Wide-screen sucks for heavy terminal users

I've always been complaining loudly about wide-screen displays. 4:3 is much better for those of us who mainly work with xterms of 80 characters width (due to e.g. kernel coding style and e-mail conventions). The additional width is typically not enough for having three terminal windows next to each other, but the lacking height means way less visible lines of code.

This is why I'm still using my Panasonic CF-R5 (10.2" 1024x768 sub-notebook) from 2006. Despite it almost falling apart on all sides after three years of most intensive daily use, despite it feeling slower than any Atom based netbook that I've used.

So despite having tried an ideapad S9e, a HP mininote 2133, I can only deem them unusable for any serious without an external display.

Right now I'm desperately looking for a device that can be the successor for the CF-R5. I don't need much computing power, a Atom N270 would be the minimum but would work. I am happy with narrow keyboards as I'm using one for 3 years every day. I don't need tons of memory as I'm not using any bloated graphical desktop (just ion+uxterm). All I care about is Intel integrated graphics, a small device, ideally 10", with at least 768 pixels height.

It seems there are now 1366x768 based 10" netbooks, but all you can find is nVidia based Samsung devices, which are obviously completely unsuitable for, considering nVidia treats the FOSS community like crap.

I've spent half the day in Seoul's Yeoksam Electronics Market. The only thing that would remotely resemble my requirements is the ASUS eeePC 1101HA. But it's 11.6" wide screen, which makes the device considerably wider/larger than the CF-R5. Plus, the maximum memory configuration is 2G.

The other options is to buy a CF-R8. Still 4:3 ratio, almost the same size as the CF-R5. If only Panasonic was selling them outside the US. Yes, I know you can mail order them. But I'd love to have a look and try it before spending at least 1500 EUR on it.

So the Notebook industry still fails to impress me. Noisy (with fan) devices with ever wider screens. Apparently ignoring the fact that there are people who can imagine more interesting things to do with their computer than to play movies.

The reason for my trip to Korea: Samsung and mainline Linux

Some weeks ago, I wrote that I'll be again in Korea without mentioning any details. As you can see from this and this mailing list posting to linux-arm-kernel, I have the pleasure of assisting the Linux kernel team at Samsung System LSI with adopting a development model that follows (and contributes to) mainline Linux.

Despite all the enthusiasm this might now create among users of the various Samsung ARM SoC's, I would like to keep the expectations low for now. After all, "talk is cheap, show me the code", I will only blog again about this once we see the first code submissions coming from the Samsung team.

I'd like to thank Samsung System LSI for their warm welcome and their willingness to change. I hope the community will understand what a big step it is for an organization like this, and will take it easy in case the first code submissions still have some glitches here and there. After all, everyone of us has started at some point.

3G and: I hate ASN.1

I've recently spent quite a bit of time looking at 3G protocol traces and I already hate them. Why do they have to use ASN.1 PER everywhere? The 2G / 2.5G protocols are much easier to understand. You can look at the hexdump and decode it in your head. You can read the spec and understand what they do. You can implement them without thinking too much. But 3G with all its ASN.1 crap, sometimes even unaligned PER encoded? Simply impossible.

Why do people want to save a couple of bits, especially on the back-haul interfaces in the core network that shouldn't matter - at least not if you can reduce the computational complexity for the involved network entities _and_ lower the R&D cost due to easier debugging for everyone who ever implements or deploys such protocols.

Learning Hangul characters

Since I'm in Korea currently, and I'm expected to come back a number of times during the next months, I thought it might be a good idea to start learning Hangul, the Korean alphabet.

It really is surprisingly easy, there are only 24 basic glyphs that are combined in sets to form syllables. So it actually is less complex than the western alphabet, especially if you consider upper and lowercase glyphs (which Hangul doesn't have).

Of course being able to read the alphabet only allows me to convert from written to spoken language and back. Without any vocabulary, there's no way to make any meaning of the words - which is fine for me now. At least I can start to memorize names of locations/restaurants/shops this way. There really is almost no English writing anywhere - at least much less than I'm used to from my extensive time in Taiwan.

