Reinke Faces Life

It took three cycles this morning before I could get YIM to open a phone line this am. That's not good. To compete with a land line, it has to be seven 9's reliable AND cheap. Just cheap doesn't cut it.

Hmm? 

http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

Karen's Replicator is a straight-forward backup utility that copies individual files, folders and even entire drives to another location. Its key feature is to schedule automatic backups. Simple, effective and … … free!

I use it to backup my luggable to my home desktop and my old laptop. While not precisely the same, if luggable would die unexpectedly, then I could take my oldlap laptop and not miss too much data wise. I would really like to be in the position of having two identical platforms but who can afford that? If I ever do it again, then that's what I'd do. It would be interesting since one would know what fouled up the environment. Sigh. Till then, I'll be using Karenware's replicator to duplicate data directories.

Of interest, the only trick I had to use was to define the other machines on the network to LUGGABLE so that they would each have drive letters. 

Hmm, other ideas?   

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Recently read the frontpage story of breaking the confederate code 137 years late… Figured I would write a visual basic version for fellow VB nerds to play with on digg.

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Adds on to the interesting story with a resurgence in private cryptology. Like brain surgery for amatuers. :-)

read more | digg story

http://rz1.razorpoint.com/index.html

How I Broke The Confederate Code (137 Years Too Late)

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A very interesting read about a former NSA cryptologist cracking a confederate code from the Civil War. Rather topical in light of the recent cracking of some WWII enigma codes, the current NSA stories in the news and, of course, all the "cryptography" in the imminent release of the Da Vinci Code. Interesting stuff.

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Having certified as crypto geek at NSA, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this crack. Note the extensive use of history, knowledge, geography, feel, emotion, and hunches. This demonstrates how far we have come. Once has to be extremely careful in any crypto operation. I am amused that PA has adopted eNotary. I'd be much more circumspec about the widespread deployment of cypto.  

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Electronic Notarization Comes to Pennsylvania!On January 3, 2006, the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania began accepting applications from currently commissioned notaries in the state for becoming approved electronic notaries (eNotaries). eNotaries are permitted to engage in electronic notarizations after receiving approval from the secretary. An application may be filled out online and printed from the secretary's Web site at http://www.dos.state.pa.us/bcel. Complete instructions and more information are also available on the Web site. 

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HMmmm? 

Easy to start

Open dos window

cd /program files

dir *.* > /dirprog.txt

edit dirprog.txt

trim the extra

CNTL-A CNTL-C

Open excel CNTL-V 

Add some headings

Then the hard work begins.

Categorize: Huh?, Utility, Application

Arghh! 

http://t1rex.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-cheap-broadband-becomes-too.html

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The professional Internet service you want, regardless of whether your office is a spare bedroom or a storefront, is called T1 Internet or Dedicated Internet.
 
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Thought I might contribute an anecdote and an idea.

Anecdotally, I ran a home based consulting business twice – first time for four years and the second time for two years – I used cable residential service and a dial account for backup. While I’m not consulting now, I have moved from the dial account to verizon wireless broad band.

An idea for some one who needs a better (i.e., cheaper) solution than that a 500 $ per month T1, which sounds great, might be — if available — two combine TWO high speed residential services (e.g.: DSL and Cable) for say 200 $ month. Not the greatest solution, but it would be cheaper that a T1. You’d have to put in a real router and do some configuration to ensure that you’re not becoming a peer in between two isps. BUT, 300 $ per month  might be good enough.

That doesn't solve your disaster recovery issues. What happens if you lose power? A "Katrina" might force you to abandon your location, what happens then?

I think that servers belong in datacenters; not homes. When I look at pricing, it seems cheap enough.

Comments?

Having been forced by winrot into rebuilding luggable, I am thinking it would be wise to plan for the next reinstall.

Last time, I was lucky because the was essentially nothing wrong with the hard drive. It was windoze that was screwed up. At least one program was lost that I know of (i.e., the Intel Wireless Configuration utility). Data and applications were duplicated. Clean up is a mess.

Why do programs have to be installed?

So my thinking is I need to identify all applications. Catagorize them as: those I can reinstall because I have media and those I can't. For the ones I can't what is my plan?

