Circuit Rider Version 5.3

by Jim Scheef

This month’s column will be a long one – there is just too much good stuff.

Sputnik celebrates golden anniversary

This news was hard to miss as it was covered everywhere from the computer press, to The New York Times. Fox News might have even mentioned it. Most reports made the launching of Sputnik in 1957 the beginning of the “space age”. I was twelve and remember seeing it and trying to tune in the signal on my short wave radio. The real significance was how it affected our education system. An emphasis on science and engineering filtered all the way down to the junior high grades. It would sure be uplifting if we could get that sense of urgency back in our priorities. Our schools could sure use the lift.

Computer Virus celebrates silver anniversary

In 1982, Rich Skrenta, a ninth-grader in Mt. Lebanon, PA, near Pittsburgh, decided to play a prank on his friends. The result was the first computer virus “Elk Cloner”. It replicated itself by copying its code into RAM during boot up and then writing itself to the boot sector of any other disk written while the computer was running – what became the classic operating procedure of a boot sector virus. All this was on the Apple II. According to the article I read in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, he still has that Apple II. The article also says the first virus for the PC, now called “Brain” came from two brothers in Pakistan. Like the Apple virus, the payload was a simple text message on the screen displaying the phone number for the brothers’ computer repair shop. The message from Elk Cloner was much more clever, every fifty reboots it displayed a poem written by Skrenta. One line was, “It will get on all your disks; it will infiltrate your chips.” For something so eloquent, the term malware hardly seems to fit.

Microsoft as a protector of your health records

Does this make sense to you? Microsoft, our dear and benevolent friend, will host all of your medical records for free. You know, I can’t make this stuff up! According to an article in The New York Times (October 5, 2007), the system will be called HealthVault. Microsoft has some worthy partners in organizations like the American Heart Association, Johnson & Johnson LifeScan, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and MedStar Health, a network of seven hospitals in the Baltimore-Washington region.

Now before you completely dismiss this, the concept is good. Presently, there is no central place to keep your medical records where they won’t get lost and you control who has access. I like the idea enough to try it. So far, with no records in my account, it’s hard to see how the access controls and security will work. Of course there is the concern of whether you really want Microsoft to manage all this.

One must keep everything in perspective as HealthVault is “beta”. My experience creating an account had some interesting moments. Naturally HealthVault uses Microsoft’s ‘Live Passport’ for authentication. So the first step to create a HealthVault account is to log on to your Microsoft Passport. Passport (aka: MSN Account Services) asked that I create a more secure password (8 characters was not enough) so I did. It then wanted me to add a secret question, which I did. In a John Patrick-esque moment, Passport told me that the name of my first pet was too short; it had to be 5 characters! No people, I really can’t make this stuff up. After choosing another question that required a longer answer, I was able to complete changing my password and was promptly take to… Windows Live. Close, but no cigar. So back to the original link, and this time, HealthVault accepted me (and my passwords) and allowed me to enter the actual HealthVault account creation screens. The Beta Version Privacy Statement is six pages, the Account Service Agreement is 4 ¼ pages. I printed both to read them later. So far, of course, I have nothing to enter into the site or have not found where I can enter more than my name and address. Obviously you will hear more about this over time.

Niagara 2

This past month Sun Microsystems (remember them?) shipped a new line of servers based on their new UltraSPARC T2 processor (code-named Niagara 2 – Niagara is a better name for a large steam locomotive than a computer chip). This may be the only RISC processor still shipping in a system larger than a cell phone. Yes, Intel still has the Itanium in their price list, but does anyone buy it? It seems like only yesterday when RISC processors were going to take over the world. It’s too bad that didn’t happen because our world would be a much more varied and interesting place. The first versions of Windows NT ran on the MIPS, Alpha, and Itanium processors and the i386. I hope Sun succeeds, and not just because I own a few shares of their stock, but we need someone to keep Microsoft and Intel in their place and Sun may be our last hope.

Virtual machines, yes, but where?

I am now a virtual machine convert; in fact, I may even be a VM junkie. Virtual machines are not just for servers. Want to try out some new software or even a new operating system without risking your existing setup? Maybe you just want to see how a website appears on an older browser, like I did. If you wax nostalgic for your own mainframe of yore, or would like to play your favorite arcade game again, you can do all of this and more using virtual machines. In my very limited and cursory examination of what is fast becoming a new industry, there are three major players for the market on PC hardware – Microsoft, VMWare and XenSource. However, this can change in a heartbeat. Every new operating system has virtualization built in, including the Solaris that runs on the new Sun UltraSPARC T2. Windows Server 2008 will have it built in or bundled. That was the strategy used against Netscape. There is even talk that the hypervisor – the program that manages the virtual machines running on one physical computer – will be built into the hardware, like the BIOS. This will be fun to watch. Naturally we’re using virtual machines in the DACS Resource Center where you can learn all about it in the Virtual Computing SIG. For my experimentation I’m using Microsoft Virtual PC. Its “free”, a price point Microsoft likes when competing in a new market against more established products.

Climbing rapidly on my list of things to do (as opposed to the list of things that need to be done) is SIMH, the Computer History Simulation Project. As the name implies, SIMH is a simulator that allows one to “run” a historic computer on one’s PC. SIMH will let you simulate (syntactical nuance different from emulate) many historic machines, such as an IBM 1401, or a MITS Altair 8800, or just about any DEC from the PDP-1 to a VAX. Another emulator is Hercules, an emulator that specializes in IBM mainframes from the 370 to the zSystem.

These emulators create virtual copies of hardware to give you the opportunity to do truly silly things. The Nokia N800 is a pocket size Linux-based wireless Internet appliance intended for web surfing and email while sitting in Starbucks. It has a high coolness quotient right out of the box. Some dude ported SIMH and Hercules to the N800 so it can pretend to be a VAX or an S/370. Just think you can IPL VM/CMS in your shirt pocket and the guy at the next table can log in using TN3270. Is this a great country or what!

Banning mandatory RFID implants

Back to more serious concerns. Should an employer be allowed to require an RFID implant as a condition of employment? California has already had the good sense to ban such a requirement. As Dr. Paul Moskowitz, our general meeting speaker this past June pointed out, an imbedded RFID tag as a security device is hazardous to the wearer. When the bad guys want the tag, they must remove it with a knife. The California law should be Federal. I wish this was a joke, but it’s not.

Now we’re really getting scary

Picture this scene: you’re at Disney World and the kids want to ride all the fast rides while you want to check out the English Pub. Hours later how will you find the kids? What if you could get an accurate, continuous location of each kid, say on your cell phone? Would you feel more secure and allow them to go on the rides while you have a leisurely lunch in the pub? A technology originally developed for the military to track soldiers may be offered to parents in a few years to find their kids in an amusement park.

This potential product is called a Radar Response Tag by Gentag, Inc., the company trying to commercialize the technology. The tag can be located over a range of 12 miles with accuracy within 3 feet, according to Gentag. The ZDNet article goes on, “Because the military has been using the technology for years, much of the field testing is already accomplished. Gentag now hopes to fine-tune the consumer product and come out with credit-card-size devices that would exchange signals between each other. Ultimately, Gentag would like to cut deals with phone makers to incorporate the chips into cell phones.” Interesting. Put one of these tags in a drivers license (Real ID) and the scenario starts to get rather scary. Remember how “they” have been saying that the RFID tag in your passport can only be read within inches? Maybe not; and this has been in use by the military for years? Now combine this with the previous item about implants and think about it for a while.

 



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