If You Sent Me An Email
If you sent me an email anytime after Sunday at 12pm, please resend it to me. Several settings became screwed up and I’m just finding them and getting them fixed.
Technology’s Infestation of my Life
Examples of how technology has permeated every single bit of my life.
Email’s Down
Some settings got screwed up (not my fault) and email hasn’t been working since late Sunday night. I’m still working on getting it up. In the mean time, call me, use my school email, or Facebook me.
Fixed
Mozy Hypothesis and the End of The World
Mozy is an online backup utility that I’ve been using for a few months now. I wrote about it on StudentTabletPC a while back:
You get 2GB for free! This is perhaps the biggest selling point. One of the other online backup sites I was looking at, Box.net, only offers 1GB. With Mozy, I get twice as for the same low cost (of free).
It’s easy to setup. Selecting files is a two part processes. First you select types of files to backup: documents, settings, bookmarks, financial, etc. Then you can select folders to backup as well.
It’s secure. This for me is a huge deal. Mozy uses 448-bit BlowFish encryption with my own private key. This means that unless you have my super secret password, you better count on spending the next few millennia trying to get access to my data.
Backs up open and locked files. I have Mozy set to backup around 4am every morning. Basically, I just leave my Tablet on and it does the rest. But what if I forget to close a document? Some backup programs would freak out and not backup the document I have open. But not Mozy, it will backup the file even if Windows has a lock on it.
Bandwidth Throttle. Not a huge deal for me, but still worth mentioning. You can set maximum uploads limits on Mozy so it doens’t suck all your bandwidth when it’s sending your files to their server. I do this at 4am, so it’s a non-issue for me.
One other thing worth mentioning is that you don’t have to perform an entire backup session at once. For example, let’s say that I have Mozy set to backup files X, Y, and Z. Mozy starts running at 4am just like I told it to. It backs up file X and starts to backup file Y, but then my Internet stops working because I have a crappy ISP.
No problem. When my Internet comes back, Mozy will pick back right where it left off.
It’s been about three months since I started using Mozy and thus far it’s been excellent. I would consider it the most successful, most complete, and most reliable system I have ever used and recommend it to everyone I know who’s looking for a backup service. In short, I’m very happy with it.
There is however, something cool about Mozy that I didn’t know. Every time Mozy backups my files, it also disproves the Riemann Hypothesis.
This is actually rather interesting since the Riemann hypothesis is probably the single greatest mathematical question of our time. It’s proof (or disproof as the case may be) would have catastrophic impacts on society.
Why? In short, almost all current cryptographic methods exploit a calculation efficiency with prime numbers. That is, the processing power to calculate the product of two very large prime numbers is exponentially ridiculously small versus the processing power needed to take the product and break it back down into the original prime numbers. Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis would create a quick way to break the product of two primes down and thus obliterate secure transactions. The point being, proving the Riemann Hypothesis more or less would be the end of the world…at least for the time being.
Of course, Mozy is really disproving the Riemann hypothesis. It’s an joke from the Mozy programmers. I sent them a “har har” message:
To the programs who have too much fun at Mozy,
Disproving the Riemann hypothesis on my computer, eh?
Thanks for a good laugh and keep up the good work!
-Andrew Ferguson
[tags]Mozy, Riemann, Riemann hypothesis[/tags]
MD5 Argument
There’s been a hilarious argument on the WP-Hackers mailing list over what MD5 is:
Its a one-way hash, and thinking it can’t be looked up in a rainbow
table or brute forced fairly easily is more often than not wrong
(because more often than not people are using things like md5() once
without any sort of salt to hash the password).But please, do not call it encryption. It is not, and it will never
be. Encrypting passwords in a database is just silly.
Response:
MD5 *is* technically an encryption scheme. And yes, with the help of rainbow tables, it can be decrypted – but it is never stored in plain text anywhere in a vanilla copy.
Instead, the user password when logging in is encrypted and the two MD5 hashes are compared.
Response:
No it is not. MD5 is technically a compression scheme. It is a one way
hash i.e. you cannot reverse the conversion function f(password) = hash.For it to be an encryption scheme there must be an equivalent function
g(hash) = password.Rainbow tables do not allow you to decrypt the MD5 hash as it has not
been encrypted all they allow you to do is identify one of the set of
plaintexts which compress to the hash string.
