Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Transsiberian Notes

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

After having used the Moscow-Beijing train (Train 4), I would like to share some tips concerning this trip, although many of these apply to the Transsiberian in general:

  • As you probably know, there is a Samovar from which hot (almost boiling) water can be drawn at any time for free, in every wagon. Coffee and tea are obvious, some instant meals like noodles and meshed potatoes are good to bring. However, you do not need to bring too much, as you can buy it at every stop from the vendors on the platforms. If you like to have some fruit, this may be more important to bring, as with the vendors, you never know how fresh it is.
  • Bring the cutlery and crockery to eat your meals. Fork, spoon, knife, a cup and a plate are very useful. You will be offered alcohol and you might want to have something to drink it from.
  • Toilet paper is not provided, so bring yours. Can also be bought on the way, but expect Soviet-style single-layer (rough, with holes) then.

  • DC 48 V ??

    There are power outlets in the wagons (this is the Chinese rolling stock on train 4, remember, Russian rolling stock may be completely different), which are exactly German Schuko standard (so fit Euro plugs). They are, however, dubiously labelled “DC 48 V”. Some mobile phones could charge (mostly the ones with very new USB chargers), such as my Motorola Milestone (probably the power adapters are very tolerant). At least some Nokia and Sony Ericsson models had problems, my laptop wouldn’t charge. However, there may be 220 V outlets in first class compartments and I think I have seen 110 V ones in one Russian waggon which was in our train (I think it went for Irkutsk)

  • First class compartments have showers shared between two of them. However, I have been told that there is not a lot of water coming from them, so they might not be worth it.
  • “Siberia” might sound like a cold place, but in summer, it definitely isn’t (continental climate). So prepare for very hot wheather, there is no air conditioning on the train.
  • You might be tempted to think that the train gives you plenty of time to adjust to time zone changes. Well, that might be true if you make sure you always go to bed according to the right time zone, but I can tell you, it is not too easy. On the first two days, it is 2h/day, which is too fast for most people, so you might want to adjust only part of it. Then another hour on the third day, but in summer, you probably don’t want to set this, as you would have to set it back when coming to Mongolia and China, which do not use Daylight Saving Time.
    However, the real problem is that the train is running according to Moscow time all the way through Russia, so many passengers do not change their time at all, and it is quite difficult to adjust your time living next to people who  go to bed at totally different times.
  • I used a Megafon (МегаФон) Russian SIM card, which provided me with cheap internet access until crossing the Mongolian border.

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Moscow-Beijing

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

On Monday, I arrived in Beijing, after a train journey which features among the longest existing: Over 7600 km, travelled in 5.5 days. OK, that is quite a long journey, you say, but I have to say I wasn’t bored even for a moment. But maybe that was due to the factors of having 1500 cards with Chinese characters on them which I wanted to learn (and succeeded, mostly), as well as being very excited about the fact that I would go to so many places to the first time. Also, the two Swedes in my compartment were very nice.

Getting on the train. Chinese rolling stock Yingwoche = Hard sleeper

The train left on Tueday (6.7.) night. First, we went through Russia, but most of the Siberian landscape is not very exciting. It’s just trees as far as you can see. Very notable is the possibility of buying things at the platform when the train stops. You can get food which is not very expensive, maybe it

Food is easy to buy on Russian platforms. People know just enough English to sell their products, but communication with hands and feet is the most promising alternative

Sometimes the means are more basic

is for Russian standards but

Cleaning the windows was not included ...

I would say average European prices. I actually never tried the Russian restaurant because of this … but my guess is, that it would have been very expensive, at least that was true for the one on the Berlin-Moscow train.

The Samovar is your friend. Hot water at any time of the day and night, to prepare coffee, tea and instant meals. Coal-fired, not insulated, probably not very environmentally friendly.

We woke up with the view of lake Baikal in the morning. Well, “morning” is a difficult concept on the Transsiberian. You might think trains are slow, but in the first two days, you still get two hours per day time difference, another one on the third day (but the latter you have to set back in China and Mongolia, which do not have DST). This is faster than most people adapt, and especially since the train is running on Moscow time for the whole trip through Russia you are more lazy. Also, the nights may be very short in summer up

Lake Baikal. Definitely planning to get out here some time in the future

here…

Mongolia was maybe the most interesting part of the trip. Pulled by an old Soviet 2M62 on a very curvy track, one way, not electrified, with some telegraph lines on the side. I thought, this must be what train travel in the Old West must have been like (and indeed, someone told me that only a few years ago, Native Americans Mongolians had pillaged some trains. I don’t know whether that is true, but it seems safe now.

