog for you. After all, you trust this person with keys to your house, you can certainly share your password, then change it when you return home.
If you must take a laptop along, make it an older model. Pick up a 486 for $30, spend $50 getting the battery rebuilt, and rent an acoustic coupler from your local phreak. Such a machine will easily run 98lite or any linux you choose, and if ill befalls it, you're only out a few bucks. If you can get a used Grid or Toughbook or any other rugged machine for a similarly cheap price, so much the better. USB cards require CardBus slots which aren't present on older laptops, so be sure to take a PCMCIA adapter for your flash media.
Nothing sucks like blowing up your partition table a thousand miles from home. Laptop drives are tiny and light, and old 400 meggers can be had for a song. Pack a spare preinstalled with your road warrior configuration.
Drip superglue into an rj45 end before sliding the wires in and crimping it. Ping -f and wiggle all connections before considering any cable finished.
Keychain LED lights make nice thank-yous for helpful people, or barter if money exchange is problematic. They can be had very cheap in quantity. Pack a dozen.
Tupperware-style containers are nearly as rugged as ammo boxes, just as waterproof, and they weigh mere ounces. Bake the moisture out of a few dessicant bags and throw 'em in.
I've installed quite a few dedicated communications systems that, while controlled by computers, leave little room for creative configuration in the "OS". I still find my ways..
On one system, I'd configure the IP address and netmask for an interface that was never enabled, with the ASCII numbers for my initials and the date, 255.78.74.66 / 6.28.20.3 for today, for instance.
On another, it was possible to create files with arbitrary names but not put anything in them. A few zero-length files with a hello-message did the trick.
My favorite machine allows hand-editing of an ARP-like table for an obscure routing protocol. Handily enough, this entire interface is never enabled, so I can stuff the table with things like "INSTALLEDBY-00:00:DE:AD:BE:EF NJBANDCREW-00:00:00:00:00:00 JAN01FEB01-00:00:00:00:00:00".
Even on dumb equipment like wiring blocks, I always scratch my initials into the backside before closing the block, so later when the system is tested and mistakes are found, I can defend myself. I've tried to make it standard protocol among the installers I've trained, since it saves everyone grief and encourages responsibility.
More than once, I've jotted notes on the bottom of steel equipment frames before bolting them to the floor, to be seen by the crew that tears them out in 30 years. Anything from "Kilroy was here" with the accompanying graphic, to "Help! I'm trapped under the rack!".
I've been responsible for installing some things I'm not always proud of. Personalization can also be a way of disclaiming responsibility.
Wiring junction boxes frequently contain notes jotted on gray electrical tape. "Approved by engineer Larry 5/22/01; says the NEC doesn't apply here. Black:Hot White:Neutral Green:Ground BlackW/tape:Messenger WhiteW/tape:Magic. If this box is smokey, check the one at the other end of the aisle too!"
My favorite thing is finding notes and doodles left by previous generations. Once I saw a pile of boards torn out and waiting for material reclamation (gold chipleads and stuff), so I dug through the pile admiring yesteryear's design. One controller board had a profusion of "green wire", added by a field tech to update the board to a new revision. In some unused space in the corner, a little smiley face had been elegantly needlepointed into the perfboard.
Makes you wonder how much personalization goes undetected in the products we use every day! Spend some time in the Silicon Zoo checking out the art inside chips themselves.
I'm sorry, you're right. I meant window-size. Something out there is going to react strangely to those packets, because that's what's being scanned for. The security community would do well to figure out WHAT, and fast.
55808 decimal is 0xDA00 or 1 10110100 0000000. I wonder if the null low byte is significant somehow.
If nobody's ever found an infected machine how can anyone declare this thing anything more than a phenomenon involving strange packets? "trojan" is a pretty narrow definition, and it sounds like it's being misused.
Secondly, all the worry about the 'unallocated' IP space is easy to explain, and here's my theory: The perpetrator has gained control of several core routers, and added routes to them for this address space. Then they've compromised machines (or perhaps are using routines on the routers themselves) to analyze the packets destined for that space.
