Hollyman’s World blog

I had the most magical experience on the Internet during the last few weeks. The whole experience has me a bit amazed and scared at the same time. And it all started with a simple magazine that I received at home last week.

Here is the story.

A few weeks ago i found out that a good friend of mine was moving out of state and selling his motorboat. Highly interested in purchasing said boat, I began to search online to look at comparable boats for values and some sites on boating accessories. I needed to find out what the actual cost of boat ownership was.

Like all good searches, I started out with google. I looked for the same model boats out there and ended up on sites like boattrader.com and others. Naturally, I hit some of the other sites out there like boat.com, which is really just a captive search site getting ad money for links that you click on while visiting.

I found some very good information on boat parts, covers, registration info and going sale prices. Good for me!

Then it happened. One Saturday a couple of weeks later, I received a catalog from Overtons.com in the mail. That is postal mail, mind you, not email. I was a bit surprised at the timing of this, as it seemed to fit in pretty well with my needs, but was totally unsolicited.

I next asked my friend and neighbor if they had signed me up for the catalog. Neither did. So now I am pretty shocked that somehow, Overton’s received my Personally Identifiable information, including my name and home address, apparently from search and surfing the web.

Being the Network Security person that I am, I decided to start the hunt for data. First, I started off by simply calling Overton’s to ask them why I was added to their mailing list. The operator there was nice, but she did not know why I was added. She suggested the basics, like it was a mass-mailing for the area. Well, that’s not an option, because Colorado doesn’t have that much water to send unsolicited magazines to non-boat owners.

I then sent an email to Overton’s from their online web email form, asking for assistance with finding out how they added me to the list. A nice gentleman responded that they purchased it from a 3rd party marketing company. This company seemed to be a large marketing company and I realized I probably wouldn’t get anywhere with that lead.

Next I decided to try and back-track my steps with Firefox and NoScript, wondering if this would show anything cookie-wise that might shed some light on the situation. I started off with my original search terms on google.com. One of the early sites I came to was boattrader.com. Using NoScript, I found this site to have a cookie from addthis.com.

I did some research on this domain and found the Registrant information from whois:

Domain Name: ADDTHIS.COMDomain Name: ADDTHIS.COM

Domain Name: ADDTHIS.COM

Registrant:

Clearspring Technologies

8000 Westpark Drive

Suite 625

McLean, Virginia 22102

United States

I then did a google search for “clearspring technologies” and found a wikipedia page that discusses them. One of the comments on the wiki page mentions the methods they use for gathering data:

Well, that certainly seems like a smoking gun to me! Here is one of the websites that I visited AND they have a cookie for addthis.com AND that is run by Clearspring Technologies AND (at least) wikipedia mentions that they actively track users personally identifiable information for sale to direct advertising.

The scary thing is, I can’t verify that this is indeed where my information was stolen. They could have stolen other cookies on my computer that may have had some additional information they used to find my personal data. It’s pretty hard to tell at this point. But the fact remains that someone sold my information, without my knowledge or consent and sent me materials in the mail that I did not request. That should be a scary concept for people that are searching for things other than boats.

Put this in the larger context with all of the news on Privacy with Facebook here, here and here and Google grabbing people’s WiFi data and people should definitely be concerned about what data they share and with whom. It isn’t a question of IF someone will use your information, it is WHEN. My catalog is proof!

Subject says it all. Craigslist kind of freaks me out. It’s truly amazing how quickly you can sell or get rid of things. I have either sold or given way 6 postings on craigslist so far. All happened within hours of the posting.

That’s pretty amazing compared to the days long past where you had to mail in an ad to some local ad seller, hope it was published in the next edition and that you would get any calls on it.

My favorite thing about it is how you can easily give things away. Just because I have no use for something does not mean it should be thrown away! The best part about that is, things don’t get tossed into the trash and landfills, nearly as much as they would have in the past.

Just yesterday, I decided to give away a car battery charger. I had recently replaced it with a new 3-stage charger to take better care of my expensive deep-cycle batteries for a camper. Those are just too expensive to buy and no one wants to waste a battery that can not be easily recycled.

In fact, I had been given the charger years ago (about 11). It’s still a perfectly fine charger and I have taken great care of it – no rust, corrosion, etc. It only makes sense to give it away again to someone in need.

Here’s a snapshot of my original post acceptance email and the first response:

How about that? 7 minutes from post to purchase! Now someone else has a tool they can use.

Perhaps if we all took better care of our household items, others could get fair use of them without the need to buy new things all the time?

Update Dec 9, 2008: I thought I would post one more recent update to this thread, as it seems to be fairly popular with visits and there are still many posts on the DirecTV forums asking about external drives. My setup has been flawless so far. The drive stays cool to the touch, makes no noise and has never had a problem losing shows. I’d consider this experiment a success and the extra data for shows has been invaluable to us.

