Koos van den Hout homepage

Zaterdag stond in de Volkskrant een opiniestuk van Dhr. Welten, korpschef van de...

Thu, 15 May 2008 19:38:52 GMT

Zaterdag stond in de Volkskrant een opiniestuk van Dhr. Welten, korpschef van de regiopolitie Amsterdam-Amstelland. Hij beweerde dat de politie wel degelijk aan privacy hecht (helaas staat het stuk niet publiek op de volkskrant site). Ik heb een ingezonden brief naar de volkskrant geschreven maar die is niet gepubliceerd. Bij deze publiceer ik hem nu zelf: reactie op Dhr. Welten "politie hecht wel degelijk aan privacy".

Zo, weer betrouwbaar Internet toegang. XS4ALL heeft het over de grootste storing...

Thu, 15 May 2008 19:24:29 GMT

Zo, weer betrouwbaar Internet toegang. XS4ALL heeft het over de grootste storing in haar bestaan. Tussen dinsdag 2 uur ('s nachts) en donderdag 10 uur in totaal ongeveer 3 uur werkend ADSL gehad. Het lijkt nu allemaal weer stabiel.

Er is weer een beetje tegengas tegen de politie die alles maar wil registreren e...

Thu, 08 May 2008 07:48:20 GMT

Er is weer een beetje tegengas tegen de politie die alles maar wil registreren en later wil kijken of de gegevens nog bruikbaar zijn. Gisteren stond er een stukje in de Volkskrant Politie registreert alle auto’s bij Zwolle

De kentekens van alle voertuigen die bij Zwolle over de snelwegen A28 en A50 rijden, worden door de regiopolitie IJsselland vastgelegd en drie dagen bewaard.

Het College bescherming persoonsgegevens was niet op de hoogte en noemde de handelwijze van de politie Ijsselland onaanvaardbaar volgens het Volkskrant artikel. Volgens een artikel vandaag Kamer beducht voor autoregistratie

De regiopolitie IJsselland gaat over de schreef door de kentekens van alle voertuigen die over de snelwegen A28 en A50 rijden vast te leggen en te bewaren. Dat stelt een meerderheid van de Tweede Kamer.

Alleen het CDA komt met een volgens mij zwak antwoord:

Het CDA is de enige regeringspartij die daar geen bezwaar tegen heeft. ‘Zie het als uitbreiding van het cameratoezicht’, zegt Kamerlid Ciska Joldersma. ‘Heel belangrijk voor onze veiligheid.’

De duidelijkste opmerking is van CBP-voorzitter Jacob Kohnstamm:

Het is de politie niet gegeven onverdachte burgers te registreren.

En zelfs de politie moet zich aan de wet houden.

Ook Martin Bril had er een mooie opinie over in de Volkskrant maar dat artikel zie ik nog niet on-line staan. De afsluiter:

En waar ik de allergrootste hekel aan heb, is dat ze dan altijd zeggen dat het voor mijn eigen bestwil is. Ik als burger wilde toch al die veiligheid?
Nou nee, weg ermee.

Briljant.

Last weekend was a very long weekend in the Netherlands (I had Wednesday - Monda...

Wed, 07 May 2008 06:59:18 GMT

Last weekend was a very long weekend in the Netherlands (I had Wednesday - Monday all off). I took the wardriving setup on some bicycle trips. One trip was specifically through all parts of Ijsselstein which has grown lots since I lived near it. A new record in 'new networks found in one wardrive': 3680 new networks in one go. And.. at the end of Ijsselstein my GPS unit broke. A wire in the cable broke of real close to the housing. So I 'wore out' the Rikaline 6015-X5 GPS I ordered two and a half years ago. So, a new GPS unit is on order: the Holux GR-213. I couldn't find a (trusted) Dutch webshop with the Rikaline 6017 and this one is quite compatible: Comparing documentation from Holux and Rikaline shows that the cable pinout is the same. I guess more is the same: the manuals look quite the same to me in drawings, schematics and headlines. And this new one has a SiRF Star III chipset which should improve results.

