Dilithium Crystalworks

Static Blamed For Voting Snafu

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Static Electricity is being cited as a possible cause for a mess in Washington DC primary last September. It seems that 326 people voted at the Reeves Center precinct in September’s primary election.

The confusion started when the computer cartridge from the voting machine that captured the voting information was put into the citywide computer to be counted, there were an extra 1500 write in votes on it. This isn’t a case of somebody getting access to the tape drives where backup information is kept because unless I’m totally wrong about it, those “cartridges” are actually flash drives.

I think perhaps that there is another possible explanation, having to do with Voting Machine Security Flaws. I guess these election officials haven’t seen the videos that demonstrate those flaws very clearly.

Technorati Tags: voting machine vulnerability, vote counting problem, extra votes, too many votes, voting snafu

Posted in Electronics, Tech, opinion | No Comments »

Judge Upholds iPhone Antitrust & Computer Fraud Claims

iPhone users will be interested in news about the class action lawsuit that claims Apple and AT&T Mobility’s five-year exclusive voice and data service provider agreement for the iPhone is in violation of the anti-monopoly portions of anti-trust laws

The suit also charges Apple with breaking both Federal and California computer fraud and abuse laws when they released version 1.1.1 of it’s iPhone operating system when Apple knew full well that doing so would “brick” (render completely and permanently useless) iPhones that users had unlocked so that they could use carriers other than AT&T.

By Upholding those claims, the judge is allowing the case to go forward which means that Apple and AT&T are going to have a tough time with this lawsuit. They’ll probably be getting out the patio furniture covers a bit early this year because the lawyers aren’t going to be sitting by the pool on this one at all.

I didn’t read the whole thing, but the decision does make it clear that both Apple and AT&T have definitely been walking the wrong side of the fence and I think that it’s only a matter of time before there is a final judgment against them. This is going to cost them a lot more than just lawyers… probably in the tens of millions.

Technorati Tags: anti monopoly, computer fraud, apple, bricked iphone, at&t, iphone, unlocked iphone, anti trust

Posted in Business, Electronics, Financial, Hardware, Internet, Phones, Programming, Tech, opinion | No Comments »

RFID Passport Hack Demonstrated By Resurrecting Elvis

Government types would have us believe that the new “E Passports” are perfectly secure and that there’s no problem with them at all. They spend a lot of time and money trying to make sure that everyone believes this and goes along with it, blindly assuming that the RFID chips in their passports, credit cards and soon driver’s licenses is safe and tamper proof.

I suggest that before everybody gets out their pens to sign up for these RFIDs (pronounced “Are Fid”), they’d be well advised to have a look at something that was done by a group called “The Hacker’s Choice” which demonstrates (again) that they’re not secure at all.

In fact, THC has shown that it doesn’t take much at all in terms of free software and just a little bit of knowledge to read the contents of an epassport, alter the information and picture in any manner desired and then write that information to a new chip that will NOT raise any alarms when it’s scanned. Instead, the machine verification system considers it to be a valid passport.

They demonstrated this in the video below which shows them putting such modified RFID in a reader and having it accept the identification of Elvis as real. They even put his picture on it.

Technorati Tags: e passport, rfid security flaw, rfid passport, not tamper proof, epassport, rfid weakness, rfid flaws, rfid

Posted in Misc, News, Programming, Tech, opinion | No Comments »

Hollywood Trying To Block DVD Copying Software

Realnetworks new RealDVD program has been causing quite a stir which has now landed in the courtrooms. Hollywood in general, movie studios (can the MPAA be far away? I doubt it.) are all trying to stop the sale of this software that allows people to copy the contents of DVD’s to their computers so that it can be played without the disks.

Movie people are saying that this thing will essentially make massive piracy easy. I think that is kinda like saying that selling me a few Harley parts means I’ll be cruising on a new hog next week. It just doesn’t work that way.

From what I’ve read about the RealDVD program (see their FAQ for details), the software doesn’t break or crack the encryption that’s used on DVD’s to prevent copying. Instead the whole thing, encryption and all is copied to the computer where it can then be played. Copying to another disk would require breaking that encryption.

The movie folks are sure that this means there’s going to be a storm of people renting DVD’s and then copying them before returning so that they won’t have to buy the title. That’s unrealistic in the extreme, even paranoid.

First is the way people watch movies. For example now that it’s out I’m planning on getting Iron Man as soon as I can. I plan on buying the title instead of renting it because I plan to watch it more than once and I’m going to want to watch it on my 27 inch tv, not a 17 inch monitor. That means having the disk to put in my DVD player. It’s called fair use. When I buy something I want the ability to use it on any device I own or obtain in the future, even if that device wasn’t designed to use the original format.

