It's time to admit I have a problem

You know you're an addict when you've used a phone seven times as long as it's even existed.

It's true: I've been using this iPhone 3G continuously since the 6th of October, 1987.

The Countryman part 2 - Retrofuture edition

Part 1 is here.

Let's start off with my new favourite-ever article:

CATTLE. HOVERCRAFT. CATTLEHOVERCRAFT. 

In 1961, rural Western Australia was just a few years away from replacing a bunch of cattle trucks with HOVERCRAFT. This is about the most retro-futuristic thing you could do to livestock farming without putting it on the moon. 

I imagine the trials for this would have been awkward when they realised the ground tends to have a lot of inconveniently-placed rocks and trees. 

I draw your attention to the byline for this article: In 1961, the government was asking farmers to volunteer up a portion of their crops to support the 1962 Perth Commonwealth Games. Just 50 years ago farmers were expected to support the government rather than the government bailing out farmers.

These last three need no commentary, they're just some ads you probably don't see too often.

One of these things is not like the other

If a contractor doesn't proof read their word documents, of course you can trust them to replace and configure the servers which your company vitally needs. Those little details never hurt anybody.

Broken things: iPod Classic

Somebody brought me an iPod with the timeless White Screen Of Death. That used to be pretty common and is easily fixed by reloading the firmware.

It worked, I turned it on, and things got a bit weird.

Somewhere along the way, about half the letters in every bit of text in the firmware vanished. Some shorter words had the misfortune to disappear altogether.

I have no idea why this happened. The firmware copy was fine, the loading process was fine, and if it was general corruption we'd be seeing a lot more than just missing letters.

Sadly, reloading the same firmware a second time gave me a perfectly-working iPod. Sometimes things are more fun half-broken than working.

Obscene Automated Tour Guides

I went to a rather nice museum a few weeks ago - it was quite new and focussed on doing everything in as modern a way as possible. In keeping with that, they'd replaced the tour guides with iPod touches that ran a custom app.

The app itself was pretty great. It identified nearby exhibits (via unique bluetooth transmitters, I'm guessing) and let you rate how you felt about them. You could read through some extra information if you wanted, and sometimes see related audio or video clips.

As an added bonus, you could leave the app and access the normal iPhone tools. I wasn't the first person to realise this.

These guys were able to deploy an advanced location-aware custom app, but don't have anybody who understands iPhone restrictions, the iPhone Configuration Tool, or old-fashioned Kiosk Mode. It didn't even throw any errors when I added a throwaway email account.

This wasn't just a recent problem - a lot of the contacts had been added over 6 months before, so they aren't even being wiped regularly. I can only assume the guys who made the app are long gone while the staff just update exhibit information on a local server.

To end with, here's some more detail about those gentlemanly prior patrons of the museum.

Symantec Endpoint, just stop this

More like SEMENtec endpoint amirite

Emails where you blatantly contradict yourself and render the message pointless, registering multiple computers under the same name due to a quirk in the installation, arbitrarily alerting me that half the computers are 'OUT OF DATE' because you don't like how some optional settings are configured...just stop.

You're pretty thorough at picking up viruses and shit, but this needy attention-seeking behaviour has got to stop. Every machine is up to-the-minute with updates and functioning perfectly, so why all the fuss? Just take a few deep breaths and calm down.

WHAT IS THIS

Seriously, WHAT DOES THIS BUTTON DO.

It's on a keyboard I got long ago, from the mid to late nineties - you know, buttons for every function you don't need a hardware button for.

The button does nothing. It doesn't bring coffee, it doesn't open up a coffee-related webpage, it doesn't try to start a coffee machine, it does  nothing at all.

I MUST KNOW.

Vodafone Australia Leaking Private Picture messages?

Over the weekend, one of our users had a pretty strange event happen. The basic chain of events went like this:

• The user receives an (expected) MMS message to their work and personal phones at the same time. Both these numbers are on vodafone.
• The user immediately starts receiving dozens of other MMS messages from numbers they don't recognise.
• After 10 minutes, the user turns off both phones.When they're turned back on, the messages have stopped.

While they'd been wiped off the personal phone, I got to have a look at the work phone this morning. The MMSes had all arrived at her email address which makes things a bit easier to analyse.

