Standard Mischief

The other day I lamented about not daring to clean my sooper leet OmniKey/ULTRA keyboard, because I was afraid to mess with it while it’s working perfectly well.

Today I stumbled upon a cache of keyboards, and after spending an hour searching through at least 300 of ‘em I pulled out a stash of the beloved IBM Model M Keyboard, (and no, I’m not about to spill the beans on my souper seekret source, sorry).

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I got 8 of them. Two are in dirty but perfect shape, and one just looks like it’s missing a few keycaps. The others are missing a few keys, but I assume that I can make a few complete ones out of the remaining parts. They are so dirty, that i was thinking of just hosing them off there in the yard, but I suppose I’ll disassemble them first and clean them up by hand, using some Simpleton Green or something. They were $3 each, cleaned up and refurbished they seem to ebay for about $15-45 each, but with all the labor the cleaning will take, I’m not likely to really strike it rich. More than likely I’ll just have myself a lifetime supply of clicky.

Since I’ve got them both right here, comparing the OmniKey/ULTRA and the Model M side by side, I detect a bit more “sprong” sound coming from the Model M, but that’s really not a problem. The clicky is the same or nearly so, the only likely problem will be that I am used to the pipe key over the backslash key that’s located under the enter key on my OmniKey.

Here are the backs of the keyboards. On each of ‘em you have the actual birthday date printed on the back. How cool is that? I have a range from 29APR87 to 24MAR95 (that last one being made by Lexmark under contract for IBM)

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I left a $3 IBM PC (original IBM PC) keyboard back there. I think you need an expensive PIC based keyboard converter to use it on a AT type modern system. I must say, however, that that IBM PC keyboard, other than the nonstandard replacement black keyboard cord, was about in the best shape of the lot of them.

Below are some other links I ought to tie together while I have a chance.

Marco points out a link to Das Keyboard, and says:

This is the keyboard for serious touch-typists…or for arrogant supergeeks who enjoy looking down their noses at the office drones who still need a label on the key in order to know which one to peck. The main market for Das Keyboard are snobby turtleneck-and-goatee-wearing latte slurpers who feel the need for a physical representation of their status on the top of the geek food chain.

The crew at hak5.org in episode #3 teardown and paint a Model M keyboard to have it look like the above Das Keyboard. Some of the campy stuff the crew does is borderline annoying but I have to say that this (and other bits in each episode) is top drawer stuff. Good job Wess! (..and as long as there’s a few model M’s for the museums, pulling off a well planned mod of the Model M certainly isn’t a crime)

There’s always the obligatory Wikipedia link. The Model M keyboard.

http://www.clickykeyboards.com/ seems to have a few for sale, some parts and accessories, and a picture of the key mechanism patent.

Now all I need is a frigging 5.5 millimeter socket for disassembly.

Update: It looks like two of the keyboards that I have picked up seem to be for the IBM 3196 Terminal. It’s a bit deceiving because it has the old style fat AT connector. It’s the ones on the upper -left corner of the grass picture above. Although it looks like you just need to add a AT to PS/2 adapter to get it to work, research on the web tells me it’s not that easy. Ebay seems to have a number of them sitting ready for sale at $20 to (WTF?) $130 each, plus shipping. There hasn’t been any recent sales, however. I’ve added this addendum merely for Google’s sake. The part number for these so called “IBM 122-keyboards” is 1390572. Leave me a comment if you are at all interested. The clicky is great on theses too, and it looks like I could at least salvage the keycaps for the others, so I suppose it’s still money well spent.

Another Update 24-Sep-06:

This looks pretty neat. The EudoraPro Keyboard, “available in black and classic white in both USB and PS/2 for $70.” I don’t know about the reviewer, but I think $70 isn’t too unreasonable. I’d like to try that red dot pointer mouse thingy first before shelling out the cash though.

Related Tags: IBM, IBM Model M Keyboard, Model M, Keyboard, Omnikey, OmniKey/ULTRA, Hak5, Hak5.org, Das Keyboard

Since I gave such a ringing endorsement of TracFone yesterday;

It?s the ideal service for identity thieves, paranoid people, undocumented workers, teenagers without credit, people who have a little action going on the side, and people like me who hate talking on the phone but need to be accessible.

(sorry, sometimes I like to hear myself blog), I though I’d go over a few advantages and pitfalls.

Bad crap:

All of the tech support is by people on the third shift in India. Their English varies from pretty good to hard to understand. You’ll need tech support if you need your voicemail reset because you forgot your password, or if you want to move your minutes from your old TMDA phone to your new GMS phone. You can pretty much redeem airtime and handle your voicemail and other day by day stuff by yourself if you are at all technically inclined.

If you lose the phone, you are pretty much SOL. The tech support doesn’t really know how many minutes you have left, that’s handled by the firmware. I would suggest signing up via the web with fake info rather than no info. I imagine then you could get access to your phone number and have it transferred to your new phone, but you likely will lose a large stockpile of minutes.

