After some googling I came across a blog entry (look for September 5, 2011) that describes a bug in bash: Bash, when calling “read” with a timeout, will install a signal handler for SIGALRM and longjump out of the signal handler, leaving SIGALRM blocked forever.

The boot-script runs as init (with pid 1) and therefore will leave SIGALRM blocked for all children. My immediate workaround is to read the filesystem to boot in a sub-shell…seems the bug is fixed with newer versions of bash.

• Skype reverse-engineered by Russian geek
• Efim Bushmanov: “Good products can’t stay proprietary for long”
• Russian Reverse Engineer Praises Skype

So we now have alle the pieces of the puzzle to start writing a plugin for Wireshark to give us a tool to further analyze the network traffic produced by Skype. Maybe an open source client is on the horizon now (there’s still a long way to go since we don’t know the binary formats used by the voice and video codecs in Skype, but maybe keyboard-chat is within reach now). Shameless Plug: If you have resources (money or time) to help writing a Wireshark plugin for Skype, please contact me, I’m trying to coordinate efforts in this direction.
That said, there are rumors that (one of) the Skype Certificate-Authority-Key (the Root key in a certificate chain) was leaked. Lets see what comes from this… leaking the key could make communications available to third parties or forge identities. But be aware that the makers of Skype probably already do have the mechanisms in place to listen into the contents of Skype traffic as was first hinted at by the Silver Needle in the Skype presentation and which I’ve mentioned in my talks on Skype (presentation material linked from my home page).
Looks like Microsoft has aquired a piece of software here that perfectly fits its security record so far — this could be helped by letting independent researchers look at the Skype protocol design, but may well uncover further problems down the road. We again see here that secrecy won’t help security in the long run, we may view this as a generalisation of Kerckhoffs’ Principle. Opening the procotol like speculated in the article Skype reverse-engineered by Russian geek is still a very unlikely move by Microsoft, in my view… but I would certainly welcome this.

Initramfs unpacking failed: junk in compressed archive

and later failed with a kernel panic

VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

Googling for the error message found a blog entry that indicated a missing LILO option “large-memory” — which wasn’t the problem in my case, the option was already present.
So I booted into GRML and installed grub2 instead of LILO. After a reboot, Grub2 ended up in rescue mode with the error message:

error: out of disk.
grub rescue>

I could display the partitions with ls and also get a listing from my root partition but trying to list other directories produces the “out of disk” error again:

grub rescue> ls
(hd0) (hd0,msdos1) (hd1) (hd2) (hd3)
...
grub rescue> ls (hd0,msdos1)/
./ ../ lost+found/ var/ etc/ media/ initrd.img usr/
...

grub rescue> ls (hd0,msdos1)/boot

error: out of disk.

So my diagnosis was that the BIOS of the Soekris box is unable to address the whole (in this case 60GB) harddisk. The install had only worked before because the kernel and the /boot directory where within the BIOS-accessible area on the disk. So there are still BIOSes out there that don’t support large harddisks — I didn’t find out until now what the limit of the Soekris BIOS is. The fix after this diagnosis was easy: Shrink the root filesystem using resize2fs, create a new root partition and copy the shrunken filesystem there, resize2fs to the new partition size. Create a new small /boot partition at the start of the disk and copy the contents of the old /boot directory there. Of course this is only possible with a working rescue system, my rescue system of choice is a GRML netboot setup which enables me to quickly boot any x86-based system that supports network boot.
Lesson learned: For small X86 embedded hardware it still makes sense to have a small /boot partition.

• Money and Dept: A Solution to the Global Crisis (2nd ed. 1990)
• New Money for Healthy Communities 1994
• Money — Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender 2001
• The End of Money and the Future of Civilization 2009

