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If memory serves, the initial attitude towards Ubuntu was positive. It was an easy to install and use distro for non-systems type users and newbs. I think the hatred set in when they adopted Gnome 3, and later, systemd.

Actually, I believe it began with Unity. That was when Canonical began pushing unripe features faster than they themselves could manage them, and the number of downstream bugs gave rise to what Shuttleworth calls the 'hate'. It wasn't hate. It was a bunch of us who just got tired of being rejected out of hand, and who couldn't get mission-critical bugs fixed through normal channels:

Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

Full disclosure: I was completely wrong in my estimation that this behaviour was going to kill the company quickly. I was not completely wrong that it rendered them irrelevant to a lot of us.

Check out the Hackaday prize, over at Hackaday.io.

Actually, you don't even have to get too clever to save lives. In early 2015, the South Pacific country of Vanuatu was devastated by cyclone Pam, a category 5 storm that severely damaged almost half the country. (Full disclosure: the UNICEF photos are mine.). In spite of some islands being completely denuded of shelter, only 11 people died.

The people of Vanuatu deal with an average of 1.5 cyclones every year, but this was an unique event. There had never been a storm of this intensity measured in the country before, and certainly not one that passed directly on top of more than half the population. 3000 years of dealing with cyclones meant that people knew how to cope, but it was telecommunications that allowed us to warn people in time for them to seek shelter. Ironically, on Tanna (the worst-affected island) the majority of casualties occurred when the wall of a building designated an emergency shelter collapsed.

One national telco saw its entire national network knocked out. But within 10 days, they had better than 90% of it back in operation. I myself saw the CEO manhandling a microwave antenna into the back of a chopper during the height of the relief effort.

So yeah, it's not glorious; it's not clever. Sometimes tech just needs to be available to save lives.

P.S. The owners of a Very Large Internet Company saved a lot of lives in the immediate aftermath of the storm when they sent their superyacht to assist with relief activities. The vessel was small enough to get into the countless tiny passages, and large enough to support a helipad for medevacs. On top of that, the 40,000 litre desalination unit could keep entire villages supplied with water until barges could arrive. They don't want their names to come out because this is one of the few places in the world they can get away and just be people. But thanks guys. You rock.

[Anon to preserve mods]

Anonycow, On the contrary, cargo cults are a well documented phenomenon, in particular the cargo cults of World War II: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Er, no.

Source: Me. I live in Vanuatu and have personally spoken with some of the chiefs.

Don't donate to any organized cause. Even the best run, most efficient ones still have part of your dollar go to administrative or marketing costs.

So the fuck what? Do you know what happens when you insist that every single dollar goes to to projects? You can't keep staff.

When there's no core funding for NGOs, they can only hire on a contract basis, which means that most of the people you want won't—can't—work for you, because they have families and stuff. And that means you get no decent skills on the ground. And that means you're flying in a bunch of outsiders who make a career out of this kind of thing, but who, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot know what things are like on the ground. And that means you waste time and money making mistakes that no local would ever make. And that means delays. And cost overruns....

... And before you know it, you're down $500 million and you've only built six houses.

The systemd complainers are just a vocal minority. If they were representative of a large fraction of Linux users, then we would see several prominent distros not using systemd or making non-systemd versions.

You need to explain your reasoning here. You seem to think that minorities don't determine the outcome when it comes to designing FOSS. But the Freedom of FOSS is not populism. It never has been. It has always been the case that a vanishingly small minority of developers have decided the fate of thousands—and more recently, millions—of users.

It's a fact that Poeterring, Sievers and co. represent a tiny minority of Linux developers. Over 90% of the systemd code base has been written by 10 or so people. The groups that decided to include systemd in Debian and RedHat are also very small, and while Debian's is nominally consultative, they declined to send this particular decision to a popular vote.

So why do you think that numbers suddenly matter?

That's why the anti-systemd people are so pissed off: everyone else is just ignoring them.

It's not that people are being ignored. It's that 20+ years of historical evidence is being cast aside.

Make no mistake: What we're talking about here is a fundamental change in our approach to systems software. The distros have been dragged along for numerous reasons, some of them technical, some of them ideological. But to pretend that the demographic that is being left behind is of no consequence is disingenuous arrogance at best.

This is Linux: if they don't like it, they can just fork an existing distro, but do you see any of them doing that? Nope.

You know, I've done that before. I've worked for a company that developed a Linux distro purpose-built for people who couldn't manage systems for themselves. I still write the bits and pieces that I need, when I need to.

I'm not philosophically opposed to what you're suggesting here. I am incensed, though, that it should be necessary. As someone who so clearly doesn't understand the first thing about how the FOSS ecosystem works, you should have a care before you begin discarding the viewpoints of those who have gone before you, and you should think twice before presuming to suggest what's good for us.

HTH HAND

Correct they do. What systemd standardization does is allows Linux applications to have a constant API to write against

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you meant a 'consistent' API.

How is this unique to systemd? How is systemd a requirement for this to occur? A consistent API for what, exactly? For inter-process communication? For service-to-service communication? For communication of service state change?

... to get process management

Ah, for process management! Because that's never existed before!

... and thus as chunks of systemd get replaced by more complex PaaS components that API is how they talk to individual applications.

Yes, because adding complexity has been the goal of sysadmins from Day One.

That's the benefit. Systemd sets a much higher minimum and a standard.

Raise the bar! Higher standards! More Bugs! But fuck that! Because we didn't write the bugs! We just made them possible!

To summarise: I find your ideas questionable, at best, and downright wrong, mostly.

Heyya - just a quick tip of the hat - sounds like we got started much the same way. What part of the Canadian frontier you tame? Yukon here, early 90s with a NPO.

Eastern Arctic, at about the same time. Worked with Jeff Philippe a bit, too. He was operating out of Yellowknife back then. We set up what was at the time the most remote commercial ISP in the world. It was a great lesson in doing more with less, but still operating in a place where the broader context was more or less sane.

The thing that people forget when they're working in developing countries is that you can't take even the smallest things for granted. The movement of goods can resemble Brownian motion more than anything else. I've been in situations where the tool (or part) I needed simply didn't exist in the country. And I'm not talking about arcane, hard-to-find items - I mean things like the proper allen key to mount drives into their enclosures in a rack mount server. Power is abysmally poor, and UPSes degrade about as fast as bread on a hot day - and they're all hot days.

