X-Geek

Extreme geekiness

There are 702 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 35 of 71).

Game over for Raleigh software startups?

I thought this recent Triangle Tech Talk column by Chris Heivly was interesting until I got to this part (emphasis mine):

So what’s my point and where do we go from here? First, notice that we refer to this as Triangle Tech Talk and Triangle StartUp Factory. We support the entire area and we will support any initiative to help Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Cary and other local communities embrace entrepreneurship. But not around software companies. Let’s support each community to identify their industry niche. Let’s rally companies in that niche to build a critical mass in a neighborhood. And then let’s celebrate and market that niche.

So, Tech Talk is declaring “game over” for software startup companies and Durham is the winner? Durham has had success with software startups, no question about it, and I don’t want to take anything away from that. Still, to imply that Raleigh should just close up shop is a bit ridiculous, don’t you think? Raleigh’s been home to Red Hat, Lulu.com, Misys, Allscripts, Da Vinci Systems, Q+E Software, HAHT, Accipiter, Oculan, Lobbyguard, and many, many others. That’s not exactly a dearth of talent. To say that Raleigh should cede it’s startup software scene to Durham is ridiculous.

How about this: Raleigh can be Raleigh and Durham can be Durham. Each city can go with whatever works for it. There are plenty of smart, creative people in both cities and plenty of room to grow and compete. Both cities can enjoy success with software startups. To declare a “winner” and divvy up who should get what is absurd.

It’s better with a dish

Though it was being shown locally on over-the-air TV, I decided to hunt for the N.C. State-Miami basketball game on satellite today. When I found it I was amazed at how much better the satellite signal was from the OTA signal. Players in motion seemed blocky as the compression artifacts piled on, but the signal direct from Miami was crystal-clear.

Whenever you compress a signal that’s already compressed, you really start making a mess as the tricks that compression schemes rely on get broken in the process. Given a choice, I’ll tune in the satellite signal every time if I want a quality signal to watch.

Building Raleigh’s startup scene from the ground up

Officials from Raleigh and N.C. State announced a partnership Monday to make Raleigh a “city of innovation.” A conference, known as the Raleigh Innovation Summit, will take place on January 18th, 2012 to discuss ways to give the city’s startup scene a boost. Being that I’m not yet working again and I have experience with startups, I grabbed my camera and headed to the press conference, eager to hear more details.

The press has already done a good job covering the details, it turns out. Thus there’s not much I can add to this except a few thoughts after the fact.
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Still no luck using my Droid phone as a SIP client

Now that I understand why my Droid phone is using a panic-inducing IP address, I decided to try my hand again at getting the SIPdroid app to work with my home phone system.

My first try was to set my firewall rules to allow traffic from 28.x.x.x. The problem with this is that since the 28.x.x.x addresses aren’t advertised (and thus routable), my home server can get packets from them all day, but can’t send anything back. My ISPs routers don’t know what to do with them.
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DoD IP mystery solved!

A commenter’s tip has solved the mystery of why my phone’s voice traffic is coming from an IP address owned by the Department of Defense. By entering the code *#*#INFO#*#*, I was able to pull up a hidden menu which shows the rogue IP address as assigned to my phone.

The Department of Defense is squatting on a massive number of IPv4 addresses and is not using most of it. Phone networks like Sprint are borrowing these IP addresses because their networks are larger than the 16 million hosts that the 10.x.x.x network can provide.

It looks, as another MT.Net visitor theorized, like Sprint is assigning the (unused) DoD IP addresses internally to its phones and then NATting the traffic from the phones to the public IPs. Since SIP packets have an additional IP address embedded inside, Sprint’s firewalls aren’t NATting that IP and thus the ordinarily “private” IP address is getting through the NAT process.

Whew!

Addressing some theories about DoD snooping

Update Nov. 10: The mystery has been solved. Sprint’s borrowing DoD IP addresses, most likely without DOD’s knowledge. It appears to be entirely harmless.

A few of my friends have weighed in with their theories as to why I was seeing my phone traffic coming from a DoD network. Many of these theories point out how the DoD is the owner of vast stretches of IP address space, many of which aren’t advertised as public routes. Some organizations treat these addresses as non-routable addresses, making it appear traffic originates from the DoD. One blogger discovered the IPs of the UK Ministry of Defence being used similarly by T-Mobile.
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DoD IP address mysteriously unreachable

I decided to see if I could find out more about this mysterious IP address that apparently belongs to the Department of Defense.

One of the best ways to do this is to run a traceroute, which shows the path back to the IP through the Internet’s routers. I also wanted to see if I could find any evidence that my router or my ISP’s router was compromised or broken.

Performing a traceroute from my home computer to the IP provides me this output:

root@maestro:# traceroute 28.191.58.169
traceroute to 28.191.58.169 (28.191.58.169), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 wireless.tonsler (192.168.3.252) 0.971 ms 1.419 ms 1.634 ms
2 user-0c2h181.cable.mindspring.com (24.40.133.1) 14.064 ms 13.993 ms 24.788 ms
3 66.26.46.13 (66.26.46.13) 18.689 ms 18.942 ms 19.029 ms
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *

It’s not unusual that the traceroute dies on the way back: many hosts and/or networks go down and the packet trace stops. However, it is interesting that the traceroute dies on Time Warner’s network. That last router, 66.26.46.13, belongs to Road Runner:
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Why is the Defense Department snooping on my phone?

Update Nov 9 11:00 AM. Mystery solved! Sprint is apparently squatting on the DoD addresses, using them for their internal phone network. Sprint understandably wants to firewall these phones from the wild and wooly Internet, so it NATs the phone traffic from these supposedly-private IPs to the phone’s public IP address. SIP packets have the internal IP embedded in them, however, and aren’t easily NATted. This address slipped through Sprint’s firewall, causing me alarm (fortunately undue alarm!)

Break out your tinfoil hats because this will blow your mind.

I found something quite disturbing today while trying to get my Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V phone talking completely through Voice-Over-IP (VoIP). For reasons not entirely clear yet, I discovered that voice packets from my phone are being routed to an IP address belonging to the Department of Defense.

Some background

I had long been a “dumb phone” kind of guy when it comes to mobile phones but finally bit the bullet and got an Android phone from Virgin Mobile when the right plan came along. I am also a VoIP enthusiast and have been sending phone calls over the Internet for almost ten years now. I’m also a cheapskate, so naturally when I got my Android phone one of the first things I wanted to do was to figure out how to make calls with it completely over VoIP – using my unlimited data plan instead of burning my limited voice minutes. That’s what hackers do, you know.
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