Entangled's hero, Jason Angle, uses steganography to keep his company's project from being stolen. It's a way of secreting information that's thousands of years old. More description is in the link below.
It's a story about how the gang of Russian spies, recently outed by the U.S., have used steganography on public websites to communicate with each other and home base. Incredulously, back in 2005, this method was discovered when a password was left on a piece of paper. Anyone remember War Games and how the kid changed his grades? Right, he saw the password to the school's computers left on a piece of paper. Didn't these spies watch that movie? Hopefully, you don't write your passwords anywhere.
See this link - Gizmodo: FBI spies and secret messages
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Chapter 1 of Entangled
Chapter 1
There was nothing ceremonious in the way Sheri Forrester slid from under the covers, tossing the sheet aside, and sitting at the edge of the bed. She took a few moments to catch her breath before rising to fetch the robe she left draped over the hotel room's desk chair. Reminding herself that Steven was at least a decent lover - not the best she'd had, but eager - she slipped quietly into the robe.
As she sauntered toward the bathroom, Steven watched her casually, savoring the view of her legs to help soothe his soul after the storm of a great woman's body. Eyes closed, he let a few minutes pass to daydream the episode before opening his eyes and spotting the marketing report on the nightstand.
He stirred under the sheets, reaching out for that report he grabbed earlier in the day during the Wireless Expo nearby in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. This generic wireless report he had picked up between his customer meetings and his speech. For him, there was probably nothing he hadn't already seen, but maybe the author's different perspective would provide some amusement. Sometimes a different view would complement his strategies, sometimes it would point out a weakness that he could exploit in his competitors, and sometimes it would crucify his company. In Steven's mind, all information was to be used opportunistically.
Sheri, meanwhile, emerged from the bathroom, strode to the desk, and drew out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her purse. “You want one?” she teased out of habit. He would say no, as usual, but maybe one day she would entice him into one long drag, just for her. Making men do anything they didn't want to do was a fun challenge. She turned and held out the pack to him.
“No, my little minx. You know better than that,” Steven replied in his practiced, patronizing voice.
Shrugging, Sheri pulled a single cigarette from the box with her lips. “Your loss,” she said, making the stick waggle. She tossed the pack on the desk and lit up, taking a long, slow inhale. She could always count on smoking afterward to give her some satisfaction no matter who she was with.
“Though,” Steven interjected into the silence, “you might get me that scotch you offered me earlier.” He had skipped the scotch when he entered the room, going straight for her; now, he figured she was up anyway.
“Sure, okay. Just-” she took another long drag, “gimme a minute.”
For a few more moments, Steven watched her pace and puff, staring out the big bay window into the East Bay like a panther. He watched how positively feline Sheri could be; disappearing like a house cat to preen one moment, prowling like a huntress the next. At 38, her body was lithe and toned as if she exercised constantly to keep herself fit and tight.
Once she stamped the half-smoked cigarette out, Sheri strode to the mini-bar and pulled two baby bottles of Scotch from the rack. Two ice cubes for Steven, she recalled. After pouring, she brought both glasses to the mattress beside him.
“These rooms here remind me of my grandparents who lived in Daly City back in the sixties and seventies. Something about the teak furniture, I think,” Steven commented, recalling his childhood visits to San Francisco.
“It’s a little out of style, don’t you think?” Sheri said without much care.
“But that’s its charm, and the view here is spectacular,” he said cheerily as his eyes moved from the furniture to the big bay window looking out into the Bay. In all his travels, he could not really appreciate decor or style even though most of the rooms he stayed in were top notch. No, he was much more taken with the windows, the most interesting feature of any hotel room. The views from the window said a lot about the hotel, whether it was a good view from a half-rate hotel, or if you watched trash bins from above. A window showed the living city, cars and people in a symphony of movement. A picture or painting on a wall was so static, like his life lately.
“So what’s new at T.W.P?” Steven asked. “You never said you'd be at the Expo and surprised me with your message this morning.”
Sheri smiled before delivering, “Ah, well, I have been busy, but if you have to know, I've got this new project idea. If I told you anything else I'd need to kill you.” Actually, as Vice President of Research and Development at Terra Wireless Products her schedule demanded constant travel between TWP's design facilities in San Diego, Colorado, and New Jersey, their headquarters. Her job had grown beyond the convenience of video conferencing, especially with Asian companies who had very different views on business relationships than U.S. companies. Besides, she figured out long ago, why bother with a conference call when she could traverse the world in TWP-sponsored style, a perk she had earned?
