Official Blog: Exploring new cities for Google Fiber

Google Fiber coming to Raleigh?

Google is considering the Triangle area for its next rollout of Google Fiber! As a veteran of the broadband fights here in North Carolina and the founder of the Bring Google Fiber to Raleigh! Facebook group, I am thrilled that we’re being considered for this.

Last week’s snowstorm provided me a perfect use case for Google Fiber. I was itching to organize a musical jam session with a few neighbors only travel conditions were too dangerous to all get together in one place. While one can do video chats with our current, abysmally-slow broadband connections, playing in time with others remotely requires highly-synchronized connections. These could be done with low-bandwidth and exorbitantly-priced ISDN circuits or on high-bandwidth, uncompressed fiber networks like Google Fiber.

I think adding Google Fiber to our area’s mix will benefit our musicians as much as our techno-geeks, pharmaceutical scientists and our other traditional area jobs.

Over the last few years, gigabit Internet has moved from idea to reality, with dozens of communities PDF working hard to build networks with speeds 100 times faster than what most of us live with today. People are hungrier than ever for faster Internet, and as a result, cities across America are making speed a priority. Hundreds of mayors from across the U.S. have stated PDF that abundant high-speed Internet access is essential for sparking innovation, driving economic growth and improving education. Portland, Nashville PDF and dozens of others have made high-speed broadband a pillar of their economic development plans. And Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, declared in June that every school should have access to gigabit speeds by 2020.

We’ve long believed that the Internet’s next chapter will be built on gigabit speeds, so it’s fantastic to see this momentum. And now that we’ve learned a lot from our Google Fiber projects in Kansas City, Austin and Provo, we want to help build more ultra-fast networks. So we’ve invited cities in nine metro areas around the U.S.—34 cities altogether—to work with us to explore what it would take to bring them Google Fiber.

via Official Blog: Exploring new cities for Google Fiber.

Customizing the Ubuntu install CD

Ubuntu

I’ve been working over the last few days to fix up a lot of the electronics currently lying around the house for eventual sale. For a few laptops this involves wiping the OS on them and installing a new one. Since I’m targeting my fellow Linux geeks, I’ve been putting Ubuntu on them.

One of my favorite old laptops is an IBM Thinkpad X40. It was built with an older Intel CPU, one that doesn’t support the memory extensions known as PAE. Beginning with Ubuntu 12.04, the OS doesn’t normally install on these older laptops as Ubuntu expects a PAE-capable CPU. So what’s a geek to do?
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Amazon.com coming to Raleigh?

I noted with interest the announcement that Amazon would begin collecting sales taxes in North Carolina. This seemed curious since the Constitution’s Commerce Clause means Congress is the only entity that can regulate interstate commerce and thus the state can’t impose taxes on Amazon. As far as I knew, Amazon doesn’t have a physical presence in North Carolina. It seemed strange to me that Amazon would willingly start paying taxes. Who does that?

Well, looks like I found the reason. This job ad from Amazon ran on Craigslist yesterday and there are plenty more on other job sites. Amazon.com is interviewing for software developers and says they’re coming to Raleigh!

Software Engineer, Digital Products (coming to Raleigh) (Seattle, WA)
We will be in the Raleigh area conducting interviews February 20th-21st!!
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Back on my old IP?

I’ve noticed more cable modem strangeness this afternoon. I reflashed my router today and noticed that my home cable modem is once again on its old 24.40.133.50 address. I have no explanation for what happened to the 24.40.133.16 address I have been using for the last 24 hours.

It’s not been my experience that TWC/Earthlink swaps out IP addresses so quickly. Normally I get an IP address for many months without it changing. It’s very unusual to have one flip in just an afternoon.

Thinking I liked my newer IP address better, I tried to force a new assignment by unplugging my cable modem for ten minutes. Apparently that wasn’t long enough to do the trick, though. I will have to consider other options.

I still have no explanation for the earlier phantom response. Well, no rational explanation, anyway. I could say it was another quick DHCP assignment but that still wouldn’t account for the missing Microsoft ports which otherwise get filtered at the cable modem of every subscriber.

Are these Time Warner Cable shenanigans?

Mystery host answers for mine

I decided yesterday morning to reflash my home firewall’s version of OpenWRT. This involved rebooting the router, of course, and when the router came up the friendly folks at Earthlink (or Time Warner Cable, depending on who runs the DHCP servers) had assigned my home cable modem a new IP address.

