Comcast DNS fail

So... according to Twitter and news.google, Comcast is down in IL, IN, MN, MI. Which is a lot of areas to be down in. DNS issue. Fix it by following instructions here. https://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html#setup

I would be unsurprised if someone hacked Comcast in return for the Netflix thing. It's not like Comcast is universally loved. I'm watching how this plays out with some interest. Mostly by keeping an eye on http://twitter.com/#!/comcastcares

If it was an accident, how did this accident come about?

Passport

I learned on Friday evening that

1. I had to send in my visa application by Tuesday
2. My passport was missing

Now it's Sunday, and the plan is thus:

• Parents send me my old passport, to arrive no later than Tues morning (as ID to get replacement for lost passport)
• On Monday, I get passport photos taken (two sets) and print & fill out visa forms and passport forms
• Tuesday early afternoon, receive old passport at post office, go to appointment downtown to get new passport
• Tuesday afternoon, mail visa application

Tuesday evening, drink with friends.

I feel a little bad for Lily (The TW visa person); there are some politely calmly panicked emails in her inbox, and one voicemail that all basically say "oh god oh god something went wrong and I don't know what to do. Help!" But now I think stuff is pretty well handled, barring (more) unforeseen fail. I hope she gets back to me on Monday, though. I'd really like some reassurance and guidance to double-check that what I'm doing is the correct thing to do.

Where did my passport go? I don't know. I wish I did. If I could find it, I could save a couple hundred bucks on Tuesday. But I'll have to settle for just not losing my new one. I'm going to keep it in the drawer of papers where it should have been this time, but wasn't.

Navigating the passport appointment phone system:

to book appointment
18774872778
1
2
1
1
4
1

...then pick appointment time. then take deep calming breath and go on with life.

Why I support Wikileaks

Well, let's start with why I shouldn't support Wikileaks.

• Some bad shit has come out of Wikileaks. Diplomacy will be more difficult for a while. Diplomacy is the thing that stands between us and war. I like diplomacy and hope that it thrives in all its finicky confusing glory.
  http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/79483/wikileaks-round-iii-will-it-matter-much
  http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2010/08/a_bad_name.html
• Encouraging people to break national security is not good for national security, and national security exists for a reason. (Sometimes a misguidedly-applied reason, but in truth there are many things that are a good idea to keep secret, like troop movements.)
• Releasing this specific bit of info could be bad bad bad (although shouldn't these sites be protected?) http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-wikileaks-reveals-global.html

Why I support Wikileaks:

• Because I've read an enormous number of scifi books, and that number included 1984 and brave New World and everything that Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross has ever written, and when the government starts suppressing more information, it is soon a very very bad time.*
  
• When Amazon and Paypal stopped serving Wikileaks, it was because they were afraid of political pressure, and not because of a violation of their company's Terms of Service. The ToS violation was the excuse. The fear of the government was the cause.
• (The following is in the words of Z and rancor, but I agree) "They're doing the right thing, because in a democratic society, transparency is a good above all others." "You can't vote for things properly if you don't know what people are actually doing." "Without information, there is no accountability."
• The infographics are awesome
  http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662770/infographics-of-the-day-whats-in-those-leaked-diplomatic-cables
  http://www.fastcodesign.com/1661985/infographic-of-the-day-a-guide-to-the-wikileaks-war-memos
  http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/11/wikileaks_us_embassy_cables_the_visualizations.html
  
• The bodies of the cables have not been published to the public (which makes me sad, but which might be a good idea... I can't know that because I don't know what's in them!) The full text is only available to a few large news agencies, who aren't releasing it.
  But you can download the cable metadata here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables-data

So there you have it. Not very complete, not very elegant, not very informed... but these are the baseline reasons behind my current opinions.