Long story short: It's tedious, difficult work with few rewards. Often you measure success in disasters averted. I wouldn't recommend it for most people, and I wish that some well-meaning people would stay the fuck away. But those who end up here, end up living a life to be envied.

Time to put on some pants, UNIX/Linux geeks: ain't no operating system out there immune to error.

No fucking kidding, software has bugs. And this is a doozy. It's not the first WTF moment we've seen, and it probably won't be the last.

As with the Y2K problem, though, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. The real test will come when we look back and measure the impact. Will we see a digital wasteland, a web devastated by shellshock-ing predators? Will we find ourselves living in an online New Jersey of the soul, wretched, empty bit-badlands stretching out to the horizon in every direction? Will the Evil Bit finally be flipped? Or will this be like the day when the public library almost burnt down, but we saved all the books by forming a bucket brigade? It's too early to say, right now. But my guess is that, unlike Microsoft's legacy, the fall-out from this event will be the stuff of a cautionary tale for young systems developers, explaining how all the cleverness in the world won't save you from stupidity, so the only really good system is one that can be patched quickly, effectively and simply.

Kant might also have admitted that, while no straight thing was ever made, quite a few bent things were subsequently straightened.

I am so full of envy right now, with a generous side order of awe. Watch that actually brought a tear to my eye.

Well, if you can pay the airfare to Vanuatu (3 1/2 hours away from Sydney for about $US 750), only a couple hundred dollars more will get you a walking tour to the edge of the caldera. It's not really a mountain so much as a high plateau with two (yes, two) active calderas. It's a fucking amazing place, a lunar landscape emerging over the last rise after a morning spent walking through jungle. Pretty primeval.

But if you're not in an exercising mood, you can simply pay a pilot to overfly the volcano. I did this once. We were actually on our way to Pentecost island in a small twin-prop charter, when the pilot said, 'Hey, the visibility's really good - you folks want to see a volcano?'

We thought about it for, like, 0.273 seconds and said, "FUCK YES!"

So he took us over it. Right. Over. The Volcano.

Was it cool? Yes, it was cool.

Going to slashdot is safe? No SSL here.

GCHQ has already spoofed Slashdot in the past. So no, going to Slash dot is not safe.

If they want you, they can't get you?

All right then. Let's all just roll over and die, why don't we?

Look, I get your cynicism, but don't let it run to fatalism. There are things you can do:

• - Stop making it easy on them. Stop using Windows. Seriously. Understand that what's convenient for you is often convenient for them.
• - Stop using proprietary software at all. Yes, yes, HeartBleed nothing is safe bla bla bla. I'm not talking about safe, though; I'm talking about safer. And FOSS is, objectively, a safer environment, and will remain so even after it becomes popular.
• - Start building and using federated, encrypted, decentralised, peer-to-peer systems. I honestly don't know why geeks didn't do this years ago, but why the fuck is Facebook the state of the art in social media? I mean, seriously. It's not only a privacy disaster area, it's a badly polished piece of shit to boot. We know that They don't like TOR because it's harder for Them. We know That they don't like bittorrent because it's harder for Them. So why the fuck are we not taking a clue from that and creating a UseNET we can go back to? I mean, I get why the peons don't, but we're geeks, for fuck sake. That used to mean something.
• - Start re-imagining an internet whose physical characteristics resemble its protocols. At the outset, we thought it would be cool to have generic protocols that ran more or less transparently on any old network at all. What we didn't realise was that just because stupid networks were possible, that didn't mean they were inevitable. The whole ICANN/ITU fiasco is all the evidence we need to see that the world's telcos have begun to realise how much ground they've lost and they want it back. But that doesn't mean we have to give it to them. Mesh topologies using low-power devices are the only we we cut them back down to size.

You can get all fatalistic if you like, but if your only response to the encroachments of authority is to run further and faster, then (apologies to Scotsmen everywhere) you're not a real geek.

Easy: use open source libraries.

Yep, like GnuTLS, or Apple's SSL implementation. You know there won't be any bugs in those, or if there are they'll be very quickly fixed and not sit there unnoticed for years.

I remember back in 2008, when the Debian OpenSSL package was found to have a gaping hole in it. I was fascinated at the fact that it had been able to lie their, dormant, until it was discovered and immediately fixed. By rights, the damage should have been widespread.

Back then, I wrote:

My hypothesis – sorry, my speculation is this: People at every stage of the production process and everywhere else in the system trusted that the others were doing their job competently. This includes crackers and others with a vested interest in compromising the code.

So, perversely, yeah: The fact that the GnuTLS hole remained unnoticed for yonks is -weirdly- an argument for using open source libraries. Notwithstanding the fact that the vulnerability remained unpatched for years, it appears to have remained pretty much unexploited for the same period of time.

When processes are perceived to be robust, by black hat and white hat alike, then the mere presence of trust in the system makes them more trust-able. (I won't say trustworthy, because hindsight shows us that they're not.)

But if you want the simple 5 cent explanation I can give it to you. God loves the truth. Anything that is not based on truth does not serve God.

Problem is, the truth doesn't serve God:

Science doesn’t require a God of any kind to be complete.

Some people construe this to mean that they can keep God in one pocket and science in the other. But science is much more dangerous than that. In rationalising a space between the two, people implicitly accept Aristotle’s theory of the primum movens (or, unmoved mover). In other words, we can regress evolution, or cosmology or what have you back beyond the point of measurement, and beyond that resides the godhead. So Big Bang is okay, because God lit the fuse, as it were.

But the fly in the ointment is that you can actually push science past Big Bang and it still remains coherent (it’s not easily testable, but it’s theoretically coherent). Likewise, you can reverse engineer forces and causes of the evolutionary process past the origin of life. In other words, science doesn’t just end where God begins, and vice versa. No, science is complete - that is, it can conceive of the universe in its totality independently of any conception whatsoever of a Creator.

Which doesn’t leave a lot of space for God, if you’re honest about it.

(And God, for his part, says, ‘I am that I am‘ and plagues me with boils. So, swings and roundabouts, I guess.)

It's hard to predict.

Well, I'm not so sure about that. I predicted it back in 2011. Money quote:

Ubuntu is slipping out of control. Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

That's pretty much the argument being made in TFA, but I'm not going to try to take credit for oracular powers or anything. It's been pretty obvious for some time that they were on the wrong track.

>>>Having a business facing site on Facebook/Google+ and even using Twitter can be great for self promotion, and can open up your business to a huge audience

actually increases sales?

That's a really good question.