Response:
No, its not an encryption scheme. Its a digest algorithm. A one way
hash. And no, it can’t be decrypted, ever. You can do a reverse lookup
(rainbow tables) or generate a collision.Encryption by definition allows one to reverse the process knowing a
certain secret (the function to reverse the process). MD5 has no such
capability. In fact, run MD5 over a terabyte of data and it’ll end up
with the same length checksum as if you checksum the letter “a”.
MD5 is a cryptographic hash function. It takes an input, performs a reducing function on it, and spits out a 32 character “fingerprint.” There is no way to mathematically take a output of a MD5 function and get the original input back. I’ve have a MD5 utility up that you play around with: http://fergcorp.com/project/tools/md5.html
Why Can’t They Just Replace It, Like I Asked?
I headed down to to Central Telecom, Inc., literally the only certified Toshiba shop for a couple hundred miles. Plan A worked, kind of. Unbeknownst to me, my warranty had free expedition! Awesome. So I waited the 45 minutes or so it took to process it. Everything sounded fine for while, however, I was wearing my headphones. I took them off and the fan started the rattle again! WTF?! I heard some air blowing when I was CTI, so I’m thinking they decided to just blow it out ’cause the dust must be the problem, there’s no way over two years of almost constant use could have caused a bearing to fail. Can you hear my sarcasm? Good, it should be oozing through your keyboard by now.
So I’m going to call them on Monday, tell that I went in today and that I don’t think they replaced the fan and that I need them to replace it. Then I’ll drive down, again, and wait some more, again.
New Antivirus Recommendation
I’m getting rid of Microsoft Windows Defender and Command Antivirus today. Why? Performance. CodingHorror has the scoop:
And nothing cripples your PC’s performance quite like anti-virus software. This isn’t terribly surprising if you consider what anti-virus software has to do: examine every single byte of data that passes through your computer for evidence of malicious activity. But who needs theory when we have Oli at The PC Spy. Oli conducted a remarkably thorough investigation of the real world performance impact of security software on the PC. The results are truly eye-opening:
Percent slower Boot CPU Disk Norton Internet Security 2006 46% 20% 2369% McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 7% 20% 2246% Norton Internet Security 2007 45% 8% 1515% Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006 2% 0% 1288% ZoneAlarm ISS 16% 0% 992% Norton Antivirus 2002 11% 8% 658% Windows Live OneCare 11% 8% 512% Webroot Spy Sweeper 6% 8% 369% Nod32 v2.5 7% 8% 177% avast! 4.7 Home 4% 8% 115% Windows Defender 5% 8% 54% Panda Antivirus 2007 20% 4% 15% AVG 7.1 Free 15% 0% 19%
Holy crap. Norton and McAfee both increase disk access times by 20x! That’s over 0.16 seconds instead of 8 milliseconds! Fortunately, I have run either of those programs for at least two years. I have been using Command Antivirus since our schools offers it for free, but the update process sucks beyond belief. I’ve also been running Windows Defender, but found that it’s probably doing more harm then good with it’s 50% increase in access times. I’m now installing with AVG Free Edition on my Tablet and I will be running that exclusively, I recommend the same now.
12 Hours of Uber Productivness
I’ve been pretty productive the last 24 hours or so. Here’s what I’ve accomplished:
- Got a good start on my housing for next year…maybe even almost finalized
- Called tech support to try and get my laptop fan fixed (it’s been really noisy of late and needs to be replaced)
- Got an appointment setup for Red October (my car) to get some things diagnosed and fixed, including:
- Constant pull to the right
- Low idle speed (~200 RPM) with jumps to regular (~1000 RPM), bad O2 sensor?
- Under body rattle at lower (<800 RPM) speeds
- Got a bunch of blog posts out of the way and cleaned up my desktop a bit
Tech support has been less then helpful. They want $75 to expedite my diagnostic. Otherwise I have to give up Apollo (my Tablet) for 3-5 business days, which can’t happen because I do all my school work on it. I can buy the part myself for $36 and change, plus shipping.