They're simply scanning the internet for something interesting. The packet length is a clue as to what. Whatever they're looking for will respond strangely to such a packet. When they find it, the response packet goes to the router which would normally toss it in the bitbucket, but because it's now been given a route, the packet is logged for further exploitation.
Slashdot Mirror
While I support encryption in a lot of applications, this is not one of them. When you need your data back, the last thing you need to worry about is where you wrote down the password. Because of course, the drive that contained that batch file that was doing the encryption is now destroyed.
Go to the bike store and get a big lock. Make sure the spindle hole of a CD will fit over the locking bar. Then simply impale your backup set on the lock. Physically securing a key is something we're all trained at doing.
Of course, you could just write your encryption key down in a safe place and secure that physically, but sometimes a big hunk of metal is easier.
Very nice. I tend to avoid the "Drive letter access" packet-writing schemes because the resulting discs aren't 9660 compliant, which could make restoration awkward. I suppose that's not an issue now that most common OS's can read them, but a few years ago when packet-writing schemes were new, they were proprietary and risky.
There's also a space penalty for formatting a CD in packet format, but intelligent drivers can minimize that. I guess using CD-RW's, that's really minimal, whereas with CD-R's it can be significant.
Still, I'd prefer to make the zip into temp space on the hard drive, and then burn it in a regular session onto a 9660-compliant CD. This also keeps the drive idle so in case the Zip process encounters an error you don't interrupt a burn.
I know PKZip can "span" across media when it fills up the first disk. Is this compatible with current packet-writing schemes? If so, that would be a compelling advantage for users with larger amounts of data, but you'd have to babysit the machine and swap disks. (Too bad spanning can't hop drive letters.)
Alternately, you could use Rar and give it a volume size argument, so it would produce several 650 meg chunks. Then if you have multiple burners, you could make your batch file burn chunk-1 to f: and if chunk-2 exists, burn it to g: and if chunk-3 exists, burn it to h:, etc...
Your scheme sounds excellent, it's the pinnacle of simplicity and elegance. I'm only suggesting modifications to prove its versatility, not to imply imperfection.
Having just completed a 4200-mile roadtrip, I can attest to the dramatic differences in road surfaces. There's a particular stretch of I-70 that drops to, I believe, 35MPH for a few miles. The pavement also changes, and becomes unbelievably noisy. I wonder if the intent was to emphasize your speed, and increase the "reward" for slowing down?
Going from state to state, or county to county, you can tell that different contractors use different mixtures and surface preparations. It's utter bliss to experience the washing machine effect you describe, just as one's favorite song comes on. Why can't they use this stuff everywhere?
I don't believe cost could be an object. Some of the quietest roads of the trip were in the middle of Kansas, miles away from anything. (not even butter and syrup!)
I was at the tire store today, getting a new set of all-seasons to replace the poor old tires that gave their last gasp on the aforementioned roadtrip. The salesdude and I talked tread patterns for a while, about how some tires are simply quieter with no penalty in handling, just snow traction. I never thought I'd regret living in Michigan, but if I could live with non-snow-capable tires, I could get a quieter ride.
I wonder if anyone's ever done a study on stress levels of drivers who're forced to crank their radios to overcome noisy roads and tires. I bet the public health benefit of quieter road surfaces would far outweigh the cost. (Now if only we could get serious about noise pollution tickets for the asshole in the next lane with the kilowatt subs.)
Aha, the italiancarparts version is the one I picked up at Murray's for ten bucks a few summers ago. It's actually got a very good handgrip, and it's held up fine under plenty of torque.
What failed on me was the switch mechanism, which is a very cheap plastic tailcap type. I still keep the screwdriver around for the grip, despite the fact that it no longer lights up.
For some reason, I always want to call it memchk86, but it's memtest86, and it's indispensable. Memtest86 boots from a floppy and begins running immediately. It's got several types of test, and runs in a loop so if you have an intermittent problem, you can just boot it and leave it for a while.