I've run a photography website for 9 years, promoting Vanuatu, a tiny but beautiful chain of islands in the South Pacific. Traffic has always been low but steady, and Google image search gives me a decent ranking for my decidedly niche category.

In August, I got recruited to manage the Humans of Vanuatu Facebook page. The page is still tiny by global standards, but I get people visiting from around the world, a ton of positive feedback and a steadily increasing and solid fan base. I've been featured in an online culture magazine, and now have a regular series in a decent (4 color glossy) lifestyle magazine that focuses on the South Pacific. Three musicians have asked to use my work in their cover art, the local newspaper has offered me a regular feature and I've been solicited to shoot more weddings than I want to[*].

In terms of actual revenue, the jury's still out. I have seen an uptick in website visits, but the vast majority of people prefer to wait for my daily posts. I haven't tried to leverage it much yet, but I've been asked to do an exhibition early next year, with the proceeds going to charity. If that goes well, then maybe I'll try selling prints or a book online.

Best I can suggest at the moment is that a Facebook presence emphatically does increase your exposure, mostly because of what they call 'virality' - the fact that whenever someone Likes a photo of mine, all their friends see it too. This means that I get about ten times as many eyes as I have fans. Will this translate to money? Not sure yet. Why not Like my page and follow me to find out? 8^)

--------
[*] In fairness, I just loathe shooting weddings. So one would be too many.

Indeed, I would like to get hands on a wide reaching comparative study involving more languages than two. My guess is that finding people speaking more than 2 languages are not common... and you sir are a real exception.

Depends on what part of the world you're from. Papua New Guinea has over 1000 living spoken languages, the Solomon Islands has hundreds. Even Vanuatu, where I live, has over 100 spoken languages. It's perfectly commonplace for a child to be fluent in either English or French (depending on which school they attend), both of their parents' native tongues, and Bislama, the lingua franca here. In the course of any given day, I find myself speaking English and Bislama at the office, French with people of French extraction, and sharing greetings and pleasantries in about fifteen (yes: 15) other languages.

Nobody blinks an eye, except for those who observe that a lot of unilingual expats never learn even one other language. I suspect the difference is that I grew up in a mixed English/French-speaking community, and picked up my first 'second' language at a very early age.

I expect that people's facility with multiple languages is what leads to Bislama - a variety of pidgin English - being used so inventively, in spite of being particularly impoverished in terms of grammar and vocabulary.

Come to Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Bilingualism English/French is a requirement in public / highschools. Parochial schools or private schools offer three languages.
My own self, I am fluent in English, began to learn french at age 40, and I picked up Spanish from my wife's conversations with her family. I read/write French and read/speak a smattering of Spanish. I can hold a conversation.

I have three adults, two sons and a daughter and three grandchildren.

One of my sons has as languages, Music, English, French, Spanish, Portugese, and Russian. He read-writes them all. He (MBA) knows various Spanish accents, having lived 10 years in Florida. Knowing English, French, and Spanish, and a great personality due to multilingualism and from multiculturalism allowed him to be top salesrep in Florida.
My other son is trilingual as well, with English, French and some Polish (from girlfriend). He has a bachelor degree in finance.
My daughter teaches Autistic children, is a psychologist, and is fluent in English, French and Spanish.

My grandkids (ages 9,8,6) are better in French than English, (They started kindergarten with full French immersion until grade 4, after which they get half days in each language). Science, gym, and spelling is given in both.) High school will be predominantly in English.

They also understand Spanish.

Yes, in Quebec, we believe in multi-culturism, with a concentration in French.

Are we brighter? I do not think we are, but our minds are conditioned or trained to think creatively. Our vocabularies are richer than most uni-lingual peoples. We think in two or three languages at a time.

By the way, Music is a language. My son at age 4 was able to identify cords and play piano. Today his hobby is composing songs and lyrics.

As for me, I have a degree in mathematics and physics. I did have very high marks in university.

Should I ever visit your country, do you have any recommendation for a good feel of the back country?

Here's a primer on how to behave (and what kind of behaviour to expect) in Vanuatu. And these people have the best tour packages I've seen. Feel free to look me up. It's a small place and we all like to welcome visitors.

Indeed, I would like to get hands on a wide reaching comparative study involving more languages than two. My guess is that finding people speaking more than 2 languages are not common... and you sir are a real exception.

Depends on what part of the world you're from. Papua New Guinea has over 1000 living spoken languages, the Solomon Islands has hundreds. Even Vanuatu, where I live, has over 100 spoken languages. It's perfectly commonplace for a child to be fluent in either English or French (depending on which school they attend), both of their parents' native tongues, and Bislama, the lingua franca here. In the course of any given day, I find myself speaking English and Bislama at the office, French with people of French extraction, and sharing greetings and pleasantries in about fifteen (yes: 15) other languages.

Nobody blinks an eye, except for those who observe that a lot of unilingual expats never learn even one other language. I suspect the difference is that I grew up in a mixed English/French-speaking community, and picked up my first 'second' language at a very early age.

I expect that people's facility with multiple languages is what leads to Bislama - a variety of pidgin English - being used so inventively, in spite of being particularly impoverished in terms of grammar and vocabulary.

From what I read, instead of handing out money directly.. which just leads to corruption, he is leveraging it in a way that prevents the money from being abused. Free money never works when it comes to aid son.

Never say never, son.

A few years ago, Xanana Gusmao, the Prime Minister of Timor Leste was facing a crisis. As a result of the violence leading up to Timor's first free elections, almost 10% of the country (over 100,000 people) ended up in refugee camps. He asked the UN and other aid agencies for advice, and they came up with an 8 year plan at the end of which, the first houses would be built.

The PM immediately ordered cash payments to all internally displaced people to help them rebuild their homes. It was a partial answer, one that the government admitted would require significant further effort, but the move helped 60,000 people to begin rebuilding within a year.

The aid agencies went apeshit. They told him that the money would be wasted, stolen, spent on the wrong things, that there would be no way to measure the success, that they wouldn't be able to avoid fraud.... But Xanana insisted. Within two years, the camps were empty.

In retrospect, it's easy to see why: Nobody wants to live in a camp. The money each person received wasn't enough to build a house, but it was enough to get started. And that's all the encouragement people need.

William Easterly's Aid Watch blog also documents studies tracking how direct cash donations to displaced persons in sub-Saharan Africa were used. They found that less than 10% of the money was wasted or somehow misused. That's better than just about every other form of aid in terms of efficiency.

