Global Toad News

Police love tasering people, if you don’t comply, even if your back is broken because you fell 30 feet, the police can legally taser you in America.  Welcome to the land of the Free, don’t expect the U.S. government to help unless you are a foreign national.

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I was reading an article by Paul Drockton about Glenn Beck and some scandal involving Goldline where people called this company that Glenn Beck promoted and ended up overpaying for common European gold coins.

But so what, Glenn Beck wasn’t directly involved in the operation of the company, and frankly people shouldn’t rely on a radio show host’s endorsement for investment advice.

What I found way more interesting was the Better Business Bureau and it’s rating system.  To me, it seems a lot like a scam.   Basically if you pay the BBB, you can get a much better rating than if you don’t.  One example was that someone paid for Hamas (which is considered by some to be either a terrorist organization or the lawful government of the Palestinian National Authority) to have a membership and it got an A- rating, while Starbucks, a real company, but not a BBB member, earns an F.

In other words, if you rely on the BBB rating for something, then you might be getting taken for a ride, because there a rating from the BBB just means how much the BBB likes that company, not how good the company really is.

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If it was April (or March) I would think it’s a practical joke, but a small company that is called “Teachbook” is being sued by Facebook because, according to a quote in the LA Times:

If others could freely use ‘generic plus BOOK’ marks for online networking services targeted to that particular generic category of individuals, the suffix BOOK could become a generic term for ‘online community/networking services’ or ‘social networking services,

So for instance having an “eBook” website would be an infringment of Facebook by this reasoning.  Or SportsBook.com is an infringer.  Strange that Facebook would go after a company with almost no users but leave SportsBook.com alone.  Of course there is the fact that SportsBook.com has been in business for 14 years, compared to Facebook being in business for only 6 years, so if Facebook wins it’s case against TeachBook.com, I think that SportsBook.com can use the exact same argument against Facebook.

That would be poetic justice.

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At least that is what I gleaned from the exchange reported between Spamhaus and NIC.LV as reported in TheRegister.co.uk.  Spamhaus maintains a free list of spam ip addresses that other Internet services use to keep garbage out.  It seems that there are large groups of spam bots in Latvia, and Spamhaus had tried repeatedly to contact the Internet Server Provider (ISP) that it originated with, with no response.   So SpamHaus added their ip addresses to it’s blacklist.

SpamHaus then contacted the abuse address for the ISP that supplied the connections to the smaller ISP, again no response.  So again SpamHaus added some more ip addresses to it’s blacklist.

It seems that the people responsible handling the abuse finally started paying attention, as it was the Latvian Computer Emergency Response Team.  It seems to me that they only took action to tell Spamhaus that Spamhaus has no right to add anyone to any blacklist without comprehensive proof.  In other words, stop interfering in our business model.  Apparently the fact that it took a couple of hours to clear up something that WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN AN ISSUE if the Latvian ISP had bothered to respond to any of the numerous warnings, is causing the Latvian people great distress.

Of course doing something about spam, that’s not their problem.

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There is a misconception that I run into from time to time that if you link, team, bond or whatever to put a group of network cards together as single managed unit you can increase the speed of the network connection.

This is not really true.  While it makes sense to have two network cards bonded (which for this conversation will be taken to mean the same as teamed and linked), it provides an automatic fail-over more than anything.  While some of the traffic and load can be distributed, it seems to me that when watching the load on my Linux server that IEEE 802.3ad link aggregation pushed most of the traffic onto just one card (unlike what I expected from this IEEE presentation).  That isn’t saying that 802.3ad link aggregation isn’t good, it just is not necessarily going to give you any additional bandwidth than a single network interface.  And that is true of other types of link aggregation methodologies, at least when implemented on top of a tcp/ip network.

