I remembered that 73 was a “message number” as used by amateur operators in the 1950s when I got my license, so I looked further.

I got the lead I needed from SignalHarbor who says that in the April, 1935 issue of QST magazine, on page 60, there is an article “On the Origin of 73” — and that is correct! I looked it up (ARRL members can read old QST issues online). They quote from “Telegraph and Telephone Age” 1 June, 1934 (which I could not find), and list the following message numbers:

• 1- Wait a minute
• 4- Where shall I start in message?
• 5- Have you anything for me?
• 9- Attention, or clear the wire
• 13- I do not understand
• 22- Love and kisses
• 25- Busy on another circuit
• 30- Finished, the end
• 73- My compliments or Best regards
• 92- Deliver

“It appears … that in 1859 the telegraph people held a convention, and one of its features was a discussion as to the saving of ‘line time.’ A committee was appointed to devise a code to reduce standard expressions to symbols or figures. The committee worked out a figure code, from figure 1 to 92. … ”

And, of course, “30” is used by lots of people, including newspaper writers at the ends of their stories. Since stories were originally wired or telegraphed, this usage of “30” makes a lot of sense.

So where does “86” come from then? One of my favorites, but it’s not a telegrapher’s message. Google it and see which theory you believe. It clearly means “removed from circulation” or “ended” but the theories of its origin are interesting and inconclusive in my opinion.

During the interview he talked about his approach to dance as he got older (play the whole thing or go to 15 minutes into the interview to hear what he says about dancing as he got older). This led me to think in terms of setting goals just a few years out – 3 to 5 years – rather than planning tasks that would take 10 to 20 years. Sure, you should think about the long-term strategy, but in planning your more immediate work, you should only plan a few years out.

[Photo: from PBS “A Lifetime of Dance” 2001]

I have adopted two primary working rules that guide my participation in projects:

• Even while thinking ahead 10 or 20 years, plan only those things you can accomplish in 3 to 5 years;
• Only participate in events and organizations where you can make an actual and immediate contribution. Go ahead and attend events where you can learn, but be sure they are aligned with the contribution you wish to make during your 3-year-plan.

The first goal makes it possible for me to accomplish things that I can quantify and see. The second goal helps me “not waste my time.”

Inquiries or QSL “cards”  »  QSL@aa6ax.us or PO Box 27591, San Francisco CA 94127-0591

I’ve had an amateur radio license since 1958 when I was in sixth grade—back in Illinois. A bunch of old WWII veterans got me involved as a favor to my father (who was one of the “country doctors” for the area). I started studying the electronics theory and the Morse code when I was 10. Their club meetings were held in a smoky room over one of the downtown stores, and I routinely got sick due to the smoky air. Code practice was on the radio once a week, and I could borrow a perforated paper tape “code practice” machine to fine-tune by skills. It wasn’t easy to get the license!

As a geeky little introverted kid, amateur radio was not really my thing, though morse code (CW) was kind of neat and a fun challenge. It also meant I didn’t have to think of much to say. I never was much for small talk.

The image of ham radio operators is that they are the geekiest of the radio geeks – carrying around little hand-held radios, long whip antennas on cars, and the obligatory plastic pocket protector that all nerds use. Kinda true, but honestly you’ll find most of them are just the friendliest people in the world! And a lot of this friendly activity takes place “off the air” at various meetings. And getting involved in civilian emergency preparedness is really a kick. The NERT program, sponsored by the San Francisco Fire Department, has a whole group of amateur radio operators who participate in weekly drills and activities. And the Department of Emergency Management of the city also has a program that involves amateur operators as a secondary channel for the Fire Department in case of emergency (ACS).

What I found after getting more active again here in San Francisco is that it’s an interesting way to meet a real cross-section of folks from many ways of life, professions, interests, and actually it’s kind of neat to see whether a little 5 watt radio can really allow me to be in a mountain peak in the High Sierras (in the summer) and talk to a friend back in the San Francisco Bay Area.