The moral of the story, therefore, is not that giving money is bad. The moral is that you need to give it to people with the reason and motivation to use it for the right things. I hate to break it to you, but the majority of multi-national corporations lack that motivation.

Exactly. They are negotiating. "War" involves shooting and death. Using it to describe sabotage is just hyperbole.

Hyperbole, yes, but not without a purpose. You could also call it fund-raising.

This is another example of a military-industrial complex ginning up a new theatre of operations in which to spend billions^W^Wdeploy.

Which side are you talking about? The military-industrial complex in Iran is easily tighter than in the USA. Besides that, Iran has people in power who are not above releasing election results in a spreadsheet which do not even add up, let alone reflect anything close to reality (I kept a copy after downloading it from the Irandian government site) Really, they have contempt enough for everybody. Negotiation only buys them more time. I think Israel gets this and that's why they're eager to launch an attack.

Exactly. They are negotiating. "War" involves shooting and death. Using it to describe sabotage is just hyperbole.

Hyperbole, yes, but not without a purpose. You could also call it fund-raising.

This is another example of a military-industrial complex ginning up a new theatre of operations in which to spend billions^W^Wdeploy.

What a stupid fucking statement about Windows PC. What is that even supposed to mean? How is a modern car comparable to a computer running Windows? What version of Windows are we talking about here?

Funny you should ask....

Dude, this is Slashdot. No car post is complete without a Windows analogy.

I am curious what advantages you imagine you'll get from having interchangeable lenses.

In my experience, it's all about the glass. You can get decent photos with a moderately good camera body, but if you have a shit lens, nothing's going to save you from a muddy pic.

This is why I'm inclined to suggest a DSLR. As others have said, entry-level camera bodies are pretty cheap these days, and they do most of the heavy lifting where shutter and aperture are concerned. But with a good prime lens (i.e. fixed-length, non-zoom), you can get remarkable clarity, right down to the pores on someone's face. You can get one for a fraction of the price of a comparable-quality zoom lens.

The only drawback is that you have to use your legs when composing a shot, but as long as you look behind you, that's generally not a problem.

That said, make sure you like photography before you jump in.

the vanilla Android devices (Nexus line) don't ship with the CarrierIQ software, which means that either the handset manufacturers or, much more likely given the US-centric focus, the carriers are responsible for installing it.

...Which is a very good point. Google gives not only end users but also manufacturers and carriers relatively free reign over Android phones. Apple retains much more control over the iPhone.

While it's easy to see how Apple's strategy can hurt power users, Google's strategy can hurt users also.

Between iOS and Android, you're just trading one bucket of problems for another. Siri will find you a dentist if you tell it you broke a tooth and point you to the nearest escort agency if you're looking for one, but it won't help you if you need to renew your birth control prescription refilled. If you tell it you've been raped, it blithely replies, "Really!"

Apple and Wolfram Alpha can say what they like about the service's beta status; the likeliest reason for this is that they didn't want to touch one aspect of societal behaviour because it might upset parents and affect sales to teens.

Google errs on the other side, empowering handset providers, allowing them to indulge their baser instincts when it comes to how they view customers on their networks. For telcos, the customer is the commodity.

In both cases, corporate entities feel entitled to decide what we are allowed to know about them and what they are allowed to know about us. The contrast between the two couldn't be stronger.

In fairness, this is a common human failing. When it's my information at stake, we call it privacy. When it's someone else's, we call it secrecy.

The only way to square this circle is to remove the dichotomy altogether. Paradoxically, the only way we can be sure that others aren't abusing our private data is through transparency, which requires less, not more, privacy. In the end, the best we can hope for is a kind of neo-Victorianism, in which we are more willing to accept polite behaviour at face value and overlook all but the more egregious failings. Ultimately, we will have to learn to accept that we are all no better than we should be.

I have no faith whatsoever that American society will be able to accomplish this. The Protestant ethic of probity and respect has long since been extinguished in favour of a mix of fundamentalist, moralistic witch-hunts and ugly prurience.

The Agenda here is to point out that Linux isn't the God of OS. It has its problems just like Windows and the others.

Fine, but that's an inaccurate statement. To say that it 'has its problems just like Windows' implies that it has the same problems as Windows. That's a perfect example of false equivalence.

For decades now, Windows has had systemic problems with security. Its ecosystem is fundamentally weakened by malware due to a legacy of flagrant disregard to security. (Unix once suffered from the same naiveté, but happily managed to move past it, by and large.) The problem runs so deep, in fact, that even relatively secure versions of the software (those produced in the last two years or so) are still burdened by the deficiency of the environment in which they operate, and the culture of complacency and ignorance that pervades MS systems administration.

In fact, things have got so bad that black hats sometimes overlook the low-hanging Linux fruit, instead spending inordinate amounts of time and effort to break into an increasingly secure Windows environment.

My organisation is in the middle of a Exchange upgrade as I write this, and if this experience is any guide, there are fundamental differences between how people administering Microsoft systems approach change management and how grey-haired old *nix farts like me approach it. These differences are cultural in part, but the respective cultures derive from the design philosophy, which in turn dictates the toolkits and approaches taken.

And yes, the Linux philosophy (and approach and toolkit) does have flaws. Here's just one example. But they have very little in common with Windows. The single most important difference is that Linux's flaws have not yet led to systemic dysfunction. I'm not saying they won't; I'm saying they haven't. Yet.

The Agenda here is to point out that Linux isn't the God of OS. It has its problems just like Windows and the others.

Fine, but that's an inaccurate statement. To say that it 'has its problems just like Windows' implies that it has the same problems as Windows. That's a perfect example of false equivalence.

For decades now, Windows has had systemic problems with security. Its ecosystem is fundamentally weakened by malware due to a legacy of flagrant disregard to security. (Unix once suffered from the same naiveté, but happily managed to move past it, by and large.) The problem runs so deep, in fact, that even relatively secure versions of the software (those produced in the last two years or so) are still burdened by the deficiency of the environment in which they operate, and the culture of complacency and ignorance that pervades MS systems administration.

In fact, things have got so bad that black hats sometimes overlook the low-hanging Linux fruit, instead spending inordinate amounts of time and effort to break into an increasingly secure Windows environment.

My organisation is in the middle of a Exchange upgrade as I write this, and if this experience is any guide, there are fundamental differences between how people administering Microsoft systems approach change management and how grey-haired old *nix farts like me approach it. These differences are cultural in part, but the respective cultures derive from the design philosophy, which in turn dictates the toolkits and approaches taken.

