And It Turns Out That Journalists Can’t Count Up To Three …

 Media  No Responses »
Feb 022014
 

The Independent is claiming today that the government’s cut in the means tested council tax is being described as “poll tax mark II”.

But what they really mean is “Poll Tax Mark III” :-

  1. The first Poll Tax was in fact a series of taxes charged during the late medieval era in Britain. Some were genuine flat rate taxes where everyone pays the same; some were in fact progressive taxes although the first “step” may have been so distant to normal people it would have looked like a flat rate tax.
  2. The second poll tax was the Community Charge which was probably the most reviled tax of modern times with mass protests against it’s implementation and huge non-payment movements.

Remembering Pete Seeger

 General  No Responses »
Jan 282014
 

So I learnt today that Pete Seeger has died, and was somewhat surprised to hear the one line obituary only mentioned his 1960s protest songs.

It is somewhat understandable because just about everyone knows a Pete Seeger song even if they don’t know the name. His protest songs (and protest songs he popularised) were covered by others before, during and after the 1960s.

But he was more than that. He was also a deeply committed political activist from the 1930s all the way through to his death. With his banjo labelled “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender”, Covering issues such as racism, fascism, environmentalism, and war, he was one of the few people of whom you could say: “When the barricades go up, if you’re not on his side of the barricade, you’re probably on the wrong side”.

If you work through the list of awards he received during his lifetime on the Wikipedia article (link at the top), the ones for music leap out at you. But if you look closer, only 1/2 are directly for music; many are for his activism or children’s writing.

There was a lot more to Pete Seeger than just a few popular folk songs.

“There is hope for the world.”

The New Cold War

 Computing, General, Politics, Security  No Responses »
Jan 272014
 

I’m old enough enough to remember the tail end of the real cold war between the West and the old Soviet Union when we were waving nuclear missiles at each other. And threatening each other with nuclear annihilation.

So it is a bit of an exaggeration to speak of a new cold war when the threat is nowhere near as apocalyptic. But if you take a look at how the old cold war was fought – with espionage, and signals intelligence – you begin to realise we do have a new cold war. Intelligence agencies around the world are cooperating in fighting against a new enemy.

Us.

Oh, they’ll defend themselves by saying that it’s not the normal man or woman in the street they are worried about, but but the terrorists in our midst they are targeting. But to do that they have to spy on us.

They’ll say that they are not spying on the people in their own country; just on those sneaky foreigners. But when GCHQ spies on US citizens, they pass the information they obtain to the NSA; and the NSA passes information on their spying activities to GCHQ.

Which means that what little protection we have against our own intelligence agencies spying on us is effectively meaningless.

How Old Is The Internet?

 Computing, History  No Responses »
Jan 172014
 

There is no clear answer to the question of how old the Internet is. For different definitions of the “Internet”, there will be different starting dates.

For instance, it is commonly held that the pre-cursor to the Internet – ARPANET – could not be called the Internet. And it is true that ARPANET was not the same as today’s Internet even at the lowest possible level. But there is a commonality to ARPANET standards through Internet standards – the very first RFC (issued in 1969) to one of the very latest (RFC7115) are all part of the same body of work.

And whilst the overwhelming majority of ARPANET era standards have been superceeded, there are a few that are still valid today. For example, an early standard for the names of hosts which restricts what characters can be used is still valid and (for example) restricts the names that can be used in email addresses – see RFC608 (it has been updated but the essential restrictions remain).

The next milestone in the history of the Internet came when the older NCP protocol was replaced with TCP/IP in 1982 (actually the “flag day” was 1st January 1983); this immediately raised the possibility of joining networks together and to route between them. Previous to this, different networks had gateway machines which were connected to two (or more) networks. Before the Internet took off, there were more than a few precursor networks – MERIT, JANET, BitNET, …; all of which used different network protocols.

Gateway machines would typically only gateway certain kinds of application traffic from one network to another; typically email was the bare minimum leading to services which would send information via email – at one point you could even “browse” the web using email!

Routing on the other hand allowed end to end communication so it was possible to use applications directly.

The next milestone was allowing commercial traffic on the Internet. The earliest networks were founded for research purposes by the American military or academic organisations, and prohibited commercial traffic Until the core networks allowed commercial traffic we wouldn’t have seen the Internet as we see it today.

There are plenty of other milestones – some would include the foundation of the world wide web (in 1991 and not 1993) as one of the most important. I don’t; simply because it was something that was bound to happen in one way or another.

Linux Dream Cheeky USB Thunder Missile Launcher

 Computing, Linux, Working Notes  No Responses »
Jan 162014
 

This is not original work, but merely a set of notes on how to do the set up. The core information (and the code) came from this blog posting.

Essentially I’ve re-ordered the steps in which to work and excluded anything other than the bare essentials to get it all working. With the intention I can get my missile launcher working at home and at work  😎

Step 1 is to prevent the HID driver from clamping on to the missile launcher. This was done by :-

  1. Editing /etc/default/grub and adding usbhid.quirks=0x2123:0x1010:0x04 to the existing variable GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT.
  2. Run update-grub (I always manage to forget this).
  3. Reboot the machine and check /var/log/messages for 2123 (the VendorID) to see if it has been claimed by usbhid (which will show up as a line beginning generic-usb 0003:2123:1010.0006: hiddev0 if it does claim it).

The next step is to download and compile the code given in the blog link above. If you need instructions on how to do this, then you probably need to look elsewhere – it builds easily.

Once built, an sudo insmod launcher_driver.ko will verify that the kernel module loads – you can double check by looking at /var/log/messages.

It’s also necessary to install both the kernel driver and the control program manually :-

  1. Copy the compiled kernel module to /lib/modules: sudo cp  launcher_driver.ko /lib/modules
  2. Edit /etc/rc.local and add the command: /sbin/insmod /lib/modules/launcher_driver.ko
  3. Copy the control program to a sensible location: sudo install launcher_control /opt/bin

There’s probably better ways of doing this, and better places to stick things but as you’re following my instructions you’re stuck with my suggestions! It’s tempting to try a reboot at this stage to verify that this works, but as there’s just one small extra step we may as well get that done too. This is to create a udev rule to set up a device file in /dev.

Create a file (/etc/udev/rules.d/99-usb-launcher.rules) with the following contents :-

KERNEL=="launcher?*",MODE="0660",GROUP="cdrom"

The choice of group name is rather inappropriate except it will work well enough, and I have changed the permissions on this to something a little more restrictive. This can be tested with sudo udevadm trigger which will re-run udev. This should change the permissions on any existing /dev/launcher* file(s). If it doesn’t work, the blog pointer above is the place to head.

Lastly, there’s a couple of corrections to the launcher_control.c that is convenient to make :-

% diff launcher_control.c launcher_control.c.orig
63c63
<         while ((c = getopt(argc, argv, "m:lrudfsht:")) != -1) {
---
>         while ((c = getopt(argc, argv, "mlrudfsht:")) != -1) {
97,98c97
< 		fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't open file: %s\n", dev);
<                 /*perror("Couldn't open file: %m");*/
---
>                 perror("Couldn't open file: %m");

 

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