Her mind vectored to the new project. She still struggled with the implications of its fantastic possibilities.
The radio section of a satellite, and even of mobile phones, consisted of a complex and sensitive array of integrated circuits and discrete resistors and capacitors, the guts of modern radios. The integrated circuits were a specialized process technology different and more costly than their counterparts in computers. This entire radio section was commonly the most sensitive and problematic of all sections of a satellite's payload. With this new technology, the issues associated with the radio design complexity and sensitivity to manufacturing the boards would be radically reduced, maybe even eliminated entirely, slashing manufacturing costs while also enhancing reliability through the hazardous launch stage.
“Perhaps,” Sheri continued teasingly, “I can tell you it promises to revolutionize satellite radio design and resolve all those nasty satellite production problems, if you promise not to tell.”
“Sounds very interesting. Won't that end up disrupting...” Steven almost continued, but he realized he would jeopardize losing Sheri's focus to her corporate quest for promotion again. “I'll just leave that to you.”
“Well, sure. Someday the supply chain will break, but the project is still in research mode and won’t be ready for production for at least three years. Nothing to worry about for a long time.”
Silence pressed in for a minute as their thoughts diverged, so Steven took Sheri's glass and set both on the nightstand and motioned for her to sit.
He began, “I’ve got to catch an early flight tomorrow. How much longer before you get home?”
“I'm in Korea for another week. But I am here for one more night.”
“So,” Steven smiled as his hand slid under the sheets, searching for the smooth skin of her thigh, “let's merger again, shall we?”
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
The Prologue is here!
The following is an excerpt from Entangled, a novel by Thomas W. Baker. Look for Entangled in ebook format soon.
*****
Prologue
In the 1860’s, a half million people sprawled west of the Rocky Mountains, many driven there by a rush of golden dreams in California a decade earlier. They were desperate for news from the Eastern United States where the bulk of the Civil War was fought. One news service, The Pony Express, formed from a government mail contract already given to a stage coach service operating on both the Butterfield route through the southern U.S. and the even slower route by ship–stagecoach-ship over the Isthmus of Panama.
Two thousand miles separated St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. With twenty riders, a hundred and sixty-three stations, and two hundred horses along the route, a mochila, a specially designed mailbag, carried the news and important letters along the central route in ten days at one week intervals. The first express mail started on April 3, 1860 with young, skinny, and wiry Johnny Fry holding the reins.
In only one and a half years, the Pony Express was abandoned. What killed the Pony Express was not the golden spike joining the first Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, but an electric spike running along wires.
On October 24, 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph completed its first transmissions and what used to take ten days now took minutes. A paradigm shift in communication, a spooky action at a distance, had toppled the Pony Express. Then came radio, a wireless wonderment that first zipped across the English Channel before the 20th century, shifting communication to broadcast for the masses. Another shift quickly approaches, launching new human abilities yet again.
*****
Prologue
WANTED
Pony Express - St. Joseph, Missouri to California in 10 days or less. Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week.
In the 1860’s, a half million people sprawled west of the Rocky Mountains, many driven there by a rush of golden dreams in California a decade earlier. They were desperate for news from the Eastern United States where the bulk of the Civil War was fought. One news service, The Pony Express, formed from a government mail contract already given to a stage coach service operating on both the Butterfield route through the southern U.S. and the even slower route by ship–stagecoach-ship over the Isthmus of Panama.
Two thousand miles separated St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. With twenty riders, a hundred and sixty-three stations, and two hundred horses along the route, a mochila, a specially designed mailbag, carried the news and important letters along the central route in ten days at one week intervals. The first express mail started on April 3, 1860 with young, skinny, and wiry Johnny Fry holding the reins.
In only one and a half years, the Pony Express was abandoned. What killed the Pony Express was not the golden spike joining the first Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, but an electric spike running along wires.
On October 24, 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph completed its first transmissions and what used to take ten days now took minutes. A paradigm shift in communication, a spooky action at a distance, had toppled the Pony Express. Then came radio, a wireless wonderment that first zipped across the English Channel before the 20th century, shifting communication to broadcast for the masses. Another shift quickly approaches, launching new human abilities yet again.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Kali Sticks
In defending his property, Jason Angle uses a martial art called Kali. This is stick fighting with one or two 26 inch rattan or wooden sticks.