And yes, the Linux philosophy (and approach and toolkit) does have flaws. Here's just one example. But they have very little in common with Windows. The single most important difference is that Linux's flaws have not yet led to systemic dysfunction. I'm not saying they won't; I'm saying they haven't. Yet.

The Agenda here is to point out that Linux isn't the God of OS. It has its problems just like Windows and the others.

Fine, but that's an inaccurate statement. To say that it 'has its problems just like Windows' implies that it has the same problems as Windows. That's a perfect example of false equivalence.

For decades now, Windows has had systemic problems with security. Its ecosystem is fundamentally weakened by malware due to a legacy of flagrant disregard to security. (Unix once suffered from the same naiveté, but happily managed to move past it, by and large.) The problem runs so deep, in fact, that even relatively secure versions of the software (those produced in the last two years or so) are still burdened by the deficiency of the environment in which they operate, and the culture of complacency and ignorance that pervades MS systems administration.

In fact, things have got so bad that black hats sometimes overlook the low-hanging Linux fruit, instead spending inordinate amounts of time and effort to break into an increasingly secure Windows environment.

My organisation is in the middle of a Exchange upgrade as I write this, and if this experience is any guide, there are fundamental differences between how people administering Microsoft systems approach change management and how grey-haired old *nix farts like me approach it. These differences are cultural in part, but the respective cultures derive from the design philosophy, which in turn dictates the toolkits and approaches taken.

And yes, the Linux philosophy (and approach and toolkit) does have flaws. Here's just one example. But they have very little in common with Windows. The single most important difference is that Linux's flaws have not yet led to systemic dysfunction. I'm not saying they won't; I'm saying they haven't. Yet.

Politicians use Google and Facebook too. Put messages there.

Or you could get together with 87,834 of your closest friends and call them.

It's good to see people mobilisation en masse to oppose this bill, but as others have said, it remains to be seen whether Congress will listen to anyone unless they dangle a cheque in front of their nose.

The big danger that I see is how dangerously regressive and backward-looking attitudes on the Hill are.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the recent House Judiciary Committee hearing was that Google, the sole opponent to the legislation allowed to present at the hearing, was castigated by most of the people there, impugned for purportedly profiting from piracy and cast as the villain in this whole affair.

Seeing one of the few growing and dynamic drivers of the information economy not only cast out of the fold but actively opposed, one can only conclude that the captains of the US media industry are perfectly content to cut their nose off to spite their face. They will burn the bridge represented by Google rather than cross it.

I see two immediate dangers if this regime is actually allowed to take the shape proposed for it:

• 1) Innovation in content re-use and sharing will move outside of the US. Some will move into the shadows (kind of like offshore pirate radio in days of yore, except the ships and radios are available for the cost of a laptop). Some will move into the less governed – or governable – areas.
• 2) US influence on innovation and invention will decline significantly. This legislative package will serve as a clear signal that Silicon Valley is no longer the influence it used to be. (Indeed, the Valley’s lack of standing in DC was evidenced by committee members’ contempt for Google throughout the hearing.)

The latter outcome is the more dangerous of the two. Losing influence in the direction the Internet’s development takes also means losing the uniquely American ethos of freedom and individualism.

There are numerous new media and technological players poised in the wings right now. But few of them (with the possible exception of Al Jazeera) have any moral stake in human rights or even individual expression. Not, at least, in the same way that many American developers do - that is, at the axiomatic level, rather than as a conscious overlay to their world view.

With enough devices on the market, altogether with advances in Ad-hoc networks, this may be possible (I think there are still tweaks to the routing protocols, which I think are pure madness).

I posted something about this just this morning, linking to an older article I wrote. In a nutshell, between advances in wireless networking protocols and approaches, improvements in mesh networking and new developments in end-to-end voice and data encryption, we can reasonably begin thinking about creating telco-less networks.

However, I see two main groups against such thing:

1. The carriers, that may lose a big chunk of customers that don't mind no having complete availability.

2. But most importantly, the government, which, besides of opposing to this, may also be worried about not being able to track users so easily and tap on conversations, as they do now.

So more than "technically", I think is politically unfeasible.

I reposted the article because of the SOPA fiasco currently playing itself out in the US Congress. Network ownership (or, more precisely, the affiliation between network owners and so-called content owners) is one of the main obstacles to the continued development of the Internet as we know it. The only way around the draconian content restrictions being proposed by media and tech companies is to operate a network that doesn't rely on their good graces.

I don't have any illusions whatsoever that a Jobs-inspired Apple network would have been a Free Information playground. Quite the contrary. It would most likely have resembled a digital Disneyland, with cutesy characters allowing you to do anything you like, as long as it's what they intended you to do in the first place.

Nonetheless, the idea of a Network Of Devices is sound. I just wish someone with both the necessary resources and a sane understanding of freedom were in a position to begin creating it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure such a creature exists....

They're probably only 10 people, anyway.

I was one of the '10' the last time this happened.

I was living in Iqaluit at the time, but was actually in flight to Pond Inlet at the northern tip of Baffin Island when the outage occurred. It was a very bizarre feeling to arrive in one of the most remote communities in the world and find I'd stepped back in time by a century.

Telephone, TV, and most other means of communications simply stopped. But people in the Arctic are adaptable. They don't last long if they aren't. Emergency communications were hopped from airport-to-pilot-to-ground from the hamlet (It's a LONG way from any other habitation). We hunkered down, and yes, politely waited for news.

As the wikipedia link indicates, we waited for days while the local telco flew technicians across the territory to reposition their dishes and get services running.

It was the experience of living in a remote location - close to the technological edge, as it were - that led me to drop what I was doing a few years later and leave for the South Pacific, where I live today. (Also: When I left Iqaluit, I promised myself I'd never be cold again.) I live in a country with only satellite service, and have worked for the last 8 years helping to improve communications here.

(Not so) amusingly, about a year and a half after I arrived, the satellite providing service to our region suffered catastrophic failure. I was able to use my experience in the Arctic to help convince people here of the dangers of relying on a single source of data communications. We should be getting a submarine cable in 2012-13, and once that happens, I just might be able to rely on Internet again.

Why not allow both and let the userbase sort out who they do and do not add on their professional (cathedral) and personal (bazaar) accounts?

google won't let us filter out the comment spammers. They'd have to add a flag for each user as "real" or "anonymous coward" and then add a filter flag so we don't have to see the AC/spammers.

You can control who sees your posts in the circles. You cannot, more or less, control who spams your comments, for better or worse.

