Practical Technology

for practical people.

November 1, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Herding Firesheep

The more I think about Firesheep, the network packet sniffer for dummies, the more I realize that end-users are never going to be able to deal with the problems that it brings to the table. Sure, there are lots of ways to handle Wi-Fi vulnerabilities from a user’s desktop. But, at the end of the day, the easier methods, such as forcing a site to set up a secure HTTP connection, won’t work with all sites and some people are too dumb to use any protection even after they’ve been told that they’re letting anyone look over their virtual shoulders.

Yes, there is now a Windows program, FireShepherd that knocks out near-by Firesheep users with a brute-force attack of junk packets. But, as the author of FireShepherd wrote, “the user is still in danger of all other session hijacking mechanisms” and “this is only a temporary solution to the Firesheep problem.” Exactly. I also wonder what transmitting a bunch of junk every 400-milliseconds or so is going to do to both your, and the network’s, overall throughput-nothing good I’m sure.

So, bottom line, the real solution to Firesheep, is going to have come from the Web sites and their owners. Firesheep’s author, Eric Butler, point that “The only effective fix for this problem [open, unencrypted Wi-Fi] is full end-to-end encryption, known on the web as HTTPS or SSL” is correct. There really isn’t any other answer.

More >

November 1, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Ubuntu 11.04 won’t be the same old Linux desktop

Ubuntu’s new Unity Linux desktop interface is the change that everyone is talking about, but it was far from the only change that Canonical and Ubuntu‘s developers are making to Ubuntu’s desktop. In fact, even without the change from straight GNOME to Unity, the developers are planning on major changes to the Ubuntu desktop.

We knew some of these changes were coming. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, had already announced that Ubuntu would be moving from OpenOffice to LibreOffice for its default office suite. At this point, LibreOffice is 99.9% identical to OpenOffice. By the time Ubuntu 11.04 is released in April, LibreOffice is expected to have improved performance and increased interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 formats.

Some people had expected to see Ubuntu switch from Evolution to Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail. That did not happen. Although many dislike Evolution — I’ve never understood this myself since I like Evolution’s do-it-all functionality — it was decided that Thunderbird simply wasn’t ready yet.

I’m not sure Thunderbird will be ready anytime soon. Although I was a Thunderbird supporter early on, the Mozilla Foundation hasn’t spent much time or effot in keeping Thunderbird up-to-date. The two main reasons why the Ubuntu programmers have deferred making Thunderbird the default e-mail choice are it’s lack of a built-in calendar and no Microsoft Exchange support. There were also my main problems with Thunderbird last year.

If you want a better, full-featured e-mail client in Ubuntu, my suggestion is to start working on cleaning up Evolution. I don’t see Thunderbird taking its place.

The most controversial change, other the switch to Unity for the main interface, is that Ubuntu is changing its default music player from Rhythmbox to Banshee. Personally, I welcome this move. Banshee is my favorite Linux music application. As I said when it was first introduced in 2006, Banshee is as close as you can get to an iTunes for Linux. I still think that’s true.

Banshee Media Player

While some people love Rhythmbox, and other music players like Amarok and Clementine have their fans, Banshee’s biggest opposition will come from those who hate that it uses Mono, the open-source version of Microsoft’s .NET infrastructure. For some people, the mere presence of Mono in a Linux distribution endangers it from Microsoft software patents taxes.

I don’t think that’s the case. Software patents are an evil that, as the current mobile phone sue-me, sue-you circus shows, don’t require the explicit use of a named technology. Besides, Mono users and developers already have Microsoft’s blessing. You may dislike using a program built on top of a Microsoft technology, but I don’t see any special legal danger in using it.

In any case, if you really can’t stand Banshee, Unity, or LibreOffice in the forthcoming Ubuntu, you’ll still be able to switch back to Rhythmbox, pure GNOME and/or OpenOffice. Personally, I’m looking forward to Canonical’s new take on the Linux desktop, but if you can’t stand it, you can have your desktop your way. After all one of Linux’s beauties is that you can always set it up just the want you want, not how someone else wants it to be.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

October 28, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Five Ways to Shear Firesheep

While bad Wi-Fi security is my major Firesheep worry, I know it’s already a major pain in the ass for everyone. Even as I wrote this, I see my fellow ZDNet blogger Ed Bott had his Twitter account hijacked by someone else in the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference press room. Fortunately, it was a friend so it all came out well. Since it wasn’t you that might strike you as funny. Just wait until it happens to you though and someone changes your Twitter or Facebook password on you. You won’t be laughing then.

So what can you do? Well, there are a lot of things. Some of them aren’t perfect, but they will protect you on most of the major sites. Here they are in their order of efficiency.

More >

October 28, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

China has the top supercomputer in the world but it still runs Linux

If you want a really, really fast computer, there are all kind of ways to build the hardware architecture, but one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they run Linux. The top spot now appears to belong to the Tianhe-1A , which means "Milky Way," at a research center at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China.

I say "appears" because the official Top 500 Supercomputer List won’t be out until early November. Still, according to a New York Times report, Jack Dongarra, the University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the Top 500 ranking, said, the Tianhe-1A "blows away the existing No. 1 machine," which is a Cray XT5 Jaguar at the National Center for Computational Sciences. Dongarra concluded, "We don’t close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster."