As one Network Administrator wrote, after spending large sums of money on link aggregation:

Long story short, we’ve had to find out the hard way that it SEEMS like in MANY, MANY hours of my own testing and extensive research, it seems that in our case of wanting to INCREASE BANDWIDTH between the new Database Server and new Terminal Server (what I call a ‘ONE to ONE Scenario’), the connection maxes out at using only 1GB (25%) of the 4GB aggregate link.

In other words, if you expect 802.3ad link aggregation (or any other scheme) to improve your throughput you are likely to be disappointed.  The best performance I could see was with the Linux is adaptive load balancing.  But before you decide on any one methodology, you should test to make sure that you are getting what you think you are getting.

Otherwise, you are just wasting resources (as in the example where the machines had 8 network cards in two “teams”).  More than two cards bonded together yields diminishing returns.  I am sure that there are solutions that can do an amazing job of putting multiple network interfaces into a whole, but you might want to just look at a fatter pipe in the first place.

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Apparently a group of priest are under attack for using the phrase “God Squad”, while I might have expected ABC to pursue them for the use of the term since it is so similar to the Mod Squad television series, the attack comes from Best Buy which claims that “God Squad” is confusingly similar to “Geek Squad“.  Can we expect to see Best Buy suing the God Squad Show as well, since the word Geek and God are so confusingly similar in the minds of Best Buy (or at least it’s attorneys), or is it because this group was a bunch of Catholic priests?  Only Best Buy’s lawyers know.

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I am just speculating here about the current Oracle lawsuit against Google.  I don’t think it’s just about the fact that Google will run programs that were written in the Java programming language using a non Java virtual machine called Dalvik.   One of the things that Dalvik is not is a Java emulator.  It instead an entirely different platform that programs written in Java can be compiled for (just like you can compile programs written for Windows to run under a different platform).

In other words, it’s similar to being able to run Windows programs on your Mac, or Linux box (there is a difference, but it’s fundamentally the same thing).  Oracle claims that anything that says the word Java belongs to them (it seems), or it might be that if Oracle can win against Google, it can collect fees from ANY compiler that implements what it claims is infringing technology.   And while this seems like the kiss of death for the already struggling Java revenue stream the bigger target might be to get people to use something other than the other product that Oracle acquired with Sun, MySql.

MySql is a very popular open source database system, that is used by many hosting providers.  It has a weird dual licensing model that has worked well for many years (or at least there were no serious complaints) but all that might change with the new litigation happy owners.

In other words, Google is a test case.  If Oracle can prevail against Google (and there is a chance it could, because it really is up to the whims of the judges) it could spell the end of emulation software (or even software that is remotely like emulation software).  It also would potentially open up hosting companies to various and sundry lawsuits for offering MySql hosting in some way that Oracle feels might be in violation of some clause in it’s license agreement.  In other words, Oracle is perfectly willing to scorch the earth with it’s Java and MySql products, because both were competing against it’s more profitable Oracle Database product line.

But these are just my ramblings, and might have no basis in what Oracle is really doing.

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Actually Oracle has declared war on Google.  It seems that Java (like DotNet) has patents associated with it, because in America we like to have patents on abstract things (for instance the famous 6368227, method of swinging on a swing patent).  Now patents used to be required to be a physical thing, then they used to be just specific, now they can be whatever the lawyers can get away with.

While this has been covered at Groklaw, they point out that Oracle once told congress that:

Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software. The Company believes that existing copyright law and available trade secret protections, as opposed to patent law, are better suited to protecting computer software developments.

Patent law provides to inventors an exclusive right to new technology in return for publication of the technology. This is not appropriate for industries such as software development in which innovations occur rapidly, can be made without a substantial capital investment, and tend to be creative combinations of previously-known techniques.

Even if patent law were appropriate for protection of software, due to the large volume of recently-granted software patents and the rising number of new applications, the current patent process would continue to be troublesome for the software industry. Software patent examinations are hindered by the limited capability of searching prior art, by the turnover rate among examiners in the Patent and Trademark Office, and by the confusion surrounding novelty and innovation in the software arena. The problem is exacerbated by varying international patent laws, which both raise the cost and confuse the issue of patent protection.

