New low consumption Atom devices

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Not really a news, but an interesting update on two new devices sold since march 4th, Atom family have, at least, two new Core, the first one is the N2650, the second one the N2850, they are two dual core, 4 thread CPU for netbook with a really low TDP.

The N2850 offers a 2GHz system with a 10W TDP, the N2650 offers a 1.7GHz system with a 3.6W TDP.

This has to be compared with my current reference (making no sens for you … but …) the D525 offering 1.8GHz for 13W. More over the IGP has been push from 400MHz to 640MHz on the N2850.

This configuration sound really interesting to build small and fanless machine… now we need to see the first box including these chips.

See Atom family on wikipedia : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom

Why behind concept PirateBox is just an experiment ?

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After a couple of days hacking PirateBox based on MR3020 i’m really happy to give this concept life, but behind the announcements like “share freely for less than 40€ with your neighborhood” the reality differs.

The first main thing is that 40€ is the price, port excluded to get the MR3020 router, then you must add a storage (25€ for 16GB), add a battery if you want to be mobile (50-100€). Which made a big difference as it becomes quite as expensive as a tablet PC where you can install the software and be mobile with higher storage, higher mobility and much more capabilities.  So, no magic around this.

Ok, i’ll tell me you can reuse an old external hard drive and not being mobile, just switching it up at home… and you’re right, this is a good capability for a reasonable price. But, once again, you’ll have to deal with the low Wifi power offer by this low cost router. I mean you’ll be able to exchange with your direct neighborhood : the one you cross daily in the stairs. Why not, it sounds good …

That last argument I also would like to share to finish to be a party killer, is about the Hadopi stuff and piracy freedom feeling…. Are you mad guys ? As much as I know, getting address of pirate is not so easy when you are downloading on Internet, even if it has been simplified, you’re one on million and the chance to be kept is small, then you will be identified more as a consumer  than a provider. To identify the owner of the PirateBox is is quite easy by triangulation, then you just need to request a judge to get the needed paper to catch a provider..

In my opinion, PirateBox has to be mobile to not being kept or need to not be owned and hosted on public domain and sourced on solar power. (Like the USB Stick embedded in walls, but for more money) Which would be a great and interesting thing but requires investment.

For all these reasons, I love the idea, I like the product in a technological point of view, interesting and easy hack, but I do not consider it as something really ready for mass. It’s hype, it’s geek, not consumers.

Jar file preloading before a go-live

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Sometimes, when you go live an application handling a big applet you could have not network problem as if all the user try to get the associated Jar files in parallel this could saturate your network and impact your go-live.

One of the solution is to pre-load these JAR files into the browser of each user. Unfortunately is sound not possible to copy the files into a specific directory to do it : the Jar files must be loaded for the server.

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How to improve PirateBox ?

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PirateBox is an interesting concept, but it had a lot of limitations based on the fact that the distance covered by a wifi connection is really limited. The mobile devices, able to cover a larger distance also have limitation due to the time needed to transfer any content.

In fact, you can’t imagine to grab content from someone you cross on the street because you might be out of signal before finished to transfer your file. More over due to the actual memory size of the portable devices you can’t imagine to share a lot of stuff on it.

So the idea is great, and the future could change all what I just said. But, today, the reality is that this system is not really usable as a real anonymous and unlimited sharing system.

To improve the system, I would imagine a network of PirateBox, this idea requires to have a larger number of devices but it would allow to share a large amount of data even on restricted memory cards. The idea is that each PirateBox would have a second wifi adapter to connect to another PirateBox. To get the list of its files and share it across this point to point connection. As each of the Piratebox is connecting to a second one we could imagine to build, dynamically a large piratebox network.

The file requests and data transfers would goes from a point to another point without keeping trace of these transfer out of the point to point exchange.

I assume there are some interesting research around this idea as the system has to build a dynamic network, avoiding cycles and optimizing the communications to make the network larger as possible, using a non centralized system to manage all of this.

Anyone to start developing a such stuff ?

PirateBox creation based on TP-Link MR3020

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Some days ago I bought a TpLink MR3020 with the objective to create a pirate box and experience this kind of solution. I already tried to do a stuff like this some month ago based on a netgear wifi router having the capability of sharing usb storage. But the system was not easily portable and not extensible.

The proposed solution, based on this low cost router is an interesting opportunity to made the solution mobile.

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UTF-8 email, body and title encoding

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When sending an email with an application or sendmail, using an UTF-8 encoding, some attributes must be given if you expect the email to be displayed correctly by the reader.

To start, to get the right display in the body of the email, you need to specify the encoding in the header fields by adding :

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" 
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

The subject is not proceed using this attribute and it must be written in a different way to be interpreted correctly:

Subject: =?utf-8?Q?éssai=20de=20sujet?=

Here, the “?utf-8?Q?” indicates what encoding to be used in the tittle, then it is followed by the title itsleft “Q” indicates that the title is in plain text. The limit of this is that the title can’t contain space, tabs or ? without being escaped firstly. The Title is ended by termination sequence “?=”

The other solution to manage title more easily is to use a base64 encoding with the “B” encoding type instead of “Q”

Subject: =?utf-8?B?base64EncodedTitle?=

This way is more easy to encode if your system handle a base64 encoding function.

Hadopi, pourquoi la sécurisation est une fausse piste

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Un appel à expérimentation vient d’être publié par  l’Hadopi  concernant les logiciels de sécurisation, arlésienne que le texte prévoit dès l’origine mais qui depuis plus de deux ans ne débouche sur rien. Cet appel est une sorte de demi aveux d’échec d’une idée politique qui comme je l’ai déjà  évoqué ne repose sur aucun fondement technique.

Un premier projet envisageait de mettre le module au sein de la box, comme je l’envisageait dans mon article de 2009, solution que je ne jugeai pas faisable pour des raisons de couts et de standardisation, d’une part, mais aussi de par le fait qu’elle ne prouve aucunement de l’innocence de qui que ce soit dans la majeure partie des cas. Le nouveau projet envisage donc l’utilisation de composant interne au réseau, distribué sous forme d’un logiciel à installé. Voila en gros le cahier des charges de l’Hadopi en manque d’idées.

Voici maintenant en quoi il ne sera jamais possible de prétendre de l’innocence ou de la culpabilité d’un personne avec un tel produits, ni même, ce qui pourrait être acceptable, de la bonne foi du prévenu :

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FreeNas and OpenFiler experimentation

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/!\ Article in progress, not yet finish /!\

As I needed to create a iSCSI share for some VM on a private subnetwork, instead of using a simple NFS server configuration, I was looking to test a NAS distribution. I saw on Internet two different distributions, one based on OpenBSD named FreeNas (here in version 8), the other based on Linux OpenFiler (here in version 2.99). I will test both for creating this share.

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