Gobuntu

The geeks have been writing about Gobuntu recently, an Ubuntu variation which only installs free software.  On the face of it, that’s an awesome prospect – an Ubuntu which by default has nothing installed which is nonfree.  However, it’s far from perfect.

The installer is text-only, which is enough to scare new users away.  Forget the fact the XP installer is text-only to begin with and is thus just as scary, or the fact that a text-based installer will run much faster, gui installers keep people happy.

Once Gobuntu is installed, there is nothing to stop proprietary software from being installed.  The sources.list which Ubuntu computers use to get their software lists from includes multiverse and universe, and there’s nothing to alert you before installing any of this non-free software – something based upon apt-listbugs would be a wonderful addition.

Gobuntu-desktop is simply an Ubuntu package, and so doesn’t have the free software that we need to replace the commercial software included within Ubuntu.  We really need to see IceCat/IceWeasel 3.0 and Icedove appear in the Ubuntu repositories, and it really shouldn’t be hard to pull in the Debian version of IceWeasel or the Gnu version of IceCat.  I’m currently having to run IceCat from a downloaded .deb file from Gnu and Claws Mail until Ubuntu can solve this.

So in reality, it makes sense for most users to stick to their favourite Ubuntu variation and then use the vrms package to search for non-free software installed on their machines.  Whilst vrms fails to find some non-free packages, and knows nothing about software not installed through package management, it’s stable and easy to use.

kaerast@bennet:~$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on bennet!  rms would be proud.
kaerast@bennet:~$

Of course it’s also up to the individual user where to draw the line between free and non-free and by how much it’s ok to sell out when something free can’t do the job (I’m very much missing the ability to play flash videos at the moment.)  Are patents with source code more or less evil than commercial binary-only software?  Do you take issue with the non-commercial or share-alike aspects of Creative Commons?  Is privacy and security your main concern, or is freedom to tinker?  These questions perhaps belong in a separate post, but are important for anybody considering how free they want their computer to be and are something we’ll all disagree on.  And if we all disagree on how free a computer system needs to be, any attempt at a free Linux distro is going to be a kludge of mismatched ideals.

Browser Address Bar

How do you copy and paste some text?  Edit->Copy?  Right-click?  Ctrl-C?  Just select it?  In Linux, all of these are valid choices and how you copy and paste text may say something about you understand software interfaces.  Are the people who haven’t learnt quicker methods than edit->copy the ones that are typing urls into search bars?

Last week, data was released about search market share for dating websites in June.  The results are unsurprising, more than 10% of the search terms were for URLs and almost all of the queries were something that adding .com to would have worked.  So what’s going on?  Are people not smart enough, or not interested in, remembering domain names?  Do people still not understand what a URL is?  Do people get confused between the url bar and the search bar?

In Japan, whether it’s because of this or because of limited availability of domain names, offline advertising for websites has moved away from mentioning domain names and has started telling people to search Google for the brand name.  I’m undecided as to whether that is unbelievably smart or unbelievably dumb; when the company’s website remains at number one search position then it works, as soon as somebody else manages to get number one spot it’s an epic fail.

Search Google for the domain name of a company and something interesting happens in the results.  If the company is big, then they will likely have bought top spot to ensure that people reach their site.  If they’re smaller or are actively fighting brand name infringement then paid results will be more limited.  The sort of people who will enter a url into a google search instead of the address bar are also more likely to click on the paid search positions, and so there’s clearly a large market built out of stupidity.

That’s not to say all search queries for domain names are made out of stupidity though.  Sometimes it’s interesting to see what competitors have paid listings, sometimes it’s interesting to see what appears on a website that you aren’t finding (by searching site:example.com), and sometimes you want to search your own domain to see what your stupid users are seeing.

If we tought people to use the internet correctly, to remember urls and enter them in the correct box, to know the difference between paid and organic search results, to tune out (or block) the advertising, to boycott ISPs who add advertising to user’s browsing, what difference would it make to the economy of the internet?  Do we rely on these stupid users to pay our way, or would the internet become so much nicer if the advertising, spam and scams that were targetting them disappeared completely?

Interference

My current QTH is plagued by radio interference.  It’s not something I have any experience in, my last QTH had some interference, the QTH before had almost none, back in the countryside there was practically zero interference.

