Category: Tech

Created in America, Made in China

China has come a long way, very quickly, from supplying McDonald’s with Happy Meal toys covered in lead paint. Last week, WBUR’s (Boston University Radio) On Point with Tom Ashbrook had a show about corporate espionage by Chinese hackers.

[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2012/02/onpoint_0216_hacking-americas-future.mp3|titles=On Point with Tom Ashbrook – China hacking]

Listening to this exchange was, for me, frustrating. There’s a lot of alarmist talk in the show, but why was it okay for American corporations to send their manufacturing jobs to China in the first place? Why, only now, with the theft of proprietary information, is China being seen as a threat? And if these victimized companies have such sophisticated intellectual property, why couldn’t they invest more in better protection against online attacks? In the old days, employees would have to be moles, or be corrupt and willing to sell secrets, for serious damage to be done. Now, just having an Internet connection is all it takes? Seems to me this is a case of reaping what you sow.

A cool guy with the right stuff

John, we hate to trouble you with this, but we’re having a little problem with your wife.

My wife?

Yes, she won’t cooperate, John. Perhaps you can give her a little call. We have a phone right here.

A little call?

The national problem was this: John’s wife, Annie, was at home with some of the wives of the rest of us watching the countdown on television. The only member of the press inside the house was a writer from Life named Loudon Wainwright [father of singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III – Doug], but outside, in the yard, was the nuthouse scene we described last time, all the TV crews and the reporters, baying for their scraps of information about how Annie Glenn was bearing up. At this point into the picture comes the Big Dipper, namely, Lyndon Johnson, who was vice president, of course … (and) he wants the Life reporter to get out of the house, because his presence will antagonize the rest of the non-TV reporters who can’t get in, and they will not think kindly of the Vice President … So the situation finally boils down to this: Johnson is waiting out of sight a few blocks away in a limousine, waiting for his cue. Johnson’s emissaries are saying that Life, in the person of Loudon Wainwright, must depart from the house so that the Vice President of the United States and his TV friends can come in … Wainwright is no fool and doesn’t particularly care to get caught in the middle like this, and so he offers to bow out, to leave. Annie shows her strength and tells him, “You’re not leaving this house” … NASA is freaking out, so finally the problem is bucked up all the way up to John Glenn himself … He says, “Look, if you don’t want the Vice President or the TV networks or anybody else coming inside the house, then that’s it, as far as I’m concerned, and I will back you up all the way.”

– “Post Orbital Remorse, Part Two: How the Astronauts Fell from Cowboy Heaven,” by Tom Wolfe, Rolling Stone, January 18, 1973, pg. 26.

I read that article when I was a senior in high school. It describes a scene that’s an audience favorite in The Right Stuff, the movie adaptation of the book that Tom Wolfe wrote based on his four-part series in Rolling Stone about the Mercury space program. I was in the first grade, 50 years ago, when John Glenn flew around the world three times. My son was in the first grade when John Glenn went into space a second time. Glenn wasn’t the first man in space, and he wasn’t the first American in space, but his flight is memorable to me, because it’s the first one that I remember from when it was happening, probably because the school played a radio report of the event over the classroom speakers.

This is a NASA video about John Glenn’s flight in the Freedom 7. Glenn is now 90 years old, which means he’s a year younger than Stephen Colbert’s mother and, no, that’s not Glenn in the preview frame.

Zip-a-dee Doo-Dah

This will be a boring post about a technical aspect of blogging, called HTML output compression. I’m going to tag it so that anybody else who is wondering about the same thing I was a few days ago might find it.

There’s a site called Is My Blog Working?. A little while ago I plugged in the Dograt URL and saw this.

A couple of minutes later I refreshed the information and saw this.

The difference between these two views is the loss of Gzip compression. Newer Web browsers support compressed HTML pages. This can greatly reduce the amount of data that’s sent over the Net for a Web page. There’s no point in trying to compress something that’s already compressed, like JPEG images, but anybody who’s ever turned a text file into a ZIP file knows it’s like Wonder® bread — it squeezes down to a fifth or less of its original size.

WordPress is written in a scripting language called PHP. It’s possible to have compression done within PHP, and some WordPress sites do this, but it increases the processor load for the site. Bluehost, which this site runs on, temporarily throttles back individual sites that are using a lot of processor time. Dograt.com currently shares a Web server with nearly 3,000 other sites(!), and enabling compression in PHP would invite a big spike in my site’s throttling, that is otherwise lessened by the use of a WordPress plug-in called Quick Cache, which holds onto pages that have already been viewed, so they don’t have to be created again the next time somebody asks for them.

Other WordPress caching plug-ins can enable compression in PHP, but I don’t use them because the best place for compression to be done is below PHP, in the Web server program. For many blogs, including mine, that Web server is an open-source program called Apache. Enabling PHP compression when Web server compression is already working, and attempting to compress data that’s already been compressed, slows things down and accomplishes nothing, which is why WordPress doesn’t offer PHP compression as a standard feature.

Enabling compression in Apache for a site requires an entry in the site’s Hypertext Access File, .htaccess. This can be done manually, by editing the file, or through the control panel software. In cPanel the compression feature is found under Optimize Website.

So this begs the question, why is compression not always — in fact, it’s rarely — enabled for this site? It’s because Bluehost turns off Apache’s compression feature when the CPU gets too busy, as explained by Bluehost’s founder, Matt Heaton.

http://www.mattheaton.com/?p=228

We then wrote a patch to the Apache web server (This is what serves your websites to your browser) that interfaces with our CPU protection system. This patch checks our CPU usage twice a second and if CPU usage exceeds a certain threshold then we temporarily suspend mod_deflate. When there are unused CPU cycles then it reenables mod_deflate. By implementing it this way we get all the benefits of mod_deflate with none of the detriments of excessive cpu usage causing slowdowns.

Bluehost is vastly faster, more stable, and reliable than iPower, the hosting service I was using until two years ago. Oh, there are occasional blips, like cPanel wasn’t working briefly a couple of weeks ago, and every so often the site has been offline, but for the money I’m paying I’m pleased with Bluehost.

SO-PAthetic

It’s Los Angeles vs. San Francisco in the fight for our online future! The music and movie industries have always cried foul over every new perceived threat to their business model. Thirty years ago they insisted that cassettes and VHS would be the end of them.

Perhaps I’m easily amused, but I never tire of the Downfall parodies, with Hitler in the bunker, railing about the latest tech controversy.

Zappos zapped

Once, only once, did I order shoes from Zappos. The money I saved buying running shoes online, instead of at Marathon Sports, wasn’t worth the hassle of having to deal with the likelihood that my account information was hacked. Zappos is owned by Amazon, so I’m changing my login there, too.

First, the bad news:

We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).

THE BETTER NEWS:

The database that stores your critical credit card and other payment data was NOT affected or accessed.