F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E
Because 2018 somehow is still a thing
Computers, gaming, and anything else of relevance.
Considering that I’ve only ever bought one thing from Ticketmaster, and that was some very sold out elsewhere Nine Inch Nails tickets, you might think that this might not match my interests at all. You would be right too; I use them for ticket alerts for bands I actually like (before finding any other ticket site to buy the actual tickets from), and there’s no Pop Idol/X-Factor/Max Martin Identikit Machine alumni amongst them. Hey, at least it’s funny.
They aren’t removing the other WGA stuff – in fact, they’re making it more annoying – but the kill switch (knocking the system down to Internet Explorer only) for pirate copies was almost certainly a step too far, especially since it could very occasionally malfunction. Much fairer to simply have a bunch of annoying warnings rather than the nuclear measure, and a sign of exactly how much SP1 should improve the operating system.
[As an aside, exactly why is it that people bash the User Account Control system when UAC is only required in the same places that the sudo type equivalent would be on Mac OS X or Linux – that is, for changing important system settings or installing applications? On a normal Linux system, actually, you have to run sudo more times to configure and install stuff than you ever have to click the ‘Accept’ box (or type a password if you’re operating user/administrator) in UAC on Vista, so why Slashdigg et al keep on bashing Vista based on UAC is somewhat perplexing. The only problem with UAC is that certain people in the ancient past wrote applications that demanded full administrator permission to run because of poor programming, and Microsoft finally called them on it. Just a thought, anyway.]
Looking at today’s security run output that FreeBSD likes to send to me by default, I find an interesting hack run amongst the several I usually get a day:
Nov 27 14:03:16 [anonymised] sshd[48794]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241 Nov 27 14:03:49 [anonymised] sshd[48810]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241 Nov 27 14:04:44 [anonymised] sshd[48844]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241 Nov 27 14:07:41 [anonymised] sshd[48979]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241
The script kiddie in question is trying to use the username ryback to get into my machine. Casey Ryback, of course, is Steven Seagal’s ex-Navy SEAL character in the Under Siege series, kicking large amounts of terrorist arse with kung-fu, knives and in Under Siege 2 a Newton MessagePad. This “ryback”, however, is just hitting against a sshd which has password access disabled completely and as such will have no success whatsoever to anyone who doesn’t have my private key – that is, everyone but me.
The IP address is in (sigh) China Telecom space, Shanghai province; no chance of tracing that then. Wonder where they got the name from.
EDS, that’s who: who would charge the child benefit people £5000 for a SQL job of the sort that would take a couple of minutes, thus resulting in a civil servant using an old dump with all the data intact, burning it to CDs and then unfortunately ending up with another stupid outsourcing partner (that is, TNT) losing them. Oh, what a surprise. It’s not like EDS haven’t ripped any British government agencies off before… (They even have occasional problems doing corporate IT outsourcing properly.) This failure is exactly the reason why no government IT services should be outsourced under any circumstances: good practice is swamped under charges and contracts.
Unity at Ministry of Truth has the best analysis of the details of the emails so far. Also, b3ta have by far the funniest comment on the issue. Probably more to come.
This might not be true and I have no way of checking since I don’t need a Wii, but apparently Amazon France and Germany have stopped selling said consoles to the UK (but will allow shipping of other consoles, even the PS3). The source is the Wii thread on the DVD Forums. Since there aren’t any Wiis in the UK but there are in France and Germany, and since we’re meant to have a single market, can one see the problem with this?
Obviously if it’s not true and just Amazon deciding not to sell electronics beyond their local store then this won’t be a problem, but if Nintendo has threatened Amazon into stopping shipping then they’re just as bad as SCEE (who of course threatened Lik-Sang out of business, amongst other things, for selling PSPs at a fair price.) Worrying.
My laptop is a first-generation Centrino machine. Perfectly acceptable speed-wise for pretty much anything that doesn’t involve 3D (and even then, a GeForceFX 5200 isn’t that dreadful), and comes with Intel 802.11b.
