I lost my entire blog database as a result of a planned server rebuild last weekend.  You  might see some wierd stuff going on for the next few days while I finish setting everything back up.  Sorry about that…

All comments and pages are gone.  Ah well…

No expectation of privacy. These words are chilling in their implication.  The government could be reading my e-mail communication on Google’s mail servers right now without my knowledge.  As a matter of fact, they don’t have to tell me for another three months.  I can understand the difference between an ISP protecting itself or troubleshooting an e-mail issue.  This is completely different.  If you are not outraged when you read this please start researching online privacy and its implications.

So, what am I going to do about it?  I am currently evaluating all of the services that I have outsourced to the cloud.  I run my own linux server at home and am seriously thinking about moving as much as I can to that box.  I already forward my work and personal e-mail accounts to the cloud so moving it home wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  I’ll let everyone know what I am up to when I make a final decision.  At least with the data at home I know what the Government is doing.  They have to supply a warrant to search my equipment.  They have to, you know, follow the law…

Thus, in the case of email messages stored and sent in the cloud, the government doesn’t need a warrant, doesn’t need probable cause, and doesn’t need to provide the “owner” of the communications with notice. At least, not right away. Indeed, the government can request that the ISP “preserve” future communications that haven’t even been conceived of yet, so that the government may demand them if the situation warrants.

Contrast this procedure with that required by both the US Constitution and the rules implementing them. If the mail was, for example, stored not by an ISP, but rather on Warshak’s own internal mail server (and putting aside subpoenas to the recipients of the emails), the government would need a warrant, supported by probable cause - not just “reasonable grounds to believe” - with an oath or affirmation to a neutral magistrate. Under the Fourth Amendment, the warrant would have to specify exactly what was to be searched for and seized, and the evidence seized would have to be supported by probable cause. The warrant would have to be narrowly tailored to seize only the evidence for which there was probable cause, and could not be what the law calls a “general warrant”. Finally, the government would have to prepare an inventory of whatever was seized, and give a copy of the warrant and a receipt to the suspect.

Thus, as a general rule, if the cops take stuff from you with a warrant, you know it, and you know when and what they took. The law does permit the judge to delay notice.

…

The court for example relied on Google’s Gmail service, which permits automated review of the contents of email (for advertising purposes), or statements by corporate employers eschewing an expectation of privacy by users of the system. The government urged the court to go even further, arguing that there is no constitutional protection of privacy in email where, for example, the ISP used malware scanners to look for malicious code in email or deep packet inspection of email.

…

The real problem with the Warshak Court’s ruling - and here is where it gets dangerous - is that it essentially held that your expectation of privacy with respect to the government’s seizure of your email is dictated by the terms of the contract with the ISP. These terms of use, which generally provide the ISP or storage facility a limited “right of entry” or “right of inspection” are intended to protect the ISP from liability, not to establish the balance of privacy vis a vis the government. Indeed, even if your employer said you had “no right of privacy” in your corporate email, this wouldn’t necessarily mean that the cops could read the email without a warrant or a subpoena. It might mean that if the ISP or employer examined your email pursuant to their policy and then saw something and called the cops that this would be appropriate.

This is an excellent five minute primer on the importance of a freely accessible whitespace. Once this space becomes available it could revolutionize the internet as we know it. Everyone should become involved in the Free The Airwaves movement. The consequences will be felt far and wide for better or worse.  Please fill out the petition.  I already have.  Let’s get started working together.

There are a few different reasons why I support Barack Obama in this election.  The most important of them is his approach to technology policy.  If you are a McCain supporter and are enthusiastic about technology, you really owe it to yourself to watch this.  It goes off the rails a bit in the last minute but the rest of the 20 minute video is solid.

Dell is about to announce a new entry in the sub notebook market.  I am very excited about this new laptop.  It comes pre-installed with a customized Ubuntu 8.04 desktop.  This is the kind of laptop that I could easily take to meetings or on long trips while still keeping my linux desktop readily available.  Ubuntu will have modifications that will reduce power consumption and also has the flash hard drive for near instant boot/shut down times.  Could this be used as a business laptop?  I would like to see linux adopted at work in some capacity.  Maybe I can pick one up and show it off.  If I can start running projectors in meetings or some other peripheral function maybe people will take notice.  No one will want to drop their main Windows laptop over this but I’ll be some folks will want to work remotely with it.  I am very excited about this product.  This would make an excellent item to buy when/if Christmas bonuses comes around… 

Dell’s much-anticipated subnotebook product, which could be available to consumers by the end of the week, will be offered with Ubuntu 8.04 preinstalled. The little laptop is called the Inspiron 910 and it could displace the venerable Asus Eee PC as the dominant Linux-based notebook.

