MagicalTux in Japan

Geekness brought me to Japan!

Registrars and authcodes

Mar 11

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | No Comments

Many registrars out there have found different ways to implement Verisign’s requirement of harder-to-guess authcodes for domains by asking to have at least one symbol character (non letter, non number) in the authcode.

This had different effect on different registrars. For example french registrar OVH have implemented it a bit too well, resulting in authcodes like “d*zuW.;2t/!>pHbU”, while others have decided that it wasn’t their problem, and just added a prefix to their authcodes. This is the case for example of GoDaddy, whose authcodes are limited in randomness. An authcode will look like: “S1-AF94C9510BA1C”. Yeah right, “S1-” followed by an uppercase hexadecimal string. I’m pretty sure Verisign wasn’t expecting this when they published the new requirement.

Anyway conditions to steal a domain are pretty much complex (you need to have it unlocked, need to know the authcode, and once transfer is started, the current registrant must not ask his registrar to cancel the transfer for 5 days, and even after the domain is transferred, there are ways to get it back – it’s just more expensive). Stealing a domain is a complex operation which will most likely be followed by legal repercussions.

Best thing to do is to check from times to times in a whois that your domain is really showing your name and address. If not, you might need to do something about it before it’s too late. You might want to consider transferring your domain to a company which cares about you ;) (we’ll even fight your old provider if troubles arise, they can refuse transfer only in some specified cases, as long as you are owner of your domain).

Tags: , , , , , ,

GG.ST: Closing server Lamune

Mar 11

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | No Comments

Closing an IRC server is always difficult as people tend to connect directly to the server’s IP, and anyway just changing the dns won’t make people reconnect immediatly. Many people stay connected for days, if not for weeks.

That’s why closing a server must be done at least 2 weeks before. We first remove the server from the DNS pool, then wait one week, then start sending notices and private messages to remaining people to notify them.

Right now we are at the “one week” mark. You can see the user count has decreased quite a lot.

Most of the users were first directed to our second european node, however the new US node is now open and people are being sent there too. I will implement support for GeoIP in SimpleDNSd soon, so people will be directed to either server based on informations available from their DNS server (the ISP dns server tend to be in the same country as the user is, for others like google’s 8.8.8.8 I really don’t know how things will end).

Tags: , , , ,

Conscious applied to quantum physics and MWI

Mar 7

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | No Comments

First, I must say that I am a fervent believer of MWI. Even when I was much younger at school, I believed that any action led to the creation of many alternative worlds in each of which the action was done in a different fashion (or not done at all). More than that, at each instant, a world where the whole universe stops existing could exist. This wouldn’t be a problem either.

It’s late at night (5.00 am) and I’ve been reading a lot of articles about quantum physics, MWI and more. I’ve read that some theories (quantum suicide and immortality) are giving an extra role to conscious beings, even making them immortal: the consciousness would automatically always pass to the “currently alive host” between different worlds, and as a world exist for each probability (even most improbable ones), and as the probability of one being immortal is not zero, conscious beings would therefore be immortal.

This would make some things possible, like the Infinite Improbability Drive: onboard conscious beings could be systematically destroyed until they reached their destination. Consciousness would be passed to the last alive one until destination is reached. Once destination is reached with the conscious beings onboard, they could resume creating an infinity of alternative worlds with their choices.

While this theory looks interesting, I believe its creation might have more to do with the desire to avoid death than anything else. First, I don’t believe consciousness has any impact on physical properties of a being, and second, I don’t know much people who have already managed to live infinitly (maybe I’m not in the right MWI path, but with all those conscious beings, I would hope to meet one someday).

Instead, I believe consciousness is also being duplicated in each alternate world, and I can only hope that the consciousness I am currently conscious of will live long and prosper. There might be an alternative world where it will not die, but the low probability of it being the one I’m currently conscious of is low.

The MWI theory also solves problem of traveling into the past. Changing the past (just “being there” is a change) would simply create an alternative world in which there is indeed someone at this place and time. The real challenge would then to be able to travel to defined alternative worlds. This is potentially more complex, especially due to the infinite number of alternative worlds (going in an alternative world will create at least two more alternative worlds).

Another option is the possibility that when we decide something of our own free will, this decision is not enough to create an alternative world (ie. there is no probability that we would have done otherwise), in which case creation of alternative worlds would be limited to half-dead cats.

I am currently unaware of any way to prove or disprove the MWI theory, however it seems that disproving quantum physics would disprove MWI in its current form. This is a complex way of trying to understand our current universe, and maybe in a few years I’ll have a different theory in mind, but for now it’s the best I can think of (well it’s 5.30 am, so I might not be in the best state to think about anything).

One last though: if I download some entropy and base the choice between two set of actions on it, I might be able to separate the two set of actions in different worlds which branching point would be when the entropy itself was generated. This would be similar to the Schrödinger’s cat experiment.

Tags: , , , ,

GTA IV – Helping our children understanding Schrödinger’s Cat

Mar 1

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | 1 Comment

Ok, it’s 8.00 am in the morning, haven’t slept this night, and just took a shower. While in the shower I was thinking about quantum mechanics applied to future generations. I then noticed that they might be better able to understand things like Schrödinger’s Cat than we are.

Everyone knows about Schrodinger’s Cat (if you don’t, read the wikipedia article about it). Basically the idea is to have a cat in a box whose life depends on a 50/50 chance. However, while you don’t open the box, you won’t know if the cat is still alive, or not. The point is the cat’s status is neither alive nor dead until you look at it and define its state.

