Help Wanted, No Skills Required

Comcast is taking heat for packing a recent FCC meeting on internet neutrality. The topic of net neutrality has pitted the telecom companies against wide segments of the public, including groups as diverse as ACLU, Gun Owners of America, American Library Association, Christian Coalition of America and the Parents Television Council. At issue is whether all data should be treated equally or if the telecoms can do “traffic shaping”, favoring some types of data over others.

The FCC often holds public meetings to allow citizens to voice their opinion. At the recent meeting in Harvard Comcast paid a group of people to fill the available seats. Interested individuals who arrived as much as 90 minutes before the meeting found the room nearly full. Comcast admitted to the payoff and stated that the seats were being held for Comcast employees, most of whom did not show up.

Linestanding is a common practice at congressional hearings but this appears to be the first time it’s been used at a public meeting outside of Washington. Lobbyists pay linestanders between $10 and $15 an hour, many of whom will queue up for a hearing the day before. This practice has been common since the early ’90s and several linestanding companies exist to serve the lobbyists. The end result is that the public rarely gets a chance to attend. Senator Claire McCaskill, freshman Democrat from Missouri, has recently introduced a bill to ban lobbyists from employing linestanders.

Comcast packs the room
Sen. Claire McCaskill
Washington Post interviews linestanders

Scary Tales + Politicians = Rushed Legislation

Lead is bad. Everyone knows that. We should keep it out of our water and our air. Until recently lead was used in solder, which means that every electrical or electronic device contained lead. Enter the European Union and their RoHS Directive. In July of 2006 lead solder was banned from the EU. Manufacturers have been forced to find replacements, usually an all tin solder instead of the lead/tin solder formerly used.

Many engineers have raise concerns. Tin solder has a number of drawbacks – it is brittle; it has a tendency to cause shorts; it requires more heat; it doesn’t “get along” well with other types of solder on the same board. This last issue can cause problems with repairs and with electronics that are composed of parts from multiple manufacturers.

Although the RoHS only applies to the European Union, it affects us all. Manufacturers cannot supports different processes for different countries. Assembly lines have been switched over to the new soldering techniques whether they are making radios or communications satellites or medical equipment or airliners.

It’s too early to tell if this will cause problems, although anecdotal evidence suggest that it has. Studies on Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) have been hampered by manufacturers who are unwilling to let their failure rates be documented. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are blaming hot-headed environmentalists for possible failures and environmentalists claim that greedy industry welcomed the change because failures sell more product.

Cringley’s column has more to say

That MS-DOS disk might be worth something someday

It’s been one big hairball of a week. As noted, computer one went belly up and I decided to upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP. While waiting for delivery it seemed a good idea to do a major cleanup – rearrange furniture, dust everything, get rid of all the junk that had piled up. In the process computer two’s video died. At least this seemed like a good time to replace its old CRT with an LCD. The trouble turned out to be a bad power supply. Ninety percent of all hardware problems can be fixed with a new power supply. Oh, and I bought a new LCD anyway.

I’m back in action. No more crumbs in the keyboard, no more physical and virtual desktops cluttered with crap, no more drawers filled with strange or useless cables. How does someone wind up with 25 IDE cables?

One Step Forward, One Leap Back

I finally decided to give Skype a try, but it wouldn’t hear my microphone and the headphones wouldn’t mute my speakers. I know how to fix that, I know where the settings are – except they weren’t. Where my speaker setup should have been listed there was nothing, just a blank list.

Fine. I’ll uninstall/reinstall my soundcard driver, except it wouldn’t. Instead it would reboot the machine halfway through the process. So, I got the latest drivers, except it’s the driver only without all the nifty extras I’ve come to rely on. With the new drivers maybe I could complete the install of those extras from the original CD. I could and it did. Except now I have this grey square in the middle of my desktop and my volume control goes funky when I click on it.

OK, I can live without the nifties because that grey square is going to drive me nuts. Uninstall. Restart. Uh oh. The splash screen comes up in 640×480, 16 colors. Gah! Windows starts re-installing every driver on the system. Now all I get is a Blue Screen. Oh, well. I knew it was time to upgrade from Win2K to XP. After all, XP is supposed to be yanked from the shelves in April.  It should be here tomorrow. Curses, I hate giving money to Microsoft.

Drive Another Stake, George. It’s Rising Again.

It’s no revelation that the Bush administration has been secretive. John Ashcroft, Bush’s first Attorney General, issued directives that government information should be considered secret unless there was a good reason to make it public. Freedom of Information Act(FOIA) requests have languished and many journalists and concerned individuals have had to go to court to force the release of documents.

This stonewalling had not gone unnoticed by Congress. For five years Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) have been trying to pass legislation that would create a tracking system for Freedom of Information Act requests. Impose penalties for exceeding a 20-day time period, and allow people who had to go to court to be reimbursed for their legal fees. In addition, it created an ombudsman who could step in before FOIA disputes went to court.

The Senate unanimously passed the Open Government Act. The House followed suit and passed it by voice vote. In December, 2007 the bill was given to the President to sign. He did so on New Year’s Eve.

