HQ version available here.
Technology
Autonomy Cube – Travor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum
A few weeks ago a friend of my sent me this link for an event with Jacob Appelbaum (who I’ve already featured here) and Trevor Paglen. Yesterday, they both held a talk about their art project Autonomy Cube at the Edith-Russ-Haus in Oldenburg, just an hour away from my home.
After seeing their Chaos Communication Congress talks it was an obvious “hell yes” for me, so yesterday a colleague and I took the drive over there.
Quite a good and insightful talk about the state of the internet (take away: “the network is hostile”), the purpose of their art and how to protect anonymity.
The Autonomy Cube is basically a small computer in a cube made from acrylic glass. It’s connected to the fiber network of the museum and acts as a TOR-enabled WiFi-hotspot.
By connecting to the WiFi, you surf completely anonymous and also help protecting the identity of all other users of the TOR-network.
Sadly, the exhibition only starts today and it wasn’t possible to see it live yesterday. I guess I’ll have to take another tour.
Please excuse the rather bad quality of my pictures made with a potato.
[Reminder] Clean up your brew formulae
Once in a while you should update and upgrade your brew formulae. And don’t forget to clean up afterwards.
Also, be advised that “brew cleanup” will need a “–all” in the near future.
FreeNAS 9.3 and booting from flash drives.
It’s been a few days and they’ve been rather quiet. That’s a good sign, because it means that FreeNAS has somewhat approved. And it really has. It is faster, more reliable and I like the new update structure making it easier to keep the machine up-to-date.
The only big issue I had is the new boot file system. With version 9.3, FreeNAS switched to ZFS for its boot medium. Not a bad choice, considering the pros of ZFS, but at least for me it seemed to lead to a lot of trouble with broken flash drives (from which I used to boot from). Multiple times I suffered from unreadable sectors.
The solution I found so far was to switch from a flash drive to a hard drive which I installed in the 5,24“ bay and plugged into the internal USB slot. Since that, it’s sailing smoothly.
Excel follow-up
Recently on Commit Strip, there was a post about a project management tool written in Excel. This, and another Excel comic from CS which I featured here reminded me to share a small story from a previous job. I work in logistics IT and had the pleasure of encountering many different companies, each of them with their own flair of “how things shall run”.
One of our clients has pretty specific requirements and had his whole transport management built in, you guessed it, Microsoft Excel and VBA.
But not enough, he also had a management software for returnable transport items, and it was developed in, you guessed it again, Excel and even more VBA.
Basically, the whole operation founded on a few spreadsheets that took eternities to load. But because their solutions didn’t scale that well, they wanted to switch to more profound solutions, at least for the transport item management.
Unluckily for us, they had some devious stuff running with other software (and even more Excel) which in the end meant we had to implement a middleware. Now guess what they opted for when it came to writing it…
The Internet is on Fire.
Security Checklist
Mac OS X bash Shellshock workaround
Many of your heard about Shellshock, a remote execution vulnerability in bash. It’s quite serious and Mac OS X seems to be vulnerable to this bug.
An easy way to check if your system is vulnerable to Shellshock is to use the following command
env var='() { ignore this;}; echo vulnerable’ bash -c /bin/true
The output on a vulnerable system should look somewhat like this:
Since there’s already a fixed version, we can install it via brew, rename the original binary and symlink to the brew version.
1. Install bash via brew
brew install bash
2. Change directory to /bin since that’s the path of bash on your Mac.
cd /bin
3. Rename bash to _bash (or anything you like).
sudo mv bash _bash
4. Link to our newly installed version of bash (brew installs to /usr/local/bin)
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/bash bash
If you check your system again vor Shellshock the output should look like this:
Finally: To revert the changes, simply delete the symlink and rename _bash back to bash.
Comic recommendation: CommitStrip
One of my favorite comics online, and one of my favorite strips of it: Excel. The poor man’s IDE.
Freifunk Bremen
Freifunk is an initiative to provide free and uncensored WiFi.
The basic principle is easy: people buy a router, flash it with a custom Freifunk firmware and share their internet connection with other people.
Or, if another Freifunk uplink is nearby, the router can simply mesh with it and use the wireless connection to connect to the internet.
The project has branches in multiple cities and in some, it has been very successful (like in Berlin, Hamburg, Lübeck, Paderborn and some others).
Here, in Bremen, the first two projects to establish free WiFi failed. Since around one year, Freifunk Bremen grows to provide exactly that. It now has around 70 hotspots throughout the city and is growing rapidly.
Since yesterday, I’ve got my own Freifunk hotspot. Why? First, because I want to support this initiative. I like the idea of free access, no censorship and a distributed network and want to be part of it.
Second, because I want to learn about networking. Networking is one of the core parts of computing and I’d say by far my favorite.
There’s a lot coming up in the fall for the project and I’m eager to see where this is going.
Heshsum 