Luckily those clever chaps at Ubuntu (and most likely a whole load of other Linux derivatives), have done some magic and got it working. The original problem was a driver issue, the touch’s  file system couldn’t be identified under Linux and while the ‘public’ areas could be seen once the device was plugged in (and for that read – Photos), nothing else was visible.

The latest upgrade works great however. I can now access the entire ipod filesystem as an external hard drive and Rythmnbox boots up nicely as soon as I plug the ipod in and starts playing Kylie like she’s never sung before. Even proprietry formats like MP4 seem to work.

Strangely this change in circumstances hasn’t been advertised widely, I don’t know if there’s some political things going on but anyway, upgrade to the latest version on your Linux box and your ipod touch and iphone should now work fine. It can even synch the music onto your linux box (although with my linux netbook only having 16G I’ve avoided doing this).

For those of you not in the know, the awfully geeky title refers to a reconnaisance attack on the nato website. nmap is a tool used by security people to determine what vulnerabilities might exist on a networked device.

Now, read this.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article7144856.ece

Ok, so if it’s passed you by, what the proposal states is that people who carry out cyber attacks on NATO countries, could find themsleves to military action. Obviously we can substitute ‘China’ for people and ‘America’ for NATO countries.

So this is pretty much telling us that America intend to carry out military action against China in the very near future, all they’re doing now is getting the legislation in place prior to engaging.

I could of course be insanely paranoid about America’s stance here and I know better than most that the role that China are taking in today’s cyber crime is a severe and definate risk to a number of Western countries but I’d be loathe to suggest  actually bombing shit out of them to make them stop as an actual solution.  I presume they’ll target computer installations/data centres/ISP’s and transmission paths.

There is of course an alternative. The internet has grown into a very powerful tool, in doing so it has become a very open and entirely untrusted network through which these attacks can take place. It’s used by a great many corporations as a cheap network layer to stop them having to buy dedicated links and it’s this reliance on a public and unpoliced  network that has placed so many public, private and military organisations in danger.

It’s about time that these organisations accept that the internet is not a safe place, stop spending a fortune trying to stay one step ahead of bad guys and isolate their real inportant information from the day to day stuff. Yes, it’s going to cost more money, yes it’s going to be a right ball ache and yes it’s going to have a lot of sticking points but I’m confident it constitutes a better foreign policy than shooting anyone who tries to break in. Maybe if the Americans didn’t live in a culture where 28,000 people are killed a year by guns they might consider the alternatives with a more open mind.

The digital economy bill has now reached it’s first draft. The proposal now states that all ISP’s with greater than 400,000 subscribers must maintain lists of percieved copyright breachers operating on a 3 strikes in a year and on you’re on the list stylee. Subscribers who have been deemed to breach copyrights on Music and Audio only seem to be the targets at the moment, possibly because taking software copyright breachers to court is a less well established process. It may well be that the music and video markets are more likely to be ‘victims’ of copyright breach but with the vast quantities of money being pushed around in all these businesses it’s hard to tell.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/copyright-infringement/summary/

The code is scheduled to be implemented early 2011 although as yet, no details of how copyright breachers will be identified have been released. I suspect this will be a sticking point, not leastly because the investment by ISP’s to carry out the checking will be vast. This is advanced traffic sniffing being carried out on severely massive bandwidths, good luck!

What’s that? You’re inspecting my traffic? That’s illegal isn’t it? It’s a vague point but I expect someone may try and push it through a European court deliberately to test the water. I hope so.

Anyway, if you want to carry on file sharing in 2011, choose a small ISP, for the time being at least.

Yes, thanks, I do have a modicum if experience in this area ta.

Actually I’ve used this sort of technology a bit in the past, I’ve watched lab setups in use where access points all controlled by the same management tools which are designed to triangulate connected and transmitting devices. Now this is in a lab, and it’s carefully controlled, and all the access points are managed by the same people and it *still* only manages to get within a couple of metres. So how do apple get some damn close when none of the access points in question are managed by them?

In their ’skyhook’ explanations they very quickly brush this under the carpet, ‘Oh, we get people to drive round collecting AP information’. Bollocks! Your guys have driven down our street? Bollocks. Google have just completed a three year program of driving around (most) of the streets in Britain and they’ve only just got enough information to carry out these sorts of triangulations.. In fact they’re currently being told off for collecting too much information.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/21/google_halts_wifi_payload_data_deletion/

So Apple clearly haven’t gone down that path, even if they had driven round collecting AP name and MAC addresses, I’ve just changed my wireless router and I checked as soon as I turned it on, yep, they know exactly where it is. And it’s clearly not tied to internal or external IP address since the former will just be in the standard RFC 1918 range and the latter will be knowledge only availale to my ISP, all an IP whois will reveal is my ISP, not my home address.

So how are they doing it? Actually I wouldn’t put it past Google to be selling them information, that would make sense, although Google have not had this information for all that long.

Another thought I had would be that touch’s actually do have GPS technology inside but that would be silly and I’m sure someone would have worked it out by now by opening one up and looking for the appropriate chip.