So I need to create a data strategy. That is somewhat easier. During the reinstall, I found that Windows, certain Applications, and some slovenly habits on my part allowed data to be scattered across the directory structure. I need to come up with a plan for data. Some data is by the nature of the application is automagically off-sited. For example, Corex's Cardscan saves its data on the Corex site. In recovery, it can, after the application is reinstalled, be brought down from the cloud. It's questionable if it MUST be brought down form the cloud (i.e., restoring is useless because it has to be brought from the cloud to be syncable back to the cloud). So it has it's own gotcha. Data could be restricted to a data drive and backup to something like that book drive. Or off-site service like Streamload or such?

So there are lots of apps and lots of data that all needs work.

There is also a class of stuff that needs consideration. Drivers, configurations, and other things need to be accounted for.

Keyboarding everything stinks. So there has to be scripts, batch files, or other ways to recover and minimize the amount of time and effort to do it.

So I have a lot of work cut out for me.

Since I won't move to Vista, I need to identify how I can stay behind until my move to Linux.

My thought is that ideally I'd like to get a base that I could image and then that would always serve as a jumping off point.

One idea would be to create images as I begin to beat this into shape.

So where do I start?

I use lots of email addresses. One for immediate attention. But each of my other email ids has a specific purpose. Politics, professional job search networking, techie stuff, Manhattan College alumni aka Jaspers, Manhattan Prep aka my high school alums, one for work, and lots of secret ones for personal use. All it costs me is setup time! Outlook can poll lots of mailboxes pretty quickly; most only get looked at once per day.

;-)

Many of the email addresses are just a random string (e.g. HJPP 0S9L C9AW EBTY  @ gmail or W363 N93A DPO8 POAS @ gmail). I have several, probably a dozen, dedicated email addresses for different purposes.

I have “lost” a lot of addresses to spammers.

In one case, I know they used an alpha progression to eventually “discover” every address.  I wised up to it when some dumb spammer had “reinke @ att.net, reinkea@, reinkez@ reinkeaa@, …” in the To field. I noted that he quit at 12 so I went to 16 character names. So, I have adopted the long random strings as the “user” part.  Since 99% of the email use is “reply”, no one cares. Also since no one invests any time in the “name”, I can change it when needed (i.e., if it starts to be spammed). 

I have many ways for people to keep in or get back in touch, so it seems to work for me. For eample, http://public.2idi.com/=reinkefj or Plaxo or LinkedIn or Corex Cardscan or … …

It makes for compartmentalizing one’s email. AND, it makes spam and phishing laughable (i.e., a financial institution coming in on the manhattan prep account can be discarded without further adieu). Each financial institution has it’s own gmail account that is never used elsewhere. Hence, an email on the proper account has a high degree of reliability.

You might want to think about what strategy would work for you.

I really really want the financial institutions and every business to truncate paper. I always seemed to be buried in it. If they offer it, I have them discontinue the paper mail. No one does yet but one can only hope they will pick the idea up.

Having a background in cryptology, public key crypto should make this trivial.

The institution could accept my public key and give me theirs. Then they could encrypt my paper (e.g., a statement; bill; receipt) with their private key. Then, they encrypt it with my public key. And put it in the public email to my registered address. I could then decrypt it by using my private key and then decrypt it by using their public key. It is worthless to anyone without my private key.

Note the order of which they do it — SEQUENCE ONE their private key first then my public key; or SEQUENCE TWO my public key then their private key — doesn't matter.

They'd have to register my public key in their keyring somewhere. But when you consider the cost of mailings, they would have to save money. And, I'd be happier.

Wonder when?

Around 2200 zulu 10MAY tonight, all sorts of strange stuff began happening. The cable burped. Then the inet slowed down. I was so frustrated I actual shifted to vwbbie and it was slow. So I don't know what was going on. I'd rant but I don't know who to rant at? About 0030 zulu 11MAY, everything began to flow normally again. So I dropped down off vwbbie and back to wifi. Hmmmm, it certainly seems that this points to the thin client with inet versus fat client with everything local. It pointed out the flaws with RSSBANDIT that refreshes from the net. I'd have liked it if it cached the pages locally. Hmmm squared.

