December 17, 2007

Evangelists over-promise, under-deliver

Filed under: Two Minute Stories — @ 6:36 pm

You can’t complain about your computer in public without some jerk telling you that all of your problems will be solved by switching to a different platform. This weekend I was at a Christmas party, and of course at some point during the evening, the conversation shifted toward computers. It seems a few Mac people convinced one of the partygoers to buy a Mac after repeated insistence that OS X is the perfect platform, and that Apple hardware was so perfect that he’d never have to worry about computer problems again. As it turns out, things only got worse post-Mac.

“Everyone I knew had a Mac, they loved Macs,” he said to me over beer and hors d’oeuvres. This is not true; I know him, I do not have a Mac, and I would not recommend one to a PC user under any circumstances. Anyway, the story continued. “So I bought a Mac, and I really didn’t like it. I told the Mac people I knew that I really didn’t like my Mac, and they told me I just needed to get used to it. Well, I’m used to it and I still don’t like the interface, I still have trouble getting software to work correctly, and it locks up so much I can hardly use it.” His wife filled in some of the details, describing what amounts to the Beach Ball Of Death.

I am no evangelist, so aside from saying that I hate Macs, I won’t try to convince people not to use them, or to use Linux or BSD, or to stay away from Vista. I’ve learned over the years that if I make a heavy recommendation to switch platforms, the people who listen to me will then depend on me for all of their migration troubles. Also, I’ve found that arguing about computer operating systems is boring, pointless, and does not change anyone’s mind about anything. It’s easier to let people make their own mistakes and learn from them the hard way. Let the platform speak for itself. So I said to this guy, “It sounds like you have a software problem. I’d save all my data to a DVD or external hard drive and reinstall the operating system.”

Ah, but they’d considered that. They’d been in to the Apple store and asked “Geniuses” (or whatever Apple calls their technicians) about the problem and they said it was probably a bad hard drive. So I explained to this couple what the symptoms of a bad hard drive were, including the fact that hard drives usually fail over time and can be difficult to detect at first. But the guy replied that he’d already been on the phone with Apple support and ran a bunch of diagnostic tests that convinced the support person that it was not a bad hard drive.

“So I called up my Mac friends and asked if they could come over and help me fix this problem, and they said that I shouldn’t be having any problems because I’m using a Mac,” he said, frustrated. “Yes,” I replied, “It seems that a lot of evangelists, especially Apple evangelists, have trouble addressing reality. But if they convinced you to buy this computer, the least they could do is make an effort to help you with this.” He agreed, but they won’t help him — they won’t even accept the fact that the computer is malfunctioning.

Evangelism of any kind is a selfish, destructive thing. Evangelists work so passionately to get people to switch to a different way of thinking, behaving, or buying, but then they slip into the shadows when things get difficult. If you want to switch to a new computing environment, don’t listen to the people who rave about it. Instead, find a good support forum or mailing list and evaluate its level of knowledge and friendliness. Discover what the most common problems with this technology are, and determine whether or not you are willing and able to handle them. It’s that support community that will be there for you in your time of need, not the jerk at the office who convinced you that life would be more enjoyable if you and he shared the same technological preferences.

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December 7, 2007

Designing BSD Rootkits book review

Filed under: Tech Book Reviews — @ 12:55 am

Despite the topic the title implies, Designing BSD Rootkits is actually more of an introductory FreeBSD kernel developer’s guide than it is a text on operating system security. If you’re okay with that, it’s a decent — if somewhat short — book.

Writing analysis

My initial opinion of Designing BSD Rootkits was that it was inconsistent. The introduction states that the book is aimed at programmers who have an interest in FreeBSD kernel hacking, and that the goal is to enable readers to “theoretically” rewrite the entire FreeBSD operating system from scratch. The back cover says that the point is to teach people how to write and defend against rootkits, and to explore FreeBSD as a side-effect. Which is it? As it turns out, it’s really more of a method of teaching people how to change and develop FreeBSD through showing how it can be exploited. It’s an interesting concept that is not properly communicated through the title.

This is a short book, at 136 pages — and most of it is code samples or program output. Chapter 1 introduces readers to kernel modules and system calls; chapter 2 talks mostly about how to intercept system calls through call hooking; chapter 3 is about hiding processes and ports through hacking kernel objects; the four page long chapter 4 briefly covers kernel object hooking; chapter 5 outlines kernel memory patching; chapter 6 is about combining the previous 5 chapters’ information to produce a basic rootkit that will bypass host-based intrusion-detection systems, including an example that defeats Tripwire; chapter 7 closes the book by offering advice and tips on how to detect a running rootkit in FreeBSD.