802.11b wireless has gone a bit out of date. It’s still perfectly acceptable, but I found myself whilst on holiday requiring a wireless stick I could stick in odd places where my laptop wouldn’t go, so I bought a Belkin F5D7051 “High-Speed Wireless G” USB stick out of the best priced place I could find. It comes with a little extension that’s perfect for sticking out of hotel windows to pick up public signals, so it was surprisingly useful.
Unfortunately, it’s based on a Broadcom chipset. And Broadcom chipsets are a real pain on Linux because Broadcom won’t make drivers for anything other than embedded systems. I dual-boot the machine with XP in any case, but I like to have a Linux partition around and I’d like it to have access to the Internet.
So if you want such a thing to be able to run on Linux, you have to use a piece of software called ndiswrapper. This is a bit of software that maps the Windows NDIS standard for network drivers on to the Linux networking subsystem, effectively using your Windows network driver on Linux. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons ndiswrapper can be a bit of a pain to work with on some cards and the Belkin F5D7051 is one of these cases.
It has taken me a long time to find a Linux distribution combination that gets it working. But with Kubuntu ‘Gutsy’ 7.10 and some helpful threads on the Ubuntu forums, I finally have it:
As you can see, it’s even working with WPA and Network Manager, pretty much perfectly. Since I’m always inclined towards tutorials, here’s how I did it.
I stumbled across an extremely helpful person on the Ubuntu forums who posted a bit of software that automates the compilation of ndiswrapper and a guide on how to use it. I’ve used ndiswrapper from the Ubuntu repositories before (as well as from the repositories of pretty much every major Linux distribution) and always run into trouble and never had the card working.
While it’s actually designed for Feisty (the previous version, 7.04), is covered in warnings and is not intended for my type of wireless card, the autodownloader and compiler for ndiswrapper within is still extremely useful. Of course, fetching ndiswrapper from the Ubuntu repo might just work for you, and if you want to give it a try just install it from there and skip to step 8.
sudo apt-get install xterm
cd /tmp wget http://blakecmartin.googlepages.com/bcm43xx-0.3.2-internet.tar.gz tar xvfz bcm43xx-*.gz cd bcm43* ./installer.py
sudo ndiswrapper -r bcmwl5
mv BCM43XX.CAT bcm43xx.cat mv BCMRNDIS.INF bcmrndis.inf mv RNDISMPK.SYS rndismpk.sys mv USB8023K.SYS usb8023k.sys mv F5D7051.DLL f5d7051.dll sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmrndis.inf
cd /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmrndis ls
The directory listing should be:
050D:7051.F.conf bcm43xx.cat f5d7051.dll usb8023k.sys 1799:7051.F.conf bcmrndis.inf rndismpk.sys
bcmrndis : driver installed device (050D:7051) present (alternate driver: rt2500usb)
blacklist rt2500usb
If all’s well, when you boot your NetworkManager will be scanning your Belkin stick as well. You can make sure, again, from the command line: if you type in ‘iwconfig’ and see listed amongst the networks listed ‘wlan0’, it’s working.
And they say Linux isn’t ready for the desktop. Unfortunately, they’re right, but in this case that’s Broadcom’s fault for not releasing the Linux drivers we know they actually have. Nevertheless, it’s still at the Windows 3.1 level of hardware configuration and when compared to Vista’s effective Windows Update driver search or Mac OS X’s “plug it in, it works” philosophy it’s getting a bit lacking. Still, if NetworkManager is any example hopefully it’ll improve over time.
Thanks go to Google for the information (and if you want to learn more, I highly recommend googling on F5D7051 Linux or similar and reading all the stuff that comes up) and I hope this is of some use to you.
3’s SkypePhone: £49 to buy, top up the phone (minimum £10) and you get a month’s free Skype-to-Skype calls and messages. The phone appears to have a surprisingly decent talk time too, and according to the specs sheet has Bluetooth A2DP for wireless stereo headsets (sadly, however, it’s only dual-band on GSM). Shame the 3 network has a bit of a reputation, otherwise I’d actually consider porting over from O2. Still, an interesting concept and one hopefully that other mobile operators will learn from.
