Author Archives: mrjones

Weak Crypto in Star Trek Beyond (SPOILERS!!)

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2 minutes, 20 seconds

Star-Trek-BeyondLet’s get this out of the way upfront: the most recent installation of the Star Trek reboot, “Beyond”, was exactly what I’d hoped it would be. It was an action packed, summer fun movie. It did not exceed, but definitely met my expectations.

The end however, was totally silly. It was the peak of the action and the sound effects and music (more on this in a second) were so loud I don’t think any one could hear my wife and I laughing. Like, laughing to the point of crying because what we were watching was so funny. But, for me at least, I kept on thinking, “wait – what?” There’s no way modern crypto would allow this scene! Let alone hyper futuristic crypto of 2263! Let me explain.

spock.bonesIn the end of the move (yes, like I said, spoilers) the Enterprise crew is rocking the 99 year old USS Franklin. They are fighting the boss of the movie, Krall (not to be confused with Khan), who has control of a massive swarm of space ships based on alien technology. The swam is all perfectly in sync, just as you’d expect your alien swarm army to be. This, by definition, means that they are communicating with each other in real time to coordinate complex movements in 3d space. And how did they figure out how to beat the boss? Well, simply by “corrupting their communication with radio waves”. Radio waves like Sabotage, by the Beastie Boys. That’s right, the Beasties are literally weaponized to literally blow up the enemy hordes. Here’s the Franklin “surfing” the enemy swarm with them blowing up in their wake (click through to see the the preview where the gif came from):

beasties.loop

So, aside from the fact that radio waves travel at the speed of of light and should be radiating out in all directions, not trailing behind them, how exactly was this supposed to be working? According to wikipedia, “they [Spock and Bones] learn that VHF transmissions can disrupt Krall’s communications and destroy his fleet.” But, like I said, this is the year 2263! Surely the alien technology powering this swarm has sufficient encryption to ensure that simple VHF radio waves won’t interfere with communication, right? Beyond things like TLS Handshakes, PKI (or even hash-chains if you wanna get tricky), basic header checksums, like in IPv4 would prevent this type of interference.

MD5But, maybe not? Maybe the aliens implementing the swarm networking were just lazy? For example, the MD5 hashing algorithm was released in 1991. By the late 90’s and early 2000’s it was the de facto way to store passwords in databases. However, as early as 2005 collisions had been proven to be a reality. In 2008 at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, researchers categorically proved that no one should trust MD5. Later that same year CERT issued a CVE agreeing. Fast forward 4 years to 2012, and what do we find? 43 million hacked passwords in unsalted MD5 is what we find. Well, we found out today (Sep 1, 2016), but the coders responsible for securing tens of millions of accounts back in ’12 should have known better. So yeah, maybe the aliens were more focused on meeting deadlines than they were in defending against VHF interference?

A great, small USB-C charger for your XPS 13 (or MacBook) (Updated 4/16/17 DO NOT BUY)

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1 minute, 53 seconds

5/12/18 Update: I’ve found a new charger that’s working well (and seemingly safely) – check it out!

4/17/17 Update: These chargers have been deemed unsafe. Please do not use them. See this post for details.

While I was on vacation, I forgot my laptop charger. I found on amazon that you can get an OEM charger for the XPS 13 (9350) for about $30. This is fine, it will work the prior gen XPS 13 with out USB-C/Thunderbolt too. I got it and used it for the remainder of my trip.

