Category Archives: geek

Google, China and Anti-Features

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

On the 12th of January, David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, made a startling announcement: Google – and dozens of other companies operating in China – had been the target of concerted online attacks originating from China. Google also claimed that the attackers, targeting human rights activists inside China and around the world, used the activists’ own PCs to take over numerous GMail accounts.

These attacks used ‘0-day’ exploits, hitherto-unknown vulnerabilities in common software applications. In a Wired Magazine interview, security analyst Ryan Olson stated that the code itself was unremarkable, but that ‘the sophistication here is all about the fact they were able to target the right people using a previously unknown vulnerability.’

Businesses and governments face online acts of vandalism and attempts at corporate espionage all the time. Even this attack, which exploited flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Adobe’s Acrobat reader software, was ‘not ground-breaking’, according to security expert Mikko Hypponen.

‘We see this fairly regularly,’ he told the BBC, but ‘most companies just never go public.’

Running against tide of companies flooding into China, Google has retaliated against these intrusions by stating that they will no longer censor google.cn, their Chinese search site. If that can’t be done within Chinese law, wrote Drummond, it ‘may well mean having to shut down google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.’

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Rights and Wrongs

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

Following a recent workshop on copyright, the plight of the local reggae group Naio was used to demonstrate how copyright legislation could improve the lot of struggling Vanuatu artists.

Unauthorised copying, they claimed, had so reduced income from CD sales that the band simply couldn’t make a living on recording alone.

While the principle of respecting creative works is one I support wholeheartedly, I need to make this clear: Recent copyright reform has done little to change the plight of performers elsewhere in the world.

There are numerous interwoven ideas wrapped up inside what people call ‘Intellectual Property’. The World Intellectual Property Organization, a UN body, clumps many of them them together under the term Copyright. In essence, it says that Copyright – the right to exercise control over one’s creation – can be exerted over any creative work, its production or its broadcast.

The idea here is quite simple: Artists deserve to be rewarded for their work. Because they share their work with the world, and because we all benefit when they do so, they should be allowed a limited monopoly on the right to reproduce the work in question.

Well, that seems perfectly reasonable.

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Geek Heaven

Okay, so I’m leaving in a little over a week for South Africa. I’m the only sysadmin at the Institute where I work – more to the point, I’m the only technical person on the entire campus with the chops to oversee their servers. (That’s a comment about the Vanuatu environment and absolutely not myself or any other IT professional. There are some very talented people there who simply lack exposure to some kinds of technology.)

The challenge: How to make sure that everything’s ticking along more or less as it should when I’m a continent away, in a locale whose Internet decrepitude is surpassed only by the locale I need to monitor? If I wait until something’s gone so wrong that someone has to contact me, I’ve lost the game already.

The solution: I’ve just hacked up a little OSD display in perl that uses SSH::RPC to poll server stats on all my production machines. It sits in the bottom left corner of my screen. As long as everything stays mostly green, I’m okay.

Total bandwidth usage is about 2 Kbps. Given that this is manageable from my pathetically poorly conditioned 128K DSL line from home, I have every reason to believe that it will be viable in SA as well.

For bonus points, I’m going to configure it so that it just pops up for a minute or so every $INTERVAL (which will likely be 15-30 minutes).

For yucks, if load average gets completely out of hand, it starts shouting that my computer is on fire. (Blame Nik for this one.)

I am one very contented geek.

Good Neighbours

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

As Internet services become more common in Vanuatu, local businesses have been using it to supplement their normal advertising and communications channels. In their enthusiasm – and, it must be said, naivete – they’ve overlooked a few fundamental rules of good online behaviour.

Businesses and individuals (there’s no need to name and shame; they know who they are and, if you have an email account, so do you) have more and more often taken to sending unsolicited promotional and editorial emails to hundreds of Vanuatu addresses.

Regardless of their good intentions, these companies and individuals are spamming. In other countries, it would be illegal. Here, it’s a nuisance for virtually all involved.

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ACTA Without an Audience

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

News has leaked out in dribs and drabs over the last several months about a US-led drive to negotiate an international treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. Conducted under a veil of secrecy, these negotiations have been the source of considerable speculation and not a little alarm among advocates of online freedom.

Part of the reason for the alarm is the utter lack of publicly verifiable information concerning the content of the treaty. When US organisations attempted to gain access to a copy of the draft, their government withheld them, citing national security, of all things.

Intellectual Property expert professor Michael Geist writes, “The United States has drafted the chapter under enormous secrecy, with selected groups granted access under strict non-disclosure agreements and other countries (including Canada) given physical, watermarked copies designed to guard against leaks.”

In spite of their best efforts, however, details of the online enforcement aspects of the treaty leaked out last week, following a negotiating round in Seoul, South Korea.

The details don’t look good.

