Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Above is a photo of part of the motherboard of a laptop a client of mine brought to me a few days ago, an ASUS X54C laptop.  It’s not to be confused with a small netbook or anything made by Acer.  In fact this laptop comes standard with a 15.6 inch display, USB 3x ports, Blu-Ray player, and either an Intel Core 2 Duo or an i3 processor.  So in other-words this isn’t supposed to be some light weight, disposable toy judging by the hardware specs.

Now to the problem at hand, the first of its kind that I’ve encountered in the wild.  Now, I’m certainly not THE first person to encounter this in the wild but I’m nowhere near the last.  The 4 black chips you see in the photo above are 4 Gigabytes worth of RAM that were built into the motherboard itself and cannot be removed.  Tragically, the RAM in this particular laptop was defective and unfortunately can’t be simply replaced.  It’s like a car with the spark plugs welded into the engine block on a car.  They go bad, you can’t just buy new spark plugs; you’ve got to buy a whole new f***ing  engine!

Traditionally laptops are built with expansion slots for RAM to be seated in and will come with one or both slots occupied by sticks of RAM that look like this:

Often these sticks are very easy to access and replace with upgrades by removing a hatch door on the bottom of the laptop.  RAM itself is relatively inexpensive so had the RAM on this laptop not been built into the motherboard it would have been a simple matter of replacing the bad RAM with good RAM and about 5 minutes of actual labor performing the replacement; a relatively cheap repair that would have been worth the time and money.

What ASUS has done here is effectively designed a laptop that was not only built with defective RAM but you could also argue that they built a defective motherboard, too.  After all, the only way to replace the faulty RAM is to replace the motherboard and if the laptop is no longer covered by a warranty it would border on being cheaper to just go buy a whole new laptop, especially when you discover just how difficult it is to find parts for ASUS products anywhere online, including from ASUS themselves.  They don’t sell parts for their products online AT ALL.

Now in a attempt to defend ASUS, they probably did this to save money; those greedy bastards.  By building a laptop that didn’t require an assembly line worker to stand in front of a conveyor slotting memory sticks in all day, they’ve saved themselves perhaps 25 cents per laptop, and that can add up if you’re moving 100,000 units.  However, I would have to say that while saving a few cents on thousands of units might look good on paper it doesn’t necessarily make it a smart idea.  I don’t have a problem with hardware being integrated together in a smaller form factor, like an iPad or a smart phone but c’mon ASUS, this is a 15″ laptop.  You have the space to spare and, trust me, the owner would have been more than willing to spend a tiny amount more in the price tag to pay for you to have made this thing like a proper laptop.

Other brands such as Dell and HP have been known to do this with some of their products, but typically only smaller devices such as a 10″ inch netbook which are priced to be disposable, unlike Apples’ next  ~$2,200 Macbook Air which has been dubbed by iFixit.com as “the least repairable laptop [ever]“ for having not just non-removable RAM but also batteries that are glued to the inside of the case, proprietary hard drives that can’t be upgraded, a display panel that is inside a completely fused assembly so if you crack the screen you’ll have to replace the bezel and display.  Also,  if you ever were to find a reason to open one up you’ll need a proprietary screwdriver to do it.  I still can’t believe people are willing to pay more money to get a computer that will be more vulnerable to obsolescence than any other laptop out there, including this damned ASUS I started on about above.

The moral of the story is that you should avoid buying a laptop made by anybody that was built with on-board, non-removable RAM on the motherboard because that just multiplies the points of failure and the amount of money and energy you might have to spend down the road to fix it if something goes wrong.

I’ve been hearing more and more stories from clients I have worked for and from other techs who do what I do for a living.  People are getting phone calls from a call center filled with employees that only have East Indian accents (for now) claiming to work for Microsoft/your ISP/some company you’ve never heard of/etc. telling you that your computer is infected with a virus and that they would like to help you remove it… for $130 or so, or whatever they charge your card if you actually give it up to them.