One of my friends here in the East Bay is a true aficionado, and a great “found-items” artists as well. KY6R

If the US were to institute laws that allow the Attorney General and/or companies to force ISPs to block (or modify the DNS for) domains they assert are in violation of copyright, it would be the beginning of a slippery slope which could well lead to blocking (censorship in effect) for other reasons. There is just not enough due process in these proposed laws. Once the mechanics are in place, it would be easy to justify using them for other purposes.

I was most impressed at the action taken by Wikipedia on January 18th (2012) to make their service unavailable (except via mobile and for certain pages). And Google did a great job by blacking out their logo, leaving their search intact, and providing links to further information, including pages to reach Congresspeople! Craigslist.org also put up a splash page, which I think sent many people in the right direction. Craig Newmark, founder (and customer support) of Craig’s List is very much involved in citizen democracy (“democracy 2.0” if you will). I put up notices on my own sites, and on my friend Amy Jussel’s ShapingYouth.org on the 18th, directing peoples’ attention to the SOPAstrike page. I was also impressed that

The key is to not require that ISPs or search engines be the enforcers of government policies, and to not wreck the DNS (and DNSSEC) system by spoofing (even legally) domain names.

I believe Wikipedia and Google turned the tide, and am hopeful that these misbegotten bills will now be abandoned or completely rewritten to make more sense!

There is no due process and no way someone who is wrongfully blocked can get themselves quickly unblocked.

And were this legislation to pass in the US, it would signal strong support for other countries similarly blocking internationally-hosted content based on their own national laws. (Many do it already, but let’s not set an example.)

Join me in opposing these bills. Notify your US Senators and Representatives.

This site will be participating in the Strike on January 18th, 2012.

In the early days of the public Internet, I exclusively used cloud servers. Cloud servers in the sense that they were virtual private servers whose location was unimportant. This was the most economical way to set up “your own server” and operate it without having to purchase hardware and colocate it somewhere in Santa Clara or San Jose. Or even L.A.

Then, in the early 2000s I bought Apple X-Serves and colocated them at a little Mac-only ISP called Maccius. I liked their premise and I liked the fact that they were hosting part of Apple’s developer network for Apple. My $3000 X-Serves were good investments, running 24/7 from 2003 until 2011 with only a reboot here and there (maybe once a year). I upgraded storage to RAID, and I boosted their RAM memories, but other than that these machines were real troopers with plenty of compute power. I saved a lot of money by owning my own boxes and just buying electricity and bandwidth from Maccius.

But by 2008 it had become cheaper (and more secure) to purchase computing as a commodity — cloud computing was coming of age. So I started launching virtual private servers again, at Slicehost and Rackspace (and eventually some at Amazon AWS). I could pay $12 a month for a tiny virtual server at Rackspace and not have to worry about some disk drive failing on me. And I could size ’em up or down as necessary.

By 2010 I was paying more for the virtual servers than for the real hardware boxes, but I was hosting far more sites in a more flexible manner. And Apple decided to exit the dedicated server business. So no hope of replacing hardware, and no more server software upgrades.

So in 2011 I shut down my X-Serves, one at a time, until I pulled the last plug (figuratively) out of the wall this morning.

And I’m entirely back in the cloud again.

[Geek warning—this post is really for geeks only]

Here’s the short version:

• If you tweet your blog posts, there are hundreds of bots reading the twitter feed and waiting for your post;
• These bots immediately descend on your web server (following a tweet) and spider all over the place;
• If your blog is WordPress-powered or requires significant CPU or database resources to generate a page, this can slow your server at exactly the time when you most need the capacity for human visitors;
• The majority of these swarming bots do not properly identify themselves to your server; and
• The majority of them are coming from AWS now.
• It’s time to firewall unidentified bots hosted at AWS out of our blogs!

