Musing of a chubby Ginger kid.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827825

Thanks God I have backups.
rm -rf * /path/to/directory/with/files/I/want/to/delete/*
See anything wrong with that? I didn't. Seven years now of working at the command line on a *nix machine and I do not think I have done something like that. *sigh*, at least I am smart enough to rsync my stuff every night so nothing super important was deleted.

Technorati Tags: dumb, *nix

Moving sucks. Moving into a place that is wrecked sucks. Moving into a wrecked place in the middle of the work week sucks hard. ISPs suck. ISPs that tell you a day when they can hook you up that is from 7AM until 7 PM suck harder. ISPs that tell you that and then reschedule for two weeks later suck even harder.
Wireless networks are not secure. WEP is not secure. Aircrack-ng does NOT suck. Oh my God! Pwnies!
Vegas tomorrow. Vegas does not suck. The way home from Vegas sucks. Going with nothing but married and engaged people may suck.

And the Raiders are 0-2. Burn!
This was a good week for my football teams. My high school beat another team that is supposed to be better than them, now they are ranked #1 in the area, Cal won, USC won, Michigan State won. Good times all around. The only miss was the trouncing that UCLA took. Ouch.

I was heavily involved in a Fraternity in college and was actually the Vice President of my chapter for a year. For marketing materials and just posterity I needed pictures of fraternity activities, so I gathered a bunch of good pictures from years past and put them together for people to look through. It was a bit a of a project that took probably 15-20 hours a week for an entire summer, so you would think I would backup my work. Well you would think wrong, I had no backups, especially of the pictures I personally took. They were all on my 12" Powerbook, nicely organized and indexed so I could find anything and I was planning on passing them off to someone else the next year so the chapter could get more pictures and add to the collection. My Powerbook decided that it did not like my friend, Rockstarmode, touching it and something happened to the hard drive. To this day I am not sure what exactly that something was, I was upstairs when "the incident" occured, but everyone who saw said my buddy literally just touched the laptop and then the screen went weird. Would not boot or anything, and gave me a folder with a question mark on it whenever I tried to boot from the drive. Since the pictures were on there I did not want to reformat the drive and reinstall so I replaced the hard drive and tried, unsuccessfully, to recover the pictures and papers and stuff on it. Three years  and some change later I think I have finally succeeded.
Linux has all kinds of file utilities for HFS+, but none of them were working on my hard drive to get data off of it. The geometry was hosed or something so all file system operations were not working, and there was a certain point that the drive just did not work past. I held onto the hard drive for last three years hoping, because there were a ton of pictures and stuff on it, none of which I had backed up. Until yesterday, when I tried the Testdisk Suite. More specifically I used photorec to grab anything files off of the hard drive that it could find.

Here is what I did.

1. Make a backup images of the harddrive:
   machine# ddrescue -r3 /dev/sdb /mnt/sparehardisk/harddrive.img
   This mean write a duplicate of the hard drive /dev/sdb to the file /mnt/spareharddisk/harddrive/img, retrying erros three times.
2. Recover any files that you can:
   machine# photorec /mnt/sparehardisk/harddrive.img -d ./recovery_directory
   This will grab any files it can, regardless of the files system. If the file is still there it will move it into the recovery_directory.

There are over 80 file formats that photorec can recover. Hard core. Now I need to figure out how to organize my files, because when they are recovered they have no names so photorec gives them one, since filenames are a function of the file system. Perl to the rescue...

Moral of the story: Back your important data up!

Technorati Tags: backups, pi kappa phi, pictures, recovery

Mumbai police will be able to monitor cyber-cafes in the city. Got this via Bruce Schneier's blog.

Okay, so I have a couple of problems with the attempt at preventing terrorism by doing this. Wasted resources, privacy concerns, easily circumvented, over-confidence in the program, and it just won't work.

Wasted Resources
From the article:

The Mumbai police will soon have khabris deployed (not physically) at over 500 (ed: emphasis mine) cyber cafes in the city. A new software will allows cops to swoop down on terrorists the moment a keystroke is pressed at any cyber cafe across the city.

