Technology Bytes Radio

You are invited to attend the Technology Bytes monthly gathering/meet-up. We’ll be descending upon at The Coffee Groundz, located 2503 Bagby, in Houston, TX.

The event starts around 7:30 and goes until ?

You don’t have to be a geek to attend. Heck, you don’t even have to be a current listener of the show. This event is a casual meet-up for anyone interested in technology or social media in all its forms and a great opportunity to just hang out with like minded individuals.

There is no need to RSVP, but if you have a Facebook account you can let us know you’re coming at the Facebook Event Page

The Geek Gathering has been happening the first Friday of the month since February of 2002 and is always a good time.

We hope to see you there!

Allright. As if Fundraisers weren’t scary enough, this Friday is Friday the 13th.

Occurring between one and three times each year, the day is superstitiously believed to bring bad luck.

Anyone want to take a shot at the clinical word denoting the fear of Friday the 13th?

Friggatriskaidekaphobia. While anyone who took some Highschool Latin can pull out the base words for fear and the number thirteen, Frigga may be unfamiliar to those not sporting Viking heritage. Frigga is the Norse goddess for which Friday is named. Pretty Friggan cool, huh? Oh yeah, I’m going to abuse this every chance I get, starting with June’s Friggan Geek Gathering. Yeah – probably best just to walk away before that gets out of hand…

Although the number 13 has had a negative connotation since Biblical times and the sixth day of the week has been considered a bad day on which to travel or to start new projects since the 14th century, the combination of the two can’t be found until the 19th century. As far as superstitions go, this one is a bit of a noobie.

While I can neither confirm nor deny this particular superstition surrounding Friday the 13th, I can try to dispell one or two more current ones.

The first? Never turn your monitor on before your workstation. I’m not sure if there was ever a time when this was true, though in the early days of Linux, it was certainly possible to damage a monitor by using an incorrect refresh rate. In the day of Energy Star compliance, monitors tend to go to sleep rather than implode, if they receive power without a video signal.

I also know a number of people who are afraid to turn off their computers, especially if they seem to be working OK. While it probably doesn’t hurt anything to leave them up and running, that isn’t exactly green behavior. Unless we’re talking servers or network gear, nightly power cycles are generally a good thing, not an invitation for something bad to happen.

In Linux circles, this is even more of a superstition, as losing uptime is considered a very Bad Thing. For instance, a server with an uptime of 400 days is inherently better than a server with an uptime of 4 days, even though the fresher server probably has a newer kernel and more current hardware. I did some checking into this myth and found out that this one is *completely* *true*.

Some geek superstitions are actually borrowed from professional athletes and gamers…

If you’re into online sports games and are having a good season in competitive play, you may have a pair of lucky socks that go unwashed for far too long. I did some light checking, and while this behaviour may not bolster your team’s standing, it will do *wonders* for your chances of catching athletes foot.

Oddly, the notion of a lucky pair of boxers hasn’t really taken hold in the Geek world. I wonder why that is…?

Blowing on dice happens not only at the craps tables of Las Vegas, but at the gaming tables of tens of thousands of paper based gamers across the US. While the moisture from one’s breath may have made early dice more likely to stick on the side closest the blower, any actual effects are mostly mythical today. There’s no harm in continuing with this one, provided you’re equipped with the appropriate breath care products.

Another one? Crossing the streams is usually considered to be bad. Outside of the realm of Proton Packs, Neutrona Wands and Particle accelerators, this is a myth. From a Geek’s perspective, the Transmission Control Protocol takes care of streams of packets getting crossed
while traversing the Internet. The only real danger is getting KPFT’s audio stream crossed with that of FOX News. Supposedly, life as we know it would stop instantaneously and every molecule in our bodies would explode at the speed of light. Actually, that sounds kinda fun on a slow Saturday night.

Anyone else have any other geek or tech superstitions?

I’d mention the superstitions about partaking in sex, drugs and rock’n'roll while spending your summer as a camp counselor at Crystal Lake, but I don’t think that any of us are in any real danger there. You probably caught that that was a reference to original Friday the 13th movie, which was actually pretty scary the first time I saw it. Of course, I was seven, so your mileage may vary.

If you *were* a kid in the early 80s, it’s entirely possible that you saw a movie starring Richard Benjamin and Jeffrey Tambor named Saturday the 14th. The premise of this 1981 work is that Friday the 13th is for noobs; the true danger doesn’t arrive until the following day, Saturday the 14th, when it’s possible to open an ancient tome that will spill forth an odd assortment of creatures, as evidenced by the the first of two monthly meetings of the Houston Linux Users Group. While power users of the Linux Operating System may seem scary to some, they’re actually completely safe to be around, provided you follow some basic rules.

Dress down. Suits and other trappings of the corporate world tend to spook Linux geeks. It’s best to go with a t-shirt, shorts and some sandals (socks are a bonus) when moving amongst large herds of linux types to avoid causing a stampede.

Linux users are primarily dossile creatures, but, just as bulls are enraged by the color red, Linux users charge and trample anything between them and a blue screen of death in an attempt to both mock it and document it with their camera phone so that the pics may be pored over during those lean periods when Microsoft happens to deploy a solid OS. This is especially true in public spaces where web kiosks, smart vending machines and public terminals may be close by.

And lastly, once you’ve become fairly comfortable moving among the monolithic kernel’d masses, be wary that you don’t become *too* comfortable. Linux users will often turn on their own when it comes to disagreements over text editors, window managers and file system choices, so it’s best to maintain an air of ambiguity if your preferences are ever called into question. “I run them all” usually works for me.

