I just got an email from what purports to be Allied Irish Banks p.l.c. , <info@aib.ie> , with a reply address of do-not-reply@aib.ie. with a subject of “Internet Banking Update” .

AIB Email

There is indeed a new look website that has been up for a few weeks, but asking to download a form and follow instructions raised alarm bells.

The attached form is an HTML page containing loads of image and script links back to the AIB wensite, but teh critical line is the form submit which points at http://212.34.134.245/webmail/themes/tmp/index.php.

The Geo IP report on teh ip address suggests it is a Madrid based computer.

Geo IP Report

The actual HTML form looks like this

AIB Phishing form

If you put in rubbish values, the javascript throws a series of errors and the form also expects that all the security codes are filled in. This is of course because AIB requires the use of a 1 time only card for funds transfers.

All in all a pretty basic attempt a social engineering, but all the same it would probably get quite a few people.

Twitter is the most important tool in the universe.

Without it how would we know that a plane was in the Hudson before the people in the plane knew? How would we know that the Mars rovers actually were sentient (I twitter therefore I am not a robot)? How would we know that Stephen Fry is a fancy dressing pugilist with a penchant for sculpting dead bodies while making bad music? Twitter that’s how.

But who are these 12,345 close friends that sit on every choice morsel of cranial excreta that oozes from your finder tips. Sure, twitter shows a few pictures, but how can one appreciate the wholeness of the twitteverse in a 6×6 matrix? A 10×10 matrix should do it. And that is what my good friend Walter Higgins has done with Twitter Mosaic from his company, Sxoop Technologies.

Never again will you be have to walk in public, worried that you, a rare and delicate example of the heaving mass of humanity, are anonymous. No, now you will be able to shout (manically but silently) with passion to the unbelievers that I, @(add twitter name here) am an early adopter, a fully fledged, paid up member of the technoarti and the you, dull drones, are doomed to never know what it feels to be part of  The Collective.

Ah go on. Buy a T.

I bought a mini laptop from Aldi, the E1210. It’s only 1.2 Kg, 1.6 GHz, 1 Gb ram, 80 GB HD. It has windows XP home which works very well, but I need Ubuntu. I wanted to keep the install of XP so here is how I did it. There is no CD so I used USB drives.

1. On my main laptop running Ubuntu I used UNetbootin to create a Parted Magic usb stick
2. On the Medion I booted from the USB disk and used the UI QParted to resize the XP disk to be 40 GB. For some reason I had to do the partitioning this way as the Ubuntu installer would not allow me to resize the exisiting 80 GB partition.
3. Then I rebooted into XP and formated the unused space as a fat32 drive
4. Then I used UNetbootin to create a Ubuntu 8.01 USB disk.
5. I booted the Medion using the Ubuntu disk.
6. I ran the install and when the partition choice came up the empty drive (SDA2) was pre selected.
7. The install went fine and then I had a dual boot with no CD used.

I wrote a fairly well received blog post on using those nice 3G modems from Vodafone and O2 in Linux to send SMS. It was based on using the modems through minicom, but since minicom uses a straight serial connection it is possible to use the modems through code, in my case Python.

The following code shows how to send an SMS via a 3G USB modem.

import serial
def SendVia3G():

ser = serial.Serial(‘/dev/ttyUSB1′, 115200, timeout=1)
ser.write(‘ATZ\r’)
ser.write(‘AT+CMGF=1\r’)
ser.write(‘AT+CMGS=”+353868276XXX”\r’)
ser.write(‘SMS over 3G but from Python\n’)
ser.write(chr(26))
line = ser.readline()   #read a ‘\n’ terminated line
print line
ser.close()

Obviously the  serial extensions for python have to be installed. I use apt.
apt-get install python-serial

You can also use some similiar code to send the SMS via a mobile phone that is connected via bluetooth

apt-get install python-serial python-bluetooth


import bluetooth
import serial

def SendViaBluetooth():
sockfd = bluetooth.BluetoothSocket(bluetooth.RFCOMM)
sockfd.connect((‘00:12:D2:7A:XX:XX’, 1)) # BT Address
sockfd.send(‘ATZ\r’)
sockfd.send(‘AT+CMGF=1\r’)
sockfd.send(‘AT+CMGS=”+353868276XXX”\r’) # TO PhoneNumber
sockfd.send(‘SMS over Bluetooth\n’)
sockfd.send(chr(26)) # CTRL+Z
sockfd.close(

You might need to mess around with python and bluetooth to make sure the channel is right for your phone (1 above in the connect line). 1 is for Nokias.

