Via Boing Boing here's a workaround fix to the help-app security hole on Mac OS. (Note that this says that this is only a 10.3 problem. I haven't confirmed that.)
engadget quoting the creator of "hymn":
The purpose of hymn is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works on Mac OS X, many unix(-ish) variants and on Windows.
AP via Yahoo!:
The explosive photos of abuse in an Iraqi prison drive home a defining fact of 21st century life — that the pervasiveness of digital photography and the speed of the Internet make it easier to see into dark corners previously out of reach for the mass media.Some of the most shocking or memorable photos from the Iraq war were almost certainly taken by soldiers or government contractors — and zipped around the world with an ease that never existed in the days of film.
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"The embedded process was supposed to give government a better handle on what journalists were doing, but now you have this whole rogue operation of civilians with digital cameras who have access to things the media don't," he said.
Made a good start today on Operation Server Independence. Mostly I was just trying to put things back to the state they were when I took the system down over a year ago.
I found all the components and cables for the old Macintosh Quadra 800. This was no mean feat as I'd stored some of the oddball cables in some non-obvious boxes, and I've moved these boxes at least twice since then, so I spent some time digging through those.
One thing I didn't manage to find is a mouse for this machine. For all the mice I've owned over the years you'd think I'd have more of them kicking around. I seem to have plenty of most every other part. But no mice.
Fortunately, booting this machine into linux involves spending relatively little time in the Mac OS, and I was able to navigate that part with the keyboard alone.
The first time today that I booted into linux I hadn't connected it to my local net's ethernet cable, so it obviously couldn't connect to the net. Some machines I've had could be plugged into the net after booting and would do all that network initializing on the fly, but not this one. But a (fairly) quick reboot got it on the net, no prob. It used DHCP to connect through my D-Link router.
Next I checked to make sure that the web server, telnet server, and ftp servers were running. Using the machine's local network IP address I was able to connect to each of these three. Good.
From past experience I know that now it gets tricky.
I want to poke some holes in the firewall, so that machines out in the world can make web, telnet, and ftp connections to this machine. My old router had something called "port forwarding" that let me just open those three specific ports, and connect them to a specific machine in the local net.
I think my D-Link router will do the same thing. But the terminology and user interface are different, and I wasn't able to quickly puzzle it out. So in the meantime I used a feature called "DMZ" which basically exposes all the ports of one local machine to the world.
I know that this is not the most secure way to do things, especially since I don't yet know how to secure the linux machine really well. But there's nothing of value on the machine right now, so I think it'll be OK during this shake-down/learning period.
Finally, since the DMZ feature connects to a particular IP address in the local net, I had to make sure that the Quadra always gets the same number from the DHCP.
The D-Link has a feature called Static DHCP Client List. It lets me set it so a specific Mac number is always given the same IP address. Easy. I had thought I was going to have to figure out how to set the IP statically in the lunux machine, but this is much easier.
Lastly, with all this DMZ and static dhcp turned on, I should be able to connect to the Quadra using the IP number that the router uses to talk to the world. But this gave me a little trouble.
I had a similar problem the first time I set this up. I think it's called "loopback". The idea is that from inside my local net, I should be able to use the router's EXTERNAL IP address and the router will treat the connection just like it came from the outside world. But this wasn't working.
I could connect to the quadra using the machine's internal IP, but not the router's external one.
I had the same problem last time, and the fix was to update the firmware of the router. There is a minor firmware upgrade available for this new router, I have v 1.0 and upgrade is v1.02.
I downloaded the upgrade, but I'm not sure it came through correctly, and I don't want to corrupt the router until I have the time to debug any problem I might create.
In the meantime I wanted to figure out if a loopback failure really was the problem. If I could go out to a machine in the world, and try to connect, that would tell me what was what. But there are none nearby, so I need to be clever.
I telneted to an account I have on a machine in Calif. While logged in there I was able to make web, telnet, and ftp connections back to the quadra. So success, the DMZ is working.
Well that's it for today.