Here are the details:

One of my clients insists on tweeting every post that goes up on her web site, and that means dozens of posts a day because the site syndicates posts (in other words, it “repeats” posts from the blogs of her contributors) from about 100 different sources. It’s a great idea to tweet your posts, because in theory it generates lots of human traffic. But, in this case within seconds of any tweet there are hundreds of Twitter-following searchbots swarming all over the site checking every possible page¹. They do (HTTP) GETs of the pages, and they don’t bother looking at photos or support files (which is nice of them, actually, because it lowers the server load) — they just hit the pages — and sometimes a single bot will hit a page 4 or 5 times right in a row. Why would a bot need to GET a page 4 times in a row? It only needs it once, doesn’t it?

The problem is that on a WordPress-powered site, each GET causes the full generation of all of the dynamic content on that page (if it’s not cached yet). This can take a considerable amount of CPU and database time. It can take “more than clock time” to generate a page…meaning that it can take several seconds of CPU time to generate a page. Bots that hit pages, like the home page, that are seen frequently will get a cached version of that page, which is “easy on the server” and requires very few resources to generate, but bots that crawl all over the site cause the regeneration of uncached pages, and that can put a significant load on a small server! For example, the bot hitting a page four times in a second can cause the need for 4 x 3 = 12 seconds of CPU time if it requires 3 CPU seconds to generate the page (it’s uncached, remember?). In one second they can generate the need for 12 seconds of CPU time. (I know I’m repeating myself.) It’s this unrestricted (and way too fast!) crawling that causes a server to fall to its knees and surrender — and stop serving pages to human visitors. Unfortunately, the crawlers hit the site immediately after a tweet goes out, which is when you want the server to be at maximum readiness to handle human traffic!

The majority of these swarming bots are now coming from IP addresses assigned to Amazon AWS. And although bots usually identify themselves to a site when they GET a page², saying who or what company is doing the search, and usually a URL so you can find out more about the company or the searchbot, the majority of these new bots I’m seeing do not identify themselves. Well-behaved bots like Google and Bing, Yahoo and MSN, all identify themselves and they only GET pages on a slower schedule³. It’s the outlaws that are causing the problems.

What I am seeing these days is dozens of AWS-based bots spidering the site, making many requests (each) per second and no identification at all!

I had hoped I could come to a compromise solution that would keep these guys from clobbering the client site but still let them in, but I can’t find one. So the firewalls went up today to refuse service to most AWS-based searchers. Sorry guys, but bad behavior on the part of many has caused grief for the few human visitors, and we have to pay attention to our real readers, who are the humans, after all.

A few weeks ago, the catwalks were constructed that will hold the workers while the suspension cables are woven.

Well, actually, some tasks for these small clients had been hanging around for as long as several months. Clean cups, clean cups!¹ It feels wonderful to have these out of the way, finally. If you have a pile-up of things waiting to be done, doesn’t it feel better finally get them completed?

In most of these cases I didn’t charge anything for the work because these clients were already struggling with their budgets. And with some I have ongoing pro-bono arrangements, but I couldn’t get to their projects earlier because I’ve been overly busy for months now.

So a few days days of rationed time for the big clients, and some focused time each day on the smaller jobs, none of which took more than 4 hours, and they are now just completely out of the way! Did I short-change the paying clients? Nah, because this weekend I’ll “pay the piper” and get lots of work done on the big projects, but I will feel great that all those little nagging jobs are out of the way.

MY TOP APP PICKS FOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION ON iPAD