Entering Mongolia. A comment on the cyrillic sign: One thing I learned on this train trip is that Western people overrate the English language by a large amount. Only a tiny part of the people in Russia, Mongolia or China even know basic English. I met a Mongolian girl on the train who was very educated, had studied in Beijing and Moscow. Despite this (and being fluent in Mongolian, Chinese and Russian) she knew only very basic English. We have to understand that the English-speaking universe is actually limited. The same goes for the latin alphabet: It was barely used on the train or the stations, which used nearly exclusively Cyrillic and Hanzi. Luckily, it is not that difficult to learn the cyrillic alphabet so you can at least read the place names.

Some Mongolian Gers. I would like to visit them one time …
I was told it has been a wet year, otherwise there would have been much less vegetation.

Nicest welcome in China, classical music all the time. I was too late to capture the soldiers saluting the train.

The Chinese definitely had the nicest border control, speaking the best English of all. Through loudspeakers we were first greeted with music, than came instructions in several different languages. From Erlian, the Chinese border control station, it was only half a day to Beijing, at a speed at least twice our speed on the Transmongolian track.

Great Chinese landscapes, maybe I am lucky it has been foggy since I arrived. It might be really hot otherwise.

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Moscow …

Monday, July 5th, 2010

is my last stop in Europe. Tomorrow night, my train to

Kremlin

Entrance to the Kremlin (with Alexander, my "guide")

Asia will depart. I am incredibly excited!

Thank you, Alexander, for showing me this wonderful city!

For the interested, as long as I am still in Russia, I may send some updates via Twitter (which I can’t link to a Russian number, so I will have to use it over internet. And I currently have no idea if it works outside the Moscow region, both the card and internet access)

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Please include at least one character from the Voynich manuscript.

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

How often do you see these? You want to choose a new password on a website, and it tells you

The password you have chosen is not secure enough. Please choose a password that is at least 6 characters long and includes

  • lower and upper case characters
  • numbers
  • punctuation marks
  • and at least one character from the Voynich manuscript.

(from XKCD)

OK, I just made up that last point, but except for that, this is exactly what one of these systems wanted from me today. Now, what I hate about these is really the parts which want you to include characters different from just lower case latin alphabet ones. Because I can easily make up and remember an arbitrarily long password as long as it only includes lower case characters, for example just make up a sentence and use the initials. I can make that as long as 10 or 20 characters if you want me to, and I will never have to write it down if I at least use it every now and then. There are many other easy systems to remember this kind of password.

However, each of the additional requirements makes it a lot harder to remember the password. Remembering which characters were upper case (or whether there were any upper case characters at all) requires much more sophisticated systems (which, honestly, I haven’t yet thought about), or you will forget it after a short time. Remembering numbers requires either a high level of creativity so that the mnemonic phrase actually includes the number in a nontrivial way (“a tiger eats 16 oven mitts” doesn’t help you to remember the number 16) or a special system for remembering numbers, which most people, I suppose, don’t have at hands. Similar arguments go for the punctuation marks. So what does it lead to? Well, if people cannot remember their passwords, this will lead to one breach of security or another, which may include

  • just using a trivial way to include the extra characters, e.g. replacing an “o” (oh) by a “0″ (zero), capitalising the first letter and putting a period in the end. Well, at least this does not make the password worse than just the lower-case alphabetic one. But most probably
  • people will write passwords down. Now, I consider it a lot more probable that someone finds and exploits a password that I have written down than that someone actually brute-force cracks my password.
  • Also typically, people take one password and use it everywhere. The danger of this is obvious: If it is broken in one place, access to all accounts is established. Well, whether this is actually dangerous depends mostly on the websites you register to… if one of them is broken or run by someone who actually just wanted to get your password, you are in trouble …
  • Or, they might just invent a cool system to remember their passwords or find one on the net.

Guess which one I think is the least probable.