Wardriving results 17 April - 1 May: 5238 new networks with GPS locations. I pas...

Fri, 02 May 2008 20:18:13 GMT

Wardriving results 17 April - 1 May: 5238 new networks with GPS locations. I passed the 100000 mark in the WiGLE stats and moved up to number 20. Bringing the setup on some nice recumbent bicycle rides yielded high amounts of new networks.

On Sunday we went on a nice bicycle tour. A bit over 80 kilometers. I brought th...

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:09:10 GMT

On Sunday we went on a nice bicycle tour. A bit over 80 kilometers. I brought the wardriving box along and logged the networks found and the gps track. But now I can do something really cool: I can plot the track on a map and put the results on-line thanks to OpenStreetMap. No hassle with 'illegal' map material. This makes this a great moment in open license map data for me. Steps to use an OSM export map in gpsmap (part of kismet). I added the line about the license for the openstreetmap data myself but I can imagine importing data from openstreetmap and correctly naming the source turning into a standard option in gpsmap.

I measured the power usage of the wardriving box. It uses a nice 420 mA. That is...

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:01:50 GMT

I measured the power usage of the wardriving box. It uses a nice 420 mA. That is very nice, given that the alix.1c board, the wireless card and the gps receiver are all powered from this. In theory, this means the 2.2 Ah battery should be able to power it for over 5 hours.

Vanmorgen op mijn werkaccount spam van ff7.nl. Blijkbaar gericht aan studenten (...

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:54:42 GMT

Vanmorgen op mijn werkaccount spam van ff7.nl. Blijkbaar gericht aan studenten (nee dat ben ik niet meer). Ziet er uit als een idee van studenten voor studenten: je scriptie backuppen naar hun server en vervolgens kans maken die weer op te kunnen halen. Leuk idee, maar jammer van het spammen. Het is wel een internationaal gezelschap: het IP van de server 194.126.173.10 staat volgens whois op naam van een bedrijf Eureka Solutions Sp uit Warschau, Polen maar is in Nederland. Die server eros.e-dentify.nl wijst weer naar een Nederlandse hoster. Abuse afhandeling voor het Poolse bedrijf wordt gedaan door swiftnoc.com en die zitten weer in Engeland.

Martin Bril heeft zich niet helemaal aan mijn voorspelling van gisteren gehouden...

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:49:26 GMT

Martin Bril heeft zich niet helemaal aan mijn voorspelling van gisteren gehouden. Vandaag schrijft hij over de kans op rokjesdag vandaag. Misschien moet Martin Bril eens de Uithof in Utrecht bezoeken waar het volgens mij toch echt al gisteren rokjesdag was.

Weird wi-fi news: A new regulatory agency in Russia has decided every device wit...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:45:58 GMT

Weird wi-fi news: A new regulatory agency in Russia has decided every device with Wi-Fi needs registration.

registering a PDA or telephone would take 10 days. Then, only the owner of the device would be licensed to use it. Registering a Wi-Fi hotspot, on the other hand, would be more difficult. Anyone wishing to set up as much as a personal home-network would need to file a complete set of documents, as well as technological certifications.

Sources: The Other Russia: Russian Agency Demands Registration for all Wi-Fi Devices, Wifi net news: Russia Requires Wi-Fi Registration Glenn Fleishman is as always following the wi-fi news, Slashdot: Russia to Require Registration for Wi-Fi Use with the obligatory joke written as wifi-register.su.
To me it sounds like that new regulatory agency claiming its turf. In a way that will annoy a lot of users.

Het is vandaag rokjesdag 2008. Ik voorspel dat morgen bijna alle krantencolumnis...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:32:50 GMT

Het is vandaag rokjesdag 2008. Ik voorspel dat morgen bijna alle krantencolumnisten die zich dat kunnen veroorloven dit gaan opschrijven. Vooral Martin Bril zal dit nieuws niet onvermeld laten.
Dat u het even weet.

Wardriving results 28 March - 16 April: 2853 new networks with GPS locations not...