As an avid "alumni collector" (i.e., I run an ezine for my fellow alums at http://www.jasperjottings.com), I have tried to "collect" their information using a variety of ever changing strategies. Corex Cardscan, Text Files, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Excel, Access just to name a few. Several proprietary databases like yahoo Groups, Listbot, and several I have forgotten. I've been doing this for a bunch of years. Nine to be exact. And, I STILL to this day don't have a good methodology, strategy, tactic-ology, or technology for dealing with it. But, I am now getting close. First rule is I'm not putting data into anything that doesn't give it back EVER AGAIN. So a wiki is perfect. Since it is entirely under my control. I have been working on getting my files into a form that MEDIAWIKI likes. It's pretty restrictive but it looks like HTML is OK. More when I have a break thru, or a break down.

20060511 @ 1437 zulu

Just when I wanted to use it. Argh! Their website isn't responding either?

http://download.yahoo.com/dl/msgr75/us/ymsgr75us.exe

Yahhhoooo, Yahoo Help finally supplied an executable that will install. I installed and it's running.

It was wireless wednesday. And, as planned, I have the loveable LUGGABLE up on vwbbie (i.e., the Verizon Wireless not so Broad Band service). I was able to make one out call from it to home that was acoustically unusable. The called party could hear me but it was delayed badly. I abandoned it and went to a landline. Of interest was that it did charge me two cents for the failed call. That's a bad omen.

I want to have an incall to test. Maybe I'll try it from my cell to laptop. 

Arghhhh!

… based on my problems with the new version of Yahoo Messenger …

… … is that you are not in control of your computing environment. You have the illusion that you are but you're not!

 If I was, I could fall back to an old version of Yahoo Instant Messenger. I have the old version. At one time, I felt that I'd always wanted to keep what I was installing locally. Remember my winrot experience. But, now neither YIM version installs.

Reported earlier, LinkedIn changed their UI which disrupted my modus operendi.

It just seems that I keep losing control.

That loss of control wastes my time. Which is the most critical resource to me.

So officially declare me "not a fan of web based apps"!

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/security/0,70831-0.html

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"Blue Security is indeed hurting our business, but not by taking down our websites," the purported spammer wrote. "Instead, they create a daily nuisance to our server administrators."

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Awhhh, poor spam server administrators … have … daily nuisance. They better not make their identities known or they will have a hard time finding work in the industry.

Already, when they pop out of their rat hole, they get pounded.

A spammers website got "dug", (i.e., equivalent to slashdotted) and their link collapsed under the traffic (i.e., ping times a grazillion people tends to abosorb your bandwidth). Akin to Dlink's NTP fiasco. Only this time it was deliberate.

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There is a great discussion going on about BlueSecurity and the jerks at specialham.com. (Search for Spammers in Digg). 544 comments when I checked a few minutes ago. There's a lot of good tech info on how the bad guys jump around the globe hourly to avoid detection.

The Digg effect and the Digg Army did a great job of bringing specialham.com to its knees. Even though Alexa is not the most reliable source of information, you can see there was a huge increase in activity on Sunday at the specialham.com site. Here is a link to the most recent Alexa chart. The daily reach went from 25 million to 450 million in one day. That is a big RED FLAG for their advertisers and sponsors. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbenson2/143175992/ 

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And one digg commentator summed it up nicely:

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A MESSAGE FOR THE BLUE SECURITY SPAMMER…

Since I've seen plenty of evidence that you're trolling anywhere on the web that people are discussing Blue Security and your deeds, I'm absolutely certain that you will read this.

Some things I need you to consider:

1) It's ridiculous for you to say "If you want to be removed from our mailing list, please opt out first." We tried that. You didn't listen. Blue Frog seems to make a concerted effort to *make you listen*. Seems to have worked. You're reading this right now, aren't you?

2) It's even more ridiculous for you to say "The point of it is to get Blue Frog software to stop turning its subscribers' computers into zombies that attack our servers". Why? Because you use botnets / zombies to do a bulk of your spamming. And you used them again to give Blue Security fits for a few days. The difference between Blue Security and you is that their software is on our computers by *our choice*. I don't think you can say the same of your vast botnet that sends spam.

3) The threats and lies you spread are so outrageous, I wonder how you think anyone is going to believe them — or for that matter — your whole facade of "I'm the the good guy" and "what these Blue Security people are doing is illegal." What you fail to understand, Mr. Spammer, is that this is a very sophisticated community of people you are dealing with; the early adopters of Blue Frog. We've put up with your Spam for years and years, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

4) It really doesn't matter if you have my email addresses. If my email addresses were so unbelievably private and well-guarded then I wouldn't have a Spam problem, now would I? So how do you think you can threaten me? Do you really think that I'm going to notice an increase in Spam as a result of your efforts when I routinely filter 500 a day? Think again.