Then, when I got home, I wondered if there were any good, cheap, small USB-C chargers that would work with my laptop. Lo, the RAVPower USB-C charger. Full title, on Amazon, is, “USB C Charger RAVPower 36W Dual Ports USB Wall Charger with USB-C (20V 1.5A, 15V 2A, 9V 2A, 5V 3A max) for MacBook, Dell XPS 13, Nexus 5X/ 6P and iSmart (5V 2.4A max) for iPhone and more Black”. OK, what ever RAVPower, too long on the title. But you know what is not too long? The products it works with:

  • Apple’s 2015 MacBook
  • Google’s second Chromebook Pixel
  • ASUS Transformer book T100HA
  • Dell XPS 13 & 15
  • HP Elite x2 1012 G1
  • Razer Blade Stealth, Blade (2016)
  • Nokia N1, ASUS ZenPad S8, Google’s Pixel C
  • Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P
  • Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe
  • BLU Vivo XL and BLU Vivo 5
  • HTC 10, LG G5
  • Microsoft Lumia 950, 950 XL
  • Motorola Moto Z, Moto Z Force

Totally awesome list! I got the charger today, so I don’t have any long term usage notes just yet. However, given it can both charge my phone over speedy USB-C, or dual charge my laptop AND my phone, as it has normal USB port to charge with, I’m fairly confident it’s my new fave travel charger. One caveat is that it does not come with a USB-C to USB-C cord. I got a nice looking 10′ one which I’ll put a velcro tie on when it arrives.

If you are an XPS 13 user, or thinking about becoming one, be sure to read my write up on running Ubuntu 16.04 after purchasing the windows version of the 9350.

1/4/17 Update – I’ve been using this charger for 4 months now and it’s awesome! I got solid, braided 10′ USB-C <-> USB-C cable to use with which I recommend as well. It comes in 6′ flavors as well. Cable aside, the only caveat is that the charger does get quite hot – but so far not so much that it has me concerned; I don’t see any signs of the plastic discoloring.

Laser Cut Acrylic SYN Shop Dice

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2 minutes, 19 seconds

Back in May for this past Las Vegas Science and Technology Festival, the SYN Shop hosted an open house. It was awesome!

first.draftI volunteered to show folks our Laser Cutter. This is by far one of, if not *the*, most popular tool at the SYN Shop. In preparation of showing folks how it worked, I made a bunch of cubes. Not just any cubes though! I started with a 1.6″ cube at Maker Case with finger joints. I then added our logo. I did a test run and quickly saw that the translucent side of the acrylic I was using looked much better when viewing it from through the oppisite clear side, instead of viewing it directly. close.upI reversed our logo and as well added a very small mark in the upper left. This mark would allow me to run two discrete jobs: an engrave job and then a cut job. If you do them as one the laser cutter will engrave all your cuts and then cut them – a huge waste of time. The mark in the upper left allows me to keep the registration the same as long as I don’t move the bed or the piece on the bed.

1.6.inch.box After feeling confident I had a good prototype design and size, I embellished it a bit by adding the 5 dice sides 1-5, the sixth would be our logo. I then laid it out as many up on the design as our laser cutter would handle, 4 x 3. Each sheet took over an hour to engrave the logos and dice faces and cut. I think I ended up making 48.

IMG_20160429_142319I learned after doing one sheet later on that though you get a bit less burn marks when you leave the protective sheets of paper on – it takes WAAAAAAY longer to peel when it has a logo engraving into it one side and then the cube face cutting it too. I pre-peeled both faces to save time. However, my son was totally into the production of peeling, stacking, and rubber banding the whole thing. I didn’t even need to tell him that he and his sister would get one to share after we ere done. We had fun!

IMG_20160504_231512During the event it self, I wanted to keep the laser cutter running to show how it works. As well, we quickly ran out of acrylic dice, so I needed another design to cut. I found a good, butterfly image that I traced in Ink Scape to create a nice looking SVG. From that, I made a bunch of test cuts and then just left it running during the day. As soon as the job was done I could pop open the lid and hand out hot, freshly cut butterflies.

OPEN.house.butterfly.trimAll of the SVGs in this post are free to use for what ever purpose you want. It’d be great to hear of any uses though! I actually have a huge backlog of SVGs I’ve created over the past 1+ year that I should share…

Finally, here’s a video of my kids very much enjoying two octopi 3D printed with heat sensitive filament (also free handouts that day ;)

https://vimeo.com/179411667

Blogs I Read

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1 minute, 54 seconds

After my upgrade to my new phone, I accidentally deleted the list of all my RSS feeds I follow. It took some months to remember all the different ones, but I’ve finally recreated the entire list and re-subscribed to them all. I use RSS Reader on Android with pro version (no ads, no tracking!).

