Done yesterday (20090805)

[mdlbear]

0805 We
  * up 8am; W=192.4; coffee; drugs, nose, teeth; dishes
  * work: good progress on demo
  * Walk.  Around the pond.
  * call back from Callie
  @ The Details Behind Amanda Palmer's Amazing Impromptu Music Video  
  @ music sales from 1973-2008, by medium.
  @ The Death Of Paid WiFi
  @ article on the new Woody Guthrie recordings
    from this post by filkerdave
  * allow connections to sg:2222 from the PC and wireless subnets
  * ordered: http://rounder.com/index.php?id=album.php&catalog_id=7186
  & call to Callie
  & 10:30 Everybody's gone now, and Colleen's in bed.  I'll go to bed myself
    as soon as I finish my drink. 
  & new shelf up in office (window).
  * laundry -> drier
  * bed ~11pm; snuggle

On the whole a very good day, albeit a busy one. Good progress on the demo at work (which is a damned good thing considering that it's this afternoon!), a walk, two calls to Callie because she called me back from the first one as I was starting to get busy with debugging, and an order for the new Woody Guthrie CD set.

A bit of link sausage:

The Details Behind Amanda Palmer's Amazing Impromptu Music Video -- a music video conceived and filmed in 20 minutes at a gig on the beach advertised via twitter. Hmm.

A chart showing music sales from 1973-2008, by medium. The CD's rise and LP's fall track pretty well; the CD's peak year was 1999, and its decline seems to be particularly rapid. I'm not sure I entirely believe the numbers, since they come from the RIAA and so probably don't include the indie labels. But it's clear that CDs started their decline a couple of years before downloads came on the scene.

The Death Of Paid WiFi -- welcome news indeed. About the only places you still have to pay for it are some hotels and airports.

And, from this post by filkerdave, A trove of Woody Guthrie gems are brought to light -- the metal masters of the defunct label Stinson Records, stored in cardboard barrels in an old lady's basement. A 4 CD set is nowavailable for pre-order from Rounder Records. Yes, I've ordered it. The price and the packaging are both a little over-the-top, but...

Comments

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

Free WiFi is subject to sniffing and DNS spoofing attacks, among others. Remember, you get what you pay for -- and if you pay for privacy, you get it.

There's a case in the Mozilla Bugzilla about a girl who was using a public free hotspot, tried to use Firefox to log into all of her sites, and ended up getting a bunch of certificate errors, 'unknown_issuer'. She, not understanding what the digital certificates are supposed to do (provide a second factor of authentication of a site, with the first one being the DNS entry), accepted every one.

Guess someone got her bank, ebay, yahoo, and god only knows what other passwords.

(The worst part is: even pay-for hotspots are subject to the same types of end-user attacks.)

[mdlbear]

Exactly -- any public hotspot is vulnerable; you don't get what you pay for. The problem is that even paid hotspots don't use encryption: they rely on being open to get you to the splash page.

The best thing would be a free hotspot with the password posted -- that wouldn't be subject to sniffing.

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

Las Vegas McCarran Airport relies on being open to get the splash page. However, they then offer a download for an ipsec client to connect you to their ipsec server.