Random ramblings

All | General | Motorbikes | Networking | Odds & Sods | Soapbox | Solaris
Main | Next page »
20090528 Thursday May 28, 2009

On Sun and Free Software

One thing I very much hope, is that the Sun software group (Sun here on) and the general free-software world (which these days is equivalent to the general Unix eco-system) will continue to converge.

I hope Sun continues to engage the wider free-software using community and embrace it more fully, as it is doing with OpenSolaris (the distro) and the work to build up a wide body of packages. Specifically I think Sun should:

I hope the greater free-software using world also considers more carefully the importance of Sun to it. Sun has long contributed both code and technologies to the Unix eco-system and to free software. Further, the Unix eco-system has always been distinguished (e.g. from Wintel) by its healthy competition. Regardless of which Unix (inc Linux) you favour, the presence of strong, competing Unixes benefits you - even if don't like everything about them. It may be useful to keep that in mind.

I really believe that the best future for OpenSolaris demands much greater co-operation and inter-mingling with other free software projects. I hope Sun does too, and I hope the greater community will encourage and welcome them.

(See you at my new blog).

( May 28 2009, 07:25:06 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [3]

20090426 Sunday April 26, 2009

War and credit-crunch

The UK is projected to borrow £175bn over the next 2 years. The UK is projected to spend approximately £16bn in total, through to 2010 on the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars. Precise figures seem hard to find, but some £7bn approx had been spent through to 2007, so a figure of around £6bn seems a reasonable, rough projection for 2009-2010 spending (winding down in Iraq has been matched by escalation in Afghanistan). These figures are, it seems, by and large supplementary to the main UK DoD budget of circa £36bn/annum.

So something like 3% of that massive 175Bn of borrowing is simply going toward that remaining, failed project of Blair in Afghanistan. That's a huge burden. Will UK tax-payers accept cuts in public-services, while paying for continuing, futile, death and destruction in Afghanistan?

( Apr 26 2009, 03:53:06 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [0]

20081209 Tuesday December 09, 2008

Why the Great-British-Pædowall is a dumb idea

It seems all my HTTP traffic to various sites, including wikipedia, blogger and blogspot, is being transparently rerouted through a Squid proxy by my ISP. This proxy checks the URIs against a block-list provided by the Internet Watch Foundation, and returns 403s for any URIs deemed to contain potentially illegal material - particularly any material of pædohilic interest.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'll stand in line with everyone else to condemn those depraved and sick people who would participate in the abuse of children. However it seems, in all the calls of "Won't someone think of the children?", that we've managed to throw the important principle of proportionality out the window by filtering everyone's internet. This is just a fantastically dumb idea, given the low efficacy of this system relative to the impact and risks imposed on law-abiding society generally.

It's still trivial to share illicit images via HTTP, as there's just no way the IWF can stay ahead of all the new images posted to all the various image and file sharing sites across the internet. Even if they could make a dent on HTTP file-sharing, there are various other protocols - some even designed specifically for encrypted sharing of files.

The impact of this filtering system on generally, law-abiding users:

Basically:

Yay..

1. Even funnier/tragic is that the IWF blacklisted an article URI, rather than the URI of the offensive image - so the latter is still viewable (e.g. use google cache to view the article). Basically, the UK have made people who seem ignorant of how the internet works the gatekeepers to it.

Update: There's a really interesting thread at UKCrypto about this - posts by Clive Feather and Peter Sommer are particularly interesting (thanks to murb).

There's another aspect to all of this: As the IWF, though governmentally-recognised, are a private organisation they are not covered by the Freedom of Information Act. So this system is completely out of the reach of the powers of oversight available to the general public, despite it having been put in the place at the behest of the government, by the threat of regulation.

Also, its worth noting that one possible argument for the efficacy of this system is that it protects ordinary people from accidentally being exposed to this material. However this argument appears to be struck down by, apparently learned, commentators in the above discussion who point out that is extremely rare (to the point of being almost unheard of) to accidently stumble on child abuse images.

Certainly, in my experience of using the internet for 14 odd years, I don't recall ever seeing anything approaching such. At least, not until the IWF managed to publicise a certain image on Wikipedia...

( Dec 09 2008, 03:16:24 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [1]

20080702 Wednesday July 02, 2008

When is a Sunni fundamentalist terrorist not a terrorist?

.... Why, when they're Baluchistani 'dissidents' agitating against the Iranian regime, of course! One could perhaps predict that in 20 odd years time Baluchistanis will be identified as being behind some terrible terrorist attrocity committed in the west, but then one would need a basic sense of history!