Thinking back at the time when I was playing GTA IV on XBox 360 I noticed a similar property in the environment. For example let’s take an empty street in this game, look somewhere else, then look at the street again. It might, during the time we weren’t looking at it, be suddently populated with a great amount of cars. Accidents might even happen the second you look in the direction.
While you weren’t looking, the street had no status, it was full and empty at the same time. Then looking at it defined its status, sometimes with an explosive effect. It is effectively the same as Schrödinger’s Cat’s theory. As long as you don’t look, there is no status.

Mh… Anyway I might better sleep a bit before I start coding weird things… and be more careful when skipping a night, it might have unexpected results, such as this post.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Simple web-whois service

Feb 20

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | No Comments

I decided to quickly create a really simple whois service.

http://whois.nf/

The url is simple, there are tons of similar services, but this one should prove to be fast to load and light on any device, thanks to its pre-1980′s design.

PS: If you are a web designer and can do HTML/CSS/JS, contact me, I might have some work for you.

Tags: ,

GANDI.NET – Registered domains count

Feb 19

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | 2 Comments

You already saw, I guess, the gandi.net statistics on top of their page…

Like many registrars, I can only believe those statistics are faked to make it look like gandi.net is handling more domains than it is actually handling.

Let’s take a simple example: I transfered 17 domains from GANDI, and they still show in the interface, can be “locked”, etc… (nothing happens in reality). Here I believe GANDI might not delete correctly domains transfered to another registrar. While 17 domains might be a really small amount, if it’s the case for all domains transfered from GANDI, it might boost the statistics quite a lot…

Anyway if you want a registrar with fast support and good answers to your questions, come to KalyHost.

Tags: , , , ,

Invision Power Board and IPv6, a dirty hack

Feb 18

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude, Hacking | No Comments

Since IPS seems to lack the willingness to fix the IPv6 issue with their software, and given the amount of users willing to totally disable IP protection on their board to allow IPv6 users, I decided to provide with those people an alternative solution allowing to differenciate users.

This will create fake IPv4 for IPv6 users based on the 64 first bits of their IP. As most currently exising IPv6 providers are assigning /64 classes to their customers, banning the generated IPv4 effectively bans the whole IPv6.

Also I do generate a 32bits IPv4 from 64bits of IPv6 using XOR. While this means people using IPv6 might share the same generated IPv4 (quite unlikely), it is usually impossible for someone to obtain a different generated IPv4 without access to more than a /64 (I believe only system administrators have this kind of thing).

You might want to store in database generated IPv4 and their IPv6 counterparts to be able to recover a given IPv6 from a blocked IPv4.

This method also allows to block IPs in the same subnet from IPv4 subnets (I don’t know if IPB supports this feature) and recognize people from the same subnet as the start of their generated ip will be the same (however whois information for the given IP will not match the real user’s ip).

To have the generated IPv4, insert this in conf_global.php :

$encoded_ip = inet_pton($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
if (strlen($encoded_ip) == 16) {
    $ipv4 = '';
    for($i = 0; $i < 8; $i += 2) $ipv4 .= chr(ord($encoded_ip[$i]) ^ ord($encoded_ip[$i+1]));
    $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] = inet_ntop($ipv4);
}

And remember to ask your IPB support to have real IPv6 ASAP.

Tags: , , , ,

Binary Barbie, can you read ASCII binary directly?

Feb 16

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | No Comments

Being able to read ASCII in binary form is really easy, in fact, especially for letters.

Basically an ASCII number starting with “01″ has great chances of being a letter. The next binary number allows to know if it’s lower case or upper case (0 = uppercase, 1 = lowercase), then the 5 next numbers will be the index in the alphabet.

For example 01000010 is easy to read. It starts with 01, then you get a 0 (upper case), then 00010. This can be decoded as: 0×16 + 0×8 + 0×4 + 1×2 + 0×1 = 2. So this is the second letter of the alphabet: B.

This also means that with only 5 binary digits, and knowing where the end is, you can know which letter was there. I tried to read what was written on Barbie’s clothes, I got some unexpected letters (like a Q). Either the designer didn’t care, or it’s just that the letter boundary was somewhere else.

Binary at the bottom of the dress has no clear boundary. I guess the designer just didn’t care about the meaning at this location.

Tags: , , , ,

Japanese Visa Part one: change visa status!

Feb 16

Posted by MagicalTux in IRL | No Comments

If you’re reading this article, you probably did read on internet that obtaining and keeping a valid visa in Japan is a pain.

Now, I’m going to have to change my visa status. This is a pain too, but I guess it should be possible. Changing visa status is not an easy task: based on the informations I could obtain from the various official locations, changing status takes 2 to 3 months, and should be done before renewing visa, which should be done 1 month before expiration.

My visa expires half of june 2010, this makes the timeline look like this:

  • February 15th: Change visa status, start!
  • May 15th: Visa changed
  • May 15th: Start visa renewal
  • June 15th: Visa renewed

I do not know what will happen between February 15th and May 15th, however I guess the informations I gave will be verified. Japanese legal system is a pain, and unfortunately, being unable to read japanese legal kanji, I’m in great difficulties when I phone to try to get more informations. My only real solution is to go there and show what I filled, and ask people if it’s OK.

Now let’s go for part one! First part will be to fill the visa category change document, and bring it with the necessary documentation for the new visa status so the people there will know what to do.

Tags: , , ,

KalyHost – Domain names now available

Feb 14

Posted by MagicalTux in Tibanne | No Comments

After some months of work, we finally are able to have our first shop online, with domain names sales and management.

You can see this on the KalyHost page for domains, where you can order many extensions for cheap (.NET are on sale until 27 february).

Sale is done via Paypal, and domain is usable immediatly after sale. You can then manage your domain as you want to. Once we finish setting up webhosting and some other services (affiliation, etc) KalyHost will finally be ready for the real show. For now cheap domains are already a great thing, and I wish more people could have a look at it.

Tags: , , , , ,