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Interesting. I was just hit by a type of bot attack called a TheGreatHatsby. It intitiates a chat between two people by sending them both messages. It doesn't appear to have any kind of malicious intent, just a laugh on the part of the creators.

The "$optout" command removes you from their network.

(21:39:47) TenGallonCoho: Catholicism is for pussies.
(21:41:30) OwlofDoom: erm
(21:41:48) TenGallonCoho: i don't know an erm
(21:42:26) OwlofDoom: what?
(21:42:53) TenGallonCoho: i asked who this is and you said erm
(21:42:56) TenGallonCoho: and i said
(21:43:00) TenGallonCoho: i don't know anybody named erm
(21:43:03) TenGallonCoho: so bye
(21:43:07) OwlofDoom: who are you?
(21:43:16) TenGallonCoho: you talked to me remember?
(21:43:18) OwlofDoom: i just got a message from you saying "Catholicism is for pussies."
(21:43:20) OwlofDoom: no, i didn't
(21:43:30) TenGallonCoho: really?
(21:43:34) OwlofDoom: really
(21:43:45) TenGallonCoho: i got one from you saying "let's murder lady gaga together"
(21:43:48) TenGallonCoho: weird..
(21:44:03) OwlofDoom: I never got your "who is this?" message either
(21:44:13) OwlofDoom: very odd
(21:44:27) TenGallonCoho: oh well alright then...this has been sufficiently awkward ha.
(21:45:03) OwlofDoom: quite! wonder what sort of malware would conspire to get two people arguing with each other
(21:45:58) TenGallonCoho: ha yeah that i couldn't tell you, must be an interesting one though
(21:46:19) OwlofDoom: are you a windows user? have you checked your machine for spyware recently?
(21:46:33) TenGallonCoho: nope i have a mac
(21:46:40) OwlofDoom: even weirder - i'm on linux
(21:46:48) OwlofDoom: never heard of any significant malware for either
(21:47:03) TenGallonCoho: yeah same. that's super weird
(21:49:32) OwlofDoom: hmm i'm going to have to do some research on this now
(21:51:01) OwlofDoom: ah, TenGallonCoho isn't your username
(21:51:06) OwlofDoom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheGreatHatsby#Coho_bots
(21:51:11) OwlofDoom: it's a bot proxy server thing
(21:54:04) OwlofDoom: $optout
(21:54:05) TenGallonCoho: OPERATOR: Are you sure you want to opt-out? If you do, you will never be contacted again on the account "owlofdoom". There is no way to opt back in and undo this.

If you are sure, type "$optout 2A52". Remember, this is permanent and irreversible!
(21:54:15) OwlofDoom: $optout 2A52
(21:54:16) TenGallonCoho: OPERATOR: You have opted out. The accout "owlofdoom" will never be contacted again. Good bye!

Feel free to email projectupstream@gmail.com with feedback, comments, complaints, etc.

So here's the question. It's definitely not spam. But is this sort of japery an invasion of my privacy? A denial of my data protection rights? Or should this sort of thing be condoned?

Tagged as: personal attack thegreathatsby coho bot spam malware aim

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I live quite simply for a geek. My only general-purpose computer is a three-year-old HP laptop, running Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

Initially, switching from a desktop to a laptop gave me much greater mobility, since the wireless internet meant the only thing I needed tethering to was the power supply, and even that could be removed for a couple of hours. But, as you might expect, over time my laptop became encumbered.

Firstly, I own a decent hi-fi amplifier and speakers. Listening to music through my laptop's crappy internal speakers was hardly a substitute, so I tend to hook it up to the amplifier using a mini-jack-to-RCA cable.

Secondly, the 80GB internal disk became too much to store all the photos from my digital camera and my MP3 collection, not to mention a single point of failure where backups were concerned. So I invested in an additional Western Digital Mybook USB disk.

Now my laptop was tethered in position by two things that I couldn't remove without losing (what I considered to be) key functionality. This week's project is an attempt to remove this tethering while still retaining the main parts of this functionality, and for minimal cost.

Phase one: Wi-fi Hi-fi

I came into possession of two useful pieces of old kit from a friend for £20. You could probably get them on eBay for not much more than that.