OK, but maybe we need passwords to include all these different kinds of characters for passwords to be secure. So let us examine this. Let’s start with a simple 8 character alphabetic lower-case password. There are 26^{8} \approx 2\cdot 10^{11} possibilities. Suppose we have a 10 MB/s connection to the website and to try one password requires 1 kb of data exchange (this is including all overhead, you will rarely get it that easily, but just for this consideration, suppose it’s true). Then you will need about 20 million seconds or just more than 240 days to get through all possible passwords, which means that on average, an attacker would need 120 days to get your password under these circumstances. Well, it is quite unlikely that this will go unnoticed for such a long time. Still, we certainly do not want to settle for this kind of security, but also, we do not have to. It would be enough to temporarily deactivate the login after three failed attempts for a short amount of time, say 300 seconds in order to make the calculation easy — then, this time would go up by a factor of one million and push the average time to above 300,000 years. That’s okay for most purposes I guess. Also, it does not rely on the assumption that general internet bandwidth does not increase dramatically, which it likely will. And for concerns about Denial of Service attacks, we could limit the ban to an IP range.

OK, we have established that 8 lower-case characters should be enough for most people. Not let’s take the requirements from the introduction, which except for the Voynich part were from a real website. The length should be 6 characters, which include upper- and lowercase characters (=52), numbers (+10) and punctuation marks (+10) [I have no idea exactly what they consider a punctuation mark, but I guess most people would restrict themselves to .!?-, which would only make 5, so I think I rather overestimate the number of possibilities here]. That makes us choose from 72 characters which gives 72^{6} \approx 1.4 \cdot 10^{11} possibilities. That’s less than we had for the previous case! Although not much, so given the right security measures, I would still consider it to be secure enough. But still! They would not let me choose an 8 character, lower case password, and someone else can slip through by with just six characters, a password which is actually less secure! So they are forcing all this extra crap on their users, which probably makes them do something stupid with their passwords anyways, and gain nothing in security at all.

So what is my suggestion? I don’t worry about the kind of restrictions you impose on short passwords. Just give me the possibility to use an all-lowercase, simple, but longer password. There is no reason not to allow me using an 8 character lower case password, if someone else can get away with 6! Imposing 8 characters mixed case and everything will make it more secure, but again, we could just as well use 10 or 11 lower chase characters. Why not allow that?

So, in case you are surprised why enlarging the character set so much, by even including mixed case, numbers and punctuations marks, is overcome by just adding two characters to the simple non-fancy password, stay here for the maths. If you make your password from a set of k characters of length n, then there are k^n possibilities. If you consider this as a function of k, the size of the character set, it is a simple polynomial function. Whereas as a function of n, it is an exponential function. As we all learn in school, exponentials grow much faster than polynomials. That is why, if you go for security, length matters! The number of characters included not so much.

So, can we now finally go back to plain passwords?

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Odyssey in the Snow

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

When the first facebook statuses showed “SNOW!!” on Thursday, I was not yet aware what drastic consequences this would have for me. When I came out of my office around 10 pm, and was confronted with about 10cm of snow, I knew England would sink into Chaos for a couple of days. But for me, it was even worse than that.

On Friday, Eurostar trains got stuck in the tunnel, allegedly due to a condensation problem. First passenger reports made clear that they had experienced no less than hell and that the Eurotunnel is a “death trap” (well, by the way, in 15 years of Eurotunnel operation, I am not aware of a fatal accident happening in there). But they even had to walk 500m through the tunnel!

Some people therefore called for Mr Brown to step down. I couldn’t believe it. I am certainly not a fan of Gordon Brown, but what did he have to do with Eurostar? Has this hypocrisy got us so far that we now call for  the Prime Minister to step down because some company messes some trains up? Well, it turns out the Eurostar Chief Executive’s name is Richard Brown.

The bad news is, I did not have to walk through the tunnel, swim over the channel or fight wolves on the way. But together with Georg and Maruta, who I joined and who wanted to travel already on Saturday, I was impressed how creative Eurostar would get in order to not let us go home. They are really evil.

So yesterday (Monday) we were planning to go to Dover as early as possible in order to get the ferry, since Eurostar made clear the night before that there would not be any passenger trains through the tunnel. Our odyssey started at 5.45 (UTC) in Cambridge. In London, Eurostar personnel told passenger Eurostar tickets would be accepted on the train to Dover. Haha, maybe in theory, but they would just not let people with just Eurostar tickets in claiming the train was too full. Luckily, I already had a ticket to Dover (apparantly, letting people with “real” tickets in did not pose a security problem because the train was too full) and my friends just quickly bought one. Hundreds of Eurostar ticket holders did not and were left in London St. Pancras Station.

Needless to say, there were plenty of free seats in the train. One could nearly have the feeling Eurostar was trying everything to stop passengers from getting on the other side of the channel… this should not have been the last time we would think about this possibility.

