ECN

Posted on January 20, 2007 by ward

Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN, RFC 3168) has been around for quite a while now, but there are still lots of devices and hosts out there that don’t support it properly. For instance, http://www.npr.org, and apparently all HP’s ILO and ILO2 baseboard management systems.

If you’re on a GNU/Linux system, just try it:

echo 0×1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn

Now you can’t go to NPR’s website.

echo 0×0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn

And now you can. If you compile your own kernels, you might have noticed that ECN is on by default these days. I can’t seem to find the configuration option to disable it anymore in the latest 2.6.20rc kernels, but the proc interface is still there.

I’ve left a message on NPR’s tech support page, let’s see if they fix this. As for HP’s ILO’s, maybe I can ask an acquaintance to forward this bug report to the right group/person…

Posted in Sysadmin | 3 Comments

MIT’s got a bit of bandwidth

Posted on January 19, 2007 by ward

Interesting interview with Jeff Schiller, MIT’s main network guy, in Network World. MIT is going to activate a direct link to New York city later this month – 72 10G waves. Yes. That’s 720Gbit/s. From Boston. To New York.

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the problem with the iPhone

Posted on January 13, 2007 by ward

So Apple announced the iPhone on Tuesday. It looks beautiful with its big screen, and it sounds exciting – both from a user interface perspective (those multi-finger touchscreen commands sound fascinating) as from a technology perspective: it runs (a stripped down version of) Mac OS X, which implies that the hardware is quite powerful and versatile.

But in an interview with Newsweek, Steve Jobs made some very disturbing comments about how ‘open’ the device will be:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

This is complete nonsense. First of all, there are lots of phones out there on which third party software can be installed: any phone that runs GNU/Linux, Symbian or even (shudder) Windows Mobile. Have you heard about Cingular’s West Coast network falling apart because someone installed Python on their Symbian phone? I didn’t think so. And that’s not even just an application – that’s an entire interpreter for a 3rd party programming language.

Secondly, there’s this other network out there called the internet. People install ’3rd party software’ on the machines that are hooked up to it all the time. And guess what – the West Coast part of the Internet doesn’t crash and burn every other day. I wonder why that is, if ’3rd party software’ is oh so dangerous.

Finally, this quote is particularly disturbing coming from Jobs – a large chunk of Mac OS X is 3rd party software. The kernel was derived from BSD, which was not written by Apple. BSD is all about openness. It pains me to see that codebase used to build a completely crippled and closed environment. With software under the GPL, this would not have been possible…

I suppose the community will have to start working on a port of an entirely Free operating system to the iPhone before it will be useful. Given the existance of Rockbox, that hopefully won’t take too long.

Posted in Completely useless | 1 Comment

the dirty secret of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Posted on January 7, 2007 by ward

The LA Times exposes the Gates Foundation as an unethical investor. Read the article – it’s shocking. They are trying to do all this good in the world, and at the same time they have their enormous assets invested in companies that make people sick, are heavy polluters, and grossly overprice the very pharmaceuticals that are most helpful in the number one priority of the foundation: the fight against AIDS.

According to the article, the Gates Foundation has at least 41% of its assets invested in companies that are notoriously non-ethical. That includes investments in 69 of the top 100 worst polluters in the US and the top 50 worst polluters in Canada (based on 2005 figures).

They are not alone – many other philantropies are invested this way – but while some of the other foundations have become activist shareholders, pressuring the companies they invest in into changing their ways, the Gates Foundation instead is planning to institutionalize the ‘firewall’ they have set up between their investment arm and the part of the foundation that hands out grants by splitting the investment arm off in a separate trust. That way, the investments will not be ‘hampered’ by the policies of ‘doing good’.

The Gates Foundation has the opportunity to set an amazing example by choosing to invest ethically. I hope they will change their ways, but I must say I’m not holding my breath, given the people that are involved.

If you want to become part of the solution rather than the problem, Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) or Ethical Investing is really not that hard. Check out this Morningstar article, and this NRDC one. Do you have a 401K or an IRA? Consider investing them responsibly. If you have a money market account, check out Domini Funds, they offer one with competitive rates. Domini has several SRI funds as well.

Posted in Finance/SRI | Leave a comment

of IE and Firefox

Posted on January 5, 2007 by ward

Brian Krebs put up an excellent article at the Washington Post, analyzing how many days in 2006 IE was vulnerable because of critical, unpatched security problems for which documentation and/or exploit code was available online. IE’s record is abysmal: 284 days of vulnerability, or more than 9 months.

