I’ll admit to a bout or two of frustration over badly designed and implemented self-checkout systems, but I think this guy went just a little over the edge.

GRAPEVINE – First there was road rage. Then there was cellphone rage. And now there’s self-checkout-screen rage.

A customer upset that his debit card wasn’t being accepted punched a self-checkout screen Tuesday at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Grapevine and then walked out.

The suspect had not been arrested by Thursday, but employees got the license plate number of his pickup and investigators awaited a copy of a surveillance video showing him leaving the store.

The damaging blow came shortly before 5:30 p.m. at the store in the 1600 block of Texas 114 when the man tried to buy a few food items, according to police reports.

After a clerk and the manager heard the bang, the suspect told them that he had broken the monitor because “it was a piece of s—-.”

As he left the store, the man yelled: “Don’t get close to me or I’ll kill you.”

The punch left the monitor with a $2,000 black eye.

I was sympathetic with him up until he threatened the store employees.  And that will probably be the bit that increases the severity of the charges once the police catch up with him.

It would appear that D-Link is causing considerable grief for a guy in Denmark who was attempting to provide a public service for Denmark’s internet infrastructure.

A number of D-Link products, so far I have at least identified DI-604, DI-614+, DI-624, DI-754, DI-764, DI-774, DI-784, VDI604 and VDI624, contain a list of NTP servers in their firmware and using some sort of algorithm, they pick one and send packets to it.

This is about as wrong a way to do things as one can imagine. There is no way D-Link can change the list once the product is shipped, unless D-Link can persuade the customer to upgrade the firmware.

The problem is that a lot of these routers are picking GPS.DIX.dk and are eating up his bandwidth (despite the NTP server’s description showing that it’s intended for the local infrastructure and that end-client use is PROHIBITED).

I have no idea how many devices D-Link has sold, but between 75% and 90% of the packets which arrive at my server come from D-Link products via this mechanism.

Up until now, the management has been allowing him to host the NTP server for free, since he’s providing a service (there would normally be a $4400 connection fee).  But because of the traffic, DIX is looking to charge him for the increase in usage. 

Negotiations with the DIX management are ongoing, but the current theory is that I will have to close the GPS.DIX.dk server or pay a connection-fee of DKR 54.000,00 (approx USD 8,800) a year as long as the traffic is a significant fraction of total traffic to the server.

I owe $5000 to an external consultant who helped me track down where these packets came from.

I have already spent close to 120 non-billable hours (I’m an independent contractor) negotiating with D-Link’s laywers and mitigating the effect of the packets on the services provided to the legitimate users of GPS.dix.dk.

Finally I have spent approx DKR 15.000,00 (USD 2,500) on lawyers fees trying to get D-Link to negotiate in good faith.

If I closed the GPS.dix.dk server right now, wrote off all the time I have spent myself, then my expenses would amount to between DKR 45.000,00 and DKR 99.000,00 (USD 7,300 to 16,000) and several hundered administrators throughout Denmark would have to spend time reconfiguring their servers.

If on the other hand we assume I leave the service running and that the unauthorized packets from D-Link products continue for the next five years, the total cost for me will be around DKR 115.000,00 + 54.000,00 per year (approx USD 18,500 + USD 8,800 per year) or DKR 385.000,00 over the next five years (USD 62,000).

All of this is entirely due to D-Link’s incompetent product design and I have no way to mitigate it.

In the end, it’s likely that he’s going to have to move his NTP server, as he’s had no luck in getting D-Link to even acknowledge the problem, much less getting them to pick up the costs for their actions.

Because of Verizon I have one of these DI-604’s, whether I want it or not.  As an interim fix to try to help this guy out I found a public secondary NTP server at Texas A&M and pointed my router at it instead of letting it decide randomly (I also changed it to only check every 8 hours).  I’m tempted to set up an NTP server on my Linux box so that none of this traffic will be flooding internet sites (even if they list themselves as allowing public access), since it appears that the default for the DI-604 is to poll once per hour.  I’ve already got an NTP client daemon running on there to keep the system clock synced, so I suppose it wouldn’t be too hard to add the required server component and just point the DI-604 at it.

