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Show of 3-30-2013

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Bill: Dear Dr. Shurtz, Last Saturday you talked about Wal-Mart’s no-contract Straight Talk plan, which provides unlimited data and voice for $45 per month.  My Verizon Android phone is off-contract.  You said I might be able to get Verizon to unlock the GSM part of my phone, and also unlock the CDMA part by wiping it out and re-installing it.  Will that wipe out my phone’s Contact List?  Related question: Can I save my phone’s Contact List to my computer’s hard drive as a csv file? Bill, a longtime listener in Bowie.
  • Tech Talk Responds:
  • Email from Lynn in Ohio: Dear Doc and Jim. I posted my name on some guest books on the Internet. My posts have been picked up by the search engines and they are embarrassing. How can I get rid of these search results? They may affect me professionally. Thanks, Lynn.
  • Tech Talk Responds: It is nearly impossible to get rid of indexed information on the web. Search engines will only remove a page from indexing when the request is made by the owner of the website. I would recommend that you go back to each of the website where you posted and request that the webmaster remove your posting. If they do it (and there is no guarantee), it will be dropped from the search results after that page has been re-indexed. That may take a while for all search engines to complete that task. But you still have the archives. Google archives and then there is archive.org.  The lesson here is don’t post anything you don’t want to be known openly. By the way Lynn, I did not use your email address or last name in this answer. So at least this post will not get picked up and identified with you.
  • Email from Hac in Bowie: Dear Tech Talk, I’d like to know more about Skype. Is it secure? Are my calls being recorded or monitored? Love the show. Hac in Bowie.
  • Tech Talk Responds: Skype is a peer-to-peer VoIP program. Microsoft purchased Skype a couple of years ago. Your connections are encrypted even when they’re going through this peer-to-peer network, or through a super node. That implies that anybody sniffing in the middle of the conversation would see only encrypted noise and not be able to determine what’s inside of it. Skype does not record, does not monitor, does not intercept.
  • Could MS listen in? They could, but I doubt it. The amount of data that they would have to be keeping in real time is immense. The only real danger would be in some oppressive countries that monitor their citizens or dissidents.  They block Skype if they cannot monitor the connection. If you are in these countries, use caution. I would not use it for top secret information.
  • Email for Lois in Kansas: Dear Dr. Shurtz. My fairly new laptop with Windows 8 has a problem. When I am typing, the scroll bar suddenly goes down the page and I lose everything. I’ve looked in drafts, deleted, etc. but it hasn’t ended up there. So I have to start all over again trying to remember what I had written previously. Please can you help stop this frustrating happening? I listen to the podcast here in Kansas. Great show. Lois.
  • Tech Talk Responds: I suspect that you have a touchpad on your new laptop. When you scroll to the bottom of the page spontaneously, probably you thumb has touched the touchpad while you are typing. I had this same problem and I simply turned off my touchpad because I use a wireless mouse with my laptop.
  • Look at is the Control Panel, under Mouse. There may be an option to either change the sensitivity of the track pad or disable it completely. Not all laptops allow you disable the touchpad. If you can’t disable it, you might tape a piece of cardboard over the track pad.
  • As far as lost data, if it’s scrolling down the page, scroll back up. What you were typing may still be there.
  • Email from Chris in Reston: Dear Tech Talk. I just got a new ISP supplied router. I am trying to set up the security. I have the SSID, the encryption key, and the router user name (admin) and password. Should I change them? Thanks for your help. Chris in Reston.
  • Tech Talk Responds: It is good that you have all of the key data. I would certainly change the router password. You can leave the user name the same, but I would change the password. Your ISP may leave all the passwords the same for convenience. I would also change the WPA encryption key. Make certain to write both of these down and tape them to the bottom of the router. I would change the broadcast SSID to something other than default (and I would not use my name).
  • In order to change these parameters, you need to log onto the router. Go to 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1 using your router. Log onto the router using the user name and password. You can use the internal webpage to make the changes.

