I am about to geek out. You have been warned.

 

A co-worker of mine clued me in to this house bill that just came out of a committee recently.  Here is a blurb from the news story about it:

A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored…. To make it politically difficult to oppose, proponents of the data retention requirements dubbed the bill the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, even though the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.

You can help fight the bill by letting your congressman know you oppose it.  An easy way to do so would be to use the form on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website.

 

Now, the mere insinuation of that level of data being kept about me got me into a bit of a sour mood.  Sure, it will probably (if it passes) be put to some good use.  But even if I totally trusted the government not to misuse this data, I certainly don’t trust that some random hacker won’t come along and pilfer it from my ISP and put it to some nefarious use.  So I decided to do something about it.

 

What’s Happening and Why You Probably Don’t Like It

In layman's terms (that means my geek friends can’t critique me for over-simplifying this), your ISP provides you with your all of your internet services, like web-surfing.  When you go to a website, your computer asks your ISP “Please take me to this website” and your ISP goes and finds that website and delivers it to you.  Your ISP could potentially keep a history of everything you ask it for…  every site you visit, and everything you type or click while on that site.  What it can’t keep a history of is encrypted traffic.  So once you go to your bank’s website, for example, you’re computer and the bank create a secure, encrypted link, and the ISP can no longer “see” what you’re sending and receiving.  It does still know how much you are sending where, and that’s still a lot of information.  What this bill would do is force the ISP to store all the data; the easily-readable unencrypted data (the majority of your browsing) and whatever information they have on your encrypted communications, as well. 

 

What I Did About It

I’m cheating.  The bill only applies to ISPs (Internet Service Providers).  So if there is a way to have someone else fetch and return your traffic for you, and deliver it in a secure, encrypted channel, then all your ISP will see is the link between you and this mysterious 3rd party.  So I created a 3rd party.   Amazon has this group of services called Amazon Web Services (AWS).

 

 

If you have heard the phrase “in the cloud” from someone in reference to the internet, then this is sort of what they were talking about.  Simply put, Amazon has a crap-ton of computational power and storage capacity, and they’ve made it available to the masses to do things with.  The user doesn’t really know where these things are being done.  It doesn’t really matter.  All that matters is they are being done somewhere and that the user gets the results.  Hence; cloud.   I made this…umm… helpful picture to demonstrate.

 

 

Amazon charges per-hour to use their cloud resources to do these things.  But their entry-level stuff is free for a year; and even after that, it’s pretty inexpensive. 

 

I created a Ubuntu EC2 instance and set it up as a proxy using a public-key encryption to authenticate me and my VPN sessions. 

 

The simplest way to explain that is to say that I now have my very own computer running at Amazon somewhere, and I have an encrypted tunnel to it from my computer.  Now, when I ask to go to a website, my computer tunnels that encrypted request through my ISP and asks my computer in the cloud to go find it for me.  It uses Amazon’s resources to find the website and deliver it back through my encrypted tunnel.  Here’s the catch… Amazon is not an ISP.  So they don’t have to keep logs. 

 

For the down and dirty on how I did this, I cannot overstate how awesome this guide is.  It’s written for mac-users, and I use windows, so I had to download OpenVPN to use instead of Tunnelblick.  I added it to my startup folder so that it starts when I log in.

 

I hope this explanation-sans-guide is helpful.  Protect your privacy!

 

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This is the second post in a short series on our Entertainment Center.  You should check out part one first; Mounting a Flatscreen TV.   Today, I’m going to cover the contents of our Media Closet, how the various pieces work together, and how we control it all from the couch.

Disclaimer: If this makes it sound like we watch a lot of TV; we really don’t.  We do watch a fair amount of movies.  Honestly, the main motivation to do all this was monthly cost saving.  That, and fun factor.  I had a lot of fun putting it all together.

When we were touring this house, I noticed this odd door in the back corner of the Family Room.  It turns out it was full of shelves and had an outlet in it.  Perfect for a Media Closet!