Unfortunately, as a defensive strategy, Oracle has been forced to protect itself by selectively applying for patents which will present the best opportunities for cross-licensing between Oracle and other companies who may allege patent infringement.

Now Google has not sued Oracle but that doesn’t matter, because what a company says they will do and what they actually will do are different things.  This unfortunately taints the whole legacy of Sun (which developed Java) and also threatens MySql (and popular open source database) because both of these entities are now owned by Oracle.  Some people say that Oracle brought this lawsuit because Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) and Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) are great friends and they both hate open software, and Android is beginning to eat into Apple’s iPhone market share.

It seems that Google wanted to use Java on their mobile device, but alas, there wasn’t a free version of Java that ran on mobile devices.  Most people don’t realize it, but many Microsoft powered mobile devices do NOT have a Java virtual machine, because even though Sun had released an open source version of Java, they made it almost impossible to implement it on a mobile device (see this article).  Google in trying to embrace Java (instead of just using C++ with some extensions like many would have like) opened the door to a potential lawsuit from Sun/Oracle.  While Google developed their Java interpreter (otherwise called a Java Virtual Machine) from scratch, I would argue that they did infringe on the very broad patents that Oracle aquired when it bought Sun, the question to be decided by the courts are broad patents valid.

Unfortunately the lawyers will be laughing all the way to the bank while the rest of us watch helplessly as incredible amounts of money (and it could be billions) are spent on this venture.

In any case, there still is C++ for people who want to use an unencumbered language.

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Recently I’ve been using Outlook to work with an Exchange Server.  Now the “recommended” setting for the connection was to use “Cached Exchange mode”, what this gives users is the ability to view their mail when the Exchange server is not available, or the connection is down.

However, for me at least, it caused nothing but problems.  Outlook would hang, and other imap type connections (e.g. to Gmail) using Thunderbird worked much better.  Cached Exchange mode was introduced in Exchange 2003, and Microsoft has been promoting ever since.  That said, cached Exchange mode actually means that more connections to the Exchange server are made, and that the connections are not maintained!  In other words, with a good network connection, cached Exchange mode might actually be slower, though if you work disconnected you see nothing.  Also when you send an email, you don’t really know when Outlook will send it (because it has to reestablish the connection).

The thing is that some of these problems are on the server side, specifically with a 32 bit server running Exchange and users using cached exchange mode, each user will be using a minimum of 10 connections (4 synchronization threads, with 2 connections each, and a fast thread with another 2).  So the users using cached Exchange mode sometimes get stuck to the end of the line for getting data from Exchange.  Now since I try to keep the infromation in Exchange to the calendar and about 10 important emails, it makes no sense for me to use cached Exchange mode, and whether it does for other people should be for them to figure out, but I do not believe that cached Exchange mode is the magic solution to performance problems with Exchange that Microsoft has pushed it out as.  Some installations throttle the Outlook Address Book in Exchange to limit the performance issues that are caused by the cached Exchange mode on the server side as well.

Now some things don’t work if you don’t use cached Exchange mode, the junk mail filter doesn’t work (and if you rely on it, then you really have problems, imho).   Of course Microsoft actually recommends disable the client side junk filter (see this) that article also addresses that the primary use (scheduling) I have for Outlook and Exchange, actually works worse in cached Exchange mode, so for some users (e.g. me!) cached Exchange mode actually degrades performance.

