My Cloudbook seems to have giving up on being fully functional, and no apparent reason can be visually inspected (ie: scorch marks etc). My theory is that the Cloudbook got overheated while stored in my backpack, so the damage should be localized (probably to the mother board, if not to a specific chip).

So I have now a Cloudbook only useful for parts, and as far as I can tell most of the components should still be working. Would you be interesting of taking it off my hand for a small fee + shipping? Please drop me an email or leave a comment.

To be frank I am not devastated by the loss of the Cloudbook. It was a fun machine to toy with, but compared to the EEE 701 or EEE 900 it lose out. 30 Gb HDD is nice, but the speed of it made it terrible to use (compared to the Asus EEE line of UMPCs).

Now I standing to make a choice of getting a new UMPC, or any other interesting computer, or bide my time and wait for the next generation. Got any feedback to share? Do leave a comment.

This morning when I tried to boot my Cloudbook I was greeting with a lit CAPSLOCK led and no other response from the machine. At work I tried to boot it again, this time plugged in to the charger with the same effect except this time I also noted that the fan wasn’t spinning.

So the plan for tonight / this weekend is to take the Cloudbook apart and see what’s wrong with it and what can be done to fix it (if anything).

On the 18^th June the Swedish parliament voted “yes” to a law (FRA Lagen) that gives Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (Fösvarets Radio Anstalt, FRA) right to monitor all traffic passing the Swedish border to “secure national interests” as it is called. Later the news came out that 80% of Russia’s internet traffic passes Swedish borders as it is one of the major hubs in Europe, and according to the reports that’s why FRA wants to have this ability (legally).

I do not care if Osama Bin Laden himself sends email though Swedish carriers, I still thinks it is too much power given to a state or military agency, power which will be very difficult to remove if the political climate changes.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, wrote about the proposal in may 2007:

“By introducing these new measures, the Swedish government is following the examples set by governments ranging from China and Saudi Arabia to the US government’s widely criticised eavesdropping programme. Do Swedish citizens really want their country to have the most aggressive government surveillance laws in Europe?”

Actually, we didn’t but the parlament voted against public opinion and in contridiction of the Swedish constitution and the Human Rights. The international response has been very unfavorable, and many jobs can be lost due to companies withdraw their IT investments from the country.

Sweden is priding itself to be a democratic country with freedom of speech, freedom of the press etc, yet the government more and more acts like the Peoples Republic of China or old USSR. So at the same time we think that what is happening in China is outrageus, we are playing the same game. I am not sure who I will vote for in the next election, but it won’t be for anyone of the current assholes ruling assembly of parties.

Now I read in the news that US Senate passes a similar bill, like the US PATRIOT Act isn’t enough. And warrantless searches, something that is against the 4^th admendment of the US Consitution, has been upheld by a recent ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that basically upheld the right of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials to search laptops and other electronic devices at U.S. borders without reasonable cause or suspicion. And all this from the “land of the free“. Someone needs to read the consitution to the people in power, because somewhere on the path they forgot what they were fighting for.

I would like to attend DefCon or ShmooCon next year, but with the current political environment I don’t think I will take the risk of having my person or property violated.

Due to these recent events I have started tunneling all my traffic through TOR (and I advice you to do the same). I also encrypt my data (when possible), both when it is at rest and when it is in transit by using Full Disk Encryption like TrueCrypt and using VPNs, and you should do this too as a matter of habbit as they are targeting you no matter if you are “innocent” or “guilty” (something that can change in a heartbeat).

I just finished watching Johnny Long’s “No Tech Hacking” presentation from DefCon 15, and seems to be inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s presentation style.

Johnny starts off by plugging his “Hackers For Charity” movement, which I find very commendable and highly recommend and is a good start if you need some references. Anyway, back to the presentation content.

Johnny goes through showing photos of cars, asking the audience questions about the car owner (exercising your mind, and very interactive). Then he covers badges, shoulder surfing and dumpster diving. To summarize, it’s an hour of your time well spent.

Now when I am back in Sweden I keep switching back and forth between Swedish and English keyboard layout, which is very inefficient and time consuming, and all of this because the Swedish alphabet has 3 extra characters (åäö). It all started out when I was looking for a way to switch keyboard layout on my EEE 900 laptop.

The standard (simple) GUI didn´t seem to have a way to switch between different western keyboard layouts, but then I came across this post on the EEE User Forum and I could launch the KDE Control panel application. At first I just added the Swedish keyboard layout and got a icon in the systray area to switch between the layouts, but then I continued reading and learned about the English International keyboard layout and it was like haven. Now I can easily access the Swedish characters åäö by pressing right alt + W, Q and P respectively.

Now I am off to update the keyboard layout on all of my computers.

I have had my Cloudbook for about 2 weeks now, and it has worked out pretty well. gOS was quickly replaced with Ubuntu and Windows XP, because frankly the gOS sucks big time. I haven’t finished tweaking it, and hardware mods have been put on hold for the time being as all the equipment is still being shipped to Sweden.

The verdict? So far Windows XP out-performs Ubuntu, mainly because I haven’t got Ubuntu to use the VIA graphics drivers and is still using the non-optimized VESA graphics drivers. In effect that means that video playback works in Windows XP, but not in Ubuntu. If you got a working xorg.conf for Cloudbook using the VIA drivers please send it to me (and if you can make it run at 1000×600 I would be very happy).

