I just wasted an entire day trying to inform Comcast about a problem with their network. This problem caused a service outage for me, and I'm sure that it has effected hundreds of other customers. Unfortunately, it will never be fixed.

Senior engineers at Comcast are not aware of the problem, and they will never be aware, because it is impossible to inform them. Comcast's first and second level support staff don't understand the problem and have been trained to aggressively blow off anyone who attempts to report it to them. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no way to get through the first and second level support barrier to someone who actually understands DHCP. Comcast's support staff does not know when to escalate something that they do not understand.

I am posting this mostly as a personal catharsis having spent an entire day being told that I don't know what I'm talking about by people who barely know the first thing about how the Internet works. Pushing this further is not worth the frustration. Perhaps someone else who is experiencing the same problem will come upon this blog post in a Google search and will be saved the same frustration. That is the only thing that I can do at this point.

The problem manifests as follows: Some devices are intermittently unable to obtain a DHCP lease. What makes this complicated is that other devices ARE still able to obtain a lease. In my case my router stopped getting IPs from Comcast, but I could get an IP with my laptop. The router had been working fine as my gateway for months and had no problems getting IPs and then one day I woke up and it wasn't working anymore. My router could not get a lease, but my laptop could get a lease if I plugged it into my cable modem directly.

The naive assumption when confronted with this set of circumstances is that the problem is with the router. The network is obviously able to hand a lease out. The router must just not be asking for one properly or accepting one as it should. The first time I encountered this behavior on Comcast's network, I bought into this assumption and went out and purchased a new router. Then, a few months later, it happened to my new router as well.

In this case, the naive assumption is wrong; both routers are working properly. Internet protocols are complicated and sometimes they fail in subtle ways that defy naive assumptions. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get Comcast to look at this problem more carefully, because their low level technical support staff don't understand how to look at it more carefully, and believe that the naive assumption is the only possible explanation.

Because Comcast's network has this problem, people likely call up technical support on a regular basis complaining about it, and they are told that their routers must be broken. Comcast's technical support staff has gotten good at arguing people down about their "broken routers" because they see it all time. Of co... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

A 56-year-old former prosecutor in the Justice Department named Thomas Tamm, whose "passion for justice" led him to make a fateful call to the Times one day in 2004 from a phone booth in a Washington, D.C., subway station.

New York Times' NSA Whistleblower Reveals Himself | Threat Level from Wired.com

When pasting text default to plain text.

When I am pasting text from one window into another window, I almost never want to preserve the font and formatting from the previous window. I'm moving information into a different context. The first context has a particular look and feel. The new context invariably has a different look and feel. I want the information that I'm adding into the new context to fit the overall look and feel for the new context, not the old one. Therefore, text should default to pasting as plain text (or "paste and match style" as Apple calls it). I should not have to click on "Paste Special..." and then choose "unformatted text" from a menu and then click OK, every time I want to paste something. That's too much clicking. The extra clicking should be preserved for the rare case where I do want the formatting preserved. If most users feel differently about this, at least make the default behavior configurable!

For some reason, the government did not appear to make the argument invited by the Supreme Court by its rulings in the FedEx and dog-sniff cases. The government could have argued that -- if the EnCase scan for a particular MD5 hash matches -- that the search is constitutionally permissible without a warrant because it revealed nothing except the existence of contraband. And, because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in contraband, the government might argue, a search which only reveals the existence of contraband invades no legitimate privacy right.

In the Crist case, however, the court never addressed that critical issue, because it never had to. The government merely argued that an automated search was no search at all.

This unanswered question -- whether a scan of hash values looking for contraband is a permissible search -- is really the rub.

If the government may conduct warrantless searches as long as they only reveal the presence of contraband, then they could lawfully put automated sniffers on any computer, searching for the presence of files for which the MD5 hash matched that of contraband. While the software categorizing the files might be considered to be conducting a search -- and I think it is -- the contents of this search are not revealed unless the program believes it is contraband.

Acidus:

... ... How did I not see this earlier? Pretty sure this is the same guy writing about how data stored "in the cloud" can be legally searched without a warrant because you have involved a 3rd party who can consent to the search.

