Dave’s Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

For those of you out there who use Ubuntu Linux (or any Linux distro for that matter), recent events on the Ubuntu Forums might intrigue you.  Ever since I became acquainted with this online community, I have paid many a visit to their “off topic” forum, originally dubbed “The Backyard”.  This forum was intended to be a place for people to post threads that had either absolutely nothing to do with Ubuntu, or in fact caused controversy (often on a political or social level).  Apparently, over the last few months, some posts in this forum have required moderator intervention.  In fact, a lot of threads have required moderator intervention lately.

As you can imagine, the variety of topics in this forum are often all over the place and unpredictable, and of the threads that are closed: often they are closed justifiably.  This is nothing new.  But lately, most of these threads have been closed, not because of the original topic at hand, but because of one or two assholes who don’t know how to act a little more civilized, when debating something controversial or sensitive, show up and spoil the discussion with personally degrading insults.  Rather than ban such users and let the conversations continue, the mods have thought the best thing would be closing the thread.  This has caused a lot of their time to be wasted because the same problems have been repeating more frequently, and they’ve finally gotten fed up with having to spend so much time censoring the forum.  They’ve been hearing opinions from users about the possible closing of the forum for the last few weeks and I always thought that, while the tone of the moderators threatening to close the forum has been stern, you wouldn’t have believed it… until now.

Recently, a new policy has been enacted by the moderators, which allows members to continue visiting the forum and posting in already existing threads, but prevent people from posting new threads.  The theory is that this will cause interest in the forum to dwindle down to a more controllable murmur, as well as experiment to see what the result of closing the forum might be without actually closing the forum cold turkey.

Having discovered this today (a little too late), I wrote the following in a thread that originally suggested the idea of disallowing new threads forever:

It seems I am unable to post a new thread in OMGPP.

This saddens me because:

1. Despite the abuse the forum gets and the trouble moderators have dealt with in an effort to keep things clean and inviting to new Ubuntu forum users, it stands to silence a lot of relevant, healthy debate.

2. The motto, “Anywhere but here” sounds rather the opposite of what open-source communities are supposed to be proud of: being open.

3. The moderators can close the forum if they’d like, but there will be consequences down the road. One consequence is the need to continue closing unwanted threads that land in forums outside of OMGPP at a higher frequency because new users might think it would be acceptable. The community cafe would be forced to absorb the traffic that used to come here.

Idea: Stealing from the comments management system on digg and reddit, why not make the posts on this forum vote-able, and anybody who gets a certain number of negative votes will have their post “muted” or something to that effect. You could even impose a minimum age requirement if you’re concerned about offending easily offended individuals.

Why do I suggest this?! Because I don’t think the moderators have provided the users a way to more easily self-moderate the forum themselves. You have a “report” button. Super! Does it work? Not for the moderators; they work for that button. Why can’t they create a few more buttons that work for them and the rest of us at the same time?

It will be interesting to wait and see what kind of feedback this late suggestion gets, now that some whiny moderators have got the ball rolling on closing it down.  But I have to say that it just seems rather outrageous to see other tech forum websites (like techguy.org and their “Civilized Debate” forum which are dominated with Windows users) exhibit more ability to tolerate or manage “offensive” users/posts/threads than Ubuntu forum users and moderators can tolerate.  What a bunch of thumb sucking babies.  Now, if I had said something like that in the forum that used to be called the Backyard, I’d probably get some sort of silly reprimand from a moderator because it made someone cry (if I had said something more insulting, I would expect to be fairly repremanded… but it feels like things have gotten more and more childish lately).  Of course, making someone cry isn’t my goal in posting in that forum.  My goal would be to express opinions that may very well be more justified than the opinions of someone who would prefer to self-censor what they read and think via complaining to moderators about being “offended.”

