If you want to use a Kindle, you have to get books onto it.  It does come with a USB cable, and you can load books from your computer.  I haven’t tried that yet, because the USB cable also charges the battery, and, in the interests of battery life, I’ve wanted to let the battery pretty much completely discharge before I charged it up again.  I’ll let you know how that works later.  (This also gets into the issue of ebook formats, and I’ll get into that later, too.)

Right off the top, probably the quickest and easiest way to get books onto your Kindle is if you can connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi.  As previously noted, if you have a private network and know the password, it can be a pain to enter, but you are in.  If you are in a Wi-Fi hotspot, things can get a bit trickier.

You can try and “Shop in Kindle Store.”  You can “Sync & Check for Items.”  (Both of those are on the “home” page menu.)  Maybe it will work.  Maybe it won’t.  Neither of them like hotspots that do redirection.  Many times they will simply tell you that the function requires a network connection.  (Sometimes the Kindle will tell you that the function requires a network connection, but you will also see indications that books are actually being downloaded.  It’s hard to tell for sure whether you are connected and can actually do anything.)
The Kindle 4 (my version) has a Web browser, which you can get to via the home page menu, under the “Experimental” entry.  It definitely is experimental.  It will not open links, if those links are set to open in new frames, tabs, or windows.  (It tells you that it can’t open the link because it doesn’t support multiple windows, rather than just opening it anyway.)  If the hotspot does redirection, the browser might go to the redirected page if you ask it to connect to a site, or reload a page.  On the other hand, sometimes you will try to fire up the browser in order to connect at a hotspot, and the Kindle will tell you that it can’t open the browser because you don’t have a net connection.  Helpful, that.

(The Kindle seems to ship with the wireless enabled and on.  I tend to turn it off, when I’m not actually downloading or “shopping,” in order to a) save battery, and b) keep from radiating all over the place.  I don’t know how many people will know that they can turn it off from the home page menu.

What I have is a Kindle 4.  I assume the “4″ stands for some level of the software.  Having done my initial exploration, I vaguely remembered having seen that it was a model D01100.  (Eventually I found that reference again: it was buried in the appendix to the “Kindle User’s Guide.”  I assume it’s less important than the Kindle 4 part.)

When you start out, the Kindle wants you to go through a registration process.  Being in a place with a Wi-Fi network, I did.  (This version of Kindle doesn’t have a keyboard.  It does have a virtual keyboard, which is usable, but difficult.  Entering a 26 character hex password was a bit of a pain.)  I have had an account with Amazon, so, when it asked if I wanted to use one or create one, I guessed at my old username and password.  It did seem to work; at least it let me start working on the Kindle, but somehow it didn’t pick up my “Registered User:” name.  At some point something must have figured out who I was, because the “Send-to-Kindle” email address (I’ll get back to that) did have my name in it.

On the first screen you see after the registration process (I later learned it was the “home” screen) there was an entry for a “Kindle User’s Guide,” and I believe it was the entry highlighted.  Being a “read the manual” type person, I read it.  It starts out by saying that it’s short and informative and can be read in 10 minutes.  Hah!

It starts out with charging the battery.  This would seem to make sense, except that a) like most battery-powered devices these days it comes charged, and b) if it wasn’t charged, you couldn’t read the manual, now could you?  It then shows you the physical layout and buttons.  Including the power button.  The power button is not intuitively obvious on first glance: one of the people who gave it to me had to show me where it was.

The Kindle has a “5-way controller.”  This should be familiar to most people who have a cell phone that still has buttons: a centre “select/enter” key, surrounded by left, right, up, and down arrow keys.  The user guide mentions that you can get around menus and text with it.  It doesn’t mention that the left and right keys have context sensitive functions that are not immediately obvious.  The Guide did mention that, when a book is highlighted, using the left key brings up an offer to delete the item.  However, it mentions a lot of other stuff, and I missed that.  (Fortunately, I did not encounter this until I had learned that the “Back” key acts as a combination of “last page visited” and “Esc.”

There is a menu button.  It is context sensitive, and will bring up, or dismiss, menus appropriate to the screen you are in.  There are lots of different menus.  It is not obvious which menu will bring up a function you may want.  This is also a good place to mention that one thing that I believe I can state, without fear of contradiction, is a major error in the design of the Kindle user interface.  There is no rollover.  Menus are limited in length, as are entries in the “home” page or your “collections” of ebooks.  Actual pages in an ebook can be much longer.  Menus tend to have the “active” item fairly near the middle.  (After a while you begin the realize that the most important and useful functions are going to be near the middle, not the top, of a menu.)  Pages always start from top left.  In either case, there is no rollover: no return off the top of a page or menu to the bottom, or off the bottom to the top.  There is no wraparound going off the right side of the page to come back in on the left, or vice versa.  (There is one exception to this” the virtual keyboard.  It doesn’t wrap top to bottom, but it does wrap side to side.)