Second is cost. RealDVD costs $49.95. If I want to just rent the movie, make a copy and return it, I’m sure not going to spend $49.95 to do it when there’s free, easy to find software available all over the Internet that will do the job easily and quickly. Software that will even make it possible to burn the resulting copy to a blank DVD.

The reason People are going to spend that $49 on RealDVD and programs like it is because they don’t mind buying a title they like….. once. However then they want the ability to do the same thing that they can do with software, make a backup copy or put it on another medium so that it can be used in a different device. Continued efforts on the part of movie studios, the MPAA, and other entities isn’t going to stop people from doing these things. It’s just going to make certain software really popular.

Technorati Tags: movie studios, copy dvd, mpaa, copy movies, realdvd, burn dvd, not piracy, fair use

Posted in Business, Computers, Entertainment, File Sharing, Misc, Movies, Software, mpaa, opinion | No Comments »

Great Combinations

There’s been some great combinations over the years. Abbot and Costello, Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon, Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz, Finicky cats in commercials for cat supplies and their favorite foods, spam cheese & tomato sandwiches, ice cream & chocolate sauce, Shatner & Nimoy, Denny Crane & Alan Shore… the list goes on.

Here’s one of the latest that I found, of all places, on Slashdot. The cast of Star Trek as, “The A Team”

Technorati Tags: crossovers, remakes, classic tv, star trek, the a team

Posted in Entertainment, Misc, opinion | No Comments »

Wal-Mart Ending DRM Support, Many To Lose Music They Paid For

I read on Slashdot that Wal-Mart is ending support for DRM encumbered music. This is both good and bad news at the same time.

The good news is that with the world’s largest retailer moved to DRM Free music last year they gave a LOT of additional momentum to the entire movement to get content providers to stop hogtying users with DRM. They (the RIAA and “Big Content”) need to understand that the days when people will accept DRM are numbered. The practice is like wooden swing sets in a futuristic world of automated flying cars.

The bad news is that when they end DRM support, anybody that’s bought the .wma music files with DRM on them will suddenly find that their music doesn’t work anymore. According to a post on Boing Boing, people who have DRM encumbered music from WalMart have until October 9th, 2008 to burn that music to CD-ROM in order to keep from losing it when they shut down the DRM server.

Then there’s another factor that was mentioned in a recent post on Ars Technica thats more bad news. It seems that WalMart is into censorship. I wasn’t aware of this because frankly, I’m not into buying music downloads, especially from WalMart. The nuts and bolts of this is that some titles have been edited to remove content that WalMart apparently objects to.

I tried to check this out for myself. Unfortunately when I tried to load the “MP3 Downloads” section of the WalMart site, I was greeted with this warning:

We notice you’re not using Internet Explorer. We will be making enhancements to our updated version in the future to support the Firefox browser. If you want to take advantage of all the features in our updated design now, please get the latest version of Internet Explorer

I tried again with Opera, and then back to Firefox to use Prefbar’s ability to spoof the ID string and appear as IE and got the hateful message again. Therefore I’m unable to confirm this since I will *NOT* use any version of IE for anything except testing local html pages that I create. (the only exception being the occasional utility that’s useful in spite of being made so that it uses parts of IE, in those cases the IE history, cookies and cache are purged when I’m done.)

In the meantime, if you have .wma music files that you’ve bought from Wally World, you have only a week or so to get them burned to CD if you don’t want to lose them when the DRM server shuts down.

Technorati Tags: drm free music, walmart music edited, riaa, drm, censorship, walmart

Posted in Business, DRM, Music, opinion, riaa | 1 Comment »

Problems With Nevada Email Encryption Law

There’s good and bad here. Good is the fact that the state of Nevada passed a law back in 2005 that as of October 1st this year requires that any business in that state must encrypt all communications that contain personally identifiable information. I wish all states would pass such a law.

You’d think that such a law (assuming everybody followed it.) would mean that “losing” information being sent by email would become almost as uncommon as flash memory was in the early 1980’s. Have a look at the law though, and there’s a problem.

NRS 597.970 Restrictions on transfer of personal information through electronic transmission. [Effective October 1, 2008.]

1. A business in this State shall not transfer any personal information of a customer through an electronic transmission other than a facsimile to a person outside of the secure system of the business unless the business uses encryption to ensure the security of electronic transmission.

2. As used in this section:

(a) “Encryption” has the meaning ascribed to it in NRS 205.4742.
(b) “Personal information” has the meaning ascribed to it in NRS 603A.040.
(Added to NRS by 2005, 2506, effective October 1, 2008)

That in itself is good. I consider it to be something of a “DUH Moment” anytime sensitive or personally identifying information is sent online that it should be encrypted so that only those who are supposed to receive it are able to decrypt and read the data.

