Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

May 23, 2015

Trekkies join the readers of magazines like Linux Journal as potential threats

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:30 PM

Yes, you read that headline correctly and no, I am not joking. According to the information revealed thanks to a freedom of Information request, Scotland Yard was worried that British fans of Star Trek might turn against society. This was tracked as part of a file called UFO New Religious Movements (NRMs) And The Millennium. In addition to Star Trek they were also worried about people who watch shows like X-Files, Dark Skies, Roswell, Millennium and The Lawnmower Man.

I already knew that I was being monitored by US Intelligence agencies thanks to my reading and occasionally writing for the Linux Journal. In case you are wondering if I have become insane or paranoid. Unfortunately (or fortunately) that is not the case. This is based on the information revealed in the recent intelligence leaks and was covered on various sites and articles :

While that is troubling in itself, even more troubling to readers on this site is that linuxjournal.com has been flagged as a selector! DasErste.de has published the relevant XKEYSCORE source code, and if you look closely at the rule definitions, you will see linuxjournal.com/content/linux* listed alongside Tails and Tor. According to an article on DasErste.de, the NSA considers Linux Journal an “extremist forum”.

Now, thanks to my love for Star Trek and X-Files I guess I must reconcile myself to being tracked by Scotland Yard as well. I did find it really interesting that Star Wars fans are not part of the potential threats they monitor. Could it be because the person who implemented this tracking was a Star Wars fan and was taking the Star Trek vs the Star Wars argument to a whole new level? That is the only reason that could possibly explain why anyone thought this was a good idea. I mean sure fans of these shows are vocal, enthusiastic and sometimes very disturbing (Try searching for Star Trek Slash Fic if you have a strong stomach for some really weird stuff. Fair warning though, the material you will get back is for adult audiences and just plain weird at times.). However that being said it is not correct to classify them as a cult and start tracking the members as if they did something wrong by liking the wrong show.

From the article:

But the police feared British fans of the cult American show might boldly go a little too far one day.

It has emerged that Scotland Yard kept a secret dossier on Star Trek, The X-Files, and other US sci fi shows amid fears that British fans would go mad and kill themselves, turn against society or start a weird cult.

The American TV shows Roswell and Dark Skies and the film The Lawnmower Man were also monitored to protect the country from rioting and cyber attacks.

I have this mental image of a spy/program monitoring all websites/conferences where Star Trek is discussed, items/props sold or just links to these kind of sites. Once you visit this site, you are automatically added to a database of potential troublemakers and if you actually buy something then you get a higher grade. The more you buy and the more involved you are in fandom the higher your perceived threat level gets.

If the people of the world insist on being idiotic, then there is nothing I can do to stop them. Unfortunately these are the folks in power so they can cause a lot of damage by creating these fictional enemies. I will end this post with the following quote taken from a book by one of my favorite authors (Mercedes Lackey) which is really relevant here :

When those in power intend to abuse that power, they look to an outside enemy in order to trick their people into pressing the means to their own abuse into the hands of the abusers. If an enemy does not exist, it will be manufactured, and all manner of horrors attributed to it, so that anyone who demands truth and accountability is set upon as being unpatriotic. And so that, when someone said to be an enemy is found, there will be few questions asked about guilt or innocence, and many faces averted when he is taken away.

We are setting ourselves up for disaster, stop turning your faces away… Else you soon will be saying “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”.

Sources:
* Slashdot
* The Telegraph

– Suramya

May 19, 2015

Drug use can now be detected using fingerprints

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:00 AM

Saw this interesting article on Slashdot about research being done in University of Surrey in which they claim to be able to detect the use of cocaine by testing fingerprints using ambient mass spectrometry. As per the paper they do this by spaying solvent on the fingerprint slide and then checking for chemical residue in the print which results from drug abuse.

This will have a big impact in a lot of areas if it is viable to do so cheaply. Companies, cops etc can check for Drug usage in non-invasive fashion and if a positive match is found then they can match the finger print to a person as well making it becomes extremely difficult to fool a drug test. Which is a good thing. Though I wonder how long after a use the chemicals are detectable in the print. I would be surprised if there are there forever but even if they are there temporarily it will reduce the drug abuse at work.

