iNODE

As I write this the email server on campus is having a problem–which gives me a few minutes to drop this tidbit into the iNode security folder.

Internet worms (and other malicious programs and tools) often begin their work by scanning for open ports on machines connected to the internet. A machine somewhere on the net sends a packet to each port on the target machine and studies what comes back. It takes only seconds to scan a particular machine, perhaps minutes to hit everyone on the subnet. Give the response the hacker’s looking for and you’re singled out for more attention. The small sample from my desktop’s software firewall log shows the sort of probes I’m talking about (notice how the machine at 61.129.33.243 is trying a number of different ports?).

You can test how vulnerable your machine might be by visiting the GRC (Gibson Research Corporation) website and following the “Shields Up!” link. That web-based service will scan the first 1056 ports on your machine and let you know whether it gets a response. You should hope to see a largely green display (stealth). A stealth response (which is no response at all) is best because even a “port closed” response from your machine acknowledges your presence.

For Mac OS X users (at least those running 10.4, perhaps earlier releases as well), it’s quite easy to turn on this “stealth” response.
Under System Preferences, select the “sharing” panel, then “firewall”, then “advanced” and when you see a screen like the one shown here, put a check mark in both the “Enable Firewall Logging” and the “Enable Stealth Mode” boxes, then hit OK. Once logging’s turned on, you can open the log from time to time to see just how popular you’ve been.

One other note, if you’re connected to the net via a small router (e.g., a wireless router at home), you don’t have to worry. IP sharing (NAT) routers don’t allow unsolicited traffic to come across from the internet to your machine—that is, they perform a hardware firewall function for you.

Seems the NSA eavesdropping story is getting much more interesting. I recommend reading the post on Wired news today (a brief excerpt follows):

Here we present Klein’s statement in its entirety, with inline links to all of the document excerpts where he cited them. You can also download the complete file here (pdf). The full AT&T documents are filed under seal in federal court in San Francisco.

If you take a look at these documents, it’s pretty clear that the “eavesdropping” that the NY Times reported recently wasn’t limited to telephone calls. The setup described in these documents is built to filter and analyze every packet coming across an ISP’s connection—which means, all internet traffic in a particular area was being intercepted. One of the devices mentioned in the documents is the STA 6400 from Narus. Quoting a review of the device in Telecommuncations magazine (April, 2000):

“The (Narus) STA Platform consists of standalone traffic analyzers that collect network and customer usage information in real time directly from the message…. These analyzers sit on the message pipe into the ISP (internet service provider) cloud rather than tap into each router or ISP device”

If you visit the Narus website, you’ll find they market their product(s) at ISP’s who want:

• Real-time analysis of customer activity and usage

• Who uses what?
• What products are hot or not?
• What is being downloaded and by whom?
• Measure customer groupings for correct segmentation
• Establish pricing models and measure assumptions
• Bundling studies and new billing plans

I hope it is just a coincidence that Narus and Google are both based in Mountain View, California.

A few years back, when “metadata” was still something of a buzzword, I always felt I lost a portion of my audience whenever the word came up in a presentation. Then I figured out a surefire way to explain the value of metadata to an audience of college students—the CDDB system:

“When you put that CD in the drive to rip your favorite tunes, isn’t it great the way the artist, title, album name, song time, and all that information just appears in your ripping tool window? You don’t have to type it in and when you go to Napster to find another song, most everyone will have used the same information which cuts down on versions you have to wade through.”

The audience seemed to instantly understand the value of having good “data about the data.”

Now I have new example to use to illustrate the use of metadata in everyday life. The NSA isn’t spying on private telephone conversations—it’s merely processing the metadata provided by AT&T.

Let me take this opportunity to suggest a recent podcast from Open Source, a radio show hosted by Christopher Lydon (airdate: May 11, 2006).   I just listened to it during lunch today and found the comments by author William Gibson (Neuromancer) particularly interesting. You may know Gibson from his writings or the quote often attributed to him: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Gibson: “I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some…“

My copy of Sorenson Squeeze 4.3 suite arrived the other day and after about 4 minutes with the online help materials I got down to work transcoding samples of the PBS videos we’ll be using in our upcoming streaming project. The videos were delivered by PBS as mp4 files–weighing in at about 800-900 megabytes per one hour episode. My earlier attempts at transcoding with QuickTime Pro reduced the file size but I wasn’t at all happy with the quality of the streams (too many artifacts, dropped frames, etc.). Where QT Pro provides the Sorenson Video 3 Codec, with the Squeeze suite the codec is bumped up to Sorenson Video 3 Pro. What a difference better software makes!