In other news, Nelson Mandela and other ANC members have been taken off the US terrorist watch lists. ANC terrorism of course was not terrorism, but instead the noble, indiscriminate maiming and killing of people who would have gladly volunteered to have died for freedom had they been offered a chance (and those who wouldn't have must have been apartheid lovers). Anyway, it seems the only way off the terrorist watch-list (besides being a US Senator or buddies with the head of the US DHS) is to be a successful terrorist..

In other news, scientists have discovered a new shade. Said to be neither white, nor black, it has tentatively been named 'grey' and even may possibly form a continuum. It is speculated the world may in fact be full of it...

( Jul 02 2008, 04:55:55 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [0]

20080531 Saturday May 31, 2008

Howto share your web-browsing experience...

Really, despite what your ego says, your web-browsing habits are unlikely to be more interesting than the various mechanisms that your bookmark/tag aggregator already supplies for finding interesting links, which other people already use, cause link-rolls are tedious..

This was originally a comment on another blog, but either I forgot to hit "submit" or it got deleted.

( May 31 2008, 12:34:19 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [1]

20080522 Thursday May 22, 2008

The Security-Industrial Complex

This piece in the Rolling Stone magazine on China's surveillance state is well-worth a read.

This piece finally gives me a sense that perhaps I can understand the economic (i.e. corporate) motivations behind the ever-increasing dominance of security in civil life, something that has puzzled me for a while. For example, the military-industrial complex clearly is a factor* in the USA's use** of military-intervention as a foreign policy tool. However, I could never understand the bias that many western-governments have shown against freedom, in favour of encumbering us with, sometimes absurd, security measures. In my naivety, I thought it had something to do with some kind of "psychology of fear"-as-political-tool - not thinking of the security industry itself as being a significant driver.

This piece though puts it into perspective. Just as there are large industrial interests driving military spending, via a revolving door between the military, the government and the industry, so that piece makes it clear there are similarly large industrial interests, and a similar revolving door (except perhaps substitute police for military+) around security. This security-industrial complex is helping to drive the security policies of our western governments, and so cause growing amounts of public (or governmentally-mandated) spending to be sent their way. Given this encompasses spending on data-retention (private spending, by EU directive), national identity databases (UK), and so on, the amounts are not quite insignificant.

It's important to realise that security-service++ spending is at best of indeterminable utility+++. At worst, it may largely be wasted, other than to a small number of people who manage to make a lot of money for little work. Further, even if there is some utility to this security spending, that money may have achieved more had it been spent elsewhere, e.g. education, research, health-care, etc. Given the dubious utility of such security spending, the opportunity costs may well be far more significant than the amount of that spending itself.

Sadly I've little confidence anything is going to change in the near future. I'm vaguely hopeful though that eventually some nations will gain a competitive, economic advantage from foregoing massive-spending on security-theatrics and so influence other states. At least now, I think, I have slightly less naive understanding of it..

* In the sense that there is clearly a strong feedback loop in the USA of high military-spending sustaining significant military-industrial interests in the USA, which lobby to have the USA sustain its high level of military spending. The end-result is a state heavily invested in military power.

** Not that I claim that other nations are more enlightened. Just that most don't have anywhere near the same military dominance***.

*** I.e. I'm uncomfortable with militarism, not nations.

+ There's also a revolving door between the military and the police forces. Many coppers seem to be ex-armed-forces in the UK at least, though I don't have hard data.

++ Note that I say "service". Money spent on research, e.g. face-recognition, low-energy, x-ray tomography of passengers, might find other applications. An X-ray scanner operator though is not contributing as much to society, in that capacity, as they might otherwise. Also, I'm thinking mostly of the kind of additional spending on indiscriminate surveillance, data-mining and check-points prevalent since 9/11, rather than spending on more traditional security, policing and civilian intelligence.

+++ Exactly how dubious, no-one knows. There is this, though it talks of the opportunity costs of terrorism rather than just of security spending - related, but not quite the same (i.e. implicit in my opinion above is that the current security theatrics are essentially useless in terms of preventing any future terrorism). I don't know of the studies into this, would be interested to hear of more.

( May 22 2008, 06:59:05 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [0]

20080127 Sunday January 27, 2008

Copyright in a digital era, how does that work?

If I see a programme in the EPG of my TV, on a "Freeview" channel (UK DVB-T digital telly channels), that I'd like to watch but can't at that time and if I then later instruct my computer to download that broadcasted programme via P2P, am I violating the copyrights of the rightsholders of that work?

(Imagine I am in a jurisdiction which recognises time-shifting as "fair-dealing" or "fair-use", as is the case in both the UK and Ireland. Imagine also that the downloaded programme will not be of appreciably better quality than the DVB-T MPEG stream my TV would have received. Does the answer change if I can not be certain the downloaded copy was made from the broadcast (e.g. if it was a film say, rather than a programme specific to the Freeview channel)?).