Now, I can’t say anything bad about the rest of the forum or the community as a whole.  My hats off to developers, the mods and the forum community users.  And I know that the general consensus says the forum does not get much traffic and thus, won’t be a great loss to the rest of the community.  But I get this feeling that some of what’s going on in this forum lately is being done because someone perceives the Backyard/OGMPP forum as being an embarrassment to the community, or worse, Ubuntu (the operating system) itself.  How pretentious do we have to be?  Well, enough that the forum is going to be officially closed on October the 1st.  It remains to be seen how the rest of the community will react when they find their backyard water-cooler hangout was closed down because Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson broke in wielding silly string and water pistols and nobody could come up with a decent solution to the problem.  ”Let’s just close the forum!”  What kind of a solution is that?  Oh well.  Like they say, no great loss… but it’s still a loss.

One user stepped up to create a replacement forum on his own server.  You can find it here:

http://grubbn.org/omgpp

Unforuantely, this alternative forum only has about 70 members in it so far, compared to Ubuntu forums ~67,000 active members (~671,000 registered members).  I’m not saying 67,000 made use out of the soon to be killed Backyard forum, but it was at least convenient for them in the off chance they felt like talking with other fellow Ubuntu fans about something other than Ubuntu.  I’ll never be allowed to post a new thread about my puppy dog, or ask people if they think the economy is going to collapse or poll people on how much longer they think Sarah Palin will be able to go without answering a difficult questions.  These topics are not offensive, and I really appreciated the quality of interaction I got from the Ubuntu community over any one of many random topics.  And now it’s about to be locked up and demolished with nothing to replace it, making Ubuntu Forums a dry, less emotional place to be.  I mean this with all due respect, but I sincerely feel the moderators at Ubuntu Forums has failed the community they govern.  Though their take is that the community failed them! That’s pretty rich, I have to tell you.

My girlfriend works as a manager for a major restaurant chain that has a catchy theme song about ribs. About a month ago, one of the restaurants located in a city about 50 minutes west of where we live lost three managers. I’m not very clear on the details, but I understand two walked out without giving advanced notice (why oh why, I wonder) and a third was fired for breaking a serious policy (I mean a federal law, but its been dealt with). As a result, the place is essentially in a state of needing emergency life support. They’ve called upon my girlfriend to help pick up the pieces (hopefully with the intention of letting her go someday, and not use this as an opportunity to coerce her to stay permanently). So far, she’s been scheduled to stay through till the end of July, and this was a very recent revelation on the part of her boss. I would not be surprised if “the end of July” becomes “the end of August” sometime soon.

Fortunately she is being put up in nice hotels (which I would imagine is coming out of her bosses bonus checks this year, and that sort of makes me feel a tad bit better about the whole long-distance relationship mini-drama). But there are many days I can’t stay with her, and spending time in a hotel alone can get really boring after a month or two or three (hopefully not four, but I’m a little pessimistic at this point).

Holiday Inn’s WiFi Meets Nintendo Wii

One of the things my girlfriend purchased before this stretch of work was delivered to her was a Nintendo Wii. I showed her at my house how to configure the wireless network connection settings and talked her through it over the phone when the time came. But for some reason, it just wouldn’t connect. By “connect”, I don’t mean wireless association followed by authentication (which, in this case, means nothing because the network does not use encryption). What I mean is, you’re not granted gateway access to external IP addresses until you’ve clicked on a link indicating that you agree to certain legal usage terms. Once you click the “I agree” button, you are then given full access to the Internet.

What the Nintendo Wii is trying to do is phone home (access Nintendo’s servers) immediately after it’s assigned a default gateway with the assumption that the gateway is not blocking traffic to external IP addresses. If it were to ping the gateway, it would likely get a reply. Any other site, nothing. The Wii assumes your router to be working, but the cable modem is broken, so it gives up and asks you to try a different network.

Since I’ve already agreed to a certain group of usage terms I shouldn’t be required to click “agree” again so as to personally access the Internet. But it’s the MAC address that acts as my identity, more like a name-badge, and the MAC on the Wii will be different from the MAC on the laptop. Your MAC address is a hard-coded number used to uniquely identify your wireless networking adapter. No two MAC addresses are said to be the same. So at first, it would seem there’s nothing I can do with the Wii to get it to connect to the Internet… Or is there?