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Time for a Change

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

I don’t usually like to advocate for particular products or technologies. There’s no shame whatsoever in having an opinion and – in this space – it’s my job. But there’s a difference between arguing for a particular approach to something and arguing for a particular thing.

It’s time to make an exception.

The Linux operating system has a well-earned reputation as the software of choice for uber-hackers and propellor-heads the world over. That’s because it is. It runs the majority of the world’s servers right now, from giant supercomputing clusters to Google to the Dow Jones stock exchange.

So what, exactly, is this Linux thing? At its core, it’s a suite of very basic utilities that allow a computer to run. Because it’s so easy to configure and customise, it runs on everything from supercomputers to your wireless router. Google’s new Android mobile phones are built on it, as are many of Nokia’s.

Nearly two decades after it took its first faltering steps, I can say with some assurance that Linux is good enough, easy enough and – this is important – safe enough for you to pick it up and use it without really breaking a sweat.

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From Small Things…

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

A number of Port Vila schools have recently begun to take the Internet seriously. Assisted by veteran and novice IT volunteers, they’ve invested their meagre computing resources in an undertaking designed to help teachers create a richer and more open learning environment.

As with all things, it started small. Circumstance threw a few IT professionals together and led them to collaborate to improve their own children’s education. One thing led to another, and now we’re beginning to see the first fruits of integration of technology with teaching in Vanuatu.

The story begins five months ago when four parents, all of them seasoned IT professionals, began to chat about how to improve conditions at Central School, where their children were enrolled. Before very long they were at the core of a group of over 30 parents and teachers, all devoted to taking advantage of computers and the Internet in order to improve the quality of education.

This may sound familiar. It’s not the first time in Vanuatu that parents have moved mountains one pebble at a time to supplement their school’s limited resources. Nor is it the first time that teachers have been able to indulge their personal and professional enthusiasm for their vocation by working with the community at large.

But there are a few unique aspects to this story.

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Communications as Survival

‘Storian hemi laef blong yumi’ – Telecom Vanuatu’s new slogan could not be more true.

In times of crisis, communication and coordination enable us to survive and to recover quickly.

When an earthquake occured between Samoa and Tonga early in the morning of September 29th, it created a tsunami that struck the inhabitants on the eastern and southeastern parts of the island within minutes. Sirens sounded and church bells rang all over side of the island, sending people fleeing to higher ground.

The latest reports from Samoa indicate that in addition to at least 149 dead, 640 families comprising roughly 3200 people have lost their homes and possessions. Most have yet to to return to their villages, and are without proper access to power, water and other basic amenities.

Food, water, clothing and shelter are all critical elements of the relief effort.

Equally important is the ability to communicate.

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The Coming Change

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy

On Wednesday this week at a quiet ceremony in Chantilly’s Resort, Minister Rialuth Serge Vohor presented six organisations with telecommunications operator licenses. His action marked the beginning of a new chapter in Vanuatu’s integration into the wider technological world.

The Minister’s speech touched on many aspects of the technical and social challenge ahead of us, but its illuminating principle was his lifelong conviction that Vanuatu should control its own destiny. Acknowledging and applauding the invaluable assistance provided by numerous donor and commercial partners from overseas, he nonetheless displayed great satisfaction at seeing local operations moving into the spotlight.

There was an air of quiet excitement in the room as, after patient months of waiting, representatives from the six groups, along with Digicel Vanuatu CEO Tanya Menzies, strode to the front of the room to accept the newly signed documents.

At the risk of sounding like a giddy shoolchild, I wonder if everyone realises just how fundamentally this moment is going to affect our generation and the next.

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Open Season

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

With the recent passage of a new telecommunications Act (awkwardly titled the TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND RADIOCOMMUNICATION REGULATION ACT), Vanuatu has taken another important step in ensuring continued success in building openness and fairness into the business of communications.

Parts of the Act, currently awaiting the President’s signature, validate and give force of law to terms and conditions already included in the licenses issued to our two incumbent telcos. It also provides an overall framework for continued growth, expansion and innovation. Most importantly, it makes permanent the office of the Telecommunications Regulator.

(Before I go on, I should make it clear that the text of the Bill was under discussion until shortly before it was voted on. The version I was able to view was not the official text. That will only become available once the Clerk of Parliament receives the signed Act from the President. That said, I’m pretty confident that those parts of the Act discussed here are unchanged.)

Perhaps the most notable aspect of this new legislation is the delegation of the right to issue telecoms licenses to the Regulator. Until the Act takes effect, this power is retained by the Minister.

John Crook, the Interim Telecommunications Regulator, has made it clear that he wants to see the process of obtaining what’s termed a Telecommunications Operator License to be as simple and direct as possible. All that should be required to start a new Internet Service Provider is to demonstrate that you have the right to operate such a business in Vanuatu, that you have the means to do so and that you’re willing to play by the rules.

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