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        string strFilter = "*.exe;*.dll";
        string folder = Directory.GetCurrentDirectory();
        string[] filters = strFilter.Split(';');
        ArrayList files = new ArrayList();

        foreach (string filter in filters)
        {
            files.AddRange(Directory.GetFiles(folder, filter));
        }        

        foreach (string file in files)
        {
            BaseCoffReader reader = new ManagedCoffReader(file);
            CoffHeader coffHeader = reader.Parse();
            DateTime timeStamp = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0).AddSeconds(coffHeader.TimeDateStamp);
            FileInfo fileInfo = new FileInfo(file);
            bool readOnlyflag = fileInfo.IsReadOnly;
            if (readOnlyflag)
                fileInfo.IsReadOnly = false;
            try
            {
                fileInfo.CreationTime = timeStamp;
                fileInfo.LastWriteTime = timeStamp;
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Exception: {0}\nFile name:{1}\n - TimeDateStamp: {2}", e.ToString(), file, timeStamp);

            }
            if (readOnlyflag)
                fileInfo.IsReadOnly = true;
        }

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I am not a fan of Blackberry, but I do think that there is something good about it when you have many governments complaining that the devices should be outlawed because the messages can’t be easily intercepted.

Which only tells you just how much information the governments routinely intercept if they are going nuts over the blackberry devices.  Personally I strongly encourage people to use encryption, but since it’s not integrated into most communincation systems (email, texting, etc), most people find it “too burdensome” and so refuse to use it.  It’s not that I am doing anything, it’s just that I believe that people should have the right to privacy, though that may be a quaint idea that the courts will override to protect us from evil invaders (not from Mexico though).

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For some things I still have to use Microsoft Outlook (e.g. room scheduling) and so I wanted to have a method to not send emails with a default account.   I finally found a good answer that covers all versions of Outlook at MSOutlook.info, where the author covers setting a dummy account for versions older than Outlook 2010, and setting a registry entry (below) for Outlook 2010 (the registry entry only works for Outlook 2010).  Hopefully this will be of some use to other people who might be using multiple accounts from Outlook.

Key:HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\office\14.0\outlook\options
Value name: forceaccountselection 
Value type: REG_DWORD 
Value: 1

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If you haven’t heard about the problems with the latest iPhone, here’s a quick rundown.  The latest iPhone (iPhone 4) from Apple has had issues with the cell phone reception.  Initially Apple claimed it was just a software issue, in that the math for computing the number of bars was just wrong (I guess they have the new math at Apple).  Apparently Apple came up with a brand new formula for computing bars,  and will now start using the method that AT&T recommends (and has been recommending for years) to compute signal strength.

Alas, that was only the beginning because it seems that the iPhone 4 also has a revoluntionary attenna design, that really isn’t that revolutionary, where the attenna is a metal bar that the user can hardly avoid holding while using the phone.  Steve Jobs while admitting that this is a problem, claims that all the other phones have this problem.  The Wall Street quotes Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha as responding:

 Antennas on the outside of products have known issues, and despite the fact that they lead to smaller phones we have avoided them because consumers don’t like being told how to hold the phone.

Of course Apple is the only company that really knows how to make great cell phones, at least if you go by the devotion of their users, who continue to buy iPhones in spite of bad connections, lost calls and slow internet connections.

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Recently I had an issue with a domain wide “RPC Server is unavailable” error when logging on for all the terminal servers.  RDP to Windows XP and other machines worked fine, and users were able to be authenticated against IIS.

Further investigation revealed that ALL the machines in the domain were having trust issues with all the domain controllers.

E.g.

On every machine I’ve looked at I saw messages in the logs similar to
The session setup to the Windows NT or Windows 2000 Domain Controller \\NETDCX.mydomain.local for the domain mydomain is not responsive.  The current RPC call from Netlogon on \\AMachine to \\NETDCX.mydomain.local has been cancelled.

or
This computer was not able to set up a secure session with a domain controller in domain %1 due to the following:
%2
This may lead to authentication problems. Make sure that this computer is connected to the network. If the problem persists, please contact your domain administrator.

Now even though the Domain Controllers did not report any problems, and users were able to authenticate against it (e.g. through web services), it seems that the process by which Windows allows the MACHINES to be trusted broke.  This seems to have been related to replacing a network switch that might have interrupted the communication between the Domain Controllers because the fix was to reboot just one of the Domain Controllers.  All the Domain Controllers are Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise and were fully patched.  However this is likely a rare occurance as no one else seems to have had this specific problem.   If you do have similar problems, you might want to look at the switch that the domain controllers are using as a possible culprit.