.ISO for machines without a floppy drive. Some of my favorite machines don't have CDROMs either (subnotebook with a network card and nothing else), so I'd love to see a version I can download and invoke with Loadlin, but hey, there's only so much I can ask.
The author has finally given in to popularity and set up a site for the program, MemTest86.com. I encourage anyone who's found bad ram with memtest to throw a few bucks his way. ("Professional" memory testers are nowhere near cheap!)
There's also a bootable CD
Who modded that up? The memory effect only exhibits itself in situations of very regular charge/discharge cycling. Regular deep discharges damage the electrodes and shorten the cycle life of a battery. All rechargeable chemistries will last longer if they're not discharged too deeply. Lead-acid ("car") batteries are particularly sensitive to deep cycling, but it applies to NiCd and NMH too. Don't flatten them if you can help it!
It's important to differentiate between batteries and cells when talking about deep discharge, too. An individual cell can be taken down to 0v without major damage. Once in a while it can be beneficial, to reform the electrolyte. However, in a battery pack, which has several cells wired in parallel, discharging until "flat" can cause serious damage: The cells in the pack are not identical, some of them hold slightly more charge than others. As the pack voltage drops, some of the individual cells near zero, cross it, and actually get reverse charged by the other cells in the pack. Reverse polarity destroys cells very effectively. Packs should never, never, ever be discharged below 0.5v per cell.
As to the parent post: Lithium-ion chemsitry produces 3.6 volts per cell, which is fine if you're designing a new device, but it makes them unsuitable for retrofit or use in standard AA applications. Lithium secondary cells are also tremendously sensitive to current and voltage limits during charging. Exceeding their specifications can cause pressure buildup, violent cell rupture, damage to the device and possible injury to the user. Because of liability, manufacturers don't sell bare lithium secondary cells to Joe Hobbyist. You can buy packs, with the appropriate overcharge protection circuit already wired in series.
Lithium primary (non-rechargeable) cells, on the other hand, are very handy in certain consumer applications: They produce 3.0 volts per cell, exactly double that of the traditional carbon-zinc and alkaline chemistries. They're also very light. The CR-V3 battery is designed to drop into compartments that would normally hold a pair of AA's. Certain digital cameras are designed with the CR-V3 in mind, giving the user a lot of flexibility in battery selection: My Olympus C-2100 can take four AA's of any chemistry (although alkalines don't last very long), or a pair of CR-V3's if I want to travel light and don't mind the price premium.
Since 9 volts is an even multiple of the Lithium primary cell's 3-volt output, lithium-based 9-volt batteries are now available for applications like smoke detectors. They're also ideal in certain LED flashlights, where the low discharge current is well-suited to the lithium chemistry, and the light weight means that many such flashlights will float, which they wouldn't do if heavier alkaline batteries were used. However, none of this is relevant to rechargeable applications.
One thing I've heard is that lower amp-hour batteries are actually BETTER in some applications. In increasing the electrode surface area that goes into a battery, manufacturers encounter a tradeoff with reliability, internal resistance, and longevity.
A lower capacity cell will have thicker electrodes, which conduct more easily and will last through more charge/discharge cycles. Ideal for applications like camera-flash units that draw very heavy current. You'll just have to charge them more frequently.
The higher-capacity cells would be more suitable for low-drain devices, like portable music players, or cameras that don't see much flash use. Their higher internal resistance doesn't pose a problem when the power draw is low.
Another thing to be aware of is that many chargers go into a blitz charging mode on startup, blasting heavy current into the batteries for the first hour, before backing off, taking a reading, and determining how much further charging is needed. This makes sense if the charger is plugged in constantly, and only drained batteries are tossed into it. It only becomes a problem in situations like mine: I was running a little 4xAA charger from the inverter in my vehicle, which would cycle on and off with the engine. Leaving batteries in the charger would cause them to get blasted every time I turned the car on, shortening their life dramatically. Don't do that. Now before I shut off the engine, I peek at the charger to see if it says they're charged. If so, I take them out and toss 'em in a cupholder, so they don't have to endure further charging. Keeping a spare set in my vehicle has proven indispensable though.
