Olympics. Beijing. Big News.
Sometimes people miss things. More than a decade ago, on a Sunday night, I was in in New York City, wandering around Midtown Manhattan and there was a distinct odor of burning wood. No sign of a fire. Just the smell. "What's burning?" I asked a cop. He told me that the problem was a fire in a switching station at 125th Street. That's the station in Harlem where Metro North trains make the first of two stops in Manhattan. The second stop is at Grand Central Terminal. A lot of people get off the Metro North trains at the 125th Street station and transfer to the subways. I expected a gigantic mess on Monday morning. Instead, I found a perceived mess. The news segments on WCBS and WINS suggested transit gridlock on the subways and trains, but when it was time for the traffic reports, the news was maximum 15-minute delays at 125th. The news and traffic people apparently didn't talk to each other because the reports continued like that all morning. The same kind of event happened at the Beijing Olympics.
Incidentally, my lead comments – the ones about the New York City subway fire – resulted in my doing a little extra research. When I tried to find the account in the archives of the New York Times, I couldn’t. I found several stories about fires in and around Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, as well as a lot of stories about track fires, so subway fires are more common than I thought. But I couldn’t find an account of the one WINS and WCBS made sound like such a big deal. All I remember is that I got into town on a Saturday or Sunday, that the weather was warm, and that it was between about 1985 and 1998. I traveled to New York City fairly often in those days. Many of the accounts I found were in the right period, but they occurred on Wednesdays or in February.
The big news wasn’t that Mark Phelps won 8 gold medals or that the US maybe edged out China on the total number of medals or even the hundreds of personal tragedies and triumphs. The big news was that nothing happened.
The Chinese government and China’s CCTV folks were afraid. NBC was afraid that global interest in the Beijing event would overwhelm their video servers. More than 100 million people around the globe accessed various online sites during the Olympics, even though there was a lot of complaining in the US that foreign sources were often blocked in the US. But overall everything worked as intended.
The estimated 1.3 billion worldwide Internet users were more than four times the number of potential users that tried to access Mark Cuban’s broadcast.com “airing” of Victoria’s Secret show a decade ago.
The media streamed more than 2200 hours of live competition in 25 sports and more than 112 video streams were often available at one time. All told 336 streams could have been sent out simultaneously. The content was available to 77 countries, of which the United States was not one. Elsewhere on the planet, viewers didn't have to settle for NBC’s version of the Olympics.
Actually, the Olympics gave the Communications Workers of America a great platform to promote the fact that when it comes to real-time download capacity to the home (the last mile), the US sucks. We are 15th in terms of broadband to the home. Nations that allow the government to govern are far ahead of the United States where we like to demonize government agencies. Most of the industrialized nations have sprinted past the US to deliver high speed, low cost service to the home.
Example: South Korea has been the gold standard for service for years. Four European Union (EU) countries have been deploying fiber faster than the US. Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands added more than 30 percent last year. Corporate media fears this change because Koreans increasingly are watching TV shows and other entertainment online rather than tuning in to their traditional media sources.
In Western Europe and the Pacific Basin, people are more inclined to watch their television and other entertainment over the Internet. Around 50 percent of the broadband users prefer the online convenience and experience. Users in the US are slowly finding that having choices in time and content is satisfying, but we're far behind the rest of the civilized world.
But as bad as the US Internet infrastructure is, it hasn’t stopped folks from going online and watching video. Did you know that 8 hours worth of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute? Wow! But watch out for HD. TV shows around the globe are going to HighDef and HD uses at least 7x more bandwidth than SD.
Expectations Grow. Once people discover they can enjoy their content when they want and where they want, the demand for entertainment options and quality steadily increase. Today online users expect to watch high definition videos and entertainment which only increases the Internet bandwidth load.
So if you have a fast dial-up connection (28.8 Kbps) and you're the only one on the Web server, the download would be fast. Well, sort of. But if you're one of 1000 or 1,000,000 people on the Web server, speed can be a problem.
China’s government dropped a bunch Yuan on the Olympics and they (and some other countries) strung more high-speed fiber optic cable under the Pacific between Asia and North America. Most of those were laid around 2001 when everyone was starting a new company to take advantage of the overwhelming demand for Internet traffic and every venture capitalist was throwing money at the new ventures.