What I found particularly funny are the borrowed words from English. Things like Like "laserprinter" or even the names of the various fast food items at KFC really sound funny once you read them in Hangul and pronounce them (or hear them pronounced) ;)

GPL case in Denmark potentially involving NDS Viasat A/S and/or Samsung

As you can at this website, somebody has discovered what seems very clear GPL violations in a device called "Samsung DSB-H670N". At the moment it is not clear who is the actual cause of the GPL violation.

However, what is outstanding about this case is that an individual on its own tries to bring the respective companies into compliance. I think it serves as a great example what somebody can do even if he is not one of the clear copyright holders and just keeps insisting enough and communicating with the companies involved.

I'm definitely looking forward to see how this turns out. gpl-violations was not involved in any sort. We're continuing with many cases at any time, so don't worry. I just thought this particular action is worth mentioning to the interested reader. Maybe some other people get inspired by it and also stand up for their rights to the source code of GPL licensed programs.

HAR2009 is over

Running our own GSM network at HAR 2009 has kept me too busy to actually attend any lectures myself - apart from the A5/1 lecture in the GSM track just after my own presentations on OpenBSC and airprobe. So I'm hoping for the recordings to be available in some non-proprietary format soon. Apparently all they have now is some website with flash videos, something I'd almost call an abomination.

In any case, thanks once again to the HAR Organizers for obtaining the GSM test license. Thanks to the Agenschap Telecom for actually granting us such a license. And thanks to the many helping hands from the OpenBSC community, as well as the several hundreds of people who have tested the GSM network 204-42.

We shut down our operations at 2009-08-16 at 16:00 CEST. There were no complaints of either the regulatory authority nor the commercial network operators during the event.

We have complete debug logs of OpenBSC, as well as pcap files of all signalling data. In the weeks to come, we'll be working on extensive statistics on network usage / load, as well as relationship graphs i.e. who called/texted whom.

After a 7 hour car ride to my home in Berlin, and an 8 hour stop-over to pack my suitcases, I'm now currently in Helsinki enroute to Seoul, Korea. Following-up to my last trip in January, I'm happy to be able to visit the country at a time of much more pleasant weather (26-30 centigrade) this time.

I'm very excited about my work there in the coming months. As soon as there's anything I can state publicly about it, I'll keep you posted :)

GSM Security Workshop at DeepSec, Vienna

As David Burgess has been posting, we'll be running a joint two-day GSM Security workshop at the DeepSec security conference on November 17 and 18 in Vienna/Austria.

This will be an excellent opportunity to provide a comprehensive and in-depth view on GSM protocol-level security and its flaws, both in design as well as implementation. I don't think anything like this has ever been done before in the free/open world, i.e. outside GSM equipment vendor, operator or intelligence crowds.

So if you've always been looking for a deep tour into the subject, presented by people with IT security background who have actually implemented the GSM protocols themselves: Go ahead and register for the workshop.

OpenBSC powered GSM network live at HAR2009

Here at the amazing HAR2009 hacker conference + camp, I have the pleasure of operating a camp-wide GSM network.

Under license of the Dutch regulatory authority, we operate two BTS with two TRX each, forming the network 204-42. The BTS are positioned on the top of a hill, with the antennas mounted back to back on a tree, each covering about half of the HAR2009 camp site. Every transceiver runs at 100mW transmit power, which is the maximum output as per our license.

From that tree, we run AC power and a single E1 line down to the GSM tent, where it runs into the Linux PC that runs our OpenBSC software.

If you register first to the network, your phone will receive a single SMS and then get kicked off the network. Inside the SMS we send your IMSI and an authentication token, which you have to use on the HAR2009 GSM registry. After registering at this website, the SIM will be permitted onto our network for regular voice call and SMS service.

Right now, as you can see on our phone book, we have 391 authorized subscribers (out of a total of 1029 different IMSI's that ever tried to log onto our network)

The coverage of the network is good, we have only very few spots without signal reception.

OpenBSC has proven to work quite stable. We have the occasional segfault every 3-4 hours, but I'm at it, debugging.

Thanks to everyone who helped to make this a success, especially Stichting Hxx for obtaining the license and Daniel, Stefan and Jan for helping me with operation and debugging of the network.