Avoid Rayovac. I got a Rayovac "3 in 1" desktop charger, which advertises the ability to charge NiCd, NMH, and rechargeable alkalines. Then I threw in a set of four Rayovac NMH AA's. A few hours later, I discovered that they'd gotten so hot during charging, their labels had warped and peeled, exposing the bare metal can underneath. They still work fine, holding plenty of charge to be useful, but the bare metal means I can't use them in certain devices' battery compartments because of shorting concerns. I put a set of ancient Radio Shack NiCd's in it, and it cooked them too. They were probably dead anyway, but the point is, the Rayovac charger doesn't have a thermal cutoff, which it should! Curiously, this charger works just fine on my other batteries, even AAA's never get more than warm during charging.
Ironically enough, another set of Radio Shack "high capacity" NiCd AA's from the same era work just fine, in the Rayovac charger and others. Because the NiCd chemistry has a lower self-discharge than NMH, they're ideal for occasional-use standby duty. Those old cells sit in my Mag Lite.
Really, for standby jobs, the best chemistry is rechargeable Alkaline. They have almost no self-discharge, so they can sit for months on end and still be ready for service. I've got a pair of Renewal AAA's in my laser pointer, I think I've charged them 5 times in the 5 years I've owned them. (BTW, it's worth the extra bucks for a laser that takes standard batteries. After you've replaced those button cells 2 or 3 times, you begin to see why.)
You should check out Isidor Buchmann's excellent book on the subject. After a free "who are you?" registration, you can read the whole thing on line.
P.S. Anyone know an outfit that rebuilds Lithium-ion laptop batteries?
You're exactly right that the memory generates a lot of heat. This is one reason not to have more memory than you need in a laptop. Heat produced is battery consumed! Get only enough to keep from swapping too much.
Honestly, I don't see why we have such obscenely powerful laptops anyway. I'm more than happy with my 300MHz Celeron. I'd love to see a laptop with yesterday's CPU as long as it got 20+ hours on a battery.
I think at that point, the screen becomes the major power sucker, and we have to go back to transflective displays. I'd be fine with that. One of my favorite laptops is an 8088 with a monochrome screen that's perfectly readable in ambient light with the backlight off. It gets 12+ hours on a charge and I use it to this day for that reason.
Why on earth would you want a portable machine that kicks out enough heat, and has poor enough thermal dissipation, to need a fan? Not only do they suck extra power and fail frequently, they require openings in the case that can introduce dust and moisture. That's fine in a server room with a controlled environment, but you'd never take such a delicate machine on the beach, or into a machine shop, or anywhere else that real people might need to compute.
;)
One reason good laptops have metal cases is so they don't need fans. It also helps with the durability just a bit.
My Toughbook experiences haven't included any millitary service, but they're similarly positive. I picked up a CF-25 at a computer show a few years back, and a CF-17 on eBay. Both have been great machines. I love any computer that goes "clank".
I've used the 17 as an umbrella more than once, and after seeing the filthy water that ran out of the keyboard tray after the first time, I've taken to rinsing it regularly with tap water. Try that with your favorite titanium fruit!
The 25 has served as a wheel chock, vise, and hammer, all while operating. I'm presently preparing it for service as a terminal server on Defcon's lan. Barf-resistant laptops are good to have at parties.
Another favorite feature of the Toughbook line is that all models use the same power supply. They want 15 volts, but will operate from the 13 you find in a vehicle, they just won't charge the battery. (My brother hacked up a connector using paperclips and gray tape when we were on the road and needed to run some mapping software.)
You're part of the problem! The reason Freenet sucks for a little while after each release is that there's a huge influx of empty datastores joining the network. The network bounces back pretty quickly, as data gets passed around and as routing tables hone themselves, the network gets a lot better.
Then a day or two later, you and 90% of the other slashdotters drop off, and leave holes in everyone's routing tables. All the contribution that your nodes were just starting to make, gets undone. All the copies of content that got replicated into your datastores vanish. All the routing optimizations that were just sorting themselves out get broken again.