However, it is often a scam that is based upon social engineering.  Social Engineering is a term used to describe the act of manipulating a person into believing you’re not a con-artist, or something like that.  Someone calls you out of the blue telling you that your computer is infected, that they’ve been receiving “signals” or whatever  from your computer that indicate you are infected with a virus.  They tell you they work for someone like Microsoft and their tone of voice is rather urgent and often outright rude.  They’ll tell you to do things to your computer that you likely never do on a regular basis, like press the Windows button + R (which brings up the run menu) and type some command into your computer, all of this in the hopes of convincing you that they are who they claim to be.  I’ve never called a psychic on the phone before… but if they were to call me out of the blue and use their “cold reading” skills to try to trick me into thinking I had a virus on my computer, talked me into putting a virus on my computer and/or simply insist that give them my credit card number to see me through some false peril… well that’s what you’ve got here.

If you get a phone call from anybody claiming to be from “tech support” or Microsoft or any handful of other places/companies, be on your guard.  It’s right along the lines of getting an email “from your bank” asking you to reply with your social security number, account number and passcodes to confirm your identity or something fishy like that.  Better yet, if you are already certain your computer is just fine and have a little experience with the computer, flat out waste their time for your own entertainment (if you have the time to spare).  You don’t even have to be at your computer.  Tell them to “hang on” and put the phone down for a few minutes; make some coffee or a sandwich.  When they’re talking interrupt and say you didn’t understand them, then put the phone down again.  Maybe you have a Macintosh or run Linux; would’t that be ironic.  Use your imagination, or just hang up.  In any case, be aware that there are scam artists out there calling random number trying to find someone who will fall for their manipulations.

Okay, probably not the first in my life time, but since I can’t remember any other in my past I’m gonna just say this is the first.  Probably last too.

I was just browsing Ubuntu Forums recently and someone wanted to get a second opinion to see if it were indeed true that Linux doesn’t need anti-virus software.  I humbly obliged them with my own answer on the matter:

You don’t need anti-virus for Linux. Others in here will do a better job at explaining why this is, but in short, the OS has a big advantage here due to it being open source. The operating system is a product of crowd-sourcing, much in the same way as Wikipedia has been since it first showed up several years ago. And much like the highly-moderated articles of Wikipedia that require membership and an approval process for changes made to locked articles, so to is a strict moderation that goes on with the source code for Linux before it’s allowed to become part of the official distribution. Everybody is out to identify possible flaws or weaknesses or bugs in the source code and it’s much easier for any single person to make a contribution because the OS and much of the software that runs on it is open-source.

In Windows, the users don’t have the luxury of being able to dig through the source code to look for flaws. All they can do is report symptoms of problems to Microsoft, and the limited number of paid programmers that do have access to the source code then have to decide what flaws are the most important and which ones don’t merit their attention. So with Windows, a bug that affects only 500 people won’t be as important as a bug that affects 500,000 and probably won’t be fixed at all. But if it were Linux and if just one or two of those 500 people were a programmer who had access to the source code and figured out how to fix the problem on their own, the other 498 would actually stand to benefit from a patch that ends up being released thanks to the work of that one developer who had some spare time on his hands and decided to do something about a bug simply because he could.

So throughout the long life of Linux there has been this much more diversified, seasoned, multi-cultured source for development feedback that has helped to make it a much stronger, more “mature” operating system, especially in terms of the way security was designed. If there was ever a person out there who found a way to circumvent that security, there is at least one other who knows exactly how to repair the flaw. The reason viruses are able to best Windows is because their developers can only patch so many holes, and the ones they don’t have time to get around to end up being exploited the most. Third-party software developers that make Anti-Virus software make a killing because Microsoft is unable to handle this responsibility all by themselves, and even still, the best anti-virus software isn’t perfect.