And don't think about kiddie porn. Think about the MPAA.

This is a HUGE question that will be one of the defining civil liberties battles of the next decade. I wrote about this case here.

The bottom line becomes, any technology that we can develop to collect information about crimes is A-OK so long as it never provides any information to a human being unless an actual crime has been committed...

Eventually in the distant future, you reach a point... where you've replaced your human police officers with robots... These robots are artificially intelligent and never report the results of their investigations to humans unless a crime has been committed.

Under this analysis I cannot see how the Constitution would prohibit these robots from doing all of the tyrannical things that the 4th amendment was intended to prevent the police from doing, and I don't see how this state of affairs would be materially different from not having any 4th amendment at all.

Therefore, if the 4th amendment is to have any meaning at all, there must be some reason that this kind of automated search is not reasonable.

Scalia offered the following in reference to Caballes: "This is not a new technology. This is a dog." I find that explanation extremely unsatisfying.

Its not a 'Search.' Its just a search.

Not only a network that lets you browse the Internet anonymously, Tor contains anonymously published webpages identified by a '.onion' URL. Tor2web enables regular Internet users to access pages anonymously published within Tor.

What tor2web does for you

1. Tells the world that you can put all of your unruly, spicy content online with impunity by hosting on a Tor hidden service. It's free too!
2. Allows the world to read and spread your disruptive content as easily as browsing the web. No installation required.

(It also lets you surf-around for interesting stuff in .onion)

WARNING: tor2web does NOT protect readers, only publishers. Readers using tor2web do not have the level of anonymity, confidentiality, and authentication that they have when using a Tor client. Tor2web trades security for convenience. If you're a reader and want the extra security, install Tor.

Thanks Virgil!

I've always wanted to check out what was hosted behind Tor but I never cared enough to bother setting it up. The Toogle keyword list gives you an overview. Most of it is probably junk but there might be some gems...

U:Yeesh... Looks like 4chan crossed with indymedia. Its not very interesting. Tor2web might make it interesting, in some respects, as it can now host information that is accessible to a wider audience. There are few things that are both interesting and impossible to host openly. I imagine that there will arise a corner case involving the intersection between intellectual property laws and the first amendment where this service will be useful. It awaits that moment.

tor2web.com - Making the Internet a more interesting place since 2008

What's going to happen in the next five years or so that will catch most of the rest of us by surprise, but not you?

I think this is an interesting question although the answers in the thread aren't fantastic.

I predict that a smartphone worm will temporarily disable wireless voice services.

I also predict that your account on some social networking sites will be verified against a government database, most likely the DMV. This practice might be tried in another country before it happens here. Most likely the UK.

The next 5 years...

President Bush at Summercon

Dow 4,000. Food shortages. A bubble in Treasury notes. Fortune spoke to eight of the market's sharpest thinkers and what they had to say about the future is frightening.

Nouriel Roubini, Bill Gross, Robert Schiller, Sheila Bair, Jim Rogers, John Train, Meredith Whitney, Wilbur Ross

8 really, really scary predictions - FORTUNE

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important! Or that they’re already doing it. It’s kind of like breathing—we’re not usually that aware of it. It’s much easier to recognize more “outbound” activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important—it’s really where everything begins. There’s a funny Zen saying about that: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.

Noticing is easier in a foreign place because mundane things are unusual. Its the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

Ever Notice?

Corey Menscher, an ITP student, has designed a kick sensor which monitors his pregnant wife's belly, and generates a fetal tweet whenever the baby kicks.

The thing seems to have a bug:

Wow I'm being very active! I kicked Mommy 1766 times at 11:59AM on Thu, Dec 11!

Regardless its another interesting use of twitter. Implementation details here:

The Kickbee is a wearable device made of a stretchable band and embedded electronics and sensors. Piezo sensors are attached directly to the band, and transmit voltages when movement underneath is detected. An Arduino Mini transmits the signals to an accompanying Java application wirelessly via Bluetooth.

The Java application receives the sensor values and analyzes them. When a kick event is detected, a Twitter message is posted via the Twitter API.

Youngest Twitterer EVAR? - Boing Boing