From this we can see:

• These were, beyond a doubt, not intended for her. The only thread even linking all the recipients (and senders) is that they're australian.
•  The messages all came through vodafones servers.
• The messages all have a send time approximately that of the receive. That doesn't necessarily mean that this was essentially a live capture of their MMS traffic, but it seems likely.
• A quick look at some messages shows a high incidence of people from WA. That could mean it was a WA-only issue, or it could be due to the time difference between us and the Eastern States.
• These are real MMSes. They are not spam, they were sent by real people who did not expect them to be made public.

 Here's a good example of the kind of thing that was leaked.
.

A student card. To go with his phone number, they gave us the high school, full name, date of birth, and some photo ID of a minor. Believe me when I say that this was far from the most personal piece of information there.

Most worryingly, Somebody has mentioned to me since then that a friend of theirs had the same thing happen yesterday - hundreds of PXTs being misdirected to his phone. He thought it was some kind of spam and changed his number, which is a shame.

I'd love to find somebody else who had this happen and still has some messages. With some more data we can work out a few more details:

• The time period. It was about 10 minutes for this case, but that may have just been the tail end - it could have been going for weeks in the right conditions.
• The trigger. I'm guessing it was 'receiving or sending a PXT message', but again I need more data.
•  Whether the same messages were sent to everybody. Everybody getting the same stream of messages is a much smaller problem than everybody receiving separate streams

With all of that, we can work out the scale of what happened here, and hopefully notify some of the customers who unexpectedly had their personal messages made public.

I should also mention:  I've contacted vodafone about this (via the authorised partner we deal with), but I haven't heard back yet. I'm very interested to hear their response.

Buggy LCD Panel

Somebody at the office came over wondering whether they had a virus, because there was a bug crawling around their screen they couldn't wipe off.

See that tiny dot in the centre? ITS ALIVE.

It's not on the surface of the screen, yet it's not software - what we have here is an actual bug that somehow crawled in between the LCD panel and the backlight. A quick googling shows that this seems to be worryingly common.

It's been wandering around in there ever since, unable to find a way out. Whenever it hits the edge of the panel, it'll crawl along a bit and come straight out. My plan is to wait for the bug to escape of its own accord or starve to death (hopefully at the edge of the screen so it's not much of a nuisance).

If you're as intrigued by this as I am, have some low-quality videos of the bug exploring where no bug has gone before.







It's only Tuesday. There's still plenty of time this week for even weirder IT problems to spring forth.

If you want a job done right

It's great when a phone company wants your business. Whether or not you're considering changing over, they offer nice perks. The latest company gave me an iPad and a playbook for a few days, to 'test out their network'. (Summary: the iPad is built better and more polished, but I love some of the playbook UI choices. After swiping from outside the screen to switch apps, double-tapping the iPad's home button felt clunky and wrong. But I digress.)

Before The Salesman handed over the iPad, he made a point of spending a few minutes clearing user data - it had just come from another company  Okay, he's not doing a secure wipe, but a quick wipe in each app is enough. At least they care about confidentiality.

This was the first sign they hadn't been thorough.

The best way to test out hardware is to buy miniskirts. Try it sometime. 

I've hidden one entry to protect The Salesman (who we might end up dealing with), but the search history is interesting regardless - mens fashion and porn. Later on I poked around to see if there was more.

I didn't investigate too much, but there's a good mix: email, mens clothing, ASX announcements, straight porn, gay porn, email again, and finally cruise ships. From this we can deduce he's an open minded young man who takes care of his looks, has a solid financial basis, and keeps track of his investments.

And since The Salesman didn't know how to clear all the pics, the man with the interesting browsing habits works with these guys:

It looks like he works in a car sales yard, but you can't tell much else. Most of the other key apps are clear of data, so the privacy violation should stop here.

Except the apps he installed require his account to upgrade.

This is getting awkward. The email is his full name including initials and there's only one guy in this city with that name. So that leads straight to his facebook account, which leads to his 500+ friends, his girlfriend, his family, and so on. I've never met this guy, but from an iPad he used for one day we can link his porn habits all the way back to his family and workplace, even after someone tried to wipe it.. Imagine what the phone you use every day has?

The moral of this story: Your personal data is important. Don't trust others to handle it for you if you can handle it yourself.
And Wipe your test devices when you're done with them. 




UPDATE:
Somebody pointed out that I hadn't checked to see if the photos had the GPS location they were taken stored. And hey, what do you know?

So in addition to everything else, we've been provided with the very building he works in. Awesome.

Why RIM stopped using Trackballs

This is under the trackball of a Blackberry Bold 9000 after about two years of light-to-moderate use. To get some lovely detail of the grime, you'll want to view that image full size.