Why use sticks for fighting? Look around you wherever you are. Aren't sticks the most available weapon at hand? A chair leg, a pencil even, a broom handle broken in two. Unless you carry a gun all the time, sticks are the only weapon you probably have available when you need it.
Almost any other weapon is illegal to carry around. Swords, nunchakus, and knives are all banned by most municipalities. How does that leave you, a sovereign citizen, in a time of need? Is an officer around when you really need one, at that moment, in the instant of crime? Not likely. So you need to be able to defend yourself in the moment.
A good alternative to carrying around a wooden stick is to carry a collapseable baton, one that telescopes out to 2 feet. These can collapse to around a foot and are easy to carry. Of course, you can't take one on a plane with you, but you can check it in your luggage when travelling. You just need it on the street if you have to be there.
Hey, it's up to you to be ready if you're attacked. You can go your entire life without a crime against you, but being ready to defend yourself, to make it back to your loved ones, is invaluable.
Why use sticks for fighting? Look around you wherever you are. Aren't sticks the most available weapon at hand? A chair leg, a pencil even, a broom handle broken in two. Unless you carry a gun all the time, sticks are the only weapon you probably have available when you need it.
Almost any other weapon is illegal to carry around. Swords, nunchakus, and knives are all banned by most municipalities. How does that leave you, a sovereign citizen, in a time of need? Is an officer around when you really need one, at that moment, in the instant of crime? Not likely. So you need to be able to defend yourself in the moment.
A good alternative to carrying around a wooden stick is to carry a collapseable baton, one that telescopes out to 2 feet. These can collapse to around a foot and are easy to carry. Of course, you can't take one on a plane with you, but you can check it in your luggage when travelling. You just need it on the street if you have to be there.
Hey, it's up to you to be ready if you're attacked. You can go your entire life without a crime against you, but being ready to defend yourself, to make it back to your loved ones, is invaluable.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Digital Decoding inside a cell phone
Jason Angle uses a form of Viterbi decoding for his Quantum Communication invention in my novel Entangled. Most digital radios, including cell phones, have this type of decoding, but what is Viterbi decoding?
Viterbi decoding is used in a digital radio receiver. Most of you have cell or smartphones. The voice you hear or the text message you see or the web page you look at was transmitted from a base station to your phone as digital information, received by it, and processed by a small computer. Part of the processing is a best guess at an incoming sequence of bits. Viterbi Decoding been used for decades and the inventor is still alive breathing life into new stuff - Andrew Viterbi of QualComm
When a radio sends digital information, it sends it in radio waves, one digital bit at a time. Those waves fly from your phone, through walls, bouncing off trees, buildings, water, you name it. When the waves get to a base-station, those ugly towers dotting the highways, the real wave adds to all the bounced waves and some good old-fashioned radio noise. That confuses the receiver, maybe enough that half the bits coming in are guessed wrong. Texting messages would look like gibberish, more so than the sender intended - LOL ROTFL u c da point.
Cleaning up this mess, decoding the digital bits, takes a bit of computing. First, take all the waves and noise for each bit, line them up, and feed them to a decoder. The decoder runs through all possible combinations of a fixed length. For example, a length of 4 bits means the decoder will test 16 possible combinations, starting at 0000, then 0001, up to 1111. The best matching sequence to the incoming data is chosen as the sequence for those 4 bits. There could be a bit error or two, but it's pretty good if the signal is strong enough, more correctly if the signal is a lot stronger than the radio noise.
That's the basics of Viterbi decoding. In Entangled I fictionalized a super Viterbi algorithm just because I needed something with a flashy name that some people might recognize. If you're interested more in Viterbi decoding, or algorithms, just search it!
Viterbi decoding is used in a digital radio receiver. Most of you have cell or smartphones. The voice you hear or the text message you see or the web page you look at was transmitted from a base station to your phone as digital information, received by it, and processed by a small computer. Part of the processing is a best guess at an incoming sequence of bits. Viterbi Decoding been used for decades and the inventor is still alive breathing life into new stuff - Andrew Viterbi of QualComm
When a radio sends digital information, it sends it in radio waves, one digital bit at a time. Those waves fly from your phone, through walls, bouncing off trees, buildings, water, you name it. When the waves get to a base-station, those ugly towers dotting the highways, the real wave adds to all the bounced waves and some good old-fashioned radio noise. That confuses the receiver, maybe enough that half the bits coming in are guessed wrong. Texting messages would look like gibberish, more so than the sender intended - LOL ROTFL u c da point.