After completing the great resubscribe of ’16, I decided to make a post about my list mainly so I have a backup but also so my friends who sometimes ask where I get my news can follow along if they so desire.

A list of blogs I follow, non-personal:

Blogs I follow, personal (people I know):

MapTable in WordPress

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3 minutes, 31 seconds

After my last post on MapTable, a friend of mine asked how he might include a map and table in a blog post on a WordPress Instance. In this post I’ll outline the steps to doing just that.

Overview

The steps to render a MapTable in WordPress post are:

  1. Include MapTable and related JS and CSS files
  2. Generating and posting your .csv file
  3. Author and post the actual JS for rendering the MapTable

Though this is specific to WordPress, the same logic applies to generically creating an HTML page in which you want to include a MapTable.

1: Ye Old <script> and <link> tags: MapTable, D3 and TopoJSON

Thanks to all the working examples hosted on the MapTable GitHub page, there’s no shortage of code snippets to look at on how to assemble the JavaScript and CSS to render a MapTable. I’ll be using the Example titled “Global Airport by Countries – +6000 rows, Log scale for country colors, tooltip“.

Looking at the source of that page, we see this code:

In order to render these in your blog post you need to switch to “Text” mode when editing your post (as opposed to Visual). Please note WordPress’s word of caution:

Switching between Visual and Text view can cause some of your HTML entities to be lost. This is due, in part, to the manner in which TinyMCE handles your HTML. If formatting is very important, do not switch between views. If you’re writing a lot of code, we suggest you remain in the text editor.

Following their advice, I don’t ever edit in visual mode.

So, now that you’re in text mode, go ahead an paste in the those three script and two style blocks.

2: CSV (or JSON) FTW

MapTable is very lenient on the format of the data you give it. While you do need to have at least Latitude and Longitude fields to render a map, you don’t need them if you’re just rendering a table! For our 6k aiport example, here’s what the first bit of the CSV will look like:

airport_id,name,city,country,iata_faa,latitude,longitude
1,Goroka,Goroka,Papua New Guinea,GKA,-6.081689,145.391881
2,Madang,Madang,Papua New Guinea,MAG,-5.207083,145.7887
3,Mount Hagen,Mount Hagen,Papua New Guinea,HGU,-5.826789,144.295861
4,Nadzab,Nadzab,Papua New Guinea,LAE,-6.569828,146.726242
5,Port Moresby Jacksons Intl,Port Moresby,Papua New Guinea,POM,-9.443383,147.22005
6,Wewak Intl,Wewak,Papua New Guinea,WWK,-3.583828,143.669186
7,Narsarsuaq,Narssarssuaq,Greenland,UAK,61.160517,-45.425978

Unlike the script and CSS files, this needs to originate from the same domain as your blog is hosted on. To facilitate this, you’ll need to upload the .csv file to your blog via the “Add Media” feature. If you get an error like “Sorry, this file type is not permitted for security reasons.” then you’ll need to try and allow this file to be upload. This forum post does a good job of describing how to do it – however please note: this may introduce some security risks to your site. Please make this change with caution!

In the end, despite explicitly adding “json” as a file type, I could not upload a file ending in “.json”. I had to change the name of “ne_110m_admin_0_countries.json” to “ne_110m_admin_0_countries.js”.

JavaScript

We’ll cull a bit of the javascript, but it otherwise is just about identical to the one on the MapTable demo page. As well, we prepend the JS with a bit of HTML and styles. Here is the complete code I’ll use to render my map:

MapTable now!

This is a MapTable of “Global Airport by Countries – +6000 rows, Log scale for country colors, tooltip” embedded in WordPress:

Caveats

If you use more than one MapTable on your blog, you’ll really want to move the .css and .js files to be in your template, as you’ll be including them many times, possible more than once on places like your home page. As well, if you do use more than one MapTable – you’ll only need to upload the ne_110m_admin_0_countries.json (or .js in our case ;) once and re-use the URL.

