Wow. A reasonable position on legimate security work and even the suggestion of protection against frivolous lawsuits?! What administration is this anyway?

The story is here but I wonder how far these fumes will go when confronted by the continual strengthening of anti-circumvention laws (which, of course, the much loathed DMCA is a part of) by politicians of the same stripe. I don’t trust a word of it but I will definitely keep an ear cocked. Even the admission that most security holes aren’t discovered by software vendors is a nice break from the usual talk of public burnings and the end of civilization.

The mention of responsible reporting is the one part that didn’t sit well with me. Until there is some kind of legal protection for people who discover and report security flaws the expectation of direct reporting is a little much. The reason that security related mailing lists and websites are so popular is that they afford hackers some degree of protection from the snapping jaws of vendor’s legal departments.

All of that said, you know who really owns (in the pejorative sense, of course) this administration and it isn’t us. It was a good speech but I don’t see any paperwork coming out of it.

For your education and entertainment (from the land where wives get naked an d all IPs are logged):

Crappy crap has an interview with John David or Jon Messner or whatever his name is today here. He had this brilliant idea to squat an al-Queda domain and then turn the logs over to the FBI. Ignoring the fact for a moment that logs are completely useless as any sort of evidence (unless, of course, curiousity or research are somehow falling under a new set of laws I don’t know about) because web content is by nature available to the world. It would make as much sense for me to claim that all of my incoming referrals from RWN were people interested in technology. Given the fact that any domain run by a terrorist organization is probably swarmed by script kiddies every ten minutes this is doubly useless. I’m not sure whether to question John’s intelligence or integrity.

Then there are the other sketchy factors. Who owns the discussion site about these issues that is “mostly unmoderated”? Another convenient source of IP addresses? What get’s even more interesting is that the same guy who is so willing to hand over suspicious IP addresses to the FBI regardless of their uselessness also owns All Turbo. What could be better than having this guy provide your dialup service? To his credit, there is absolutely no privacy policy posted on that site. OK, so that’s a little unreasonable. He’s just reselling service from some company in Pennsylvania when he’s not selling the script kiddies pictures of his wife. Oops. That was tasteless. I’m not sorry. It is the same woman in every photo. Maybe it’s his cousin although the Wired article makes me think otherwise.

One quick quote before work:

John David: We have all the IP addresses to the tune of 27 thousand visitors a day seeking Alneda.com (the calling) from every hostile country imaginable. But interestingly enough, 90% were from Saudi Arabia.

That becomes much less interesting when the site is in Arabic. Click the links, kids and be automagically associated with terrorist associations! Get your very own FBI file on your subversive activities!

Update: Just noticed that the introduction of the RWN article calls JD’s domain buying a “hack.” Buying something out from under someone is not a hack in either the popular definition or the original sense. It takes neither technical ability or ingenuity to buy an expiring domain. Spammers and porn sites do it all the time. The redirect is back up. It points you to a full page of advertising banners for John David’s various porn sites. Sad little snitches.

Update II: Electric Boogaloo
All of the pundits have been linking to usual crap about John’s courageous hack. Jesus. You folks do actually run your websites, right? Pick all of the terrorists’ IP addresses out of your logs and mail them to the FBI. I’m sure they’ll give you the prompt attention you deserve. I’ve heard they’re also very interested in which browser and operating system terrorists are using these days. I made the mistake of posting an overly long comment about it over at Anne McCaffrey’s site but I can’t imagine that anyone will take it seriously.

I have to stop taking naps. This big shitstorm about a reported vulnerability in HPUX (which is notoriously bad for security problems as it is) which HP tried to quash by threatening legal action. Rather than issuing a patch HP threatened the organization that found it with fines and jail time.

The most complete story is here. In the discussion at Slashdot (linked here for the first time ever) Bruce Perens was responding to comments and trying to do some damage control. After the word came down from the suits in control about his intended demonstration of DVD hacking at the Open Source Con you’ve really gotta wonder what’s going through Bruce’s mind right now. The potential litigation would fall under the DMCA which is the exact piece of law that Perens was planning to protest.

The real question, of course, is what the hell is Hewlett-Packard thinking? If you look at it from the most crass perspective (I’m thinking public relations here) any legal action based on the DMCA is going to be an albatross around HP’s neck forever. I’m fairly certain that you will find no strong supporters of the DMCA within the tech community and even less among the advocates of free software.

I’m going to leave it at this since I’m basically regurgitating one news story and what little useful information can be gleaned from the discussion on Slashdot. Hopefully HP will get their shit together and release a proper statement sometime tomorrow.

Noticed this article about a warm and snuggly spammer who lambastes something like a million email addresses a day. He claims that he’s giving people a “little ray of sunshine” even if they don’t ask for it. I’m very sure that few would sympathize with this defense given his plan to sell the “service” at some point in the future.