Anyhow, this isn’t the only time D-Link has been caught abusing public services.  I recently began investigating to try to see why my DynDns.org host entry wasn’t automatically updating.  The router is supposed to have DynDns support, but I got an email that my host entry was expiring.  In the past, I’d seen this occasionally when my IP address didn’t change for long periods of time.  Since the router didn’t see an address change, it didn’t try to update DynDns.org, and so the host would eventually expire.  I’d usually work around this by forcing a manual update on their website, but this time I noticed that the current address was different than the address in the DNS record.  Some further research turned up the fact that almost all D-Link routers have been blocked by DynDns.org due to abusive updates and incorrect implementation of the protocol (it appears they just “borrowed” an example implementation without bothering to change the User Agent).

So now I’m stuck with a POS router that a) causes headaches for NTP server owners, and b) won’t update DynDns anymore.  But I guess Verizon support is happy that they get to use a “standard” router (with its non-standard Verizon-specific, but still buggy, firmware).  I complained in no uncertain terms to Verizon about this when they sent me a customer survey about Fios.  I don’t know if they’ll ever listen, though.  Perhaps in the meantime Verizon could put up an NTP server and update all these stupid D-Link devices to help mitigate some of the problem.

Link via Slashdot.

I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of wanting to be able to check email and go online from anywhere.  The current crop of devices like this seem a bit awkward to me, though.  Take the Palm Treo 700w as an example.  If you look at it as a PDA, it’s not too bad, in that it’s similar to many others in size and form.  However, as a phone, it’s really funky.  Everyone I’ve seen using a Treo as a phone looks slightly uncomfortable.

Now the idea of an all-in-one still has some appeal, but I think it needs to be better integrated with proper input/output devices, so you don’t have to hold a brick to your face to have a conversation.  This seems like something appropriate for a Personal Area Network.  Have a central “box” that manages the CPU, memory, and networking capabilities (i.e. cellular plus WiFi) and then connect the various devices with Bluetooth or something similar.  It’d be nice if it integrated iPod functionality as well (and you could have an integrated stereo headset with mike for listening to music and taking calls). 

I could also see this box being pluggable into a “base station” and usable as your personal computer, so you don’t have to have different systems for PDA vs. laptop/portable.  I guess this is getting into oQo territory, although maybe a bit smaller.

This still leaves some interface issues, though, as entering and viewing data is often difficult on these small screens.  All those people working on holographic interfaces need to get cracking. 

It seems that some animals think they’re more equal than others and their arrogance might end up getting someone killed one of these days.

You might want to think twice the next time you’re tempted to make a call from your cell phone during an airplane flight. Or flip on your portable game player. Or work a spreadsheet on your laptop.

Besides possibly annoying fellow travelers and breaking federal regulations, you might be endangering the airplane, according to a Carnegie Mellon University study that quietly monitored transmissions on board a number of flights in the Northeast.

The study, by CMU’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy, found that the use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices can interfere with the normal operation of critical airline components, even more so than previously believed.

Now we’ve all heard the announcements to turn off and put away “all portable electronic devices” during takeoff and landing.  And we’ve all seen people who can’t be arsed to follow the rules.  The majority of the time they get away with it.  And from the article, it seems to happen quite a bit:

And despite the ban on cell phone use during flights, the researchers discovered that on average one to four cell phone calls are made from every commercial flight in the northeast United States.

Some are even made during critical flight times, such as the climb after takeoff or the final approach.

The Slashdot discussion had an interesting link to an EMI study that attempted to analyze the reasons for interference.  Unfortunately, there is not good data available, and the incidents are hard to reproduce.  But while the article above talks about GPS, GPS isn’t really the main concern.  There are a lot of more important systems on board that could potentially be affected, as this quote shows:

April 30, 1997. B737-400: During level cruise, the AP pitched up and down with ROC/ROD of 400 fpm indicated. Other AP was selected: no change. Cabin was checked for PC’s and other electronic devices: nothing was found. Requested passengers to verify that their mobile phone (GSM) was switched OFF. Soon after this request all pitch oscillations stopped.