I’ve created a little class (although it’s a while since I wrote this and I may have got inspiration from somewhere as it looks too good to be my code!!!) that makes using the E220 a little easier in more complicated use cases.

import bluetooth
import serial

class HuaweiModem(object):
def __init__(self):
self.open()

def open(self):
self.ser = serial.Serial(‘/dev/ttyUSB2′, 115200, timeout=1)
self.SendCommand(‘ATZ\r’)
self.SendCommand(‘AT+CMGF=1\r’)

def close(self):
self.ser.close()

def SendSMS(self, address, message):
command = ‘AT+CMGS=”%s”\r’%address
self.SendCommand(command,getline=False)
command = ‘%s\n’%message
self.SendCommand(command,getline=False)
self.SendCommand(chr(26),getline=False)

def GetAllSMS(self):
self.ser.flushInput()
self.ser.flushOutput()

command = ‘AT+CMGL=”all”\r’
print self.SendCommand(command,getline=False)
self.ser.timeout = 2
data = self.ser.readline()
print data

while data !=”:
data = self.ser.readline()
if data.find(‘+cmgl’)>0:
print data

def SendCommand(self,command, getline=True):
self.ser.write(command)
data = ”
if getline:
data = self.ReadLine()
return data

def ReadLine(self):
data = self.ser.readline()
print data
return data

h = HuaweiModem()
h.GetAllSMS()
h.SendSMS(‘+353868276XXX’,'A Nice message from Bluekulu.com’)
h.close()

Happy texting!!! and check out www.Bluekulu.com. Bluetooth Marketing Specialists.

Apologies for the formating but WordPress is deleting the leading spaces from the code above. Use this link to get a text file.

Via have released a design of one of their ultra small laptops under CC. I tried to download the CAD files but something was wrong. I contacted them through the site and got an email back from Tim Brown, International Marketing Manager (straight to the top with me; no messing with minions there) who said that I had to register first, an instruction that was on the site, but not clear. Anyway I went to the site today and they have removed the registration for download req. so now you just have to accept the CC license and download away.

But the files are in Pro E format, not a package that most people have lying around. I’ve suggested that they supply the designs as Rhino 3D files as Rhino provide a free evaluation download. We’ll see how that goes.

I recently bought a few of these eBox-2300-SX computers. Really small and pretty cheap at 90 USD. For various reasons I did not know that these were the SX version. The chip is a 300 mHz 486 and a previous one that looked very similar had worked a charm. I’ll tell you this. The SX bit is important. It means there is no maths co processor on board the chip (it’s like computing back in 1988). The critical thing is that most Linux distros assume the co processor otherwise the kernel has to be compiled to include math emulation (Debian did so in sarge but has stopped since). I managed to install Debian sarge on the computer’s compact flash, but it was sloooooow. Bogomips of 116.99. I use some arm chips that are 260 bogomips or so.

The other thing is that the Ethernet drivers are not available, but must be compiled into the kernel as well.
Punkytse over at voyage Linux has kindly recompiled his great little Debian based distro. to include  math emulation. I hope he now includes the Ethernet drivers in it too.

The E220 as sold by many mobile phone operators has transformed business use of the web. No more is the sales force tied to poor wifi coverage, dial up connections or 56k GPRS speeds. The E200 gives 3G speeds of 7.2 Mbit in a very nice tidy package.

