Circuit Writer Version 7.7

by Jim Scheef

DACS Survives For Another Year

Many years ago, DACS presidents seemed to serve for all eternity. Long-time members will remember how Dick Gingras built the club from a dozen members to over five hundred. This was the heyday of computer user groups, and at its peak, DACS had well over 800 members. People fought to be on the board. Succeeding presidents saw membership begin a steady decline to our present level of under 200. Being president became a tougher job and when no one would step forward, one president actually resigned from the club. When I was president I encouraged shorter terms with more orderly succession. Since then Jeff Setaro and Rob Limbaugh have each served three years as excellent presidents.

Over the last three years, Rob led us in tremendous progress on an improved infrastructure. Thanks to Rob’s efforts, the Resource Center has a rack of servers and routers that can serve the SIGs in many ways. The Server and Networking SIG and the Virtual Computing SIG have both used these machines as practical examples of building an enterprise-worthy network. Recently Rob moved the dacs.org website to a hosting site provided by APCUG, we opened the DACS Community Forums, and are now positioned for further gains in serving you, the members, online.

At our March meeting, your board of directors elected Richard Corzo as president. Richard has been a director for several years. He leads the very popular Macintosh SIG and is one of our co-webmasters. Richard takes the helm at a difficult time for DACS as we fight for survival.

If you value this organization, then you should help. We need someone to help with publicity. This is not a tough job; it just requires sending out press releases to area newspapers. There is nothing to write and anyone with email can do it. Please let any board member know if you are willing to help.

The Price of Liberty is Vigilance

Cheap hard drives are both a blessing and a curse.

Google has saved every search ever made going back to Stanford University in 1996. After all, it was a research project. Retaining such vast amounts of data was unthinkable even in the mid-90s. The ability to accumulate and store data is one thing, but to make it instantly accessible is quite another.

In the past, large amounts of data was on reels of tape stored in vast racks. First, humans would retrieve the tapes, but then these libraries became the realm of robotics. Now, paperback sized hard drives with two terabytes of data, have encouraged organizations to store information that perhaps should not be stored more than a “short time”.

The case in point is the “stop, question and frisk database” kept by the New York City Police Department. The data is the names of everyone stopped on the streets of New York City for any reason. The vast majority of these people are innocent of any wrongdoing yet a record of the incident (the stop) is entered and retained forever. An Op Ed piece in the NY Times makes the case that because the majority of people stopped are either black or brown, the practice is racist. I will leave that judgment to you. My objection is that such records can be used years later to justify actions that otherwise might not be justified by the case at hand. The logic “Hey, this guy was stopped three times over the last few years, so he must be doing something wrong” could be used to justify probable cause when in every stop, the person was completely innocent. Such a person could be you if you happen to be at the scene of a crime or even an accident.

The presence of records with your name in a database can cast a veil of suspicion. I believe that single instances of these records should be removed from the database after six months (i.e.: the person is stopped only once in the six months) so you, and everyone else, can forget the incident.

Malware Included for Free

Generally speaking, when you buy a product you expect the product to be what it claims to be and nothing more. This is particularly true of software where the unfortunate truth is that the product often turns out to be much less than it claims. The worst case is when a product turns out to do actual harm to your computer, not because of bugs but because of embedded malware.

Several years ago many “free” programs on download sites turned out to be a delivery vehicle for spyware that displayed advertising on your computer. The most egregious case was the Sony root kit episode (Circuit Rider - Version 3.7). Well, we have a new example from an equally reputable company – Energizer Batteries. The Energizer Duo is a charger for two AAA-size rechargeable battery cells. It can be used from a wall socket or from a USB port on your laptop, which I suppose could be handy. According to an eWeek article, the Windows version of the software for the device has contained a backdoor for as long as three years. The Energize website confirms the story and says they are working with “both CERT and U.S. government officials to understand how the code was inserted in the software. Additional technical information can be found at http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/154421.”

Technology That Warms the Heart

The Winter Olympics last month were the best Olympics since Lillehammer in 1994. I particularly enjoy all the Nordic events but the technology used was interesting as well. The RFID tags on skiers’ and skater’s boots eliminated timing disputes by identifying the skiers as they crossed the finish line. This seeming overkill proved helpful in the Winter games with most photo finishes ever. [I believe the very short Nordic courses where the skiers had to cover multiple laps contributed to the extremely close finishes – a down side to these Olympics.] These tags were mentioned over and over by the commentators. You can read a Smarter Technologies article about some other interesting contributions to the games.

Rarely does a current development beat the technology in Star Trek, but here we go. Read about an “Artificial Retina Enables Blind to See Again” on Smarter Technology. This “third-generation retina prosthesis” developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will enable people to see again well enough to “read, recognize people's faces and restore mobility”. If I could make this stuff up, I would write science fiction.

IEEE 802 Committee Turns 30

IEEE 802 refers to the committee that writes the standards for computer local area and metropolitan area networking. When you see something like 802.11N (the latest Wi-Fi standard), this is the committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) that wrote the spec that allows manufacturers to make devices and guarantee interoperability – and that is why we can all afford to buy networking equipment today. Ethernet (802.3) was the first LAN standard (802.1 deals with authentication) issued in 1982 after two years of debate. My friend Evan Koblentz wrote an article for Mobile Enterprise Magazine. In addition to writing for Mobile Enterprise, Evan is president of the Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, my “other” computer club. There is more on IEEE 802 on Wikipedia.

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