As well, I had some trouble getting the tooltip to work just as it is in the example. If I used HTML in it, the JS would break :( I suspect this has to do with the way WordPress aggressively adds line returns to HTML. This included taking a lot of line returns out above the MapTable JS and between my <script>, <link> and <style> tags.

Finally, if there is sufficient interest, I can see that a MapTable WordPress plugin would be really handy! Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll see what I can do!

Punk Rock Band Names

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1 minute, 16 seconds

For some time now, I’ve been thinking that I need to add a category to this blog that is for cataloging and giving away for use punk rock band names. I guess I should really call them just “band names”, as they’re not all categorically for punk or punk rock bands. However, for even longer, I’d say back in school when I was hanging out with Scott at the old location of the Bike Doctor, we’d say something funny and say, “man, that’d be a great punk rock band name!” So, this is the first in a series of names that I think some one should use as their, possibly punk rock, band name. Any names in this category are free to use with no reservations and what not. But maybe you’d like to give me a t-shirt of your band? A couple of tickets when you come to town?

For each post in this category I’ll give the name and any background on how I came up with it. Enjoy!

Punk Rock Band Name:Promiscuous Profusion of State

Background: I was reading up on Fathom and came across this passage (emphasis mine):

A study of existing projects like Readability and Distiller suggests that purely imperative approaches to semantic extraction get bogged down in the mechanics of DOM traversal and state accumulation, obscuring the operative parts of the extractors and making new ones long and tedious to write. They are also brittle due to the promiscuous profusion of state. Fathom is an exploration of whether we can make extractors simpler and more extensible by providing a declarative framework around these weak points. In short, Fathom handles tree-walking, execution order, and annotation bookkeeping so you don’t have to.

MapTable.js for all your table and map needs!

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2 minutes, 13 seconds

I’m proud to announce that I played a small role in releasing a great new JavaScript library called MapTable. This is an open source JavaScript library that accepts longitude and latitude data (CSV or JSON) as input, and outputs beautiful maps in native SVG with table of the data used to generate the map.  I said I played a small role in this release because Mohammed “Simo” Elalj did 99% of the coding of the library and I just swooped in for testing, PCH specific feature requests and pushing out new builds to GitHub. Version 1.0 of MapTable was technically released way back in December of 2014, but it has been greatly improved since then (again, almost entirely by Simo :).

pch.ixpdir.maptableVersion 1.1.1, the current version, was developed specifically so it could be used on PCH’s next generation Internet Exchange Point directory (IXP Dir). PCH’s IXP Dir was also the original use that MapTable was conceived for, so it has been a long journey until just now (as of Monday, July 25, 2016) that it has been pushed live!  My main role as an employee of PCH was to complete the nascent integration done a while ago and ensure that all feature requests were made on GitHub so that the improvements would be made upstream of us for all to benefit from. It was great fun to do a deep dive into a well though out and highly function JS library.

pch.homepageWhile I was in the IXP Dir, I also replaced the code on our home page which used an outdated version of MapTable. Fortunately, Simo had done PCH the huge favor of making one of the MapTable demo pages be based almost entirely on our home page. The ability to set an entirely custom color palette topped with icing on the cake of being able to specify an arbitrary SVG shape to use as markers on the map was just delightful!

While I’m wildly biased, MapTable is quite easy to use. Here’s the simplest incantation, taken directly from our docs:

Looking at the two examples I cited above, our home page and our IXP Dir, you can see that this simple snippet can be greatly extended to show either a stand alone map or an interactive, zoomable, filterable, printable, map downloadable, tooltipable and sortable map and table. The library is super awesome, and I recommend you start using it today! And yes, I just add “able” to tooltip. Try that in some other JS lib. I think not!

And, before I end this post, if you’re a JS developer and have some spare time, we’d love some help! I’m looking at you Issue #25!