Tourists hurt the network. If you're judging Freenet based on it's performance the day after a slashdotting, you're not getting a full or fair picture. Come back and stay a while! Let your node run for a week and I think you'll be impressed.
When they say Freenet is slashdot-resistant, they refer to content within the network. Any piece of data, be it a single file or a whole freesite, will simply propagate more as more people request it. The network itself definitely labors a bit as empty datastores dillute it. The best way to improve Freenet's performance is to encourage those tourists to stick around, so they and the network will benefit the most.
I've said this before!
The only problem is that there's no one-click tool to mirror a website into Freenet, yet. Freenet's gateway has an anonymity filter which prohibits out-of-freenet links, and it also disallows a lot of things. If someone wanted to write a simple tool to clean up a site and hack the links to work in Freenet, it would make this a lot easier.
By the way, using the http://127.0.0.1:8888/KEY@whatever style links is discouraged, because not everyone's freenet node is localhost, and not everyone runs it on port 8888! The preferred format is freenet:KEY@whatever which can then be handled appropriately by your browser.
That's what I mean, I'm sure the tracker could be replaced with a Freenet interface. Technically Freenet is only for static content, but there are tricks around that. Frost is messageboard software that uses Freenet as its data store.
From a quick look at the BitTorrent protocol, it looks like the tracker simply serves as a repository where peers tell each other about their existence. That could be easily modified to look for data within Freenet.
This still leaves the peers wide open to prosecution though, and it doesn't solve much. It would be much better for all the users to abandon BitTorrent, run Freenet permanent nodes, and get their dose of techarchy that way. *sigh*
I don't see why it surprises anyone that a network with centralized servers and plaintext transfers is running into problems with that architecture. BT was intended for things like linux ISOs, which are supposed to be free.
Even if you don't want to share your content on Freenet, which it might not be big enough to handle yet, you could always share your torrent files. Replacing the centralized part with a totally decentralized network.
It's right there at the top of Geek settings: "Allow changes to node address, port, and availability settings (on Normal page)"
Just put a checkmark there and go back to Normal settings. Put your static IP in there, set it to Permanent, and watch your CPU melt! No, actually the NIO builds are much better about that. A month ago, it was bad.
For the Freenet newbie: This is NOT your plain jane filesharing program! You don't just point it at files and say "let people leech these". Freenet is a transport layer. Most users access it through a browser, retrieving HTML and images stored within Freenet. It's also possible to use it as a messageboard, file repository, and more.
When you start up Freenet, you give it some disk space to use as a "datastore". This starts empty, and fills itself up over time as your node participates in the network.
When you click a link in Freenet, your web browser requests the key (sort of like a url) from your local node. Assuming your node doesn't have the key, it asks another node for it, which then asks another and another until the key is located. The data is then passed back up the chain to your node, and along the way some of the intermediate nodes keep a copy.
In this manner, popular content propagates in Freenet. By leaving your node running (and making sure it's actively participating in the network, serving requests) you'll allow it to store some of the keys that make up Freenet's content. When you use your node, it's likely that some of the keys you want are already stored there.
Routing is similar. When you first install Freenet, it has knowledge of a few "seed nodes", and that's all it knows about. As your node talks to the seed nodes, they tell it about other nodes, and your routing table grows. This makes you less dependent on the seed nodes (which are probably melting today).
A new system in Freenet called "probabilistic caching" results in a certain amount of specialization, and a significant performance improvement. It's based on keys (which are cryptographic hashes of content) and node IDs (which are crypto keys). Both are fairly randomly distributed, numerically. Here's how PCaching works:
If your node ID ends in 0x3F, then when your node participates in the chain for a piece of data whose key ends in 0x3F, it's very likely to keep a copy. When your node handles other keys, it might still keep a copy but it's not as likely. Likewise when you request a key that ends in 0xD3, that request will be passed, if possible, to a node whose ID also ends in 0xD3. This is a simplified explanation and I'm not a Freenet coder, but that's how it's been explained to me.
Obviously, the larger and more up-to-date your routing table is, the more easily your node can find the pages you request. Being an active part of the network is the best way for your node to keep a healthy routing table and a relevant datastore.