In terms of writing quality, it’s hard to gauge Designing BSD Rootkits because there are so few words in it that aren’t code, results, or captions. What you can read in plain English is decently written and easy enough to understand, assuming you meet the technical prerequisites.

Putting the book to the test

This book will be way over your head if you’re not a competent, fluent C programmer. You don’t have to be familiar with FreeBSD, or even any BSD or Unix SVR4 derivative, but you do have to be able to write C code without having to think about it. Most of Designing BSD Rootkits is C code, not explanatory text, so you will get lost quickly if you can’t read and follow a C program.

Though this book focuses specifically on FreeBSD, most of its techniques (and all of its concepts) apply just as well to most other operating systems, including Windows. So if you’re inspired by the notion of learning kernel hacking through rootkit development, you don’t have to let its FreeBSD theme get in the way of your dream.

It would be difficult to write an actual rootkit using Designing BSD Rootkits because it doesn’t cover the most challenging hurdle of remote system cracking: Breaking into a computer and gaining root access for a meaningful length of time. The information included in this book will most definitely show you how to develop your own rootkit, but it also spends a chapter explaining how you as a programmer or sysadmin can detect a rootkit on your system, so it’s not entirely evil, if you’re of a mind to think that way about such books.

Conclusions

Designing BSD Rootkits is not a title appropriate to this book’s subject matter. It is as much a guide to theoretical rootkit development as it is an introductory text on developing the FreeBSD operating system. I don’t think I have seen any book that so quickly and effectively gets readers involved with FreeBSD kernel hacking. At the same time, I feel like I’ve been misled as to the book’s true subject matter.

I’m sure some less scrupulous programmers will use Designing FreeBSD Rootkits for nefarious purposes, but since the book does not contain substantial, working code samples, a malicious reader would need to have a great deal of skill in order to implement any of the techniques in this book. So don’t worry, FreeBSD admins — this book does not mean that you are in greater danger of remote attacks. It does mean, however, that you have an interesting way to get started with FreeBSD kernel programming, should you be interested in it.

Title	Designing BSD Rootkits
Publisher	No Starch Press
Author	Joseph Kong
ISBN	9781593271428
Pages	Paperback, 136 pages
Rating	out of 10
Tag line	An introduction to kernel hacking.
Price (retail)	U.S. $20. Buy it from Amazon.com

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December 5, 2007

Lessons learned from playing female characters in MMORPGs

Filed under: Articles — @ 10:36 pm

On my primary World of Warcraft (WoW) server, I have several high-level characters on the Alliance faction — all male. Every now and then I get sick of guild drama or the game’s snail-like progression through the high level armor and weapon set upgrades, and I head over to another server where I have some Horde characters. I think of this other server as my own personal Bizarro World, where I make totally different character choices than I would on my Alliance server. As such, most of my Horde characters are female — not for any other reason than wanting to make different choices so that I can see parts of the game that I’ve never seen before. That mission was easily accomplished; the entire social aspect of WoW is completely different between male and female characters. Here are a few of the things I’ve discovered about playing a female character in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

Traditional gender roles bleed into the virtual world

Among the World of Warcraft player classes that can be healers, players unanimously assume that if you are female, you are a healer. If you’re male, you’re generally assumed to be a tank (you take all the damage and focus enemy attacks on yourself) or DPS (an abbreviation for Damage Per Second, meaning you do most of the damage). There is a sense of surprise when you announce that you, a female paladin, are in fact a tank or DPS. Even after you’ve made that clear, you’ll probably still be expected to heal a 5-person group, even if there are male characters more qualified to heal than you are. People just tend to assume that a girl cannot do as much damage as a guy, and that your primary strengths as a female involve caring for others.

The good news is, if you actually are a healer, the male characters feel a much stronger urge to protect you from enemy attacks. This has an overall positive effect on group dynamics, because all 4 other players should protect the healer with their lives — it’s the healer that is keeping everyone from dying. One of the things that frustrates me about my main Alliance character — a healer-spec shaman — is that your teammates tend not to notice that you’re being attacked until you’re dead or you scream at them to protect you. My shaman is not only male, but kind of ugly too — nobody you’d want to impress, I suppose.