The reason anti-virus software isn’t necessary in Linux is simply because the OS and its updates that patch vulnerabilities do the exact job anti-virus software in Windows is meant for: Prevent unwanted, malicious software or network activity from compromising the system. If there were a flaw in Linux found that allowed something like that, it wouldn’t be the job of some third-party software to safeguard the user against but the job of the OS itself. The reason anti-virus software even exists is simply because Microsoft is unable to handle the immense work load of patching their own source code as well as a crowd of Linux geeks can.

Am I saying Linux is perfect and invincible to viruses? Might it become more susceptible to viruses in the future if it were to ever become as popular as Windows is today? I would think that with an increase in the number of users would also come a complimentary increase in the number of clever developers that would only help to increase the number of eyes available to find flaws and fix them. Saying that Linux would get a lot of viruses down the road because more people are going to use it is like saying Wikipedia will become rife with widespread, uncontrollable vandalism because more people visit it. It hasn’t happened yet, and very likely never will happen because of the way it is designed, moderated and improved upon by the hive mind.

EDIT to add: As mentioned in the first comments below, I failed to acknowledge that while Linux is more robust in the area of security, nothing can compensate for the weakest link in this arrangement:  The User.  A novice user could easily be enticed by a sinister website  that tells them to download a deb file which might contain malicious code and absentmindedly install it or execute a destructive command from the terminal window because they didn’t know any better (like rm -rf ~/*).  Fortunately for novice users there is little if any need to actually venture out into uncharted territory like a terminal window or strange websites to get software, thanks to the official repositories that contain a HUGE collection of software which continues to grow.  I’ve even heard you will soon be able to purchase proprietary Linux-based software through it.  Unfortunately, little can really be done to compensate for user negligence, and trying to compensate for all possibilities would likely result in too many annoying alerts and prompts for the average user (like when Windows Vista sprang the UAC on its users).

There are only a couple of circumstances that I believe anti-virus software on a Linux platform would might be worth having which involve helping to protect other Windows systems.  Say you got an email from someone that contained a virus but you never knew it was there and forwarded it onto someone else who uses Windows, resulting in their day being ruined and you being blamed.  So that’s one scenario.  You might also have a Linux server administrating a network of Windows based workstations which you have read/write access to and use the server to conduct scans of these machines over the network, but at the expense of finite network bandwidth and CPU cycles on the server.

Every now and then I post questions on www.techguy.org when I’m having difficultly with something computer/networking related.  It was a good place to get your feet wet when aspiring to become a grade A guru and occasionally pull your hair out if you wanted to get into a civil debate with someone about politics.

Recently, I posted the following in their Networking forum:

I have a new Linksys/Cisco router WRT54G2 v.1 with the latest firmware installed. I currently use port forwarding for things like VNC and SSH into my home PC. However, every time I try to set a new rule (for both TCP and UDP) up for bittorrent, the bittorrent clients I try say the port is closed. I’m using an Ubuntu Linux system, and both Transmission and Deluge will say the ports I select are closed, even if I change the port numbers and do another test. So I’m just wondering if anyone has encountered anything like this before and might have an idea of what could be causing this problem.

The thread was alive for a matter of seconds before a moderator locked the thread and replied with the following:

Please read the rules. We will not help with P2P apps.

I was surprised to see this happen, and that’s probably because I use www.ubuntuforums.org more often than any other forum for technical assistance.  Linux people like me approach the controversial topic of bittorrent a little differently…  I decided to send the moderator a private message to let him know what I thought about his decision:

Sorry for violating the rules. However, I would argue that I did not ask a question pertaining to P2P applications at all but a question strictly about networking problems with a Linksys router. I should also remind you that bittorrent is a common protocol used for the transfer of free, non-copyrighted information spanning from GPL licensed open-source software to free music or movies released under the creative-commons license, which is becoming more popular. There is nothing inherently illegal about using bittorrent (the protocol), but it would seem the moderators of techguy.org hold a contrary consensus that I feel they should consider revising in recognition of the legitimate and legal uses of bittorrent.