However I am sure there are a lot of legal hurdles etc which will need to be solved if the technology is going be widely used. Currently the test only works for Cocaine, it will be interesting if they can do a similar test for other drugs like Heroine etc.

From the paper:

For their research, scientists sprayed a beam of solvent onto the fingerprint slide (a technique known as Desorption Electrospray Ionisation, or DESI) to determine if these metabolites were present. DESI has found use in a number of forensic applications, but has never been used to demonstrate drug use says lead author Dr Melanie Bailey from the University of Surrey.

Researchers took fingerprints and oral fluid from patients attending a drug and alcohol treatment service. Using a technique called gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS), they tested the oral fluid of patients for the presence of cocaine and benzoylecgonine. They then employed DESI, which operates under ambient conditions and Ion Mobility Tandem Mass Spectrometry Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization (MALDI-IMS-MS/MS) and Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS), to analyse the corresponding fingerprints.

– Suramya

May 17, 2015

Penn Libraries Launches Digital Resources Online Platform

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 11:04 AM

In an effort to make information more freely available and answer the growing demand for open data Penn Libraries have made some of their cultural heritage materials available for free downloads as high-resolution images along with machine-readable descriptive and technical metadata about the images via their OPenn digital resources website. Looking at the site I see that they are not kidding about the images being high-resolution, I downloaded one of them just to see how it looked and it was a 3400×4444 image file 45MB in size.

From their press release:

Images from items such as a 16th-century Portolan Atlas and a unique book of Ciphers made for Pope Calixtus III in the 15th century are available on OPenn.

More datasets, including manuscripts from Penn’s own holdings and items from other institutions, will be added in the near future. Historic diaries from a variety of Institutions belonging to the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries are next in line for inclusion on OPenn. Many of these documents are unknown while others are celebrated, such as the Union League of Philadelphia’s Tanner manuscript, a unique firsthand account of the events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

”Allowing all those who wish to use data from the site to do so, in whatever way they desire and without requiring them to ask for permission, creates boundless possibility and an exciting unpredictability surrounding the outcomes,” said Will Noel, director of Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

It’s good to see more and more libraries making their works available online for free. It can only help with spreading the knowledge.

– Suramya

May 16, 2015

Testing Auto post publication to FB, Twitter

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 7:57 PM

Testing Auto post publication to FB, Twitter. If all goes well this should be posted to FB and Twitter automatically.

[UPDATE] Yay! It worked 🙂

– Suramya

Facebook Command Line (FBCMD) no longer works fully

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 7:08 PM

Thanks to FB constantly changing their API the maintainer for FBCMD finally decided to call it quits and shut down the project. I found out about this when I started hitting issues with syncing my blog posts automatically to my Facebook account. I would keep getting an error that the app didn’t have the permissions to post to my wall even though I explicitly granted it permissions again. From the maintainers site:

I am now raising a family and have a demanding job. When I do get precious “free” time, there are other projects I’d rather spend my time on.
I stopped using FBCMD myself. I log in to facebook once a week and lurk around for a bit, but I rarely interact or share anything.
Facebook is moving away from apps that have broad access and permissions.
It was too frustrating to keep up with facebook perpetually depricating features and changing its API.
The straw(s) that broke the camel’s back were: depricating API 1.0, removing offline_access and changing the authentication model.

Now I need to figure out another way to automatically sync my posts to FB. There are a bunch of plugins that people talk about but I still need to decide on which one to use and try them out. Or I could hope that someone decides to pick up the project and fork it.

– Suramya

May 6, 2015

How to Root a second generation Moto x running Lollipop

Filed under: Knowledgebase,Tech Related,Tutorials — Suramya @ 11:22 PM

I got my new phone today and as usual the first thing I did was root it before I started copying data over so that I don’t loose data when I unlock the boot loader. The process required a bit of work mainly because I was following instructions for KitKat while my phone was running Lollipop. That caused the phone to go into this funky state where the Play Store API’s went MIA and the entire thing stopped working to the point that I had to do a hard reset to get back to a stable state.