I develop mini computers for use in remote locations. These are used for a number of purposes, but particularily Bluetooth Marketing (www.bluekulu.com). The use of the E200 has allowed me to quickly add in both internet access for the device and now I have SMS working. This will be used to both trigger an action on the computer or indeed let it SMS out reports.

In this short article I explain how to set up the E200 for use as an SMS transmitter and receiver on Linux.

Setting up the E220 for use as a modem to allow 3G on Linux is well documented on the web, but there are a few articles that really made a difference in getting it going for me.

The Irish Penguin » Blog Archive » Getting the Huawei E870 to work on Kubuntu (and Mobile Internet from O2)

NSLU2-Linux – HowTo / AddUsb3gModem browse

However, the SMS side is poorly documented.

I have put together a simple script that can be used to put the modem in the right state and that then launches minicom.

#!/bin/bash
rmmod usb-storage
rmmod usb-serial
mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
mknod /dev/ttyUSB1 c 188 1
mknod /dev/ttyUSB2 c 188 2
modprobe usbserial vendor=0×12d1 product=0×1003
sleep 10
sudo /home/broadcast/bin/huaweiAktBbo-i386.out
sleep 3 # wait for the USB host to settle down…
sudo minicom

In minicom I used the following settings

Minicom settings
Serial Device : /dev/ttyUSB0
Bps/Par/Bits : 115200 8N1
Hardware No
Software Flow Control : Yes

Once you set these settings as the default, restart minicom. (CTRLA z x)

You are now in a position to send commands to the modem. The general format is AT+Some_Command. Some that will work straigh away are.

AT+COPS=? #get network names

AT+CIMI #Get IMSI Number

AT+CGMI #Get manufacturer name

To send SMS’s you need to put the device in “Text” mode. This is done by sending the following command:

AT+CMGF=1 # Puts the mode in text mode

To send an SMS do the following:

AT+CMGS=”+35386827XXXX”
> 3G Rocks!!!!
CTRL-Z

When you type in the line with the phone number the “>” will come up automatically. Type in your message and when you are finished type in CTRLZ (as in ctrl key and z at the same time).

Good so far? But how about incoming messages. Have no fear, DBTR is here!!!

AT+CMGL=”all” #To get a list of SMS’s type in :

AT+CMGR=0 #get an individual message

AT+CMGD=n #Delete a message where n is the number returned by the list above.

There are quite a few other commands that the Huawei understands. I’ll post them later.

To hangup just do CTRLA x.

I hope this makes using the Huawei a bit easier. Now if anyone can tell me why incoming HTPP requests don’t work on Vodafone Ireland, I’d be happy to hear from them.

I’ve being following the progress of OpenID with interest and I blogged about it before. I toyed with an alternative called ClosedID and even checked to see if ClosedID.org was free. It was … but not anymore. Microsoft has it as of 12th January. It is registered to the OfficeLive.com domain but has info about the University of Washington’s Network Security Lab. Their home page spiel is little cryptic:

The identity is the most important property that man could have during and even after his life. We academically research the one identification method in closed environment.

“The one identification method”!!!!

Amazon have announced a database product in their Web services offering, calling it (in another Ronseal moment) “SimpleDB”. It provides spreadsheet lookup type access to data.

It looks like a great complement to the 3 other big systems.

EC2 for virtual computers, S3 for storage and SQS for message queue. Up etill now, the only way to store volatile data was in S3 as files, but lookup was limited to searching by name. I use it for storing content generated by users, so I can search by bucket_name/username/datetime/extension/ and then I can get the list of filenames. That’s fine for data that is structured just so and you only want to search for it via that particular search sequence. It would be impossible, for instance to search for all data created on a particular day. SimpleDB changes that. Now I can search by type, date, name, username, etc as I wish.

The task now is to remove all Mysql requirments. Oh and thanks to the AWS team for inviting me to be on Beta. They called me one of their “most active developers”

Openstreetmap is a FOSS project that allows anyone to help with creating a fully open source street map of the world. Users upload GPS data to a central server where they or others can annotate and create street-maps . The resulting street-maps are as good as Goggle maps, Yahoo or Microsoft. The coverage is great in the dense urban centers and not so good in the country side. As part of this project they have created some great tools and leveraged some others.

