Journal 5, September 27

Article: Slashdot says.. AU Government To Build "Unhackable" Netbooks

The Australian government has taken it upon itself to hand out 240,000 laptops to grade 9 and up students over the next 4 years. Which I think is a commendable initiative. The catch is all the laptops will be preloaded with security measures to prevent students from installing their own programs or changing the laptop configurations in any way.   

The laptops are loaded with Windows 7 Enterprise and use its AppLocker functionality in Windows 7 to only allow approved programs to be installed. I think this is a very bad idea since students will be locked into a limited set of software that once out in the real world they will likely have to switch from. 

An example would be Symphony the Open Office based office suite that IBM just completed the mandatory company wide migration from MS Office. And there are many companies that see the advantage to choosing from alternative software as well Lowe's for instance uses Lowe's Linux based thin clients for all its Point of Sale computers. The advantage for both IBM and Lowe's is that the software comes at a much lower cost since the initial licensing is free and optionally paying for developers to add needed features should be much cheaper than proprietary software.

While I am obviously pro free licensed software I don't think that the fact that these systems are preloaded with non free software is their main fault. It is the fact that these laptops are locked into the non free software with no option to change. I think it is a rather severe encroachment on freedom of choice and quite possibly a monopolistic venture on the part of Microsoft , Apple and Adobe all having their software loaded and locked in on the laptops. Another severe fault is the lojack installed on the laptops making them privacy invasion cases waiting to happen.

For the cost of $500 the laptops have quite low usability and flexibility for the students. Considering that the laptops are standard run of the mill lenovo netbooks than cost around $300 retail the Aussie government could have upped the specs on the laptops to around $450 which brings slightly more powerful graphics chips and larger screens into the picture. The other $50 dollars per laptop could have went directly to custom software development totaling around 12,000,000 dollars enough to pay 25 developers 120,000 dollars a year for 4 years. The advantages being that if they choose to load a free operating system on the laptops they could have content filtering built-in with dansgardian and additionally frequent security updates that is a trademark of open source software.

Their claim of the laptops being “unhackable” is also disputable since after all they are just standard netbooks which have easily flashable BIOS firmware and even windows 7 has supposedly unfixable exploits

Journal 4, September 20

Your next laptop might be an ARM!

Osnews.com: ARM_Pushes_Envelope_with_New_Multicore_Chips

While you might initially think that Intel and AMD lead the computer processor market, if you stop to think about all the computers and not just desktops or laptops but also processors such as ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SH and a few others found in the embedded computer market is much you can easily see that embedded computers far out sell personal computers.

Embedded computers can be found in most electronic devices. Examples using the ARM processor include 98% of cellphones cellphones, game consoles (Gameboy color and newer models), PDAs, mp3 players (for instance my sansa e200 media player has an ARM cpu), and even calculators.

The ARM processor was originally designed for the Acorn RISC Machine computer but it was overtaken in the market by IBM compatibles and Apple computers. Since then ARM has become the most popular processor architectures in the embedded computer world selling around 90 processors a minute! The popularity of ARM processors in embedded devices is largly due to their power efficiency and not their speed since you don't need much number cruching on a cellphone instead battery life is more important. However recently ARM processors have made large strides in performance while maintaining low power requirements. Intel has also developed lower power usage processors found in PCs designed for web browsing or long mobile battery life. Intels processors are still no match for the ARM design which does not maintain as much backward compatibilty as intel's x86 which allows them to keep ARM processors highly power efficent. For instance instance Texas Insturments' OMAP3 ARM processor can boast; “during average operation the OMAP 3 processors draw only 25.6 mW, about 11 to 16 percent as much as the 160 to 220 mW required by the best x86 solution in similar conditions“ [1]. A yet to be released hand held computer called the Pandora uses the ARM Cortex-A8 single core cpu at 600Mhz by default and up to 900Mhz offering 10+ hours of web browsing or over well over 20 hours of mp3 playback.

In the topic article ARM has announced that it will release new 2Ghz multi core versions of its ARM Cortex-A9 design which will further widen the performance gap. ARM processors will then be fast enough to compete directly with Intel and AMD desktop processors while consuming comparable power to their mobile processors.

The impact it could have once ARM processors start showing up in laptops and perhaps media center computers is that people will realize that ARM processors will make good desktop processors as well. It could lead to an entire market shift from x86 to ARM processors if game companies take notice. The fact that many games and applications are already available for ARM Linux is sure to help. While you will probably lose compatibility with most of your purchased software if ARM becomes popular on the PC again some manufacturers would likely offer patches to get your software working on ARM or free alternatives could be found. For instance IBM has recently made it mandatory for all employees to switch to Symphony Office their modified version of the Open Office suite instead of using Microsoft's costly office suite. Another example is the K3B an excellent CD burning application available on Linux and BSD which has proven itself better than non free CD burning programs in my opinion.