Squeeze 4.3 offers several different codecs (MP4, QuickTime, RealMedia, Flash, WMV (need plugin)) and a number of filters and tweakable options, all pretty simple to use (even if you don’t quite understand the outcome of certain switches and checkboxes). Here’s a sample from one program, encoded in QuickTime (using Sorenson Video 3 Pro codec) with streaming “hints” at a 512K bit rate. I tested this version last nite over my WiMax connection in rural Virginia and it streamed quite nicely–looking no different really than the version I ran off my local drive.

[Note: You'll need QuickTime to view these samples]

QuickTime 512K data rate (384 video, 128 audio), Dual Pass VBR, 480 x 360

I made a second version with the same settings, only a smaller video window (320 x 240) and the quality is better (in web-based video, good things really do come in smaller packages).

QuickTime 512K data rate (384K video, 128K audio), Dual Pass VBR, 320×240

Using this 320×240 window, the 875 Mb mp4 video compressed to a 178Mb hinted streaming version.

Here’s a final version, created using Sorenson’s H.264 codec (Sorenson AVC Pro). It seems I had to run this through QuickTime Pro (export->Movie->Hinted Movie) to get it to stream correctly but this might be because I had some other setting incorrect…nope, that’s just the way the AVC codec works with QTSS.

MP4 (H.264) 512K data rate, single pass encoding, 320×240

and a slightly different clip with a larger window size and 2 pass encoding:

MP4 (H.264) 512K data rate, 2 pass encoding, 480×360

I also created a version using the Spark Pro Flash codec included with Squeeze and that too looked quite clear. Unfortunately, as I write this I have not yet installed the Flash Media Server (free developer edition) so I can’t yet see how it streams. Squeeze 4.3 provides the Spark Pro codec but also offers support for the add-on On2 VP6 Pro codec plugin(which must be purchased separately). I tried out the “trial” version of the On2 plugin that comes with Squeeze 4 suite and despite the little “On2 VP6” watermark that obscured portions of the output, it is a demonstrably better codec.

Another really useful feature Squeeze offers is a “watch” folder—drop a file (or files) into this folder and they get processed automagically—great for overnight batch processing. On a dual 2.3Ghz PowerMac it takes around two hours to transcode a one hour mp4 video (and pegs each CPU at about 90% utilization while it works). I’m sure I could make a few choices during setup to reduce those numbers (for example, the work I’ve done so far used 2 pass encoding which yields a better picture at the cost of more processing), but when run overnight, do I really care how long it takes?

Research (experimenting and learning) continues. I hope to set up a developer edition of Adobe’s (nee Macromedia) Flash Media Server in the next few days and find out whether all the “buzz” around that platform is justified.

We’re all familiar with maps of the Earth based on the amount of land within each country’s borders. Found a website today that offers a number of interesting visualizations of the world based on different statistical measures. For example, as the first picture shows, the US is quite a small country when it’s relative size is measured by electronics exports—but look at how things change if you base the map on electronics imported.

For each of the 92 maps on the site (many more are coming soon), you also find a downloadable PDF poster of each map (along with statistics) and Excel data files to boot. All sorts of interesting measures: toys imported/exported, net immigration, net emigration, rail freight, etc.

Found this site the other day and it looks like a really good resource—pulls together at one URL a number of different information resources for the web designer/developer. Of course all the standard sorts of things are found here, but there are some interesting oddballs as well.

While not as cool as DadaDodo (which isn’t included in this collection of tools), you’ll probably someday have a use for the Lipsum generator that is…

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat…”

http://www.tonyyoo.com/protolize

Wonder if this will work for Windows users (with Quicktime installed) where the rtsp (real time streaming protocol) caused issues?  Just ignore this test…

http://u2.gmu.edu:7070/pond_2.mov