Update: It’s been a few weeks now using the new drive. All things work great and even seems a bit faster with response times. As of right now I have:

• 40 30-minute shows in SD
• 15 1-hour shows in SD
• 16 1-hour shows in HD
• Total: 34 hours SD and 16 hours HD
• Space remaining: 89%

Bring on the Olympics!

I’ve been a subscriber to DirecTV for the past 8 years. Last year we were forced to purchase a new TV when lightning stuck near the house and killed my 1995 Sony 27″ Trinitron… R.I.P.

We upgraded to HD and received the DTV HR20-700 HD DVR. While this was a fantastic upgrade in picture quality, it was also a downgrade from my previous DirecTV Tivo unit. I still miss the quality of the Tivo, but DTV is getting much better with their own DVR software.

Anyway, with the French Open Tennis ongoing and the 2008 Olympics coming up, there is no way we can continue to get by with the 320GB internal drive. That only holds approximately 50 hours of MPEG4 HD video and with so many HD channels on DTV now, it is very easy to fill that up.

So, I finally decided to try to add an external eSATA drive to expand my storage capacity. Searching on the DTV forums web site I found many articles like this one:

http://forums.directv.com/pe/action/forums/displaypost?postID=10370752

Many of the articles there will refer you to this external site:

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=92029

I decided that the Costco WD MyBook 1TB was probably not the way to go, after hearing all the stories on the forums (although I am quite sure that non-technical people just plug things in an expect them to work, then cry when they don’t understand what’s happening…).

Anything less than 1TB in the upgrade would be useless.

I ended up heading over to microcenter and picked up a WD Caviar GP 1TB SATA hard drive and a Nexstar 3 external SATA->eSATA/USB case for it.

The nice thing about the case is, no fan to make lots of noise (let’s hope the case and heatsink can keep the drive cool enough) and it also has USB, so I can easily use it on my laptop if things fail to work for some reason.

I open the drive and change the jumper setting to drop it down to 1.5Gbps from the default of 3Gbps. According to posts on the dbstalk.com forum.

I then mounted the drive on the case tray, which was very easy to do. Just slide it into the sata connector and use the provided screws to hold it in place.

Here is a picture from the back of the external case. It has a power switch, USB and eSATA connectors.

After I put it all together, which simply consists of sliding the drive tray into the case and securing it with 2 screws, I tested it on my MacBook Pro with USB. It was recognized OK, but had no filesystems on it. I left it unformatted and went into the family room to test on the DVR.

I used the DTV menu to reset the box. Once it was rebooting, I pulled the power plug on the DTV DVR.

I plugged the power cord in for the new drive and connected the drive to the DVR using the eSATA cable that came with the case (that cable is about 2.5 feet long, BTW). I turned on the drive for a few seconds so it could power up, then plugged the DVR power cord back in again.

The DVR booted up and while it was booting, I could see the blue light on the external drive case flash on occasion. Once the system was up, everything seemed to work OK. I had no previous programs, since they are on the internal drive and that is no longer in use. while watching live TV, I could see the activity light on the drive flash as it was writing out the live buffer to disk.

Sweet!

I had to remove the drive after this little test, so my wife would not miss any of the programs on the internal drive. I simply reset the DVR, unplugged the power and removed the eSATA cable. When the DVR rebooted, it had all of our previously recorded programs on the internal drive.

Next I took the drive back to my office and plugged it into my laptop again, using the USB port. The drive showed up, but OS X can’t mount any of the partitions on it. I examined the drive with Disk Utility. Here are the screenshots of the new partitions for the DVR drive. The layout of the 3 partitions is:

• 517MB
• 15GB
• 916GB

I will post some follow-up with stability information once I have this setup running for a while.

I have been a fanatic about gas mileage, ever since I bought my 2004 VW Passat. My car reports the real-time, average per trip and the long-term average fuel economy of my driving patterns. When I first got it, I was obsessed about getting the highest average I could on any given trip.

This led me to clutch in (it’s a 5-speed manual) while going down hills, while still maintaining the speed limit. I also plan my trips, knowing where I am going and the best routes to get there. Finally, I really try to do what’s best for traffic patterns. One thing that I have found to be a huge benefit is reading the lights ahead and coasting up to a red. I always think of the U2 lyric “running to stand still” when doing this.

However, all around me, I see people with horrible driving patterns! Here I am trying to squeeze out every extra MPG, while people all around drive with reckless abandon! Here are some things I notice with others driving (and this is the MAJORITY of drivers, not a small fraction):

• Full acceleration leaving a light. These are large mini-vans (oxymoron?) and large SUVs
• Accelerating towards red lights! It’s obvious that the light turned red and you are a good distance away, why do you keep on the gas??

Those are the major issues I see on a daily basis. If people would only adjust their driving patterns a slight amount, the percentage of fuel used in the US could be dramatically reduced (1-2% is a HUGE difference).

Maybe some day, everyone will have at least a 28.8MPG long-term average like I do…