Cleaning up this mess, decoding the digital bits, takes a bit of computing. First, take all the waves and noise for each bit, line them up, and feed them to a decoder. The decoder runs through all possible combinations of a fixed length. For example, a length of 4 bits means the decoder will test 16 possible combinations, starting at 0000, then 0001, up to 1111. The best matching sequence to the incoming data is chosen as the sequence for those 4 bits. There could be a bit error or two, but it's pretty good if the signal is strong enough, more correctly if the signal is a lot stronger than the radio noise.
That's the basics of Viterbi decoding. In Entangled I fictionalized a super Viterbi algorithm just because I needed something with a flashy name that some people might recognize. If you're interested more in Viterbi decoding, or algorithms, just search it!
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Part with your Operating System (Windows, Linux, Mac)
If the op system dies or you get a nasty virus, why not just re-install a fresh one without worrying about your data (assuming you put your data on a different partition)? Any OS is always faster and better with a fresh install. That's also the best way to get rid of a virus! I guarantee it's faster and safer than a recovery too. Once you re-install, you're ready to go immediately. You can go right to your applications on your data partition too without having to reinstall the app. You could have even created a folder with all the application shortcut links and kept that on the data partition, then just copy all of the shortcuts back to the desktop. Voila! Ready to go.
That gets you productive immediately. When you have time, you can install antivirus and other system necessities into the operating system (not the data drive for those types of apps). But the point is, you get back to work faster by yourself than taking the computer to the Geek Squad and paying them to do it, wasting driving time and money.
Here's what I have on a 1/2 Terabyte drive (500 Gigabytes). I have a 40 Gigabyte partition for Windows, my main man (I like FPS, RTS games too, even if outdate PCs). I have applications that take up more than the 40 Gigs, but I put those on my data partition and link the apps. Another 20 Gigabyte partition I leave for my virtualbox playground and run Linux through that. The rest, about 440 Gigabytes on a 500 GB drive, I make my data and Apps partition. I can use that data whether Windows or Linux is running - very nice. The big advantage is if my operating system barfs I do not lose my data; it's on a separate partition, or drive letter. The only disadvantage: a little more work on reboot (since I encrypt my data drive - don't you, especially laptop drives?).
My data partition has these directories: program files, music, video, and data. I share the music and video on my home network and can play them through my DVR too.
I don't have to do special back up if the operating system (which has always been the problem) dies. I don't have to restore the data, or most of my applications, either. And I backup faster since it's a partition or image backup - fastest you'll ever do. This doesn't help if the hard drive completely dies, but I eliminate the operating system taking my data, and even applications, with it.
And, if I upgrade operating systems? Clean install. That's what I did with Windows 7. In an hour I was writing again in the same application. I didn't restore data. I didn't re-install all the applications I use. I just waited (okay, took a walk) while Windows installed and then I took off into the internet again.
So if you are smart about computers and how to be productive, or want to be, put your data and Apps on a separate partition. I laugh at the Bluescreen of Death!
Are you still reading? Okay. You probably want to know how to do this. Here's a quick list. If you need more detail, Google instructions for repartitioning on your own operating system. You will destroy anything on your hard disk so be sure you have backups!
1. Make sure you have an installation disk for your operating system.
2. Have a backup of your entire data on a separate hard disk, flash drive, cloud space, whatever.
3. Grab a partitioning tool. Many free Linux downloads are available which boot from a CD, launch an application called gparted, and allow you to do this to ANY hard drive.
4. Partition your hard drive into an OS partition and DATA partition. Allow for an extra 10 gigabytes to the OS partition as you will need some anti-virus, firewall, and a few other boot time programs. Add another partition if you wish to mess around with dual booting. Two partitions are sufficient.
5. Reboot into your OS installation disk and install the OS in the OS partition.
6. Reboot into your fresh OS.
7. Restore your DATA into your data partition.
8. Install all your applications to the DATA partition in a folder you choose. I use Program Files just like Windows does. Except install anti-virus, disk encryption, and any boot time programs into the OS partition.
9. Enjoy fast upgrading, backup, and switching to a new OS if you like.
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