Technology
Entries related to technology.
The G-Men and the Evil Robots
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/16/2011 - 20:01It might seem like this hypothetical question is coming from some cheesy 1950s science fiction movie, but actually, it is based on some recent news:
Let’s imagine an evil mastermind sneaks robots into millions of American households. Government agents figure out the plot and raid the evil mastermind’s control center. They are now faced with a dilemma: Do they simply turn off the control center, leaving millions of robots waiting idly for the next command from the control center? Or, do they send out a special command from the control center that disables all of the robots.
This is actually a question that legal scholars, privacy advocates and others are currently discussing. Recently, Federal Agents took down the Coreflood botnet. A botnet is a network of robot like programs that get snuck onto people’s computers. They check in with a control center that tells them what to do, record users keystrokes, send out spam, or other nasty things.
When a previous botnet was taken down, the control center was shutdown and the bots remained on people’s computers trying to contact the control center, but with no control center to command them, they simply remain idle. Of course, if someone creates a new control center, they might be able to reactivate the bots. This time, the Federal agents received permission from the courts to take over the control center, send out messages tell the bots to disable themselves, and recording the addresses of the computers so people could follow up and make sure the bots were removed.
What are some of the issues? Well should the government be allowed to disable programs on your computer? If the programs are malicious? What if you want to keep the malicious program to investigate how to turn it around and use it for good? Can we trust the government not to misuse any other information they get from the botnet? Are there other unexpected and unintended consequences to this?
If you’re interested in more discussions on this, check out Feds ‘Reverse Hack’ Millions of Infected Computers and The Coreflood takedown: building a better, broader botnet response.
Advanced Roku
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/02/2011 - 10:51Yesterday, I set up another Roku video player, and so I spent a little more time looking at different ‘private channels’ and other configuration that can be done with it.
The Roku play is a small set top box that allows you to pull video streams off the internet and display them on your TV. We initially got it to stream videos off of Netflix in a way that the whole family can watch it. However, being the hacker that I am, I’m always looking for ways to tweak it to do more things.
One of the key features is the ‘private channels’. A private channel is one that is not listed on the Roku, but that you can add via your Roku account on the Internet. There are a couple of good websites listing different private Roku Channels. I especially like Nowhere TV which has its own Roku Channel with many great shows on it as well as a webpage talking about other great channels.
Another site I like is streamfree.tv. They point to Nowhere TV and list several other channels. This includes several live channels, including Al Jazeera, BBC World News, CNN International, and RT America. They also have a section for channels that support local file systems.
I had thought that these channels were limited to devices that have USB connections. However, it turns out these channels can also easily pull content off of a local network. Channels that they list include Gabby Media Server, PlayOn, roConnect and Roksbox.
Unfortunately, many of these are oriented to people using Windows. Since we run mostly Linux in our home, several of the solutions just didn’t work all that well. However, Roksbox has proven to be pretty nice.
Roksbox runs in two different modes. One is to connect with Media Monkey, which is yet another Windows based system. However, it also connects with webpages, so I’ve set it up to pull music, pictures and videos off of my linux box running an Apache server. It works fairly nicely, but could be better.
Originally, I just threw all of my music into one big folder. Roksbox doesn’t provide nice navigation around that folder, so I probably have to reorganize my music collection. I was hoping that it would work with a uPNP server, like the MediaTomb server I’m running on my linux server. This would give me the ability to search for songs by album, performer and genre. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get these to connect and am looking for a few different approaches.
One would be to try and find a private channel that will connect to uPNP servers. That would be really nice. Lacking that, would be to find some sort of uPNP server to Webserver gateway, so that the songs could be selected via a web interface to the uPNP server.
I also used Roksbox to look at photographs and videos. I didn’t have a lot of different videos to test, but I did successfully play some MP4 videos I had recorded on various devices. Roksbox also provides the ability to stream live video, and I used their example, to add a Nasa live stream. For some reason the pxml file that they suggested did not work, but the http live streaming (HLS) file worked nicely. Now, I just need to find more sources that are streaming HLS.
One trick I found was to access Ustream and Livestream feeds as HLS. AppMakr has hints on this.
Health Records
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/22/2011 - 20:43Today, I stopped at the drugstore to pick up some over the counter medications. Fiona is pretty much over her latest cold, or at least I hope she is, but she is still a little congested.
While I was there, I notice various blood pressure cuffs. I’ve got one kicking around the house somewhere, but haven’t been able to find it in quite a while, so I thought of picking up a new one.
These days, many of them have the ability to store the past 60 blood pressure readings. There are even blood pressure cuffs that will take SD cards, have USB interfaces, and WiFi enabled blood pressure cuffs have been announced, but I don’t know if any are in production yet.
One cuff interfaces with Microsoft’s HealthVault, so you can save the results in your personal health record. These aren’t the only devices like this. There are WiFi enable scales as well.
With my work at the Community Health Center, I’m getting more and more interested in these sorts of devices, as well as in electronic health records.
A friend of mine has diabetes and I know that there is a whole measuring regimen with that. I’ve also looked at various pedometers, and loaded a pedometer program in one of my cellphones, but I haven’t really done much more with that.
So, I’m wondering, are any of you doing anything with internet connected health recording devices? Do any of you have Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault accounts? Are you doing anything interesting with them? Have you connected them to electronic health records from your doctors office, or perhaps to pharmacists or labs?
Spring Cleaning
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/20/2011 - 09:40Yesterday was a day of spring cleaning, of getting done several tasks that have been waiting too long to get done.