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:36:22 GMT

Wardriving results 28 March - 16 April: 2853 new networks with GPS locations noted at WiGLE. Most amazing was finding 505 new networks without moving the wardriving box one centimeter: the AMD_IBSS networks were showing up again when I had the wardriving box running overnight in the top window.

Found out why firefox didn't talk ipv6 by default: the same resolver bug that I ...

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:13:37 GMT

Found out why firefox didn't talk ipv6 by default: the same resolver bug that I saw before: the resolver prefers ipv4+rfc1918 addresses over ipv6. Fixed with some DNS magic. Some day I'll phase out NATted IPv4 addresses. Until then they are irritating.

Squid has always been my webproxy of choice. Especially at home where I need int...

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:37:58 GMT

Squid has always been my webproxy of choice. Especially at home where I need interesting proxy rules to access certain work-sites via a special route and I like to use the parent proxies of xs4all. But ipv6 support was always a problem in squid until I looked recently and found out that IPv6 support is now default in squid 3-HEAD. So I compiled it and started playing with the access-rules. What I want (ofcourse) is the dancing turtle of kame. I tried to get this by adding an acl ipv6space dst 2000::/3 and using this in specific cache_peer_access deny rules which now works after some trying. I also found that writing the acl for the local network correctly helped a lot: acl localipv6net src 2001:888:1011::/48 works, when I forgot one : at the end it didn't work and denied me access. Now to get firefox to use ipv6 to talk to the proxy...

Our bicycle ride Sunday was really 'dual-use' for me: I logged 218 new networks ...

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:45:00 GMT

Our bicycle ride Sunday was really 'dual-use' for me: I logged 218 new networks with GPS locations at WiGLE and I mapped some bicycle paths around Utrecht at openstreetmap.

Found out the hard way: in the innfeed.conf configuration file key bindaddress6 ...

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:51:02 GMT

Found out the hard way: in the innfeed.conf configuration file key bindaddress6 needs its value quoted. So now inn is feeding again.

I tried flashplayer 9 for Linux because flash 7 makes my browser hang often, esp...

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:09:18 GMT

I tried flashplayer 9 for Linux because flash 7 makes my browser hang often, especially on flash video. With flash 9 I had no audio because flashplayer 9 for linux only supports alsa (and I prefer oss), but a bit of searching found Flash Player:Additional Interface Support for Linux which includes the source of a support library which fixes this problem... for linux users who don't mind compiling a shared library on their own. But now I can watch a youtube video without firefox crashing.

The wardrive yesterday evening was around some streets in Groenekan. Not that sp...

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:52:05 GMT

The wardrive yesterday evening was around some streets in Groenekan. Not that special, it was all within bicycle range, on the level of 'detour in my commute'. But, it was the same area where I decided to build the dedicated wardriving hardware. The area is now in WiGLE and I jumped up in networks found with gps locations by finding gps locations for earlier found networks.

Wardriving results 4 - 27 March: 3487 new networks with gps locations. From time...

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:28:49 GMT

Wardriving results 4 - 27 March: 3487 new networks with gps locations. From time to time I also use the gps logs from wardriving for mapping for OpenStreetMap. The map of the Netherlands in OpenStreetMap is quite complete thanks to a donation of data by AND but a lot of bicyclepaths are missing. My wardriving is usually by (recumbent) bicycle so I can use wardriving tracklogs for mapping too. I even contributed a bit about mapping with Kismet for OpenStreetMap to the Wiki.

Lately a major factor in spam seems to be casino spam. I see names popping up li...

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:42:03 GMT

Lately a major factor in spam seems to be casino spam. I see names popping up like Royal VIP Casino or Euro VIP Casino. According to analysis by James Miller it is all the same company from Antigua.

Average bicycle speed on my commute today: 22.9 kilometer per hour. A new speed ...

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:10:56 GMT

Average bicycle speed on my commute today: 22.9 kilometer per hour. A new speed record for me. It felt very good too!

no solar power Picture I took yesterday morning in the back garden.

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:47:04 GMT

no solar power

Picture I took yesterday morning in the back garden.

Not so subtle advice from Sans in the latest Sans newsbites: Don't open email at...