The above comment and any replies received in any form will be posted publicly on my blog. Thank you for your time.

I got a reply fairly fast.  Here’s what it said:

We cannot and will not assist in the illegal downloading of software through P2P applications, and that includes any impediments offered by networking components to such downloading. Any legal uses of such software are few and will unfortunately need to be included in this prohibition.

The policy has been in place for quite some time now and will not be changed.

Thank you for your concern,
Elvandil

I like his use of the word “prohibition”; like bittorrent is some sort of drug paraphernalia.  I also noticed Mr. Elvandil happens to be Microsoft MVP and a die-hard Windows user who is probably adverse to anything of value that isn’t proprietary.  This is just my own opinion as he is ignoring the fact that millions of people use Linux and a large portion of us download and share our Linux ISO files (for burning to CD) via bittorrent, among many other things 100% legal to share.  It is a world he is unfamiliar with or in denial about.

Fortunately in the world of Linux it’s recognized that bittorrent itself is not illegal at all and I was glad to see a helpful reply in ubuntuforums.org within minutes; a reply that made me realize that sometimes I can be a completely narrow-minded person, too.  ”Did you check your host-firewall?”  Why… NO!    So I opened my firewall manager Firestarter and sure enough saw blocked events taking place on the port I told my bittorrent client and router to use.  All I had to do with allow inbound traffic to take place on that port.  Talk about overlooking the obvious!

For about 4 years I’ve had a lot of faith placed in Netgear routers and networking equipment in general and had great luck with an old Wireless G router for years.  Until a couple weeks ago, when I began to notice that my downloads were actually being subjected to a tiny bit of packet corruption/swapping.  MD5 file integrity checks were repeatedly failing and I couldn’t get downloaded software to install, even if I used an Ethernet cable instead of a wireless connection.  Only a direct connect from laptop to the modem always did the trick, and so narrowed things down to the router.  Keep in mind that I troubleshot this problem for at least 5 hours across two days of experimenting using a PC and a Laptop, doing everything from full factory resets time after time, dismantling the router to blow it out with compressed air, to testing without wireless encryption enabled.  The sad fact became clear that if any data passed through the router at all there was a good chance it would be screwed up by the time it got to the computers.  And so began my quest for a replacement.

The dead router this little journey into hell all started off with was a Netgear WGT624 v3 with the latest firmware installed.  I’d owned this router for several years with nary a hiccup or serious problem the occasional power cycle couldn’t fix.  But as mentioned above, things started to get flaky and I had tried everything I and other forum crawling network experts could think of.  So I decided to head to my nearby Wal-Mart just a couple blocks away and pick up a new one; a Netgear WGR614 v9 router (and I installed the latest firmware after it arrived).  To my shock and disgust it had the exact same problem as the WGT624: data corruption.

So I exchanged it for a third router (a Netgear WPN824 v3) spending about 25 dollars extra after exchanging in the WGR614.  This new router solved the problem I was having with corrupted packets and I was relieved.  But then a new fucking problem cropped up!  For some reason the router would require a power cycle at least two or three times a day.  This was often because for some odd reason it would just randomly stop passing HTTP traffic between me and the Internet.  I could ping the modem (gateway) IP, as well as the ISP’s DNS server addresses, but I couldn’t ping Google nor visit any website except the routers internal configuration utility page (e.g., 192.168.1.1).  Even more bizarre was that one time this occurred after I had already accessed my computer by remote while I was away from home, using VNC on port 5900.  Let me say that again:  I had accessed my home PC over the Internet, and the router told me there was no active Internet connection when it went to check for firmware updates automatically after I logged into it to see if I could find the problem.

