Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - internet

Fliss' 32 Inch TV

2011-08-08T14:56:00+01:00

The weekend was both incredibly efficient and lazy in equal measures. We headed into town bright and early at 9:00 in a bid to miss the rather nasty traffic Cambridge inflicts on it's driving population. I would have cycled were it not I was picking up our new Smart TV for the library. It's an LG LV550T which replaces the ageing CRT with something a lot slimmer and fits nicely on the new shelves in the library. After some faffing with connectors and convincing it that it really was connected to the internet first impressions are pretty good. It's full 1080p with a built in HD tuner so we can finally receive BBC HD. Comparing the two BBC One channels you can certainly see the difference the high definition brings. It's still not enough to warrant upgrading my main TV though which I expect to keep until it finally dies.

The Smart TV stuff is pretty impressive. Aside from having built-in iPlayer (and ITV/4oD) it also offers a slew of "apps" including the ubiquitous YouTube. As a bonus it's DNLA enabled so it can stream stuff directly from our media server. Sadly it doesn't seem to be able to cope with all the audio codecs the PS3 can. About the only wrinkle was convincing it it was on the 'net. Despite having been given an IP address it was convinced it could access the "Gateway". It was still able to access the media server and download a firmware update through the ether so I suspected it was just some needless self-test the wizard went through. Once I plugged it in via a spare broadband router I had lying round it worked fine. I suspect it was trying to do something UPnPish to prove it was on a home network.

Memories of 1989

2011-01-28T23:05:00+00:00

I remember the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. It seemed rather surreal as dictatorship after dictatorship fell in relatively quick succession. Some passed with little bloodshed, some went through more violent phases but in the end it changed the face of Eastern Europe. It was certainly exciting for a 16 year old boy to watch unfold especially as I'd been raised with the spectre of nuclear war and faceless totalitarian states. All of this happened with nothing more than word of mouth and a few foreign radio stations reporting what they could.

Watching events unfold in Egypt and the wider Arab world you would think the ability to organise and co-ordinate offered by modern communications mean the days of Middle Eastern dictatorships are numbered. However I'm not so sure. While it's true that more people than ever have the ability to access the Internet and mobile communications they are networks that are controllable for the most part. There are always ways around these blocks but by denying it to the majority it severely hampers peoples ability to co-ordinate. They certainly don't have anything near the facilities available to them that our Students did during the recent student fees protests. I hope I'm wrong and the darknets are in place and cobbled together networks are playing their part in helping people organise.

What is clear that the only people that can do anything about it are those inside the affected countries. Western governments can only offer warm words with the appropriate diplomatic hedging just in case the dictators manage to hang onto power for the time being. The rest of us just get to watch.

Infowar

2010-12-07T13:03:00+00:00

Unless you have been living under a rock the last week you cannot have missed the latest wikileaks data dump. This iteration of leaks had lead to what could possibly be described as the Internets first Infowar. Aside from the predictable Denial of Service attacks there has also been political pressure on hosting providers and sources of funding for the organisation. The most effective act so far was EasyDNS dropping support so wikileaks.org no longer resolves to IP address. This makes it a lot harder for non-technical people to find the raw data even though the servers are still up.

The response has been predictable, the Wikileaks site has now been massively mirrored making suppression of the data a game of whack-a-mole. It's also trivially simple to setup a redirect to Wikileaks' real IP address.

Perhaps realising that technical measures aren't going to stop the spread of information there has also been an intense focus on Wikileaks founder and front-man Julian Assange. By far the most public face of the organisation he has faced calls for extra-judicial assassination as well as rather nonsensical treason charges. This includes the rather unprecedented Interpol involvement resulting in his arrest for questioning on rape allegations. It's certainly the story that keeps on giving.

There are some problems with the current raging war. The mirroring system used by wikileaks is akin to giving some random unidentified stranger the keys to your front door. Without a domain name they can't effectively use SSL so you can be positive the site your talking to is Wikileaks and not some false flag operation. Without digital signatures for the mirrored data you can't be sure that what your reading hasn't been tampered with by that host. It will be interesting if they ever mirror the site on Freenet and we can find out exactly how censorship resistant it is. However these are all peripheral to the main story. We are watching Internet history unfold.