5) The more attacks you pull on Blue Security and especially ** read this ** on regular guys like me, the more you draw attention to yourself and increase the possibility that the real big guns of the Net will get involved and squash you. And at the same time, you make Blue Security even more powerful and well known. Everyone I know is installing Blue Frog now.

I guess your threats had the reverse effect than you intended.

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DITTO!

Come on inet, let's get mad!

http://www.google.com/reader/things/intro

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Welcome to Google Reader

Spend your time reading what you care about most.

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Nifty! 

Plug in https://reinkefj.wordpress.com/feed/ to read my feed in it.

You need a signon so if you need a gmail invite, drop me a note. I have lots of them. As does most GMail users. It is important to play with all these gems. Just to know what is in Web2.0. Or whatever the hyped name for the future of the web is being used today.

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Reference number: LTK6904419311X Please use this ticket number in any correspondence with us.
Subject: from email
Dear reinkefj,

Thank you for joining Blue Security community.

Unfortunately, because of a major DDos attacks, we are currently focusing on maintaining our facilities, therefore your Blue Frog will not post opt out requests in the next few days and the spam reporting may fail. Please report us your spam messages only after the service will start function properly again. Thank you for your patience.
Thank you again for your support.

Should you require further assistance or information, please do not reply to this message, but simply use this Support form.

Best regards,

Idan Liron
Support Team
www.bluesecurity.com  

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Go get 'em guys. This is one of the first offensive strikes back at spammers. I think they deserve our support. It doesn't surprise me that at least one spammer doesn't want to lose his revenue stream.

I would think that those interested in cyber-defense of the USA would be watching this epic struggle as a prototype of what could happen to our national infrastructure.

To compensate for a cheap mp3 player which doesn't remember where in an mp3 it left off (i.e., it always starts at the beginning of a "song" arghh) and its lame fast forward function (i.e., hold down a button forever), I engineered my own solution.

I like to listen to the fellows over at http://www.freetalklive.com, who while sometimes a tad "juvenile" about what they are interested in and talk about, do have a show that talks about liberty. It does challenge one's assumptions. And, even for a cranky old Libertarian like me, it has developed my thinking. It's a good use of my commute time. And, they put their show out as a podcast, which means I can time shift. They rapidly wormed their way into my commute and become my favorite podcast. And, the podcasts are free unlike almost every other talk show like Rush, Bob Brinker, or such. Many talk shows don't even have a podcast for you to time shift with. From time to time, I listen to IT Conversations, but it's too much like work where I'm going to or coming from.

Any way back to compensating for the cheap mp3 player. The freetalkwebsite has the last six days of podcasts available as an http download. More than a year's worth are available by BitTorrent. So every Sunday, I get the last week's for my next week's drive time.

FreeDownloadManager http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/ is a download accelerator and manager. Free! Using this software you can easily download files from any web site. With FDM, I do my usual "save as" and FDM takes over from there. So I do six right clicks on the web site, select the right destination directory, first time takes a few more clicks, and FDM does the dirty work. It gets each one in turn; two at a time.

Then, I fire up mp3split-ght http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/ and get ready to surgically split the nominally 3 hour mp3 from FTL into 12 ten minute segments. I experimented with 24 fives and that was OK; ten seems to be "better". SO I set my output destination the first time; it remembers after that. Select 600 minute blocks. And, select my input file. Usually by this time, FDM has all the files. So I run mp3split-ght and it creates my 12 ten minute mp3s.

Here's the tricky part, if I just went ahead an split the next file, it gives them the same name. (I haven't figured out that different name stuff in the program. Must have a feature. Just too lazy!) So I run a trivial batch file to rename the parts to Monday1 to Monday12. Yes, I have six batch files, one for each day.

I proceed to iterate. Split and rename five more times.

Then I use MusicMatchJukebox http://www.musicmatch.com/home.htm to nuke everything on the mp3player from last week and stuff this week's stuff on it.

The whole process takes less than 20 minutes. And which doesn't require my full attention all the time.

FWIW YMMV just in case you were interested in a cheap and lazy way to do it.

Maybe it's me?