Next is to make some DNS entries so the quadra is a subdomain of one of my existing domains. And then I'll be venturing into unexplored -- for me anyway -- territory.
I think I'll going to look at mail serving first.
To be continued...
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Via Doc Searls here's a piece about how Truck Stops across the country are putting in WiFi hotspots, and the truckers love it. Truckers surfing the net via WiFi from the sleeping cabs of their trucks, you don't get a much better example of "Geeky Technology for Regular People"
AP via excite.com:
All across the concrete byways of this interstate nation, long-haul truckers are going the extra miles - but it isn't necessarily for heaping plates of hearty fare or hot showers.It's Wi-Fi they're wanting.
About two years ago I set up an old Mac of mine, a Quadra 800, as a linux box. I did it mostly to see if I could, and I ran it on my home net for about 8 months as a testbed for various linux and webdev experiments.
I took it down when I moved a year ago and it's sat unused since then. But I'm about to dig it out, and get it online again, with a much more ambitious goal this time.
I want to turn it into a full-blown production server/host, running web service, mail, and dns.
This is a tall order, because I've never admin'ed some of these things before, but I want to figure it out.
Initially I will set it up as a subdomain of one of my existing, professionally hosted, domains. But eventually I want to get to the point where I can use this personally hosted machine for my main sites and services.
I want to gain some freedom from the restrictions and expense of commercial hosting services.
I'll be reporting here about how this process goes.
This is of more than academic interest to the "Regular People who are Geeks" audience. The idea of running a "home server", that hosts all kinds of local network services, is the thing of the future. One day a home server will be like the cable box and refrigerator. Everyone will have them.
I blogged about this a couple months ago. And the Boston Globe wrote about it again this morning.
Stay tuned.
Wired magazine writes about a new Library of Congress facility for preserving media:
The building's solid underground structure, complete with vaults, converts easily to media storage, said Gregory Lukow, chief of the motion picture, broadcasting and recorded sound division of the Library of Congress.
But this is just the old-fashioned approach to these things. The hardened, centralized, protect-it-in-a-mountain method is so 20th century. Today it's a distributed world. Want to preserve a copy of something? Don't hide ONE copy in a central place, scatter LOTS of copies all over the place.
The chances that every one of 100 copies would be destroyed -- especially when you can make more copies before the last one is gone -- is extremely low. And it's much less expensive than these steel blast door places.
And you can make it even more redundant by putting data centers in orbit, on the ISS, on the moon, on Mars!
The way to deal with a distributed problem is a with a distributed solution.
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The civil-libertarian in me is severely troubled by these things, but the benevolent (I hope I am) marketer in me thinks they could be a real boon for both customers and businesses.
A series of pilots are set to begin at regional and national theme parks. Baseline has learned that Walt Disney Co. is planning to use radio waves to track assets such as laundry, beverages and bus shuttles that ferry visitors around its parks. The Disney pilots are in the early stages—the company in some cases hasn't even selected a tag vendor yet—but the company does plan to use radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging throughout its parks.Disney would not comment, and details about pilots by the company and other theme park operators are sketchy. Oklahoma City-based Six Flags Inc., however, did confirm that Memorial Day will kick off pilots at four of its water parks in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas and Jackson, N.J. Six Flags plans to give patrons wristbands with chips that emit radio waves. The wristbands can be loaded up with the digital equivalent of cash. Instead of digging through wet dollar bills, park visitors swipe their wristband past a reader and have an amount deducted from their stash.
I had seen this in my reading travels, and now Hiawatha Bray reminds me of it.
Live music events are offering a kiosk services where, immediately after the event, you can insert one of those little keychain, USB, memory modules, and download music from the just finished performance. They'll even sell you one of the memory modules if you forgot yours. You take it home, plug into your computer, tranfer to your digital music gadget of choice, and listen.
AP Technology via Yahoo!:
Oh, how far we've come from the 78, the 45, even the CD. Now, minutes after your favorite band sounds its last note on stage, you can load a live recording of the concert onto a cigarette-lighter-sized hard drive hanging off your keychain.