Scanning multiple subnets for SSH servers that accept passwords

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1 minute, 25 seconds

At work I was tasked to see if any of our servers are running SSH which allow passwords instead of strictly only allowing SSH keys.  You can tell if they allow passwords when you get a password prompt like this:

$ ssh user@example.com 
user@example.com's password:

Of course we’ll use nmap to scan for open SSH ports. I suspect I should have have used nmap NSE to do scripting, but we’ll plod ahead with out it.  Here’s the call I used to scan each subnet for open SSH ports and append it to ‘open.raw.txt’. Run this for each of your subnets:

nmap -PN -p 22 --open -oG - 1.2.3.0/24 >> open.raw.txt

Here’s an example line from open.raw.txt:

Host: 1.2.3.1 ()	Status: Up
Host: 1.2.3.1 ()	Ports: 22/open/tcp//ssh///

To get that all formatted nice for the next phase, we’ll just cut out dupe and grab just the IPs:

grep 'Up' open.raw.txt |cut -d' ' -f2 > open.ips.txt

Finally, taking much inspiration from this script on StackOverflow, I wrote a bash script to check for servers with a password prompt on SSH called ssh.test.sh:

#!/usr/bin/expect
proc isHostAlive {host} {
set timeout 5 
spawn ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o LogLevel=QUIET -o PasswordAuthentication=yes ssh-testing@$host
expect {
    timeout {puts "Timeout happened"; return 'TIMEOUT'}
    eof {return 'NO'}
    -nocase "password:" {send "exit\r";return 'YES'  } 
}
}

# Lists to maintain the each host's information 
set serverList {1.2.3.1 1.2.3.2 1.2.3.3 1.2.3.4 1.2.3.5}

# Looping through all the servers and checking it's availability
foreach server $serverList { 
    puts "\n$server : [isHostAlive $server]\n"
}

To execute and log the results, call:

ssh.test.sh > password.accepted.raw.txt

And finally, to clean up those results into a file with “YES”, “NO” or “TIMEOUT” for each IP, just use this final grep

egrep  'YES|NO|TIMEOUT' password.accepted.raw.txt > password.accepted.txt

The final results will look like this:

1.2.3.1 : 'YES'
1.2.3.2 : 'NO'
1.2.3.3 : 'YES'
1.2.3.4 : 'YES'
1.2.3.5 : 'TIMEOUT'

Happy SSH testing!

Ubuntu 16.04 on Dell XPS 13 9350 (Updated 11/24/16)

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4 minutes, 52 seconds

Why upgrade?

dell.xps.12.deAfter watching my shopmate get one, then seeing The Wirecutter recommend it (as of May 2016) and then seeing Dell upgrade it, I was very tempted to get a Dell XPS 13 and run Linux on it.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was seeing factory refurbished ones with 16GB of RAM, 512GB of disk, an i7, a Dell 1 year warranty and that gorgeous QHD+ resolution (3200×1800) for less than $1,300 on eBay (again as of May 2016). This is is about $700 off of retail for a comparably equipped machine (or a lot more). Though this ships with Windows 10, I figured I could install Ubuntu on it.

Ubuntu 16.04 install

Xerus_White-1024x576Before pulling the trigger on eBay, I did a lot of reading on the forums about how to install over windows. Specifically, posts like this we’re key. I knew in the BIOS that I needed to turn off Secure boot and switch disk mode to AHCI. Further reading suggested that it might be a real uphill battle to get everything, hardware wise, working.

I’m happy to report that just about everything works under 16.04! I installed it after making an install image after USB boot drive from the .iso. The touch screen doesn’t work after suspend. I was hopeful that the xinput enable/disable trick might fix it, but no such luck just yet. Given that you can’t do single finger scroll and pinch to zoom when touch is working, I’m not too bummed about this.

I was very pleased to see that this cheap USB-C to DisplayPort adapter works great. Though it can’t quite do 4k (resolution shows in “Displays”, but my Dell won’t show an image), it will do all resolutions below that. It works on boot and after repeated hot swaps. The cheap USB to Ethernet adapter worked flawlessly as well, Handy times!

