NASA Scam?

I think of all the people that got otherwise useless physics degrees, and of the engineers that aren't allowed to fix bridges, and all the money that pours into colleges to spit out people that have supposedly the same dreams of exploring space as I did when I was growing up... I think of all the trillions spent on war and the paltry billions spent on space... and of all the projects people have labored for years on, only to see canceled at the last minute - and I have to wonder:

Maybe thunderbird has figured it out?

Labels: nasa, space, spam

  ¶ 6:04 PM 0 comments

  On the internet, nobody cares if you are a cat

Mark Moreford of the SF Chronicle writes:

I want a president who not only freely discusses and shrugs off his or her loves and sexual desires and even affairs, but dares to enjoy sex and thrives because of it and makes his behavior a part of his perspective and attitude on life and love and leadership and the general sticky messy beautiful evolution of the human soul. Is that too much to ask?

This delightful bit of sanity (do read the link) reminded me of what I'd written during the previous election cycle on the same subject, so I re-read that, thinking maybe it was time to rewrite it, focus it more, and add a few more jokes. Yea, I should do that.

I read a bit more of Moreford's canon. Loved Tax my rich white torturer!

That led to me to re-reading Evan Hunt's profound and wonderful piece on ad pollution, on the utter importance of changing the oil in the omni, which led me back to re-reading Beating the Brand and finding the first part that I'd never managed to incorporate back into the whole.

"RubbermaidRubbermaidRubbermaidRubbermaidRubbermaid" got stuck in my head. I learned there was a name for this problem - Earworm.

All this led me to clicking absently on what used to be the Unbrand America web site. It's been taken over by a domain squatter!

In light of my last couple pieces about the mess that the internet is in -

In light of all that - and the troubles that jwz had in resurrecting the web as it stood in 1994, I finally cut loose with the biggest belly laugh I'd had in weeks. I roared. I fell off the bed laughing.

In the end, there's nothing better to do. Look how far we've come! Know how far we have to go!

If I didn't laugh at the world as much as I do I would have slipped off the deep end long ago. (Some would argue that I already have slipped off the deep end)

Problem with all that laughter was that it is 3AM, and I woke up my landlady...

Seeing how humans cope with the world, with machines, and with "progress", is like watching a cat trying to play jazz.

Labels: ads, cats, ipv6, irony, mozilla, networking, politics

  ¶ 11:38 AM 2 comments

  The tragedy of the wifi commons

Ahh, multicast - the holy grail of distribution networks - is like wet paint. Once you decide that "hey, multicast would be the best way to do this", you are compelled to touch it. You are led down a twisty trail of rfcs, all different, and complex protocols like IGMP...

It's no wonder that skype and bittorrent went their own way, and adopted simpler protocols (udp,tcp) to achieve their purposes. Figuring out how to use multicast properly is a black art. The amount of open source code that actually uses it is limited to a few odd corners of the internet, and is very hard to understand.

The one major client side application of multicast - multicast DNS - is so badly broken that it makes me cringe to see the packets go by. The following is a dns scan taken from a public wireless access point (the names and mac addresses have been changed to protect the innocent), using mdns-scan:

root@dancer:~# mdns-scan
+ dancer [MA:C :AD:DD:RE:SS]._workstation._tcp.local
+ Jen Christou’s Computer [MA:C :AD:DR:ES:SS]._workstation._tcp.local
+ Malcolm Jone’s Computer [MA:C :AD: D:RE:SS]._workstation._tcp.local
+ pecutmac [MA:C :AD:DR:ES:S ]._workstation._tcp.local
+ Shogunate Macbook._smb._tcp.local
+ Very Annoyed Wombat._ssh._tcp.local
+ Very Annoyed Wombat._sftp-ssh._tcp.local
+ Trophie [MA:C :AD:DD:RE:SS]._workstation._tcp.local
+ Trophie._pds._udp.local
+ Trophie._pds1._udp.local
+ Trophie._msgsys._tcp.local
+ Trophie._cba8._tcp.local
+ Trophie._ldgateway._tcp.local
+ Ryan’s Computer [MA:C :AD:DD:RE:SS]._workstation._tcp.local
+ Malcolm Jones’s Computer._sftp-ssh._tcp.local
+ Malcolm Jones’s Computer._ssh._tcp.local
+ Malcolm Jones’s Computer._ftp._tcp.local
+ Malcolm Jones’s Computer._net-assistant._udp.local
+ Malcolm Jones’s Computer._rfb._tcp.local
+ Human._ssh._tcp.local
+ Human._sftp-ssh._tcp.local
+ pecutmac._net-assistant._udp.local
+ pecutmac._rfb._tcp.local
+ pecutmac._sftp-ssh._tcp.local
+ penutmac._ssh._tcp.local
+ iTunes_Ctrl_stringofdigitsthatdontlooklikeamacaddr._dacp._tcp.local
+ Nicolas Bob’s Computer [MA:C :AD:DR:ES:SS]._workstation._tcp.local
+ mbears-mbp._smb._tcp.local