The problem here is that all these devices haven’t been tested on airplanes and to do so would be a monumental undertaking, as it’s not just intentional radiators, like cell phones, but other devices that are unintentional radiators that must be tested.  Further, it’s nearly impossible to guarantee that any particular instance of a class of device still complies to standards after it’s been dropped, kicked, bitten, stepped on, and otherwise abused by its owner.  While we expect airplanes to be resistant to EMI/RF, and they are tested for this, there are still many situations that could lead to sensitivity.  An example given in the above study is that connectors are especially susceptible to RF leakage, especially after repeated maintenance.  Further, since the skin and framework of the aircraft are metal, they could act as an amplifier for an ill-behaved device (or even a well-behaved one in unforseen circumstances).  Heck, even devices that have been certified according to the existing standards can sometimes interfere with each other unintentionally (i.e. through harmonics of internal oscillators, etc). 

It seems to me that we’d have to engineer airplanes with a whole new level of RF interference standards before we allow cell phones to be used onboard.  I’d consider any existing design to be unready for the challenge.

In the meantime, I have an idea for a way to protect airplanes from this sort of problem.  It might prove too expensive, but I can envision a set of RF detectors stationed strategically throughout the aircraft cabin and wired into a central control system.  Using relative signal strengths, the system could determine the location of any RF radiator in the cabin down to a small section of the cabin (perhaps two or three rows, or even one row if you have enough sensors).  If the system were sufficiently foolproof, it could even activate a small light above the offending row or rows.  Or if you wanted to make it unpleasant to ignore the rules, have the system sound an alarm and flash a light over the row in question.  It would then immediately become obvious who was trying to use a cell phone (or even some other RF-emitting device).

If the above is too much, then one could perhaps implement a rule that if a passenger is observed using any sort of transmitter (cell phone, FRS, Gameboy, etc) and there is interference observed with the plane’s systems on that flight, then that passenger must stay behind and cooperate with troubleshooting activities with the flight and maintenance crews.  I suspect after a few of these self-important bastards are made to spend several hours “cooperating,” they might think twice about breaking the rules (as these types of people always regard their time as more important than that of others).

Anyhow, it seems to me that there isn’t anything so urgent that it can’t keep until the plane lands, except for emergencies, in which case the rules are out the window (as we saw on 9/11 with people calling from cell phones).  But frankly, airplanes are so damned cramped (at least back in steerage where I usually travel), that it’d be intolerable to have to listen to someone babbling on a cell phone.  I like the idea of the Amtrak Quiet Car that one Slashdot commenter mentioned.  Sit down, shut up, and enjoy the view!

That’s a nice website you’ve got there.  It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Once again, a Verizon executive is bellyaching about not getting enough fees out of Internet traffic.

A Verizon Communications Inc. executive yesterday accused Google Inc. of freeloading for gaining access to people’s homes using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build.

The comments by John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, came as lawmakers prepared to debate legislation that could let phone and cable companies charge Internet firms additional fees for using their high-speed lines.

“The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”

Verizon is spending billions of dollars to construct a fiber-optic network around the country for delivering high-speed Internet and cable TV services. Executives at other telecom companies, such as AT&T Inc. chief executive Edward E. Whitacre Jr., have suggested that Google, Yahoo Inc. and other such Internet services should have to pay fees for preferred access to consumers over such lines.

Frankly, this is a daft load of bollocks (sorry, been reading too many British mystery novels lately).  Google may be using “cheap servers,” but they pay for the bandwidth they use in their datacenters.  And I pay for the bandwidth I use on my end of the link.  Verizon isn’t having its lunch eaten for free by other players.  All of us who use their broadband services have already paid them for it.  If they’re not making money on their backbone operations, then maybe they need to negotiate better deals with their peering partners.  But it’s time to stop bleating about this.  No one is getting a free lunch here. 

There also appears to be some confusion about just how these networks can be used.  It sounds like Verizon is complaining that all its bandwidth is being eaten by services offered by providers other than itself, and that makes their new fiber build-out unprofitable.  This is an obnoxious obfuscation on their part.  They have built capacity into their network for their own services, and then provide broadband access to people using the remaining bandwidth.  Their own video offerings are in no way threatened by Google or Yahoo, at least from a bandwidth standpoint.  And I see nothing wrong with them using QoS tools to guarantee bandwidth to their own IPTV offering (should they ever actually start offering it; right now, at least here, their TV service uses an RF overlay on the fiber).  After segementing out their own traffic, they’re offering me a certain amount of bandwidth.  It’s really not up to them what I do with that bandwidth.  But this sort of talk sounds a lot like they’re wanting to charge me more depending on how I use that bandwidth.