I think that in general people would be blown away by what an multi core ARM computer is capable of. Already single core ARM processors have been shown to be capable of watching HD video. Enabling normal web browsing with Firefox, Midori ( Webkit browser like Apple's Safari) or Google Chrome. No more hot laptops burning your lap. Extreme battery life would be achievable with a large a battery 24 hours or more of battery life would be no problem. It might not be long at all until you can buy a new laptop in Walmart and Bestbuy running with a similar processor to the iPhone so look out Intel and AMD!

[1] http://focus.ti.com/pdfs/wtbu/ti_mid_whitepaper.pdf

Journal 3, September 13

Article link: WebGL OpenGL in the Browser

In these days of increasing competition between web browsers we have witnessed the JavaScript performance wars,increasing compliance with the W3C standards, the advent of tabs for nearly every modern browser and even support for video without flash in the most recent Firefox release. But there is one feature that could make all the other tricks seem like old news. WebGL will allow web browsers to display 3D content accelerated by your graphics card directly in nearly any web page!

There are ways of displaying 3D content in a browser already but they all require a different plugins. For instance flash 10 from adobe can to some degree display 3D content but it has had little uptake, id Games also has its own plugin that allows the integration of their popular game Quake into a web interface called Quakelive that can be played anywhere you have a fast Internet connection free of charge. I have also seen some software 3D done in some extension of HTML but it was quite limited and I haven't found anything related to it since. The drawback to these is there is no open spec for all the browser companies to implement. WebGL is the answer, it gives the browsers a standard to rally around that doesn't require clumsy to install or in some cases bloated plugins.

So besides out of the box support for 3D in at least several browsers (Google Chrome and Firefox and Opera support the standard) what will this mean? For starters it means that many of the small flash games many people enjoy would no longer have to be written in flash but could be written in plain old html/javascript and WebGL which would be even more powerful for developers since it would be faster preforming and have inherently better 3D capabilities versus today's predominately 2D flash games.

The Khronos group who writes the WebGL and the well known OpenGL standard predicts the release of WebGL to happen sometime in the first half of 2010. That quick release schedule is backed up by the fact that the Webkit browser engine used by Apple's safari, Google Chrome and Midori already has at least a partial implementation working.

The possibilities of 3D in the browser are endless from games to more fluid redering of your web mail inbox WebGL with 3D avatars in your chat list. I think WebGL will probably mark the biggest change in the web since Web 2.0. A change this big could change a lot of things people do for instance it may become increasingly less common to go to the store and pick up a video game. Why bother when you can play hundreds on the web?

Journal 2 , September 6

Cracking GSM phone crypto via distributed computing

The encryption on cellphones has been the subject of attack for the past few years. The most recent seem to be using the new found power of GPGPU computation. GPGPU stands for General Perpose computation on Graphics Processing Units and most all of the new dedicated graphics cards can do it pretty well. The cards from ATI and NVIDIA are the main supporters of this technology.

To give you some perspective on the amount of computational power this gives programmers access to one of intel's fastest CPUs on the market the Core i7 extreme 965 tops out at 69 GigaFlops (69 Billion floating point operations / second ) in double precision Nvidia tesla c1060 can proform 1 TeraFlop (1 Trillion floating point operatons / second) of calculations per second in single precision. And up to 4 Nvidia GPGPU cards can be installed on a single custom PC for nearly 4 TeraFlops of computational power.

The goal of the hackers is to force cellphone companies to upgrade their encrytion due to the fact that for quite some time the GSM encryption that cellphones use could be broken with a large multi-FPGA system such as discribed on hackaday.com .

The implications are that GSM encrytion is hackable now if you have enough cash to buy an expensive computer setup and the expertise to build it. However with the release of the encryption key lookup table being currently being made using graphics processors anyone with a fast gaming laptop could break the encryption and listen in to cellphone calls and even intercept text messages.

Of course many people will never notice this as their phone contracts expire and they get new phones these are likely to include better encryption to keep your calls private. The people that do know about how quickly and cheaply a cell phone can be snooped in on will likely drastically change their habits when communicating.

I recently moved into town for the summer and was surprised that even in the small town I was in there were nearly 5 WiFi bases in the area. Most of them were using weak WEP or WPA encryption and not WPA2. This sort of situation where anyone with a little of know how can hack into your PC is entirely preventable.

Our society today is predominantly unaware of the dangers they are opening themselves up to by no keeping their computers and means of communication are secure. Imagine what kind of chaos would ensue if credit card numbers were stolen when people buy a product on their cellphone you might never even see the thief!

Perhaps the government could create a technology security site making available information about how to better secure your wireless devices and computers. The options for improving cellphone security are currently limited and vary since not all phones are capable of providing better encryption. The situation is better for PC since secure free operating systems like Linux and BSD are know for their security and Windows Vista is also more secure than Windows XP when it's security settings are turned up. Wireless networks in the home can also be secured with WPA2 encryption although that standard will eventually need to be replaced just like GSM.

Be safe and don't give out private information over the phone ;-) .