Tag: Internet

Bringing Nothing to the Party

I heard about the book thanks to a post written by @nikan. I read the HTML version of it on my BeBook Mini. What follows are a few thoughts on the book (in no particular order):

While the subtitle of the book reads:

True Confessions of a New Media Whore

It could easily (and more fittingly) read:

“Οὐκ ἐᾷ με καθεύδειν· τὸ τοῦ Μιλτιάδου τρόπαιον”

According to the narrative, Carr spends a lot of his time in Entrepreneur networking events together with very (financially) successful (and famous in certain circles) people:

“I’ve been around the people in this room for my entire working life, and count many of them among my good friends. I’ve written about them in newspapers, and I’ve published their books. I go to their parties, and share their successes and failures. But I’m not one of them . And that’s fine by me.”

(Big personal parenthesis: The above paragraph could easily describe my experience with the Greek Database Mafia. I am a friend of most of them, but not one of them. And that is fine by me too.)

Only it really was not fine by the author. And with “If them, then why not me?” at hand, he proceeds on discussing about his successes and failures (including some personal ones) using sharp British humor, which is kind of helpful when one reads the book on the bus returning home after work. Other than that the book contains useful instructions on how not to kill your angel investor by Power Point and a basic element for success:

– Have a fucking brilliant idea

Ultimately, Paul Carr failed in his quest for while he was committed to the jet-set lifestyle of the entrepreneurs he spent time drinking with, he was not committed to hard work the same way they did. An interesting story, but nothing more.

HOUMF! Con version 0.0 (mind recompilation)

mind recompilation by skotos

Αντιγράφω από το Internet Archive:

Το HOUMF! Con version 0.0 διεξήχθη το Σάββατο 6 Ιανουαρίου 2001 στο Αμφιθέατρο Πληροφορικής στην Πολυτεχνειούπολη Ζωγράφου (Εθνικό Μετσόβειο Πολυτεχνείο). Υπολογίζεται ότι περίπου 150 άτομα συγκεντρώθηκαν εκεί και εξέφρασαν τη βούλησή τους να δοθεί συνέχεια…

Το HOUMF! Con version 0.0 εστίασε την προσοχή του στη συνάθροιση ανθρώπων με κάτι-παραπάνω-από-απλές γνώσεις πληροφορικής και με ενδιαφέροντα στους τομείς ασφάλειας δικτύων/ υπολογιστών και προχωρημένων τεχνικών προγραμματισμού. Βασικός σκοπός ήταν να γνωριστούμε μεταξύ μας καλύτερα και να θέσουμε τις βάσεις για περαιτέρω συνεννόηση και συνεργασία.

Η συνάθροιση αυτή ήταν κρίσιμης σημασίας, καθώς θα έθετε τις βάσεις για τη διοργάνωση ενός πλήρους Con. Τόσο το μικρό χρονικό διάστημα για τη διοργάνωση όσο και η δύσκολα προβλέψιμη ανταπόκριση που θα είχε, κατέστησε το version 0.0 κάτι σαν demo version, ενδεικτικό για τις μελλοντικές προοπτικές.

Η διοργάνωση του version 0.0 ήταν ιδιαίτερα επίπονη, αλλά και διδακτική, καθώς αποτελεί χρήσιμη εμπειρία και παρακαταθήκη για τη διοργάνωση ενός πλήρους HOUMF! Con.

Οι διοργανωτές (aka HOUMFers – houmfers@houmf.org) ήταν (με αλφαβητική σειρά): Budha, databus, DiJ, N3tKick3r, night, Prowler, w0lverine. Τη διοργάνωση υποστήριξαν το HACK.gr και το #/dev/urandom.

It was fun after all…

Ticket to the Con

If you cannot kill the content, kill the path that leads to it

One can stop content distribution by DDoS-ing the networks hosting it. This is a direct attack from one opponent to another. There are also some indirect attacks that people rarely think about (or notice). For the content to be reached, two things must be available: routing and DNS. And these are services that are not necessarily under the administrative control of any of the two parties in conflict. And they can even be easier targets, since they can be put in the position to choose between one customer and the rest of their 500K customers.

With Wikileaks now moving to wikileaks.ch, are we to expect a DDoS on the .ch DNS servers?

When are we going to see Wikileaks blackhole routing? Or routing to its DNS servers being blackholed? Or even to its parent ccTLD, making whole countries invisible to DNS? I wonder whether has anybody collected any data on that…

Επίσκεψη στο CoLab

Χτες μετά από τη δουλειά μαζί με τον @kotsgeor επισκεφτήκαμε το CoLab. Μας υποδέχτηκαν ο Σταύρος και ο Σπύρος. Μας ξενάγησαν στον (πολύ όμορφο και ζεστό) χώρο και μας μίλησαν για το τι σκέφτονται για το CoLab και τις συνέργειες που επιθυμούν να ξεπηδήσουν μέσα από αυτό. Τα παιδιά είναι ανοιχτά σε ιδέες από τους επισκέπτες ώστε να μπορούν να προσφέρουν μέσα από το χώρο ότι περισσότερο μπορούν για τους υποψήφιους χρήστες του. Δεν αρνήθηκαν να απαντήσουν σε καμία μας ερώτηση, όπως π.χ. τιμολόγηση των παρεχόμενων υπηρεσιών (που δεν υπάρχει ακόμα στο site).