There is another option. itunes has my home address. It’s got the home address of the chap across the road too because I know he has an ipod touch. My touch knows the name of my AP and it’s MAC address and it knows the physical location of my house (through simple postcode checks and quite possibly, Google information).

*Now* we have enough information to work out where my touch is to a couple of metres.

I’ll bring them down.

It uses the hooks that are embedded in the windows kernel used by all windows anti virus programs (as far as they are aware), to trick the machine into executing malicious code by first presenting the system with some legitimate code and then once that has been security assured by the machine, swaps it for for some nasties.

Register article is here

The actual research paper is here

Now watch the panic as windows security product vendors desperately try to release a fix before the hacker community builds some in the wild exploits and releases them.

What’s way more interesting though is the poll on matousec’s website up there which questions whether Vendors should pay researchers when they discover exploits such as these. After all, this is vaulable information and will cost the vendors a fortune to rectify, paying a researcher to delay his announcements could take a lot of the heat off them. If we get even more paranoid, the researcher could approach one vendor and say they can have a heads up on the exploit but their competitors won’t. Once the exploit is made public the paper could say that the only vendor who is not vulnerable is  ‘SECULOCK’  or whatever thus raising the  reputation of that company as well as boosting sales.

If you’re not aware, the government are using the ‘wash up’ period prior to dissolvement to rush a digital econmy bill through which has significant impact in many areas, but the one that affects normal people the most is the online copyright infringement section. Namely, they’re trying to stop people downloading illegal media. It’s all here if you want to read it.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmbills/089/2010089.pdf

But the gist of it, that affects us, is that if we have an internet connection, we have to

a) avoid copyright infringement by not downloading illegal stuff
and
b) protect the connection from others.

The first is fair enough, you’re breaking a law of sorts so it’s your call. The bill states you could get a letter from your ISP telling you to desist followed by technical controls to stop you doing it if you carry on such as slow connection and disconnection. Finally they’re permitted to take you to court.

The second is reasonably vague but is as follows:-
(6) The code must provide that, where a ground mentioned in subsection (3) is relied on, the appeal must be determined in favour of the subscriber if the subscriber shows that—
(a) the act constituting the apparent infringement to which the report relates was not done by the subscriber, and
(b) the subscriber took reasonable steps to prevent other persons infringing copyright by means of the internet access service.

That last clause says you must take reasonable steps to protect your network. What the fuck does that mean?
I reckon it means, you’re responsible and if your network connection is used to infringe copyrights then no more bleating about someone else hijacking your network (which has been the case many times in the past). If it comes from your connection then it’s your fault.
What does this mean for normal users? Protect your network, in particular your wireless connection. Use encryption as good as you can support and use a strong password.
Yeah? Well, not really. That’s all a load of bollocks. The vast majority of users aren’t ever going to have someone use their network to download stuff. The bill is there to effectively close that loophole and provides the government the leverage to make the ISP’s take action against persistant bittorrenters. Of course, they have to prove copyright infringement has taken place.
Bittorrenting in itself is not a crime and neither is hosting a site that host the torrent files. (The phrase used is ‘file sharing’ but typically the technology is torrents – where an initial information and tracking file is held on a central site and then the files are downloaded from users machines who have an association with that torrent file). I foresee an explosion in encrypted torrent sites. If ISP’s can’t determine which files you’re downloading, they’re on shaky ground giving you a bollocking and taking action subsequently.
And then where do they go? Make file sharing illegal? That would be illegal. Start carrying out warrants to search and seize? Seems a bit dramatic to stop some guy watching Lost or 24 before they’re screened in the UK.
The whole thing is an appalling piece of badly thought out and badly implemented legislation and stands on seriously loose ground before it even gets through parliment. In short it’s a big old bucket of cock, but lets not let that stop them. You can’t even vote for the right lizard either as all parties with the exception of the wonderful pirate party, seem to be for it. Join them now.

http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/

took my son to the drome in the morning, sat there doing fuck all for three hours although I did go out for a coffee and then got back and chatted to an old bloke who had come down from middlesborough for the weekend. Nice bloke. We talked about cycling and that for a while, and then he took his kecks off to get ready for his SQT. JEBUS! His legs were skinny, shaved, very dark brown and literally strewn with veins and knots of muscle and stuff. He’d suggested during our conversation that he’d spent so much time taking his kids around the country to riding events (one was there with him, a 40 year old 6 foot one bloke), that he’d not got chance to ride as much as he wanted to. His words were ‘I’ve not got many miles in my legs this year’, and then we watched him power round the track like it was all downhill while he whistled away like he hadn’t a care in the world. Proper character.

Also, this lady turned up for the SQT. Highly classy, rather sexy and had a habit of marching around the D talking to people she knew on a very direct fashion (including the old chap I was talking to). She was rather exciting to me. Lots of hair all over the place. Splendid.

Came home, had some dinner and then intended to go out for a ride but lawks! The computer broke. So I spend a few hours fixing it (new power supply) and by the time it was sorted it was too late to go out without lights so I canned the idea.