So the police are going to watch the goings on of every single person at all times at five hundred places? Just like they watch every traffic light at all times here in the U.S. ? Yeah, that is just a colossal waste of a police officer's time. More likely they will log everything and then try to shift through it all when "something" happens. Ten bucks says it is not a crime having to do with terrorism. It is impractical to monitor that much data and expect to catch anything in real time. People doing the watching can't stay focused enough and it is a bad idea to try to keep them on task. Frustration will set in and you will always fighting a losing battle with staff. Let's say they automate it. They get a great indexing tool that can look all the traffic, in real time, put it all together, and generate and alert when there is really suspicious going on. How many hits do you think they are going get on people discussing "bomb" just on IRC the day after an attack somewhere else in the world? Police are going to be rolled out all day on false positives, or worse, stop reacting to anything from it because it is wrong so often.

Easily Circumvented
Let's see what are some ways of getting around all of this pesky government snooping.....Oh yes encryption. SSL VPNs, Tor, Proxies, Steganography (which there is no evidence terroists use, but I would), OTR, the list goes on and on. The problem of keeping communications private has been solved multiple times and multiple ways by the computer industry. Put those apps on a USB stick, or a Linux LiveCD and you have your app. Hell, google chat has a web client so you cannopt over https the entire time and you are done. Traffic analysis you say? Tor will fix that for you.

Privacy Concerns
Where do I begin?! The system gets hacked and people lose their identities, police abuse their authority and use it for non-terrorist stuff *cough* FBI *cough*, corrupt police track people for personal gain, corrupt techs track people for personal gain. That is just off the top of my head. Not only that, now a person who wants to operate a cyber cafe needs to register with the police. They can be punished if they do not follow the police guide lines, so if someone in their shop does any of the above, can the cafe operator be nailed? Imagine that in the U.S. MORE beauracracy, just what we need.

It just does not work
Too much info. Big time smart people have been working on a way of indexing information and giving it meaning for years. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, people like that. I would imaging that CARMS is along those lines, but no one has yet to solve the problem of giving it all meaning meaning easily yet. See the above on false positives.

Technorati Tags: privacy, terrorism

So I have been trying not to be the fat guy anymore for a few years now with mixed results. Yo-yo weight loss and gain, diets, etc. One thing that I have found to be successful is keeping in contact with people who are doing the same thing you are for support. Forums, IRC, mailing lists whatever. It is part wisdom of the crowds, it is part just social pressure when you can't see the forest from the trees, but talking with people helps. I am participating in a 52 Day Challenge with people from fittobemen.com.

"If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."
-- Phillip Zimmerman

So I listen to PaulDotCom on a regular basis and have listened to Twitchy go on and on about Tor a thingus for anonymous web browsing. He goes on and on about how Tor is cooler than sliced bread with and a banana, Jesus used Tor, Tor once got a kitten out of a tree, etc. Little did I know it is way more powerful and way cooler than that. It lets you go through the internet, anonymously, and come out randomly on the other side, in a manner of speaking. It mainly protects you from traffic analysis, protecting you from others finding out where you "go" on the internet. Want to read about Tiananmen Square and you live behind the Great Firewall of China? Maybe you have an embarrassing health condition and want to be able to join an online support group, but the idea of the support guys at work reading you posts kinda makes you queezy. Tor will let you go to those sites anonymously and all anyone watching you traffic will know is that you are using Tor. It defeats websites from tracking their users, prevents people from watching where you are "going online", people can communicate in socially sensitive forums, journalists to communicate in a hostile country, the list goes on and on why it is a great resource for anyone wanting to protect their privacy and anonymity. You can use it to IM, email, surf, use bittorrent, just all kinds of cool things. There are also things like hidden services which sounds super cool and might come in handy at work. I plan on writing a full howto later on Tor with all kinds of pictures for people who are more visually oriented

Resources

Wikipedia Article
Tor Homepage
Privoxy

Being fat is just more sucky.