If you figure the drive down to Lone Tree and back is about 23 miles each way, I’m looking at $5 in gas for a round trip. If I do that twice (once to diagnose it, once to actually get it fixed…both while I wait), that’s $10 in gas…or almost a 1/4 of the cost of the part. Bonus: There is a Krispy Kreme in Lone Tree, which I’ve been craving since my dream yesterday.
My plan is to drive down there and turn on the charm and logic. Turn the computer on, show them the racket it makes, and get them to order the part.
Plan B is to talk with Nick Lew from SAAS and see if he’d be willing to get the part for me under warranty and have it shipped to me for a modest fee.
Plan C is to order the part my self.
New Phone
I got a new phone (again). I think this makes me six for five: six phones in five years; yea, sick I know. This time it’s an LG VX8100. I’ve had good luck with LG’s in the past. Motorola has been the bane of my existence, so I’m giving up on them completely and sticking to LG from here on out (watch me eat my words in a few years).
In any event, the VX8100 is so much more easier to hack. It comes with it’s Bluetooth serial port enabled by default (not even turned off by Verizon, which is unusual if you ask me). “Feanish” over at HowardForums has an excellent step by step for tweaking it, if you’re interested.
[tags]lg, vx, vx 8100, lg vx 8100, motorola, verizon, bluetooth, hack, serial port[/tags]
Shutdown Day
In just a few seconds, Saturday will begin and Shutdown Day will begin in my time zone. What does that mean? No computer…for the entire day. Yea, I know. Amazing, we’ll see how it goes. Since I won’t be on the computer, there will be:
- no email
- no RSS reading
- no AIM
- no Facebook
- no updates
- no comments answered
- you get the idea
I’ll be back some Sunday, probably by late morning or early afternoon. I have two discs worth of Star Trek: The Next Generation to watch, so I’ll probably do some of that. Feel free to give me a call, you know my number.
If you want to learn more about Shutdown Day, visit the website:
Shutdown Day
The Blockbuster Killer
A while back, Scoble wrote about a new product Verisign was rolling out:
Here’s what they were demoing: a peer-to-peer system for selling and distributing high-def videos. It really rocks. I downloaded a movie while there in the booth and the quality wasn’t distinguishable from the HD-DVD’s I get from Netflix.
It made me realize why would any of us go into a Blockbuster in the future, or wait two days for a DVD to show up from Netflix.
Scoble called it “a Netflix killer.” Maybe.
For the past few months, Blockbuster has been running an ad campaign targeted at Netflix users. The basic idea is this: We (Blockbuster) do pretty much the same thing Netflix does (send DVD’s to you in the mail). But we make it better, if you want to watch another movie now (and not wait for the mailman), just come to Blockbuster and drop off your DVD and get another one for free.
It was a pretty good campaign. Until now.
A while back, I got the chance to get into Netflix’s WatchNow program. I played around with it a bit and thought it was pretty cool. I had an hour free yesterday between some classes, what better way to fill the time than to watch a movie (or at least start watching it). Mom had recommended Born into Brothels, so I started that. The quality was pretty good.
After lab today, I wanted to relax. All my Netflix movies were in the mail, I went for a real movie this time: The Untouchables. It wasn’t quite DVD quality, but it’s nothing I’d miss. Read as: The quality was awesome for what it was, streaming a full length feature film over the Internet with less than 60 seconds of buffering time.
Netflix basically just said: Blockbuster had a great a idea. Why make people wait for the mail? But why make them drive to store as well? You don’t even have to get dressed, now you can watch movies online for free (for every dollar you already spend at Netflix, you get one hour of online movie viewing per month).
The only downside is that you have to watch it on your computer and you have to be connected to the Internet. This isn’t a huge hurdle for me and it’s not a deal breaker since I watch most of my movies on my laptop anyway.
The WatchNow feature isn’t completely rolled out to everyone yet, but it will be soon (June, I believe).
[tags]Netflix, WatchNow, Blockbuster, Scoble, movies, online, verisign, Born into Brothels, The Untouchables, DVD[/tags]