Circles are unidirectional, not bidirectional like other services.

A typical failure mode would be I add wiedzmin to my circles, and whenever you post, I spamflood your post comments, and there's nothing you can do about it at this time. Needless to say, I'm not going to behave like that using my real name, so you need not worry. Allowing an infinite collection of ACs in would only make it worse.

cooooool . i like this post :)))) i circle u if u too

The spamflood has already started. The biggest mistake Google is making is assuming that the owner of the account is the spammer (or conversely that the spammer actually cares about the fate of the account). That hasn't been true of email spam for years now, and it's not true of Google+ accounts.

Arguments about what constitutes a real name aside, Google has completely missed the boat where the nature of online identity is concerned. They may want a cathedral, but human society is far too bazaar (sorry) for that.

Laugh however much you like about Liberal Arts majors, but this is a classic case of mistakenly believing that an engineering solution exists for every problem.

More likely accounts would mostly be used for post spam than pure harassment. Browse /. and look at the score -5 to 0 posts for a good idea of what anonymous G+ would mostly look like.

No need. G+ is already looking like that.

If someone hot-wires my car, and then rams it into a police station, then I'm not liable. The car manufacturer is not liable. The police are not liable. As a matter of fact, its not even my fault if I left the doors unlocked and the engine running. The person responsible is the bastard that stole it and did the damage.

That might be true for the first half-dozen times the bastard did it. But once the number reaches into the millions, you might want to reconsider the design of the car.

Problem right now is that you are all driving pintos.

Why is Ubuntu so prone to horrible choices like this?

The answer's pretty simple: They've stopped listening.

Ubuntu is slipping out of control. Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

Worse, they simply don’t have the number of skilled developers they need to achieve their goals. When I look at the bug queues on some packages, I shudder in sympathy with the poor souls who are expected to wrangle them. Canonical is clearly embarked on an impossible task, but nobody’s either got the guts or the vision to spell this out to Shuttleworth and co.

(This is excerpted from a slightly longer piece I wrote after 11.04 was released.)

I get so sick of hearing people say that the internet can't be censored (usually with some "The internet is *designed* to route around any censorship" crap).

The Internet is designed to route around censorship. It's the physical networks that have choke points.

And no. this is not a distinction without a difference. As long as there are multiple routes to a destination, TCP/IP manages very well indeed, and allows the opportunity for all kinds of hard-to-track activity. But the vast majority of physical networks are built in the traditional telco format: Small pipes aggregating to big ones that pass through a single gateway, which is typically where the telco installs its toll booth and the government its censor. This topology is really the opposite of an end-to-end network, which is typically how we define the Internet.

The Internet is useful for two important things during an insurrection: To win the sympathy of the outside world, and to coordinate action. Ad hoc mesh networks would address the latter moderately well[*] (in urban areas) and smuggling high density media would work for the former. There is hope for the Internet yet, but it's not going to be realised as long as we leave it in the hands of telcos and governments.

--------------
[*] Of course, I'm not talking about typical North American consumer Internet. I'm talking about having any ability to communicate at all in the face of overwhelming censorship..

I get so sick of hearing people say that the internet can't be censored (usually with some "The internet is *designed* to route around any censorship" crap).

The Internet is designed to route around censorship. It's the physical networks that have choke points.

And no. this is not a distinction without a difference. As long as there are multiple routes to a destination, TCP/IP manages very well indeed, and allows the opportunity for all kinds of hard-to-track activity. But the vast majority of physical networks are built in the traditional telco format: Small pipes aggregating to big ones that pass through a single gateway, which is typically where the telco installs its toll booth and the government its censor. This topology is really the opposite of an end-to-end network, which is typically how we define the Internet.

The Internet is useful for two important things during an insurrection: To win the sympathy of the outside world, and to coordinate action. Ad hoc mesh networks would address the latter moderately well[*] (in urban areas) and smuggling high density media would work for the former. There is hope for the Internet yet, but it's not going to be realised as long as we leave it in the hands of telcos and governments.

--------------
[*] Of course, I'm not talking about typical North American consumer Internet. I'm talking about having any ability to communicate at all in the face of overwhelming censorship..

I would expect as Apple becomes more popular it will become more of a target for malware. This is not very surprising. I just hope Linux never becomes popular!

Well, if we do a quick calculation, perhaps we can get a ballpark idea of just how big this threat is:

Number of distinct threats: 1

Number of distinct reports: 42

Now, let's be generous and assume that for each of those 42 threads, there were about 1000 other people who experienced the same problem. That makes about 42,000 people who inadvertently installed and ran a Mac trojan. I'm not certain about the size of the Mac desktop/laptop installed base, but I suspect that a reasonable estimate is in the tens of millions.

Now, compare this with Microsoft's admission that 1 in 14 downloads on Windows is malicious, and I think it's safe to say we have two problems of distinctly different scope.

The article's author, Ed Bott, asks whether we should be crying wolf about this latest surge in Mac malware. Near as I can tell, there is a threat, but it's more akin to an excited chihuahua trying to hump your ankle than a ravening wolf.

Once again, those who claim to see direct parallels between Windows security and Mac/Linux security are guilty of false equivalence.

How much work is it to avoid installing fake antivirus?

That is not a problem inherent to Microsoft operating systems. Just because you haven't seen those popups on your Macbook yet, doesn't mean they aren't right around the corner.

Nor does it mean that these pop-ups are right around the corner. Your argument is a perfect example of false equivalence: If no software application can be 100% secured, all software is therefore equally insecure.

To tar other OSes with the same brush as Windows is to suggest that one should not move to another bank because, once enough people move to it, it too will become the target of bank robbers. That’s wrong because:

1. Nobody is suggesting that everyone has to move all their money to one single bank;
2. The new bank might not be perfectly secure, but at least it doesn’t leave all the money in a pile in the middle of the floor.

Using generic parts of a kind you can find in the local hardware store is a Good Thing.

Pardon me, but an autoclave is not a generic part that can be picked up at the local hardware store. Besides, remote areas of underdeveloped countries do not have hardware stores. So claiming anything that requires parts from YOUR local hardware store is suitable for people who have never seen a hardware store shows a complete lack of empathy for the problems of the people who make up a large part of the world's population.

Dude, chill. The problems we're discussing affect about 85% of the population of the country I live in right now.