TracFone will spam you. I highly suggest setting up an email just for the phone. Go get a yahoo account or something. Keep note of who’s name is on the phone’s account. I think Karl Marx of 308 Maple Way set up my account.

TracFone will instant message you. They either stopped because I called and wasted operator time bitching at them, or they figured out that any more than 3 instant messages is really annoying, and bad for business.

Good crap:

TracFone buys service from major cellphone networks. My old TMDA phone got the service from AT&T or Verizon, I forget. My GMS phone gets service from Cingular. I get the same coverage as anyone else with Cingular, and my voicemail works just like Cingular’s too.

The Email to SMS gateway is also Cingular. The email address for my phone is something like myphonenumber@mobile.mycingular.com. I’m pretty sure that TracFone never told me that, it was fairly easy to figure out.

Incoming SMS are free. Script kiddies and shell script authors can have fun with this. You can get the weather texted to you every day at 8 am, or have a message sent to you whenever your garage door opener opens, just as long as you are geeky enough to wire things up and write the shell scripts. Everything everyone figured out already back in 1986 when you got your first pager.

Outgoing text messages cost three tenths of a credit. That’s about 12 cents each, worst case. Best case is about three cents or so. If there’s ever an emergency like 9/11 and all the cellphones can’t make outgoing calls, frequently a text message can get through. Because your loved ones might be on another network, you need to get their email gateways now to use in an emergency.

Other stuff to keep in mind:

Upon activation, you get a number of units, and a date. Either run out of time or run out of credits and the phone is only good for 911 calls, Each card you redeem will add two months to the end date unless it’s a year card. They’ll also only let you get a few months ahead on the date department, unless you buy a year card, then it’s something like two years.

Update 18Aug06: From the website:

Add airtime before your due date and your remaining minutes and service days will carryover and be added to your phone, to a maximun of 120 days with any combination of regular airtime cards or 730 days with any combination of annual plan cards

If you run out the date clock, you lose your phone number. Fail to reactivate your phone again with in a few days and you lose all your credits too.

Redeeming a card consists of keying in a crapload of numbers 2 or three times, one after another. That once a year hassle card looks better and better.

You will want to check you email before redeeming a card. Sometimes you can get a bonus minutes that way. Redeem a year card, and use promotional code 54220 for an extra 200 credits/minutes. Code 54604 should work with any type card until the end of August, 2006.

Update 18Aug06: There’s always a code you can use to get bonus minutes when you redeem a card. If you don’t get the codes via email just google for them. The search terms tracfone 10000..99999 expires seem to work well for me.

Very occasionally you will get into a roam area. When this happens, local and long distance calls cost 2 credits a minute. This only happens to me up near Harper’s Ferry, WV up near the woods, but it might be an issue if you move to Wyoming.

You can buy a lot of minutes for the $30+tax/month that even the most basic cellphone plans cost. I’ve personally never talked for longer than about 200 minutes a month, but there’s plenty of people with the damn phone stuck to their ear out there, if that’’s the case, prepaid is probably not for you.

Recently, in the news there have been stories about people with ties to the middle east going around and buying mass quantities of pay-as-you-go cellphones. A few people have speculated what the heck was going on. Were they making them into Improvised explosive devices (IED), or reselling them to teh illegal immigrants?

Actually no, it’s simpler than that. I left the same comment over at SayUncle and Shots Across The Bow, and at the latter, someone was impressed enough by my insight to revise their own post (though apparently not impressed enough for him to link to my blog, or at the very least mention me by name).

So here’s the poop. There is a company out there called Tracfone, and they sell prepaid phone service. It’s the ideal service for identity thieves, paranoid people, undocumented workers, teenagers without credit, people who have a little action going on the side, and people like me who hate talking on the phone but need to be accessible. The reason for this is that you can get a phone, voicemail, SMS, and email to SMS gateway without giving out your name or other personally identifying information. The cost can be very cheap, as low as $8.33 a month if you buy a year’s service in advance and use it an average of 20 minutes or less a month (minutes roll over). It can also be pretty expensive (the same deal works out to 40 cents a minute, though it’s cheaper if you buy more minutes). This is possibly a good place to mention that prepaid phones are not subject to the local municipality special taxes. My county gouges residents with a $3 per month tax, which is a tax of 10% on say a $30 per month basic plan. We do, however, get to pay sales tax on the prepaid minute cards.

To get you to use their service they also sell the phones cheap as a loss leader. This is my phone below, the Nokia 1100b:

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It’s resting on my 31337, old skool OmniKey/ULTRA keyboard. (Marco tells me it’s worth 2 bills, me, I just like the clicky. As you can see, I have been afraid to wash it because I’m afraid the clicky will go away. It’s a tactile feedback thingy, you wouldn’t understand.)