Freenet is unique among p2p apps in that your user experience actually improves if you contribute more bandwidth and space. (Bandwidth is much more important than drive space. 100 nodes with datastores of 1 gig each will make a much bigger impact on the network than 1 node with a 100 gig datastore!)
Part of how Freenet works is that your datastore (which starts empty) fills itself up with data that passes through your node. Your routing tables also continue to refine themselves as time goes on. A virgin node has an empty datastore and little knowledge of its neighbors, and will therefore have a hard time getting much at first.
Leave your node running for a while. Set it up as permanent, make sure it's got a publicly accessible IP, and after a few hours, use the node status interface to make sure that "local queries" is nonzero (i.e. your node is serving traffic).
The longer your node runs as an active part of the network, and the more you use it, the more relevant information your datastore contains. Your routing table also gets a better idea of where to go for certain types of keys. (That's probabilistic caching, it's weird but it works.) After your node's been up and active a few days, it'll become more responsive and usable.
This is a very unique property of Freenet. The more bandwidth you give it, and the more disk space you give it, and the longer you let it run, the better your user experience becomes.
There are at least half a dozen reliable index sites within Freenet itself, and several of them are linked to from the gateway page.
Why would you want an index outside of freenet anyway? Holding such a thing on a regular web server means your access can be tracked and logged, which defeats the purpose!
There's plenty to look at in Freenet. I'd bet a significant sum that you haven't tried it recently.
Packetstream Gold is the name of the plan, it's all-you-can-eat for $45 on top of whatever voice plan you've got.
My speeds have been ~30kbps very consistently. Under poor signal conditions it occasionally drops to 25k or so, probably because of packet retries. The phone appears as a plain old modem plugged into the serial port, unless you get the USB version in which case you get to play driver-go-round until you get it working. Argh!
Once you're able to say AT and get an OK from the phone, a simple ATDTS=2 causes the phone to start a PPP session with you. It then chops the packets up and sends smaller ones over the air, which is optimal for an interface with high interference and loss. The equipment on the tower side requests retries of air packets, reconstructs your IP datagrams, and puts them onto the back-end WAN, where they ride to Texas for some serious NAT-fu.
The reason I got the serial cable in the first place was that the USB cable does not charge the phone from your laptop, so you're limited by the battery. Plus if I'm sitting still with the laptop and phone, I'd like to use the time to top off the battery anyway. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I've been trying to find a full-pinout cable that I can hack up and make my own usb data-and-charging cable.
The RS232 cable has a jack on the side, where your regular charger plugs in, and the power is then passed through to the phone. Plugging in the charger during a session doesn't interrupt your connection, but unplugging it does. This effectively prevents opportunistic charging, as it's a major inconvenience to reopen whatever connections I had, following a charger yank. (Or worse yet, using the car charger, the power hit from twisting the ignition switch back and forth is enough to kill the ppp session!) Nextel claims that this stupidity is behavior-as-designed, which I think is corporate speak for "we don't care, neither should you."
There's another issue that the phone seems to reset itself during intense upload activity. Forget throwing a few photos into my gallery while on the road! Upload half a meg and *beep* oh look, the phone's rebooting and I've been disconnected! At least FTP restart works sometimes. The rest of the time, there's Zmodem-resume. (Ironic that we'd revert to decades-old technology to overcome today's crap networks.)
I agree with krangomatik that Nextel's IP assignment bites the bag. There's a $20 setup charge for an IP when you get Packetstream, but I'm still behind their braindead NAT system. Where's my public address, guys? I think I'll raise some customer service hell this week. Going PASV for FTP uploads bites, especially if the server's behind a firewall and can't make outbound connections either!
All in all, it's fairly workable and worth the money. I'm still a customer after all. There are some stupid little issues that Nextel could work harder to resolve, though.