In contrast, Firefox had exactly one period of 9 days in 2006 where a patch for a critical vulnerability was not available.

Posted in Completely clueless, Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

petition: the council of the european union – lack of open standards

Posted on January 1, 2007 by ward

The Council of the European Union streams some of its meetings and press conferences online. Unfortunately, that streaming is done in Windows Media format. They barely support browsers other than IE, and then only on Windows and Mac OS X. If you don’t use IE on Windows, you get degraded functionality, and GNU/Linux is not supported because the people who run this service claim:

We cannot support Linux in a legal way.

Yeah, right. What a load of nonsense. I think they mean they don’t want to. There is a way for the Council to save a lot of money (licensing WMV for streaming is not cheap), and to be able to support any browser and any operating system for its viewers: switch to open standards. Ogg Theora for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio would do very nicely. If the 23rd Chaos Communication Conference can do it, I’m sure the Council could too.

There’s a petition doing the rounds to ask the Council to do the right thing. Please sign it!

Posted in Completely clueless, Open Standards | 1 Comment

the web 2.0 hype

Posted on December 16, 2006 by ward

This article on the Register’s development site is pretty interesting. To be honest I don’t really understand the whole web 2.0 hype – for me Ajax is just a tool to make web-based interfaces more user friendly. A future of distributed networked objects sure sounds cool though!

Posted in Everything else | Leave a comment

Free Ryzom. It’s time.

Posted on December 13, 2006 by ward

Several other bloggers have written about the Free Ryzom campaign. In a nutshell, Nevrax, the French company that wrote Ryzom and is running the game is going bankrupt. Not because the game is not good – check out the free trial (Windows only, but see below) or the videos – but for unspecified ‘business reasons’. Whatever.

Nevrax is currently in bankruptcy court in Paris. Its assets will be sold. A coalition of free software people, spearheaded by a couple of Nevrax employees, is one of the bidders. They need to prove to the judge that they will have enough money to start a non-profit that will take over the assets of Nevrax, with a workable business plan and (this is important in French bankruptcy court, apparently) minimal loss of employment. To achieve this goal, the Free Ryzom campaign is collecting pledges to raise 200K Euro. Yes, that’s a lot of money. But they are promising to put the entire codebase and artwork under the GPL, as well as develop a GNU/Linux client. Given the quality of the game and the framework, this would be a major boon to Free Software gaming – an area that can do with some help, particularly when it comes to MMORPGs.

The Free Software Foundation has just pledged $60K, which brings the current total to roughly 135K Euros. Still some way to go, so if you can, please go and pledge. Remember, it’s just a pledge. If this does not work out, you won’t have to pay anything. But if it does work out, we will have a state of the art MMORPG framework with beautiful artwork, under the GPL! For 200K Euros, that seems like a bargain to me…

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

the music industry

Posted on December 10, 2006 by ward

So, in one week the music industry has managed to get signatures from artists that are dead in support of a (retroactive!) copyright extension in the UK, and now the RIAA is trying to lower the royalties it pays to artists for “innovative” music distribution.

Let us get this straight – on the one hand they are saying ‘oh but the poor starving artists’ (you know, Sir Cliff Richard might stop receiving royalties from his hits from the late 50s! Horrible! What about the upkeep on his villa on Barbados!). The extension is so important that even some deceased artists support it.

On the other hand the labels are saying that for ‘innovative’ music distribution – read that as in ‘digital’ – the artists should receive lower royalties, so that the labels get to keep a bigger cut. It makes total sense, right? The distribution costs are practically zero, as a consequence the justification for the record labels as a middleman is becoming, well, let’s say ‘questionable’, so the artists should get a smaller slice of the pie.

Music industry logic at its best.

Posted in Completely clueless, Copyright, patents, and trademarks | Leave a comment

Linksys WRT54GL

Posted on December 8, 2006 by ward

I’ve been a fan of the Linksys WRT54 series of wireless routers for quite a while now. They are cheap, and you can replace the firmware with the excellent DD-WRT or Openwrt, which are both GPL’d GNU/Linux distributions for the platform.

There are many versions of the WRT54 routers. The wikipedia page on WRT54G has a comprehensive overview. As things stand currently, the WRT54GL is the best choice if you want to install a Free operating system onto your router – which is highly recommended. The GL is the version Linksys has put out specifically for the purpose of supporting 3rd party firmware.

The ‘list price’ for the GL is about $60 to $70. However, because of a rebate and a Google checkout discount, it can now be had for $36.55, with free shipping, from Buy.com. Highly recommended.

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment