Microsoft leaks tool that lets law enforcement turn off your hard disk encryption, clear your passwords, and scoop up batches of evidence.

Oops.

I’ve maintained for some time that Microsoft has programs that fit on bootable USB sticks and allow law enforcement to override your Microsoft Bitlocker, Encrypted File System (EFS), and password data, and gather all your private information to use against you later in a criminal trial.

That system is called COFEE, for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor. (Microsoft page about it here)

It has been known for some time that Microsoft has backdoored Windows for the US government, when Microsoft got careless and forgot to obscure a cryptographic signing key given to the NSA back in 1998. (The backdoor is still there, just obscured now), but people don’t tend to believe me about COFEE.

If you use Microsoft Bitlocker or EFS, you’re wasting your time, because Microsoft gives these devices out to law enforcement on down to your local police department. If the police get a warrant and seize your machine, and you’re using Bitlocker or EFS, you’ve essentially just handed them the evidence and the only difference the “Microsoft security” will make is that it might cost the cops an extra 2 minutes to boot off the COFEE key and unlock your hard drive.

COFEE was recently leaked onto the web, and Microsoft has been sending cease and desist orders, but COFEE is still on a lot of bittorrent sites if you would like to try it out for yourself.

While I’m at it:

Many Linux distributions offer /home folder + SWAP encryption or (even better), whole disk encryption. And I doubt the people behind those projects are pissing on you and telling you it’s raining, like Microsoft has when it tell you that Bitlocker and EFS are trustworthy and proceeds to sell an instant workaround and evidence collector to the police.

 

Does having an HDTV actually mean anything if you have Comcast?

I’ve been tossing the idea around to get a new LCD HDTV set, but I don’t think I will, here’s why.

I got a letter in the mail from the evil Cable Overlords known as Comcast. In addition to the obvious raise in rates (10% hike in a year where the government says that the economy DEFLATED), we’re getting a whopping seven HD channels.

Five of these are local channels, I could get them for free on an antenna. Technically they are on the “Limited Basic” plan for $19.99 a month, but you need an HD box (which means a DVR) for another $15 a month to actually tune any of these in. Do you think anyone wants to rent a DVR for basic cable? Neither do I.

The other two are on “Digital Starter” which went up to $57 and are ESPN and ESPN-2, which I don’t care about.

The last bit of “good news” is that Comcast is shifting the channels around so that all the channels people want are only on Digital Starter or higher. They did add one channel I want, but I’m not paying another $15 a month for the package that has it.

When my Digital Starter promo fee crap wears out, I’ll probably go to Digital Economy, which means I lose the Sci-Fi channel (only one in Starter that I care about), but pay $30 instead of $57. Thankfully Stargate Universe is on Hulu anyway.

So not only am I going to downgrade my service, there’s yet another year with no real HD programming from Comcast and no reason to buy a nice TV.

I may just get satellite yet...

Windows 7 Starter sucks so bad that even Windows “evangelists” are running for cover.

Microsoft’s big plan to take on Linux…

The netbook is a funny thing, funny in that the hardware has to be so power efficient and light that Microsoft could never stuff Vista onto them. Another problem for Microsoft was that Linux set the price point at around $299 USD. To compete, Microsoft dug out its 9 year old OS, Windows XP, blew the dust off it, and dumped it for around $3 a copy.

Obviously Microsoft can’t thrive without inflated profit margins, so when the time came to slap Windows 7 on the things (which I’ve used on netbook hardware, and found that it doesn’t work well), they came up with a crippled edition with all of the features turned off.

This edition is called Windows 7 Starter, and has no AERO, no Media Center, is 32-bit only, won’t let you change the wallpaper or the theme, and has a bunch more ridiculous limitations.

Last year, Microsoft conspired with retailers like Best Buy to fake some statistics on Linux netbook return rates. While in truth, most people were perfectly happy with them, Microsoft bribed companies to spread the word that they were not happy, and were returning most of them.

With Vista 7: Crippleware Edition, I’d like to see what the return rates on these suckers will be. Of course, Microsoft is hoping to surprise you with how much it sucks, and wave Windows Anytime Upgrade in your face. For a mere $80 more, you can presto change-o and transform it magically into the same OS you had before with the features turned back on!

I don’t think people will go for this, because I tend to be pissed when I buy something and then later find out that it wasn’t the full version and they want more of my money. Technically with Windows, you never have the full version unless you pay them to give you “Ultimate” which is essentially still just paying them to enable features that were already in the OS.

I believe a mixture of two things will happen to the Vista 7 Crippleware netbooks:

1. Massive return rates.

2. The rest will figure out how to install Linux, which is free, and has no such silly artificial limitations designed to pump you for more money like an elaborate Vista 7 Crippleware scam.

The article that inspired this is from Preston Gralla at Computer World, who is essentially paid by Microsoft to write favorable reviews. It kind of shocked me when he had this to say about Vista 7: Crippleware Edition:

Computerworld just published the results of a survey from the shopping site Retrevo.com, which found that 61% of people don’t know that there’s a difference between Windows 7 and the Windows 7 Starter Edition — and that 56% of those who then found out the differences between the two said they would not be happy with Starter Edition.The Computerworld article notes that, according to Retrevo.com, 23 out of 28 netbooks sold on Amazon.com are equipped with Starter Edition, which means a lot of potentially unhappy Windows customers.At $80, the price to upgrade from Starter Edition to the full version of Windows 7 is steep, particularly for people who have opted to buy a low-cost netbook.That’s bad enough news for Microsoft, but there’s worse as well. A recent study from ABI Research found that 32% of people worldwide will buy Linux netbooks this year, versus 68% for Windows. Other studies have shown Microsoft with a far more dominant lead in netbooks, but those studies are for the U.S. only.

 

Source.

At least one of the rats can tell when the ship is sinking.

Goodbye Nvidia, forever. Hello AMD/ATI! On Linux, ATI is a no brainer.

So my last computer had a massive failure that would cost more to fix than the computer was worth. It happens.
This time, when selecting a new machine, I steered clear of Intel (another story there sometime) and Nvidia. I instead settled on an AMD Phenom II X4 945 3 Ghz and an HIS ATI RadeonHD 4670 (1 GB GDDR3). Needless to say, this system blows the older Core 2 Duo and Geforce 9500GT 512MB GDDR3 system I had away, but there’s some added bonuses in here for persons who use Linux, and a few perks that seem to apply no matter what OS you use.

Nvidia has been grinding my gears for a few years and I’ve had enough:

Aside from the political activities of their Board of Directors, several of which donated $10,000 to help pass the bigoted Proposition 8 in California. (Source: Publicly available donor list), their video cards are overpriced and still manage to under-perform similarly priced RadeonHD models. (The RadeonHD 4670 outperforms the Geforce 9500GT by a factor of two to three, at about $20 cheaper).

What *really* destroyed Nvidia’s chances of selling me another card in the future though is their terrible support for Linux.

The biggest single user experience problem with Nvidia’s driver is that the installer is not user friendly, it requires you to make X shut down which is not always easy. If the installer bombs out for any of 1,000 reasons, the errors are unhelpful, and you have to redo everything each time you rebuild a kernel. Having an Nvidia card on Linux puts you on a very short leash, and sometimes stops you from building your own kernel or even using development kernels. Sometimes even final release kernels are a no-no for weeks until Nvidia catches up.

Almost everyone has heard the cliche that “It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch”. On Linux, Nvidia is that bad apple, because it’s like, here’s 95% of your hardware that the kernel supports and you never have to think about, and here’s one device with a horribly conceived installer for an out of tree driver that doubles the work needed to run your own kernel. If that wasn’t enough, having the Nvidia driver installed invalidates all your kernel bug reports, is frequently the cause of crashes, lags months or years behind new features in X or the kernel (Like the eternal promise of RandR 1.2 support and always the excuse that it supports their crappy TwinView instead), runs a binary blob with kernel permissions that could be executing anything on your computer or causing security holes (say goodbye to being able to do a real security audit), and generally drinks the blood of puppies. (That part is a slight exaggeration)

And that’s why I’m not going to be recommending Nvidia to anyone I talk to from now on. You can run into the same number of problems that Nvidia causes your Linux distribution just by formatting Linux off and returning to Windows.

You can run a fully functional Linux system with an ATI RadeonHD without finding binary drivers. The binary ATI driver does provide faster performance on some models, but you don’t need it just to have 3d acceleration and all the features of X.

If Nvidia tried this behavior with Windows users, it would be the longest suicide note in PC history… I’m switching over to ATI’s line of cards from now on regardless of which OS I choose.

Microsoft promotes Windows 7 with a bunch of giant Whoppers

For real!

Now some Asian dude is going to drop dead from eating enough cholesterol to kill anything that’s ever lived.

I guess the lesson is, watch what you swallow.

Full story here.

“Call ‘em out” The Indiana state website is using Microsoft crap and screwing over standards-compliant browsers

As many of you know, I begrudgingly use Windows:

That doesn’t mean that I love it, and I certainly hate Microsoft Internet Explorer. Seems that some sites still don’t get that IE is a turd and that it’s not what their visitors wish to use.

Well, I had to print out a license I hold from the Indiana State Department of Health yesterday and guess what came up?

Notice the “.aspx” extension? Means they’re using Microsoft ASS.NET, errrr….. ASP.NET. No wonder it breaks when you’re using Opera.

Not every ASS.NET page breaks in Opera, but nearly every page that does break in Opera is built with ASS.NET. (On a side note, Silverblight won’t work at all, but who cares?)

Maybe now that the FCC is making a landgrab  for the internet under the veil of “network neutrality”, they can enforce real W3C standards on the assclowns that handle Indiana state websites.

There’s nothing worse than a Republican -or- Fear and Loathing on the American No Insurance Trail

In case anyone was wondering why I disappeared last month…

No, I didn’t die, but I may well have thanks to our broken healthcare system and the Republican politicians who are more or less paid employees of the pharmaceutical and insurance cartels.

Rather than re-type the entire thing, I’ll paste the letter I sent to the editor of the local newspaper, the Huntington Herald Press.

Before I quote myself, let me say one more thing. You know what really pisses me off? That the Republicans, and the cartels who sponsor their high treason get to run libellous and patently false TV ads accusing the Democrats of trying to make a smash and grab government takeover of healthcare. They cite the pending failure of Medicare that the Republicans caused in 2006 with the pharmaceutical cartel written Medicare Part D law which forbids Medicare from negotiating for better drug prices. If the bottle of pills that costs Eli Lilly $1 to make retails for $400, Medicare must pay that even if the same bottle of pills in Canada is $80.

Their fraudulent astroturfing TV ad ends with something like “Don’t let bureaucrats stand between you and your healthcare”. Well, not having $400 a month for pills, $50,000 for major surgery, or $70 for an office visit to your doctor won’t get in the way any will it? Geez, give me a break! These idiots are just so far over the damned top, they’re in low earth orbit.

Dear Editor,

With the Republican Party continuing to be an obstruction to quality healthcare, I recently had my own ordeal.

On Sept. 27, I had two Grand Mal seizures. One was in my shower, and when I woke up, my arms were damaged and later bruised, and I had to pull myself screaming out of my shower. I called my mother at work who came to my apartment and took me to the Parkview Emergency Room, where I proceeded to have another one. The ER did the very minimal stabilizing treatment they were legally obligated to do and sent me on my way, barely able to move, since I am not rich and don’t have tons of insurance (in the same boat as 48 million other Americans). For two days I was bed ridden and could barely move, and I still have major bruising on both arms and am in considerable pain, two weeks later.

The bill for the ER arrived and is $2,851.10 after a so-called $900 “No-insurance discount” plus other expenses that haven’t arrived yet for a required EEG. (Most likely another several hundred dollars or more)

I am on Disability income and have no access to Medicare til May, many Americans don’t even have that to look forward to, and these Republicans need to stop being the “Party of No” and do something, because every minute they delay, more people die or go bankrupt due to refusal of treatment or crushing medical expenses they cannot afford.

In closing, I would like to thank the Huntington Free Clinic for helping me so much, and without their help this situation would be far worse than it is.

Sincerely,

Ryan F.

Tune in next time for “Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Bankruptcy Court”.

Maybe Florida Representative Alan Grayson says what the Republicans are up to best:

Huntington North High School gun threat keeps many kids at home.

The local high school had a gun threat etched on a bathroom wall at a Big Lots retail store:

The school responded by having extra cops there today and by trying to downplay the situation as a bunch of “rumors” in a letter addressed to parents on the school’s website.

The problem in this case is that the Republicans who hold their own single party system in local politics were/are willing to plunge Huntington County into massive debt (millions of dollars) constructing new school buildings that are of questionable need, but they also spent over $50,000 in taxpayer money  trying to defend an unconstitutional “bible trailer”. The perpetrator’s of that particular bullshit were the local churches of course, but the taxpayers get stuck paying for the mess they have made, as usual.

Not that the school or police are owning up to this, but I have it on good authority that the police found four firearms during their search of the school.

Here’ a message to the idiots running Huntington and the morons running the schools. That $50,000 could have bought metal detectors for the high school so the guns wouldn’t have even gotten into the building in the first place. Paying some cops to walk around and act important to assuage the fear of parents of children whose life has been threatened and make it look like you have the situation under control TODAY does not make my teenage brother any safer when he comes back to school on Monday, does it?

This is yet another glaring example of how the Republicans are a party of frivolous and unconstitutional taxation and spending and how the mayor of Huntington, Steve Updike, known for such gems as calling his political opponents “the Taliban” and stating that anyone who disagrees with him should leave town, along with the Republican city council, have failed the voters yet again.

I say to Steve Updike and the Republican city council that YOU are more like the Taliban of Huntington, Indiana than anyone else. The Taliban were theocratic and there was no other party opposing them, they were usurpers. Many of the Republican petty criminals and nincompoops running this town were “elected” after running unopposed like Judge Jeffrey R. Heffelfinger.

Come to think of it Mr. Updike, I hear that the Taliban are still hiring after 8 years of the half-assed Republican “war” in Afghanistan, which is more than I can say for any decent place to work in Huntington thanks to your policies and the Republican Party’s national platform, including the favoring of NAFTA. Where did Stride Rite’s warehouse go? Ohio? Where is Hayes-Lemmerz? Canada you say?  You are the tyrants, Mr. Updike. The _only_ service you Republicans offer to the American people. time after time, is lip service.

Hell, even Marion’s mayor Wayne Seybold, and I grit my teeth to mention that he’s a Republican (although his policies aren’t typical of your party), has attracted thousands of living wage jobs to Marion in spite of this recession.

Back on topic. I’d like to take this opportunity to speak to the many parents who took their kids out of school today due to the incompetent Republicans. First, you should call the Mayor’s Office at 260-356-1400 x212 and demand metal detectors that all students are to walk through upon entering the building. If he doesn’t do it, throw his worthless ass out in the next election.

While I’m at it, how much do you want to bet those incompetent pencil pushers at the Huntington police department never even catch this/these asshole(s)? If it comes to anything more complicated than a domestic disturbance or a speeding ticket, it’s my firm belief that these local cops are out of their league, and that they’ll likely spend more effort investigating the supply of doughnuts down at the Huggy Bear than on solving this case.

Steve Updike, AKA "fucking idiot", Mayor of Huntington

More Comcast kerfuffle; The return of the DNS hijacker; Random dropped connections; no HD channels

Update: Apparently one of their techs knows what he is doing and swapped out my modem for a DOCSIS 3.0 modem yesterday, which has stabilized my connection. It’s unfortunate that Comcast makes you go through so much trouble when I’d bet anything that they know the problem was their ancient modems all along. I wonder how many other people are having random signal drops and don’t know it’s because the Comcast reps on the phone either don’t know or aren’t telling. I also got one of their support reps (after about 20 minutes in the support chat) to get me a Customer Central login so I could disable the DNS hijacker

Where do I even begin?

First, let me say that I hate Comcast. Their mediocre service is expensive and bundled with other products you may not even want (should be illegal), and that’s when it does somehow manage to work.

Over the last week I’ve been experiencing dropped connections and bizarre modem resets, a LOT of them. The problem is at least 100 times worse when I’m (god forbid) actually using the bandwidth I paid for with something like Bittorrent, which makes me wonder if they aren’t foisting more Sandvine-ish crap designed to frustrate/infuriate people who want to use their expensive broadband connection to do more than they could with a dial up modem and America Online. If America Online did their own broadband networks instead of slowly dying off like the dinosaurs they are, you’d get Comcast , I’m sure of it. In fact, anyone who remembers what AOL was like in 1998 (busy signals, disconnects, apathetic support drones) would be hard pressed not to notice the similarities.

I’ve called their support line so many times over the past week or so that I’m practically on a first name basis with everyone on the other end. They’re not rude, they’re mostly just clueless. In fact, this problem has been ongoing for months now but it was maybe one reset per day, perhaps two. Now anybody that sees me just magically fall off the face of the Earth on IRC to reconnect whenever the modem decides to can attest to the fact that Comcast is dropping me sometimes 6-8 times an hour or more.

Today I had another service call scheduled, third one in a week after the other two techs came out and couldn’t find anything wrong (or at least weren’t giving me the truth if they really did know. Anyway, this guy calls me and explains that the cable line has three channels that the modem can use and that if I use all of my bandwidth, it may cause a congestion on that channel and the modem resets and finds a different channel. I suppose I can take that as “We oversold our lines and we’re screwing you over, but who are you gonna leave us for? AT&T? BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!!”.

So as this particular mess is ongoing:

I mistyped a URL today and got search hijacked by that damned DNS hijacker crap again, and landed on a nice big Comcast/Yahoo page full of advertisements. This is *AFTER* I EXPLICITLY opted out of their bullshit a few weeks ago. Apparently Comcast has cooked up a new customer torture device called “Customer Central” which is not letting me log in to turn the triple-damned thing off.

Not only have they opted everyone into their disreputable business practice(s) by default, but then they set up a fake opt out system that goes in behind your back later on and flips the ******* thing back on again.

Thanks to Comcast for pissing all over my preferences, violating my privacy, and not letting me turn off your whoring hijacking/advertising pages.

If you can’t turn it off, Adblock Plus will at least kill the advertisements.

Another thing, Where in the HELL is my HD?

To rub salt in the wound some more, it doesn’t do you any good to have an HDTV if you use Comcast and don’t live in a major city, their entire package is non-HD here and pretty much all channels are still analog too. Their entire setup in Huntington, Indiana could have been ripped right out of 1995 and I pretty much guarantee you wouldn’t notice any differences.

So what can I do?

FIOS is still not an option around here and there’s no ETA on when to expect it, the only other choice is AT&T which is as bad or worse.

I guess that thanks to the duopoly of old cable and ma bell, all I have left to do is, in the words of Jim Carey from liar liar, “Bitch and moan like an impotent jerk, then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!”

Thanks for nothing Comcast! (Bunch of shysters!)

PS: My connection just died as I was trying to submit this page, so I guess I’ll sit here with my thumb up my ass til it decides to come back up.

Another Microsoft horror story, the Huntington Indiana public library

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while but just never did until now.

If you want a prime example of how reliance on Microsoft software damages the community and betrays the public interest, look no further than the Huntington, Indiana public library.

To say nothing about the potentially tens of thousands dollars their reliance on Microsoft software has cost taxpayers in Huntington County directly, their reliance on it also conflicts with the budgeting they’re allocated to the point where they paradoxically  almost never upgrade anything because it will cost money.

Case in point: Their website. If you look at the source, you’ll see meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 4.0″.

When was Microsoft Frontpage 4.0 out?

