992df473bbb9e132f4b3b6e4d33f72171e97bc7a.mddata Voicemail list
ff1324e6b949111b2fb449ecddb50c89c3699a78.mddata Call log
3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata SMS Log
740b7eaf93d6ea5d305e88bb349c8e9643f48c3b.mddata Notes database
31bb7ba8914766d4ba40d6dfb6113c8b614be442.mddata Contact List

The schema for most of these can be found here: http://damon.durandfamily.org/archives/000487.html (although he references their on-phone location, and talks about jailbroken phones, these SQLite DB files are accessible on your desktop machine, and are updated in place every time you sync your phone.

In addition to these, a few interesting DBs I found that are specific to apps installed on my phone are:
6639cb6a02f32e0203851f25465ffb89ca8ae3fa.mddata Facebook friends list
970922f2258c5a5a6d449f85b186315a1b9614e9.mddata Flightstats
5ad81c93601ac423bc635c7936963ae13177147b.mddata Daily Burn food log


Each of these database can be accessed via the sqlite3 command line tool for interactive use. For bulk processing and playing with stuff in a spreadsheet or other DB, you can dump whole tables to CSV easily with sqlite3
sqlite3 -csv -separator , 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata "select * from message" > smshistory.csv
you can dump your SMS history to a CSV file.

I’m writing a few scripts to generate ‘top talkers’ and some other statistics, and will post those later.

NTC FIRST Team’s Robot takes it’s ‘first’ steps! from HR Geeks on Vimeo.

Click through for a higher resolution view of the video.

“On November 5th, 2009 Hampton Roads’ premier learning and network event for software developers, interactive agencies, and technology entrepreneurs will be held at Grow Interactive, Norfolk.”

Speakers:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
by Andy Hunt
Author & Co-Founder Pragmatic Bookshelf

The Joy of Ruby
Clinton R. Nixon
Development Director at Viget Labs

iPhone Development: Touching Cocoa
Jamie Pinkham
Software Engineer at Mobelux

Sounds like a great event. It’s free, seating limited to 50. RSVP today!!

More information at www.757studio.org

Congrats!

These instructions work for Ubuntu 8.10 on my hardware.  My card reader is built into a USB Dell Keyboard.  It takes only a couple of steps to enable it for use in Firefox.

1. Install libccid (which requires pcscd as a dependency)
2. Install coolkey
3. Tell Firefox to use coolkey’s pkcs11 library
4. Profit!

To cover these steps in more detail:

1. Install libccid and pcscd.  (`apt-get install libccid`) libccid and pcscd are the hardware drivers for USB cardreaders and smartcard support libraries for Ubuntu.  With these alone installed, the ‘light’ on the smart card reader should illuminate, showing that it recognizes that a card is inserted.
2. Install RedHat’s PKCS11 SmartCard library coolkey (`apt-get install coolkey`).  This provides a PKCS11 compliant interface between smartcards and applications that support PKCS11 certificates, such as Firefox/Thunderbird.
3. Tell Firefox to utilize the coolkey PKCS11 library:
   1. In Firefox, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Security Devices and click ‘Load’.
   2. In the Module Name field, type “DoD CAC“
   3. In the Module Filename field type or select “/usr/lib/pkcs11/libcoolkeypk11.so”
      or “/usr/lib64/pkcs11/libcoolkeypk11.so” if you’re on 64bit systems
   4. Select ‘OK’, and confirm that you would like to install the module.
      
   5. Click ‘OK’ to acknowledge that the module has been loaded.  If you receive an error that the module could not be loaded, exit and restart Firefox, and make sure your card reader light was on.
      
   6. This returns you to the Security Devices dialog.  Click ‘LOGIN’ in the upper right corner, and enter your CAC PIN.  And that’s it!
      
      
4. Now that you’ve got the CAC enabled and recognized in Firefox, you can login to sites requiring it.  A dialog box prompts you to select the proper certificate and enter your PIN each time.  That’s all there is to it!

After the recent Apple update, which included ‘security fixes’ for Safari, Little Snitch popped up a warning message when I attempted to visit my banks website.  A process called ocspd wanted to visit “EVSecure-ocsp.verisign.com”.  Needless to say, I was instantly curious as to what in the world ocspd was, and why it was trying to talk to Verisign when I was visiting my banks webpage.

