Follow-Up

There are 521 posts filed in Follow-Up (this is page 35 of 53).

American Censorship Day pop-up

If you’d like to add your own anti-SOPA pop-up to your blog, simply add this text somewhere on your website:

script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://americancensorship.org/js”>/script

You’ll want to enclose the above “script” and “/script” in angle brackets, of course.

On my WordPress setup, I put this into a text widget and added it to my sidebar. Your Mileage May Vary.

Thanks for spreading the word!

The Virginia Company

As word came in today of the “eviction” of the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, I thought about our weekend visit to Williamsburg and Jamestown.

As a kid, the story told in my history lessons was that the Pilgrims came to America for its freedom. What this weekend’s visit to the Jamestown Settlement Museum reminded me of was that the first (European) settlers in America – the Jamestown settlers of 1607 – weren’t seeking freedom at all but riches. Those settlers weren’t seeking to establish a government, colony, or society but a company: the Virginia Company. America’s government was a business.

The other interesting thing was the tour of the historic gaol (jail) in Colonial Williamsburg. The cells housing prisoners were all spartan and exposed to the elements, except for the cell for debtors. The debtors’ cell was the only one that had a fireplace. Financial crimes weren’t considered as serious as robbery or other crimes.

Not a lot has changed in four hundred years, has it?

NCDOT to award graffiti-removal contract

Graffiti on the Beltline

I found more graffiti on the I-440 Raleigh Beltline last week and that sent me Googling for how to get it removed. Seems a Google search on the terms “NCDOT graffiti” returns MT.Net as the third result. In other words, there aren’t a lot of resources for graffiti removal.

The good news is that NCDOT is getting serious about graffiti removal. It has a contract out for bid right now for graffiti-removal services for Durham and Wake counties.
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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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Daylight complaint-saving time

I managed to make it through the whole day yesterday without my usual twice-yearly rant about daylight saving time. The truth is that Kelly and I completely forgot about DST ending and woke up thinking it was later than it actually was. Other than resetting far too many clocks it was a smooth transition for us.

Since I’ve blogged before about DST’s dubious benefits, I came across an interesting National Geographic look at DST. Some excerpts:

Likewise, Matthew Kotchen, an economist at the University of California, saw in Indiana a situation ripe for study.
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The 100 Up Exercise

Here’s more on the 100 Up running exercise that the New York Times Magazine discussed. The video below is helpful to see what the proper technique is.

The 100 Up exercise, which McDougall is touting as a surefire technique for training away these bad habits, is actually an incredibly old invention of a long dead English chemist apprentice. Since he was English, in this case being a chemist probably refers to a pharmacist. W.S. George developed his exercise pattern so that he could train for running even while busy at work all day. The technique was apparently quite successful, as George went on to achieve world record times in several short and middle distance races.

via The 100 Up Exercise: Method for Training Barefoot Running Form | Naturally Engineered.