Ricochet sure would be nice, but it looks like Aerie's growth plan only includes the few markets where they think they can make a profit. That makes sense I guess, but what of all the equipment in the rest of the country? It's powerful DSP-based radio equipment with FPGA's for packet logic, the closest thing we've yet seen to software-defined radio, and it's all sitting there idle because nobody in the community knows how to program it.
For quick file transfers in urban areas, nothing beats the trusty old Pringles can, I've got to admit. If only deliberate hotspots were as common as accidental ones! Oh wait, they are.
The problem with the camera phones and such, as they presently exist, is interception. The government already has the infrastructure to monitor your mobile phone's calls and messages. When something happens, it'll be very easy to see which subversive free-thinkers are sending pictures of the event. Forget about having anything like the Zapruder film next time something big happens. Accounts of the event will be instantly censored for quick coverup by big brother.
For blogging to be useful for any news more controversial than your pet's latest chew-toy, we need a mechanism for censorship resistance. Communications between phones and internet hosts should be strongly encrypted, and users should be able to choose anonymity for publishing sensitive material.
Freenet is nearly perfect for this. It's a little too bulky for the current generation of Java-capable phones, but in a year or two we should see handsets with very powerful JVMs. Freenet 'blogs, or flogs, will become increasingly important as awareness of government eavesdropping increases. Being able to update a flog and instantly add pictures, right from your phone at the scene of an event, will vastly improve the reporting of important news. At the moment this would require carrying a laptop, which is not only bulky, it's conspicuous.
Bloggers need to embrace Freenet en masse, to secure their right to uncensored, optionally anonymous publication and communication. If you could say anything at all, what would you publish? You can, please do.
Let's be serious here, Apple laptops aren't all that durable. Two of my friends have had the screens break, one in a bookbag and one in a laptop bag. With a few exceptions, I'd say the average laptop now is a lot less durable than 10 years ago.
I've picked up two used Panasonic Toughbooks on eBay and they've been attention-getters ever since. How many laptops can you stand on, throw across the room, use as hammers, and use in the rain, all while your favorite mp3s are playing?
I'm a big form-follows-function guy. The Toughbooks are all black, magnesium alloy with rubber covers over the ports. They're elegant in the same way a Beretta pistol is a work of art.
I've taken to keeping my Tougbook in a bag lately, not to protect it from the outside world, but to protect the outside world from it. The rubber feet came off the bottom some time ago, and the metal case has a tendency to mar floors if I drop it. I do that sometimes just for effect.
I presently own two Toughbooks: a CF-25, which is a full-size machine (comparable to any other laptop). It's a Pentium 150 with a nice comfy keyboard, 1024x768 screen behind a polycarbonate sheet, three(!) PCMCIA slots, and a gel pad surrounding the hard drive, which I upgraded from 4 gig to 10. The lack of CardBus and USB finally forced me to upgrade to my present machine, which is a...
CF-17, a Celeron 300 subnotebook. It's petite, the (touch)screen is only 800x600, and the keyboard takes some getting used to. With 128 meg and the 20 gig drive I dropped in it, it's more power than I need. (My desktop is only a 300MHz machine, for comparison.) It's got a single USB1.1 port, and I occasionally stick a 480Mb/s "hi speed" USB card in the slot when I need to use an external burner.
There are of course more recent Toughbook models, up to Pentium III and probably faster, but my budget and needs are more modest. Lately Panasonic's come out with a few "semi"-rugged models, which translates to "beats the crap out of your Dell, but won't survive a 10' drop onto concrete like the others". They're worth looking into if you're not the type to occasionally toss a load of 2x4's into your truck without noticing the laptop sitting there.
P.S. I'm not affiliated with Panasonic in any way, just a loyal customer. I could've probably sold a dozen of these machines to people who've been impressed by mine, I should see about becoming a dealer.
If you dictate 2 minutes of travel notes onto your own machine, your friend can easily transcribe that onto your weblog for you. After all, you trust this person with keys to your house, you can certainly share your password, then change it when you return home.
