Author Archives: Lloyd

Can You Hear Me Now?

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My Google Nexus S phone has been cutting out and dropping calls all week. It’s been embarrassing.

I thought it was my phone. I was getting ready to reset my phone, and the next step would be returning it.

Tonight I joked on Facebook, “it’s sad that I get better call quality from web Google Chat to landline then over Fido/Rogers Mobile network.”

Within minutes I had a half dozen responses from other friends here in Victoria that they have had the exact same experience including:

  • No reception inside
  • Even with 5 of 5 bars calls cutting out
  • Phones affected including iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, my Android phone, and Blackberry Torch.

Other friends also said they were about to return their phones!

The common thread is that we’re all on the Fido / Rogers Wireless Network and on 3G.

The workaround seems to be to disable 3G, ie switch the phone to 2G.

This severe mobile service degradation doesn’t seem to be an isolated incident. I haven’t yet found any information on this issue on either Fido’s or Rogers’ sites, or on CFAX or Times Columnist Victoria news sites.

Anyone have more information on this issue? And when it will be resolved?

2011-12-12 Update:

The problem has gotten much worse. My wife’s phone has been completely nonfunctional since yesterday. On the iPhone 4s you can’t disable 3G, so unlike with my Android phone, there is no relief available. We neither have the old phone nor the old SIM card.
Here is what Fido Support wrote in  ”livechat” with me just now:

Thank you for your patience! Apple has installed software that prevents going onto the Edge (2G) network. And this, there are presently intermittent reception issues with 3G in certain regions of Canada at the moment

The 3G towers are owned by Rogers, and they have not released an ETA at the moment. It is a high priority issue, but again, it is intermittent (and in more than one location)

I’m sorry, but we don’t make this information public. We (at customer service) have had only one update (as of this morning) which is the one advising us to suggest trying the Edge network periodically during the day.

This is not in the slightest bit intentional, and we do apologize about the inability to turn off 3G on an IPhone (again, Apple has theirreasons for this). I can only suggest your wife put her old SIM in her old phone for the time being, until the 3G is clear again.

You Do Not Scale

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“Most developers are itching to be a part of their favorite projects. You do not scale, but by giving developers tools and getting out of their way, your project can. So please remember that when issues are reported on your open source project, you should not fix them. I hope this serves you well and would love to hear about your experiences and help any way I can.”
By Wesley Beary in “Less is More published Nov 27, 2011. Hat tip Jake Dahn.

A leader will always lead by being prepared to do the work themselves, but I’m really feeling what @geemus wrote.

It is in the ethos of the WordPress community, and the company, my former employer, Matt Mullenweg formed to support it. Here is my favorite part of the Automattic Creed:

“I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.”

I’m excited by the help I’m receiving from my new colleagues at Piston Cloud and the OpenStack community.

Pistoneers are kindred spirits of Automatticians. Before joining the Piston Cloud team I noted automation being a regular theme on “Our Team“.

Google AdSense ad serving has been disabled to your site

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It’s amazing that Google is as successful as they are given their customer service.

I received the following email last night, and it still has my fur standing-on-end (defensive rage).

Subject: Google AdSense ad serving has been disabled to your site

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not
accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello,

During a recent review of your account we found that you are currently
displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program
policies
(https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&stc=aspe-1pp-en).

--------------------------------------------------
EXAMPLE PAGE: http://foolswisdom.com/

Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may
exist on other pages of this website or other sites in your network.

VIOLATION(S) FOUND:

It is important for a site displaying AdSense to offer significant value
to the user by providing unique and relevant content, and not to place ads
on auto-generated pages or pages with little to no original content.

Your site should also provide a good user experience through clear
navigation and organization. Users should be able to easily click through
your pages and find the information they are seeking.

Please review Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines (
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361 ) for
more information.

ACTION TAKEN: We have disabled ad serving to your site.

ACCOUNT STATUS: ACTIVE
Your AdSense account remains active. However, please note that our team
reserves the right to disable your account at any time. As such, we
encourage you to become familiar with our program policies and monitor
your network accordingly.

Issue ID# 3227412

--------------------------------------------------
Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
----------------
For more information regarding this email, please visit our Help Center:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=113058&stc=aspe-ai4-en.