( Jan 27 2008, 01:00:01 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]

20071130 Friday November 30, 2007

Gone in a Flash: The Disappearing Web

Is it just me or is web content (ignoring video) disappearing from the web, slowly transforming into opaque blobs of a proprietary format? Things that once were described in some flavour of text, now are engulfed in a form so inscrutable that even the clever folks at Google do not seem able to index it (at present). E.g. the Nokia Products comparison page , which was till recently HTML/Javascript, has been reimplemented in Flash. The functionality is the exact same, except that the UI widgets now no longer conform to the look/feel of my platform, and it no doubt takes more CPU time.

We might wake one day to find we've handed a good chunk of the web to a single source (particularly with respect to content-creation tools). But, meh, who cares - it doesn't matter, now does it?

( Nov 30 2007, 03:06:08 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [1]

20070929 Saturday September 29, 2007

About Me Howto, aka Insecurity Questions

My place of birth is a matter of public record, not too hard to find - if you know even a little about me, you'll likely know to start looking in the Netherlands. If you find that record, you'll know my mother's maiden name too (it's a good Wexford name).

Details of various places I've lived in or near, and all the schools I've gone to, may be on-file with various companies, through my CV. You can probably figure out a good deal of it with a mild googling.

My dog's name is known to a good few friends, all neighbours and many people in my family's town - just go to the green by Woodside and wait for my mother to walk him, and you'll hear her call him "Buddy". Oops, let that cat out of the bag! Speaking of cats, my family's long-dead cat was called "Cuddles", and my mother's been minding a stray we call "Bonnie" for years now.

I don't really follow football (it was far more fun playing it..), so I don't really have a favourite team now, but I did have a big poster of Johan Cruyff in my bedroom as a boy (you'll take a guess that that must have been early 80s, from your visit to NLs radio city).

Don't really have any favourite colour, but if you've seen me around, you'll know my clothes tend to be a certain colour (a darker shade of it, often).

My favourite food is, is... Well, that's too difficult to answer! (As someone pointed out, you'd have to never eat anything new again to answer that one and have a hope of recalling your answer later).

On a different subject, what's with those really dumb sites which let you change your password based on very unsecret personal details? For what it's worth, I will try avoid doing business with you, if possible.. It's not worth the hassle of remembering invented answers (National-Lottery.co.uk lost potential £6 today cause of such dumb questions).

End the madness ;)

( Sep 29 2007, 10:52:46 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [2]

20060323 Thursday March 23, 2006

HEAnet benchmarks their Try/Buy T2000

Colm MacCarthaigh, of world's busiest webserver (probably) fame, has posted his Niagara T2000 benchmark results, comparing T2000 against Dell Xeon and Itanium (see also his earlier first results looking at single-thread I/O and scheduler latency).

The summary is that the T2000 gets more than twice the peak requests/sec (5718 req/s Vs 2712 req/s), with significantly better latency under load, for just shy of half the power consumption and at less than half the price of the Itanium ;). Also cheaper than the Xeon, which the T2000 completely demolishes on concurrent performance.

Corrections: Fix name of HEAnet, spelling of Colm's surname and change 'fastest' to 'busiest'

( Mar 23 2006, 02:15:43 PM GMT ) Permalink

20051205 Monday December 05, 2005

"Report on the Use of Safety Cameras"

The Department of Justice recently released the working group on speed cameras' Report on the Use of Safety Cameras. The report examines "safety cameras" (nice bit of double-speak there) in the context of the proposed move to 'out-source' their operation from the Garda Síochána to the private sector (it's silly to have trained police operating cameras).

More paranoid motorists have long been cynical of some of the motivations behind speed limit enforcement. This report, in plain english, confirms the views of the cynics. Some initial highlights:

Here are the interesting, nay, nonsensical parts. The report recomends:

What a joke. You have to wonder if there's anyone with half a clue in the DoT. There must be clever and studied people there, yet no one appears capable of realising that formulating road safety policy mostly along the accepted "politically correct" dogma of "Speed baaad" has gotten us relatively nowhere (the other dogma, the more Irish problem of drink-driving, on the other hand has had an effect).

1. Setting speed limits according to the 85th percentile is common practice around the world. It has some serious problems. E.g. the 15% percentile is rather arbitrary. The bulk of the 15% of drivers above the limit are not per se the ones who cause accidents, particularly those in the 85th to 90th percentiles, who are likely quite competent. Further speed limits and accident rates do not strongly correlate. The main goal of 85th percentile limits are simply to allow majority of motorists to be in compliance (or maybe, to still leave a significant number out of compliance).