Flashback: Από το 1990 μέχρι και σήμερα έχω δει πολλούς χώρους που θα τους ονομάζε κανείς hackerspace. Έχω δει ιδέες καλές, κακές ακόμα και καταδικασμένες να κάνουν τον κύκλο τους. Έχω δει να οικοδομούνται σχέσεις φιλίας, εμπιστοσύνης και σεβασμού στην ικανότητα, όπως έχω δει επίσης να συμβαίνει ένα απίστευτο μοίρασμα της παραγόμενης γνώσης. Ήμουν εκεί όταν κάποιος είχε μια πραγματικά εφυή ιδέα και ξέρω αυτή τη λάμψη στο μάτι. Έχω δει το αποτέλεσμα. Σε όλα τα παραπάνω όμως δεν υπήρχε κάτι, στο οποίο στοχεύει το CoLab. Το οικονομικό κίνητρο των χρηστών του χώρου. Γιατί οι χώροι αυτοί ήταν πανεπιστημιακά εργαστήρια.

Εύχομαι στο CoLab καλή αρχή και να εκπληρώσει το σκοπό για τον οποίο δημιουργήθηκε. Ερμού 44 στον πέμπτο όροφο. Αξίζει να το επισκεφτείτε, να δείτε το χώρο και να μιλήσετε με τα παιδιά μόνοι σας.

$5/year and the Paradox of Choice

It has been over a month since I purchased 20G of disk space from Google for $5 per year. Given that a relatively cheap 32G USB drive is being sold for €19 this is a bargain (including the risk of not being able to access my stuff over the network).

The reason I bought space from Google, was because I wanted to upload “My Documents” (PDF mostly) to a single place where I could access it from any computer I work from and always be in sync. By the way, for non-documents I am using MyNetworkFolders.

But here is where the Paradox of Choice emerges: In my “Books” directory I see over 200 ebooks (Math and CS-Math related mostly). They are either O’Reilly titles (including a few from Apress less than 20) or interesting books that have been made available online. Picking them up and filing them in a directory is quick and easy (Hey a book on Optimization, another on Topology, etc let’s keep a copy around). Can you imagine the actual space that 200+ hundred books would occupy? Would the bookshelf cost $5 per year? But then again how many of these books will I ever manage to read in my lifetime? At least it seems that sometimes when someone has a question, the answer may have already been downloaded.

The speed and easiness of the delivery are making us somewhat less picky (or alter the way we research before grabbing a book). I was having a similar discussion with a friend who is a professional photographer and he observes that people click far too many (digital) photographs which they file away and forget, as opposed to taking the time and shooting less photographs (because film was expensive, developing took time, etc) which they enjoyed viewing more. As Ashby said “only variety can destroy variety“.

Adobe Digital Editions E_ACT_TOO_MANY_ACTIVATIONS error

After reformatting my desktop (and installing the world) I was bitten by the “too many activations” error while trying to register my Adobe-ID. I lost about an hour chatting to the web support staff, with no sucess. I resorted to Adobe forums, where Jim Lester provided a helpful answer:

Support through ADE is not offered via phone or Web Chat support. It is only offered through submitting a web case (http://www.adobe.com/support/digitaleditions – click on ‘Submit a web case’). Avereage resolution time for these cases runs about 3 days.

Note: you have 6 activations (for computers, and then 6 seperate activations for devices) and each time you reformat you lose your activation

I submitted my web case and in less than 24h I got a friendly email informing me that I was OK.

When should we migrate our mail servers to IPv6?

In “IPv6 and Email: What’s the Hurry?“, Todd Herr from Return Path argues:

As for migration strategies for email, I’m going to throw one out here that may run contrary to popular thinking: perhaps there’s no need for you to migrate your public facing email streams to IPv6 in the next few years. Instead, I propose that you slow down, focus on some other things first, and then worry about migrating.

A small conversation followed on twitter:

I cannot imagine anyone in the email delivery business risking not to be able to deliver email in the dual-stack world that we are entering. Really I am not crying wolf, for yesterday Daniel Karrenberg wrote:

So it looks like a genuine IPv4 network problem while IPv6 was just fine. A whole new level of redundancy!

Imagine having a path that reaches the desired destination and not taking it. Make no mistake, situations like this will start to appear. They will be routing problems, DNS problems and other unforeseen problems in the largest network interoperability experiment ever.

Todd Herr also advices that “First, you are going to have to listen for outbound email connections on IPv6 from your own customers”. I disagree with that also. The first step is to accept IPv6 traffic on all services before creating outgoing IPv6 traffic. This means that ISPs must be able to accept email coming from IPv6 before sending. And yes I know that while the robustness principle was invented for what one accepts and sends within a protocol’s specification (i.e. what one sends and accepts in an SMTP dialog) it also applies here. One cannot have machines ready to send via a medium where no one is listening. First we build the listeners and then the senders.

The time to deploy IPv6 is now: First the routers, then the servers, next the services and last the users. So yes, you do not have to migrate your email infrastructure to IPv6 tomorrow, but spend this year planning (and testing). In a year the migration clock will be ticking.