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I thought to comment on an interesting inadvertent mistake that happened the other day, and how having a decent twitter stream or a competent method for a person to communicate to would have fixed this very quickly..

So what is the example?

The other day, a friend of mine on twitter @vaughndavis spotted an awful ad serving disaster whereby a TVNZ article which had the news of the day about some parents who had raped their young son for the purpose of teaching him sex.

This story is in itself an absolutely awful story, but what has made this much worse, is that the ad detection program has worked out from the the context of the page, that this news article was related to losing of virginity, and this program decided to feature an ad for a website which cheerily encouraged you to submit to a map where exactly you lost your virginity..

The concept of this website in itself seems a bloody weird site to start with, but who am I to comment on the oddness of a website’s concept (given that my website is dedicated to the obscure art and science that is ADSL troubleshooting)

Now they have a “ contact us ” page, but with 13 compulsory questions including my sex, my age group etc, means that it is much easier for me to blog about this small mistake, and hope that they hear about it through other news sources rather than picking up the message, and getting it fixed.

Someone really should do something about that I think.

What could this have looked like? What would have been a different twitter model?

Well the model of @johnjcampbell is one that I find awesome, and for me personally as a result of the way that he interacts, it makes me feel that he is my friend, and that I have a real personal connection with him.

He tweets regularly, not about serious / branding related topics, but about the stories he has covered, and in a very real way and makes a real point to reply when you send him a message.

And it is funny cause through no one telling me to do anything, I have quietly started watching John rather than flicking between him and and that other-guy-with-the-moustache-who-doesn’t-tweet.

So in summary, TVNZ – get some real people with intelligence and authority who are able to reply / interact to your Twitter and move away from the one directional shouting of news to a 3 dimensional human interaction with the audience you are communicating with, and you might find as a result that people like me suddenly have a real connection with a real person and develop a real brand loyalty over and above the output of your reporting.

I just found this article regarding some really clever people have been doing to get low cost wireless transmitters for rural broadband options, so thought given that it is in the creative commons – why not reproduce it here.

If anyone knows of any good sources for these transmitters – do get in touch with them at
http://drupal.airjaldi.com/node/9

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The AirJaldi Mesh Router

The AirJaldi Mesh Router (AJMR) is built around a SBCs (Single Board Computers) which we extract from low-cost popular WiFi devices such as Linksys WRT54G . Most of the SBCs used, utilize a 200mhz MIPS CPU with 4Mb of Flash memory and 16Mb of RAM. However, we also use some lower-scale units and recently also developed more powerful units. The Netgear WGT634U appears to be most suitable for our application but it was recently discontinued. This small SBC draws less power then its bulkier cousins, features a MiniPCI slot for radio card, hosting a great Atheros b/g radio, double the flash and ram of the WRT54G and maybe the greatest feature of all is a USB2.0 port.

Most of the Mesh network is based around the AJMR. The SBCs are sealed in a low-profile, weather-proof enclosures which where designed in Dharamsala and are being fabricated in Delhi. The present enclosure is the 3rd version and is designed withstand the harsh Himalayan climate as well as the scorching heat of the plains. Manufacturing costs for the enclosures are just a bit over $10, for the small quantities which we make. This will decrease as higher volumes are produced.

— Update: We now also use a “double hight” enclosures, which house two routers – to allow for simple multi-radio applications, such as relay stations or mostly for connecting a hotspot “back-to-back” with a mesh router.

The following hardware modifications/additions are made to the AJMR SBCs:

* Power supply integrated with a POE (Power Over Ethernet) injector, which allows for long-distance PoE feeds;
* Tolerant power-supply for wide-range input voltage 90-240v;
* Current-limited battery charger.
* Low-voltage disconnect (LVD), to prevent router hung if battery is depleted and to prolong battery life;
* Optional solar-powered battery chargers;
* Improved antenna feed system, to decrease RF transmission losses;
* Optional sensors for remote monitoring, graphing, and logging of temperature and voltage;
* Optional lightening surge protector for antenna feed;
* Optional lighting surge protectors for Ethernet feeds – (build in Dharamsala).

— Update: We have begun a collaboration with the TIER research group , out of UC-Berkeley, head by Prof. Eric Brewer, on the development of advanced (yet low cost) solar-battery-charger. We expect to begin testing these new intelligent units before end of Q2/07.

