Charles Curley's Weblog

Ubuntu 9.01, and I've just upgraded my laptop. I'll have notes on that shortly. For now, I want to take a (skeptical) look at Ubuntu One, Ubuntu's Cloud Computing effort.

There are two plans available. You can get two GB for free (except the sign-up information you give them) or 50 GB for $10 a month.

My first caveat with cloud computing is: I don't want to store sensitive data on someone else's servers. They have less incentive to keep it private or accessible to me. Also, legally, they, being a third party, may have to cough it up where I would not have to.

Then there is the data you give them on sign-up. You may or may not care about that data or what Canonical does with it.

Then there is the thought that the 2 GB for free will fill up very fast, and is likely a loos leader for the 50GB for $10/month plan. Let's look at this a moment. For $10 a month, in a year I'll shell out $120. That will get me a terabyte plus external drive, or 20 times the storage. I can encrypt that myself, and use it for off-site backup. I can buy two drives (paid for in two years at the same rate) and rotate them, which I've been doing for over a year. And at the end of that year or those two years, I still own those two hard drives.

On the other tentacle, you can share your two or 50 GB with other folks much easier than you can share that terabyte drive. OK, rotating two drives to off-site storage locations means getting up out of my chair and walking downtown. O! The horrors! I might actually get some exercise! I might have to interact with someone in meat space!

I suspect that, in addition to being Canonical's entry into the cloud computing foofooraw, this is also part of Canonical's effort to claw back some money from all those CDs and all that software and all that infrastructure (like Launchpad) they've given away free.

Aaron Toponce has come up with an interesting attack on computers called the The Evil Maid Attack. It requires physical access to the machine for a few minutes. Aaron claims it is effective against any operating system. I'm skeptical on that, but will assume he is correct.

In any case, Aaron emphasizes what has been my long term policy with regard to laptops: never let the thing out of your possession. Never! Shut it down when you aren't using it. Suspension and hibernation are not acceptable. Any questions?

With the PATRIOT ACT and other legislation legalizing sneak and peek attacks, do not assume that your home machines are immune from this attack either.

Update 2009-11-07

Mossad hacked Syrian laptop to steal nuke plant secrets

Evil Maid attack led to air raid

Posted in Spyware, 6th November 2009 16:38 GMT

Mossad reportedly used a Trojan to hack into a Syrian official's laptop while he stayed in a London hotel.

The information extracted was used to plan a bombing raid at a suspected nuclear reactor facility in Syria, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/06/mossad_syria_trojan_hack/

OK, not everyone who reads this blog is a Syrian official, but still...

Saturday I attended the Grand Opening Celebration of the new Wyoming Whiskey distillery in Kirby, Wyoming. While this was the formal opening, they had actually started production on July 4, a good day for making whiskey.

The food was excellent, and some excellent wines and beers were available. I didn't stay for the band, but I hear tell they were very good. It seemed like half the county was there. That isn't quite true, but the town of Kirby (population 57) experienced a massive population growth for the day. In fact, there were enough folks there to justify someone actually directing traffic!

I got an excellent tour of the facility. Having worked in factories and done electrical work for stage and film production, I was pleased with what I saw of the facility. They had one huge shed built for aging, and will build one a year for the next five years to house each year's production. The owners are clearly investing good money, and clearly planning on being around for a while. Like almost everyone else in the county, I await some product.

By the nature of their product, they are going to have to plan on being around. Federal law requires they age their bourbon at least two years. Some distilleries release a two or three year old product, known as a "baby bourbon". But these guys aren't. Depending on how things go, they plan to age their product five or six years, a more typical age for a bourbon.

Now, compare that with the typical software project. Five years? Six? And throwing a party for friends and neighbors when you don't plan on any ROI for at least five years? In the software industry? Some time after the Irish build a monument to Cromwell!

As mentioned in my last blog post, the 1GB SODIMM memory on my laptop died, leaving me with 256MB of memory.

Yesterday evening, as I went past Orem en route to the 2009 Utah Open Source Conference I stopped at the Best Buy there. They had what I needed, for $69.43 (tax included). Right there in the parking lot, I opened up my laptop, put the new RAM in, fired up the beastie, and ran Memtest86+. Everything looked good, so I drove off. (Thereby redefining the term Field Replaceable Unit [FRU]. :-)

It is well known that Linux is much less resource intensive than Windows. I have a good lesson in this because I run the latest Ubuntu on three of my four Fit PC 1s. (The other runs Gentoo, but that's another story.)

I got a better lesson in this recently. I use several GPS applications on Linux as navigation tools, including routing. On my way to visit friends (an 8 hour trip) I had the laptop set up as usual with GPS and GPSware. As I pulled into the town where my hosts reside, my laptop failed catastrophically. It would not even reboot. This at 10:30 at night.

Fortunately, I was able to remember the street address and how to get to a home I had never been to, and didn't have to call my hosts to ask for help.

This computer normally has a 1 GB SODIMM add-on Field Replaceable Unit (FRU, in IBMese) and the 256 MB SODIMM that came with it. A bit of work with memtest86+ (on most Ubuntu installations and on Finnix CD-ROMS; see the boot menu) and a Phillips screwdriver showed that the 1 GB SODIMM had died, and the 256 MB SODIMM was still intact. So I had a working 256 MB (240 MB after you subtract the video memory) laptop. Some testing with badblocks on Finnix showed that I had a good hard drive. Phew!

So I am now up and running and navigating through the American Southwest on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on 240 MB. It's slow, and the hard drive is busy, but it works. This is a Good Thing because right now I am off-grid and a 1.5 hour drive to the nearest city even likely to have a replacement SODIMM. Since this is a four year old laptop, Office Depot and the like don't carry what I need.

And I have found an unexpected advantage to nanoblogger as well: being off-grid right now, my Internet access is via satellite. This makes interactive web work slow and tedious. If I were using typical blogware, I would not try to add this entry. But I can post to my nb blog locally, and then commit to the local git repo. (I'll push to the git server when I get home.) When I am satisfied with the entry, I can upload to the servers over the satellite link. As that is a "fire and forget" operation, the slow reaction time of the satellite link is not a hindrance.