The bad part comes when you look at their definition of “encryption”:

NRS 205.4742 “Encryption” defined. “Encryption” means the use of any protective or disruptive measure, including, without limitation, cryptography, enciphering, encoding or a computer contaminant, to:

1. Prevent, impede, delay or disrupt access to any data, information, image, program, signal or sound;
2. Cause or make any data, information, image, program, signal or sound unintelligible or unusable; or
3. Prevent, impede, delay or disrupt the normal operation or use of any component, device, equipment, system or network.

This definition is entirely too broad. It’s actually possible that you could look at this and decide that emailing a password protected Word or PDF file would fit the requirements. The problem with this is that there are a lot of easily available tools that allow anybody to recover the password that will unlock such a document.

If anybody is serious about encryption then the only thing to do is go with a “strong encryption” solution. i.e. the company should get GnuPG, create the needed keypairs and then require that all data that contains sensitive or personally identifiable be encrypted to the private keys of those who are authorized to have that information. This way, nobody’s going to get access to something they shouldn’t have. Not even if said email is posted on a public forum, because the content will be encrypted.

Technorati Tags: nevada, personally identifiable, encryption, email, encryption law

Posted in Business, Computers, Internet, Privacy, opinion | No Comments »

How To Create a Password Reset Disk For XP

If you’re running Windows XP Pro and you’ve got it set up with a separate Aministrator account and however many user accounts that each require a password for to logon, sooner or later somebody’s going to come to you looking really stressed out like they’d had about six too many weight loss pills and announce in a panic “I can’t remember my password.”

The answer is fortunately an easy one. It just requires thinking ahead to be prepared for the problem. You can create a password reset disk that will allow you (or one of your users) to log on when the password has been forgotten.

1.Click Start, Control Panel, and then User Accounts.
2.Click the name of the account you want a password reset disk for.
3.Under Related Tasks, click “Prevent a forgotten password”.
4.Follow the directions in the Forgotten Password Wizard to create a password reset disk.

store this disk someplace safe in a secure location, because anyone using it can access that local users account and reset the password to something else.

Then, in the event of a forgotten password, the password reset disk can be used to change the password to one that you remember.

Technorati Tags: windows xp, password reset disk, tips, how to, password

Posted in Computers, Software, how to | No Comments »

UN Agency Examining Changes That Would Limit Anonymity Online

The UN, the NSA, and others are talking about a change to Internet Protocols that would implement “IP Traceback” which would make it difficult, if not impossible, to be anonymous online.

The big noise they’re making to justify it is how anonymity is often abused and used for criminal purposes. The problem with that reasoning though is that anything can be abused like that, from diet pills to kitchen knives.

The real problem is that if this isn’t stopped, it would be a serious blow against people in countries with oppressive regimes, victims of abuse, and any of dozens of other perfectly legitimate reasons to be anonymous. Then there’s my favorite reason to be anonymous: What I’m doing is none of anybody’s business but mine.

Besides which, creating a method for governments to track down and silence their opposition is in direct violation of the UN’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Then there’s the simple fact that if something can be abused, it will be. Anonymity can be abused and is frequently. The IP Traceback ability would also be abused to silence free speech and basic human rights.

The whole thing needs to be tossed in the dumper now.

And the old “if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide” argument holds exactly zero weight.

Technorati Tags: ip traceback, oppressive regimes, human rights, freedom of speech, anonymity, free speech, un

Posted in Freedom of speech, Internet, Misc, Privacy, opinion | No Comments »

Buy Dot Com Really Does Rock

Recently I’ve decided that I was going to be changing the way I do the occasional website review. I decided that instead of settling with just writing about a site that I would also do a video review in which I could point out the positive and negative points about a site using a visual commentary that I’d narrate (probably with a Text To Speech voice, my sound pickup really blows.. too much background noise).

Anyway, This got me to looking around at some of my earliest videos and I ran across one I did called “Why Buy.com Rocks” and it occurs to me that while it’s been a while since I did that, it’s still true that Buy.com rocks because it’s hard to beat some of the deals you can find there. For example they’ve got a Garmin GPS, it’s the Navigon 2100 Max. It’s a top notch unit that normally retails for $389.99 and Buy.com has it for $284.99 which saves you a cool $105.

It doesn’t stop there either. They’ve literally got an inventory of millions of items in just about every department you can think of (within limits, no space shuttles or nuclear submarines in stock unless they’re models.). Add that to free shipping on lots of stuff and you’ve got a pretty good buying situation. (don’t forget, Christmas is only a few months away!)

Just for the heck of it, here’s the video I mentioned earlier. I made it back in Feb of 08 and it was the seventh video I’ve made and I think probably the best one I had done at that point (no humility here at all can you tell?).

Which reminds me, I need to look into their affiliate program sometime soon.

video, website review, video, buy.com, buy.com rocks, savings, deals

Posted in Business, Electronics, Entertainment, Financial, Hardware, Misc, Movies, Music, opinion | No Comments »