The router’s firmware (operating system) is a Dharamsala-brewed Linux clone, based on multiple open-source projects. Thanks to the amazing and promising development of the OpenWRT project, we now need very little additions of our own. The core of OpenWRT is based on UCLIBC and Busybox. With so many supporters and contributors, today one can find a very rich selection of pre-compiled packages and tools. This allows people on the ground to focus on local issues, while enjoying pre-tested and fully functional OS. Multiple Mesh routing protocols were tested and are supported optionally.

A locally tweaked OLSR had become the protocol of choice for the present mesh. Major development efforts are aimed towards prevention of wireless transmissions collisions a.k.a hidden node problem. At present an iptables queue is controlling transmissions based on an advanced token-passing protocol among the mesh members. This technique, while increasing latency, prevents radio collisions and therefore provides a network free of packet-loss even when radio links quality is very poor. The concept idea and much of the development efforts are coming from Frottle and the guys at Melbourne Wireless. While such a solution is essential for the scalability of WiFi based networks, the present implementation is extremely difficult to tune in Mesh environments, hence we where forced to give-up on it’s use for most of our network. We feel that a complete re-write is called for, focusing on tight integration into OLSR, possibly an OLSR plugin. We hope to focus much of our future development efforts to produce a field-tested Mesh frottle solution.

Running later Linux Kernels (2.4.30 and also 2.6), the units supports all the advanced networking elements critical for deployment of such an advanced network:

* Full iptables stateful firewall, including all forms of NAT, traffic shaping, QoS management, packet tagging and even latest Layer-7 classifiers;
* Policy routing (iproute2) is included along with “tc” and multiple supported QoS queues;
* “tcpdump” packet sniffer for network debugging;
* ARP Tables for L2, MAC filtering and Linux-bridge for L2 bridging support;
* The unit support SNMP for remote management, NTP for maintaining accurate network-time (critical for encryption) and remote syslog host support, for concentrated logging.

Encryption is done using the on-board hardware accelerator, supporting 128bit WEP for wireless encryption. An optional OpenVPN package can be included, turning the unit into a military-grade VPN tunnel end-point. Since OpenVPN encryption can only be done in software, the unit cannot handle high-speed encrypted data. It is however sufficient for most low-speed (less then 2mbps) WAN applications. The units also provide DNS and DHCP servers, with support for multiple (up to 5) physical LANs (can be extended up to 256 LANs, using VLAN tagging and matching L2 switching devices). Fixed (MAC Based) and/or dynamic address allocation and optional PPPoE support can be used if interface to ADSL or similar line is needed. A shrink Asterisk VoIP software PBX can be installed on the unit, allowing support for a small number of IP-phones or ATAs.

Tight integration of telephony applications will be essential for future deployments in rural areas and developing countries. We hope to port the existing firmware to run on devices which include ATA (Analog Telephone Adapters) within the same SBC, to further reduce the overall cost of telephony systems deployments in rural areas. At present, all management is done using remote SSH access. No GUI is offered at this point. In general, all configuration and management of the unit is done using Unix command shell, and basic knowledge of Linux is needed to manage the device.

There is hardly any documentation at this point, and many future efforts should be focused on ease of management, configuration and control, along with in-depth technical documentation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

A really amusing story has just come to light (and it seems that at least 2 reporters are preparing stories about this)…If you are involved, feel free to let me know as people want to get in touch with you on either side of this story..

A fascinating series of events of alleged Birkenhead Burglar “Chek Otoony”
The basic story is that a person in Auckland North Shore, had their laptop and other things stolen:

“Chek and his mates decided to break in to my mate’s house, and completely rob him blind.
They took the TV, stereo, his Dad’s medals that were locked in a safe, etc etc.
However, they also took the laptop, which they then proceeded to delete all of his family photos and claim for themselves. They then logged on to Facebook, MSN, Hotmail, etc. making sure to click the “save password” button each time.

The police raided a house (presumably with a warrant for something else) recovered the laptop and returned it to my mate.”

Now this is where the story gets rather witty. The burglar had saved all his passwords for Facebook etc, onto the stolen laptop, so when the PC was given back to the rightful owner, they could simply see which websites had been used, (Through browser history) and then work through each site and see if anyone had saved passwords.

This gave them the list of the 3 assumed burglars (or at the least the users of the stolen laptop) as well as Pics of the possible offenders.

So why is this witty? Well then the owner registered http://www.birkenheadburglars.comthrough a proxy service (which protects the identity of the domain owner), and they posted all the information and photos of the people who they thought were the burglars.