The first is a Philips SLA5520 Wireless Music Adapter (pictured here with my amp and a pen for size reference). This is basically a little wi-fi receiver with RCA phono output that looks for music being served on the local network by its own (Windows-based) file server and allows the user to browse and play them using a remote control and a small LED display.

Now, it turns out that (yay Philips) the protocol it watches for is not some proprietary thing but the open and well documented UPnP protocol. This is a multicast-based file-streaming protocol for local networks and there are lots of servers and clients available by default in Ubuntu.

I went for Mediatomb because it seemed the easiest to configure. With a bit of faffing around setting up my laptop's wi-fi interface for multicast and getting my wireless router to notice the SLA5520 existed at all (incidentally, it supports WPA-encrypted networks just fine) I was able to get music streamed directly to my hi-fi from the laptop.

Tether number one eradicated!

Phase two: NAS No More

The other piece of kit is a Linksys NSLU2 (pictured, it's the closest item to the pen; the big black box is the USB disk). It's marketed at as NAS (network file server) for USB disks, configurable by a web interface. Out of the box it supports ext3 and FAT32 disks.

But the partitions I care about on my disk are formatted as ReiserFS; and not only that, one of them is LUKS-encrypted.

Luckily, the NSLU2 is really just a tiny little ARM Linux box (266MHz, 32MB RAM, 8MB flash storage) and the community (as it is wont to do) has already hacked it to death. I chose a distribution of Linux called SlugOS specifically designed for this device and for people who already know their way around Linux. It swaps the web interface for the much more familiar ssh and comes with a package management system called opkg that is very similar to apt.

Installing SlugOS to the RAM is really easy. All I had to do was connect the NSLU2 to my laptop directly with an ethernet cable, reboot it into a special "upgrade mode" (done by holding the reset button for 10 seconds during the boot cycle) and then install the 8MB flash image from the SlugOS site using a tool called upslug2 that is already available in Ubuntu.

With relative ease, I was able to get ReiserFS kernel modules and the LUKS utilities & modules installed and running on boot. I had to wipe a (mostly unused) partition of my disk to make room for a disk installation of SlugOS (which it can do automatically using a command called turnup) and a swap partition since 8MB of storage and 32MB of virtual memory is not much to work with. Great. And then getting an NFS server up and running so I could mount my disk from my laptop again was as easy as it would be on a Debian server.

Tether number two eradicated!

But I didn't have to stop there. I was able to install Mediatomb on the NSLU2 (I had to use the version in Optware, the core package seemed to be broken), which means I can save network bandwidth and also run the streaming even when my laptop is swtiched off or in standby.

The performance is not brilliant, given that the box is only a poor little ARM board. It took over 24 hours to index my entire music collection, and during the indexing it was frequently unable to present the list of albums/artists to the network. Now the indexing has finished it's fine, even while the NSLU2 is busy doing some compilation for Phase three (below) and there are no gaps or jumps in the music at all.

Phase three: Last.fm But Not Least

This is the most ambitious phase, and is still in progress as I write this. Geek warning: it stops being readable by normal humans at this point.

According to this blog it's possible to get Mediatomb to scrobble to Last.fm using lastfmlib. This requires the installation of lastfmlib and the rebuilding of mediatomb with the lastfmlib patch.

I'm following the instructions on creating Optware packages firstly to create a brand new package for lastfmlib and then to create the patched Mediatomb package.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of undocumented and untested territory here. I tried to use the standard Makefile to build the ARM toolchain on my laptop and it ended up building me an x86_64 toolchain. The current plan is to build the packages natively on the NSLU2, which seems to be going quite well, except that the Makefile insists on rebuilding the entire toolchain (gcc, glibc, binutils, etc.) even though it's not going to be cross-compiling anything. It's been happily building away for a few hours now so, fingers crossed, I can use it for something more useful when it's done.

The good news is that this CPU/RAM-intensive stuff isn't interfering with the IO-heavy music streaming so I can have both (although poor Last.fm isn't going to know what I've been listening to these last couple of days).

Tagged as: music linux geek project nslu2 sla5520 streaming last.fm
Operating at caffeine mark 6
I'm feeling confident
I'm singing Manic Street Preachers - All Is Vanity

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