What can be done about this?

There are a couple solutions. The first is to contact customer service and see if they can get their IT guy on the phone. I would then ask him if he could manually add the MAC address of the Wii to their routing tables and grant the device access. For some, this would be the simpler solution… though your mileage may vary. How long do you think it would take? Because I really don’t feel like placing bets on them being immediately available. I’m just telling you right now that the IT people at this particular hotel are not very advanced. The reason I say this is because the channels they picked for their 3 routers are all within the same frequency range (channels 1, 2 and 3) instead of spread out (channels 1, 6 and 12). In other words: They’re not very professional. Bandwidth is being lost because the routers are overlapping each others frequencies, and this is basic wireless network design technique we’re talking about here.

The other solution is to trick their wireless networks into thinking my laptop is the Wii and click “I agree” a second time, and then disconnect. I would do this by changing the MAC address of my wireless adapter. This is what is known as “MAC address spoofing”, the act of using a networking device to appear to be another (not to be confused with a “spoofing attack”, because we’re not going to attack anybody). Not all networking devices can do this. I happen to be using one that contains an Atheros chipset (it’s a D-Link WNA-2330 to be exact), which can be made to do anything I want it to do in the world of Linux. (Another blog I’m going to write in the future about Wireless Adapter hacking is turning my laptop into a Wireless router, and then share my cellphone’s Internet access wirelessly).

The Trick

I intend to use a copy of Backtrack 3 beta to carry out this little experiment. But it’s late, I’m away from home and have to download a fresh ISO and burn it to a disc first before I can try this out. By the way, spoofing a MAC address can be done in Windows, but I’m not going to write about Windows software that does this in here (because I’m lazy. But if you’re really curious, google can help).

In Backtrack (or even Ubuntu if I install the MadWifi drivers, which is not as easy as burning a Backtrack Live CD) the commands to change the MAC are as follows (reference link):

• wlanconfig ath0 destroy

You can use any mac address you like. In this example: 00:11:22:33:44:55

• macchanger -m 00:11:22:33:44:55 wifi0
  
• wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode managed
• ifconfig wifi0 up

After this, I can just use a plain old connection manager to connect to the network.  I could also use this command to do it manually:

• iwconfig ath0 essid [NetworkName] key [WepKeyHere]

Pretty simple. Note though that if your card uses a chipset other than Atheros, you might not be able to do this with your card, and the first command “wlanconfig ath0 destroy” might be slightly different (like “eth1″ for instance), depending on the device name Linux assigns your wireless adapter.

Isn’t this a little extreme?

If by “extreme” you mean “illegal”, the answer is no. Spoofing doesn’t become illegal until you use it in to acquire private information you’re not supposed to have access to (which requires a lot more work anyway). The Nintendo Wii is flawed in that it doesn’t included a web browser with it by default, and even if it were installed, it wouldn’t believe it was actually able to connect to the Internet. Perhaps I’ll send Nintendo a little suggestion so they’ll release a patch in their next update sweep. Though it surprises me that they’ve not encountered this problem, considering they sell Nintendo Wii carrying cases for smug Wii-owners to take their Wii’s to their non-Wii-owning friends’ house so they can show it off over and over… though this probably doesn’t take place in nice Hotels with moderate network security in place. And Nintendo would probably ignore me because they charge people to buy their web browser (you have to be able to download it from their servers anyway), which is required to agree to view Holiday Inn’s agreement page.

So I suppose the next best place to put the blame is on Holiday Inn….and we know that IT guy isn’t in the mood to revamp company policy (and I can’t really think of an easy solution, other than unblocking the MAC). You see, it becomes this dilemma of, “Just how out of my way should I have to go?” If I had a backtrack CD with me right now, I’d hopefully be able to solve this problem in 5 minutes. To me, that’s the opposite of extreme. I’d call it practical (for me). For most people, they’re either stuck with a design flaw in their game console, or hotel Internet policies that were not designed to accommodate these kinds of dumb devices.  Quite a double-bind we have here.