The train for Dover (which uses the same tracks as the Eurostar trains) never made it there. It would go no further than Ashford, claiming “adverse weather conditions”, of which we could see nothing. It was not very cold, not snowing, not raining, not particularly windy. Suspicions rose. Maybe one of the Eurostar “test trains” was blocking the track? They had become serious about holding us back!

But we would not surrender! After only half an hour and about 10 calls, we found a taxi in Ashford and went to Dover. With us were Elina and Janis, Latvian siblings heading for Brussels who would stay with us for the next couple of hours. Without major problems, we could reach and board the 11h ferry for Calais, finally leaving the island.

Of course, in Calais, we expected the worst. Hadn’t Eurostar said they could not run trains due to “extremely adverse weather conditions” in northern France? Certainly, it must be very cold, maybe -20 or -30 degrees centigrade. Any less than that cannot hold back trains, can it? Come on, -5 to -10 are common in any winter, that can’t be it. So we were prepared to step into the French taiga, expecting nothing less than the coldest weather we had ever seen. Maybe we should rather expect -50 degrees?

But it was not that holding us back. Eurostar got creative. We thought they might just tell the ship to go back, but that would have been too blunt. Instead, when we wanted to unboard the ferry over the gangway, we were told the Calais chamber of commerce had forbidden its use: It was icy and therefore dangerous. Oh, and they forgot the salt do de-ice it. Yes, they forgot the salt!! We were just about prepared they would now tell us we had to go back to Dover because of this!

But after some time, they figured out how to get also foot passengers off the ferry: They drove some busses on the car decks and let us enter. Once again, we managed to escape Eurostar’s mighty claws and finally reached the soil of the French taiga.

But wait, it was not cold there at all! Maybe -1 or -3 degrees, but no colder than that for sure! There was some snow, but only a mere 5cm or so. Also, the French and Belgian part of our odyssey were boringly uneventful. Not even the trains were late! These railway organisations should certainly think more about how to entertain their passengers, after all, who wants to travel just to get from A to B? No one, you want travelling to be as difficult as possible. After all, it should be a challenge. At every station, you should have to figure out what means of transport could be used now to get a bit closer to your destination. SNCF and NMBS/SNCB should try to understand this, otherwise they will quickly be driven out of business by much more successful English and German companies.

What French and Belgian were unable to provide, the German Bahn was happy to replace. Obviously, the ICE from Brussels to Frankfurt we wanted to take was cancelled. We were lucky to hear it in time when there was still a Thalys to Cologne in the station, which was just one hour late at the time. But this train would, in fact, take us to Cologne without further incidents! We could barely believe we were so close to home now.

Being in the territory of the Bahn, everything could not just go well now. Or maybe it was also Eurostar still doing everything to interfere with our journey. After they were so creative with that salt thing, I would not be suprised at all! So the ICE from Cologne to Frankfurt was obviously cancelled. That would have been too easy now, come on! Instead, we had to go to the Cologne Messe-Deutz station, where a train would go for Frankfurt Airport! Unexpectedly, we all made our way home that evening, kind of unexpected after all they had done to stop us.

I conclude, in my opinion, Mr Brown stepping down for this is not enough. This calls at least for Obama to step down.

So is the Eurostar unreliable, dangerous, a death trap?

Many stranded passengers were outraged that they could not make it home and had to wait for so long. Services were only restored today. Even worse for those being trapped in the tunnel for more than half a day. I can clearly understand they are upset.

So what is my opinion on this? While the circumstances do not, in my opinion, seem so extreme as to be an “excuse” for trains breaking down, technical malfunctions can of course happen. Also, Eurostar did get all the people out, nothing serious happened, and people should just understand that an accident is an accident and not complain about climatisation not working (oh well…) or not having enough water on board (come on, you won’t die after a couple of hours with no water). This can happen. And judge whether the Eurotunnel is a death trap by considering it transports tens of thousands of people each day without any fatal accident since 1994.

What has been apparently very bad was Eurostar communications. Well I was for example not really happy that they only told me at 8pm on Sunday that my train on Monday would not go! That is a very short notice and for example too late to book regular ferry tickets. But much worse than that, people in the tunnel did, for a long time, not know what was going on. That is really bad and I would hate to be in that situation. This seems in part also to be due to bad communication between Eurotunnel (running the tunnel) and Eurostar (running the passenger trains). I found this blog post helpful in analysing this. Generally, Eurostar Client seems to be an intersting source for this event.

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