But the Internet infrastructure isn’t free. Maybe it's time for government to do what it's supposed to do: Regulate. The Internet gives firms the most direct, most personalized, most individualized means of talking directly to you about their products, services. They should pay for the privilege of trying to grab your attention, interest, and checkbook. But the way things are headed, it's us who will pay for businesses to spam us.
Why Do Movies Always Get Technology Wrong?
I know that you have to advance the plot and that sometimes the only way out is a deus ex machina, but it really shouldn't be that hard for movie makers to get at least the basic technology right. Getting it wrong breaks the suspension of disbelief that is essential for enjoyment of a movie. Take Die Hard 4 for example. It's an air-head plot with the typical blow-em-up scenes typical to the property. Overall, it was a fun movie because of the heroic Bruce Willis (John McClane), the evil Timothy Olyphant (Thomas Gabriel), and the constantly amazed Justin Long (Matt Farrell). (I wonder if anyone will complain about my wandering into movie critic territory here.) Let's take a look at some things the movie got wrong and how they might have gotten them right. I'll even try to do it without giving away the plot, such as it exists.
Does this look like a federal office to you? Me, neither.
Click any of the smaller images for a larger view.
The movie starts with McClane rescuing his daughter (who doesn't want to be rescued) from her boyfriend (who isn't her boyfriend). Are you following the plot so far? After she stomps off to her dorm room and the not-a-boyfriend drives away, McClane's car radio summons him. He's a NYC detective and they need him to pick up Farrell and take him to Homeland Security. The only problem is that the radio isn't a police radio; it's a 2-meter amateur rig made by ADI. Would it really have been that hard for the film company to procure a real police radio? The frequency shown is 143.30 MHz, which isn't licensed for police use. Virtually all police radios today operate in the 800 MHz range and don't display a frequency.
When McClane and Farrell get to Washington, the bad guys spot him using the device at the left. Now this might be showing what's happening on the various talk groups of a real 800 MHz system. Or it might just be a spectrum analyzer that's displaying the audio from a variety of frequencies. Whatever it is, this isn't a device that would make it possible for the bad guys to locate our heroes.
The bad guys, of course, get the upper hand and are able to shut down all of Washington by jamming the traffic signals and turning off all the cell phones. Hacker Farrell pulls out his little Nokia cell phone and reprograms in in less than 6 seconds to communicate via satellite. Have you ever seen a sat phone? They're just slightly more complicated than this to set up.
When they needed to get to West Virginia, they were able to hijack a car by using the on-board monitoring to sweet-talk the command center into starting the car. The drive from Washington (remember, all the traffic signals are out) to West Virginia took about half an hour.
The bad guys were planning to shut off all the electricity to the eastern United States and, to do that, they needed to visit the control center (such as the one AEP operates here in Columbus). The command center looked more like what you might find in a standard power plant and, from the looks of the image at the right, shutting down the entire power grid would be accomplished by clicking Yes on a Windows-based application.
While on their way, they had to stop in Baltimore to see The Warlock, who appears to live in a basement with extremely high ceilings (left). The Warlock is one of Farrell's hacker friends. Despite all of his hacker gear, he keeps a "CB radio" nearby just in case (right).
You know we're going to see this "CB radio" later, except that it's no CB radio. More accurately, it may be a CB radio (it's hard to tell with the paper label stuck on the front) but 66.6 MHz is no CB frequency. CB radios operate in the 11 meter band on frequencies in the 27 MHz range. (Yes, 66.6; I see the significance. Impressed? No.)
Meanwhile, back at the power plant, the bad guys are bringing their most sophisticated gear into play: A Palm Pilot sitting on a keyboard that's apparently not plugged in to anything.
Later, McClane needs to reach out to The Warlock. Conveniently, the vehicle he's in at the time happens to have a radio that transmits on 66.6 MHz (left). It's apparently another piece of amateur gear, this time from Icom (right). That frequency, by the way, is right in the middle of the low part of the VHF television band. I believe it would be in use by TV channel 4, so it's pretty unlikely that McClane would be able to reach The Warlock this way. He does, of course, and The Warlock is able to patch him through to Homeland Security instantly, even though he didn't know the phone number and even though the telephone system isn't currently functioning.
How They Might Have Gotten it Right
- Amateur radio in place of police radio: Borrow a police radio. The LAPD would probably have cooperated.
- Standard cell phone turns into a sat phone: Make up something more believable. The cell phone companies keep certain frequencies available at all times for government emergencies and Farrell could know the code. Whether this is true or not, it's a lot more believable than turning a cell phone into a sat phone.