2000. Now I’m no mathematician, but 2009 minus 2000 means that their web page generator is 9 years old and still targeting Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (which was still in wide use back then).

Why bother having real bona fide web standards if public institutions entrusted with public money squander and abuse their budget?

Now, judging from the image on the top right of the page which is a 1.3 Megabyte JPEG at a resolution of 2204 x 1364 pixels which someone tried laughably to turn into a thumbnail, when any semi-competent Windows user would know that even paint.exe can resize an image, I am kind of left to deduce that some fucking idiot without even the slightest skillset produced these pages.

With their caveman wit, they chose 10 year old standards-violating Microsoft products and couldn’t even figure out how to resize an image with some bundled freeware.

People like this are a disease.

The IT department

Moving on… Someone thought audio books in DRM’d WMA would be a good idea:

This means that if you’re not using Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can’t check out an audio book, so suddenly the library isn’t just abusing your tax money, they’re practically ripping money straight out of your wallet. I’d liken the Huntington Library using DRM’d WMA to a daylight theft by a pick pocket that the police wouldn’t do anything about.

That means that since I have Kubuntu Linux on my main system right now, that I can’t just load the audio file into my media player and hit play because it won’t work. It also won’t play for Mac users.

The library could use Speex, which is a codec in the public domain with no royalties and broad cross platform support, but the Imaginary Property pushers at the book publishing companies wouldn’t go for that. Who made the law that says that knowledge has to be bottled up to protect the profits of a few corporations, at the expense of the entire public?

Federal lawmakers who have been bought by lobbyists and other special interest groups of course. This one isn’t to be squarely blamed on the incompetence of the Huntington Public Library, but also on state and federal lawmakers betraying their duty to the American people.

And lastly, the internet computers at the Huntington Public Library all run Windows XP:

This falls back under the categories of incompetence of staff and the misappropriation of public tax money.

Not only that, but Windows is so susceptible to viruses and worms and spyware that would never affect any operating system where security was one of the design concepts from day one, that the Huntington Public Library has locked all of them down in the mistaken belief that this will protect them.

They’ve locked the systems down so tightly that you can’t even use sites that have been designed with Flash or use thumb drives you brought from home. Whoever did the locking down also missed one giant problem, they all use Internet Explorer 6. The least secure web browser ever.

What is the alternative?

The library in Marion, Indiana, just 15 miles or so south of me, uses Linux. Not only do they use Linux, they use a distribution based on the free Fedora Linux called Userful Discoverstation which uses terminal multiplexing. This allows one tower to power 10 workstations with their own monitors, keyboards, and mice. This is not only much better for the environment than having 10 boxes running their own copy of the OS, it saves on the electric bill, and they don’t have to buy licenses from Microsoft. (You could set up a free Linux distro to get the same effect, Userful just makes it easier).

Userful creates an account that is deleted when the user logs out, and times the session to last however long the library allows. So instead of the librarian having to get up and tell someone who is hogging the computer that their time was up 30 minutes ago and others are waiting, the system gives them a warning 10 minutes before they’re logged out to get their shit together and get lost. (In more diplomatic terms obviously).

The systems are secure with the normal permissions of a Linux user account plus the standard SELinux targeted policy inherited by Fedora which helps keep malicious remote attackers out. Since there are very few security concerns on Linux and because the user is literally incapable of any lasting damage to the system, you can do anything on one of these boxes that you could do as a user on your PC at home. (except for clearly Administrative tasks). Where the Huntington library Windows XP systems are useless, I was using the Linux system at the Marion library to log into Pidgin instant messenger, browse with Firefox, plug in a thumbdrive with documents saved on it from home, and EVERYONE is allowed to do this because the system is in no danger.

So I guess the thing to take from this if you’re the Huntington Library or are in a position of trust to use taxpayer money in a non-frivolous manner and to not discriminate against users with disabilities or with non-Windows systems (or browsers other than IE), is that you should never use Microsoft products in this setting.

They are wholly inappropriate with no merit whatsoever in this use case.

I emailed the Huntington library with my concerns about six months ago and they never bothered to reply.