The Houston Linux Users Group gets together at two in the afternoon every second and fourth Saturday of the month at the HAL-PC Headquarters located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive for a two hour talk that will drop some new knowledge on your superstitious self, but for now, that’s it for your Friday the 13th 411 and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright.

It’s no secret that the May installment of the Technology Bytes Geek Gathering is happening this Friday night at the Coffee Groundz in Midtown Houston, but what if it were? How would you go about protecting said secret? Do you have the tools it would take to keep this
meeting of magnificent minds on the DL? On the Point 00243? (That’s the inverse of 4 1 1.)

The move from analog to digital cellular networks gave us all a slight reprise from the casual creep eavesdropping on our calls, but it’s no great secret that Uncle Sam can check up on our voice communications at will, pending the proper paperwork. If I were to place a call to Dwight right now to tell him that the Coffee Groundz is located at 2503 Bagby and that we’d be there this Friday from 7:00 PM until close, we’d have cheap suits all over us from the time we order our first coffee, tea or other non-alcoholic beverage until we disconnect from the free WiFi and head home.

Let’s give him a call… My phone is actually dead, so we’ll have to fake this. Ring Ring. “Hey, Dwight! Allah your base are belong to us at 7:30. The gathering should be the Bomb! Gotta go – I’m shopping for vintage Anthrax t-shirts on eBay.”

See? Totally unencrypted. And…I suppose it also went out over the FM band, too. Not to worry – while many Three Letter Agencies do monitor KPFT, I’m pretty sure they take a lunch break when TechBytes comes on. We’re harmless. Mostly.

And seeing that they’re all on lunch right now, let’s take a second or two to talk conspiracy theories.

See? I think this solves the mystery of the empty trailer parked in front of the station. It’s an NSA listening post. They must re-staff it by the time Damage Control comes on, because it’s definitely still empty when Vegan World Radio takes the air. I guess they figure the vegans don’t have the energy required to mount a revolution. Wow. I think that’s a little insulting to the vegans. (Hey Vegans – you should know that the National Security Agency’s initials, NSA, are more commonly known to mean No Such Agriculture. That’s right. They want to hide all the fruits and vegetables and force everyone to eat meat.)

OK – that’s it for ConspiracyTime. Now back to fixing our phones on BarretTime.

Adding a layer of end-to-end encryption that protects everything passed between your mobile device and the device of the person you’re communicating with is really the only way to ensure that your RAIDed drives don’t get raided as you’re pulling up to the Geek Gathering. *Android* users can do this with RedPhone. Sorry, iPhone users, but you’ll have to wait a little longer for an iOS version to be released.

RedPhone provides end-to-end encryption for your mobile calls, securing your conversations so that nobody can listen in. It functions just like the normal dialer you’re accustomed to and uses your existing mobile number for addressing, so there’s no need to have yet another identifier or account name. If you know someone’s mobile number, you know how to call them using RedPhone. And when you receive a RedPhone call, your phone will ring normally, even when it’s asleep.

Of course, you’ll still have to provide your own Cone of Silence.

Just like that reference, RedPhone is probably pertinent only to those over-35, as all the kids these days are texting.

If you’re young, or just young at heart, you’ll want to check out TextSecure, again for the Android Mobile Operating System. TextSecure is a drop-in replacement for the standard text messaging application, allowing you to send and receive text messages as you normally would. All text messages sent or received with TextSecure are stored in an encrypted database on your phone, and text messages are encrypted during transmission when communicating with someone else also using TextSecure. This also means that should you lose your phone, you won’t divulge the contents of any surreptitious SMSs.

Both RedPhone and TextSecure are available for free on the Android Market.

Now, these only work if you completely trust your phone. Which I do. I’m pretty confident that my stock 2.2.3 Android install on my Nexus One is free from government back doors, malware and the like, but what if you don’t trust Google’s stated desire to not be evil?

And do you trust that “Angry birds walkthrough” you downloaded? Or that “Office Space soundboard”? You really have no idea what those programs are doing behind the scenes unless you take control of your phone at a much lower level so that you can police what applications are allowed to communicate with the outside world.

If you want to swap out the kernel that came with your phone for one you can trust, look no further than WhisperCore. WhisperCore is a secure Android platform dedicated to providing the security and management features necessary for transforming a consumer phone into an enterprise-class device. It provides full device level encryption for your phone, and can encrypt any attached SD card as well.

WhisperCore comes with WhisperMonitor, a software firewall capable of dynamic egress filtering and real-time connection monitoring, giving you control over where your data is going and what your apps are doing.

Unfortunately, installing these packages takes a little more commitment than clicking through a couple of screens on the Android Market. You’ll need to load an installer on your Mac, Linux or Windows PC, completely back up your phone, and go down the “road of secure communications” knowing that there’s no way back, both in terms of paranoia and in restoring your phone’s original firmware.

Luckily, we want *everybody* to know about the May Geek Gathering, so there’s no need to risk bricking your phone. Of course, if you’re up for it, I only ask that you wait until this Friday night to give it a go. If things don’t go as planned, you can always see what’s required to hack together a new phone from Arduino parts, a SIM card and a small GPRS radio. We’ll also have several radio-controlled blinky lights to help you find your happy place, as well as a ton of HexBug Nanos to play with.

Now, I’d spend some time talking about how to secure your email using PGP encryption plugins for popular mail clients, like the Gnu Privacy Guard for Outlook, Thunderbird and Evolution, but again, all the kidz these days are using FaceBook.

So… Here’s what you need do to make your FaceBook communications secure:

( . . . . )

That’s it for your concealed communications codex and that’s that for BarretTime.