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:22:33 GMT

Not so subtle advice from Sans in the latest Sans newsbites:

Don't open email attachments unless you were expecting them. Send a note back and ask the person to embed the text in a simple email. This matters to your career. The people who break this rule will be the reason their organization's data are stolen and they won't be able to hide.

De spoorwegen in Nederland blijven altijd een paar jaar achterlopen op die in En...

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:47:21 GMT

De spoorwegen in Nederland blijven altijd een paar jaar achterlopen op die in Engeland, en nu is volgens reizigersvereniging Rover eindelijk het excuus van the wrong kind of snow gebruikt door Prorail.
Bronnen: Reizigersvereniging Rover: “Ontwrichting treinverkeer door sneeuw is blamage”, nu.nl: 'Ontwrichting treinverkeer regelrechte blamage'

Today is one of those if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes days. I ...

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 10:56:38 GMT

Today is one of those if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes days. I have seen snow, hail and sun in the last thirty minutes and rain will probably happen too soon. The webcam shows interesting cloud views and the temperatures at home are dropping due to the snow on the roof.

We zijn naar het paastreffen van de nederlandse vereniging voor human powered ve...

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:21:42 GMT

We zijn naar het paastreffen van de nederlandse vereniging voor human powered vehicles (oftewel de ligfietsclub) geweest. Zaterdag naar Harskamp gefietst samen met een paar andere Utrechtse ligfietsers. Vlak voor we weggingen regende het serieus maar onderweg bleef het beperkt tot een licht buitje regen of sneeuw. Dit jaar viel pasen heel vroeg en het was de koudste pasen in 40 jaar volgens het knmi. We hebben nachtvorst gehad en sneeuw van de tent af moeten ruimen, ook een nieuwe ervaring voor ons. Mijn slaapzak is goedgekeurd voor lage temperaturen, ik heb prima kunnen slapen ondanks de koude. Zondag hebben we een mooie toertocht door de omgeving van Harskamp gemaakt. Zonnetje erbij en het was prima te doen. Zondagavond ging het sneeuwen en die sneeuw lag vanmorgen op de tent. Vandaag terug per fiets, maar toen er weer buien sneeuw kwamen hebben we het voor de rest uitbesteed aan de nederlandse spoorwegen om thuis te komen. En dan blijkt maar weer wat een gedoe het is om 2 ligfietsen en 1 aanhanger in en uit een trein te krijgen. Wel weer leuk zo'n evenement, de ligfietsclub is heel gezellig en een groep mensen met een heel andere focus (maar 1 nerd-shirt gezien dit weekend) dan andere groepen mensen waar ik mee te maken heb, en dat blijf ik een leuke ervaring vinden.

A new version of my homepage, rewritten in perl because PHP was starting to irri...

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:24:08 GMT

A new version of my homepage, rewritten in perl because PHP was starting to irritate me. More database-driven in the background which allows me to add things like the tags. And a minor change in the colour scheme because someone remarked that the black-on-cyan was hard to read for people above a certain age.

Time to change my signature at work: we switched off the last Sun server today. ...

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:24:11 GMT

Time to change my signature at work: we switched off the last Sun server today. I updated my .signature which mentioned 'herding Suns' to 'herding systems'. Most server-hardware at work is from Dell running Linux but that doesn't sound as good.

One of the little irritations at work was trying to find out what the exact erro...

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:11:49 GMT

One of the little irritations at work was trying to find out what the exact error was of the printer when the helpdesk ticket just says 'printer problems'. Since HP laserjets will divulge everything via SNMP, I thought the complete information must be available. It is, and I gobbled together a perl script for our noc webserver. Public version in the perl noc stuff page.

Indexed also has a nice view on the 7 new flavors of sin.

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:41:06 GMT

Indexed also has a nice view on the 7 new flavors of sin.

The Vatican has published a modernized version of the 7 deadly sins (over 1500 y...

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:19:57 GMT

The Vatican has published a modernized version of the 7 deadly sins (over 1500 years old). Toronto Star article: Thou shalt not pollute or clone. Still no listing for installing microsoft windows or connecting microsoft windows to the Internet...