PS: FWEIW, I actually think speed limits are too high in many cases, particularly in suburban settings (50km/h here in Ireland). 20% of fatalities occur on local roads, according to this very report. It is in these settings where lower speeds could have the most dramatic effects on RTA fatality rates. Limits in suburban/local settings should be 30km/h IMHO, as on the continent.

Limits on safe roads like the motorway should, IMHO, be increased - significantly. To 160km/h at a minimum, preferably 200km/h. Remember, it's a limit, not a mandatory speed, the vast bulk of drivers will settle on what they consider to be a safe speed according to the 85th percentile rule. Only training and road awareness can affect safety after this. Penalising competent drivers for exceeding an arbitrarily low limit on quite safe roads is insane. Even worse, the absolutism of our system mean that you can face a greater penalty for exceeding a limit on a motorway than a proportionally greater infringement on a local road (the latter class being where excess speed is proportionally the more dangerous), e.g exceeding the 120km/h motorway limit by 65km/h (55%) versus exceeding the local road 50km/h limit by 30km/h (60%). The former can land you in court IIRC.

Enough ranting though.

( Dec 05 2005, 11:29:22 AM GMT ) Permalink Comments [2]

20050514 Saturday May 14, 2005

Yesterday's security research today!

Must be a slow week in security research land. First "news" that IPSec could be configured insecurely! which IPSec implementors have known about for ages and had already taken steps to ensure the user was warned if AH was not configured. Then a shock announcement that HyperThreading is harmful because it could allow a timing attack against OpenSSL RSA, an attack which has been known about for years and which has had a defence implemented in OpenSSL for only, oh over two years now.

Anyway, I'm off to browse the wayback machine now, to see if I can predict next week's shock security news...

[Update: Turns out the previous SSL RSA attack was different, so this is a new attack. A very difficult one though]

( May 14 2005, 12:37:35 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [0]

20050509 Monday May 09, 2005

genesis

Rde has an excellent little rant on creationism.

(warning: Link unsafe for those unable to comprehend that the book of Genesis was not meant to be taken literally, or an authorative work on how the universe came to be, but at best a metaphor, if not just simple supposition on how we might have been created, as imagined by Aramaic man a millenia or three ago. And damnit, but aren't Christians supposed to focus on the second half of that book? The bit with the "blessed are the meek" and "let he is who without sin cast the first stone" type stuff?).

( May 09 2005, 01:43:58 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [1]

20050506 Friday May 06, 2005

RSS XML Rant: USE CDATA!

Sigh.. all too often I see the following in my RSS reader (liferea): 

There were errors while parsing this feed. The following error occurred:Entity: line 61: parser error : EntityRef: expecting ';'
  Microsoft Peddles Unused R&D To Eager Startups
                                     ^
You may want to validate the feed using FeedValidator.

If you're writing an RSS generator (no matter which kind): Encapsulate user-supplied data in CDATA. The title, the description, the author's name, everything, and most especially the actual item entry.

That's worth saying again: USE CDATA!!!

It's amazing how many badly broken RSS generators there are out there. Then there are the aggregators that try to aggregrate all these god-awful broken RSS XML feeds into a single feed, often re-escaping possibly already escaped HTML entitities rather than just USING CDATA LIKE THEY SHOULD. It's not even like outputting good robust RSS/XML is that difficult, if you just blinking USE CDATA TO ESCAPE USER SUPPLIED CONTENT.

There's a lot more to rant about wrt RSS generators and aggregators, eg the damn annoying tendencies of some generators and many aggregators to keep changing the 'pubDate' attribute (no no no, change lastUpdated), but hopefully Atom will fix that.

end-rant

( May 06 2005, 03:18:28 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [0]

20050401 Friday April 01, 2005

awk pedantry

Jason Salkeld blogged about how to find the package a file belongs to and included this command: 

grep /usr/sbin/fuser /var/sadm/install/contents | awk '$2 ~ /^f$/ {print $NF}'

Two problems:

  1. as someone else already noted, grep piped to awk is redundant.
  2. Using a regex for an absolute match on a field is overkill

The following would be more efficient (well, notionally at least... ;) ): 

awk '$1 == "/usr/sbin/fuser" && $2 == "f" { print $NF }' /var/sadm/install/contents

Note that the above assumes that awk is either a shell alias for or that the executable is a symlink to either GNU Awk or nawk. (GNU Awk appears to be the more efficient of the two, for this command at least).

( Apr 01 2005, 07:00:35 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Calendar

« November 2009
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
      
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
      
Today

RSS Feeds

XML
All
/General
/Motorbikes
/Networking
/Odds & Sods
/Soapbox
/Solaris

Search

Links

Navigation

Referers

Today's Page Hits: 214