List of Wikileaks mirror sites (it is long and I am pleased) http://www.twitlonger.com/show/79s9r1

Have I donated money to WIkileaks? I believe so. I hope I did. I remember donating to Wikipedia, but that's and entirely different organization. Am I likely to donate to Wikileaks? Yes, when they have a Paypal-substitute up again. Why? Because I they need it, and because I think they'd do good things with it. Why not until there's a faux-Paypal working? Because I'm lazy. Such is humanity. I'm not a very good revolutionary... which is probably a good thing.

*I very much want to read a scifi book which has a plot like so: government starts supressing and regulating the free flow of information. Through intelligent political maneuvering by hackers, the government is quickly and without fuss returned to its place.

Clear wifi

If you are connected to a Clear wifi hotspot (in my case, one that I own) then go to its IP, which is 192.168.1.1

At this point you can log in as admin / admin (unless someone's changed the defaults)

Or you can go to 192.168.1.1/super and log in as super / super and change the admin password from there. There's no GUI way to change the super password, but if you go into the .htapassword file, you can change it there I believe.

I'm still experimenting... while keeping in mind that there's no "reset" button on this thing and if I screw up then I will have no internet until I go somewhere else...

This idea came from an article about how to hack the Clear iSpot, which only works for apple devices and which is rather cheap per month. Therefore, if it can be hacked to work for non-mac devices... one would get a good return. Since it's all Clear hardware... it seems that it's the same. Sigh.

I'm perfectly content with my current Clear services and I don't intend to hack anything... but I'm concerned that someone could potentially log into my Clear device and change my admin password (which is no longer the default password, of course...)

So, what are the security defects here?

• The informed populace can log into my wifi hotspot and change my admin password
• There's no way (yet) for me to stop them
• Presumably, the "informed populace" can also go in and screw with my security settings, therefore opening a way for them to gather my data, including credit card information if and when I send that over the network.

Why are these security defects not that bad?

• The "informed populace" is so far very small. The wifi hotspot is also small. It's unlikely that anyone within range of it will be able to figure out how to use it... or hack those using it.
• this is probably Clear's way of resetting *lusers' admin passwords when they forget them, which is a necessary task
• With some work, I can probably change the password on the super account.

* luser is a contraction of loser and user and means an uninformed user.

Euler 13

Today I learned about Ruby inject, otherwise known as a left fold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fold_(higher-order_function)

nums.inject &:'+'

&: takes the ... and calls to proc which is a callable object. with the provided arguments... the result is that you can take a method name on one of the array objects (like +) and ...do it.

1.send '+', 2

Assuming that you've assigned nums[] to hold the data you're dealing with, then puts nums.inject(0) {|a, b| a + b} will get you the answer 9and then you just take the first ten digits)

A much less elegant way to do this is

sum = 0

for i in 0..nums.size-1

sum = sum + nums[i]

end

puts sum

Once you understand what the notation does, it's an elegant way of doing it. But the uneducated will be extremely confused. There is all sorts of evil to it.

Impostor syndrome:

The recurring feeling that you don't know what the hell you're doing, regardless of whether or not anyone else knows what they're doing. Brought on in this case by reading blogs written by people while they were attending TWU.

Right now, my flatmate is watching... some show... about cops, I think? In her room. So that's cool, although I can hear it pretty well.

Passport: I lost mine. I spent most of today and yesterday looking for it and trying to figure out where it could have gone. if it were in my apartment, I would have found it. But I'm reasonably sure that it hasn't left my apartment since September. We haven't been burgled or anything, so... where could it have gone? I have no idea.

On Tuesday (the earliest appointment available) I have to go downtown and get a new one (in person, for a painful amount of cash). Then I can send my Indian Visa application, which will be lovely. In fact, there is a faint chance that I can even make the hoped-for deadline that Lily from TW sent me, or at least not miss it by more than a day. Sigh. I'm very upset with myself for misplacing my passport. I don't know how I did it; it was in a safe logical place... and now it's not there. I obviously moved it while cleaning, or used it for some purpose which doesn't come immediately to memory.