Well, I’ve got some sleep to get… At least they have nice pillows here and the bathroom sink is to die for!

This note just hit Digg’s front page a short moment ago. I thought I’d share it with you all.

It’s about 2:30 on Tuesday morning. The Kansas Jayhawks just won the NCAA championship. It appears they’ve brought on some thunder…

So I’ve unplugged almost everything you could possibly call a computer at my place, and am now hunkered in my girlfriend’s bedroom at her apartment, running on lithium ion and T-Mobile cellular Internet access… I’m still adapting to this place. And I’m about to run out of power. I could go off on a rant… but it’d be pointless.

To pass the time by, I’ll probably crack the blinds open a bit so I can watch the lightning. It can be pretty impressive. And if that doesn’t keep me up, my girlfriends roommates’ noisy friends probably will.

Creative Labs is causing a stir among open-source developers and Windows Vista users alike. Apparently there have been a lot of driver issues happening exclusively within Windows Vista with many Sound Blaster cards made by Creative Labs. In response to this, many Vista users have resorted to a user modified (hacked) version of Creative Labs’ set of Vista drivers, which enable and fix many flaws with the company sanctioned drivers.

The sound card manufacturers response to this act has caused an uproar, as it appears they do not want users to modify the drivers in such a way as to make them…what’s the word?….FUNCTIONAL!?

Responses from users have varied…

Here’s a great link if you would like to read more about all this in great detail.

For some f—ed up reason, Wordpress would give me a 403 error every time I tried to post something about access control lists. That last failed attempt at a post for this CCNA series was caused by the same problem: IOS command syntax in the writing. Really, I think that’s the problem. I can’t prove it for certain, but I can point to another Wordpress bug that would do the same thing to people who wrote posts that included a couple of very common Linux commands.

So, yesterday after losing over half of what I wrote AGAIN, I copied and pasted my text to a word file first before producing that damn 403 error again. I reinstalled my whole blog twice, and the same error was being produced by that specific text. I didn’t have a problem posting other test blogs, or that other super long one I put up yesterday.

Anyway, enough ranting. Without further a due, here’s a link to the word file I wrote my notes into. Topics touched on are Advanced ACL’s and the Cisco Discovery Protocol.

Now….back to the mystery that is my day of trying to remember where I put that f—ing thumb drive!! Don’t you just hate it when you lose tiny stuff like that?

If you like the above video, you may wish to read an older blog post of mine: “What if George Orwell had written about Net Neutrality?“

“Mainstream Media” is a term used to describe any major news publication (TV/Newspaper/Magazine, etc.) which is well known and arguably influential. Examples include CNN, the New York times, Time Magazine and many more. Each of these publications take pride in the work and material that they produce and do what they can to avoid tarnishing their own reputation and their public image. Each also have distinguishable differences in style, professionalism and journalistic integrity. But nearly all of these types of media suffer from a few common (perhaps fatal) flaws. Flaws such as: lack of objectivity (”embedded journalism”), sensationalism (lets talk about Britney Spears for a half hour, then talk about spring break in Cancun for a half hour after that), concision (that’s all the time we have folks/”cut his mic”), censorship (war is ugly, lets avoid showing it), and occasionally misrepresentation of public opinion/concerns (the questions selected by CNN for their recent Youtube debate. Really, do you wanna talk about immigration for over a half hour?).