You can fit through doors

Some races are taller than others. Gnomes are the shortest and can fit through any door without any trouble. Draenei and Tauren are the tallest of the races, and can’t fit through some openings (like the stable side door in Arathi Basin). While on a mount, these races are even taller, and can’t fit through most doors in major cities, which forces you to dismount before you can go inside. Obviously this is annoying. Female Draenei and Tauren, however, are just a little bit shorter than their male counterparts, and can usually fit through the same doors that males cannot, while mounted. This may sound like a trivial problem, but to some people it is a really big deal — so much so that some people have vigorously petitioned the WoW developers to allow them to switch genders on their Draenei and Tauren characters.

You get free stuff

Just standing around in a major city, it’s quite possible that someone might walk up and give you something valuable. I was in the Silvermoon City auction house once, when a male character sent me a whisper asking if I liked 2-handed swords. Since I obviously had one equipped, it was more or less a rhetorical question. “Yeah, they’re okay,” I replied. The character responded by opening a trade window and giving me a good 2-handed sword close to my level, with a pretty decent enchantment on it.

Oddly, the character that gave me that sword did not seem to expect anything in return. He didn’t ask for payment, bother me with personal questions, or follow me around like a lost puppy.

In dungeons, if a female character asks to take particularly good loot, male characters won’t usually argue with her at all, even if they really want it for themselves.

Everyone wants to group with you

No I will *not* be your fairy princess, and put that back in its sheath…

Whether I’m looking for a 5-person dungeon group, or running around the outside world on quests, people are constantly inviting me to groups. At first I thought they were spammers, because group/party chat channels are a common way to send gold spam to players, so I usually declined the invitations. But then I’d get messages from the people who invited me asking me why I didn’t want to group with them for a certain quest or whatever else they were doing.

The positive side to this is that it’s much easier to do group quests. On my Alliance server, I have characters who have had group quests in their quest logs for months, unable to find other people who will help to complete them. On my female Horde characters, it’s never a problem to find help, as long as the other players can see me. In some cases, a female-sounding name is good enough to merit an invitation.

You are the center of attention

In party, raid, battleground, and guild chat channels, conversation always flows to and around the female members. People are always commenting on what you are or are not doing, or are telling you jokes, offering support, or asking if you need help. Being a female character in World of Warcraft is like being a D-list celebrity in the real world.

Of course, when you screw up, everyone sees it because you’re the center of attention. But since all of the male characters want to be on your good side, people rarely say anything other than words of support and encouragement. One time I was waiting for an auction delivery to go through in Undercity, so I thought it would be funny if, while I waited, I laid down in one of the coffins near the mailbox. A couple of male characters made a show of doing various mournful emotes at me as they came to the mailbox.

Being the center of attention can also make you feel a sense of guilt or shame, since being a male in real life, I am deceiving other players in the game. I’m not actually claiming to be female, though — it’s just a cartoon character in an online game — but I do generally allow other people to assume that I am who my toon looks like.

Nothing infuriates a man like a woman laughing at his ineptitude

I have a female Blood Elf hunter character that I really enjoy playing in player-vs-player (PvP) battlegrounds. As any WoW player knows, hunters absolutely destroy in battlegrounds. If you’re dominating the kill list as a female player, male players really get upset and tend to spend the rest of the match focusing on killing you. If you’re in a world PvP situation and you kill a male player and laugh at him, the gloves come off and the fury is truly unleashed.

Maybe this is part of the traditional male and female roles point I made above — that women aren’t supposed to do more damage or be more physically powerful than men. It might also be that the female Blood Elf laugh emote sound is unusually derisive and evokes an elevated emotional response in male players. No matter what the reason is, the fact of the matter is that most men get really pissed off when a woman laughs at them, even moreso if said woman has just beaten him in a video game.

Men are creepy

Most of the points I’ve made so far are generally positive things, at least from a female character’s frame of reference. But there’s a dark side, too. I’ve had several people ask me how old I am and where I live. A lot of male characters follow me around, and stand close to me when I stop moving, presumably so they can get a closer look at my toon. Some have even asked me if I would take my armor off (characters are equipped with bikini-style undergarments, so you can’t be totally naked, but you can certainly reveal more if you unequip your gear).

Isn’t there enough porn on the Web to satisfy these men? Furthermore, do they think I actually look like my character toon? I mean, all of the characters in WoW are smokin’ hot — even the rotting undead female characters are thin and have have nice boobs, even if there are green exposed rib bones below them. Reality says, however, that most women do not look like this in real life, no matter where you live. Not only am I male, but for all these online guys who hit on my toon know, I could be some fat, hairy, slob. Honestly, why risk it?