• iSSH— gives you secure shell (SSH) access to your servers using name+password or digital certs. If you use a command-line editor on your server (I use vi), be aware that up-down-right-left arrows won’t really function if you use the onscreen keyboard, but from a bluetooth keyboard they do work! Recently I’ve also had trouble with ESC, and I’ve had to tap its onscreen “button” instead on the physical key. You can also configure iSSH to emit true function keys (which are needed for some configuration work—in htop, for instance).
• 1Password— what a great way to keep all those passwords in one place! And encrypted too. 1Password for iPad syncs with 1Password on my Mac through Dropbox. When I make a new password, or change one, it is always available on the iPad as soon as I need it. This way I can use those 20-character random passwords that I’d never remember if I had to commit them to memory.
• Dropbox— Well of course you already know I use Dropbox for sync’ing 1Password across devices. And you can do without it if you sync the two devices “locally” on wi-fi, but I would never remember to do it—Dropbox lets it happen more in real-time and effortlessly.
• DropDAV— (Not an iPad app, but essential nevertheless) I need DropDAV because I have a buddy who watches my back and serves as sysadmin when I’m on those long air flights or otherwise indisposed, and he and I need to share documents, which we do through DropBox. DropDAV isn’t an app, it’s a service. Sign up and it makes your DropBox documents available to Pages and Keynote through WebDAV services on DropDAV.
• WordPress app— HTML textboxes don’t scroll properly on Safari on the iPad. This is a really big problem if you’re trying to admin a WordPress blog in Safari. So the WordPress iPad app is a necessity, though you don’t really have access to all of the WP admin features (it’s designed for bloggers, not admins), which means I’m constantly back and forth between this app and Safari even when I’m working on a single blog. This needs improvement, but I can make it work well enough for now.

PROBLEMS WITH THE iPAD

• No Flash. This means I can’t fully utilize a lot of tools, like Cloudkick, when on the road because they use Flash extensively. (However, I can log in at CloudKick even with my Yubikey one-time-password USB device, as long as I have the iPad USB camera adapter with me. That’s a trick to be explained elsewhere.)
• There’s no PGP mail encryption/decryption for the iPad mail app. Although I have other ways of dealing with encrypted mail when I’m on the road, this is still a big problem. If you rely on encrypted mail, be sure you have an alternative available when you’re traveling with your pad.

With luck, of course, each step yields some piece of information that ultimately contributes to finding a solution. But sometimes there are dead-ends.

The key to not becoming frustrated is to learn something from each step along the way. It might involve learning something new about the programming language, or maybe DNS infrastructure, or about administering Ubuntu, or about SMTP interactions, or about cryptography. Depends on the overall project, of course. What is ultimately “learned” might not even turn out to be relevant to solving the problem.

But the key is to step back at the end of the day and say “I learned something really valuable today, even if it took me ten times as long to solve this problem as I thought it would.”

However, as I started relying more on the iPad for my mobile life, I realized that I could go without the full backpack¹. So I checked at REI and found two items I couldn’t live without².

The first is this Outdoor Products 10-inch  Power Laptop Sleeve. {The blue bag in the photo.} They may call it a sleeve, but it’s a full carrying bag, padded on all sides, and large enough for a 10” clamshell computer (the type with a flip-up display—Acer, Asus etc.), so it handles an iPad with room to spare even when the iPad is already in a protective case. The bag has a shoulder strap that clips on two ways, so you can carry the bag in a “vertical” or a “horizontal” orientation. You can sling it on your back, around the front, or almost under your shoulder. Over your coat or under your coat. Over the shoulder, or across the chest (strangle-hold around your neck) because the strap loosens and shortens. You insert the iPad through a zipper pocket that allows easy access in either orientation, then you zip it closed. There’s an outer zippered pocket with a little slip-in pocket for SD memory cards, clip-ins for carrying pens (I keep a small LED flashlight in there as part of earthquake readiness), and an interior zippered pocket for headsets and the like. The case is soft enough that it expands as you feed it more gear, yet padded enough to protect against bumps and grinds. I don’t believe the case is waterproof, because water doesn’t bead up on it, so I have taken additional precautions.

Oh, and perhaps the biggest surprise of all, I use a bluetooth wireless keyboard and it fits nicely inside the sleeve along with the iPad. Just barely, but it definitely fits.

The next one isn’t from REI, but I’ve got to mention it. I enclose the iPad directly in an incase Book Jacket that is heftier than Apple’s sleeve and really gives great protection. Yes, I drop my iPad just like I drop my iPhone (and their iPhone case has saved my phone numerous times when it went flying across the room on the floor due to my waving my arms with great abandon). The case makes the iPad seem twice as thick as the naked iPad would be, but makes it so much safer to carry. And even inside the incase, the iPad fits snugly into the Power Laptop Sleeve!