In other news I’ve got 537 in flight control on my ipod. Not bad eh?

I also spent a fair bit of time afterwards playing Borderlands. It’s a great game, get it.

1. Fix the computer
2. Make sure all the important documents are restored
3. Make sure office, all the solitaire games, google architect?, all bookmarks and everything else work fine.

O….K…. Not happening, the main hard drive is screwed. Looks like some nasty physical contact has occurred.EDven booting to live linux and attempting a format results inmany errors. That disk is goosed. Luckily, I have a 160G disk lying around (plus the 1 Terrabyte data disk in the computer), so after lots of very low level messing around with teh screwed disk I have everythging I need to start again.

Windows 7 here we come. It installs in about 30minutes and is up and working on the internet in 10 more. WOW! It’s great. So fast and easy and quick and clear. Love it!

Still sorting things out but it’s on here and working very well now.

After a HUGE amount of shopping around, I finally chose a notebook for myself. The decision was accelerated by the amount of time I’m spending in hotel rooms at the moment with not much to do so I pumped up my options, did some final checks and went for this. An AcerAspire One from Acer Direct .

This one is a refurbished unit Grade A2 (which means it’s effectively brand new with some damage to the box – The box is a bit tatty, nothing more – the laptop itself looks pristine.). It has a 16G SSD hard drive and 1Gig of RAM. I went for the small SSD drive because I realised I’d not need a huge amount of space for what I’m going to do with it (web/writing/email/photo editing/videos/music). Yes, music, photo’s and videos take up a lot of space but they’re very transient. Load them up, do stuff with them, remove them (with music being the possible exception).  Videos I’ll just watch once or twice and then delete, photos will be there only prior to sticking on the internet or back to my home PC terrabyte drive so space isn’t a big issue. Plus I have three USB drives. One 16G that I’ll use for videos (I typically accumulate videos on my home desktop and then move them onto this USB for watching), an 8G one that I use for general file transfer and a 4G encrypted stick that I use for very special things. I also have a 16G ipod which I wish could share it’s files when it’s connected but sadly not.

The other issue with the disk was that while SSD is much faster than a spinning platter and far more fault tolerant, it’s not nearly as quick as I wanted it to be. The online comunity suggests the way forwards is to replace the original SSD with a compact flash card and adaptor. Which I may do for a laugh.

Anyway. I can live with the space issue, (and there are many options available for internal expansion) . Battery life was a bit disappointing, 2.5 hours with the wireless enabled. I’m hoping this improves over time, it might need to go through a few discharge/recharge cycles before it reaches optimum performance.

The software was completely pants. The device came with Linpus Linux installed which I hated fromthe very start. Clearly desigend to allow idiots to use it it was far too restrictive for my geek fingers so I almost immediately downloaded an Ubuntu notebook remix image and dropped that on. Ten times better! It needed a bit of tweaking when it came to codecs for the video player but apart fromthat it worked fine. Sound, video, wireless, all the things that linux is typically slated for, all worked great!

It is brilliant! Battery life aside it’s very easy to carry around and while the keyboard is quite small for my engineer rapid fingers, I soon got used to keeping it tight. Well recommended.  140 quid from the link above. Get one.

SUSE comes out top in all the linux reviews so I download the DVD and install it. It all looks very nice and professional, installs with minimal effort, all very good.

Starts up for the first time, the Grub loader screen appears, SUSE is default, we’ll change that later but for the time being, off you go. My laptop dies. Oh, try again, dies again. Panic a bit and select windows next time, that’s fine. Had to do work then so waited till like now before I got chance to look at it again.

Try again, this time select SUSE safe option, that boots up OK. Login, again, all looks quite slick but then the real rot makes itself apparent. They’ve tried to make it cute. It’s like a fucking MAC. They have these little icons that hop up and down next to the mouse cursor, yeah, fun for two seconds. I’m sure you can turn them off but doing that would mean having to use something far more sinister and mind controlling… the menu system. Nothing is where you expect it to be, nothing is easy to find. There’s messages and alerts popping up all over the place, wireless goes up and down, up and down.

In terror I flick through the menus trying to find a terminal window, THERE! loads of terminal icons. I open it up (it’s like going into a starbucks, JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING COFFEE!!!), I choose one of the 17 options and hope it opens something I can use. YAY! I take a quick look at the logs, wireless is pissing about so I turn it off. Things calm down a bit but finding how to do ’stuff’ is just horrible. I appreciate it’s just KDE and that it’s all configurable but I, (and I’m sure many others), do not want to have to do it.

I try to configure Grub to set windows as the default. Seems simple enough, YAST, change settings. Although YAST will no longer start. I check the logs again, no errors, just nothing. I mess about for an hour or so, make no progress with wireless (i’m a seasoned wireless-on-linux user and have been through the ball ache many times before so accept it’s not entirely SUSE’s fault)

Back to Ubuntu tomorrow. If I were a normal windows user, this would have stopped my Linux experiement in it’s tracks right there and then.

And they still don’t set up select-paste-with-right-mouse by default, what’s that about?