BTW, before you continue please note that this will delete all data on the phone so you need to ensure that you have a proper backup before proceeding. Without further ado, here are the steps I followed to get things to work using my Linux (Debian) desktop:

Unlock the Bootloder

The first thing you have to do is unlock the Boot loader on the phone:

  • Install the Android SDK by issuing the following command:
    apt-get install android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot
  • Run the following command:
    fastboot oem get_unlock_data
  • Take the string returned, which would look something like this:
    (bootloader) 0A40040192024205#4C4D3556313230
    (bootloader) 30373731363031303332323239#BD00
    (bootloader) 8A672BA4746C2CE02328A2AC0C39F95
    (bootloader) 1A3E5#1F53280002000000000000000
    (bootloader) 0000000

    and concatenate the 5 lines of output into one continuous string without (bootloader) or ‘INFO’ or white spaces. Your string needs to look like this:
    0A40040192024205#4C4D355631323030373731363031303332323239#BD008A672BA4746C2CE02328A2AC0C39F951A3E5#1F532800020000000000000000000000

  • Visit the Motorola Website.
  • Paste the string you got in the previous step on the site, and then click on the ‘Can my Device be Unlocked?’ button and if your device is unlockable, a “REQUEST UNLOCK KEY” button will now appear at the bottom of the page.
  • Click on the “REQUEST UNLOCK KEY” Button.
  • You will now receive a mail with the unlock key at your registered email address
  • Start your device in fastboot mode by pushing and holding the power and volume down at the same time. Then release the power button followed by the volume down button. The device will now power up in fastboot mode.
  • Run the following command to unlock the bootloader:
    fastboot oem unlock 
  • If the code was correct then you will see a message confirming that your device was unlocked and the phone will reboot.

Enable Developer Options/USB Debugging

In order to proceed further we need to enable USB Debugging and in order to do that we need to enable Developer Options following these steps:

  • Pull down the notification drawer and tap on ‘Settings’
  • Scroll down to ‘About Phone’
  • Now scroll down to ‘Build Number’
  • Tap on ‘Build Number’ 7 times.
  • It’ll now say that you are a developer. Now press back, You should now see Developer Options above About Phone.

  • Click on ‘Developer Options’
  • Check the box next to ‘USB debugging’ and save

Root the Phone

First we need to download the correct image file for the model of your phone. I had to look up my model on Wikipedia because for some reason my phone decided not to share that information with me. Use the appropriate link for your model in the list below. I have a XT1092 but the XT1097 image worked fine for me.

After downloading the file, extract it. Run the following command:

adb reboot bootloader

This will restart the phone in the fastboot mode. Then boot using the image you downloaded in the previous step using this command:

fastboot boot /path/to/image/file/CF-Auto-Root-victara-victararetbr-xt1097.img

Once you run the command the Device will boot up, install su and quickly reboot (this is automatic, no user intervention is required). After the phone starts up, you need to install Chainfire’s SuperSU from the Play Store.

After that you are done and your phone is rooted. You can verify the same by installing a ‘Root Verifier’ application from the store.
Well this is all for now, will write more later.

– Suramya

May 5, 2015

I met Rakesh Sharma – the first Indian to go into space this weekend!!

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 1:51 AM

I was in Wellington this weekend to spend some time with Gaurang, Kangan & Sid and meet Gaurang’s parents. The visit was great but the highlight for me was getting to meet Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma (Retd.), the first Indian to go to space. At first I didn’t realize who we were going to meet because I was still a bit groggy from lack of sleep but then the lights came on and I realized just who I was going to meet. Trust me I was wide awake shortly thereafter. 🙂

We met him twice and I even managed to get a photo with him :). I am not going to go into how/why we met him twice and how it almost became thrice but it was worth it. 😉

Well this is all for now. I need to crash now, will write more later.

– Suramya

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