I am thinking of switching hosting providers for this site. Those with a technical bent may wish to read on.
Category: Internet matters
Posts about the internet
When only the high-carbon option works
After an agonizing two hours of trying1 to book Eurostar tickets, I gave up and got a flight to Paris from EasyJet. I am not sure if the bookings problems were Eurostar’s or NatWest’s fault. If my bank is to blame, they have sunk even deeper in my estimation. If it was the train company, they lost two customers because their web interface is unreliable. It failed at every possible stage: listing train times, entering payment information, and processing my credit card.
I am leaving on the afternoon of April 26th (three days after my thesis submission) and returning on April 30th (a few weeks before exams). It would be nice to go for longer, but the middle of an Oxford term is not the time for an extended foreign jaunt.
[1] Over and over and over again, without success.
Serial numbers and used goods
One of the great things about the internet is the ability to deal with information that is far too diffuse and voluminous to be processed in other ways. Indeed, that is the principal way in which modern computing qualitatively changes that we are able to do, as opposed to altering the rate at which we can complete a particular task.
Given those characteristics, it surprises me that nobody has come up with a site that catalogs serial numbers for all the kinds of products that include them: from bicycles to cameras to mobile phones. Such a site would allow users to enter that information when they purchased a product. It would then be on hand for warranty claims and in the event of loss or theft. People purchasing such items online, or in used good shops, could check the database to ensure that the products they are buying are not listed as stolen. Like eBay, it is much more efficient to have all these numbers sorted in a single place than to have numerous separate databases. The chances of a person trawling through many sites are low, but one well organized one could get masses of traffic. (See: network effect)
You could even imagine a system where online retailers like eBay are integrated with such a site. The listing for a camera would thus include a serial number linked to an entry in the database. If you bought the item, then received one with a different serial number from the one listed, you would be entitled to lodge a complaint and the seller would get flagged as a potential fraudster. I have personally avoided buying photographic equipment from eBay because I fear that a lot of it may be stolen. Having some simple protections like these in place would make me feel a lot better about it.
PS. For an example of an existing but limited serial number listing, see the stolen equipment registry over at Photo.net. It is unlikely that someone buying a cheap digital camera online will look at that (I knew it existed and it took me some searching around to find the URL), but perhaps someone buying an expensive tilt-shift lens for a medium format camera system will.
Waiting for SkypeIn in Canada
Canadian telecom regulators should hurry up and allow the allocation of SkypeIn numbers. The deal is that you pay about $50 a year to Skype for a phone number in an area code of your choice. People can then call it from within that area, as though it were a free local call. They would actually be calling a computer that forwards the call to your Skype account, on whatever computer or Skype-enabled phone you are using, anywhere in the world. You can also have it automatically redirect calls to another normal phone, though there is a per-minute charge for that.
The system seems really good because people in your designated area can call you without worrying about long distance charges. Also, people who don’t find the whole Skype system comprehensible can call you without any knowledge of how it all works. Supposedly, it is unavailable in Canada because it is incompatible with 911, but this doesn’t make a great deal of sense, since SkypeIn numbers receive calls, rather than initiate them.
With a combination of SkypeIn and Skype Unlimited (which costs $30 a year and includes unlimited calling to landlines), I could speak an unlimited amount to friends in North America for less than $75 a year, with benefits such as being able to use any internet cafe that has Skype installed as though it were my home phone. I just need to wait for Canadian regulators to permit the final link in the chain.
PS. I realize that I could buy a SkypeIn number for New York or Seattle, which would be very cheap for friends in Canada to call. Losing the convenience of it being a local call, for them, is the reason I have not done so thus far, though you can attach SkypeIn numbers in up to ten area codes to a single Skype account.
Information saturation
There is no time when it is easier to get distracted from a task than when it is something long, complex, and challenging. My room is never cleaner than at the periods before exams, nor my emails so well managed as at times when I have some massive research project to complete. The number of possibilities on the web: from blogging to instant messaging, compound the danger. So too, the special stresses involved in thesis writing.
This month’s issue of The Walrus includes an article called “Driven to Distraction” that addresses the issue of how many such temptations exist in a digital age. I subscribe to 127 different information feeds: most of which get updated more than once a day, and some of which are regularly updated more than twenty times a day. Beyond that, I have email, the manual screening of spam from blog comments and wiki pages, Facebook, constantly updating access logs for various sites, text messages on my cell phone, and news websites that I track.
Just as I have frequently used music and immersion in a laptop-free coffee shop environment to try to get some reading done, I am going to try to reduce the frequency with which I am checking my various feeds: staying logged out of Bloglines and email and checking each only a few times a day (or at least every couple of hours, instead of virtually constantly). Maybe then I will be able to finish hammering out a new version of chapter two, as well as drafts of chapters three and four, before Dr. Hurrell departs for Brazil, leaving me to finish my thesis entirely on my own.
Two useful WordPress hacks
By the time anyone is reading this, I will be well on my way to Snowdonia with the Walking Club. Rather than make this the longest pause in blogging in recent memory (four days!), I have queued up some short entries with images.
This post is a fairly esoteric one, of interest only to people who are either using WordPress of thinking of setting up a WordPress blog. It details two little programming tricks that improve the WordPress experience. Continue reading “Two useful WordPress hacks”
Afterlife for web pages
One research tool that surprisingly few people seem to know about is the Wayback Machine, at the Internet Archive. If you are looking for the old corporate homepage of the disbanded mercenary firm Executive Outcomes, or want to see something that used to be posted on a governmental site, but is no longer available there, it is worth a try.