I’m due to get a new frequency counter in the next few days which I’m hoping will help me track down the sources, but I’m a complete amateur when it comes to hunting interference.  I already know my monitor is causing a small amount of the interference, but I don’t know if that means the rest is coming from other electrical devices (presumably it is.)

Anyway, the main reason for this post is that I’m not going to be able to write an awful lot more until I’ve solved at least some of the interference issues; there was going to be a post on Pocsag and Flex coming, but the interference is so bad I’m unable to successfully decode either.

People Counting

Several years ago, many shops would have infrared beams across the entrance to count the number of people passing through.  It helped managers fill in spreadsheets and get nice pretty graphs comparing sales to number of people passing through.  They range from basic (count the number of times the beam is broken and divide by two) to advanced (two beams to detect directionality and only add when the beam is broken for more than a certain time).  They were however inaccurate, and it really didn’t help when shopper’s children spent their time waving their hands infront of the beam.

In terms of surveillance, they require power and the general shop beams weren’t exactly small enough to hide and so again aren’t terribly useful.  There are however a couple of alternatives for monitoring usage of a particular building/room, depending on whether you actually own the property or not.

One client a few years ago kept having their safe cleaned out, clearly by an employee who knew how to access it.  A beeper attached to an infrared beam as described above would have been a simple device to alert people to the safe being accessed, but we wanted to covertly monitor usage.  We therefore installed a small networked webcam and configured it to record whenever activity is detected.  Unfortunately either news about the hidden camera leaked, or the culprit just moved on because the safe remained secure from then onwards.

Occasionally we want to monitor whether a particular door or gate is being used, in order to work out whether it’s safe to spend some time snooping around what’s inside.  Either a webcam or an infrared device could be used, or we could hire the opposite building/room and watch for comings and goings.  There is however a much simpler low-tech way, used mostly when we presume the owner to be unsuspecting of surveillance, it’s called a sticker.

A small sticker, advertising a charity or other worthy cause you’ve just donated to, stuck across the doorway will look as though it’s grafiti-style vandalism or simply a sticker being discarded.  What the user of the door won’t realise however, is that it’s detecting whether the door has been used between your visits.  By opening the door, the sticker gets ripped, and possibly removed.  It obviously doesn’t tell you when or who or how many people used the door, just that it has been used and that you may need to spend more time watching it.

Quick! It's the fuzz!

Back in the day, a certain estate in Manchester had kids playing on all the roads into it.  I forget the exact deal, but they’d keep a lookout for the police and would be given radios to monitor communications to know who needed alerting to hide their stash.  Police technology has moved on with encrypted radio communications, mobile phones and more unmarked police cars.  Technology for monitoring police activity however hasn’t moved on quite so fast, some does exist but it’s expensive and/or difficult and/or unreliable.

Whilst it’s true that police radios are all encrypted, and that for now the public is unable to decrypt these communications, they are still trackable.  They still send out radio waves on particular frequencies, and the relative signal strengths of individual communications can still give an idea as to location – more so if people put resources together to work in direction finding.  If it’s just necessary to know when a police radio is transmitting within a few metres of you (eg. the entrance to your street) then a Digi-Hunter would find it.

Police radios also have another (perhaps largely theoretical) weakness, they send out tones whilst nobody is transmitting but a connection is established.  These tones can often be heard for quite some distance if the radio is on loud enough, and so a microphone positioned in a suitable place could be linked to a device which detects the relevant ‘beep-boops’.

Another method which could be used unreliably is the method in which traffic lights detect oncoming emergency service vehicles and so change pre-emptively.  It’s unreliable because the technology used varies, and usually requires input from the driver (who obviously wouldn’t enable it to get past your sensor).  However, when placed beside existing traffic lights it could return interesting data regarding the coming and going of emergency vehicles over time.

And finally there’s the obvious, looking out the window for police cars, police in uniform (perhaps in undercover cars!), etc.  Facial recognition software used by government and corporate agencies are now quite highly developed, and so theoretically could be used to watch for police activity.  In practise, it would require the system to either watch for uniforms (which could be mistaken for other emergency services) or every single face of every single police officer.