One other problem related to the menus: the time, battery power, and Wi-Fi indicator only show when you have a menu open.  You can’t even tell the time on the home page unless you bring up a menu.  (Interestingly, when I got mine, the time was set for a time zone either four or sixteen hours later than the one I’m in.)

The User’s Guide takes a lot longer than 10 minutes to read.  It does contain a lot of information, but a great deal of it will not make much sense until you have explored the device a bit.  So you are going to have to read it at least twice.  And probably keep it around for reference.

The Girls, who have been having a grand time in recent years finding interesting high tech goodies that I never even knew existed, got me a Kindle for Christmas.  So, of course, I’m going to review the Kindle.

I had been putting off the idea of getting one for myself.  I do a lot of reading, but that’s primarily because I do a lot of reviewing, and for that you need the ability to make notes, and transfer said notes back to the computer for writing up.  So far, I haven’t seen an awful lot that convinces me the e-readers are there yet.

But, I do have to say that, right off the top, the idea of having 60 books (so far) in something that is lighter than a paperback definitely has its attractions.  So far I’ve been able to load the Bible, some tech articles, my own security dictionary, a dozen Sherlock Holmes stories, Don Quixote (both of which I have read), The Divine Comedy, War and Piece (both of which I intend to read–sometime), a fair amount of poetry, and an egalley for Bruce Schneier’s latest (sent along by his publicist).

Unfortunately, all this fun exploring has me somewhat behind in news and email, so I’ll have to start putting together my observations of the Kindle, itself, a bit later.

Some things are cross-culture it seems. Especially when it comes to trivial security mishaps.
So I’m at a PoS terminal in a large department store in Seoul and while I’m waiting for the register to ring up my order, I look at the touchscreen where I will be asked for my signature in a moment. I notice a little icon that looks like ’settings’. How can I not click on it?

Oh, it needs a password. Must be this PCI compliance thing everybody is raving about. And no, wiseass, 1-2-3-4-5 doesn’t work.

…But 1-2-3-4 does.

Yup. Unlocked.
Now I need to polish up my Korean to figure out what to do next. Suggestions?

Sorry for the full disclosure guys. And that includes all of you that now need to change your luggage combination.

It seems to be getting harder to give … greetings at this time of the year.  There’s a bit of risk involved.  Lots of people think we are exclusive to be simply wishing everyone to enjoy our holiday.  (Of course, if you think that, you have no right to use the word “holiday,” now, do you? 

I had thought I’d made a decent attempt with “Merry Mid-Winter Party Period.”  Until some in the southern hemisphere took exception to the seasonal-centredness of that phrase.

Recently one of our local columnists came up with “non-denominational-culturally-palatable-holiday-seasonal-politically-correct-racially-inoffensive-ritual-drained-of-all-religious-meaning-so-as-to-be-acceptable-to-every-creed-festival.”

So, never mind.  Merry Christmas.  Whether you like it or not.  (If not, you can have a Happy New Year anyway 

In keeping with Christmas itself, I wanted to give you a Christmas present.  Maybe before some of you disappear into family time and last minute tasks for the Exmas Rush.  You don’t have to wait until December 25th if you don’t want to.

Very cute, but possibly not completely original.  A great many people have apparently done a “Silent Monks” version.  Still, this seems the most involved and active.  The earliest versions I could find were from 2008.  Slight variation.

Slightly more seriously.  And, in response to the commercialization of it all.

For those who want lighter fare.  Or, slightly geekier.  Or, for those trying to keep warm.  Or, for those deeply into their devices.

BKSRCYWR.RVW   20110325

“Surviving Cyberwar”, Richard Stiennon, 2010, 978-1-60590-688-1
%A   Richard Stiennon
%C   4501 Forbes Blvd, #200, Lanham, MD   20706
%D   2010
%G   978-1-60590-688-1 1-60590-674-3
%I   Government Institutes/Scarecrow Press/Rowman & Littlefield Publ.
%O   800-462-6420 www.govinstpress.com
%O  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1605906743/robsladesinterne
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1605906743/robsladesinte-21
%O   http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/1605906743/robsladesin03-20
%O   Audience n- Tech 1 Writing 1 (see revfaq.htm for explanation)
%P   180 p.
%T   “Surviving Cyberwar”

The introduction is the customarily (for books on currently “hot” topics) vague warning that there is danger out there.

Chapter one, according to the title, is supposed to talk about the “Titan Rain” attacks.  In reality it concentrates on Shawn Carpenter and his personal problems, and says very little either about details of the technology, or ideas for defence.  China, and various activities in espionage (and diplomatic disagreements with the US), is the topic of chapter two.  (One story is not about China.)  Although entitled “Countering Cyber Espionage,” chapter three is just about security tools and malware.  Chapter four lists random aspects of, and attacks on, email.  The Pentagon is dealt with, in similarly haphazard fashion, in chapter five.

