Without a Traceroute

The Italian hackmeeting is really awesome. There’s a bunch of cool people, and the building is awesome. It was apparently built by some guy with mafia ties as a fancy house in the city, but was confiscated by the government before construction was complete. It sat empty for years, but now it’s a squatted social center. I only wish I spoke Italian, because it’s tough to follow the presentations.

Sadly, my computer is now totally dead. The hard drive had been behaving much better, lending further creedence to the loose-connection theory. However, today, it started freezing during bootup at the “Checking NVRAM…” stage of the POST. It’s completely unresponsive. Even more bizarre, if I try to enter the BIOS, it prompts for a password, and I’ve never set a BIOS password for this machine.

I’ve been in touch with tech support via email, and they claim there’s no easy way to reset the BIOS, no reset jumpers like on a desktop. The machine is still under warranty, so I’m hesitent to start tearing it apart and shorting EPROMs based on suggestions from the internet (or Italian hackers). Tech support keeps giving me variations of, “just bring it down to the store”, despite the fact that I’ve told them I’m traveling.

I’ll see if I can get them to pay for repairs at a computer shop here. Alternatively, I may wind up shipping it back the US for warranty service, and then just buying the cheapest thing I can find here, since I’ll be looking at a least a month round-trip. The ASUS eee PCs can be had for around €250, and they’re kind of trendy so I’m sure I could re-sell it easily if/when I got my machine back.

Ugh, super frustrating. If anyone has ideas or suggestions, I’m open.

OR When the Stormtroopers Are the Good Guys

Last Saturday in Budapest, there were at least three significant political demonstrations. The first was organized by the Hungarian Democratic Charter (HDC), theoretically a non-partisan group, but one that was founded by the Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, head of the Hungarian Socialist Party. It was a large, peaceful demonstration against extremism and fascism, and several thousand people showed up (one source I read said 4,500, which seems plausible after being there).

There were nice old people wearing red hats

Hey! It's the prime minister! (somebody pointed him out to me)

(more…)

I’ve actually got a bunch of stuff to write about. Unfortunately, my laptop’s hard drive seems to be in the process of dying a slow, painful death. It tends to flake out completely at inopportune times. During these “bad periods” the BIOS acts like it can’t even find any bootable media, but then it will randomly come back and work perfectly fine (minus some data corruption from improperly disconnecting without unmounting the drive).

If nothing else, these experiences have put the fear of God in me with regard to data backups and I’ve been burning CDs, uploading to servers and saving to flash drives like crazy during the good periods. The all-or-nothing nature of the issue leads me to suspect the problem might be as simple as a loose cable connecting the drive. I don’t have the necessary tools (a very small screwdriver, basically) with me to open up the computer and take a look, but I’m going to try to borrow one.

In the meantime, I did manage to download and burn a copy of the Ubuntu LiveCD, so at least I’ll be able to have a functional system, even without a hard drive. The worst/most annoying part about this is just not having any confidence in the hardware. It’s not fun playing roulette to see if your computer will work when you need it to. This goes for other pieces of tempremental, but vital equipment, too: cars that only start half the time, bikes that frequently get flat tires. In some ways, it would almost be better if they didn’t work at all. That way, you’d know where you stand.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of notes (mostly on paper) from the Budapest conference and the last couple of days, so I’ll try to get up to date when I get a chance. I’m flying to Palermo, Italy in a few hours for another hacker conference, but I’ve got a 10-hour layover in a small regional airport outside of Milan. I’m debating whether it’s worth going into town for lunch. Right now, I have to go pack.

So the data retention workshop was really cool and interesting. I’ll write more about it later, but I’m pretty tired right now. Most of the conference participants went out to dinner afterwards, at a fairly fancy restaurant. I didn’t have a lot of money, so I basically ordered the cheapest thing on the menu (some sort of cabbage and noodles dish, which wasn’t bad). Little did I realize that Central European University was picking up the tab. I should’ve gone to town! They also provided an excellent catered lunch for the conference, so kudos all around to CEU for being such fine hosts.

Anyway, because I’m lazy about writing right now, here’s some photos of the Széchenyi Baths I went to yesterday. It was a pretty neat experience, kind of like a cross between a public pool and a water park. One thing that isn’t very obvious from the photos was the fact that it was actually really cold out, but the water is extremely warm (25-40°C depending on which pool).

This might be the best photo I've taken

(more…)

My biggest impression so far is that the EU legal and bureaucratic apparatus is positively labyrinthine. I pity the poor internet service providers trying to make sense of ambiguous, poorly written directives. It seems like the EU imposed these requirements without much reflection and with only a very minimal amount of input from the public or members of industry.

The directives seem to be written with the mistaken idea that the ISP market looks like the mobile phone market, with only a few, large providers. Of course, if small ISPs are driven out by the costs of trying to comply with the directive, then that’s what the ISP market will look like.