Such flaws exist for a variety of reasons. The most prominent reason involves advertisers or special interest groups who pay the owners of news publications to run ads. For example, if a news paper has an account with Nike, but decides to run a story which reflects negatively on Nike’s use of child labor in the Dominican Republic, the news paper faces the possibility of Nike retracting that advertising account and taking their money somewhere else. In addition, such news publication companies also have their own obligation to keep a tight lid on negative criticism against the internal business activities of their owners. NBC is owned by General Electric, which has been known in the past to be not so environmentally friendly. Naturally, you probably didn’t see NBC saying much about GE being obligated to clean PCB contamination on a 40 mile stretch of the Hudson River a few years ago. A more recent example might be CNN’s negative criticism of Michael Moore’s movie Sicko, while CNN was/is simultaneously receiving large amounts of advertising dollars from pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly or Pfizer. These are just a few examples. (On the Internet: A recent controversy over the firing of an editor who worked for Gamespot.com resulted in a widespread boycott of the website by many of it’s regular visitors after it was suspected that he was fired for giving a poor review to a game which Gamespot was paid well by Eidos to advertise on its website).

Another flaw which I personally detest about television news in particular is its linearity; the progression from one story to another with a selection of stories that you didn’t actually select. You are forced to sit down and watch whatever the media tells you is important that day. There is little if any interactivity or feedback available from other viewers that you can read in real-time, and again, time constraints severely limit the depth of coverage on any given topic in the first place.

With such conflicts between commercial interests and public interests, it can be debated that the mainstream media we’ve been raised to admire and respect might not be representing the public it purports to be serving as best as it could. Granted, no form of media is flawless and it is ultimately the responsibility of the viewer to triangulate multiple news sources and judge reality for themselves. But it’s difficult to do when the traditional news sources skew their coverage of reality because they are more interested in taking money from advertisers instead of volunteer to fulfill any sort of moral obligations on behalf of the viewers.

The good news is that there is change on the horizon, and it greatly involves the Internet. I’d like to focus on one particular website for a moment which I’ve been a fan of for a little over a year. That website is Digg.com.

Digg is a community-driven social bookmarking website. The way it works is simple:

1. Digg users submit links to web pages containing something interesting (such as a news story, youtube video or a picture).
2. Other Digg users are able to view the link, and if they like it, can “Digg it” (essentially, vote for it).
3. If the diversity of users who digg a story is wide, it will hit the front page sooner. And if the number of those digs take off after hitting the front page, it’ll end up in the top-ten list for a short period of time.

If a user submits a link to something inaccurate or obscene, other users can vote to bury the submitted story.

I am not bringing Digg up to promote it exclusively. There are other websites out there that function in very similar fashion, such as Reddit.com. The point of all this is that the popularity of Digg and other such sites has been increasing and similar clone websites have been creeping up to cater to different audiences. Why are such websites gaining in popularity? Well, primarily because of the ability for the public (the users) to rank the importance, legitimacy or popularity of any given item submitted, and feel more participatory in the process of bringing important things to the attention of others. This is much different than sitting down to watch the 6 o’clock news to listen to 10 or 15 stories you have no say in selecting, nor have any idea how much other viewers/readers actually care about any given subject.

With social bookmarking websites, the source of the news stories is more open. You could call it open-source news, much in the same way that Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia, or Linux being an open source operating system. Another term used to describe this kind of productivity model is “crowdsourcing.”

The next ingredient you can add into this is the blogosphere. Granted, a majority of blogs out there are opinion oriented, but quality of these opinions can be taken into account before a person diggs or votes in favor of a blog. Another factor you can take in is Youtube, or more specifically, freelance video news coverage of public events not closely covered or even looked at by the mainstream media. A few people actually do this professionally, but more often than not, cell phones are being used to document events in public places. The quality of these types of small video cameras is getting better, and having a video of something controversial instead of just writing about it can make all the difference. I think one thing we’re going to see during the presidential elections in 2008 are the use of cell phones to root out flaws in electronic voting systems or people potentially cheating, and stuff like that.

In the future, the mainstream media will still have a role to play. But as the popularity of such community driven methods of news reporting evolve and become more popular, mainstream media will find itself in fierce competition and under constant surveillance by the public (as is the current trend on Digg right now).