Category Archives: Uncategorized

Uncategorized

Stopping Credit Card Offers

It seems like the mail includes a good number of credit card offers. Various companies seem to send offers for their special Visa or Mastercard affinity programs almost daily. It only takes a moment to run them through the shredder, and the fees for sending them help keep the lights on at the Post Office. Besides, figuring out how to stop them takes too long, right?

But Thursday’s daily email included something special! A credit card offer with the magic phrase, “You can choose to stop receiving “prescreened” offers of credit from this and other companies by calling toll-free 1-888-567-8688.” Now I’m suspicious of pretty much any offer that comes in as a spam email (These turkeys weren’t even supporting the Post Office!) but a Google search is pretty painless.

The second result was the US Federal Trade Commission’s “Prescreened Credit and Insurance Offers” page. So what do you know? That phone number’s legit.

So it turns out there are actually three options:

  1. Call 888-567-8688 and you can stop (most) credit card offers for five years.
  2. You can also stop (most) credit card offers by visiting https://www.optoutprescreen.com/, clicking the “Click Here to Opt-In or Opt-Out” button.
  3. Or you can go for the gold by visiting that same link, printing out the form at the end, and mailing it to 
    Opt­Out Department
P.O. Box 2033
Rock Island, IL 61204­-2033

    .

Total time spent: less than five minutes.

(Image via pixabay)

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Food Production

I’ve been listening to the .Net Rocks podcast for about eight months and one of the things I like is their willingness to discuss topics outside the Microsoft software platform. The monthly “Geek Out” where co-host Richard Campbell deeply researches and then discusses a technical topic is another interesting part, and always informative.

A few months ago, the geek outs turned into a series on food production, starting with the history of agriculture, and moving up to how food is beginning to be genetically modified.

If you have any interest in food (we all eat from time to time), the series provides a lot of interesting information, and delves into some of the more controversial topics while remaining neutral. Well worth a listen.

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Three Minutes of Fame

Today I was internet-famous for slightly more than three minutes; just long enough for Richard Cambell and Carl Franklin to read and reply to a comment on an episode of the .Net Rocks Podcast.

Back in January, I left a comment on their website, regarding StartSSL and Let’s Encrypt, two providers of SSL certificates they’d mentioned during the show. Today, show 1287 came out, covering the topic of “InfoSec for Developers” and they used my comment (right about the 5:40 mark) as the segue to the conversation with their guest, security professional Kim Carter. (Interestingly, he turns out to be using security certificates from one of the sources I’d commented on.)

So if you don’t know that’s all about, an “SSL certificate” is one of the things you need in order to setup a secure website using HTTPS. This is part of what triggers the lock icon to appear when you’re viewing a secure web site. (You do look for that when buying things online, right?)

Richard made a valid point that a paid-for certificate really doesn’t get a whole lot more validation than what the free ones get, so if you’re able to take advantage of the free ones, there’s not really a lot of incentive not to. (it does leave the question of what extra value you get with a paid SSL certificate.)

The self-signed certificates mentioned in my question don’t have anyone vouching for their authenticity, though it’s not clear that the free or even the paid for certificates have anyone vouching for them either. There is another kind of certificate though, the “Extended Validation” certificate (which is what your bank should be using) which does involve some in-depth checking of identity.

One thing that does distinguish third-party (i.e. “real”) certificates from the self-signed ones is that if something goes wrong (e.g. the private key is stolen), a third-party certificate can be revoked. Since the webmaster is the only one vouching for a self-signed certificate, there’s no way to tell whether the person saying the certificate is valid is who they say they are. The third party certificates come from a source which has been validated, and there’s a secure chain of connections for verifying that the certificate can be trusted.

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How To Leave a Facebook Group Message

A friend mistakenly started a massive (50? 100?) group message on Facebook. After the initial admission of “I created this by mistake,’ people started replying (to all) that they would like to be removed (which is something you have to do yourself) and others began asking, “How do you do leave a group message?”

Below are the steps for doing this from the full version of the Facebook website. The mobile site doesn’t seem to offer this functionality and while this can probably be done from the mobile app, I don’t use it so can’t provide much guidance.

  • Click on “Messages” on the left hand side.
  • Click on the message you want to leave.
  • At the top of the screen, there’s a box labeled “+ New Message.”
  • Next to that, there’s a smaller box with what looks like either a gear or a sunburst. Click that.
  • A list of options will appear.
  • Click “Leave Conversation.”
  • Confirm that you want to leave.
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Hacking a Space Probe

This is just absurdly cool.

The ISEE-3/ICE space probe was launched in 1978.
In 1997, it’s mission complete, it was sent a shutdown signal.
In 2008, we discovered it hadn’t shutdown, was still responding to commands, and still had fuel.
And it’s orbit was going to bring it near Earth in 2014.

NASA no longer has the equipment for communicating with it and decided it would be too difficult and expensive to rebuild it. (Right about now, I’m thinking about V’Ger. “The creator does not answer.”)

In March of this year, xkcd published comic #1337 with the idea of a group of online volunteers re-establishing contact.

In May of this year someone actually did it!