How much faster? NUDT claims the machine is 1.4 times faster than Cray XT5 Jaguar. NUDT claims that the computer’s peak performance can hit 1.206 petaflops and jogs along at 563.1 teraflops. To do this, the Tianhe-1A system covers a square kilometer, weights in at 155-tons and uses 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs.

The software behind it? Linux of course. Linux has long been the operating system of choice for the world’s fastest computers. While NUDT hasn’t said which specific Linux they used, I strongly suspect it’s a high-speed optimized version of China’s Red Flag Software’s Red Flag Linux.

It’s not just supercomputers that have become Linux fans. Other high-speed, no-room-for-failure systems have moved to Linux. The one that comes first to my mind is the London Stock Exchange, which dumped its slow Windows/.NET system for Linux. It’s not the only one. Many of the world’s stock exchanges, where every millisecond counts, have either already switched to Linux or are planning on it.

The bottom line: when speed and reliability is what you have to have, Linux is the operating system you have to use.

A version of this story was first published in ComputerWorld.

October 26, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

What’s really going on with Ubuntu Unity

ORLANDO, FLA.–As Debian is to Ubuntu, so GNOME is to Unity. What do I mean by that? Well, once upon a time there was an operating system called Debian. It was, and is, a powerful version of Linux. Outside of the Linux community, though, almost no one had ever heard of it. Then Ubuntu came along, built its own easy-to-use distribution on top of Debian, and now it’s arguably the most popular Linux in the world.

Yesterday, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced at the Ubuntu Developer Summit that Ubuntu was switching its default desktop from GNOME to Unity, a GNOME-based shell interface. Guess what he hopes will happen?

If you answered, create a desktop interface that will bring millions more desktop users to Ubuntu, congratulations, you win a prize. Unity is not just a desktop interface though. It’s also Ubuntu’s one master interface for desktops, netbooks, and someday, tablets.

While a tablet version of Ubuntu isn’t in Canonical’s immediate plans, Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager, told me that "all the pieces are in place to create an Ubuntu tablet."

He’s right. Later that same day, Canonical multi-touch and kernel developer Chase Douglas showed me the first baby steps of multi-touch Unity on a 22-inch 3M Multi-touch Display M2256PW. I was impressed.

I’ve seen lots of touch systems. Most of them have left me unmoved. This, though, was the first PC touch system I could actually see taking off in the mass market. What’s more important than what I think, though, is that the software toolkit developers and vendors are interested in it too. That means that multi-touch applications may be ready in time for the Unity-based Ubuntu launch in April.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. If you take a look at Unity, you’ll see a desktop interface that clearly meant for touch.

You can also dismiss the silly idea that Unity is some kind of fork from GNOME. It’s not. As Shuttleworth said, "Unity is a shell for GNOME, even if it isn’t GNOME Shell. We’re committed to the principles and values of GNOME."

The next question people ask is: "Why didn’t Ubuntu work with GNOME on this?" The answer is that these two group of developers have fundamentally different views of what they wanted from the shell, the first interface that users will encounter. For example, GNOME’s didn’t want global menus, while Ubuntu really wanted them.

Under the hood, there were also technical differences. Ubuntu’s developers greatly preferred using Compiz for the windows manager over GNOME’s Mutter windows manager. Ubuntu developers also like Zeitgeist, a framework that tracks and correlates relationships between the user’s activities so that it can supply applications with contextually relevant data.

Although many Unity users like it even now, Unity still has a long way to go. Penelope Stowe, co-leader of the Ubuntu accessibility team, said she was concerned that there was "very little time to do some very important work on making sure that Unity is accessible to all users." That’s an excellent point.

I’m seeing great potential here. Now, we need to see the reality, and that will be at least six months away.

Still, while Unity has a long way to go, I see Unity as becoming very popular with users who might never have considered Linux before. Even in this early form, it’s simple to use. Unlike any other operating system interface, it can also be used from desktops to netbooks to tablets. I think many users are going to find a system that will look and act the same no matter what device they’re using to be very attractive.

Don’t like it? Don’t worry about it. Ubuntu will have the full GNOME desktop a click or two away. Don’t be surprised, though, if many users, especially ones who are new to Linux, find Unity to be just the desktop they’ve been looking for.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

October 25, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Wi-Fi Direct: Really fast but Really Necessary?

is one of those technologies that sounds like it makes sense, but then if you really think about using it in real life…. well then it doesn’t sound so great.

The idea is simple. There are two ways you can do Wi-Fi. There’s infrastructure, where you have an access point and a lot of clients and then there’s ad hoc, where laptops share network with one another in peer-to-peer mode. Ad hoc, as anyone who uses it knows, has awful throughput but the security is even worse. With Wi-Fi Direct, you get peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections between devices like camera and a printer without an existing network.

That could be useful for grandma who just wants to get the photos of the new grandkids from her PC to her digital picture frame, except… well how does she do that again? The technology may make this possible, but I don’t see much in the way of the all-important implementation details worked out yet.

For everyone else, we already have our Wi-Fi networks right? Do we really need what amounts to a long range, high-speed rival to Bluetooth? I don’t think so.

Under the hood Wi-Fi Direct uses the same old Wi-Fi wireless technologies. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi Direct will work with 802.11a/b/g/n networks and it all be as easy as pie.

Except, of course, it won’t be that easy.

More >