2011 Annual Blog Statistics

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Brad Heap

These are some stats from Google Analytics, the figures from 2010 are in brackets.

Overall there were about 2,500 fewer visits, from 1,700 fewer visitors. This is probably a result of me blogging less and the content of the blogs I did post were focused more on personal adventures than in previous years.

I am still very pleased that a website that was started in 2005 as a bit of computer geek vanity is 7 years later generating visits from all corners of the globe.

Recovering from Grub Rescue after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Brad Heap

Over the weekend I upgraded one of my computers to the new beta of Ubuntu. Upon restarting the computer I got dumped into grub-rescue with the message missing-xputs. Part of the cause of this was having Adobe CS3 installed in my dual boot with Windows 7.

When you install Adobe products a little DRM program called FlexNet gets installed into your boot sector which is also where grub resides. When grub is upgraded along with Ubuntu it flicks a warning about the FlexNet being in the sector but then continues to install. However, when you restart grub will not run and will be unable to boot your system into either Ubuntu or Windows.

The following instructions is a result of about five hours of googling, reading forums and talking to other linux geeks. The following commands should take about 15 minutes to complete.

This is how I got my system back:

Warning: I cannot gaurantee this instructions will work on your computer. Please read them all before continuing and take extreme care. I am not responsible if these instructions result in corrupt data or the loss of system functionality.

1. Boot to the LiveCD Desktop (Ubuntu 9.10 or later). Please note that the Live CD must be the same as the system you are fixing – either 32-bit or 64-bit.

2. Open a terminal

3. Determine your normal system partition

sudo fdisk -l

4. Mount your normal system partition:

sudo mount /dev/sdXX /mnt
Example: sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

5. Mount the critical virtual filesystems:

sudo mount -B /dev /mnt/dev sudo mount -B /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts sudo mount -B /proc /mnt/proc sudo mount -B /sys /mnt/sys

6. Chroot into your normal system device:

sudo chroot /mnt

7. Attempt to install grub

apt-get install grub-pc grub-common

During install a warning should appear about FlexNet being in one of the sectors. In my case it was sector 51, others have reported it in 32 and elsewhere.

8. Purge grub

apt-get purge grub-pc grub-common

9. Remove the flexnet sector

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 seek=X

Where X is the sector number grub-install warned about, in my case 51.

10. Reinstall grub

apt-get install grub-pc grub-common

11. Exit chroot

CTRL-D

12. Unmount

sudo umount /mnt/dev/pts sudo umount /mnt/dev sudo umount /mnt/proc sudo umount /mnt/sys sudo umount /mnt

13. Reboot

sudo reboot

Further References:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20GRUB%202
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661254

Can you sue an artificially intelligent machine?

Posted on September 26, 2010 by Brad Heap

The Herald reports:

A Paris court has convicted US search engine giant Google and its chief executive Eric Schmidt of defamation over results from its “suggest” function, a French legal affairs website has revealed.

The new function, which suggests options as you type in a word, brought up the words “rapist” and “satanist” when the plaintiff’s name was typed into the search engine, legalis.net reported.

The court concluded that the search engine’s linking his name to such words was defamatory.

A Google spokesman told AFP by email that they would be appealing the ruling.

The statement said that the Google Suggest function simply reflected the most common terms used in the past with words entered, so it was not Google itself that was making the suggestions.

Now this is interesting, Google are correct that they are not manually making the suggestions. But a machine they programmed is. Where does the accountability for the suggestions it makes lie? You can’t sue a machine, or in the future maybe you can?

But does this mean that a machine that is artificially intelligent and makes money for you really makes money for itself? And if it gets sued then the money that it has made can be used to pay court costs? Can a machine be represented in court by a lawyer?

Australian Ministry of Truth Continues Feeble Attempts to Censor the Internet

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Brad Heap

The SMH today is reporting that Inner Party member Conroy is secretly pushing on with plans to filter the Australian internet.

The federal government is hiding controversial plans to force ISPs to store internet activity of all Australian internet users – regardless of whether they have been suspected of wrongdoing – for law-enforcement agencies to access.