Boys are petulant

Recently I was in a 4-person group for Ragefire Chasm. Just as we were running toward the instance gate, a Tauren druid who had been waiting nearby sent me a whisper, asking if he could join my group. I wasn’t the group leader, so I told him to send a whisper to the leader to ask him. He repeated his question, and I clarified that I was not the group leader and could not add him. Guessing that he might be too young, stupid, or drunk to figure out what to do, I mentioned in the party chat channel that this druid wanted to join our group, so the leader invited him. We figured out our group roles based on level and spec; I was the designated tank because I had the most armor and hit points.

After 4 or 5 battles, the Tauren druid sent me a whisper. I can’t recall exactly what he said because at the time I did not understand what he was asking me — it didn’t make any sense, so I said, “What?” He replied by asking how old I was. When I did not reply (being a tank requires that you pay close attention to the fight), he told me that he was 16 and asked my age again. Over the next 15 minutes, he asked me my age several more times, all of which I did not reply to. At the same time, he kept attacking enemies when the rest of us weren’t ready, which caused the healer and I to work harder to keep him alive and get the attackers off of him. When we got to the first dungeon boss, I began re-issuing magic buffs for the other party members to prepare us for the battle, when suddenly, in true Leeroy Jenkins style, the druid went charging forward into the boss. “Stay back!” he exclaimed heroically, apparently trying to prove his worth by getting creamed by an elite monster. We leaped into action to save him, and ended up pulling through without any serious trouble. As we rested to regain our health and mana, our 16 year-old hero asked me one more time how old I was. This time I put him on my ignore list, figuring that he’d get the hint without a confrontation. Soon after, he left the party and logged out. All I saw were the other 3 party members asking what happened. I told them that he’d been repeatedly asking me my age, and because of that, I’d put him on ignore. The group healer told me that the druid left because he said he didn’t want to be in a party that hated him. We all had a good laugh about it, then easily finished the dungeon without him.

If any parents are reading this, please take my advice: Do not teach your children that being annoying and repeatedly making demands will get them what they want. Make “no” mean “no,” — not “no” meaning “ask me 50 times and I will give up and say yes just so you’ll stop bothering me.” The rest of us human beings, who are forced to interact with your unruly brat, will be ever grateful.

Is being female right for you?

I’m sure I’ve made female MMORPG characters sound like a good option to you, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Your guy friends will certainly tease you about it, for one. And for every free item you get and group you find, some high school boy or creepy old man annoys or bothers you about personal details. I have not yet had a real-life female unload a bunch of girl talk on me yet, but I’m sure that given enough time, it will happen. And what will I do when I get to the maximum level and am more or less forced to use voice chat to participate in raids? I guess I’ll have to come clean about my gender at some point, if I’m going to raid with a guild. It’s not that big a deal, though — I’ve played the game with a lot of guys who had female characters, and nobody really cares so long as you don’t try to role-play a different gender. After all, you are not an Orc, Tauren, Troll, Draenei, Undead, Elf, Gnome, or Dwarf anyway, so in essence you’re already creating a character that is clearly not representative of your real life appearance and persona. If you’re going to choose a different race, why is it such a stretch to choose a different gender? Creating a female character when you’re male in real life doesn’t mean you’re confused about your gender or sexuality any more than creating an Orc means that you’re confused about your race.

Playing a girl character in a computer role-playing game is not remotely a new concept; Roberta Williams thought of it back in the 1980s when she developed King’s Quest 4: The Perils of Rosella. In a brief incarnation of the first Warcraft-like MMORPG, Quest For Glory V Online, one of the three character choices was Elsa von Spielberg, a female warrior (that game never made it out of beta; it’s a shame, considering how World of Warcraft-like it was, and predating the latter by several years). The majority of the Final Fantasy games have had main characters who were female.

World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs are not virtual hook-up services — they’re not Second Life — they’re adventure games. The point of playing is to virtually destroy the virtual forces of evil, not to find virtual love with someone you’ve never met. At the core of the issue, this really is just an online game and it should have no bearing on your real life activity, so roll whatever character race, class, and gender you think will be the most fun to play.

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December 4, 2007

Bluetooth is still hangin’ in there

Filed under: Two Minute Stories — @ 11:01 pm

I’m working on some laptop mouse reviews, and I found myself expressing a degree of surprise in discovering that Bluetooth mice still exist. Not only do they still exist, but they’re growing in capability (this laptop mouse can switch between conventional 2.4Ghz and Bluetooth wireless technologies) and popularity, and prices are coming down. It would take too long to figure out exactly how long ago Bluetooth peripherals made their debut (mid-2000?), but I know I’ve been seeing Bluetooth mice and keyboards for at least a few years. I never expected it to last this long.

