Centroid.EU Blog

Why I think America is greedy, under Trump's presidency

June 1st, 2017

I don't know why Donald Trump thinks America is getting the short end of the stick in trade. Let's look at some facts. America has a monopoly in data. You know..google, microsoft, apple, facebook, twitter, amazon, what have you, those are all american companies. There is not too much competition for these that I know other than perhaps baidu in China and vzkontakte in Russia. So while the rest of the world is locked-in to american data brokers, they are saying they are getting the bad deals. This is greedy! As you may know, data isn't profitable by itself. But massage it with analysis it is very valuable and it is powerful. The trick is to run powerful algorithms over it after it's being collected.

Now, the NSA has access to some of that data and they have their own data. But the NSA isn't for-profit per se. But they run some of the same algorithms that for example google might. It's in their interest and again they have a monopoly of this data in the world. You may remember the spy plane that was damaged in April 2001 as it was collecting data from cell phones in China. That is what's called aggressive data collection.

So while perhaps other areas in trade are lacking overall, the "data" cannot be overlooked. And that's why I think America is greedy.

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Launched first page of http://goldflipper.de

May 30th, 2017

I have launched the first page, more to follow on goldflipper.de. I think it looks great so far. Also check out the reload the colour border is randomly created.

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Played with my wacom a few days ago...

May 26th, 2017

Or... from a different perspective:

Go flipper go!

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Built an aggregator for big files

May 25th, 2017

I had the problem of getting 8 Mbps downloads across the Big Pond (tm) from my VPS psi.virgostar.net. So I constructed a little system with scripts and ssh to aggregate several locations together. Now I get ~30 Mbps.

As you can see this is how it works, each arrow is an ssh connection. BPI is the Big Pond Internet, the area where I cross the ocean. I checked I get routes from Tata, Telia and Cogent, so everything is nicely dispersed and they can't put 2 and 2 together and throttle all my hosts. At uranus I assemble the temporary files into 1 big md5 summed file. If the md5 sum is fine then it deletes the temp files. Below is the script from Uranus which does most the work of chopping up the workload for each host.

#!/bin/sh

if [ $# -ne 1 ] ; then
        exit 0
fi

RET=`ssh psi /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 || echo NSF`

if [ x$RET == x"NSF" ] ; then
        echo no such file
        exit 1
fi

SIZE=`echo $RET | awk -F: '{print $2}'`
MDSUM=`echo $RET | awk -F: '{print $NF}'`

CHIP=`expr $SIZE / 4096`

date
echo getting 4 chunks of size $CHIP
TMP1=`mktemp 1.XXXXXXX`
TMP2=`mktemp 2.XXXXXXX`
TMP3=`mktemp 3.XXXXXXX`
TMP4=`mktemp 4.XXXXXXX`
BASENAME=`basename $1`

ssh omega /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 0 $CHIP > $TMP1 &
OFFSET=$CHIP
ssh supercluster /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 $OFFSET $CHIP > $TMP2 &
OFFSET=`expr $CHIP \* 2`
#OFFSET=`expr $OFFSET + 1`
ssh chi /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 $OFFSET $CHIP > $TMP3 &
OFFSET=`expr $CHIP \* 3`
#OFFSET=`expr $OFFSET + 1`
ssh psi /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 $OFFSET 0 > $TMP4

wait %1
wait %2
wait %3

cat $TMP1 $TMP2 $TMP3 $TMP4 > $BASENAME

SUM=`md5 $BASENAME | awk '{print $NF}'`
if [ $SUM != $MDSUM ] ; then
        echo sums do not match!
        exit 1
fi

echo file is $BASENAME
date
rm -f $TMP1 $TMP2 $TMP3 $TMP4

exit 0

There is intermediate scripts on omega, chi and supercluster and another big script on psi to make this all work. But I'm not gonna share it all here.

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Purchased 2 WR-1043ND Routers for Freifunk

May 22nd, 2017

I purchased two more routers for Freifunk. I need these to accellerate my network at home a little. In other news I'm trying to give out a few WR-841 routers to stores near here in order to grow the Freifunk in my neighbourhood. We recently got a new router for Schweinfurt and the Freifunk Net is gonna rock!

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Purchased a 4TB external USB3 harddrive

May 18th, 2017

In fact I did this last week even on the 12th. The new drive is amazing. It can be written to at 70 MB/s, I find that extremely high. And that's only from copying from the internal drive on my computer "earth" (mac mini) to it, so it may just be limited to the read speed of earth's internal hd.

First I wanted to encrypt this drive but noticed that I had too many sectors in order to use softraid's crypt. I guess softraid by default is limited to 2TB unless you fiddle with the sector size which I did not want to do. So I left it unencrypted, on FFS2.

I already put some backups on this drive:

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd1a      3.6T    367G    3.3T    10%    /backup

Now you may wonder why i's 3.6 TB here and I said 4TB. Well WD sold this with the label "1 TB == 1 trillion bytes", so let's do some math.

$ dc
4 1000 * p
4000
1000 * p
4000000
1000 * p
4000000000
1000 * p
4000000000000
1024 / p
3906250000
1024 / p
3814697
1024 / p
3725

It comes very close to 3.6 in fact when I do the last step with a calculator I get 3.6376953. (dc doesn't give me decimal places in the way I'm using it). I'm overall pretty happy with this purchase. I've never had this much capacity before.

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Goodbye Soekris! Pity to see you go!

May 11th, 2017

Soekris was a small i386/amd64 computer on a rackmountable or desktop small case. They were driven out of business by the competition in Asia and what I think was a business mistake. Their long awaited products never left the drawing board last. I would have bought it but they scrapped it.

This is my soekris at home but it uses more connections than the one you see. In fact I utilize 1 external NIC card fully with 1 connection on the second card.

Goodbye Soekris rest in peace! It was probably the last Made in the USA computer that I bought, pre-snowden. For all those other manufacturers that are waiting on business, we want 10-Gigabit ports! Without them we can't justify buying more equipment. I also want under 20 watts power consumption on top of that.

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Why do we need more than one State-run TV station?

May 8th, 2017

Rumours has it that the state-run TV and Radio stations are wanting to increase the GEZ tax. Now the question abounds to.. why do we even need more than one state run TV station? As the "official" voice of the state we don't need two! In german these state run behemoths are called "Oeffentlich-Rechtliche Sender". Germany, you're not giving choice, you're milking ordinary citizens dry with GEZ taxes! Let there be only 1 TV and 1 Radio station that is from the government. Because even if we switch channels the message coming from the government will always be the same. There is no difference! Let some die! And we welcome the digitalization of the state-run TV station and radio.

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In 6 days we're 8 years old (with history)

May 1st, 2017

Happy anniversary!

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Government issued national ID card online

April 24th, 2017

Before a nation decides to hook everyone to an ID card, I'd like to remind them that not everyone runs windows. And it is against our democratic right to be forced to use windows. No, I don't run a Macintosh at all times either. My OS (betriebsystem) is OpenBSD. If you'd like me to run your ID card, I expect a fully open sourced driver to my OS. The driver has to satisfy the OpenBSD developer community in order to be accepted into the base kernel system. No, it isn't linux and it's not linux compatible! There is a lot of OS's other than Windows and Macintosh, AND I'm afraid you'll have to satisfy all instances if you want 100% coverage. This means jobs for developers. It can be done. Please make it so!

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