Here’s to the “techno-terrorism” of blackhole lists and suspended accounts.

Anyone who reads this junk knows I’m not a huge fan of RedHat. Althought I’ve never pinned down any logical reason for my distaste for their take on the Linux distribution I’ve steered clear of both the distribution and the company altogether. So here is the golden opportunity to talk some nasty shit about them. This is just nasty shit and I really hope it isn’t true.

The weird disdain that RedHat seems to have for the KDE Project is no big secret. Although RH started including KDE within the distribution a couple of years back there are still outstanding and unfixed bugs specific to RH. They don’t seem to give a shit. If you want a desktop environment that works seamlessly on a RH system you’re pretty much stuck with Gnome. Not necessarily the end of the world but given a choice I choose choice.

This confuses me because RH has always been the great hope of the suit-oriented factions of the Linux community. Because they became a sort of de facto standard for the Linux desktop (even more so if you consider that Mandrake was originally based on RedHat) people started looking to RH to give Microsoft a little competition. All of this is fine and dandy but as a somewhat pissed KDE developer points out in the article Redhat doesn’t have the lions share of the Linux market that it used to and KDE is probably the most popular desktop environment on the Linux platform. What the hell are they thinking?

You can also read the email exchange and try to make some sense out of all of this. It isn’t entirely black and white. KDE developers don’t have the reputation of being the most nice or forward looking folks on the planet but then again I wonder what the RH folks are thinking with the used car salesman pitch. I dunno. It’s a little too late to think too hard about this and I feel like I’ve been blogging about window managers and desktop environments too often.

LinuxWorld dedicating not only ink but an entire column to my own personal favorite window manager Ion.

Ion has none of the flashiness (unless you configure it that way) that most people expect out of window managers. Although I’m risking the wrath (and believe me, it makes the hollow roar of the right wingers seem pathetic in comparison) of the purists here, I tend to lump desktop environments and window managers together. For me Ion might as well be a desktop environment since I use it for specific purposes. Programming? Reading a lot of documentation while programming? Wish you could just use the damn keyboard like Thompson and Ritchie intended? Ion is the shit.

It’s a bit of a learning curve in the same sense as emacs. You need to remember multiple key combinations (which the author of the article seems to find more fault with than I do) and get used to things automatically tabbing when dismissed. Like Linux itself, Ion requires the reading of some terse documentation but gets the job done with incredible speed and reliability. I tend to send X down in flames fairly often. The twenty odd active terminals and real player and mozilla open with like three rows of tabbed sites will do that under KDE or Gnome. X seems more reliable under Ion which is quite possibly my imagination but still makes me want to use it when I’m doing resource intensive crap.

Oh yeah, the article at LinuxWorld. I almost forgot. There’s also an informative write up about Ion over at Monolinux if you’re so inclined. As far as LinuxWorld is concerned, I’m eagerly awaiting the article on Surfraw.

Update:
I guess I was a little cracked out after work. I completely forgot to mention why I like Ion so much.

1. Keyboard centric: While pointing and clicking is fine for most desktop navigation it becomes really irritating when you’re dealing with multiple instances of nearly identical terminals. There is no clickety click in terminals and using the mouse is just irritating. Ion also makes it easy (once you get past the aforementioned learning curve) to navigate between active windows. This leads us to…

2. Tabbing. Because a window manager is supposed to, well, manage windows I’m always a little surprised at how badly most of them handle dozens of windows. Ion automagically tabs inactive windows and doesn’t allow workspaces to overlap. You end up with a well organized desktop of visible workspace instead of a pile of unsorted windows. It’s difficult to explain but it makes an enormous amount of sense when you’re dealing with numerous text files.

Whew. I need to start taking naps after work. I’m coming home more spaced out and brain dead than usual.

I occasionally lurk on the debian-user mailing list which is trickier than it sounds due to the sheer volume of the list. More times than not I end up downloading 50 out of well over a hundred headers. Even without reading even keystroke that lands on that list I’ve noticed one recurring problem that I had myself while installing Debian: Configuring nvidia video cards correctly can be tricky. Debian’s oft maligned installer assumes you know what you’re doing and sometimes you just don’t.

One very simple and basic thing – make sure you’re using the nv driver when configuring X. If at any point you make the wrong choice use dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 to start the process over again. This will come in handy if you’re testing different configurations. Your previous selections are the defaults after you’ve configured it so it’s a relatively safe way to tinker and fine tune.

You’re going to want the nvidia-kernel-src .deb and the nvidia-glx-src .deb in most cases. You can get them with dselect or apt-get install them.

If X still refuses to start go back to the X configuration and turn off the frame buffer option. This was the final problem for me. Since the configuration routine says that it’s probably safe to leave on I didn’t think that it would be so problematic. It was and once I disabled it X reared its ugly head and everything was fine.