More holes have been picked in the security measure designed to protect the privacy and data of wi-fi users.
Of course, when you actually read the article, it turns out to be yet another attack on WEP.
WEP is not the security measure. WEP is a security measure, and it’s an extremely poor one. WPA, which is on pretty much every ADSL router that people in the UK actually own because it’s been around for about as long as WEP’s been useless, is the security measure that people should be using, but this article only actually mentions that close to the end and then adds a bunch of confusion about WPA2.
It’s also incorrect on operating systems: since Windows 2000, for example, has no native wireless support, everything depends on the driver. Therefore the Ralink-chipset PCI card my brother uses on his Win2K-running room PC can connect to the home WPA network with absolutely no difficulty.
If you have Windows XP, you can update to SP2 unless it’s a pirate copy; and even then, you should be able to find a mate with a copy that will. If you have Vista, Linux or a Mac running recent OS X there’s no difficulty with WPA or WPA2. And the only current, mainstream device I can think of which isn’t WPA by default is the Nintendo DS; the 360 through its wireless adapter, the PSP (above firmware 2.0, which you’ll have had to update to play any games anyway), PS3 and Wii all support it fine. And yet the guy from BT who they question says:
A spokesman for BT said that it used WEP on its home hub products because of the compatibility issues.
“We use WEP for a very sensible reason,” said the spokesman, “there are a number of devices out there in the marketplace that do not use WPA.”
So why not supply it WPA as default (as Sky and Be Unlimited do) and then tell people in the manual or on an information sheet how to scale it down using an Ethernet cable and a web browser if they actually have some of the ancient crap they worry about? By supplying WEP you are supplying a product that is broken and gives a false sense of security – WEP is about as secure as covering a broken window with tin foil.
A better way to go about this from a consumer protection point of view would be an article talking about how WPA improves your security, how to put it on and at the end say that if there’s any difficulty with it, update your devices and if that doesn’t work, WEP might have to be your least worst option if you can’t put an Ethernet cable out to them. At least the ISPs have stopped supplying routers which default to unencrypted now, but there’s still a long way to go and articles like this one are not helping.
Sony have cut the price of the PS3 in the UK to something a little more reasonable, months after they did so in the States. Previous to this price cut, the £425 60GB PS3, which excluding VAT (the right way to compare these things) is £361.70, was the only model in the UK. In the US, this model is $499, which when converted to pounds is £244.65 – so an entire £115 (a little over $230) was going directly into Sony’s pockets as a stupidity tax on Brits. Now the 60GB is £349, £297.02 excluding VAT, meaning the ripoff is now only £50.
Never give Sony an even break however – they’ve also introduced the 40GB cut-down PS3 we’ve been hearing about, for £299 (removing VAT and converting, $520), but it’s a serious ripoff – they’ve reduced the number of USB ports, removed the SD card etc. slots and even worse than that, they’ve removed PS1/PS2 backwards compatibility.
Which was in software anyway so doesn’t cost them anything to include whatsoever. And of course this crocked model is going to be the only PS3 in Europe in the future. Always give it to Sony to mess things up big time – the US’s only PS3 in the future will be a $600 80GB model with the same backwards compatibility and sockets as the original Euromodel.
And there still aren’t any games. If you want a console, buy a 360 and/or a Wii. If you want to play PS2 games, buy a PS2 – you can buy it very cheaply. If you want a Blu-Ray player, buy a Blu-Ray player. Do not buy the PS3; if you must, buy the 60GB, but it only encourages them.
£269/1.175 = £228.94 = $461.49
which is really pretty acceptable on the usual rip-off Britain scale, especially when compared with that of the PS3 (US PS3 price, $499=£247.54; UK price still £425, albeit with an extra controller and one of those copies of the giant enemy crab game Sony are trying desperately to get rid of.)
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 