To your points: First, that 'people who have never seen a hardware store' line is a little disingenuous. We're obviously using shorthand for generic consumer-grade materials that are readily available via standard distribution channels. Yes, there is no hardware store in the village to which these parts are destined, but it's a damn sight easier to get generic parts shipped from the nearest city (no matter how far away that might be) than it is to get a medical supply company to ship to the same place.

Second, the whole point about making an autoclave (or any other needful thing) out of generic, readily-available materials is that they are otherwise extremely difficult to source, operate, maintain and replace.

Sometimes, holding out for optimal conditions or equipment is just plain wrong. In many cases, just having something -anything at all- is often better than nothing. A friend of mine has had to perform emergency surgical procedures by the light of a Coleman lamp, so I suspect that having a quick and dirty (sorry) way of sterilising surgical materials when there's no diesel for the generator would be seen as a Good Thing, provided it worked.

The problem I have with a solar-powered version is that, in my part of the world at least, the sun is not around much at precisely the time of year when disaster is most likely to happen (i.e hurricane season). Also, it's night about half the time. If someone could find a way, for example, to heat an autoclave with a truck battery, I'd be a lot more sanguine about the prospect.

I may be mistaken or just plain wrong about how an autoclave should function, but please don't make assumptions about my experience with this kind of thing. The repercussions of a non-functioning health system is something I and my family deal with all the time.

At some point, someone will have to determine what's costlier: a little extra money up front to recruit knowledgeable and capable people to safeguard the company's and customers' valuable information ... or a public relations disaster such as Sony is experiencing.

You're assuming that massive data theft is a disaster to the company. If experience is any guide, that's not true:

It seems that in the esoteric world of noughts and ones, belief matters far more than empirical truth, making a true Data Disaster literally inconceivable.

There can’t be a Data Disaster today, because we can’t imagine what one would look like. Likewise, there won’t be a Data Disaster until we become capable of realising that they’re all around us, happening every day.

Shame on you Flickr....

Shame indeed. I live and work and write occasional newspaper columns in the tiny nation of Vanuatu, Last week, our Minister of Infrastructure and Public Utilities arrived in the offices of our national newspaper with a gang of 8 thugs and proceeded to beat the crap out of the publisher. His sin? Telling the truth about a litany of crooked dealings the Minister was involved in.

This prompted people from all walks of life in the Pacific Islands region to stand up and make themselves heard. The staff of the Daily Post newspaper - and contributors like myself - were defiant in the face of overt coercion and threats.

Why, I would like to know, is it easier for pipsqueaks like us to stand up to government coercion than for large corporations with a stable of capable lawyers on hand and not a fear in the world for their own safety?

Of course, we already know the answer.

Further, there is nothing secure about communications, however well encrypted they might be as people in Egypt found out when the entire country's net went dark.

Secure also means Operational.

RedPhone is just one piece of a larger puzzle that could create some very exciting stories for freedom-lovers everywhere:

We need to disintermediate the network. It's an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.

As long as the cables, wires and frequencies over which we communicate are susceptible to being controlled, curtailed or even disconnected when the things we say -or the way we say them- become upsetting, we will find ourselves increasingly confined.

As I said during an Internet policy session yesterday, if you ask anyone -anyone- whether there should be limits on Behaviour X on the Internet, the answer will always be a resounding Yes. That's not a problem in and of itself, because X is usually anti-social and contrary to the public good. The problem is that anything capable of curtailing Behaviour X can be brought to bear on Behaviours A through W as well.

The only way out of this is to provide the technical means to do what we have always done in democratic societies: Keep our private discussions private and our public discussions free.

RedPhone (well, the ZRTP protocol, anyway) is a pretty important component of that.

Further, there is nothing secure about communications, however well encrypted they might be as people in Egypt found out when the entire country's net went dark.

Secure also means Operational.

RedPhone is just one piece of a larger puzzle that could create some very exciting stories for freedom-lovers everywhere:

We need to disintermediate the network. It's an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.

As long as the cables, wires and frequencies over which we communicate are susceptible to being controlled, curtailed or even disconnected when the things we say -or the way we say them- become upsetting, we will find ourselves increasingly confined.

As I said during an Internet policy session yesterday, if you ask anyone -anyone- whether there should be limits on Behaviour X on the Internet, the answer will always be a resounding Yes. That's not a problem in and of itself, because X is usually anti-social and contrary to the public good. The problem is that anything capable of curtailing Behaviour X can be brought to bear on Behaviours A through W as well.

The only way out of this is to provide the technical means to do what we have always done in democratic societies: Keep our private discussions private and our public discussions free.

RedPhone (well, the ZRTP protocol, anyway) is a pretty important component of that.

The "point" to me sounded like a bunch of bullshit cyberspeak about how the internet is going to turn government into a big drum circle where we all join hands and sing songs of peace and love.

I'll be the first to admit that a lot of Progressive activism does suffer from its (often impractical) idealism. That said, the assertion that the Internet, with its FOSS-style approach to standards and its preference for unmediated communication, really is a democratising force.

The problem is, the powers-that-be are becoming aware of this fact, and they don't like it. I may be getting cynical in my old age, but recently all I've been seeing is how susceptible to coercion modern networks are. I've written a series of newspaper columns and blog posts on the topic. Here's the basic take-away:

We can take two closely related lessons from this:

• Centrally controlled communications resources are, in times of social crisis, extremely vulnerable to compromise; and
• Information networks that rely on the ‘End to End Principle’ – that is, networks that join two end points without particularly caring how those two points connect – are still subject to compromise, but the damage can be mitigated either by routing around trouble spots or by connecting to different end points.

In short, the core design principle of the Internet, the concept of the ‘end to end’ network, is inherently democratic, empowering the individual at the expense of central control.

Will the revolution be twittered? If Egypt is any example, it's increasingly likely that it won't. That said, Internet protocols and FOSS philosophy still hold some important ground. They can be used to organise groups and share experience/intelligence. Not all hope is lost.

And only 246 hops to reach Slashdot... response times blow out to 30 seconds instead of sub-second response times. I don't think so...

You make a valid point, but the hacker in all of us should be seeing that as a challenge, not as a show-stopper.

If we really want a distributed, mesh-like network architecture (and I use that term loosely), we could have it without a huge amount of work. As with all things Internet, we'd have to appropriate a bunch of tools, invent a few others, cobble them together into a shape which they weren't really intended to take, then somehow find the means to play nicely together....

... Sounds a lot like the way the Internet itself came about, doesn't it?

Sure the basic elements were very much designed, but compare that to the amount that was appropriated or just whipped off in a half-assed way -only to be formalised and made robust later. So there may be 249 hops between me and Slashdot, but you know what? They'll be my hops.