Tom then proceed to outline the history of money: It started out with barter exchange, the first form of money was commodity-money, various commodities like tobacco (cigarettes), flour or grain, nails and precious metals like silver and gold (highly valued in small amounts, portable, durable) served as money. What follows is symbolic money: the first bankers were goldsmiths depositing gold for their customers, the receipt from the bank about the deposit of gold served as a place-holder for the gold. When goldsmiths discovered that they could give receipts not only to people depositing gold, but also to people who came to borrow it, credit money (the 3rd form) was born. The last form is credit clearing where we keep only an account for each member and incoming money is added while outgoing money is subtracted. The main problem of credit is interest which exploits people.
Then a discussion where Franz Nahrada claimed that money is always an alienation ensued. Thomas explained that the farther the relationships among people are, the higher the need for money: In the family we don’t need (and don’t want) money. With a close neighbor we expect some reciprocity (we keep in mind if the other person is always taking). For dealing with people you don’t know we need some kind of formalized structure. But he agreed that a closer community relationship is a good goal. It was mentioned that experiences without money (where you lose your wallet and have to find your way without money for some time) can be a lasting positive experience, on the other hand money may cut through relationships…
In the discussion I asked about Toms view about demurrage, a negative interest rate on money. He answered that demurrage is an unnecessary “stamp scrip” (so called because some demurrage currencies use stamps that have to be bought and affixed to the banknotes) first introduced by Silvio Gesell and that it’s unfortunate that demurrage is the only one of his proposals that is generally remembered. Demurrage currencies where successful in a time where any kind of exchange medium would have been successful. The problem demurrage tries to solve, the prevention of hording (mainly of paper currencies) could be solved by reallocating excess money to (new) businesses. I noted that Gesell also had this in mind when he argues that when depositing excess money in a bank for re-lending, he proposes that there should be no demurrage. (I’m still not fully convinced that demurrage might not be a good tool at times) We agreed that a shortcoming of Gesell is that he can only envision a central banking system while Thomas recommends the separation of money and state (I also think this currently is our best option). There is also a blog post on demurrage by Tom.
During the discussion Tom remarked that due to the “Bubble and Bust Cycle” of our current money system, banks always have to find new ways to indept the people. When he studied, there were no student loans. This is a new idea that came up in the 60s. In the 90s we had the dot com bubble and the recent crisis in 2008 added a lot more dept to the private sector. He thinks we reached the end of the line, the dollar will probably be inflated out of existence. One of the outcomes of a hyper-inflation like Weimar in the 1920s is that the middle class gets wiped out. They still have savings but these won’t buy anything. Maybe the plan for after the inflation is a global currency. A question about the timeframe for these predicted events was answered that it’s hard to say, but China already has satisfied its appetite on US government bonds now buying gold. Maybe an America-wide new currency (Amero) or a global currency will be the plan. This would wipe out everyones savings and re-start the game, hopefully not everybody will go along with this.
In the later discussion I asked — when Tom had talked about the Government and the central banks cooperating — that up until now I had seen the private banking as the problem and the state more in the role of a victim. Tom replied that they are cooperating and that this cooperation was introduced in the early days of the Bank of England (when the king needed money for war). In a blog post When will the dollar die? Greco also outlines a facet of that cooperation: “National governments are unique in being able to play this role [of borrower of last resort] because of their collusive arrangement with the banking cartel.”
We also had some discussions on emerging trends, barter exchanges (which aren’t really barter in the original sense of the word). Tom said that if businesses are not involved early on in an alternative currency project, it is bound to fail. Barter exchanges that only involve retailers can work to a certain degree of circulation. But for a robust system, manufacturers, employess are needed to close the circle. Not all suppliers are within a region, so we have to get regions to cooperate. Mistakes that have been made by some local exchanges (which is detrimental to their own business and the whole “industry”) are:

• competition with members (taking the best things for themselves)
• too much credit for themselves (debasing their own currency)

Tom also mentioned Argentina during the discussion which had a strong social currency movement in the early 2000s with dozens of trade exchanges. The system (nearly) collapsed due to mis-managed, my question if this was induced by outsiders was answered that there were accusations of counterfeiting by the central government or other authorities but it is unclear if this is true. When he visited Argentina, there already was counterfeiting in some of the largest exchanges and they didn’t do anything about it. Now they have better safeguards.
The following links are taken from the discussions (no particular order, Tom is not affiliated with any of them as far a I know but knows some of the creators as “cooperatively minded entrepreneurs”), during the discussion I noted that we would need a common protocol among different barter and community currency enterprises, so that not everybody builds his own “walled garden” which was agreed… I’ve written about that problem before when writing about cloud computing.

• Cyclos, a system for manageing lets trading circles
• zacle.com an newly started web-based exchange (this takes ages to load for me with layers upon layers of javascript, that by default isn’t enabled when I surf with noscript, so not a site I’d ever use)
• poiu.com , another trading system
• community exchange network www.ces.org.za
• getsplus.com: a proprietary platform where a lot of money was invested, it’s a cashless trading platform which might eventually become open source
• virtualbarter.net an online barter exchange
• imsbarter.com one of the biggest US barter companies
• www.favors.org a social network by Sergio Lub
• www.livingdirectory.org one of the first social networks with 60.000 people worldwide participating, has levels “identified” (a real person), “sponsor” (trust someone to sponsor other people) and “networker” (full access to the system).