The diminutive Dell was first spotted at the All Things D event in May. There has been much speculation about what software platform will ship with the device when it finally hits the market. Our sources told us that Linux would be available as an option, and this was confirmed this morning when Gizmodo published detailed specifications which show that buyers will be able to choose between Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows XP.

The specifications also show that the device includes an 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, up to 1GB of RAM, and an 8.9″ screen with support for a resolution of 1024×600. It will also include a built-in camera, solid-state drives ranging between 4GB and 16GB, a VGA port, a media card reader, WiFi, and 3 USB ports. Rumors indicate that the base model could be priced as low as $299.

Ubuntu Remix Launcher

New announcement from the Fedora folks.  This is starting to get a bit frustrating.  Some detail would be helpful.  Was it a security compromise, hardware failure, logic bomb or any other number of myriad problems.  It would be nice to know if some of the updates I downloaded last week when I converted to Fedora 9 were compromised.   I am concerned that this problem is not being handled very well from a PR standpoint.  I’m sure it’s not a big deal but some broad outline of what the problem is would be very helpful.

Our team has been hard at work for several days now, restoring services in the Fedora infrastructure. We started with what we identified as Fedora’s “critical path,” those systems required to restore minimum daily operation. That work to be completely finished by the end of the day. We then move on to our other value services to complete them as soon as possible.

Please give the infrastructure team the time they need to do this demanding work. They have been doing a spectacular job and deserve the absolute highest credit.

The systems that are now back online and usable include the following:
* Puppet, Xen and FAS hosts
* app1, app3, and app4
* database and proxy servers
* the majority of the Xen guest machines
* serverbeach5, serverbeach4
* Fedora Hosted**

The systems that should be available very soon:
* asterisk1 and collab1
* cvs1
* builders, x86 and ppc
* Fedora People

We know the community is awaiting more detail on the past week’s activities and their causes. We’re preparing a timeline and details and will make them available in the near future. We appreciate the community’s patience, and will continue to post updates to the fedora-announce-list as soon as possible.

From an interview with Dr. Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite.  The technology world would be much better off if more people operated this way.

RM

I like your note that reads …

‘The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of a legal notice, here is a blessing: may you do good and not evil. May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others. May you share freely, never taking more than you give.‘

Who or what inspired you to write that?

RH

People customarily put a copyright notice at the top of each source file. But SQLite version 2.0.0 had no copyright so I had to think of something else to go in that space.

The second sentence, “May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others”, is a loose interpretation of Matthew 6:12, part of what is commonly called ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and more recognizable as ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’.

The third sentence tries to capture the concept of paying debts forward. The ‘never take more than you give’ part is a paraphrase of one of the lyrics from The Lion King. The first (hokey) sentence is there because it seemed like a good benediction needed three sentences.

H/T: Alan Swartz

The Fedora Project update servers have been down since last Thursday because of unspecified infrastructure problems.  This is a bit disconcerting to me as I switched from Ubuntu late last week because of sound problems.  I use linux at work as my primary operating system so I need a stable platform.  I’m glad there aren’t any major security issues popping up during this outage.  No word yet today if this is resolved.  If this keeps up too long maybe I’ll have to switch back to Ubuntu…

Thursday update:

The Fedora Infrastructure team is currently investigating an issue in the infrastructure systems. That process may result in service outages, for which we apologize in advance. We’re still assessing the end-user impact of the situation, but as a precaution, we recommend you not download or update any additional packages on your Fedora systems.

We’ll share updates as we develop more information. Those updates will be published here on the public fedora-announce-list: https://redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-announce-list

Thanks for your patience as we continue working on this.

Saturday update:

The Fedora Infrastructure team continues to work on the issues we discovered earlier this week. Right now, we’re getting the account system restored to service, along with some of the application servers. We’re also taking advantage of the outages to upgrade a few systems at the same time.

Some services such as the Account System and the wiki should return to normal over the weekend, but we expect outages to continue for some other systems. Please be patient as we continue to work the problem.

A colleague of mine recently brought me three floppy disks full of his old sermons.  He couldn’t read them on his computer anymore, so he asked if I could help.  Being the friendly neighborhood IT guy I told him I would take care of it without giving it much thought.  That quick decision soon became a much bigger project than I had anticipated.  It turned out to be a closed format horror story, so I thought I would share what was learned.

Here’s where I started:

• Three floppy disks full of various files with file names that were no longer than seven characters and had a .wps extension (Originally created in Microsoft Works).  I’m not sure what version of Works was used.  I think they were created over a few versions back in the late DOS/early Windows days.
• Total file count: approx. 130 files.  With this many files I needed to find some kind of automated solution.
• My friend needed the files converted to the Microsoft Word format.

