Roadblocks to Secure Internet Usage on the Road

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I’m in a different hotel today, one that is served by Cox Internet, and I immediately discovered that the SSH redirection which worked flawlessly yesterday completely fails here. I can start the secure shell, and it works for a couple minutes or a certain number of bytes, then I get a “connection reset by peer” error and it dies.

I suspect this is due to the War On Peer-To-Peer Protocols that Comcast is in such hot water over. Either Cox or the hotel chain is probably doing the same thing, to every port except port 80 and a handful of others. I can’t confirm this though, because I can’t remotely administer the hardware firewall in the office to punch a hole through it for a different port. I could do it easily if I were in the office, and I could do it easily from here if the SSH tunneling were working, but neither is the case.

I have a plan, though. I can use the SSH connection to copy over a new configuration file (it stays running long enough for that), and I think I can talk someone in the office through making the change to the router tomorrow morning. If so, I’ll try setting the office SSH server to use the HTTPS port (443) instead of it’s normal one (22). Presumably Cox won’t be able to mess with that port, since they won’t know what’s actually secure HTTP traffic and what isn’t. We’ll see how it goes.

Securing Internet Usage On The Road

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I’m on the road today, writing this from a hotel’s unsecured wireless Internet connection.

Call me paranoid if you wish, but I know how easy it would be for someone to snoop on any Internet traffic over such an unprotected wireless connection. Most of my e-mail accounts already use SSL encryption, but there’s one that doesn’t have that option; if I check it over this connection, any snooper could read not only my e-mail, but my account name and password too. The theoretical snoop could also see any websites I view, and any data I send to them, unless they use secure HTTP (which most sites don’t). A malicious one could even could even redirect my DNS queries and pretend to be any site that I want to view, potentially scarfing up my login credentials for any web account that I access. Secure HTTP would defeat such a man-in-the-middle attack, but again, most sites don’t use it.

So the first thing I did when I got online this evening was to research this problem. Lo and behold, there’s a very simple solution, and I was even all set up for it already! Continue reading ‘Securing Internet Usage On The Road’ »

“Everything breaks :(“

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I just don’t get it.

Some people put on a perfectly-working watch and it suddenly starts losing time. Technology seems to hate them. This guy is a case in point (and his article prompted this entry), but I’ve known other people who had the same problem, including some of my relatives.

On the other hand, most technology seems to really like me. When I walk up to a machine that isn’t working, the chances are good that it will suddenly start working properly, even without me doing anything more than looking at it (which makes me popular around relatives’ machines). I very rarely have technological devices fail on me too.

Modern science has no explanation for either phenomenon, other than some vague mumblings about statistics that explain nothing, or bull-headed insistence that it’s all in our heads (which doesn’t seem to cut it either). I have no answer, and my speculations are no more rational than thinking that simple machines can like or dislike people, so I leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Western Digital MyBook World Edition II

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I was at the store yesterday, picking up a pack of recordable DVDs for backup purposes, when I saw that the MyBook external drives had dropped in price. I’d been drooling over them for a long time, and that proved to be the final straw… I walked out with a one-terabyte dual-drive network-accessible version.

As soon as I got back to the office, and before I even opened the packaging, I got on the ‘net to make sure that it would work okay with Linux as well as Windows. To my surprise and delight, I discovered that it isn’t just a plain old external drive like I’m used to, but an actual headless (no monitor/keyboard/mouse) Linux machine itself! It didn’t take long to find this page, which offers a lot of information on it, including a way to get a secure SSH server running on it, which I immediately did.

After playing with it for a while, I set it to reformat itself as a RAID-1 system (where the second drive is a mirror image of the first, protecting against hardware failure of one of the drives). The formatting didn’t take long, but it took several hours to “synchronize” the second drive to the first, even though both were all but empty. Once that was done, it was ready to go.

It’s fast. It’s fairly quiet. It’s network accessible, and can even be made Internet accessible (though I don’t have that set up at present). All in all, it’s pretty darned spiffy. 🙂

“Video Game Addiction”

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Joshua Lee pointed out an interesting item on the Terminally Incoherent blog a few days ago, on video game “addiction.” I have an obsessive personality, as well as problems with depression, so I have a good idea why people might think they’re “addicted” to a game. I also know why they aren’t, though I couldn’t have put it into words before reading that.

Cheap Computers Running Linux

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The One Laptop Per Child project is now offering one of their rugged machines for you and one for a child in a developing nation, for a total price of $399 (only 13 days left on that offer, and only if you live in North America). And Wal-Mart has apparently already sold out of the first run of their highly-touted $199 PC at their online store. It kind of makes you wonder just how much an OEM copy of Windows really adds to the cost of a computer — and that’s before adding Microsoft Office to the mix.

“Guy Fawkes Day Helps Raise Millions for Paul”

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What’s this — a Republican Congressman from Texas who is willing to buck the trend?

Mr. Paul has stood out from the Republican field for his opposition to the war in Iraq. In the speech he argues that the fight against terrorism is threatening American democracy. “The American Republic is in remnant status,” he says. “The stage is set for our country eventually devolving into military dictatorship, and few seem to care.”

Amazing. If there were more like him, I might even be persuaded to vote GOP.

“Dutch Museum Hunts Elusive Crab Lice”

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“The Rotterdam Natural History Museum has appealed for somebody — anybody — to give it a single crab louse for its collection, amid fears they may be dying out.” Apparently a style of bikini wax (the “Brazilian,” which removes practically all of a woman’s public hair) might be killing them off. “‘When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with extinction. Pubic lice can’t live without pubic hair,’ [curator Kees] Moeliker said.”

Surely someone can help them out?