Now, buried in Bush’s $3.1 trillion budget, “on page 239, at the appendices of the Commerce Department section, which had nothing to do with the Justice Department, is a phrase that does not mention FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, does not mention the Office of Government Information Services, which is the name of the ombudsman, does not mention the National Archive. It just has this, you know, pithy little phrase that says, ‘This position will no longer exist.’” [quoting Rebecca Carr, national correspondent for Cox Newspapers, On The Media broadcast, 8 Nov 2008]

Duties of the ombudsman will transfer to the Department of Justice, the main target of criticisms for not enforcing the FOIA.

In a 3.1 trillion dollar budget and its funding for the war in Iraq, it is unlikely that this will cause much stir unless a major noise is made.

Satellite Target Practice

What’s behind the U.S. shooting down a malfunctioning satellite?
Here are some things to consider
* The U.S. strongly objected to the Chinese test of anti-satellite weaponry when they shot down one of their satellites in January, 2007.
* The stated reason for the U.S. shooting down this malfunctioning satellite is to protect people from a possible toxic cloud of gas from the on board fuel. This is preposterous. Both fuel laden satellites and booster rockets are commonly left to fall to earth. Any possible cloud of gas would impact an area of about 2 football fields and the chance of anyone being hurt is about as likely as getting hit with a meteorite.
* The Russians and Chinese are trying to restart the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space treaty discussion which would ban space weapons.
* A low orbit satellite is an impressive test subject since it travel much faster than one in high orbit.
* A new administration may not give the Missile Defense Agency the top-level advocacy that it currently has. A successful test increases the likelihood of program refunding.

Be Careful Out There

Domain Name Service [DNS] servers are the roadmaps of the Internet. They direct your browser to the correct website. Computers use numbers [called an IP address] to identify themselves, but humans have a hard time remembering numbers. Enter the DNS server. When you type www.google.com the DNS server looks it up in a table and returns the number 208.67.217.230, which is the IP address of Google. When you first connected to the Internet your Internet Service Provider [ISP] told your computer how to find its DNS server.

DNS poisoning is an increasing problem on the Internet. If your machine is compromised then it will point to a rogue DNS server. This server will return incorrect numbers and you will be sent to the wrong website. These websites can be mockups of legitimate sites that are phishing for personal data, malicious sites that try to install software on your machine, or sites that are full of advertisements.

If you notice that you are being sent to the wrong websites or a familiar site doesn’t look quite right, contact your ISP or local computer geek and ask them to verify that your computer is using the right DNS server.

Smile and Say Cheese

The United States has laws that prohibit it from spying on its own citizens. This is not to say they don’t do it, just that they avoid being caught. As example, take the ruckus caused by the discovery that the NSA was sucking up all the phone and internet traffic flowing through ATT. By the way, ATT and the other cooperating telecoms are about to get a pass on violating their privacy contracts with their customers. The Senate has passed a bill granting them retroactive immunity and the House is expected to follow suit.

Another key surveillance tool is the spy satellite. How well these satellites can see is a closely guarded secret but those in the know guess that they can see things as small as a softball. The government is about to allow local law enforcement access to much of this spy satellite imagery. A warrant will still be required to obtain the images but the details “would be determined in the future”.

The common argument for all of this increased surveillance is that if you have nothing to hide, then there is nothing to fear. This assumes a perfect system, but every system is vulnerable abuse, to hacking from inside or out, and to “mission creep”.
AP New report

Don’t swat it, Burt. It might be one of them gu’mint flies

Researchers at Cornell University have successfully implanted probes into tobacco hornworms that grow into adult moths. Their muscles can then be remotely controlled. Many researchers attach radio transponders to insects to track their flight. There have been several unconfirmed reports of dragonfly-sized craft buzzing around demonstrations in Washington. D.C. Cockroaches have even been employed to pilot robots. Much of this research is funded by DARPA which is part of the U.S. Department of Defense. Next time you pull out the can of Raid, be careful. That bug might be a soldier in the War on Terror.

Wii! Physical Therapy Gets Fun

Nintendo’s Wii video game system was designed to appeal to a non-traditional gaming market. Nintendo has succeeded beyond even their own highest projections. Despite the machine being on the market since November of 2006, finding a Wii is still difficult. Where are all those machines going? They’re winding up on cruise ships, in retirement homes and now in physical therapy clinics. The innovation is in the motion sensitivity and the simple controls; users wave the controller to initiate actions.

Many reports have documented the bowling leagues, tennis matches and golf tours organized by retirement homes around the U.S. As one granny said after playing a round of Monster Truck, “This is fun! I haven’t been able to drive for fifteen years.” Now physical therapy clinics are using the Wii to eliminate the boredom of repetitive exercises. The various Wii sports games require body movements similar to traditional therapy exercises, One doctor at Illinois’ Herrin Hospital observed, “When people can refocus their attention from the tediousness of the physical task, oftentimes they do much better.”

Watch the AP video.

Read the Wired article.