My esteemed friend Dr. Rich Boakes has noticed some odd behaviour in his Apache logs that turned out to be people abusing his OpenID server to make page requests to remote sites, presumably as a way of increasing clicks. He raises an interesting point as to whether this makes OpenID servers potential DDoS amplifiers (I suspect he’s right).
Category Archives: Internet
I Can Haz Android (on an OpenMoko Freerunner)
I have been assimilated. Or at least my OpenMoko Freerunner has been! It’s now running the Koolu port of Android 1.5 “Cupcake” on it, and with a *very* helpful hint from Damian Spriggs on the OpenMoko community mailing list it’s able to make and receive calls and SMS’s. For the record you need to get ADB working and grab a root shell on the phone. Then you can use the sqlite command line utility to set the “provisioned” flag in its DB.
# sqlite3 /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db
SQLite version 3.5.9
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite> INSERT INTO secure (name, value) VALUES ('device_provisioned', 1);
I’ve also found a rather nice application called VCardIO for importing my contacts exported in VCard v2.1 format from KDE’s Kontact addressbook. Now we’ll see how it goes over the next few days!
CSamuel.org Now IPv6 Enabled
Well thanks to those nice people at Rimuhosting for migrating this Xen host to a 2.6.27.x kernel and pointing my at the Hurricane Electric IPv6 TunnelBroker.net service this blog is now IPv6 enabled (as is Donna’s site, blog and podcast)! Slowly updating DNS for all the other sites hosted here but I’ll finish that off tomorrow night.
Congrats to Brian for being the first person to hit the site by IPv6! 🙂
Google Chrome OS
I suspect that the world and its dog will have heard about this by now, but in case you’ve somehow missed the announcement from Google..
Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
If (and I emphasis if) this takes off then MS might be in for something of a rough ride in the Netbook market. The Netbook vendors have been unable to stand up to the MS monopoly with Linux on Netbooks until now, perhaps Google can start to rebalance the marked a little ?
On Twitter
OK, I broke, I’ve got myself a Twitter account (chris_bloke)..
Iranian Internet Controls – Targeting Flash and Email ?
Some very interesting investigations done by the Arbor Networks security folks looking into Iranian traffic engineering and filtering from the time of the Iranian presidential election onwards. They have both a preliminary investigation showing a dramatic fall in traffic at the time of the election and a follow up deeper look demonstrating that they appear to be specifically targeting streaming media (flash, et. al) and email, as graphically demonstrated by this graph:
Web and other traffic have been left relatively unscathed, prompting this comment:
Perhaps games provide a possible source of covert channels (e.g. “Bring your elves to the castle on the island of Azeroth and we’ll plan the next Ahmadinejad protest rally?â€)
Phishing by Phone
This got caught by the spam filters:
To speed up the process, you are required to call us at our free toll free number (+61) 731-235-996 to verify your Commonwealth Maestro Card.
First time I’ve seen a phishing attack that uses (presumably VOIP) phone numbers (in this case allocated to GoTalk in Brisbane, they own 0731230000 to 0731239999 according to the search you can do here) rather than a web site (though I suspect it’s been around for a while).
Benchmarking Amazon EC2 for High-performance Scientific Computing
There’s an interesting little paper published in Login on, er, well, “Benchmarking Amazon EC2 for High-performance Scientific Computing” (PDF). Basically it shows that whilst there’s promise, there’s also a massive gulf between what you can currently do on EC2 and on a regular HPC cluster in terms of MPI jobs.
(Hat tip)
Belle Monte-Carlo Production on the Amazon EC2 Cloud
A few weeks ago Martin Sevior and Tom Ffield of the University of Melbourne did a talk at VPAC called “Belle Monte-Carlo production on the Amazon EC2 cloud” based on a paper they’d presented at the International Conference of Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics. The presentation is now available on the VPAC website.
It’s all about testing the cloud computing model via Amazon EC2 for Monte Carlo production for the SuperBelle experiment at the KEK collider in Japan. My favourite comment is that for a real full production run on Amazon EC2 to be useful it would need to be able to return data from S3 to the KEK collider at 600MB/s (~4.7Gb/s) sustained.
I don’t know what Amazon would say to that – well, apart from maybe “no”. 🙂
NB: This is the talk I mentioned in the comments on Joe Landman’s blog post called “Cloudy Issues“.
Time Team Excavation Reports 2005 to 2009
Wessex Archaeology (a registered charity in the UK) have the Time Team excavation reports from 2005-2009 on their website as part of their Time Team site.
They’ve also got a number of blogs (and an aggregator for them), an awesome HD LIDAR flyover of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, a Twitter feed and a Flickr stream including a Time Team set. Nice one folks! 🙂