It turns out, ocspd is part of Apples new ‘safe surfing’ update to Safari.  Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is the functional replacement for the old school PKI Certificate Revocation List (CRL).  It allows the Certificate Authority (CA) (in this case, Verisign) who signed the websites certificate, to authenticate the presented certificate in real time.  This is a much more ‘elegant’ solution than the old, crummy CRL, which had to be manually updated (or pushed down with OS patches, etc) and did not allow certificates to be rejected in anywhere near realtime if they were deemed fradulent.

Despite being a more elegant solution, it also creates a number of new problems.  

First, it places a big new load CAs, who went from being trusted certificate issuers to being real time certificate verifiers.

Secondly (and more importantly), it seriously breaches the privacy of every user using the service.

By requesting verification of every SSL certificate, the signing CAs now receive notification (and potentially tracking identification) every[1] time someone browses to a site utilizing an SSL certificate signed by that CA.  If that’s not bad enough, at least for Verisign, the server name is POSTed via plaintext HTTP!  Your formerly encrypted, secure connection to the remote server is now compromised by a plaintext referral to a 3rd party, who also gets to track your visits.

The entire contents of the SSL session isn’t posted, only the name of the site you attempting to access, but even that would have normally been encrypted, and most definitely not available to 3rd parties.  

So, Safari, by default, will now violate it’s users privacy in an attempt to prevent stupid users from mistaking an SSL certificate for being invalid.

Luckily, Firefox 3 (all versions of FF support OCSP, v3 turns it on by default), Opera and IE7 (only on Vista) do the exact same thing!  With IE and Firefox, however, the ocsp provider is apparently in-process to the browser, so it didn’t flag on firewalls and app monitors like Little Snitch.

On FF3 and Safari, it is simple enough to disable – in ‘Security Settings’, simply uncheck the ‘Safe Surfing’ or ‘Fraudulent Site’ protection buttons.  I don’t have Vista or Opera, so I don’t know if it can be disabled there or not.

The protocol doesn’t appear to allow cookies or specific tracking tokens to be exchanges, but IP addresses and the like most definitely are exposed.  I have to wonder what the privacy policy of the CAs is on information like this – there is definitely monetary value in knowing which IPs are hitting which encrypted sites.  I can’t find (after a bit of googling) any real reference to privacy policies or other tracking information policy on the part of any CA.  

[1] Technically, ocspd supports session ‘stapling‘, allowing the server serving the credentials that are being verified to cache a short-duration ‘stamp’ from the ocsp responder at the CA, and providing them as a cached object during TLS session negotiation.  This definitely does not negate the need to take a better look at the privacy implications of ocsp in the first place.

This stuff changes pretty substantially year to year, so it’s worthwhile to go back and see exactly where the sweet spot is.  Today, from a cost-per-gig standpoint, the Seagate 1.5TB and the Samsung 1TB discs barely nudge ahead, coming in at a mere $0.12/GB.

 Here’s a quick break down of that statistical information, as of October 21, 2008:

(edit: fixed messed up pricing for Samsung disks).

All disks in the comparison shared the following characteristics:

• 3.5″ Internal SATA 3.0Gb/s Connector
• 7200 RPM spindle speed
• 8MB Cache @ 250GB, 16MB Cache @ 500GB, and 32MB Cache @ 750/1000/1500GB tiers
• ‘OEM’ pricing on Newegg, disregarding any special offers or rebates (instant or otherwise) 

On a per-tier basis, the following disks were used:

250GB Tier

• Hitachi P7K500 HDP725025GLA380 (0A35399) – $54.99
• Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500AAJS – $49.99
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250310AS – $49.99
• Samsung does not make a 250GB 3.5″ disk

500GB Tier

• Hitachi P7K500 HDP725050GLA360 (0A35415) – $69.99
• Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS – $69.99
• Seagate 7200.10 ST3500630A – $79.99
• Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD502lJ – $69.99

750GB Tier

• Hitachi K1000 HDS721075KLA330 (0A35154) – $99.99
• Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS – $129.99
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3750330AS – $109.99
• Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ – $99.99

1000GB (1TB) Tier

• Hitachi K1000 HDS721010KLA330 (0A35155) – $129.99
• Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS – $149.99
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS – $139.99
• Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ – $119.99

1500GB (1.5TB) Tier

• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS – $179.99
• Western Digital, Hitachi, and Samsung do not yet produce 1500GB drives