Tasks around the house
Besides the typical laundry and dishes, which had been compounded by my being gone for much of the week and Kim and Fiona being sick, I spent time out side repairing the ravishes of winter on our yard with a rake.
Winter also took its toll on the black car. It was shimmying pretty badly and pulling to the right. I took the car in to get the wheels aligned, and saw that one of the front tires had worn way to thin and needed to be replaced. I should take a moment to note that Danny at Town Fair Tire in Orange was a paragon of customer service. If you are looking to get tires replaced, go to Town Fair Tire in Orange and ask for Danny.
Kim picked me up at Town Fair Tire and the two of us went over to Village Bagel for a cup of coffee. I had a great bagel to go with it. By the time we were finished with our coffee, the car was ready and Kim headed off to get her hair cut, and I headed home to get some projects done that have been waiting too long to happen.
The first project that I tackled was to create a stop motion video of the construction site at work.
First, I found a website with a webcam of the construction site. Then, I wrote a small script on one of my Linux machines that would run a wget command every minute to pull save a copy of the image. I then loaded the stopmotion program for linux, imported the images and saved the file. It came out much better than expected and leaves me with a few different projects.
One is to gather the images over a longer time and show the building as it takes shape. Another is to create other stop motion videos. For example the Cape Cod Coast Guard Beach Cam might make a great video. I could also check other webcams around the world. If you have suggestions, let me know.
I might even take my shell script and generalize it to make it easier to create these movies. I’m also interested in exploring Gimp Batch Mode so I could do some preprocessing of images between capture and being added to a movie.
Public Mapping
Another project I’ve been wanting to kick off is setting up a Connecticut instance of the Public Mapping Project. This is a project to use open source software to make it possible for anyone to create new legislative districts online. They have a sample that people can use with Virginia data. They also have an image set up on Amazon Web Services.
I hadn’t worked with Amazon Web Services before, so I spent a little time exploring it. Finally, I got it working properly. Maybe I’ll write a quick description of how to get it to work nicely later. During my testing, I set up a Drupal 7 instance on AWS. It was fairly quick and easy to set up, and I may write more about that later. As I worked on it, I discovered that my Smartcampaigns domain had expired so I renewed that.
Unfortunately, the Public Mapping Project instance ran incredibly slowly. Also, I couldn’t find documentation on how to prepare Connecticut data, so I fired off an email to the project head and am waiting for a reply.
Upgrading this server to Ubuntu 10.04
However, the Public Mapping Project also works on straight Ubuntu. This site has been running Ubuntu 8.04 for a long time. I had tested earlier versions of the Public Mapping Project on various versions of Ubuntu, and couldn’t get it to run. I had particular difficulties on Ubuntu 8.04 and eventually upgraded my workstation to run Ubuntu 10.10, but still haven’t gotten the Public Mapping Project to run smoothly there.
I’ve hesitated to upgrade this server out of concern that it might be down for an extended period, especially if I screwed up something, or simply that the process might take a long time. However, last night, I bit the bullet and tried the upgrade.
The upgrade was fairly uneventful. A few minor problems cropped up. Apparently, the old tspc package that I’ve used for tunneling IPv6 is no longer supported, but there is a new package gw6c which does essentially the same thing. So, my IPv6 is back up, different address, slightly different configuration, but up and running.
I also had problems with locale and installing Postgres. I set them aside and went to bed. This morning I tried again, and Postgres appears to have installed properly and I’m not seeing locale errors right now.
So, I’ll return to the Public Mapping Project later.
Other Stuff
This morning, I saw a message from Miranda that she has posted her Senior Thesis, Full Artist Statement. It is great and I wanted to highlight it. You can see photographs from her senior exhibition Composing Through Color: A Senior Thesis Exhibition
Monday Morning
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/14/2011 - 09:26It is a bright sunny morning in Jacksonville, FL. I arrived last night on an uneventful flight from Connecticut. For the next three days, I’ll be at a conference on social media and health care. I may be tweeting a lot, so if conference tweeting annoys you, you might want to unfollow me until Thursday. I expect that my blogging may also be a little sparse for the next few days.
I am currently working off of my old IBM laptop. I’m going to guess that it is about six years old. I’ve installed Linux on it, and it mostly runs smoothly, but it has been freezing a bit recently, so I’m trying to do some updates. However, the hotel WiFi is pretty slow.
On the plane down, I worked on the laptop a little as well as played with my Android phone in Airplane mode. I didn’t have a lot installed on the Android that worked in Airplane mode. So, I’m thinking I should try to tweak it for the flight back. Adding a podcast player would probably be good. Also, I have Squeak running on Android on my N900, so it might be fun to see if I can get squeak to run on the Samsung Android. I did take the MicroSD card from my N900 and put it in my Samsung. I could get to the files, but couldn’t launch Squeak.
I also kicked around running a virtual world program on my laptop. I have Imprudence and Hippo loaded on my laptop. However, I don’t currently have an instance of OpenSim running, so without an internet connection, there wasn’t a virtual world I could connect to.
I’m also thinking it is time to kick around Blender or some other good animation program. I’m also thinking it might be good to kick around Alice again sometime soon, and even take another shot at OpenCroquet.
It was nice to be disconnected from the internet for an extended period, but still have access to technology. It gave me more time to kick around ideas of things I should try to set up.
Meanwhile, I got a phone call from home. Kim has been sick, and now Fiona has gotten it.