The next thing they will try is for everyone in the country to wear a GPS tracker so we always know where people walk, drive, train or cycle so that we can fine them when they jaywalk or fail to indicate.

As every day goes by it seems the Rudd government is becoming more and more successful at achieving the impossible – losing the next election. For me being a computer geek all it means is that I am much more aware of my actions online and wherever possible I am using encryption for data transfer. It is not an argument about having nothing to hide and therefore needing no privacy. It is a matter that the government wants to data mine our every single action, watch our every single step and monitor every little thing we do in our lives.

I have no issue with sharing my browsing habits with people who I opt to share it with; more often than not I opt into anonymous data sharing of software usage. However, this is not what the government intends, what the government intends is complete mind control of its population. This is not censorship, censorship is a public list of banned material and the reason why they are banned which is debatable in court, this is well beyond censorship and amounts of thought control. The government is not telling you what is blocked, why it is blocked, or any way of being able to appeal sites being blocked. All in all it is a very scary idea that you would expect from a mad dictator not a democratically elected government.

Five years of brad.net.nz

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Brad Heap

Today marks five years to the day since I launched this site. A year ago I blogged some stats and pictures from prior versions of the site.

Below are the updated versions of the graphs from that post with data collected in the last year, the large drop off in visits in the middle of last year was due to a change in servers and the stats reporting software which filter out bots and other non human source of traffic from the stats.

During the last five years this site has served as an outlet of fun, anger, opinion and pure geekness.

In total over the last 1,826 days of operation there have been 203,869 visitors accessing 670,871 pages. Sure that may not be earth shattering stats compared to many other blogs or websites but as a website I set up as an experiment in my spare time while at university it is stats that are far beyond anything I expected. So today I say thank you to my readers of my random rants.

Facebook Exodus Becoming a Raging Torrent

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Brad Heap

For months if not years now privacy groups have be moaning about Facebook, along with MySpace, Bebo, Buzz, Twitter, and anything and everything else about the internet in general.

However it is rare for the technological blog and news websites to complain. They complained about Buzz and within days Google had changed its policies giving users much more control. However, with Facebook something else is happening, there is a massive turn off in the technology community against Facebook.

On the weekend I removed all my photos, applications and personal information from Facebook. Twitter is no longer linked into it and I am no longer posting status updates. At this moment I have not yet deleted or deactivated my account. But everyday I am getting a little closer to doing so.

Articles complaining about Facebook’s new information selling regime are now stretching across the web, last week wired.com ran a number of pieces about Facebook. Now readwriteweb is running an article on how to completely delete your Facebook account – They also have a screenshot of the emotional blackmail when you try to deactivate.

The torrent is also appearing on Twitter. Nearly every post I see about Facebook is about how to delete or deactivate your account. Check this search on Twitter for an example (edit: search may not work, can’t link to a search on twitter).

I saw a prediction on the weekend that Facebook would be dead within 6 months – dead as in dead like MySpace, alive but on life support. At the rate people are getting angry over these latest changes the exodus of tech people could be complete within the month.

Pot Kettle Black

Posted on May 4, 2010 by Brad Heap

From an SMH article on Adobe Flash.

“Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security and performance,” said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for the Internet Explorer browser.

How many urgent security updates has Internet Explorer had issued against it in the last 12 months? How many in the last 10 years? How about this list of updates for IE 6 Service Pack one as an example: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326489

A Few Thoughts on Facebook and Social Networking Privacy

Posted on May 2, 2010 by Brad Heap

Growing up in the Internet age I accept that I don’t really have any privacy. It is possible for almost anyone to find out almost anything about me. For instance any company that extends a form of credit to me be it a hire purchase, credit card, or even renting a car will be able to find out my finance history through information sharing services such as Veda Advantage. And if I move house or update one piece of information with a government department suddenly the IRD, Electoral Office and almost everyone else knows my knew address and starts sending me angry letters telling me to update my details. I simply couldn’t vanish no matter how hard I tried.