The problem we face today is that centralised networks are not the way to go. They are nothing more than a hold-over from the telco era, in which big monolithic networks made some kind of sense. More and more as the years go by, they have proven to be the problem, not the solution.

Having spent much of my professional life on the frontier (literally -first in the Canadian Arctic and now in the South Pacific), I've never really had the luxury of waiting for the telcos to bring me the services I need. That's why I'm inclined to agree with anyone who sees the danger in any network that aggregates too much traffic. Experience has taught me to look at them as nothing more than choke-points

I'm pretty pessimistic about our prospects though. The big problem is that the vast majority of consumer devices are network-dependent now. The iPhone's great crime is not that it indulged an entire generation of hipster-wannabes but that it blurred the lines between device, network and content, causing marketers to package everything together. This means that it's harder than ever before to be network-agnostic and to focus instead on unmediated end-to-end communications.

Oh well, it was a good run while it lasted. I don't think I'll be applying for an Internet license when they become compulsory.... I'll miss it, though.

WTF is the damn difference? What BS is this statement trying to make? Am I supposed to feel better about the pending 'Kill Switch'?

It actually does make a difference, because it means that the Mubarak regime was able to keep each ISP scared enough to intimidate them into doing exactly what they said, even when that meant effectively cutting off their business. The timing of the calls -a little more than 13 minutes total- tells us that there was no hesitation from any of the ISPs. The only exception was the Noor group, who somehow managed to evade this order and remain online for days after the others had disappeared.

The fact that a government functionary can pick up the phone, say, "Shut down your network" and be complied with without the slightest hesitation doesn't say a thing about technology, but it teaches us a lot about the nature of government, and perhaps makes it a little clearer to those of us in the outside world just what the pro-democracy protesters were willing to risk their lives for.

Side note: It was James Cowie at Renesys who first posited this scenario within hours of the shutdown.

I wrote a much longer consideration of the effects of the Egyptian outage for my country's national daily. In a nutshell, the design of our physical networks makes them vulnerable to the kind of coercive pressure exerted by the Mubarak regime. And a some of the powers-that-be like it like that.

This sounds to me more like savvy business wheeling and dealing. It's no different than what the Indians, Japanese or Koreans would do.

It sounds like savvy business practice, and to some degree it is, but it is not at all the same as what the Indians, Japanese or Koreans do.

The Chinese Government has a great deal more control over their economy than other countries. Well, more to the point, they're willing to exert far greater control over their economy than most other nations are.

This is nothing new. Some of us have been trying to sound the warning about the myth of the China Market for years.

Rent a Navajo Today!

No more worrying if your neighbor is intercepting your calls. No more being paranoid of foreign governments. Conduct insider trading in front of the SEC!

Word on the street is Julian Assange has his very personal Navajo. No proper business man would be caught with out one.

- Paid for by the Navajo Talkers of America

This is insightful in a Haha Only Serious kind of way.

The fact of the matter is that a Personal Navajo is actually a pretty comprehensible way to present Public/Private Key cryptography to non-technical users.

This reminds me of the Cargo Cult mentality mentioned in an article quoted a few days ago, here [fordham.edu], where the view of the cult is that technology is an immutable force of nature, not a tool mastered by man, and the idea that man can wield it is so foreign as to be unthinkable.

It's not so uncommon as you think. I live in Vanuatu, where most of the remaining South Pacific cargo cults exist. You and the learned professor give too much credit to the rest of the world, and not nearly enough to the ni-Vanuatu people.

In the cold war, Americans were afraid of losing their freedom to the Soviet Union. But according to the article, the cyber cold war is about America holding on to its "intellectual property":

In the cyber cold war, the capabilities and resources of our adversaries refers to the ability ... to steal intellectual property from businesses, secrets from governments and money from everybody.

Very interesting. Especially because theft of 'intellectual property' is usually called 'espionage'. While spying and intelligence-gathering happens quite a bit during times of war, it is not warfare, per se.

As usual, the redoubtable Seymour Hersh got there first with this observation.

The can wirelessly transmit, (using low power, low bandwidth technologies perhaps not yet invented or a low power subset of Wifi that only works ~30ft?), from their more traditional notebook information during class.

... And these need power cables and external power sources.

I rest my case. 8^)

Trust me, I've been down this road over a dozen times in the last 7 years working in ICT4D. It's one thing to aim for low power. That's a commendable and essential goal. (One which modern technology vendors don't take nearly seriously enough.)

It's another thing entirely to think that you can operate entirely off the grid, or more to the point, that you can rely on any one source of power generation. Experience has taught me that this is a deadly assumption.

I've seen a long string of innovative answers to the same problems. Some of them work, but never as elegantly and as simply as you want them to. The bottom line is that ugly hacks rule, and that means being able to adjust to differing conditions on the fly and staying away from the bleeding edge.

And, by the by, I am the opposite of a 'classical thinker'. Go read my blog if you want to see someone ranting at length and in detail about the perils of applying the computing patterns of the developed world onto the less developed parts. I am a huge fan of appropriate technology. But my main criterion is that it has to work.

Finally, don't get me started about missionaries. I have yet to see an instance where they did more good than harm. Christian fundamentalism is fragmenting this country's social fabric. You want to help? Just help and keep your opinions to yourself.

at least at the start of this next frontier how about testing for the chip profiling software.

As others have said already: cat /proc/cpuinfo

Okay, seriously: I know you mean more than that. If an application really wants to take advantage of shortcoming within a given processor type, it will necessarily have to interact with it. Problem is, it can do so in one of any number of ways. It could even infect other software and use its activity as cover to inject the tests necessary to characterise the processor's weaknesses.

It's one thing to be able to "detect subtle differences" in floating point operations but another to do it while also trying to avoid detection....

See above.

But why bother attacking the processor if you've already won your way onto the machine and infected other software? Back in 2007, Adi Shamir outlined a way to use errors in math routines to crack private keys. My write-up on it is here. Put most simply, if you know there is a math flaw in a particular kind of processor, then you can exploit that by injecting ‘poisoned’ values into the key decryption process. By watching what happens to that known value, you can infer enough about the key itself that you can, with a little more math, quickly break the private key.

This is not particularly useful for botnet-style attacks that spread themselves indiscriminately around using lowest common denominator exploits. It is useful for the kind of focused attack we've seen recently, in which people target specific individuals in order to steal sensitive data.