And finally, since it’s rainy season in San Francisco, REI sells “4 litre” Sea to SummitUltra-Sil Dry Sacks (waterproof bags) ³ and I bought a cute little yellow one (with a white interior, just like the raincoat my Mom got me to wear to kindergarten) and this bag fits very snugly around the incase and completely waterproofs the iPad for when it gets a tad rainy. I even use the larger 10 litre size sack to put entirely around the Power Laptop Sleeve when there’s a downpour, thus enclosing everything in a waterproof skin. I carry the sacks rolled up inside the larger Laptop Sleeve when I’m not using them. Yes, everything fits nicely.

And I don’t have to carry a backpack to business meetings any more! W00t!

Without much comment, but with so much enjoyment (as one who uses the Paris metro beaucoup  when I’m there — three times in the last 12 months)… the story of a subterranean world very few will ever see.

I would call them benign explorers and documenters of public territory (my words, of course) and certainly not terrorists, though I’m sure there would be hell-to-pay if they were caught by “the wrong people” and someone wanted to hold them up as examples of how poor security is. But they are urban heroes to me. 

I’m certainly not going to tell you the details, but I’ve done my own exploring of locked up places that I shouldn’t have visited (once freeclimbing up the side of a brick building at midnight with no gears, ropes or other aids, checking for unlocked windows, and picking locks), and I know the rush of being there with no intent to do  harm but just exploring spaces that are usually closed off!

Perhaps you’re aware of the outcry among photographers (including myself) about rent-a-cop guards in the U.S. who try to stop you from taking perfectly legal and legitimate photographs in public places (most often near courthouses and federal buildings) — I have been stopped twice by these two-bit uninformed guards trying to keep me from taking photos because they believed there are federal laws prohibiting photography of federal or critical structures (even bridges). That’s not the same as jumping off the platform and running next to the subway tracks, but I couldn’t resist the comparison because it shows the paranoia that exists here in the U.S.

Also see my Art in Public Places articles, and the mixed-reality games I’ve made over the years since 2002.

[Photo “Ubiquitous | Paris 2007” from SleepyCity.net]

Here are five reasons why you have to build your own cyber-protection capabilities rather than relying on governments to solve any of your security (and cyber-attack) problems for you. And you have to be vigilant and aware of what’s going on that might put governments even more in control of your online communications, reducing the options you have available to communicate privately with others as well as to defend yourself.

1. Government behavior recently shows that ultimately they (all?) want online communications to be available for them to read, even if they’re encrypted. The excuse is that terrorists and traitors use encrypted channels and therefore all communications must be readable by the authorities. Thus countries are fighting to secure warrantless wiretapping¹, and to get hold of encryption keys (RIM/Blackberry², Google³, etc.) so they can read Internet traffic.
2. Some governments (certainly the US that we know of) are already copying your communications into their data storage for later correlation and reference ⁴. ISPs and telcos have gigabit taps in place at interconnect facilities that give government agencies unfettered access to the entire information flow. I know from secondhand reports that this happens in other countries—you can google-around for more leads on that.
3. Governments are now saying (the UN particularly is floating this idea) they want to create international agreements so governments can work together to help make the Internet a safer place. This is a bad, bad, bad idea⁵ because repressive governments would rather you not have the ability to blog freely, and if this turns into an international agreement, everyone will be reduced to the lowest-common denominator.
4. They’re talking about kill switches⁶  that would shut down critical portions of net communications in the event of a government-declared emergency. And many governments already selectively kill some types of communication, walling off YouTube, or Google search, online news like the New York Times, or other services  when they cover something the nation’s governors do not like.
5. If they don’t like something you say, then governments, or patriotic individuals, or attackers-for-hire will shut you down with denial of service attacks. So really you have to have your own plan in place and be ready to execute it. Your plan might just be to shut down, but at least you should be thinking about it in advance. And I’m telling you that governments are not going to be able to step in and protect you from that—it requires action at the level of your hosting facility.

My bottom line is that you yourself have to take care of your security to the degree you can.