Profiles in IT: Ivan Edward Sutherland (suggested by Bob in MD)

  • Ivan Edward Sutherland is a pioneering computer scientist, who is often recognized as the father of computer graphics.
  • Ivan Edward Sutherland was born May 16, 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska, United.
  • In 8th grade he built a gantry crane with surplus motors brought home by his father.
  • His favorite subject in high school was geometry. Sutherland describes himself as a visual thinker, which led to his interest in computer graphics.
  • His first computer processing experience was with a computer called SIMON, a relay-based computer with six words of two-bit memory. Sutherland’s first significant program allowed SIMON to divide.
  • In the 12th grade, he made a magnetic drum memory with 128 2-bit words.
  • He graduated from Scarsdale High School, 20 miles north of NYC in 1955.
  • He received a BS from Carnegie Mellon (on full scholarship) in 1959, a Master of Science Degree from Caltech in 1960, and a PhD in EE from MIT in 1963.
  • His doctoral thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical Communications System, described the first computer graphical user interface (GUI).
  • Sketchpad was developed on a unique computer, the TX-2, built by Wesley Clark. It had a light pen, which Sutherland used it draw directly on the computer display.
  • After graduating from MIT in 1963, Sutherland accepted a U.S. Army commission.
  • He was assigned first to the University of Michigan, and then to NSA.
  • In 1964, at age 26, First Lieutenant Sutherland replaced J. C. R. Licklider, as the head of the DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO).
  • From 1965 to 1968, Sutherland was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. Work with student Danny Cohen in 1967 led to the development of the Cohen–Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithm.
  • In 1968, with the help of student Bob Sproull, he created the first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system.
  • From 1968 to 1974, he was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah. His students included Jim Clark who went on to found Silicon Graphics.
  • In 1968 Sutherland co-founded Evans & Sutherland, with David C. Evans, to develop accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages.
  • Starting in the mid-1970s, Sutherland was affiliated with the RAND Corporation, and investigated making animated movies—an undertaking well ahead of its time.
  • From 1974 to 1978, he was founding director of Caltech’s Computer Science Dept.
  • In 1980 he founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates.  It was purchased by Sun Microsystems in 1990 to form Sun Labs, its new research division.
  • Sutherland became a Fellow and Vice President at Sun Microsystems.
  • In 2006, he established the Asynchronous Research Center at Portland State Univ.
  • During his career Sutherland has obtained more than 60 patents.

Internet Vulnerability: Undersea Internet Cable Cut

  • A cut to the largest internet cable that connects Europe and Asia caused severe service disruption that stretched from from Africa to Pakistan.
  • Parts of Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and India have reduced connectivity since the cable was severed.
  • These internet customers get most of their internet service routed from Europe and the US and when the cable was cut, some lost internet connectivity entirely.
  • When a cable like that gets cut, a lot of the paths between networks get radically changed and we see that within a few seconds.
  • Seacom, a submarine cable network that provides broadband to Africa and owns the cut cable, said Wednesday that the cable had suffered a cut off the coast of Egypt.
  • When an undersea cable’s service is disrupted, internet service must be rerouted through other cables, significantly impeding an internet service provider’s ability to deliver internet service.
  • The predecessor to this undersea cable has had a service interruption since January after being damaged in the waters of Singapore. Repairs to the cord have been impeded because of delays in obtaining the licensing from the Singapore government allowing it to be fixed.

