Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 27, 2011
by sjvn01
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Get Started With a VPN: For Beginners, Power Users, and IT Pros

Do you want to be secure–I mean really secure–when you’re on the Internet? If so, then you want a virtual private network.

A VPN creates a secure “tunnel” across the Internet between you and your office, a VPN provider, or your home. Why would you want that? Easy-to-use programs such as Firesheep make it easy for snoops to see what you’re writing in your e-mail messages, posting to your Facebook page, or buying online. But with a VPN, you can surf the Web through that virtual tunnel, away from prying eyes, and your Internet traffic is encrypted.

Whether you just want to access Wi-Fi networks on the road without potentially exposing your activities to nosy strangers, or whether you need to enable a team of remote employees to handle business securely on the Internet, you can find a VPN to fit your needs. This guide will walk you through VPN essentials for beginners, power users, and IT departments.

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March 26, 2011
by sjvn01
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Did Microsoft leave Hotmail open for Dictators?

On Friday, March 25th, Jillian C. York, a writer for Al Jazeera English, claimed on her personal blog that a Syrian Hotmail could not turn on (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) on Hotmail and, “he was … blocked from turning on the ‘use HTTPS automatically’ setting.” Eva Galperin, a Electronic Frontier Foundation staffer followed up, and found that the “always-use-HTTPS option in Hotmail for users in more than a dozen countries, including Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, had been turned off.” This meant anyone using Hotmail in these countries could have their e-mail read by their government-controlled ISPs.

Since then, Microsoft, on one of its technical help sites, has denied that it had deliberately disabled HTTPS for some of its users. The statement reads: “We are aware of an issue that impacted some Hotmail users trying to enable HTTPs. That issue has now been resolved. Account security is a top priority for Hotmail and our support for HTTPS is worldwide – we do not intentionally limit support by region or geography and this issue was not restricted to any specific region of the world. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers that this may have caused.”

Inconvenience? The wrong e-mail being read by the powers that be in some of these countries could lead to a one way trip to the closest firing squad.

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March 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Fixing Firefox 4’s Mac multi-touch woes

I may not be a huge Firefox 4 fan, but I do like it and I use it, along with Chrome, on my Linux and Windows boxes. On my Macs Minis, I tend to use Safari. My wife, on the other hand, loves Firefox and uses it on her latest MacBook Pro all the time. Until that is, she updated to Firefox 4 and discovered that all her Firefox multi-touch goodness was gone.

She was no longer able to pinch in or zoom out of her Web pages with a few gestures on the MacBook Pro’s touchpad and she was not a happy camper. And, if she’s not happy, I’m not happy.

After playing around with it for a while, I elected to fix it the brute-force way: I uninstalled Firefox 4 and brought back a copy of Firefox 3.6.16 from her Time Capsule using Time Machine. In passing let me say that Time Machine is the best backup and restore program out there on any operating system. You just set it up once and then you don’t need to think about it every again until you still recover something and then recovering a file is as easy as one, two, three.

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March 24, 2011
by sjvn01
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Want to buy an Internet IPv4 address? Cheap?

I predicted that IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) hungry companies would start shopping for IPv4 addresses and a market would be created. I was right. As part of Nortel’s bankruptcy settlement, Microsoft has offered to buy Nortel 666,624 IPv4 addresses for $7.5 million (PDF Link).

Making this call didn’t require me to be a Nostradamus. It’s basic free-market economics. Internet IPv4 addresses are now in short supply and with no more ever coming down the pike and the demand for Internet addresses increasing it was only a matter of time and dollars. Of course, everyone should be switching over to IPv6, but given a choice between buying their way–for a while anyway–out of a problem or investing in a major network infrastructure, Microsoft, at least, is going for the buy option. It won’t be the only one.

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March 23, 2011
by sjvn01
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Openflow: Internet 3.0?

If it’s not broke, then don’t fix it. I may make a living on the cutting edge of technology, but I like that advice. Now, just as we’re finally switching from IPv4 to IPv6 for the Internet’s master protocol, the newly formed Open Network Foundation (ONF) is proposing that we use the OpenFlow as a new standard on how packets are forwarded through network switches and how we’ll manage them.

Was packet switching really broke? Did we need yet another network switch standard? Well, actually, according to the researchers who came up with OpenFlow, we don’t. Instead, according to their 2008 white paper, OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus Networks (PDF Link): “The basic idea is simple: we exploit the fact that most modern Ethernet switches and routers contain flow-tables (typically built from TCAMs [Ternary Content Addressable Memory) that run at line-rate to implement firewalls, NAT [Network Address Translation], QoS [Quality of Service], and to collect statistics. While each vendor’s flow-table is different, we’ve identified an interesting common set of functions that run in many switches and routers. OpenFlow exploits this common set of functions.”

In other words, the OpenFlow researchers wanted to standardize what a lot of network vendors were already doing.

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March 22, 2011
by sjvn01
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Android Linux FUD Debunked

The claims that Android has intellectual property worries from Linux and its Gnu General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2) are rather absurd. After all, Android is a smartphone/tablet optimized Linux. Android may have real legal worries from Microsoft and Oracle, but from Linux? I think not. And, now Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has declared that these claims are so much junk.

In an e-mail to my friend Brian Proffitt, Torvalds declared that the claims that the Android violated the GPL “It seems totally bogus. We’ve always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too.”

Sean Hogle, a technology attorney, agrees. Hogle wrote, “The most objectionable aspect to the Mueller and Naughton blog entries are the wildly exaggerated claims that Android applications will be forced to be licensed under the terms of the GPL in open source code form.”

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