As I worked out a few issues with the new firmware, paring down modules and processes in order to make it all fit inside my modest little router, I decided to test the firewall rules to see whether things were working. From my server hosted outside of my network, I ran a simple nmap test to see which ports were open:

[root@tranquil /home/markt]# nmap -sT -P0 maestro.markturner.net

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-02-02 11:44 EST
Nmap scan report for maestro.markturner.net (24.40.133.50)
Host is up (0.035s latency).
rDNS record for 24.40.133.50: user-0c2h19i.cable.mindspring.com
Not shown: 955 closed ports, 40 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
587/tcp open submission
993/tcp open imaps
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 6.86 seconds

That’s about what I expected, so I turned my attention to other issues, including running another test twenty minutes later:

[root@tranquil /home/markt]# nmap -sT -P0 maestro.markturner.net

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-02-02 12:04 EST
Nmap scan report for maestro.markturner.net (24.40.133.16)
Host is up (0.028s latency).
rDNS record for 24.40.133.16: user-0c2h18g.cable.mindspring.com
Not shown: 991 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
135/tcp filtered msrpc
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
587/tcp open submission
593/tcp filtered http-rpc-epmap
993/tcp open imaps
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 38.88 seconds

For the second test you can see I’ve got a few other ports showing up (TCP 135, 139, 445). These are supposedly filtered by the ISP somewhere down the line (probably the cable modem-level) to block clueless Windows users from exposing their networks to teh Internets.

You can see that these tests produced different results. It what was the same about these results, however, that caught my eye!
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Validating email alerts about school closures

I just got this emailed alert (allegedly) from Wake County Public Schools, announcing that school was closed tomorrow (we have an inch of snow tonight with another six possible by daybreak):

From: notify at …
Subject: Wake Schools Closed Wed, Jan 29
To: notify at …
Reply-To: webadmin at …

All Wake County Public School System schools will be closed on Wednesday, January 29, due to inclement weather. Athletic and extracurricular events are also canceled. The safety of our students, parents and staff remains our top priority.

Make-up dates for this missed day of instruction will be announced as soon as possible.

(I’ve replaced the wcpss.net domain in the above email addresses to thwart spammers)
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Retablature

I spent a little time voiding the warranty of my Lenovo Ideapad K1 tablet last week. I’ve owned it for over a year and like the idea of tablets but I grew increasingly frustrated at Lenovo’s lack of software updates. Finally, I got determined enough to flash it with a new ROM, just like I did with my Samsung Galaxy Epic Touch phone.

A number of web searches later and I had Cyanogenmod 10.2 running on it, with the latest Android 4.2.2 under the covers. My tablet speed tests report a speed boost of a whopping 25%, too. What’s more, I can transfer files with it much easier than with the stock rom, making it far more useful.

This kind of stuff is another example of the power of open source: if a company can’t (or won’t) do the right thing, customers have the power to do it themselves. (The corollary to this is: if you don’t have the right to hack it then you don’t really own it.)

Facebook echo chamber

I’ve written before about the Facebook echo chamber where, like karma, like-minded Facebook friends are drawn towards you. This becomes an echo chamber as one only hears from those who share your views.

Yesterday I was shown again just how much filtering Facebook does, when my friend Tanner Lovelace commented on an update Kelly made to Facebook.

“Wait, are you and Tanner Facebook friends?” I asked Kelly.

“I am,” she answered.

“How come I’m not Tanner’s friend?”

“Well, the only way I know Tanner is through you,” she said, “so you must be his friend.”

I checked my list of Facebook friends and, sure enough, there was Tanner. Then I checked Tanner’s page and saw how many of his updates I haven’t been getting because for some reason Facebook never thought to show them to me.

Without me knowing it, Facebook was steering me towards some friends and away from others. I never knew what I had been missing.

This is what I find really frustrating about Facebook: the view it gives you of your world is highly distorted. And you might not ever realize it.

Why Bitcoin Matters – NYTimes.com

Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen explains the promise of Bitcoin. I thought I understood these concepts well enough but this showed me new possibilities.

That last part is enormously important. Bitcoin is the first Internetwide payment system where transactions either happen with no fees or very low fees (down to fractions of pennies). Existing payment systems charge fees of about 2 to 3 percent – and that’s in the developed world. In lots of other places, there either are no modern payment systems or the rates are significantly higher. We’ll come back to that.

Bitcoin is a digital bearer instrument. It is a way to exchange money or assets between parties with no pre-existing trust: A string of numbers is sent over email or text message in the simplest case. The sender doesn’t need to know or trust the receiver or vice versa. Related, there are no chargebacks – this is the part that is literally like cash – if you have the money or the asset, you can pay with it; if you don’t, you can’t. This is brand new. This has never existed in digital form before.

via Why Bitcoin Matters – NYTimes.com.

Nasa says Mars mystery rock that ‘appeared’ from nowhere is ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’ – Science – News – The Independent

This is bizarre.

A mysterious rock which appeared in front of the Opportunity rover is “like nothing we’ve ever seen before”, according to Mars exploration scientists at Nasa.

Experts said they were “completely confused” by both the origins and makeup of the object, which is currently being investigated by Opportunity’s various measuring instruments.

via Nasa says Mars mystery rock that ‘appeared’ from nowhere is ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’ – Science – News – The Independent.

Here’s the referenced Mars status report from NASA.