- Windows-based application runs the entire eastern power grid: Find someone with a computer that actually controls something large and complex (the power companies probably wouldn't agree to showing you their gear, but you can find a control room for a factory). Examine the setup. Add a little realism.
- CB on 66.6 MHz: Forego the "666" reference and use a real CB radio and a real channel.
- Palm devices as controllers: Make it a super-small notebook computer. These exist and might have enough power to accomplish your task.
Even with all the distractions, it was an amusing movie. And that's the end of my excursion into the land of film critics.
Nerdly News
Clickjacking: How Big a Threat?
In the current issue of the Windows Secrets newsletter, Stuart Johnston writes about the relatively new threat of "clickjacking" and says that all browsers are vulnerable to this threat. A simple click can result in your computer being infected with all sorts of nasties. Johnson suggests some things you can do to make your browser safer.
The problems are hidden deep inside browsers and within technologies that are used to provide a richer browsing experience (Javascript, the Flash player, Silverlight, and such). At its most basic, the threat involves placing a button behind a button on a website. Clicking the safe button (a link to a new page, to send a form, or to display a video, for example) you also unknowing click the hidden button.
An Overblown Threat?
So far, there have been only "proof of concept" activities. That is, nothing has been found "in the wild". While that is somewhat reassuring, the threat exists and all threats will be exploited sooner or later. In most cases, sooner rather than later.
And here's an interesting thought: "[A] hacker can use the Flash player to take over a PC's webcam and microphone. Imagine the implications of stalkers eavesdropping on your laptop's built-in camera and mic."
If you disable all plug-ins and turn off scripting, you'll be safer (but not entirely safe) and many websites won't work at all. Javascript is commonly used on websites (including this one) to provide navigation, forms validation, animation, and the like.
Adobe has a patch that reduces threats posed by Flash and, if you use Firefox (as I do) install the NoScript plug-in. This plug-in blocks scripting except for sites you approve; if you arrive at a page that requires flash, you will need to tell NoScript to allow scripting, but that small inconvenience is far less than the inconvenience of ridding your machine of malware.
A good source of information about how to protect your computer is the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT - part of Homeland Security). Read their page on how to protect your browser.
For Johnson's full article, see the Windows Secrets website.
Mac Notebooks for $999
OK, so that's really $1000. I wish marketers would simply tell the truth. Instead of shaving $1 off the price, so it can be a 3-digit number, just leave the nice round $1000 out there. Are 9's really all that more attractive than 0's? The good news is that Apple will sell you a notebook computer for $1000. The bad news is that you won't like it unless you spend more money.
For $1000, you get a notebook computer with an 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB DDR2 Memory, a 120GB hard drive, and Intel GMA X3100 graphics. So what's wrong with that, you might wonder. The CPU is slow by today's standards. You need at least 2GB of RAM, the disk is OK (but you'll want more), and Intel's GMA X3100 graphics subsystem will frustrate you with its speed. Or maybe I should say "with its slowness". The first thing you'll want to do is add at least another 1GB of RAM ($75, but I'd recommend 4GB for an extra $225) and you'll want a larger hard drive ($50 to $150).
At this point, you might as well opt for the 2.0GHz system (Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB DDR3 Memory, a 160GB hard drive, and much better NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics.) Now you're at $1300 (or AppleSpeak "$1299"). You could easily spend another $400 on more memory and a larger hard drive. And, in any case, you'll want to drop $250 on the Apple Care protection plan. Notebook computers are one of the few devices for which a service contract makes sense.
Apple's notebook computers still come with a significant price disadvantage when compared to standard (Windows only) notebooks. Or do they? Because Apple's notebooks now run on Intel processors, you could easily install both OS X and Windows on the same machine. Instead of buying 2 computers, you'd need only 1. And if you want to add Linux to the machine, you can do that, too.
If you really want to dream, how about a MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, a 17-inch widescreen monitor, 4GB Memory, a 320GB hard drive, and NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB of RAM for $2800. You might want to (although I wouldn't) spend $250 to kick the CPU up to 2.6GHz. I would swap the hard drive for a faster model ($50) and add the $350 service contract, but that's all there is to add, except for software. The total price for the machine I would love is just $3198 (or $3200 if you like zeros).
When you buy it, make sure you get my shipping address right.
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