The other pleasant surprise was that the Broadcom WiFi/Bluetooth card also seems to just work under 16.04. Admittedly, I’ve just been using the WiFi with no problems and haven’t tested the Bluetooth.

The trackpad works as well as my MacBook Air trackpad did under 14.04. It looks like there’s some PS/2 vs Native twiddling that might improve palm detection, but I’m happy with it as is given it’s status quo for me.

Software and eBay

air.ebayThere’s a little hiccup with OwnCloud resetting after suspend or WiFi hopping, but this is nothing to do with the XPS 13, and everything to do with 16.04. As well, the version of KeepassX that ships with 16.04 no longer supports the old version 1 flavor of the password safe. It was high time I upgraded to version 2 anyway!

Finally, anyone want to buy an 11″ Air formerly running Ubuntu 14.04, but now with a clean install of El Capitan?

6/2/2016 Update

intel.cardAfter having this laptop for a bit now and having made a few tweaks, I wanted to update this post. The first, and most important, change is that I found the Broadcom chip I mentioned above did not “just work”. Though strictly anecdotal, I found that the card had intermittent high packet loss on WiFi and was actually unusable when I went to use my Bluetooth mouse for a few hours. Swapping out the card it shipped with for the Intel 7265 802.11ac one, instantly solved all these problems. The Intal card may have caused WiFi to stop working just once after a bunch of suspend and resumes, but I can’t remember so it must not be that annoying ;)

Two notes on replacing the card: The first is that while the Amazon link cited for this is certainly the right price at $20.99 (as of Jun 6 ’16), it is a bit slow in shipping. The second is that you should totally use iFixit’s XPS 13 tear down guide as a how to for opening this laptop. As well, they cite the online Dell repair manual (pdf), if you want to reference that. And, yes, when iFixit says the bottom of the laptop takes more force to open than you think it should, they’re totally correct!

The other big change is that I installed TLP in hopes of improving battery life. Using the default config out of the box seems to yield good results. However, this is just anecdotal evidence again, nothing scientific.

Otherwise, the general update is that this laptop continues to rock. I use it about 3-10 hours a week, including some intense 4 hour work sessions at the cafe. For full dev environment I run two vagrant VMs on Virtual Box along with Chromium, Firefox and PHP Storm as my IDE. I’m pretty sure I could get 6-8 hours of battery life running these apps if I was conservative with the screen brightness. Some times when I resume it, I’ll see 14 hours remaining in the battery life. It almost always drops down, but still neat to see.

It looks like you can still get this bad boy on eBay for just under $1,400!

8/13/2016 Update

I’m still totally loving this laptop! Seeing my wife get more comfy with her laptop and it’s touch screen, I wondered if I could find a fix for mine under 16.04. After some searching around a found a fix that is…so simple it’s silly. Quickly close and open the lid:

close the lid just to enter suspend state, but then reopen it quickly, so that it stays in suspend state even when the lid is open. Then press power button to wake it up. Then the touchscreen works again!
– xps9350: touchscreen stops working after sleep

After testing this over the last 4 days, I can confirm it works. Coupled with the fact that the OS and Chrome/Chromium handle single finger scroll and pinch to zoom, I’m a happy camper! The icing the cake was finding the Grab and Drag plugin for FireFox. Though pinch to zoom doesn’t work, single finger scroll does. Handy times!

11/24/2016 Update

One my fine readers pointed out that the touch screen under 16.04 has been more properly fixed. This is awesome! This gist on github has all the info you need. Be sure you read the part about using uname -r to get your kernel and make sure it matches on the line that the script is hard coded against. For it it was 4.4.0-45, but for the original author it was 4.4.0-47. As well, it didn’t fully start working for me until a restart.

5/17/2018 Update

Almost exactly two years in and this laptop is still my daily driver! It’s been *super* stable and I’ve had no problems with it. I’m still on 16.04, despite 18.04 having just been released. Also, check out my latest post about USB-C accessories I’m using!