Internet Vulnerability: Advanced Denial of Service Attacks

  • A year ago Anonymous proposed using DNS to enhance the standard DDOS attack.
  • Around the same time, Anonymous proposed “Operation Global Blackout” to use the DNS service against the very core of the Internet itself in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
  • This week, an attack using the technique proposed for use in that attack tool and operation was at the heart of an ongoing denial-of-service assault on Spamhaus, the anti-spam clearing house organization.
  • DNS Amplification (or DNS Reflection) remains possible after years of security expert warnings.
  • The Domain Name Service is the Internet’s directory assistance. It allows computers to get the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address for a remote server.
  • DNS is organized in a hierarchy; each top-level domain name (such as .com, .edu, .gov, .net, and so on) has a “root” DNS server keeping a list of each of the “authoritative” DNS servers for each domain registered with them.
  • When you type “Stratford.edu” into your browser’s address bar and hit the return key, your browser checks with a DNS resolver to determine where to send the Web request.
  • The resolver pings the top-level domain’s DNS servers for the authoritative DNS for the destination domain, then it sends a DNS request for the full hostname to that authoritative server.
  • To save time, DNS requests don’t use the “three-way handshake” of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to make all these queries. Instead, DNS typically uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP)—a “connectionless” protocol that lets the server fire and forget requests.
  • That makes the sending of requests and responses quicker, but it also opens up a door to abuse of DNS.
  •  All the attacker has to do is find a DNS server open to requests from any client and send it requests forged as being from the target of the attack.
  • The “amplification” in DNS amplification attacks comes from the size of those responses. While a DNS lookup request itself is fairly small, the resulting response of a recursive DNS lookup can be much larger. .
  • A DNS query consisting of a 60 byte request can be answered with responses of over 4000 bytes, amplifying the response packet by a factor of 60.
  • But even if you can’t find an open DNS server to blast recursive responses from, you can still depend on the heart of the Internet for a respectable hail of packet projectiles.
  • A “root hint” request—sending a request for name servers for the “.” domain—results in a response 20 times larger than the packet the request came in.
  • In the case of the attack on Spamhaus, the organization was able to turn to the content delivery network CloudFlare for help. CloudFlare hid Spamhaus behind its CDN, which routed to the closest CloudFlare point of presence. This spread out the volume of the attack.
  • But that traffic still had to get to Cloudflare before it could be blocked. And that resulted in a traffic jam in the core of the Internet, slowing connections for the Internet as a whole.
  • The simplest way to prevent DNS amplification and reflection attacks would be to prevent forged DNS requests from being sent along in the first place.
  • The problem would be greatly reduced if zone and domain DNS servers simply were configured not to return responses received from outside their own networks.
  • Another possible solution that would eliminate the problem entirely is to make DNS use TCP for everything—reducing the risk of forged packets.
  • But that would require a change to DNS itself, so it’s unlikely.
  • Maybe the attack on Spamhaus will motivate core network providers to address this problem.

Kodak Instamatic Camera Release 50 Years Ago

  • Kodak’s Instamatic camera celebrates its 50th anniversary this month.
  • Because of it, picture-taking was made more instantly possible than ever before.
  • Within two years of its March 1963 launch, more than 7.5 million Instamatics had been sold worldwide starting at $16 — a little more than $120 in today’s dollars.
  • All of Kodak’s cameras since the $1 Brownie was introduced in February 1900 strove to achieve George Eastman’s ideal of making photography universally accessible and affordable.
  • As with most things at Kodak, what looked simple and inviting on the outside was the product of hard work and ingenuity in the Kodak labs.
  • It hit the retail market with the force of transformation.
  • It had a self-contained flash and it had a unique film canister or cartridge that solved the long-time problem of erratic film-loading.
  • The film cartridge took that fear away for many. Anybody could use this camera and load it in daylight.”
  • Between 1963 and 1970, more than 50 million Instamatics were sold. The engineer who came up with the 126 cartridge was Hubert Nerwin. His name is on the patent.
  • This year is the 50th anniversary of the Instamatic. It’s also the 100th anniversary of the Kodak lab.”