I think a lot of this is simply sour grapes on the part of telephone providers who can’t stand the idea that data is the new game and the old (and very lucrative) telephone system is on its last legs.  Verizon and the others are trying to find ways to reach into the data stream to pull out new sources of revenue, rather than being relegated to being providers of commodity bandwidth.  Verizon had better be careful about this sort of talk.  We’re already getting rumblings of “net neutrality” legislation in response to these sorts of proposed schemes.  Millions of people now use broadband, and those people have come to depend on the net working a certain way.  They will never stand for additional per-site charges and sites like Google will not likely stand for being charged.  I would expect a player like Google to segregate traffic from providers who demand payment so that the end-user knows exactly who is to blame (i.e. if you’re on Verizon and Verizon demands payment from Google, Google could simply redirect you to a page that explains that you are experiencing slow performance because Verizon is demanding that Google pay extra for you to use the bandwidth you already paid for).  Just how much bad press and customer enmity are Verizon, AT&T, and the other network providers really willing to incur in this battle?

Link via Slashdot.

They’re starting by talking about VOIP, but AT&T and other broadband providers want to charge content providers for access to their networks. 

Well, the traditional phone companies are at it again, looking for pounds of flesh that they can extract from the feature-rich Internet-based services and sites that want carriage over their networks.

Just yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (I’m there) Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg talked of willingness to strike up deals with unnamed sites and services. "We have to make sure they (services) don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity," he said.

Of course, this is where the distinction between a deal and a shakedown starts to get a bit blurry. After all, it was AT&T (formerly SBC) CEO Ed Whitacre’s controversial statement last fall that free carriage of high-bandwidth services would be "crazy" that started this fiirestorm.

William Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth, told the Journal today that he envisions charging content providers a fee based on the volume of material they send over BellSouth’s network, as well as the bandwidth the content takes up.

As I see it, there’s just one tiny little hole in this “logic.”  Broadband subscribers are already paying for access to the network.  This sounds suspiciously like double-dipping by phone companies that are afraid of losing their lock on the phone business.

It’s technically feasible to determine the ISP of the user based on their IP address.  It would be a simple thing for Yahoo! or Google to deny access to AT&T/SBC users by redirecting them to an alternate page with a very simple explanation of why their carrier is blocked.  I suspect that most people would be rather upset with their ISP for doing something like this.  With enough customer outrage, I’d expect that something like this wouldn’t last long. 

I noticed that Verizon was among those contemplating this sort of thing.  Despite the fact that cable can’t offer me the speed of Verizon FIOS, I’d drop Verizon in a heartbeat and go back to cable if Verizon were to pull this sort of stunt.  I pay Verizon for a certain amount of bandwidth.  It should be irrelevant to them what I use it for.  If they think I’m using too much, then they should reprice their offerings. 

Further, I don’t like the idea that Verizon decides which services gets better performance on their network.  Any way you slice it, it looks like end users get screwed under that kind of deal.  Instead of getting the bandwidth and performance we pay for, we get the bandwidth and performance that someone else pays for.  If they’re going to do that, then they’d better knock some off of the price I pay.

I ran into an interesting problem with my game PC over the weekend that I just solved yesterday.  I haven’t had much time for games lately, so it hasn’t been used in a while.  But I had a friend who wanted to transfer some tapes to CDs, and this system is the one that’s connected to the tape deck.  So I fired it up to make sure it had the latest Windows updates and to make sure that the audio capture stuff worked.  The system seemed to work fine, except for an exasperating hang whenever I tried to access a Samba share on my Linux system.  This was especially annoying since it was working fine the last time I used it.  Despite this problem, we were able to make CDs from the tapes.

What I eventually noticed is that this system refused to talk to the Linux system in general, either for Samba or for HTTP.  It would get about 1MB of data to flow before it would slow to a crawl (i.e. maybe a few bytes per second, if that).  This would cause Windows Explorer to hang if you were trying to browse a share via the GUI (sometimes it would come back with the message “the network name is longer available”).