I was going to go to RHoK today but instead spent the day looking for my passport (and being somewhat ill from the typhoid vaccine). It snowed somewhat excessively earlier. Biking in snow is difficult; it would help if I had larger tires...

I wish I had gone to RHoK. But at the same time, I know that opportunities for communal freeware opensource coding are not all that difficult to find. And I can always just scout github and request a fork of something. The human interaction is valuable, but it can be worked without.

Right now I'm trying to make a coherent summary of what I think would be good to learn while at TWU. Messy version is at http://notepad.cc/share/SQnRYrimN5 for now.

Oh hey. I should have used http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html#uh-0 sed to deal with euler 13.

Southwest database fail

Linda: So it turns out that the reason that I've been locked out of my account is that when I booked your ticket their database subbed your birthday for mine, therefore no validation with my birthday would work. Database flaw, they have one. Also, it seems likely that all of my password reset emails are in your spambox somewhere.
(1:29:32 PM) ce: oh, that's ugly :(
(1:29:54 PM) ce: at least it's fixed now?
(1:30:59 PM) Linda: No, it's not. The database also subbed in middle name and gender and I can't fix them from this end for some reason. Unless I get this fixed, there's no way I can get through security again if booking travel through my SW account.
(1:31:03 PM) Linda: Sigh.
(1:31:27 PM) ce: that's fucking terrible.

When I booked a trip for him using my account (and the rewards and vouchers in my account) the database must have inserted his information instead of mine in the fields of: middle name, birthday, gender, and email address. And there's no way to fix it from the consumer side of the webpage.

However, the good news is that, thanks to someone on the help line, I have a password to my account now. The bad news is that I can't book travel yet, unless I want travel booked for a male with my first and last names, but Lance's middle name. ...useless, no? So, back to the phone help line.

Edit: Called customer service 214-932-0333. After some initial confusion on the part of the agent, and then a request that I fax her my drivers license (my reply: "I don't have a fax machine... can I email you a picture?"), she simply changed my data to correct data which I supplied verbally. A quick refresh of my account page shows that she changed my middle name and my gender, and although for some reason my account won't show me what she changed my birthday to, I have no reason to doubt that she did that accurately too.

So, where are the security flaws here?

• Initial database flaw- replacing good information with bad. How far does this extend?
• In password reset attempts, sometimes two attempts with the same data had different results, i.e. either "bad data, please retry" or "email sent, please click link"
• Lack of ability to change your own birthday/gender on the website might be an attempt at security? Or just a bug. Inability to see my own birthday in my account info is definitely a bug, because if I can't see it, it might be wrong and I would have no way of knowing.
• Ability for customer service rep to change account info without evidence other than my voice (and confirmation data that I provided, such as address, name, birthday... all things that someone could find out about me).

By the way... the way to add a Southwest LUV voucher to your account is here: https://www.southwest.com/flight/travel-funds-results.html (for the next time that I forget and get frustrated)

quantum crypto

Quantum crypto is what I claim to be interested in. It would help if I took some time and poked around in advanced math. I made it through Calculus 4 (didn't know that existed, did you? Me either) but I stopped there for reasons of practicality- i.e. gotta get the degree, get out, and pay pack the loans.

I don't love math enough to chase it in my free time, but at the same time I like it enough that I choose it over other occupations when it's one of a set of options... and frankly once you get past algebra, math and numbers are differentiated by many factors.

I guess I'll go donate to the EFF and go back to writing Ruby of slowly increasing quality.

Cyberpunk tropes

I was looking for cyberpunk ebooks and began thinking about common themes in cyberpunk literature.

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/

AI evolves out of the internet

nanobots

India / Japan / China (is this just a western thing?)

neotribalism / geotribalism

copyright leads to war

lone hacker

against The Man

nearfuture (at least the beginning of the series)

space (in-system, not FTL)

urban

one-world syndrome / globalization

convergence

tech singularity

social breakdown as tech evolves faster than response

megacorporations

human vs. economy

lack of idealists / idealists die

hacker as protagonist

human mind incomplete without data access