Monthly Archive for December, 2006

Christmas comes early, thanks to Fon

wstryder December 15, 2006 2 Comments

La FoneraThis is old news, but Fon gives out free wireless routers (Finnish) to all Finns who request one before 24.12.2006. The La Fonera is “free” as in “free beer” – you don’t need to pay a single nickel or a penny for it. Nope, not even for the delivery. It comes hand-delivered to your front door and they also bring you a bouquet of flowers with it! OK, well they don’t bring you any flowers, but it is totally free (as in beer). I ordered mine just before December and got it last week.

The deal is that you have to share your WiFi connection with other registered users. That’s pretty cool, because if there are a lot of Foneros out there, then you have a good chance of using a Fon connection for free when you travel. You can use maps.fon.com to check out Foneros closest to your location. Tech.am has some “real statistics” of Foneros worldwide, claiming that Fon isn’t actually as widespread as they let you believe. Well I don’t care if there aren’t any Fon hotspots in Bangkok or Cathmandu, there are some in Helsinki and that’ll be enough for me.

The La Fonera is “free” as in “free beer for a limited time only”, but how “free” is it as in “freedom of speech”? (See “Gratis versus Libre” if you are still confused.) The La Fonera wireless router uses the open source OpenWrt firmware for embedded devices. It’s nice to know that my Fonera router is running open source software. If I want to, I can download the source code for OpenWrt, hack it, share my hacks with others, and install it in some other device. The Fonera router is therefore “sort of free” – but it’s not free for you to hack and do whatever you want with it. It’s like a piece of free software locked up in a cage. Anton Demartini writes:

“What I mean is that perhaps, leaving la fonera open, and freeing the possibility for anybody with skills to reflash it, to enhance it and, why not, to correct bugs along you, could be a great benefit also for FON business.”

I completely agree. It would be much smarter If I could just use my hardware of choice, install more features on the router and provide a better service for the Foneros that connect to my WiFi. It would be possible to create a free wireless network similar to Fon, which is open for all registered users, but gives the users more flexibility with their hardware and software.

The bottom line is, I got a free router from these guys and I get to use WiFi for free when I travel, so I should not complain. However, I do suffer from the “free all software” syndrome. I just hate to have a piece of free software on my device, which I cannot use as I like. Thankfully, there are some solutions. Jauzsi explains how to open up the device and attach a connecter to allow ssh on the device. As far as I know Stefan Datenbruch was the first to use shell code injection to free the device. The exploited weakness has been fixed by Fon, so that hack doesn’t work anymore, but it worked as inspiration for this hack, which works like a charm. Follow the hack and then just SSH to your La Fonera, enter password “admin” and behold:

Fonera root

Next it’s up to you what you do with your unlocked Fonera. If I come up with any hacks of my own, I’ll be sure to post them here.

Update: There’s now a third hack for firmware version 0.7.1 r1. If you’re feeling especially white and nerdy today, check out gelPlog’s instructions on how to recover a bricked Fonera.

1:07 pm Tags: , , .

Sony viral marketing bs like.no.other

wstryder December 13, 2006 0 Comments

Sony’s alliwantforxmasisapsp.com is the most pathetic attempt at viral marketing I have ever seen. It’s so blatantly fake that you just feel sorry for these guys. Some say there is no bad press, but this isn’t true if you’re trying to create a cool and hip image for your product. The deal is, if your astroturfers suck big time, your brand image will suffer too.

Why is it that everybody loves hating Sony? There has to be some sinister-twisted-evil-conspiracy behind all of this that we’ve yet to figure out, otherwise it just doesn’t make any sense.

Update: Sony now admits that their campaign sucked:

“Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn’t a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP.”

11:38 am Tags: , .

Receive postcards from all over the world!

wstryder December 6, 2006 0 Comments

StampsDo you enjoy receiving snail mail? That’s real mail, with like stamps and all. I sent my first postcrossing postcards yesterday. Soon I should get more postcards back from random locations around the world. Sounds like fun? Just register online, send a few postcards and get more postcards back. Here’s my profile – haven’t actually received any postcards yet, because my postcards are still on their way. Check out the flickr postcrossing group for some really cool postcards.

1:49 pm Tags: .

Insane mystery painting

wstryder December 4, 2006 1 Comment

Here’s a killer Internet meme for all you mystery fans. Veryrussian.net has a post about a creepy painting allegedly painted by a mentally ill person. (Check out this bigger picture of the painting.) The picture has been posted on veryrussian.net by a student whose psychiatry professor has presented the painting in class, claiming that there is one telltale sign in the picture which reveals the painter’s insanity. However, only one student in fifteen years has been able to spot it. How fast can the Internet community figure this one out?

Well, this story has been dugg over 2100 times and has gained over 1100 comments, yet nobody seems to have a very sensibly theory. The diggers did find out some very interesting points though, which the original poster failed to mention. According to museum.ru the painting is titled “Maslenitsa festival” and has been painted by someone named A. Kuplin. The painting is a loose replica of Soviet artist Antonov’s postcard from 1970’s. The museum.ru site also features another painting by A. Kuplin, titled Ninth Wave, which is a replica of Ivan Aivazovsky’s painting by the same name from 1850. The museum.ru site mentions that the Ninth Wave was transferred in 1990 from Moscow mental hospital, confirming that the author A. Kuplin was indeed a mental patient.

What’s really interesting about this phenomenon is that the painting is not a masterpiece. It’s pretty dull and uninteresting, yet it has received a lot of attention – all because of one person who claims that there is a big mystery behind it. This could be hoax, and if it is, it’s a good one.

Out of all the theories presented so far I digg the snowman theory the most. The Maslenitsa festival is a Russian festival celebrating the end of winter. Yet there are no signs of spring in the painting – the scene looks like it takes place in midwinter (although there is a lot of room for interpretation). The biggest clue supporting the snowman theory is in fact the other painting – The Ninth Wave by A. Kuplin. Check out the person in the water, that’s clearly a snowman melting in the warm sunset! So A. Kuplin had severe schizophrenia and was under the delusion that he was a snowman. This explains why the children sitting in the sleigh are all looking at him, while all the adults in the painting are busy doing something else.

It’s incredible how many different phobias people see in the painting, fear of dark, fear of open spaces, fear of being alone etc. It’s almost like everyone finds their own phobias present in the painting. Could it be that the painting is actually just a demonstration of suggestion – if we are told the painter is mentally ill, then we will find all kinds of symptoms in the painting? Or is it a social experiment, something designed to test the problem solving skills of an Internet community or a class of students? Maybe it’s an elaborate hoax, a bad joke, a conspiracy? Whatever it is, it’s making us all insane!

4:40 pm Tags: , .