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For some reason VMWare server 2.0.2 (and Workstation) are a little tricky on OpenSuSE 11.2 and other Linux systems.  However there is a very good walkthrough over at RiseSecurity that makes it as painless as it can be until someone writes an automatic method.  It seems to be the best version out there.

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It seems to me with 2000 oil skimmers in the United States and have turned down other nations offers of Super Skimmers, the oil should be well contained by now.  But it’s not.

We only have 20 skimmers in the gulf, I guess they must be doing the job they are supposed to.  Which is destroy BP, and crap on the United States at the same time.  I am not a fan of an oil company that wanted to claim is was for green power when it makes most of it’s money from Oil, but BP’s board just does the oil thing for the money, not because they understand the reality in the fields anymore.

The editor of International Currency Review reports that:

BP appraised The Obama Administration on 13th February 2010 that the Deepwater Horizon was leaking oil and natural gas onto the ocean floor

 Of course this is what he has had reported to him by what he considers reliable news sources, which suggests that someone should look into this.

After all it’s a crazy conspiracy theory to think that Obama would deliberately destroy (or nationalize) the oil industry if he could get away with it, not matter the cost.  But someone in government might, which might be why congress is working with the White House to ensure that there is an internet KILL switch which will give the president at his sole discretion to declare an cyber emergency which will allow him to seize the control of the internet in the United States.

Now, I can see the argument for this, but I would gather get back to Congress having to declare war, in other words for the President to get all the members of Congress together, present the evidence to suspend the constitution before doing so.

Sadly that is not the state of the nation today.  Oh, if you are a non United States citizen you might be able to argue the constitution in your case, if you are in the United States, because your government cares more about you the United States government cares about it’s people.  This is why people love to come to the United States, as long as you are in the United States you have extra legal protections.

At least that’s how it looks to me.

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In case anyone was wondering about the security of using TrueCrypt (because it’s open source).  The FBI and the Brazilian police spent a year trying to decrypt some TrueCrypt’ed drives with no success.

And that’s only one reasone why you should use the Free Whole Drive Encryption in TrueCrypt.  Of course it could be that the government found some flaw in TrueCrypt and just is pretending that they can’t decrypt the drive after a year.

Makes all those movies where someone is able to crack a secure system seem like the fiction they are (it’s not that you can’t get into a secure system, it’s that brute force won’t get you there).

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Recently I was getting the following error trying to get some things to work with Microsoft’s DotNet Framework.

An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007000B)

Unfortunately neither Google, Bing, or MSDN was of much help.  I did get some help from Tracker Software Products who told me that I need to compile my DotNet projects as for a specific platform (eg Platform target x86 or x64).

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Apparently “powersellers” on eBay have a knack for keeping people from leaving honest bad feedback, suing the people who leave the feedback.

So if you get crap on eBay, and leave bad feedback, expect to get sued by the powerseller.

Nice.  Really makes me want to use eBay.

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No, I am not talking about the congressman who though Guam might tip over and all the people fall into the sea (though that was very stupid).  Rather I am talking about the politician who wrote in The Register:

 Just as Apple, the inventors of the iPhone, ensured that their product was ‘open source’ – meaning that software developers could come along and invent ways to use the phone going well beyond what Apple themselves had initially imagined – so too will our planning policy benefit from involved citizens achieving more than central government could ever manage on its own.

The rest of his ramblings are likewise full of nonsense.  The iPhone is a closed system, and like the government people might think it will bring freedom or whatever, but it only finds new ways to funnel money from your pockets.  The iPhone is not open source, Apple does not let developers do what they want, and it even dictates which languages they MUST program in.

Hmm, I guess the analogy of having a government that is like Apple isn’t so far fetched, glizty marketing, inferior delivery.

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