On the internet privacy concerns have existed since its birth. In the past in order to protect peoples identities many users operated behind aliases and screen names. I have had a few the two most prominent being kiwikidbrad and more recently nzv8fan. However, there are two main problems with screen aliases. The first is they can still quite easily lead back to you, for instance kiwikidbrad suggests my real name is Brad, and I am a kiwi, and still reasonably young (okay I started using this name when I was around 10 or 11 years old). When I switched to nzv8fan it was a little less obvious who I was other than I was from NZ and into V8 Supercars, but still over time you slip and sign off a post as Brad or accidentally post from somewhere that lists your real name alongside your screen name. The second problem with aliases is not knowing the true identity of who is behind them. Even though I just said I could be worked out, if I had a phony identity to start with, and then built an online alias on top of that I can become quite a credible fake.

To get around these problems Facebook did something quite radical when it launched. You would not have screen names rather you would use your actual identity. This is both a good and terrible idea. It is a good idea because it means you can rapidly be found my people in your past who may not know you currently and therefore would have a hard time finding out your screen name. It is also a terrible idea because of how easy it makes you to find.

Initially Facebook introduced some good privacy controls around this, firstly anyone accessing any data on Facebook had to be registered on the site, there was no such thing as a public profile. Secondly a lot of your data was hidden to people who were not your friends and only a limited amount was supplied to people so they could identify you as an actual friend and add you. This system worked quite well.

As a result of this openness about identity but strictness in privacy a lot of people flocked to Facebook as it was a genuine site where you could actually trust people, but as people flocked to Facebook it became too popular for its own good. It got greedy and power hungry. As a result of this over the past two or so years the high walls of privacy that protect users on Facebook have come tumbling down. Now in the latest development (see my immediate prior post) Facebook’s desire to connect everyone to everyone else has seen the creation of public pages that connect anyone with any remote common interest that they list. Essentially everything you write on Facebook will be connected. Forget 6 degrees of separation Facebook is aiming for 1.

The next developments in Facebook’s history will be interesting. I am wondering if a new player will arrive on the stage that brings back the privacy controls that users once had. I wonder if Facebook will buckle and bring in a whole lot of strict privacy controls not the complex mess they have now that is confusing and doesn’t give you much control at all. I wonder if they will be sued by some government department, state, company or individual.

If I were to start some form of Facebook clone there are a few things I would do:

Use people’s real names.
Allow people to list their birthday – birthday wishes are cool, but not publicly list their year of birth.
Allow people to upload and tag photos – but photos tagged of other individuals must have their permission for the tag first.
No public profiles.
You must be registered on the site to access any other members.
People can search for others but only on name, email address (not publically listed but searchable), workplace, school, college or sports team, but not common interest.
Not allow applications that access other user’s private details. If you want to do some sort of quiz that is cool, but having third party applications mine other user’s data without their permission is wrong.
Have fan pages for companies, and political causes. But disable pages that require you to join something before you can see all the details – and irony with facebook is fan pages often have more privacy controls than user pages.

These are just a few thoughts, I don’t have time, or energy, or the will power to start my own clone and have it reach a critical mass. However, these thoughts are welcome to be used by anyone who is willing too – and please do. I am planning on deactivating my Facebook account in a week’s time.

And for those people who think Facebook is too big to fail just look at what happened to MySpace. This Alexa traffic graph shows it nicely.

Facebook Connections Be Damned

Posted on May 2, 2010 by Brad Heap

I have been using Facebook for around 3 years now. I originally set up my Facebook account at the same time as I was setting up Myspace and Bebo accounts to connect with students when I heavily involved in student politics. At the end of 2008 when I finished my stint in the political arena I deleted my Bebo and Myspace profiles but kept my Facebook account. The key reason for me keeping my Facebook account was due to critical mass. I had so many friends on Facebook the majority of whom are from High School and it was a good way to keep tabs on who was where and doing what. However Facebook’s latest move to make more of my details public has me convinced that Facebook is nothing more than a mass identity theft ring.

This morning when I logged into my Facebook account I was presented with a pop up box asking me to connect my personal info – workplaces, schools and colleges, and likes to public pages. It was either tick a box to connect or untick not to connect, there was no way to see the content of the pages that would be linked to before confirming or denying the connection. To see what this new development entailed I click on select all and connect for my profile thinking that the workplace connections would correctly link through to the fan pages for these companies. The annoying thing is they didn’t. Instead they linked through to automatically generated info pages about each of my workplaces, schools, and likes.