Very nice. Very elegant. Very Geeky revenge.

So it got me thinking how could you take this further? Well if this scenario happened to you in the future then this would be a simple thing to repeat, but what would be cooler is to track down people while it was still stolen:

So here are some clever tips to get your stuff back after it has been stolen.

Camera Hacks
First of all, if you have a laptop with a built in camera, the following is a pretty simple idea when setup would continue to take photos of the burglars (and you as you sit there if it hasn’t been stolen yet of course).
http://www.camerahacker.com/myink/ViewPage.php?file=docs/Setting_Up_a_Remote_Web_Cam.html

In fact while we are talking about privacy and webcams, there is a creepy story about a school who had given their students Macbooks, remotely spying on the students afterhours. Which I think is creepy.
http://www.loopinsight.com/2010/02/18/school-officials-remotely-activate-macbook-web-cam-take-picture-of-kid/

But the flip side of the same method, being used to capture a pic of the burglar here
http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/thieves-caught-on-stolen-macbook-webcam-20080513/

Remote into your machine
For those who are a bit more geeky you can setup your machine to allow you to remote into your home machine if it is turned on: eg http://lifehacker.com/125607/geek-to-live–how-to-control-your-home-computer-from-anywhere Then if your machine was stolen, you could log into the stolen machine and setup some keylogging software and then capture their actions and passwords (including bank details, and bank passwords).

Ooh that would be so satisfying! Take out of their account the exact amount that the replacement cost you..who would they report the theft to?

But no, the right thing would be to do what was done for Chek and gather the Pics and details for your local policeman to then use!

Tracking by IP address
I haven’t done this, but I expect it wouldn’t be that hard:

The next option would be quite simple to write a program which captures your IP address, and then updates this to a website (I was thinking something like http://www.dyndns.com/) so then all you do is put that IP into reverse IP Whois page (for the Asia Pacific this is the link:http://www.apnic.net/apnic-info/whois_search2
And click here for how to report abuse from a particular IP address this would give you a contact for the Police to get in touch with.

The ISP can simply identify who was using that IP address at the time after your computer was stolen, and then tie this to a phone number, and thus the address.

Giving the Police a very simple open and shut case (especially if you have the pics!) as to who is now in contact with your machine.

So the moral of the story:

• Don’t steal
• Never steal from a Geek
• For anyone DONT save your password for any website.

The following email was actually taken out of one of the guys from work trawling 5 years of email from one of his colleagues…

The content was different for so many different emails, however somehow the context remains constant!

This illustrates what can happen when non technical people are encouraged to use email.

—

Attn.

I trust your day is going well.

To ensure we are both on track (and on the same page), some resources will need have their bandwidth increased (nobody wants to sweat the assets here team, but a little SWOT analysis will ensure all deliverables can be achineved with in an acceptable ETA vis-à-vis the non-linear components of the requirments).

As per the context of our last ear-to-ear, we can leverage our B2B synergies in a real-time customizable fashion.

I’d prefer to be guided on this one by the subordinate stakeholders- and with that top of mind, let’s not forget the natural synergies that should be utilized, going forward, in a brand-alive mode. (let’s not visit the historionics bank people!!).

Once bottom-lined, I’d one of you to facilitate a drill-down session (let’s talk in real time one this one), so we can cummunicate the outcomes (and let’s have some outputs too please!!) back into the bussiness.

Please review and escalate critical non-compliances to me by end of play. (I’m always avaialbe for a tic-tac via email)

My expectation is that given the socially networked architecture of the stakeholder relationships, a paradigm shift is not what is needed- a step change will achieve desired and acceptable results.

We’ll have to move quickly to avoid negative positions, but given the sense of urgency from within the business (and indeed from the entire vertical market), the is no reason that all targets can be met.

Visability will be key- and a data dump will ofcourse be included in the post mortum. Done properly this could be a win win (provided we are deconflicted (can you all provide cross team action items on this point)).

I know many of you are running low on cycles, but let me remind you of your BAU responsibilites. This company has a zero tolerance policy towards zerotasking. I’m sure you will see these read-only values as tacit. This is not blue skys stuff guys, it’s green fields, and we’d like to own the first mover status.

I accept that nothing is furutre proofed 100%, but these gaols are achievable and done right, we can minimize any forward-looking blow back.

Let’s keep it high level for now.

If there is nothing to worry about please advise via one-liner reply.

A defrag will be made avaialable to you all upon completion of this piece of work.