Emphasis was mine.

The only pieces of useful information would seem to be “EXAMPLE PAGE: http://foolswisdom.com/“. The reason is provided as an exercise for the reader to solve, and the status of disabled, but active almost makes the whole thing humorous. The email also has the feel of treating good customer’s like criminals, because of how “bad” customers behave.

So what do I do with this information? “Please do not reply to this message.” That’s the real problem, not my AdSense account. I’ve received an anxiety causing email, and I’m helpless.

Don Dodge, then at Microsoft, now at Google(!), wrote October 27, 2007 what still resonates with me today “Will Google Docs and Spreadsheets succeed in the enterprise? I don’t think Google will succeed in the enterprise. Why? Customer Support.”

“Google doesn’t understand people,” [Don Norman] said. “Have you ever spoken to a Google support person on the phone? They don’t have them. Sure, they’ll direct you to their blogs — where you’ll be lucky if you can find the answer you’re looking for — or they’ll let you give feedback. But do they ever give you feedback on your feedback?”
FROM “DON NORMAN: GOOGLE DOESN’T GET PEOPLE, IT SELLS THEM” BY BOBBIE JOHNSON ON GIGAOM.COM, SEPT 5, 2011

I think they do understand people, and have a stubborn resolve to demonstrate that machines can be programmed to help man better than man can help herself.

They’ll tell you it’s a scalability problem:

If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you’d spend19 person-years handling support issues every day.

If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you’d need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up.

That, folks, is internet scale.

That is cold, machine cold, comfort.

Customer support isn’t the 1 in a 1000, 10 minute on average problem, customer support is the support you receive under exceptional circumstances. This is when you need support, and when most companies fail to deliver.

So what do you do when you need support from Google? Either you know a Matt Cutts (there is only one!), or you hope your friends, like Chris Messina, working on Google+ and other promising tools with warmth, will help Google find balance and treat their customers, like you know, people.

Oh, and if there is anyone on the Google AdSense team reading this, I suspect that there is a bug in your “review of your account” software, as you probably should have terminated CloudFlare’s account, not mine.

Canadian’s Election Will Be on Twitter

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It will also be illegal for any citizen, journalist or not, to tweet or blog or post something on a Facebook wall about the election results, until all the polls are shut.

Ordinary citizens aren’t immune. In 2000, Elections Canada brought charges against a Vancouver blogger and software designer named Paul Bryan after he dared to publish election results from Atlantic Canada on his small-audience blog. Bryan was fined $1,000. He fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds, with major media outlets from across the country joining his battle. It did no good. In 2007, by a vote of 5-4, the court upheld Bryan’s conviction, and Section 329.

The four minority judges were passionate in their dissent.

By Paula Simons in “Ban on Twitter, Facebook election-night posts draconian“, April 20, 2011

This election will be tweeted. I’m hopeful that Elections Canada will act appropriately, by not acting. Then the newly elected government can fix these laws.

ebooks are Fiction

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Buying ebooks is an incredibly frustrating experience!

No wonder the publishing industry is so hurting.

Most books are not even available as ebooks, and even when they are it is likely only in the United States of America, or at least that is the case for any book not on the New York Times Best Sellers List, which the majority of are fiction.

Here is a table of all the books I’ve bought from Amazon in the last 1.5 years for my Kindles:

Summary:

  • I’ve bought 15 books.
  • None of them are available in Canada at Amazon.ca!
  • It cost me more to buy these books as ebooks than it costs in the USA for dead tree version of the books!
  • Canadians pay more for dead tree books.

If I didn’t have a US address, then I would have bought zero books! Seth Godin’s Poke the Box isn’t even available on Kindle in Canada and it’s published by Amazon’s The Domino Project!

If you have information on the cost or availability of these books in other only stores or other countries, I’d love if you would share that data with me.

I find it incredibly frustrating how many books I go to purchase where an ebook either doesn’t exist or costs more than what a dead tree version costs. It makes no sense!

Screenshot of The Leap for sale on Amazon.com

Rick Smith's The Leap costs 3 times more for the digital version

If I included all the books that I have not purchased the picture is even a lot grimmer. I end up borrowing from the local library the non-fiction or older books that I’m interested in — unfortunately many of them lately — rather than feel like a fool.