But you ask, why bother when Google and co. are so generous with their data? Well, nothing is free and while Google can afford to let you use this data at home for nothing, they do restrict use of the data for commercial applications. They specifically do not allow system that connects a GPS to their map. Yahoo and AFAICT, Microsoft are the same.

OSM on the other hand, allow you to do pretty much anything you want with their data. They provide a great interface using OpenLayers, that gives the now commonplace, ajax “slippy map”. They use a great map renderer call Mapnik that actually creates the little images that make up the web map. While their images can be used freely, even in commercial applications, They are served from some hardware that is under allot of strain, and they encourage use of caches on your local servers.

I am developing a GPS tracking system for cars, trucks and boats and I want to do this as cheaply as possible. While I could use Google, et al, I don’t want to get into licensing, etc. So I am going to run my own OSM servers and I am going to do it on Amazon AWS.

Technical Details follow!! You’ve been warned.

I used an Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06. LTS server AMI with all the usual build tools. I downloaded mapnik 0.4.0 and compiled. I downloaded World Boundaries and extracted to /mnt/spatialdata. I copied generate_tiles.py and osm.xml to /mnt. I modified osm.xml to reflect the new path locations as well as removed all the postgresql calls (OSM stored all the road data in sql but I had trouble getting it going so I have left that for now). I then modified generate_tiles.py to only do an area around the South of Ireland and to write all data to /mnt/tiles. I added S3.py to /usr/src and modified generate_tiles.py to add in that directory as a src (sys.path.append(‘usr/src’)). I then added in code to upload the new tile to Amazon S3 in the osmtiles bucket.

I added the following lines above the “def minmax (a,b,c):” line. It assumes that you have set the environment variables properly.

Then after the file is created locally I add these line:

where tile_shortname is = zoom + ‘/’ + str_x + ‘/’ + str_y + ‘.png’ . Thus files are created like the following on S3.

with a path of http://osmtiles.s3.amazonaws.com/1.0.0/basic2/10/485/340.png.

These files can then be used in an Open Layers map. http://www.lukulu.com/map/tilesv2.htm

I also wrote a script to store the World Boundaries file on S3. I used a file splitter and created 20 segments. I also did the same for the planet.osm file (which contains the road data) which is 2 GB. There is no cost for data transfer between EC2 and S3 so I won’t have to pay to download these again for a while.

So What?

OK, so you ask, what is the big deal. Well, you may be right, it is not such a big deal, but what this means is that I can use Amazon EC2 to create my maps, the use Amazon S3 to store them. The only load on my servers is dishing up the map holding page. The java script for the map comes from the OpenLayers site. I do have to pay for storage of the files and transmission costs, but it means I have an app that can scale and is being served by one of the fastest pipes in the business.

Where to from here

I only ran my scripts for a few minutes as I just wanted the coast lines but if neccessar one could build a more sophisticated system. You could have a local script that creates messages on the Simple Queue Service that would tell running scripts which tiles to render. Thus popular locations (particular cities) could be prioritised. I can see for my requirement that I only want certain areas to be rendered in high detail. I would develop a tool to allow me to create the bounding boxes easily, create the messages and then my script would render just those areas. I could see this being useful also when changing the format of the osm.xml. Of course, you could launch 20 instances of the AMI doing the processing to get the images rendered quickly.

Also, while serving images from s3 is easy and there is a cost for storage there is alos a cost per request. As each pan of a map loads up new images, this could be an issue. Running instances on Amazon have up to 160 GB of “storage”. I say “storage” because if you turn off the instance, data in /mnt is gone (it is preserved through reboots). When an instance is run it could download from s3 a tar’d file of a standard set of tiles. The web server would the serve the files. Dynamic DNS could be used, but this area is in flux at the moment with Amazon (NATting, etc.

I am going to implement most of the above and see how well it works. I’m quite enthusiastic that this could work very well for mapping in other areas too, e.g Mining, Geophysics, etc