It occurred to me that I hadn’t used the system since the network reorganization that took place during the FIOS TV saga and my struggle to get a wireless router that worked.  The main difference between then and now is that I had to plug everything into the D-Link DI-604 and that I now had a Belkin Pre-N router acting as an AP, where in the past I used a single unit (a Linksys WRT54G(S)).  The system could access the internet fine, which goes directly through the D-Link router.  It just couldn’t access the Linux system, which is across a wireless bridge. 

The system is built around an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum, which has two gigabit ethernet controllers integrated into the motherboard.  One is part of the Nvidia nForce chipset, and the other is based on a Realtek chipset.  The ethernet wire was plugged into the Nvidia port.  I began to suspect, based on the symptoms, that there was something about the whole wireless bridged path that it didn’t like.  Some searching on Google turned up a few people who also had trouble getting a reliable connection using the Nvidia port.  Some were able to fix it by changing the driver settings so that the ethernet speed was locked, rather than autonegotiated (i.e. they’d set it to 100Mb/s Full Duplex).  Others got around it by switching to the Realtek port.  I first tried changing the ethernet speed setting, but as soon as I applied the setting the system rebooted (!).  So I went into the BIOS and disabled the Nvidia ethernet controller and re-enabled the Realtek one.  Sure enough, everything started working perfectly. 

So, I can only conclude that there’s something about the Nvidia controller or its driver that does not like crossing the bridge to the remote network.  Technically, a bridge is supposed to be transparent at the MAC layer, but it would introduce a bit more latency than if the connection were direct.  I didn’t investigate further to see if there were any driver settings that could be changed.  I was a bit afraid to mess around with it, given how badly the driver reacted.  It should be noted that this occurred with the latest driver available at the time, which was part of the nForce 3 Version 5.11 package.

Here’s how the systems are laid out.  The systems in question are “Game PC” (on the left towards the middle) and “dominion” (the Linux server).

An inventor in Wales has created a sonic annoyance weapon that targets teenagers (mostly).

The device, called the Mosquito (“It’s small and annoying,” Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he said, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in South Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside.

“On the low end of the scale, it would be intimidating for customers,” said Robert Gough, who, with his parents, owns the store. “On the high end, they’d be in the shop fighting, stealing and assaulting the staff.”

Gough (pronounced GUFF) planned to install a sound system that would blast classical music into the parking lot, another method known to horrify hang-out youths into dispersing, but never got around to it. But last month, Stapleton gave him a Mosquito for a free trial. The results were almost instantaneous. It was as if someone had used anti-teenager spray around the entrance, the way you might spray your sofas to keep pets off. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one.

I wonder if I’d still be able to hear something like this?  While I have some notches in lower frequency ranges (due to gunfire and drums), my high frequency ranges used to be quite sensitive.  I don’t doubt that I’ve lost some as I’ve gotten older, but I often still hear things that others don’t (then again, maybe it’s just me   ).

I recall that we used to have trouble with a dog that would chase cars.  In an attempt to deter her we bought one of those sonic devices that only dogs are supposed to hear.  It had two tones, each one with a button.  One tone would be a warning and the other for stopping the bad behavior.  It never really did work on the dog, but I know that if I was close enough to it I could hear the tones, which were nerve-jarring enough to make you slightly nauseous.  I learned this because my sister snuck up behind me one day and hit the button to see what would happen (I think she may have been surprised when I reacted to the sound…).

Link via Slashdot.

I see that the FCC has decided to advocate “a la carte” pricing for cable TV (although they aren’t pushing for it to be required).  In the past I’ve often wished for something like this as well as “on demand” or “pay per view” for premium channel shows (i.e. being able to watch individual episodes of “The Sopranos” without having to buy a full subscription, since I don’t watch anything else on HBO). 

But it occurs to me that the cable operators, if they were to participate, would see it as a money-making opportunity.  I would bet that when all is said and done that you’d pay more just to get your favorite channels than if you bought the package.

In my daily referer check I came across someone hotlinking (or trying to hotlink) an image of mine from something called the YaHooka Forums.  It requires a membership to view the particular thread, but I decided not to bother, since I’m not particularly interested in a pothead forum.  But I found it interesting that the same forums can be found via l1.itechgroup.com.  I guess someone over there hasn’t killed off all their braincells and figured that this would look less damning in the corporate firewall logs of some members.