If you must take a laptop along, make it an older model. Pick up a 486 for $30, spend $50 getting the battery rebuilt, and rent an acoustic coupler from your local phreak. Such a machine will easily run 98lite or any linux you choose, and if ill befalls it, you're only out a few bucks. If you can get a used Grid or Toughbook or any other rugged machine for a similarly cheap price, so much the better. USB cards require CardBus slots which aren't present on older laptops, so be sure to take a PCMCIA adapter for your flash media.
Nothing sucks like blowing up your partition table a thousand miles from home. Laptop drives are tiny and light, and old 400 meggers can be had for a song. Pack a spare preinstalled with your road warrior configuration.
Drip superglue into an rj45 end before sliding the wires in and crimping it. Ping -f and wiggle all connections before considering any cable finished.
Keychain LED lights make nice thank-yous for helpful people, or barter if money exchange is problematic. They can be had very cheap in quantity. Pack a dozen.
Tupperware-style containers are nearly as rugged as ammo boxes, just as waterproof, and they weigh mere ounces. Bake the moisture out of a few dessicant bags and throw 'em in.
Things that have saved my ass:
I've installed quite a few dedicated communications systems that, while controlled by computers, leave little room for creative configuration in the "OS". I still find my ways..
On one system, I'd configure the IP address and netmask for an interface that was never enabled, with the ASCII numbers for my initials and the date, 255.78.74.66 / 6.28.20.3 for today, for instance.
On another, it was possible to create files with arbitrary names but not put anything in them. A few zero-length files with a hello-message did the trick.
My favorite machine allows hand-editing of an ARP-like table for an obscure routing protocol. Handily enough, this entire interface is never enabled, so I can stuff the table with things like "INSTALLEDBY-00:00:DE:AD:BE:EF NJBANDCREW-00:00:00:00:00:00 JAN01FEB01-00:00:00:00:00:00".
Even on dumb equipment like wiring blocks, I always scratch my initials into the backside before closing the block, so later when the system is tested and mistakes are found, I can defend myself. I've tried to make it standard protocol among the installers I've trained, since it saves everyone grief and encourages responsibility.
More than once, I've jotted notes on the bottom of steel equipment frames before bolting them to the floor, to be seen by the crew that tears them out in 30 years. Anything from "Kilroy was here" with the accompanying graphic, to "Help! I'm trapped under the rack!".
I've been responsible for installing some things I'm not always proud of. Personalization can also be a way of disclaiming responsibility.
Wiring junction boxes frequently contain notes jotted on gray electrical tape. "Approved by engineer Larry 5/22/01; says the NEC doesn't apply here. Black:Hot White:Neutral Green:Ground BlackW/tape:Messenger WhiteW/tape:Magic. If this box is smokey, check the one at the other end of the aisle too!"
My favorite thing is finding notes and doodles left by previous generations. Once I saw a pile of boards torn out and waiting for material reclamation (gold chipleads and stuff), so I dug through the pile admiring yesteryear's design. One controller board had a profusion of "green wire", added by a field tech to update the board to a new revision. In some unused space in the corner, a little smiley face had been elegantly needlepointed into the perfboard.
Makes you wonder how much personalization goes undetected in the products we use every day! Spend some time in the Silicon Zoo checking out the art inside chips themselves.
I'm sorry, you're right. I meant window-size. Something out there is going to react strangely to those packets, because that's what's being scanned for. The security community would do well to figure out WHAT, and fast.
55808 decimal is 0xDA00 or 1 10110100 0000000. I wonder if the null low byte is significant somehow.
If nobody's ever found an infected machine how can anyone declare this thing anything more than a phenomenon involving strange packets? "trojan" is a pretty narrow definition, and it sounds like it's being misused.
Secondly, all the worry about the 'unallocated' IP space is easy to explain, and here's my theory: The perpetrator has gained control of several core routers, and added routes to them for this address space. Then they've compromised machines (or perhaps are using routines on the routers themselves) to analyze the packets destined for that space.
They're simply scanning the internet for something interesting. The packet length is a clue as to what. Whatever they're looking for will respond strangely to such a packet. When they find it, the response packet goes to the router which would normally toss it in the bitbucket, but because it's now been given a route, the packet is logged for further exploitation.