Bitcoins Reach $1B total Valuation

  • Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol.
  • It was introduced by a pseudonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.
  • Internationally, bitcoins can be exchanged by personal computer directly through a wallet file or a website without an intermediate financial institution.
  • In trade, one bitcoin is subdivided into 100 million smaller units called satoshis, defined by eight decimal places.
  • Bitcoin does not operate like typical currencies: it has no central bank and it solely relies on an internet-based peer-to-peer network.
  • The money supply is automated, limited, divided and scheduled, and given to servers or “bitcoin miners” that verify bitcoin transactions and add them to a decentralized and archived transaction log every 10 minutes.
  • The log is authenticated by ECDSA digital signatures and verified by the intense process of brute forcing SHA256 hash functions of varying difficulty by competing “bitcoin miners.”
  • Transaction fees may apply to new transactions depending on the strain put on the network’s resources.
  • Each 10-minute portion or “block” of the transaction log has an assigned money supply. The amount per block depends on how long the network has been running.
  • Currently, 25 bitcoins are generated with every 10-minute block. This will be halved to 12.5 BTC during the year 2017 and halved continuously every 4 years after until a hard limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached during the year 2140.
  • Bitcoin is the most widely used alternative currency. As of March 2013, the monetary base of bitcoin is valued at over $1B USD, pushed up by the Cypress instability.

ACLU Challenges Stingray Cell Phone Surveillance

  • Civil liberties activists asking federal court to disallow evidence obtained by technology that mimics a genuine cellphone tower
  • A technology which lets police locate and track people through their cellphones in alleged violation of the US constitution will be challenged in court.
  • The American Civil Liberties Union will urge a federal court in Arizona to disregard evidence obtained by a stingray in what could be a test case for limiting the technology’s use without a warrant.
  • The case revolves around Daniel Rigmaiden, a hacker accused of leading a gang of sophisticated identity thieves which allegedly stole millions of dollars by filing bogus tax returns.
  • A stingray mimics a cellphone tower, prompting a phone to connect to it even if no call is made. This lets a stingray operator send a signal to the phone, locate it and in some cases intercept conversations. The device sweeps up data from other people nearby, regardless of whether they are the focus of the investigation.
  • Stingray is the generic name for the technology. Similar devices, typically the size of a shoebox, have different names such as Triggerhead and Kingfish.
  • The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have used the technology at least since 2008 but according to the ACLU they have routinely concealed or downplayed its role in surveillance requests to federal magistrate judges.
  • The EFF said in a statement that the technology’s unrestricted use violated the fourth amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures:
  • The FBI so values the technology it has a policy of deleting the data it gathers to keep suspects in the dark about its capabilities, the Wall Street Journal reported.

FBI Seeks Real-time Internet Monitoring

  • Right now, the FBI can obtain electronic communications after the fact.
  • If they could snoop on people discussing illegal activity in a chat, they could catch criminals in the act.
  • A problem for the FBI is that most savvy criminals know to not discuss business over landline phones and other platforms that make it easy to get caught.
  • Instead, conversation has moved to online chats, text messaging, and cellphones. And the law hasn’t kept up.
  • The 1994 “Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act” was written with some knowledge of the internet, but this was well before Skype, widespread email, cloud computing, and gchat.
  • To catch up to all that technology, the FBI is working with other members of the intelligence community to propose new legal snooping rules by the end of the year.
  • FBI would like the ability to monitor  Gchat in real-time, but also the chat function in online games like Scrabble, as well as online voice chat programs like Skype and cloud storage services like DropBox.
  • In the late 1980s, pagers and payphones revolutionized the drug trade, with the combination of anonymity, on-demand delivery, and an absence of recorded-transaction information.
  • Police eventually caught on. Criminals moved on, using pre-paid and disposable “burner” cell phones for everything from drug sales to bomb detonators.
  • The FBI’s latest call for great legal power to spy on online chats as the happen is just a sign of the perpetual cat-and-mouse between police enforcing the law and criminals trying to dodge it.
  • The next likely move for criminals: casual cryptography. Protocols for off-the-record chats already exist, and will ensure that conversations remain only between known parties, without someone else eavesdropping.
  • Expect me in five years to be writing encrypted conversation. Next up: a back door to encryption programs.