Now I just read that the browser's User-Agent field provides 5 to 15 bits of identification (10.5 bits on average). If you add zip code, geolocation, it becomes nearly enough to track people perfectly.
Mais suite à une question de ma part, il avoue que « 4 années de vieillissement supplémentaire n'influent pas trop sauf en cas de stockage humide », ce dont je déduis que le thé pourrait dater de 1990 mais qu'il ne s'est pas bonifié de manière notable durant ses quatre dernières années de vieillissement.
En conclusion, je vais essayer de suivre son conseil, même si je sens mon esprit analytique se rebeller à cette idée : « Profite simplement de tes Pu Er et ne te pose pas trop de questions, de toute façon c'est un monde tellement complexe et opaque qu'il vaut mieux se contenter d'apprécier ce que l'on a sans en savoir plus car on risque toujours d'être déçu. » En d'autres termes, si c'est bon, c'est bon, et si c'est pas bon, c'est pas bon. Lapalisse n'aurait pas dit mieux.
End of the new ADSL modem story. I sat on my principles and bought last Saturday an A-Link RR24AP(d) at Gigantti, even though it runs Linux (yes!) without publishing the source code (boo!). It cost me 20 EUR more than what it would have cost at Multitronic.fi, but I guess that's what it cost to get it immediately.
The RR24AP(d) is not perfect either: its DynDNS client is updating its DNS record even though the IP address doesn't change (I got banned temporarily by DynDNS for that; I restarted the DynDNS daemon running on minikone and disabled the one in the router).
Moreover, I wanted to use its telnet/ssh menu-based interface for enabling/disabling the WLAN from the desktop (I wrote a docklet for that with a wrapper script for hiding the protocol stuff), but although enabling works, disabling doesn't work. I had to use the Web interface instead. An additional nice discovery is that although the main menu offers choices numbered 1 to 10, when you choose 0, you get a root shell. I haven't found a way to enable/disable the WLAN from the shell, hence the wrapper script for the Web interface.
Part 2 of the new ADSL modem story.
This is how it goes: reboot the modem, connect to its telnet server. The TCP window is 2048 bytes long. Everything works fine. Telnet again: the TCP window is now 1024. Actually, it shrunk to 1024 already on the FIN/ACK packet sent by the router when closing this first telnet session and stays like this for all the subsequent connections. During those connection, each ACK packet it sends is followed by a second ACK where it resets the window size to 1024 bytes. After some time (this is the tricky part, I have no idea how time or idleness affects it), when telneting again, some TCP packets are lost, the client side has to retransmit them. Insist a bit more, and there are more and more packets which don't get acknowledged. Eventually, the telnet server may become non-responsive and the whole device stops responding to pings. Reboot the modem.
Whether using the forwarded port from the WAN to the client machine on the LAN is involved or not in prooking this behaviour is not known, more investigation needs to be done.
I contacted ZyXEL, they asked me to return the device. Let's see if they are able to reproduce the problem.
The old A-Link RR64, Linux 2.4-based ADSL modem and router has been dying slowly for the past eight months or so, and when the “alarm” LED went suddenly on, I decided it was time to get a new piece of hardware before that one broke down completely. Since it had a hard time booting up after the power had been down, it was a good idea anyway.
After long discussions with my colleagues, I decided to buy a ZyXEL Prestige 660WP-D1, with an integrated WLAN base station. It's not based on free software, but the equivalent linux-based model by A-Link doesn't respect the GPL regarding the distributon of the source code (it actually doesn't even mention it's based on Linux), so I wasn't going to give my money to those people anymore.
The second problem was that the NAS I use for backups is unable to get its IP address from the ZyXEL, so I had to set a static one.
But the weirdest of the weirdest, is that the machines connected through the WLAN were not able to connect to the ones on the LAN, which is a bit of a problem since the dnsmasq is on the LAN. After a long time reading the docs, I found in the latest firmware's changelog that the following bug had been fixed: 22. WLAN and LAN can not communicate with each other when the admin password is changed in the GUI. The new firmware indeed fixed the problem, but what screwy software design makes the bridging between two networks dependent on the admin's password and the GUI? This is bound to be a problem for any user who knows that default passwords must be changed, since the first time you connect to the Web interface as admin, it forces you to change the password.
Well, it seems to be working now. Let's cross fingers.