I assumed that he would want the files in the older Office 2003 Document (.doc) format.  This would allow for easy reading in any recent version of Microsoft Office, while avoiding Office Open XML.  I would rather have converted the files to the Open Document Format, to make sure that they would always be readable, but my colleague is much more familiar with Microsoft Office.  In order to minimize training issues I agreed to produce the files in the Microsoft format.

Microsoft Batch Conversion Wizard

The first place that I went to convert these files was to Microsoft’s website.  I thought that since it was their file format they would be the people to go to for conversions.  They have an excellent article on using the Batch Conversion Wizard in Office 2003.  You can find an article on Office 2002 here.  You probably noticed I haven’t mentioned a link for Office 2007.  To be honest, I couldn’t find one.  There may very well be a wizard in the newer version of Office but I could not figure it out.  I had to hunt down a computer with the older office suite loaded and try it from there.  This wizard is supposed to convert every file in one folder from a specified format to a specified format.  I dumped all of the .wps files into one folder, opened the utility and kicked it off.  All of the files failed. Two or three tries later on different computers and on both of the older versions produced the same results.

Zamzar.com

After giving up on the Microsoft utility I moved on to Zamzar.com.  This website allows you to upload files that will be automatically converted and e-mailed back to you.  The unregistered version allows up to five files at a time.  I uploaded five files to test out the conversion and they all came back as corrupted files.

Media-convert.com

Media-convert.com has an impressive list of convertible file formats.  It did not unfortunately support the .wps format.

Manual Conversion

After trying three different ways to convert these files I finally tried opening them directly in Microsoft Office.  None of the three different versions I have access to (2007, 2003 or 2002) would open the files.  All returned error messages.  My last shot was to try OpenOffice Writer.  It worked like a charm!  There was a single character in the beginning of each file that was causing the other programs to fail during conversion.  I think it was some leftover legacy character from whatever system he was using.  Here’s what I finally had to do (about 130 times!):

1. Open the file in OpenOffice.org Writer.
2. Delete the first character (invalid) in the file.
3. Save the file as a Word document.
4. Move on to the next file.

Out of about 130 files roughly 15 were corrupt and could not be opened.  All of these files fit on the three floppy disks initially.  After I finished converting them they were over 10 mb!  How’s that for file bloat?  As a final test, I decided to try converting the manually created Word files to Open Document Format.

OpenOffice.org Document Converter

The OpenOffice.org Document Converter worked very well with the Word documents after I manually converted them.  It only took a few minutes for the wizard to automatically convert all of them to the Open Document Format.  The conversion was flawless.  I checked several files and couldn’t find any conversion problems.

So why is this such a big deal?  This process took several hours of research and manual work.  There are hundreds (if not thousands) of these files floating around.  Important data is locked away inside these older, unsupported file formats.  Microsoft has already declared some of their older formats unsupported and ended support for them.  This is exactly what happened here.  We have to start changing the way that we approach document management.  This includes moving to a standard file format.  This is the only way to avoid these kinds of problems.  I have started working on a proposal for moving away from proprietary file formats.  More on that later…

I got this e-mail from Roadrunner a few days ago. It’s not often that a technology company slips out something new that I haven’t heard about yet when I am using their products.

So what does it do?  It looks like Roadrunner Turbo users will receive an extra amount of bandwidth for file downloads when there is additional capacity on Timewarner’s fiber backbone.  I haven’t noticed anything special yet but maybe that’s because I haven’t rebooted my router in awhile.

I wish they would spend a bit of time figuring out why my modem randomly disconnects from their network.  I have to reboot it 4-5 times a month on average.  There’s no telling how long it has been down each time as I don’t always find it right away.

Here’s the e-mail:

Your PowerBoost™ enhanced Road Runner Turbo is now faster than ever!

Dear DOUGLAS:

As part of Time Warner Cable’s commitment to provide the latest in technology and innovation, we are pleased to announce that effective Tuesday, July 29, we enhanced Road Runner Turbo with PowerBoost™. Now when bandwidth is available, on our Advanced Fiber Network, Turbo customers will experience faster download speeds (up to 16 Mbps)!

PowerBoost will last for the first few seconds of a file download. Once the PowerBoost burst is complete, your download will continue at your normal blazing-fast speed. PowerBoost will jumpstart a large file download and automatically reduce the overall download time.

PowerBoost activates automatically when network capacity is available and is FREE with Road Runner Turbo!

To ensure that you receive the full benefit of this new enhancement to your Turbo service, you may need to “re-boot” your cable modem by unplugging and re-plugging your equipment.

Sincerely,
Time Warner Cable Customer Care