Oh, one other thing that you should probably already know, don’t (unless you absolutely have to) follow those links above to get the nvidia files. Apt (usually in the apt-get install package-of-your-choice invocation) will get the job done or you can use dpkg’s dselect for a text menu driven interface.

Good luck.

You really have to wonder if these fuckheads/warbloggers/pundits think before posting things like this. Although you’re a pathetic mouthpiece for conservative “voices” at very best, you really need to give what you’re saying a quick lookie-loo before declaring that simply being neighbors with someone the powers that be consider a bad guy makes murdering them swell and dandy. Then again you can just blow the criticism off with “political correctness” whenever the question becomes too complex, right? Ah, the simplified world of the warblogger… I wonder if you think at all.

If you have any sort of long term memory at all you’ll remember your painful introduction to logical thinking. While the Law of Hammurabi might be a useful context for dumbing things down for folks of your mindset it isn’t particularly helpful for understanding things within a useful context. How about a quick refresher?

A government shoots a fucking missle into a residential area in an allegedly targeted attack. While the folks they’re after are killed, five children are killed and something like 150 others are injured. Did I mention that this action was taken by an incredibly militarized government with a seemingly endless supply of resources? Is this the act of a group of terrorists? No, it’s the Israeli government. I’m thinking maybe crappy crap didn’t read the entire opinion column he quoted from. A couple of lines below the part he lifted is this line: This is not about diplomatic table manners. It is a fight to exterminate human monsters. Then’s there’s the sheer genius assertion that the entire continent of Europe is somehow anti-Semitic for being critical of Israel’s actions.

Whoops. My fault for making the mistake of wishing you’d think before opening that big old trap. Dumb motherfucker or Joe McCarthy’s ghost? You be the judge.

There’s a short but very informative interview with the grand poobah of the Gentoo project over at Tiny Minds.

Although I’ve seen more than a few interviews with Daniel this one is worth reading because he (patiently) answers the recurring installation speed question. It baffles me that people can’t seem to figure this one out (and I fully realize that the interviewer was mainly voicing the questions of readers here so don’t take it as a slag on that person) and it makes me wonder if this is a side effect of the majority of Linux distributions being binary based.

I think that most people have never compiled a large piece of software. It isn’t the quickest process in the world. Robbins has the patience to explain why this is a good idea. He summarizes it by basically saying that compiling from source allows users to exploit the power of available source code in a utilitarian way instead of the usual lip service given to the concept.

He also devotes a little time to talking about creating a quicker install version of Gentoo with more dependence on binary packages and also about introducing some kind of branching to separate the unstable and stable versions. The pace of Gentoo development is insane and I’m a little surprised that branching hasn’t happened yet. They’re supposed to make a whole bunch of announcements in the coming weeks so we’ll just have to wait.

The only thing that leaves me confused is the creation of more binaries since the whole point of this distribution is optimization. The best way to optimize free software is by compiling it on your own machine and with your own compiler. I’m not criticizing the decision but I really hope that it doesn’t eat up time better spent or cause the project to lose focus.

Redneck roommates? Too much coffee and time? Learn how to make that annoying fish into something marginally more interesting here. Funnin’ aside this is pretty cool because it attempts to solve the lip synching problem with a fairily complicated procedure. According to the site this project has been submitted to an embedded Linux contest but you know you just want to watch the funny fish say “Mmmmm, forbidden donuts” so get your ass over there before this gets /.ed to pieces.

The nightly Ditherati mailing features a quote from Bruce Perens about his employer and freedom. All of this from the man who was at one time the grand poobah of the Debian project. Argh.

Here ya go:

“I care more about this than getting myself fired, but the fact is that getting myself fired today would have hurt Hewlett-Packard’s Linux program.”

A little bit of money goes a very long way apparently. I wonder what the exact price of maintaining a shred of dignity is these days. I guess the commercial exploitation of Debian means more than a token (at this point, at least) act of resistance against arbitrary and overreaching protection of intellectual property. Tsk tsk.

They came for the middle managers and I hated middle managers so I said nothing. Then they came for the NT admins and I can’t even have a conversation with an NT admin so I said nothing. Then they came for the accounting department. Good riddance and I said nothing. Then they came for the MBAs-without-purpose-or-knowledge and I absently chuckled. Then they came for the desktop support drones and I was already gone for the day and my pager was off. It must be Friday.

Did I forget to wish a horrible, violent, and painful death to all Macintosh zealots who would do something as stupid as forcing a floppy into a zip drive and then complain that Macintoshes are supposed to be more friendly and figure that stuff out for them? No sir. I believe I forgot that part. Your respite from the forces of Darwinism is temporary.