Obviously, they cannot archive everything that is online, but the collection is complete enough to have helped out more than a couple of my friends. People who operate sites may also be interested in having a look at what data of yours they have collected.
Making a hash of things
The following is the article I submitted as part of my application for the Richard Casement internship at The Economist. My hope was to demonstrate an ability to deal with a very technical subject in a comprehensible way. This post will be automatically published once the contest has closed in all time zones.
Cryptography
Making a hash of things
Oxford
A contest to replace a workhorse of computer security is announced
While Julius Caesar hoped to prevent the hostile interception of his orders through the use of a simple cipher, modern cryptography has far more applications. One of the key drivers behind that versatility is an important but little-known tool called a hash function. These consist of algorithms that take a particular collection of data and generate a smaller ‘fingerprint’ from it. That can later be used to verify the integrity of the data in question, which could be anything from a password to digital photographs collected at a crime scene. Hash functions are used to protect against accidental changes to data, such as those caused by file corruption, as well as intentional efforts at fraud. Cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier calls hash functions “the workhorse of cryptography” and explains that: “Every time you do something with security on the internet, a hash function is involved somewhere.” As techniques for digital manipulation become more accessible and sophisticated, the importance of such verification tools becomes greater. At the same time, the emergence of a significant threat to the most commonly used hashing algorithm in existence has prompted a search for a more secure replacement.
Hash functions modify data in ways subject to two conditions: that it be impossible to work backward from the transformed or ‘hashed’ version to the original, and that multiple originals not produce the same hashed output. As with standard cryptography (in which unencrypted text is passed through an algorithm to generate encrypted text, and vice versa), the standard of ‘impossibility’ is really one of impracticability, given available computing resources and the sensitivity of the data in question. The hashed ‘fingerprint’ can be compared with a file and, if they still correspond, the integrity of the file is affirmed. Also, computer systems that store hashed versions of passwords do not pose the risk of yielding all user passwords in plain text form, if the files containing them are accidentally exposed of maliciously infiltrated. When users enter passwords to be authenticated, they can be hashed and compared with the stored version, without the need to store the unencrypted form. Given the frequency of ‘insider’ attacks within organizations, such precautions benefit both the users and owners of the systems in question.
Given their wide range of uses, the integrity of hash functions has become important for many industries and applications. For instance, they are used to verify the integrity of software security updates distributed automatically over the Internet. If malicious users were able to modify a file in a way that did not change the ‘fingerprint,’ as verified through a common algorithm, it could open the door to various kinds of attack. Alternatively, malicious users who could work backward from hashed data to the original form could compromise systems in other ways. They could, for instance, gain access to the unencrypted form of all the passwords in a large database. Since most people use the same password for several applications, such an attack could lead to further breaches. The SHA-1 algorithm, which has been widely used since 1995, was significantly compromised in February 2005. This was achieved by a team led by Xiaoyun Wang and primarily based at China’s Shandong University. In the past, the team had demonstrated attacks against MD5 and SHA: hash functions prior to SHA-1. Their success has prompted calls for a more durable replacement.
The need for such a replacement has now led the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology to initiate a contest to devise a successor. The competition is to begin in the fall of 2008, and continue until 2011. Contests like the one ongoing have a promising history in cryptography. Notably, the Advanced Encryption Standard, which was devised as a more secure replacement to the prior Data Encryption Standard, was decided upon by means of an open competition between fifteen teams of cryptographers between 1997 and 2000. At least some of those disappointed in that contest are now hard at work on what they hope will become one of the standard hash functions of the future.
Visual programming tools for non-coders
Using Yahoo Pipes, a neat visual tool for making simple web applications, I made an RSS feed that aggregates new blog posts, blog comments, changes to the wiki, and 43(places/things/people) contributions. While this particular feed is probably only of use to me, people may well find the architecture useful for doing other things.
While it will probably never be the case that you can do serious computer engineering without knowing how to write code, tools like this are a good way to deal with the fact that the vast majority of computer users will never write Java or PERL. Designing interfaces which are both flexible and comprehensible to non-experts is quite a challenge, but certainly one worth taking up. Much of the momentum behind blogs is simply the result of the fact that they can be set up and operated by people who have never needed to deal with a command prompt or the configuration of a web server.
WiFi Skype phones, a very good idea
If we were allowed to run a wireless network, I would think very seriously about buying a WiFi Skype phone – a product distinctly more novel than the much touted Apple iPhone.
Basically, you have a little device that looks like a cell phone. It searches for wireless networks, connects to one if available, and then uses it to make calls using Skype. More people should use Skype. Calls to anyone who is online are free (as is always the case with Skype) and those to normal phones are cheap (two cents a minute to Canada, from anywhere in the world). For those in the UK, there is a deal right now: a Skype WiFi phone, a wireless router, 900 SkypeOut minutes (to call normal phones), and a year’s worth of voicemail for £99 ($230).
Not having to use a computer, and being able to use the phone anywhere there is a wireless network are pretty excellent features. Of course, the real fun will begin when somebody makes a combined device that can access GSM cellphone networks at times when WiFi is unavailable, but otherwise routes calls through Skype.