First, (#1 above) you need to encrypt your communications with your business partners and friends. There are lots of ways you can do this and all of them require some amount of work, and that small amount of work has always been a barrier. You gotta get over that barrier and do it!

Second (#2) if your communications are encrypted and are copied for later analysis, someone who wants to snoop on you probably won’t like it, but you still are safer because it may take a considerable time to break that encryption. And although 99.9% of what you say won’t be of interest anyway, unless you’re plotting some evil deed, it’s possible for people to misinterpret what you’re saying and go after you. And on top of that, some of your personal conversations might just be embarrassing.

On #3, it’s just a really bad idea for governments to make policy about what can be carried on the Internet because the repressive governments will speak loudest, and any uniform international rules that would be formed would aim to protect the interests of the most repressive governments, not the rights of individuals. They’ll make it illegal to “advocate overthrow of the government” or “to offend national social norms” and since these differ so radically from one place to another, we will all be bound by rules that severely restrict our ability to speak openly about practically anything.

On #4, cutting access to the Internet in the event of a government-declared emergency immediately impedes the ability of civil society and NGOs to work across borders to stop any hostilities that might arise. It would plunge the net into darkness, where none of us could function. We see evidence of this in the ways China’s Golden Shield (the Chinese firewall) is used to suppress any mention of topics the government does not wish to see discussed. There is no broad freedom of speech in countries that do this kind of filtering and blocking, and if this were institutionalized worldwide so that we could not offend the Chinese government (they say offend the Chinese people, but we know it’s the government objecting, not the people—Chinese citizens are certainly as able as humans anywhere to accept diversity of opinions). Forming regulations that would apply worldwide would severely restrict freedom of speech in the most “free” countries in order to reduce it to the level acceptable to all repressive states.

And finally, #5 denial-of-service attacks are becoming the norm when someone doesn’t like what you’re saying. These are the “private” equivalent of setting up a firewall to stop your opinion from entering a country (like China) by shutting down your “printing press” as it were.

Why the parrot photo? Well, I’ve long had a policy of “if you can’t say something new and unique, don’t say anything at all” so I have not, so far,   parroted any comments on Wikileaks or Julian Assange, though there are many hints about the future of free speech, journalism, and government involvement in all of this, in what you can read almost anywhere online!

Domain takedowns

TSA: Recently the TSA in the US has begun using backscatter x-ray and microwave “naked scanners” to  examine all passengers before they take flights (see TSA Encounter at SAN that sparked the“don’t touch my junk” outcry and the statement “He said that I gave up a lot of rights when I bought my ticket.”), and so officials assert that although the US constitution in its fourth amendment guarantees the right to be “secure in our persons… against unreasonable searches and seizures”, there is no right to fly and if a citizen wishes not to be searched they must travel in some other way.

Network Neutrality: I see similar arguments from ISPs which wish to prioritize traffic based on economic and other concerns rather than observe the “net neutrality” rules that have served the Internet well for decades, which could mean that only the web sites that choose to pay higher prices would have their traffic carried quickly and efficiently, and the rest of us might be left in a second tier (or lower) where our sites might be carried more slowly, or not at all.³ The argument would be that online expression is a privilege and not a right.

Email blocklists: You’re probably not aware that in attempting to reduce the flow of spam email, ISPs typically “blocklist” servers that they judge to be contributing to the problem. This process entraps many little email servers that are innocent but happen to be housed in hosting facilities where spammers are doing their dark deeds. And getting off the blocklists, or getting removed by ISPs who are blocking receipt of your email, is a difficult process that can take days. Getting onto the list can be by chance, but getting off can be a nightmare. Again, it’s not your right to have email, it’s a privilege.

So what’s the similarity I see in all of these? It’s that technologists, and I include myself in the group (and would also say that the framers of the US Constitution were also technologists in a sense who were inventing a new form of government), frequently develop systems that assume free flow of information, and may even guarantee it as a right. But, as those systems mature and others see the potential for economic gain (which usually implies restricting the flow of something or other), what has been seen as a right frequently turns into a privilege that you have to pay for.