Did some work on The Virtual Bookcase. First of all Amazon notified me that amaz...

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:36:07 GMT

Did some work on The Virtual Bookcase. First of all Amazon notified me that amazon web services was going to disable version 3 of the API which I was still using (yes, a year after the first notification that it was going to be ended .. not that much time for virtualbookcase at the moment). So time to do some PHP programming and redo the stuff for version 4. I also noticed that the bot for the russian search site Yandex was causing high amounts of hits but would not even return a direct link to www.virtualbookcase.com when searching on virtual bookcase at yandex. So I wanted to disable Yandex in robots.txt but I could not easily find the right name to put in robots.txt because all the help at Yandex is also in Russian. Finally I found some hints at this page describing robots.txt in russian that the right User-Agent probably is Yandex. And the robots.txt for cisco.com agrees.

I downloaded Adam Curry's Daily Source Code #732 where he mentioned phonecaster....

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:53:10 GMT

I downloaded Adam Curry's Daily Source Code #732 where he mentioned phonecaster.de (german site). Phonecaster.de links phone numbers with podcasts, playing (by default) the most recent episode of a podcast when you dial the linked number. According to the phonecaster technical faq the service uses Asterisk. Sounds a lot like an upscaled version of my bel een podcast project (dutch).

I found an interesting tidbit in the apache-config today: after setting the Auth...

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:57:26 GMT

I found an interesting tidbit in the apache-config today: after setting the AuthLDAPBindPassword directive I could find the password in the server-info output. Which was to be expected, but still an interesting side-effect.

Wardriving results 24 Februari - 3 March: 4377 new networks with GPS locations. ...

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:12:00 GMT

Wardriving results 24 Februari - 3 March: 4377 new networks with GPS locations. The wardriving box is helping, together with having nice weather and time for long bicycle rides around Utrecht. I passed the 90000 new networks mark at WiGLE and I'm back at position 22 in the WiGLE stats.

Funny new music doing the rounds: SoKO with the weird song I'll kill her.

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:30:26 GMT

Funny new music doing the rounds: SoKO with the weird song I'll kill her.

Real test of the wardriving box yesterday: I brought it along on my recumbent bi...

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:59:34 GMT

Real test of the wardriving box yesterday: I brought it along on my recumbent bike on a 38 kilometer biking trip. With the big antenna on a piece of metal on the rack of the recumbent bicycle. Worked great and found 1354 new networks with GPS locations.

The wardriving box is finished and I have done the first test today. And scored ...

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:28:12 GMT

The wardriving box is finished and I have done the first test today. And scored new networks! Between 13 Februari and 23 Februari I found 184 new networks with GPS locations. Of those 108 using the laptop on bicycle, 63 in the first testrun using the wardrivebox on bicycle and 13 from testing the wardrive box at home. Yes, I can still find new networks at home without moving.

I left the wardriving box running overnight to test the stability and heat gener...

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:07:19 GMT

I left the wardriving box running overnight to test the stability and heat generation. No problems in those areas. It was on the top floor of the house in the window facing northwest (in the direction of the student flats). A total of 43(!) access-points were seen. Yes, wireless networks are still rising in numbers.

I had some time for work on the wardriving box. I fixed the powerbutton problem ...

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:10:36 GMT

I had some time for work on the wardriving box. I fixed the powerbutton problem by switching to Linux kernel 2.6.24.2. Linux 2.6 has specific support for the geode processor which include acpi support. With 2.6 I get a good power-button event when I press it and on a shutdown with powerdown the alix system is powered down completely (power led goes out). I also worked on the case, making holes for the antenna connectors. I managed to make the right holes and modify the I/O shield without making the wrong holes or get damaged myself. My teacher in metalwork years ago would probably think I'm still bad at it but with a drill and a metal file the modifications got done, including filing the flange of the N-connector to make it fit in the case. Pictures of the results,

Results of the metalwork.

Antenna connectors in place and the I/O shield modified to allow for the big N-connector.

Board installed in the case.

I'm also learning about Linux 2.6: without a keyboard there is not a lot of entropy for /dev/random.