At the end we watched the short film The Essence of Money (4:13) that outlines how money works. In my opinion it’s also a good illustration how a distributed money system — where every player in the game can issue his/her own money — could work. With todays electronic systems we maybe can come up with a solution that is distributed: compare this to file-sharing systems that started out as centralized systems like Napster and evolved into distributed systems like Gnutella today. The film Money as Dept was recommended, there seems to be a sequel, the original seems to be available in several places on the net.

from socket import socket, SOCK_SEQPACKET, AF_UNIX, SOL_SOCKET
from struct import unpack
try :
    # Not implemented in python 2.6, maybe higher
    from socket import SO_PEERCRED
except ImportError :
    SO_PEERCRED = 17 # Linux
sock = socket (AF_UNIX, SOCK_SEQPACKET)
path = '/path/to/socket'
try :
    os.remove (path)
except OSError :
    pass
sock.bind (path)
conn, adr = self.sock.accept ()
ucred = conn.getsockopt (SOL_SOCKET, SO_PEERCRED, 12)
pid, uid, gid = unpack ('LLL', ucred)
if uid... check uid:
    error...
    conn.close ()

data = conn.recv (4096)

Code for client (python):

from socket import socket, SOCK_SEQPACKET, AF_UNIX
s = socket (AF_UNIX, SOCK_SEQPACKET)
s.connect ('path/to/socket')
s.send (.....)
s.close ()

def skype_crc (s, seed = 0xFFFFFFFF) :
    return (crc32 (s, seed ^ 0xFFFFFFFF)) ^ 0xFFFFFFFF

With this crc implementation I’m now able to also decrypt UDP (see updated code) packets. I’ve shown this some days ago at my talk @linuxwochenende, for slides see my events page.

• somebody who wants to blackmail others
• a willing victim to go into the trap

You have the choice: Only use a service which at least provides a way to get your data out. (To be fair, it seems Ning will be offering this according to the blog entry cited above, but the details are still unclear)
But: The data alone is nothing without the software. So you need a service where you can export the data and have open source software available to do something with the extracted data. But the first part is the crucial one: If you have only the data, software can be written…
I’ve written earlier in this blog (and talked @Manchester) about the problem of vendor lock-in in “cloud computing” which is almost the same as “web 2.0 services”, namely software as a service (SAAS). Ning falls into that category as do other social network services like facebook or Xing.
This boils down to what the open cloud initiative has defined as cloud computing openness: For open content you ideally want to go for a free cloud with open APIs, open formats, open source (software), and open data.
Note that facebook is no alternative to ning: People have been thrown off facebook for retrieving their data, cited in these two entries on Henry Story’s blog.
But the choice has to be made by customers (or non-paying users) of these services: Don’t use something where you lock in your data. Or your data might be at risk, or locked in, or dead.
Doc Searls, co-Author of Cluetrain Manifesto and Editor of Linux Journal has written about this in a blog entry called Silos End: “These problems cannot be solved by the companies themselves. Companies make silos. It’s as simple as that. Left to their own devices, that’s what they do. Over and over and over again.”
Ideally there would be a standardized service and hosters agree to use the same software (maybe customized in the appearance) to host services for users. A hosting standard for collaboration software. Starting with the services Facebook, Xing, etc. are offering today. We want an interchange format that everybody can use, export, import.
I think a standard for these types of services will leave us with a network of hosters. This — in comparison to the status quo today — will be a distributed system, maybe a peer-to-peer system, not some big players locking in users. A common standard will hopefully keep the players honest.
To get there: Lets try to evaluate replacement software for Ning. Work on interchange formats. A suitable format for contact information is the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) format endorsed by the W3C, this is part of the semantic web effort.
One software that comes close to this goal might be elgg — I’ve not tried it myself, but there is already a group of Elgg Service Providers which comes close to the goal of a support infrastructure built around an open source project.
I’ve two points of critique, one of them being more personal taste, the other related to the license. The first is that the software is in PHP. The license is the GNU General Public License which offers no protection against a service provider making own modifications to the hosted software and not releasing these modifications as open source software. Details are in my earlier article on the subject. So far, the team of elgg seems to play the game very open. The Source code with (yet) unrelease modifications to the software is freely accessible as a subversion software repository. Furthermore they offer nightly builds for download.
There are many other good points, too: It offers syndication with RSS and JSON, and has an API to interconnect with software running elsewhere — which are the basic ingredients for a distributed system. The API is Representational State Transfer (REST) that happens to be the same mechanism on which the semantic web can be built.
So lets take some steps in the direction of a system built on standardized components where no vendor can lock us in.
When we get there, we’ve left Web 2.0 behind. The future is a distributed system, lets call it Web 3.0.

Vor zwei Wochen habe ich endlich die Amateurfunkprüfung gemacht — ich wollte das eigentlich schon immer tun — und habe jetzt ein Rufzeichen für Österreich. Schon früher habe ich ein bisschen SWL (Kurzwellen-Hören) betrieben, inklusive digitaler Modi wie RTTY (Funkfernschreiben). Jetzt kann ich auch die Sendeseite ausprobieren… Danke an die Metafunk Gruppe im Metalab und an Mike, OE3MZC und Gerhard, OE3GSU für die Unterstützung unserer gemeinsame Vorbereitung.