At the time, the access point in question was saturated - maybe capable of 3KB/sec out to the internet. Now, I don't think multicast was at fault for that in this case, but given how 802.11 wireless works (coherent explanation to be typed in later), multicast is bad. BAD. BAD. It does not scale.

But it's not just multicast. The uselessness of some of the dns announcements above in mapping back to conventional DNS boggle the mind.

Nicolas Bob's computer.local Great. Not only do we have spaces in this name, but punctuation! Try parsing that dns name with tools like grep - or sticking it into named - etc.. You can't even type it into a web browser or ssh. What's the point?

[MA:C :AD:DR:ES:S ] as a part of the announcement. Cooool. Now I know who you are - forever....

mbears-mbp._smb._tcp.local: Thanks for letting me know you have windows filesharing turned on. I look forward to introducing your girlfriend to your wife.

pecutmac._ssh._tcp.local: I'm willing to bet that none of the people on this network broadcasting that they have ssh available have ever used it. Why should they tell people about its availability?

5 multicast announcements from this one machine alone...

Itunes: Why the heck does itunes have to have its very own announcement with a huge unique identifier?

Programmers coding for multicast ought not to be allowed to code for it until they can recite the relevant RFCs chapter and verse, the same goes for their QA people. Would it have been so hard for Apple to enforce a DNS compatible naming scheme with a single regex? IDN, even, would have been fine. Or did they put the same people that loosed filenames with spaces and punctuation on the world on the multicast DNS project?

I'm told that the linux.conf.au network basically suffered congestion collapse. Was it due to the 70+ olpcs merrily broadcasting their services under both IPv4 and IPv6? I don't know...

I saw that the latest iphones support ssh, via a mdns-scan, the other day. That was kind of cool... but seeing the public wifi airspaces of the world clogged with devices saying "Hi! I'm ME! I do this, this, and this! My owner is clueless! I am insecure! CRACK ME! ME! ME!" really gets to me.

People can wander around naked at home all they want, but I'd really like to see computer manufacturers implement a standard policy of clothing their hardware by default on unknown access points.

Although I just used multicast dns as a talking point, it is far from being the worst offender.
As it is a relatively new protocol, the designers should have done better. Perhaps it can be fixed in the field before it becomes more pervasive.

The rest of the local networks services is much worse.

I don't want to talk about all the other announcements like SSDP, and SMB - or the bittorrent traffic, worms, insecure IM exchanges, bogus DNS servers, dhcp announcements, and TCP retransmits, etc, I saw on this poor overloaded public access point. It depressed me. All I wanted to do was get my email, (via IMAPS, thank you very much) but I couldn't.

I turned off my laptop, had a long black coffee, and moved on. I don't know how to fix public internet access points. I just don't. We could use a unique frequency band per user and people would still screw it up. Maybe the amateur radio guys and the FCC have it right, that certification should be required in order to broadcast anything on any frequency band.

I now know what it must have been like for someone that understood germ theory during the black plague era, seeing all the rats scuttle around.

I'd like to add a clause to The world of ends.

The Internet:

a) Nobody owns it.
b) Everyone can use it.
c) Anyone can improve it.
...
d) Everyone is messing it up!

Apply wireshark to a network that shouldn't be slow, but is, and see your awareness change.

Bonus Link: Ongoing discussion on Ipv6 in the home.

Labels: commons, dns, ipv6, multicast, networking, olpc, wifi

  ¶ 4:22 PM 13 comments