The first thing I noticed about these automatically generated pages is they brought a lot of content across from Wikipedia. Now Facebook do have a nice little disclaimer on the bottom of each automatically generated page claiming: “Description above from the Wikipedia article Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, licensed under CC-BY-SA“. However I wonder if they are actually violating the terms of the license by using the content and then only claiming that section of the page is covered by that copyright license. It is clear to me that they are building the rest of the page on top of that. In particular if they state “Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, sign up and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for your help.” If Facebook does not license these new pages under the CC-BY-SA license then I expect some form of lawsuit.

Anyway this copyright discussion has me side tracked a little. What I am most pissed off about is the way that Facebook through this connection thingy in my face and now I have no way of disabling links to connections I do not want to share links to. Just because I worked at Kathmandu, a clothing store in NZ, Aus and the UK does not mean I want a connection to Kathmandu, Nepal. And just because I like the book 1984 does not mean that I want a connection to all the George Orwell fans out there. Now I realise that prior to these connections you could search for people based on the information that you provided in your likes and workplaces sections. But this new addition goes well beyond finding people through it. If people want to find me by a certain keyword that I list that is cool, but to just throw a whole page together and say I like this thing with no way of disabling it once it is enabled and no clear instructions on what you are accepting is wrong.

This is the first time Facebook has really pissed me off over a privacy matter. As a response I have removed all my work history and about half of my likes. Furthermore I am seriously considering “deactivating” my account, I would delete it but Facebook doesn’t give you that option.

Update: There is a Facebook Blog Post on this subject, reading it is scary enough but the comments are pretty telling in how pissed off people are about this. Essentially the gist of the post is any info you list will be public and if you don’t won’t it public don’t list it.

Update 2: I have been reading through some of the 3,000+ comments on the Facebook Blog Post. Some of the more pointed ones:

You created a Community Page for MY company that I OWN – and I cannot control what’s on it.

NOT COOL.

This feature is terrible. On a personal level, you hosed all of my interests when you added it. On a professional level, you have created a duplicate page for my organization, the U-M (University of Michigan) Ginsberg Center. We already have a facebook community page for ourselves; now when people add us as an interest or an employer there will be a new page created. You guys really need to start thinking the implications of these changes through before you make them.

I happen to like my “boring text”. You should give people the option to either keep it the old way or go with this new way.

I really HATE the links to everything in my profile. I cannot personalize it the way I want or say what I want – I DO NOT WANT LINKS TO EVERYTHING I HAVE ON MY PROFILE!! I want to be able to write what I want on my profile and everything does not HAVE to be linked! This is the most assinine change you have made to date. You talk about privacy issues – where’s the privacy in linking to the town where I live or my hometown or my schools that I attended or my work? THIS IS A TOTAL INVASION OF MY PRIVACY!! My whole family is on FB (75 of us) and we are seriously contemplating switching back to MySpace or Twitter!

This is ridiculous. I just deleted all of my interests, etc, etc, etc because of you FORCING ME to “like” something. Facebook has become infantile and archaic . If you want to charge for facebook, then charge – but don’t force me to contribue to your revenue and ad clicking by forcing my PERSONAL interests to be linked to some idiotic page you wrote on what you think my interest actually is.

April Blog Stats

Posted on May 1, 2010 by Brad Heap

Despite being incredibly busy during April and having little time to write many posts the number of visitors remained very strong.

Raw Visits: 5993 (down 2% on March)

Raw Page Views: 17642 (up 1.5%)

Google Analytics Visitor Count: 2184 (down 3.5%)

Google Analytics Page Views Count: 2935 (down 11%)

RSS Feed Views: 4009 (up 44%)

Estimated true number of visitors (Google Visitor Count + RSS Feed): 6193 (up 23%)

It is very difficult to extract all the robots polluting my data especially around reading the RSS feed. Looking at the figures my best bet is I am getting around 3,500 true visitors to my site through both directly loading the site and RSS. At the moment close to half my data each month is being spent on identified robots some of which I may start to block if they continue to consume too much data.