News archive 2008 - Koos van den Hout

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 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 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 - 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 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 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 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 (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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 needs its value quoted. So now inn is feeding again.

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 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 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 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 record for me. It felt very good too!

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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 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.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 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. 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.

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 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 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 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.

The battery (and the charger) for the wardriver box arrived. Even with the room number and the department missing from the address label the internal mail still managed to deliver it to my desk.

Ik ontdekte een verwijzing naar mijn homepage bij het overzicht van labjournaals van Henk van de Kamer die ik ken via de hcc PCgg netwerkgroep. Ik volg Het Lab van Henk van de Kamer ook regelmatig.

A few minor setbacks on the wardriving box project yesterday evening. Software shutdown via acpid does not work (there is no event when I press the power button). Kernel recompiling for acpi debugging gave me lots of headaches with the module versioning. I did some searching for it and the Linux Loadable Kernel Module HOWTO had the answer:

So it is generally not wise to use symbol versioning

.. words to the wise. And the CF connector of the M200 case is a normal 40 pin IDE connector where I bought a cable for 44pin 2mm ide connectors because the alix.1c mainboard has a 44pin ide header. It would be nice if I could fix this, I could use the external CF-bay of the M200 case which would mean I wouldn't have to open it to change/upgrade the CF. The manual of the M200 case has stern warnings about opening and closing it too often.

Wardriving results between 12 January and 12 February 2008: 1321 new networks with GPS location. Since the work on the wardriving box software and hardware the GPS and the antenna have been at home for testing it all.. and I did not feel like bringing the stuff along and getting another run with problems. I ordered the battery and a charger yesterday and did some more test runs, some with the external antenna connected. The big external antenna gives me 23 visible networks at home. Work that is left on the wardriving box: cabling, making holes in the case for antenna and power connections and building it all together.

Back from the snow! We went for a week of snowboarding in Samoëns, France. Great snow, good weather and no broken bones. We stayed at the Viking Lodge, a very nice and luxurious apartment. Besides snowboarding for real I also played with Amped3 on the xbox 360 in the apartment ;)

Just doing the rounds: Bloomberg: Microsoft Offers to Buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion, CNN: Microsoft bids $45 billion for Yahoo.An interesting bit of news. Analysts at Google are probably laughing out

First network scanned with the wardriving box uploaded to WiGLE. Not a new network (my own), but a valid upload anyway. Now for the final automation bit: starting kismet at the end of the boot process with the right drivers and settings. And the hardware bits: power and antenna connectors on the case and a battery (and charger) to power it all when not on my desk. And making sure it can all be brought along on the bicycle or in a car.

A fellow wardriver asked for a picture of the new wardriving box which is still awaiting serious hardware work, but the software is mostly up and running.

The wardriving box with notes about the different parts

First boot on the wardriving box (like first light on a telescope). Thursday evening I had some actual time to play with the mainboard and a CF card. With a lot of peeking at the presentation on building flash-based Linux routers by Remco van Mook I was able to get a basic Debian Linux to run on the Alix board in little time. It boots, it starts a few getty processes and ifplugd. I also automated work on converting the local installation to a root image and the root image to the CF card.

A few updates to the weather maps recently: The maps are now generated each hour and there is a list of the recent weather maps.

The hardware I ordered for the wardrive box arrived yesterday. Now to find time to start playing with the enclosure, finding the right spot for the antenna connectors, doing the drilling for that, building it all together and after that working on the software. The manual for the enclosure starts with telling you need to take time to understand what needs to be done because you can only open and close the enclosure so many times.

Gisterenavond zijn we gaan snowboarden/Skiën in de sneeuwbaan van de Uithof in Den Haag. Lekker om nog een paar uur te oefenen voor we echt naar de sneeuw gaan. Helaas was de baan in een niet zo ideale conditie: grote stukken ijs.

I did it: Another wardrive with partly missing GPS locations because of a GPS problem Thursday was the reason I needed to start ordering parts for the wardriving box. So I clicked an order together at LinITX.com for the hardware.

I always thought the "Braille edition of Playboy" was just a joke in the movie Sneakers. But! It is no joke: the braille edition of the playboy, available from The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. ObJoke: you will really read this for the articles.

In a websearch about wardriving I came across a nice article on wardriving for people with enough time and budget which is probably known better as a wireless security penetration project: Spy guys: The anatomy of a covert wireless security assessment. Including notes on what kind of wheels to rent for ideal wireless scanning: a box truck has room and fiberglass sidewalls.

I noticed that I haven't posted wardriving results since 31 October 2007. Well, even with the recumbent bike, gps problems and winter weather I still scored new networks with GPS locations at WiGLE. In the backlog I can see that between 16 November 2007 and 11 January 2008 I found 1272 new networks with GPS locations. A the moment I am at position 24 in the WiGLE stats, a slight drop from the 23 I occupied for quite a while.

We monitor the temperatures in the server room at work carefully, andviewing the changes over a while makes it look like the server room isa multistable climate system.Our interest in temperaturesOn 23 December 2006 we had a complete failure of the airconditioning systemin the serverroom at work. One of the worst days of the year to have this,we did not find out until 24 December due to e-mail from our NetApp fileserver

Another instance of me thinking so seriously about a project that I started a webpage about what I want to do and how and collecting the knowledge and ideas that I already have: building a wardriving box. I first thought of a small PC for project sundial, the self-powered weather station and gps time receiver but I got the idea that this could also make a really nice Wardriving box which would do just that.

Slowly I'm no longer denying the blogness of this page ;). View myTechnorati Profile. I got the idea from Kirrily Robert's article Technorati and Perl.

I just read an article about the Neuros OSD: a digital video recorder which is different: the OSD stands for 'Open Source Device', it runs Linux and you are free to modify it in any way you wish. The Neuros OSD site shows a device with a lot of potential. Something I'll keep an eye on.

Yesterday I found some time to install the new 1-wire sensors in a place where I am interested in the temperatures: the attic where the home server gosper lives and started fetching data into rrdtool databases. The assorted sensors at home page now shows some of the available temperatures. Sensor 2 lies in the open area right below the top of the roof.

athcool is .. cool! The new server mainboard was consuming some more power and was at a higher temperature. I looked for ways to reduce this a bit. Setting power throttling mode to T1 did not help for power use or temperature (but the system reacted slowish), but athcool made the readouts from lm_sensors change from CPU Temp: +42.8 C to CPU Temp: +21.5 C which looks a lot better. And, more important: the UPS reports a drop in power-use, which is good for the electricity bill. Follow the graphs at my assorted sensors at home.

The 1-wire sensors and adaptor I ordered arrived today and I started playing with DigiTemp. After running into a faq item (make sure you don't have crossed phone cable) it started working like a charm. The DS18S20 sensors work really easy and they are quite precise and fast to react to temperature changes such as touching fingers. Two sensors in the home office: on a switched-on PC speaker Sensor 1 C: 19.38, on another speaker switched-off Sensor 0 C: 18.81.

My first CPAN upload. I uploaded Geo::METAR 1.15 to CPAN just now. Time to find out if I did stuff right.

Happy new year! I used the christmas period to do an upgrade I have been planning for a while: change the mainboard of the home server gosper to a newer (better: less older) one. A few hours of screwing worked: it now is an AMD Athlon 1400. Everything works after a few bits of tweaking, including updated mainboard temperature sensors.