Concern

You should read Peter Gutmann’s Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.

(Also, according to Slashdot, this is an article on “security” by a “medical imaging” expert, which is so completely wrong it’s really funny. I’m sure that 90% of articles on Slashdot are exactly this wrong, and I just don’t understand the subject of the article enough to notice.)

Update: Peter has updated his piece, adding more footnotes and a “mini-FAQ” to address (in an appropriately dismissive way) critics of it. And judging by the reactions I’ve read, few of you understand at all (a) the issues he is discussing, or (b) the tone Peter uses in his writing. Also, this weblog is a top-ten hit for certain keyword searches on the subject, in which case I weep for the dear Internet surfer’s future if I am a key source of information.

My hacking project over the holiday is a network analyzer app for Mac OS X, which is similar in style and function to Wireshark, but it is written using the Cocoa frameworks. I considered just writing a Cocoa GUI for the existing Wireshark code, but that seems a little too hard, since Wireshark looks too closely tied to GTK.

Also, Wireshark doesn’t quite function like I want it to, when it comes to privileged access: when I want to run Wireshark or Ethereal (via DarwinPorts) I usually have to run it as root, which I don’t like doing, and using X11 on OS X works, but isn’t as nice. So, what Network Analyzer does is use the Security framework on OS X to gain privilege to read the packet filter interface, then forks off a helper program that does the actual packet sniffing. This works pretty well, since you only have to authenticate as administrator when doing the capture, not when looking at a capture.

The program can now capture traffic, and load previously-captured traffic. My TODO list is:

• Implement packet decoding, and finish the UI for handling it. I’d like to support the same packet-decoder plugins that Wireshark does, but I’m not sure how easy that will be. And, I’d like it if you could write decoder plugins in Objective-C.
• Allow capture files to be saved. The App uses the NSDocument framework, so this is pretty easy; I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
• Add sensible copy support; like, you select some packets, or parts of them, and are able to copy the raw packet data selected into the clipboard. An alternative copy command for copying hex data would be nice, too.
• Add multiple packet selection. This way you can select multiple packets, and copy them as above.
• Make a better icon, and finish the toolbar.

This has been a fun project, so far. I like hacking with Xcode, because it makes so many tedious things really easy. If you are curious, check out the code. This is pre-alpha, so the functionality is pretty limited.

Update: I’ve made a binary release of the current functionality. This is not a complete program yet, but it should show the UI direction I’m working toward.

This is part two. It ends kind of dangling there, because I haven’t figured out yet how to get the characters out of that situation, just after a bombshell gets dropped. So, this is a rough draft, still.

You should read part one first.

He of His Mind

2   Continuation

“Nice to see you up, Mr. Broderick,” the nurse says to him. It’s an ironic statement, since he can manage to sit up slightly, and not much more. She is heavyset, but with smooth, clear skin and wavy black hair. He relishes looking at her, seeing her move; movement feels alien and new, and it pleases him to experience it again.

“It’s getting easier,” he says. He surprised himself, there, with how clearly and loudly he could speak. It surprises and pleases her, too, he can tell.

“Oh, that’s great,” she says, “you’re doing really well. You’ll be up and about soon.”

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The class at UCSC that I just finished was great: it consisted of reading a bunch of academic papers (4 per week, for about 10 weeks), and doing a final project, and nothing else. My project was to write “a metadata search file system,” which renders a metadata search query as a file system: directories represent queries, and a file exists in a directory if it matches the query.

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My experiences in getting wireless access for my laptop have been plagued with problems. The following scenarios have all failed me:

• Some really old Linksys, which not only would get slower if it was in use for a day or so, but finally just stopped working altogether.
• A D-Link Dl-514. This one will consistently stop announcing itself after a day or two. I have to restart it in order for it to resume announcing itself.
• The AirPort card in my Mac Mini, with Internet sharing enabled. Randomly, it just stops working, and I have to disable and re-enable it on the Mac Mini.

The only time, it seems, that I’ve been able to get reliable wireless Internet access is by using someone else’s unprotected wifi (by a happy coincidence, both near my apartment in Santa Cruz and near my parent’s house in Fremont, someone is running an unprotected Linksys wifi router hooked up to their cable modem).

Is this experience common?

(Also, Firefox 2 is grating on my nerves. All I am doing is typing this into a text area, and every couple of minutes it pegs one of the CPU cores, and my typing gets really slow. Is this Firefox’s way of simulating a slow telnet link? How retro!)