To me, Bluetooth means “expensive and unsupported.” Expensive because Bluetooth peripherals don’t just cost more than their standard wireless counterparts — they cost a lot more, sometimes by a factor of two. At one point both Microsoft and Logitech had wireless keyboard and mouse desktop sets that retailed for roughly twice the price of the same products with standard wireless RF technology. Outside of special-case scenarios where there are a number of wireless devices on the same frequency (such as an office with many computers), I could not figure out why anyone would opt for the Bluetooth edition of the desktop keyboard and mouse set. I say Bluetooth means “unsupported” because no desktop computers and a tiny number of laptop computers have Bluetooth transceivers built in. You can of course get a PCI card or USB dongle to add Bluetooth capabilities, but that only adds to the cost of using the Bluetooth peripherals you bought.

When Bluetooth first hit the market, I remember reading commentary from technology analysts predicting that it would completely replace all corded computer peripherals — mice, keyboards, printers, and anything else that connects to computers — within a short period of time. So revolutionary was this secure, low-power, long-range wireless technology that it was going to change the way we arranged physical computing environments. The funny thing about outlandish predictions is that they never come true. The only aspect of Bluetooth’s history that surprises me is that it hasn’t yet been replaced by something more inexpensively implemented.

Nowadays, most people are familiar with Bluetooth because of wireless headsets for cell phones. That is, after all, the market that Bluetooth was designed in and for. I’ve thought for quite a while that Bluetooth’s moonlight career in computer peripherals is coming to an end — if it ever had much of a beginning — but now I’m seeing a new generation of portable computer peripherals (mice, mostly) that are Bluetooth-capable. I think perhaps this says more about the evolution of cell phones as computers than it does about the need for laptop mice, though.

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December 3, 2007

Hundreds of bookmarks represent tough-to-find information

Filed under: Two Minute Stories — @ 7:09 pm

I have about 400 bookmarks between Opera and Firefox on my workstation and laptop computers. Every once in a while I sort through them to remove dead entries and figure out if I still need to keep some of them. Despite my efforts, I usually end up deleting very few bookmarks. I’ve been trying to analyze why this is; for some reason I have an emotional attachment to links, some of them on pages that I have not fully read, some of them on pages that have information I can’t use. Some of them are even on sites I don’t particularly like.

So I thought really hard about why I have so many bookmarks, and it boils down to the fact that I am using bookmarked links to solve two problems: Finding unique and useful information in a Google search, and finding things that I didn’t know I wanted. These things are difficult to do. For instance, I found out last year that I occasionally suffer from sleep apnea. The standard medical cure for this is to wear a Darth Vader mask hooked up to a water vapor air pump when you go to sleep, which you do for the rest of your life. An unfortunate side effect is that you wake up saying things like, “There will be no one to stop us this time!” and “You may dispense with the pleasantries, Commander, I’m here to get you back on schedule.”

In all seriousness, from my frame of reference, this solution does not address the problem. The problem is that I’m not breathing correctly when I sleep, but the sleep doctors tend to assume that the problem is that I was born without a breathing machine to hook up to at night. If I buy a machine, I’m cured for as long as I use it. Imagine how miserable vacations would be without it. Naturally, my reaction was to hit Google to determine if there are alternative treatments, and to see if I could read some stories from people who have dealt with this problem before.

I spent several hours reading through the same information over and over again on different sites, all of which were at the top of the Google results. Little of the information was conclusive, which is another way of saying it was useless. The best information came from two sites, which I’ve bookmarked: this article on a preliminary medical study, and several message threads on the Apnea Support forum. Both of these led me to develop my own cure for sleep apnea, and so far it is working rather well.

There are many such bookmarks in my collection — sites that I’m worried I’ll never find again, and may need to consult later. The IBM Lotus Symphony page, which is not navigable from www.ibm.com as far as I can tell, is a perfect example. So is this Google video capture of The Century of the Self. Since I’m doomed to forget the title of that documentary, I’ll never find it again unless I bookmark it.

The other aspect of bookmarking is finding things I don’t think I’ll be able to find again — in many cases, things I did not know I wanted to find. There’s this site that makes custom teddy bears, and a collection of Leisure Suit Larry music remixes, to name two. Until I found them, I didn’t know I wanted to bookmark them.

So the list is 400 and growing, with no end in sight. Perhaps if there were less clutter on the Web, I wouldn’t need to pack so many links into a single menu in my Web browser.

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