 

This is the current state of it.  From top to bottom, we have:

1. Home Server
2. Wii and Media Center
3. iPod Dock, Modem/Router, and Blu-Ray player
4. A/V Receiver / FM Receiver and IR Broadcaster

Home Server
The server is an older computer I built for my wife a few years ago.  It’s now running Windows Home Server and has a couple of Terabytes of storage.  It’s supposed to come on each night from 0200-0600 to perform nightly backups of my computer, my wife’s computer, and the Media Center.  It still has some quirks; mainly because it’s older hardware.  I plan on updating it with some newer, low-power components soon.  Overall, I’m very pleased with WHS.  I don’t use many of the features it offers, but I do use TV archiving (explained below)

Media Center
I love the Media Center.  It is a low power ITX computer running Windows 7.  It uses Western Digital Green Drives, which spin less often and slower than normal HDs, saving energy.   The motherboard and CPU are also low power users.   The Antec MicroFusion case has an IR receiver built into the front of it; critical for using a remote to control the whole thing.  I’m using two USB HD tuners connected directly to an antenna on the roof, from which we get broadcast TV.  Cancelling our cable has saved us a cool $70.00 a month.
The Media Center boots directly into Windows Media Center.  Once there, we can access NetFlix streaming, Hulu, live TV, and recorded TV.  Since we have massive amounts of storage, all the shows we record get archived to the Home Server after we’ve watched them, unless we delete them first.  In this way, we’re building a library of past seasons of some of our favorite shows.  We also can browse our collection of pictures and listen to our music library.  The music library is shared by all the rest of the computers, which run iTunes and point to the Media Center box for their libraries. 



The picture shows my custom Autumn WMC theme with the Guide.  It’s all free, and easy to use. 

Whenever a camera is attached to any computer in the house, the pictures automatically go to the Media Center.  The same is true for buying music on iTunes or ripping a CD.  Because of this, the Media Center has to be available all the time.  This is why it is such a low power box… it is never turned off.  It has an HDMI-out port, which is how I get all this magic to the TV.

iPod Dock / Router / Bluray Player
Nothing too special, here.  The dock is to allow guests to hook up and play music, or ourselves to do the same if we don’t want to have to turn on the TV and browse the entire music library looking for an album.
I ran Cat5e (Ethernet cable) to the office, so that my computer, the Home Server, the Media Center, the Wii, and the BluRay player are all hardwired in.  Just the iPhones and the wife’s laptop are wireless.
The BluRay player can also access Netflix streaming, albeit poorly.  Once I upgrade the Media Center by adding a BluRay drive to it, I’ll be moving the player to a different room to allow us to stream Netflix to another TV.

A/V Receiver
I’ll admit it; this thing was pricey.  The Onkyo TX-SR608 is pretty awesome, though.  And, I needed a solution that allowed me to connect a lot of HDMI and Component devices to one source and output a single HDMI cable to the TV, as I had a long way to travel.  Going into the receiver is the Media Center, Wii, and BluRay player.  It also had the Cable Box before we cancelled cable.  We still have room for any future additions, too.  The output from the receiver goes into the basement, through the rafters, up into a wall, and out to the TV.  The DTS is amazing, and as we’re only using 5.1 channels right now, we still have 2.1 available for another room at some point in the future.  The subwoofer sits in the mini-closet beneath the bottom shelf.

How to Control it All
This one is actually easy to answer.  The Logitech Harmony 890.    I got a refurbished one for just over 100 bucks.  It’s worth it.  Without this, my wife would never allow the Media Center to be our primary source of TV, Movies, and Music in the house.  If she presses “Listen to Digital Music”, it turns on the TV and the Receiver, sets the inputs correctly, and loads the Music Library for browsing.  If she presses “Watch a Movie”, it fires up the Bluray player.  The software makes configuring the remote pretty simple.  The other big factor with this remote is the RF.  It broadcasts button-push signals in the FM spectrum, which are received by an FM receiver in the Media Closet, translated into the IR spectrum, and spammed out to all the devices.  This means we can have that closet door closed and change channels from the couch (or another room entirely) without any awkward over-the-shoulder remote pointing.



So that’s it!  I’m happy to answer any specific questions, and I’d love to see your Entertainment Center setups!

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