It looks almost uncannily like a birds nest aside from the scale - it's just a few millimetres across. Perfectly shaped to the underside of the roller, it kept it's form as I yanked off the protective plastic coating. I'm not sure what material kept it stuck down during this but it certainly didn't wipe off easily. I'll be disappointed when the 9000's are retired as the trackpad handsets don't have this kind of character (I haven't had a single one in for cleaning yet).

The best part: The roller was still working perfectly, it was brought in because of antenna issues.

Broken Things: iPhone 3G

Somebody brought this iPhone 3G in a few days ago. I'll give you three guesses why.

You're absolutely correct, she wanted a software update. The owner has no plans to replace the screen - after all, it works perfectly aside from the occasional ear-cutting incident.

She's been through two screen replacements so far with this handset. For her next phone I might recommend a nice sturdy case to go with it.

Boxify.me: A brief lesson in what privacy isn't

Boxify.me is getting a bit of press lately as a new site that allows sharing multiple files with others in 'boxes'. No sign up required; you just click on the 'start sharing' button, upload files, and share the URL around with others.

Here's their current front page.

Before I go further, I should mention this kind of sharing is inherently insecure - they make no promises about keeping your data safe and there's no password protection. Anything you put up there can be accessed by whoever has the private URL, and that's how it's designed. The only thing they specify on that page there is that your box has a 'private URL'.

That should be easy, right? All they have to do is set up robots.txt so that nobody can spider their site, after all.

Unfortunately, I'm wrong.

And as a result of that:

Now, I know what you're thinking -"That's not too big a deal, google can't find anything that's not already linked to". That's where the second mistake comes in, which is only obvious because of the first.

When you click on the link to uploads.boxify.me, you get this lovely page.

Yup. That a public xml file with hard links for the thousand most recently uploaded files. I'm not sure why the file exists, but the fact it's publicly accessible is just terrible. In 15 minutes you could knock up a shell script that regularly checks for and downloads every single file uploaded to the site.

So the outcome here: Boxify.me may turn out fine one day, but so far Loren Burton's  claims of a private URL aren't holding up.. If you don't want your files immediately available to the general internet, don't use boxify.


Interesting Sidenode: The example box they link to on the front page can also be edited by the masses. Consequently, it has naughty material for the discerning visitor.

Fringe

I finally got around to watching Fringe, after a year or two of constantly meaning to. It's a macabre but fun show where you have to suspend quite a bit of disbelief - they're always reading the memories of corpses, teleporting around, and growing single cells to the size of a greyhound. Sometimes they push my limits, but I've mostly been able to enjoy it. Then I saw this.

In their Operating System (that consists entirely of fancy maps and scrolling text), they have an IP address where every octet is over 256. This was a bit of a surprise, so I went back through the scene a little more carefully to glean a few more facts about their computer.

The text might be a bit small, but his computer is s a PIV 2.8 MMX cpu running at 3.2kMHTZ with 128000 memories. There's what seems to be a typo on the next line with the 'Plug and PLay' bios, and the rest is a nice mixing-pot of acronyms that occasionally make sense. 

Here's more of the same address type: all IP addresses, but nearly all of the numbers involved are way too big. This time they've thrown in a few token two-digit numbers, but they're clearly not using IPv4 as we know it.

It's hard to read, but that top window is full of extra IP adresses... this time consisting of 5 pairs of numbers. They've added a whole new octet but limited themselves to numbers below a hundred, which doesn't give them much more IP space to work with. The only reasonable option I can think of is that these guys are working with base 10 computers and I've uncovered a major plot point later intended for later.

It's reminds me of a cargo cult. Whoever did this knows what a computer should look like, they vaguely remember the boot screen and they liked that map in Goldeneye. It's so close at the casual glance, but wrong in every single detail. Mindbogglingly, they had to use a computer to create all of this. At some point in the process, people who know what an IP address is must have been involved. They stood by and watched somebody fake a a whole boot sequence for no good reason.

If you want to see the whole scene, you can find it here.

On the plus side, they have a rather nice Hard Drive sound effect.

Reassuring incompetence

With the world being full of  Crazy really-tough-to-remove rootkits and surprisingly realistic fake antivirus software that steals your credit card information, it can sometimes be a bit of a downer working in IT.

That's why I love it when I come across something like this at work:

Even the pros sometimes forget that computers can have two screens.