Some links:

According to the Rockethub page, contact was lost again on August 10, but it’s still amazingly cool that they were able to pull this off. (And for less than $200,000 to boot!)

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Raspberry Pi Beginners Guide

Another entry from the land of “So I can find it later….”

Setting up the Raspberry Pi set was easy enough, and installing Chromium (the open-source version of Chrome) only took a single command (apt-get install chromium). When I was using it to post “Hello World” on Facebook, I discovered that the @ and ” keys were reversed (the physical keys were in their usual locations, but their behaviors were backwards). OK, the keyboard mapping isn’t set for the US. (The Pi and the drive image I’m using are both from the UK.)

I was pretty sure I could fix it via the configuration program that runs when you boot the first time, but there were two problems: (1) the configuration program only run automatically on the first boot and (2) I couldn’t remember the command.

Searching for raspberry pi configuration program led to the link RPi Beginners which looks to chock-full of useful information if (like me) you’re just getting started with Linux and/or the Pi. (For example: Backup your SD card.)

By the way, the configuration program is raspi-config; you’ll need to run it as sudo raspi-config.

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Installing Ubuntu without pae

From the land of “things I might want to refer to later….”

My old Dell Inspiron works fine except for a missing ‘R’ key. Windows XP is showing more signs of age than the notebook, so time to put another OS on it.

I’ve been using Ubuntu in such situations, but my attempts at installing both 12.04> and Lubuntu (lightweight Ubuntu) have both ended with a message about the hardware not supporting the required pae extensions.

Physical Address Extension (aka pae) is an Intel technology which allows a 32-bit operating system to access more than 4 GB of RAM. (A quick read suggests it essentially hands each application a 4 GB chunk of memory, similar to how programs on the 80286 and earlier chips were able to address more than 64 KB at a time by combining a 16-bit memory address with a 16-bit segment address — and by revealing that I know about this, I’ve probably dated myself quite handily.)

Another quick search on Google turned up a relevant pair of AskUbuntu Questions describing how to install a non-PAE version.

In a nutshell:

  • Download the non-pae netboot image mini.iso. This is a bare-bones installer which downloads the selected packages during the installation process. (Obviously, this requires a broadband connection.)
  • Burn the image onto a CD* and boot the computer from that.
  • Accept the default values for most of the prompts. You’ll need to supply a userid and password. My experience is that it’s faster to select the keyboard layout from a list then to go through the prompts for “detection.” (Faster for a standard US keyboard anyhow; your mileage may vary.)
  • At the final screen, when prompted for packages to install, be certain to select a desktop (e.g. Ubuntu Desktop) unless you plan to do everything from the command line.

* The Inspiron’s CD drive is getting old and unreliable, using UNetbootin to make a bootable thumb drive worked perfectly.

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DRM and Monopolies

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I miss Rob Pegaroraro’s contributions to the Washington Post’s technology coverage. Instead of the Apple Rumor du jour that passes for Tech Journalism in most places, he digs into policy angles.

He makes some interesting points in his story “Overlooked E-Book Chapter: DRM Makes Monopolies.” Notably, the fact that once someone buys an e-reader (e.g. a Nook or Kindle), they’re not likely to buy e-books from competing vendors. Why not? Because the Digital Rights Management (or rather, Digital Rights Restrictions) prevent you from reading a book from vendor A on vendor B’s hardware.

He does overlook two loopholes though. First off, you can buy two e-readers. If you have lots of money. (In which case, please share some with me!) Or you can buy a tablet computer (iPad or Android) and download the free Kindle and Nook e-reader apps. You still can’t read the books from one store in the competing stores’ app, but at least you only have to buy one piece of hardware.

But it’s still not convenient. And, as Pegaroraro points out, your rights to the book are sharply limited. With a physical book, once you’ve read it, you can put it on a shelf, sell it or give it away. With an e-book, it’s yours forever.

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Is Your Computer at Risk?

If you have 10 minutes to spare, read about The Virus That Really Will Kill Your PC.

If you only have 5 minutes, the super-condensed version is that there’s a virus which may have altered your computer’s settings and if you’re infected, your web browser and email will stop working on July 9. To find out if you’re infected, visit http://www.dns-ok.us/. If the page shows up with a green background, then you’re in the clear (or at least, you don’t have this particular problem). A red background however means your internet connection will stop working in July.

The linked article is worth a read. In short, the FBI busted some bad guys who were hijacking people’s internet traffic by way of a virus that changes DNS settings. (DNS is the system that turns human-friendly address – such as www.thatblairguy.com – into computer friendly IP addresses.) For the time being, the FBI is running the DNS server the bad guys had been using, but that won’t go on forever.

The interesting question to me then is how does that web page work? Viewing the page source, there’s nothing but static HTML.

It turns out The Good Guys are taking advantage of the compromised DNS to set up an “eye chart”. If your computer is using a safe DNS system, then www.dns-ok.us resolves to an IP address where the “green light” page is displayed. But if your computer is using an unsafe DNS system (the one the bad guys put in place), then www.dns-ok.us resolves to the IP address of the “red light” page.