You get a basic GSM phone that’s not only locked to Tracfone, but also has custom Tracfone firmware that shows you how much service you have remaining. It’s a dual band, digital only, b/w LCD, less than 4 oz base model thingy, but it works just great. You don’t get a camera, Bluetooth, IR syncing, laptop modem, Internet-tube browsing or any JavaBeans. There is a handy white LCD, set into the top, that makes a good flashlight.

Here’s the inside:

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This phone does not have the standard Nokia “m-bus” or “f-bus” port, but as you can see inside the red circle, there are a number of gold contact pads for programing. The resellers connect their computer here and wipe that custom Tracfone firmware. At this point, you have a basic GMS phone that could be used on any GMS service. Inside the battery compartment, on the lower left hand side is the spot for the SIM card.

In addition to reselling them on Ebay (look carefully below the keypad for the Tracfone logo. This link will eventually die, of course), I’m sure a number of them get sold overseas. In fact, I believe this phone was specifically designed as an inexpensive phone for the third world, but don’t quote me on that.

I’ve seen these $20 phones for sale at Mall-Wart, other chains, and dollar type discount stores. If they wipe the firmware, they seem to be able to sell the phones for about 35 bux. Tracfone, of course, doesn’t like this, but they go over the line when they lawyer up and try to use the courts as their own personal blunt instrument. Don’t use our government, by and for the people, to prop up your crappy business model.

Because it can be tough to identify resellers that don’t advertise, or resellers that sell overseas, the other thingy Tracfone seems to be doing is to limit the number of phones a person can buy at a time. As you can see from the news story that above guy linked to, make it worthwhile, and people will drive around to every location to buy whatever daily minimum is allowed. (This should also show the futility of those “one gun a month” laws, but it won’t, and legitimate customers will continue to be inconvenienced, while criminals will just use multiple people, and multiple locations to circumvent the law as needed.)

Finally I’d like to mention that this weekend I went shopping, to see if I could score another model 1100. At Target, they had one, but it was priced at $30. At Wal-Mart, one store had a 1100, but it was bundled with a prepaid top-up card at $30, and another store they were all out, but had a newer, possibly harder to hack Motorola V170 at $20 each.

Update: A news report also also states, “They sell them without the packaging or charger.” This also seems to point to overseas sales, because in many places the wallwart charger won’t plug into the local outlets. GSM 850/1900 MHz phones like the Nokia 1100 work, acording to Wikipedia, “United States, Canada, and many other countries in the Americas“. If we assume that the wallwart charger isn’t used because it won’t fit, then the phones must be being resold in somewhere in South America, such as Argentina or Chile.

Related Tags: Tracfone, Terrorist, loss leader, cellphone, improvised explosive device, IED, explosive, Nokia 1100, Nokia 1100b, 1100, Nokia

Wow, what a screw up. I?m not a 100% sure what?s going on here, but AOL seems to have made a bunch of search queries available on a public website, then yanked the page. Screenshot of the AOL page is here.

Maybe I’m missing something major, but this seems exactly like the case where the Department of Justice asked Google for a bunch of search data in their attempt to resurrect a law that was struck down, except this time it was AOL, not Google, and the data was released world wide instead of being sent to the DOJ.

I have no idea why AOL compiled the data in the first place, but obviously they made a mistake by releasing it.

So here’s the thread I’ll be quoting from. This whole thingy was brought to my attention by Acidus.

by skullaria:

Aol released TONS of user information in the form of search engine queries, and whether or not links were clicked on.

While they did obliterate the name, replacing it with a number, anyone that has egosurfed is clearly at risk..

Emphasis is mine.

by Rattle:

Update: I’ve imported the data into an SQL database so I can do some data mining. It’s about 3.5G worth of SQL, so the process of building indexes and performing any useful queries is really slow going. Sometime in the next 24 hours, I should be posting up some statistics. I have to think about it some more first… From what I’ve gathered so far, there is no liability in doing so.

AOL fucked up. This data is in the hands of many, many, many people. That being the case, I want to see how the data frames the issues we all have with this kind of data being available to law enforcement, marketers, and others.. Anyone who has any ideas about what questions we should be asking, reply to this with your thoughts.

Here’s a list of mirrors for the data.

by Decius:

This will probably be a watershed moment for Internet privacy.

Unfortunately, we?ve been having too many watershed moments lately. Recent thefts of laptops containing unencrypted, private information that was being held by government subcontractors barely caused a ripple.

Update: An apology by AOL, in part, from The Paradigm Shift blog:

This was a screw up, and we?re angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.

Translation: We meant to do this, but at the time we didn’t consider how the public would perceive it. The backlash stings, I tell you. If our left hand knew what the right hand was doing, we would have never done this.

“…We?ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again….”

Translation: Someone’s going to get fired.