The Windows XP installation has been tweaked according to Black Viper’s OS Guides, except that I still have Windows Wireless Zero Config running (because I connect to a lot of different public hotspots).

The Ubuntu 8.04 installation didn’t go without problems. It seems that at least the Desktop (live) installation CD has problem detecting and loading the drivers for the IDE controller and generating a working xorg.conf file. After manually loading the IDE drivers and generating a xorg.conf that works the installation is pretty painless. The Ubuntu installation on the Cloudbook needs to be documented more in-depth.

I used a lot of the EEE optimizing tips for the Ubuntu installation, and the guides works out surprisingly well. EEE users wants to minimize writes to the SSD because it will wear out, while as a Cloudbook user I want to minimize disk access because frankly, the 30Gb hard drive in the Cloudbook won’t be setting any speed records. I also used the output and tips from PowerTOP a lot to optimize system resource usage.

Currently I have partitioned my drive as follows:

• 7 Gb Windows XP
• 7 Gb Ubuntu
• 7 Gb gOS (to compare it to the standard Ubuntu installation)
• 1 Gb Swap (used by both Linux installations)
• 6 Gb Data partition, to transfer files between the different systems

I will soon remove the gOS partition and make the Data partition larger (using the gparted software). I have a long way to go with my Cloudbook project, but so far it is looking good.

I’ve noticed that more and more magazine shops have started to carry “hacking” magazines like 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and today I saw Hakin9 2/2008 at Sim Lim Square (and of course I bought myself a copy - I’ll let you know what I think of it once I’ve got to read it, but the table of contents looks really interesting).

The interesting thing is that magazine retailers are starting to carry more and more of these magazines, which is a change considering the country which I speak of. When I came here in 1999 with a copy of 2600, which I bought in Sweden before I left, the reaction was quite interesting. Based on the reaction from my then colleges having a copy of 2600 was like having a copy of Playboy or any other contraband. Needless to say, I kept that copy carefully before I read it so much it fall apart and I had to throw it away.

But the story here is that finally there are some hard copy material to read for the security minded person in Singapore, and in my opinion it is a very good thing - we are living in a globalized world and we compete with not only security professionals in the same country, but security professionals all over the world. Providing the same ability to learn as the other countries have increases the skills of our security professionals.

Personally I think Singapore IT security professionals are lacking, both in numbers and in skills. It is hard to find some really hardcore security geek in Singapore, but I have started the Singapore Security Meetup Group to both provide an meeting point for already established security professionals as well as a platform to guide and mentor future security professionals. We meet every 2^nd Thursday of the month. Check the website for more details.

I’ve been starting to record some screencasts, and this is what I used on the Microsoft Windows platform:

CamStudio was used to capture the actual area of interest. It can record the screen either to a avi or swf file, where I always go for the avi format as it is easier to deal with at post production.

For post-production I am using VirtualDub, where I put in my logo as a “watermark” in the image as well as trim out any unwanted parts of the recording (typing errors, getting things in the right position to begin with etc.) as well as changing the frame rate and co lour depth. Once done I save it again to a AVI file (using both Xvid and the CamStudio Lossless codec).

For putting stuff on the web I was searching high and low for something that could convert my avi file to a flv file, hopefully without spending any money. CamStudio already comes with a converter that can create a flash (swf) file with built-in player, but I have already got a flv player on the site and want to keep things consistent. Then I stumbled upon a post in a forum that pointed out that ffmpeg could do the conversion for me, and I quickly downloaded the sources from SVN and compiled it under Cygwin. A few minutes later I had created my first screencast, and started tweaking the parameters for optimal output.

What I’ve got so far is a sound-less clip. My next step is to start recording some voice-overs with Audacity and combine that with the recorded video in VirtualDub to produce the final product.

For the Linux side of things it should be basically be much the same stuff, but I have not explored that part yet. However, many of the tools used either originates from the Linux side, or have a Linux port. For the tools that doesn’t a replacement needs to be located.

Today I did something new: I gave a 90 minute presentation using only 8 slides without a single word written on them - basically a bunch of pictures only - and it worked out well. The Beyond Bullet Points and Presentation Zen reading seems to have been paying off.

I am wondering if I should upload it on my website or not. To keep a complete record of my presentations I should upload it, but considering the lack of content in the slides I am not sure how useful they would be… Unless I record some voice over. I didn’t record the presentation itself so there is no live audio to put it to. I need to sort out some equipment that allows me to record that stuff live, does anyone have a good (but cheap) clip-on microphone to recommend? If so please leave a comment.

Please leave a comment if you think I should upload the slides (or not). And if you attended the talk, please give me some feedback on the presentation content and style. Thanks.

I got tired of providing free advertisement to the laptop hardware vendor where ever I go and decided to do something about it using custom laptop skins (instead of doing something drastic like re-painting your laptop). Sure, you can use a off-the-shelf laptop skin but it isn’t unique and sometimes it’s hard to find a skin that actually communicates your view of the world and you end up with something generic.

So what I ended up with was a couple of custom laptop skins, and all was good. So good actually so that people started to ask me where I got the skin and how they could get one as well. So I’ve started offering custom laptop skins to anyone who wants one, delivering worldwide with PayPal handling the payments.

Please drop me an email at cls@michaelboman.org if you are interested or have any questions.