A few wars, or tense “situations,” are mentioned in chapter six, along with some possibly related computer involvement.  Chapter seven titularly promises DDoS defence, but mostly just talks about distributed denial of service attacks, along with a mention of the error of using BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) as a routing protocol.  Aspects of social networking, mostly in support of activism, are noted in chapter eight.  Chapter nine is a not-very-useful account of the Estonian cyber-attack of 2007, ten briefly mentions some others in eastern Europe, and eleven mentions the Georgian attack.  There is a rambling dissertation on war and various computer security problems in chapter twelve.  Chapter thirteen appears to be an attempt to provide some structure to the concept of cyberwar, but establishes very little of any significance.  Preparations, by some nations, for cyberwarfare are mentioned in chapter fourteen.  Most of the detail is for the US, and there isn’t much even for them.  A final chapter says that the existence of cyberwarfare could cause troubles for lots of people.

The content and writing is rambling and disorganized.  This reads more like a collection of fifteen lengthy, but not terribly well researched, magazine articles than an actual book.  There are many more informative resources, such as Dorothy Dennings’ “Information Warfare and Security” (cf. BKINWRSC.RVW) (which, despite predating this work by a dozen years, still manages to present more useful information).  Stiennon does not add anything substantial to the literature on this topic.

copyright, Robert M. Slade   2011     BKSRCYWR.RVW   20110325

BKGNOM.RVW   20111128

“Good Night Old Man”, George Campbell, 2011, 978-9878319-0-3, C$19.95
%A   George Campbell georgeca@telus.net http://is.gd/x28QRz
%C   PO Box 57083 RPO Eastgate, Sherwood Park, AB Canada T8A 5L7
%D   2011
%G   978-9878319-0-3
%I   Dream Write Publishing dreamwrite10@hotmail.com
%O   C$19.95 http://www.dreamwritepublishing.ca  780-445-0991
%O http://www.dreamwritepublishing.ca/retail/books/good-night-old-man
%O   Audience i+ Tech 2 Writing 3 (see revfaq.htm for explanation)
%P   342 p.
%T   “Good Night Old Man”

On page 114 the author asserts that even learning to use Morse code “bestowed on us instant acceptance into a society whose members regularly performed tasks too difficult for most others to even attempt.”  This statement will be instantly recognizable by anyone in any technical field.  This is because in the beginning was the telegraph.  And the telegraph begat teletype (and baudot code) and the telephone.  And telephone company research labs (in large measure) begat computers.  And teletype begat the Internet.  And wireless telegraphy begat radio.  And radio and the telephone and the Internet and computers begat 4G.  (Or, at least, it will begat it once they get it right.)  But it all started with the telegraph.

As the author states, any communications textbook will mention the telegraph.  Most will tell you Morse code began on May 24th, 1844.  Some might mention that it isn’t in use anymore.  A few crypto books might let you know that commercial nomenklators were used not just for confidentiality, but to reduce word counts (and thus costs) when sending telegrams.  (The odd data representation text might relay the trivium that Morse code is not a binary code of dots and dashes, but a trinary code of dots, dashes, and silence.)

But they won’t tell you anything about what it was like to be a telegrapher, to actually communicate, and help other people communicate with Morse code.  How you got started, what the work was, and what your career might be like.  This book does.

I am not going to pretend to be objective with this review.  George Campbell is my wife’s (favourite) uncle.  He’s always liked telling stories, has a fund of stories to tell, and tells them well.  For example, he was the first person in North America to know about the German surrender in Europe, since he was the (Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve) telegrapher who received the message from Europe and passed it on.  Of course, the message was in code.  But everyone knew it was coming, and he knew who the message was from, and who it was going to.  You can learn a lot with simple traffic analysis.

There are lots of good stories in the book.  There are lots of funny stories in the book.  If you know technology, it is intriguing to see the beginnings of all kinds of things we use today.  Standard protocols, flow control, error correction, and data compression.  Oh, and script kiddies, too.  (Well, I don’t know what else you would call people who don’t understand what they are working with, but do know that if you follow *this* script, then *that* will happen.)  It is fascinating to see all of this being developed in an informal fashion by people who are just trying to get on with their jobs.

The title, “Good Night Old Man,” comes from a code the telegraphers themselves used.  “GN” (and a “call sign”) was sent when the telegrapher signed off his station for the night.  Morse code is no longer used commercially.  Within a few years, the last of the “native” speakers will have died off.  Morse will become a dead language, possibly studied by some hobbyists and academics, who can tease legibility out of a sample, or laboriously create a message in that form, but without anything like the facility achieved by those who had to use it day in and day out.

This is a last chance to learn a part of history.

copyright, Robert M. Slade   2011     BKGNOM.RVW   20111128

In Korea, the ruling party performed a DDoS attack, and as result the chairman and most of its officials will resign. Most likely, it will be disbanded completely.
This is probably the most severe result of a cyber attack yet. Of course, the only reason they know who to blame, is because the guy responsible for the attack admitted guilt. DDoS is all fun and games until the guy you hired to do it spills the beans.