Screenshot of The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton on Amazon.co.uk

The UK is the only country where Consolations of Philosophy is only available on Kindle

Something has got to change. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the devices are (kindle3, ipad2) if you can’t get what you want to read.

I will close saying that one publisher is doing it well. If the Pragmatic Bookshelf has a book on a software topic I’m interested in, I will purchase it from them even if other tech publishers have a better rated book on the topic. The Pragmatic Bookshelf is the only ebook store that I know of that works.

The Miracle of Human Action

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As a measure of how much modernization has changed things, as recently as 1923 over 100,000 died in the Kanto quake, which was not nearly as strong, but also generated tsunamis. Remember that when people (as they inevitably will) start talking about the relatively low death toll from today’s events as “a miracle“: it was only a miracle comprising knowledge, understanding of history and plate tectonics, planning, engineering, construction, communications, discipline, and other sorts of hard human work.

The low cost in lives and injuries does not, however, diminish the pain and suffering encompassed in each of those lives. It does not make it easier to witness one’s house or office destroyed. It does not clean debris from a formerly vibrant seashore, or put out a raging fire, or comfort an orphan.
Derek K. Miller, “The modernization of Japan saved hundreds of thousands of lives today“, March 11, 2011

Inertial Measurement Units

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Happily, a few decades from now a GPS signal might not be required at all for many things. If atomic clocks get cheaper, then they could be built into everything that needs accurate time. And eventually you’ll be able to navigate without any external signals, thanks to devices called “inertial measurement units”, which track your movements from a known start point. Today, these IMUs use gyroscopes to measure orientation, plus accelerometers to tell how fast it is accelerating. Using this information, plus time, the acceleration is converted into speed and distance to reveal relative location.
David Hambling’s NewScientist article “GPS chaos: How a $30 box can jam your life“

I bet it’s a lot sooner than “a few decades”.

The article was a real eye opener for me on our dependency on GPS, and how fragile the technology is.

The Inners of a Small Computer Security Firm

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From: Greg
To: Jussi
Subject: need to ssh into rootkit
im in europe and need to ssh into the server. can you drop open up
firewall and allow ssh through port 59022 or something vague?
and is our root password still 88j4bb3rw0cky88 or did we change to
88Scr3am3r88 ?
thanks
From: Jussi
To: Greg
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
hi, do you have public ip? or should i just drop fw?
and it is w0cky - tho no remote root access allowed
From: Greg
To: Jussi
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
no i dont have the public ip with me at the moment because im ready
for a small meeting and im in a rush.
if anything just reset my password to changeme123 and give me public
ip and ill ssh in and reset my pw.
From: Jussi
To: Greg
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
ok,
it should now accept from anywhere to 47152 as ssh. i am doing
testing so that it works for sure.
your password is changeme123

i am online so just shoot me if you need something.

in europe, but not in finland? :-) 

_jussi
...

I stayed up much too late last night reading the fascinating Anonymous vs Aaron Bar, HGary, HBGary Federal, Greg Hoglund, rootkit.com well researched and written articles on Ars Technica, mostly by Nate Anderson. (Fascinating at least to a software developer, particularly web developer.)

Start with “How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price“, then read “Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack” by Peter Bright. If you still want more also read “Spy games: Inside the convoluted plot to bring down WikiLeaks“, “Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government” and take a look at Joseph Bonneau’s “Measuring password re-use empirically“.

Some high (or lowlights depending on how you see it) technical elements include:

  • An email admin with an 8 letter all lower and number password used on many other sites.
  • Custom CMS on two sites with unsalted password hashes.
  • Custom CMS with non-complex SQL injection.
  • Classic computer system access social engineering.

This is negligence at any company with sensitive customer data, but at a computer security firm this is dereliction of duty.

There there is the unsubstantiated public accusations that could result in severe USA federal criminal charges for the accused, and down right criminal behavior by a white hat security firm.

Aaron Bar for all his arrogance, ego and unethical behavior still comes across to me as the fall guy for a whole (small) computer security firm that had failed to take care of its own security, and has lost its moral compass.