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Expedient Potato Clock

Music: 

Joe Buck - Muddy Waters

Today one of our ISPs, Expedient(Warning: Opens annoying talking flash-based woman talking over your music), sent me a potato clock. I think it was to mark the 10 month anniversary of a new circuit we haven't quite been able to turn live yet (fault of another 3rd party vendor, long story) :-)

You'll notice the sticker on top is not centered, and that made it rest on this like 1/32" lip around the right "potato cup". That was going to drive me mental, so I was able to re-center it, now my inner Monk is happy.

Aside from that, it works great. It took me 10x as long to set the clock as it did to get it powered by potato, but it's pretty much staying right on time after 30 minutes anyway.

This is not the first such strange vendor swag they've sent me. The last thing I can remember was an Expedient branded USB hub, that had a keyboard controller in it. The Keyboard controller was so that whenever you plugged it in, it could send "http://www.expedient.com" to your default browser and open their homepage when you attach it. It also had a button on the top that would send you to their site, which is why it needed to be a "keyboard". I can't put my hand on that thing at the moment, but if I ever do, I'll definitely update this entry. It may not have survived my move from my last cubicle.

Photos:

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Fix for DSL latency issue

Music: 

Siouxsie and the Banshees - Isreal

Office
Since upgrading to 7.6Mb/sec DSL, I've had an occasional issue where the Tubes get all slow-like. The modem will say it's connected at full speed, and that things are, highly technically, "GO!". However my latency is horrible. Even to my first upstream router I end up getting like 50+ms ping replies. Pinging my site or 4.2.2.2 or other "Things that are fast on the Internet" ends up well over 100ms.

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Presidential Candidate Questions

There are several pointed questions I'd like to see people ask our presidential candidates. I'm going to start a list below, if anyone goes to an event, and can get one of these off before being tossed out, I'll buy you a coke. If it gets a reasonable answer, I'll buy you two cokes. If anyone has anything to add, tell me and I'll add it.

I'm going to do them by issue type and candidate, I guess. Most of them are probably pretty interchangeable. I started thinking of these in the context of "questions I would want to ask Rick Santorum", so I'm starting with him.

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Once again with security Spam

Why can't we pay attention to FB hacking warnings?

People do hack FB profiles, it happens every day. They often do it by inducing the target user into clicking a link that can steal their login information in any number of ways. This happens. It's a Big, Bad Internet, and in all likelihood at some point you will:

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Hey Hey RSA

Today I got a customer satisfaction survey from EMC. It was specifically about RSA and how we like their products and the company in general. Cynically, I have to believe that it's not entirely a coincidence that they did this survey during BlackHat & DefCon because, well jeez maybe because half of the people receiving this aren't even in their home fucking state? There was a comment field to one of these asking "why do you feel this way".

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Server Room

Click these for huge images if you wanted to get a close look at something, I figured I'd run through a bunch of stuff since I was in there rather than just the couple things we were talking about.

This is the AC, it's a 10 ton unit, which as I said was supposed to be ducted to blow down in front of the racks, but instead the baffles are aimed to shoot air into the cold-aisle. This seems to work very well. Scale-wise, that thing is 8' tall.

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Yay Yay RSA!

The key point I took away from RSA's communications today is that all implications are that it's likely their token seed database was taken and that token codes are predictable, and may be able to be matched to customers.

They didn't say this, clearly, but every action they suggest to mitigate risk points to the fact. The mitigation steps they give are:

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Help me kill this window

I have a bash script on my work Mac which creates an ssh tunnel to my home machine, then runs the Mac ScreenSharing.app VNC client so I can VNC home without opening VNC externally. All this works great with key based auth and stuff for the ssh session, so I just get a login prompt for the VNC session and I'm on my way.

At the end, I try to have it clean up after itself, I've tried using waits and then killing the PIDs associated with things like the tunnel, so when Screen Sharing closes, it tears down the SSH tunnel.

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A new job for the little Asus

I think I've finally found the perfect job for the little Asus EEE, since it's just too weak to show good video. It has the following tasks:

Sphere of Inconvenience

So... As I was putting together my most recent post regarding IPv6 I got to thinking about how many computers I use every day. It started as I counted up how many things in my house use IP addresses. From here forward I will refer to anything that uses an IP address as a computer for simplicity (yes, that means that in this context my iPhone is a computer, as is my Tivo, and my Linksys wireless access point).

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