I put up with this router for a few days, hoping that after a while things would smooth out and I wouldn’t have to do power cycles so often.  They didn’t get better.  In fact, they got even worse.  I was already having to power cycle the router on a regular basis until one day PORT FORWARDING STOPPED WORKING!!  I couldn’t access my remote desktop over the Internet anymore and more importantly, I couldn’t accept incoming connection requests from Virtual Dave users.

Unfortunately I made the mistake early on (because the packet corruption problem had been resolved by the WPN824) that I was going to be happy with this router, and I threw the receipt away, so I couldn’t exchange it for a different router.  The only option I had left was to take this router back to Wal-Mart and exchange it for another one exactly like it.

Not only did this replacement WPN824 mimic all the problems the previous WPN824 had, but the packaging had evidence of actually being a refurbished product, sold off the shelf by Wal-Mart as a new item at full price!

I’m sure it’s one of the ways Netgear cuts corners for the sake of competing with other “rolled-back prices” in Wal-Mart; I hope they don’t pull this shit with other vendors.  I can’t assert that Wal-Mart is knowingly selling refurbished products at the same cost as a new item, but from the look of the professional shrink wrap job, they may not actually be aware of what’s going on.

Now you might say to me, “just because you have two seals doesn’t mean that you have refurbished rather than new. It may simply mean that at one point someone had to open the package for a customer, and the customer ended up not wanting it, or it was returned.”

Okay, I see your point, but it doesn’t change the fact that the router still didn’t work, nor did another one exactly like it I had purchased just a couple days earlier. Something odd I noticed between the two is the first of those two needed a firmware upgrade, but the second one didn’t. Just an observation.

There was one other suspicious piece of “evidence” I didn’t photograph and that was the “install the netgear software on your PC before you setup your router” sticker that covers the downlink ports on the back. It had obviously been re-applied before.

Also, the shrink wrap on the box wasn’t something you’d see from the standard cheap heat gun seal you’d find in most stores that will re-stock items with explicit “open-item” sticker with a reduced price on it; this LOOKED brand new from the outside, like it was sealed at the factory. So I guess the theory is, someone bought it from another Wal-Mart, found it didn’t work, returned it, Wal-Mart sent it to Netgear because they were told it was defective, Netgear put a new sticker on the bag around the router, and re-wrapped the packaging in house with little or no testing done on the hardware. I highly doubt Wal-Mart has spare Netgear stickers laying around to help disguise an open router bag.  And good lord, what does this say about the state of our economy!  I mean, if I were Netgear and I were serious about deception, I would still at least use a NEW replacement bag with a NEW tamper-sticker, instead of reusing an old one with a broken label stuck to it to save a few cents.

So to recap the sequence of routers I’ve been through:

Original Netgear WGT624 v3 (loved for years, dying of old age I thought), followed by a WGR614 v9 (which had the same problems as the previous router), followed by TWO WPN824 v3 routers. 4 Netgear routers, one old, two “new” and one that was obviously opened/returned/refurbished being sold as a new item.  They all failed me in the end.

I’ve said to hell with Netgear and Wal-Mart, caving in and going to pick up a Linksys/Cisco from Best Buy, but I’m not going to give it a thumbs up or down until I’ve had some time to test it out.  From what I hear, Linksys/Cisco’s are back up to snuff and have a better reputation than they did when I stopped using their products years ago.  We’ll see.

EDIT:  My idea has been marked as a duplicate of another that was posted back in March of 2008.  So visit this link to go vote for its posted solution.

Every now and then I drop by the Ubuntu Brainstorm website to post an idea that I think would help improve the user experience of Ubuntu Linux. Sometimes these ideas are geared more towards a specific application rather than the operating system and in this case the suggestion I made recently has to do with Firefox.

One of the things that’s bothered me about using Firefox in Linux is the fact that when you click on a link for a file, an Open With dialog box appears, but if you want to open the file with something other than the default application shown, you are forced to browse the Linux root file system. This strikes me as an unfriendly way to have the user select an alternate application. If anything it wreaks of Linux elitism, the kind that acts like nothing is wrong with the way things are currently being done. If this were Windows or Mac OS and you wanted to find a different application to open a file, you wouldn’t expect to have to wade through sub-directories of a file structure most sane users wouldn’t want to be familiar with.

Let me show you what I’m talking about.  This is what appears when you hit Browse (for applications) button in Firefox on a Windows PC:

You’re presented with a simple list of applications to scroll through and pick the one you want.  It works the same way with Internet Explorer, and I would suspect all browsers do this in Mac OS X as well.

Now, here’s what you get in Linux when you click on the “Other…” button (which is equivalent to Browse in this context):

Do I even have to ask you which of the two above examples looks more user-friendly?

Anyway, if you’re a member of Ubuntu Brainstorm, I encourage you to vote for my idea by clicking here. And if you’re not a member, sign up! It’s free and only takes a minute and you could post an idea that will forever change Ubuntu Linux for the better.

Now, I’m not the first person to submit a suggestion about this quirk. In fact someone submitted a bug report about 4 years ago suggesting the exact same thing.  You might ask yourself, “If they submitted a bug report that long ago, why hasn’t it been fixed by now?”  Because in the eyes of developers (who are obviously a strange, bizarre species of emotionally sensitive anti-social hermits), this isn’t a bug.  It’s a “feature request”, and is considered something of a lower priority as a result.

It’s damn frustrating, I know.  Just look at the responses I got when I tried to point out that Amarok was installing missing a certain mp3 decoder package in GNOME systems, and was told that in order to get it to work correctly out of the box, a “feature request” would have to be submitted and approved before the app would install with all the necessary packages.  So for things like this it seems the only thing that gets developers off their pias/lazy asses are statistics (votes, in this case) showing them that people (normal earth-dwelling humans) actually want a feature to be added to an app.  I would suspect they need this kind of persuading because they have a very difficult time understanding what non-technical people expect from their computers.  But seriously, what idiot out there thought it was smarter to force users to browse the root file system instead of present a simple list of installed applications to pick from?  So please go vote this idea up, because it seems that sometimes a “feature” is actually something that should have been there in the first place, but wasn’t implimented for very stupid reasons.

As much as it would probably sooth the stiffness in my neck and shoulders from doing busy work inventorying computer equipment today, I’m going to try to not turn this into a sarcastic sounding slam against Microsoft… although they damn well deserve it.

I’ll just keep this very short.  Internet Explorer has once again dropped the ball in the realm of Internet security and it’s something that’s been present for over 48 hours already.  You can read about the problem via BBC’s website by clicking here.

The article states in bold letters at the top, “Security experts recommend switching to a rival browser until the problem is fixed.”  Need a rival web browser?  Download Firefox at www.firefox.com.  It’s free, faster and much more secure than Internet Explorer ever will be.  Seriously.  Why is it more secure, you ask?  Because it’s open-source, just like Linux.  But again… don’t wanna turn this into a “Microsoft sucks” bashing post.

Also, on the side, I should mention that I’ve see a LOT of Windows systems get hit with viruses in the last 3 weeks, a good chunk of which have come in from emails on Facebook.  Which isn’t to say that Facebook is bad.  It just doesn’t have much of an effective spam filter or virus scanner built into it.  You would think that after a few people have recieved the same spam from their friend whose computer was compromised, they’d start filtering messages with the same links, the same stupid subject line, and all the rest that comes along with basic social engineering-based viruses.  It’s what Yahoo and Google do.  So to you Facebook/Myspace users out there (and everyone else who doesn’t uses these services), be VERY cautious about clicking on links to websites you’ve never visited to before in email sent to you by a friend.  They may not have actually sent you something.  In fact, it’s possible their account password was phished, changed, and their account used as a lauch pad for spreading the same infection to other people (like you).  So be careful.

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 11). 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!