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You can get it here. But be careful. Any spyware attempting to install itself on your machine will fail, and subsequently report you to the Department of Microsoft HomeLAN security as an unamerican, cancerous commie who stifles innovation.

And she has done so for years. She isn't a computer geek. Never a virus or other problem with the Linux box in all this time. Every couple years I stop by and upgrade the thing with the latest and greatest RedHat. Next time it'll be Fedora. Here's a blurb I wrote up about it way back when.

Tracy Reed did this last year (I think) -- Check this out. [ultraviolet.org] Definitely makes you wonder how soon it will be before someone comes up with a way of intelligently integrating all these isolated WLANs to form a really nice mesh of urban connectivity.

I am an instrument rated pilot with 550 hours and *almost* commercial rated (I've got more than twice the experience required, just need to sign up for the test) and I fly a Cessna 210 or a Cirrus several times a week.

I encourage people NOT to use flight simulators to prepare for initial private pilot training. It is next to useless and teaches bad habits. The private pilot training is all about teaching you how to eyeball it. You fly in VFR (Visual Flight Rules). You barely need the instruments. It is all about looking out the window and learning about weather, judgement, physics, etc. PC based flight sims don't teach you any of this. The view (the most important part) is extremely limited even with todays modern graphics, tuning VOR's with the mouse is just not realistic, and you don't have any control forces or wind noise. Rudder is completely ignored in PC flightsims. You end up relying totally on the instruments without learning anything but how to read instruments which is a trivial skill taught new pilots in just a few minutes.

Flying a PC with a cheap plastic joystick in your hands is nothing like flying a noisy, vibrating, machine where you have a huge view all around you and can feel the aerodynamic forces on the yoke in front of you and the G's on your butt and while trying to keep track of exactly where you are in relation to that class bravo airspace with controllers barking instructions at you on the radio. And this is just stuff the first time student pilot has to learn to deal with to say nothing of actual instrument flying in bad weather.

Before I started flying I used to play with PC based flight sims and I liked to think it was something like the real thing but now that I can look back on it I realize I was fooling myself. I learned a *LOT* more about how to fly an airplane from radio control airplanes. Build the plane yourself, learn something about airframes, control surfaces, flutter, weight and balance, etc. Then actually fly it and learn something about preflighting, takeoffs and landings, airspeed/energy control, the need to be smooth on the controls, making timely corrections, spins and stalls, etc. Much more educational to the potential pilot.

Of course as long as you use consider the PC flight sim as nothing more than a sophisticated game then it's pretty good. They have certainly put a lot of work into things like MS FS. I first used it on my Apple ][c way back when SubLogic produced it.

All that being said, I live in San Diego and fly out of Montgomery Field and I am always looking for people to join me in the cockpit so if anyone wants to go up for a short little spin around town and have a go at flying the airplane (Yes, I will give you complete control of the plane if you are willing) just drop me a line at treed@copilotconsulting.com and check out my photo gallery of flying pics at:

my flying photo gallery.

There's not a whole lot new and interesting in terms of security on the network side of things. Lay out your network properly, use a DMZ, firewall (preferably Linux's iptables with stateful firewalling and something like shorewall to make it easy to use) and use IDS etc. Actually, one kinda new and interesting you can do on the network side of things is to use User Mode Linux to set up a fake network (all running on one box) of tempting looking target machines simulating your production network and watch for people to poke at it. It serves as a good control subject to compare against your IDS results to reduce false positives. If anything is hitting your honeypot you know it's hostile.

But the real recent innovation in the host based security area is Mandatory Access Controls. ugo+rwx and unix uid's are all part of descretionary access controls. Users can make their .rhosts world writeable and can often use suid binaries or buffer overflows in daemons running as root to elevate their privs. But if you have a kernel enforced mandatory access control system these things cannot happen. I have been playing with SE Linux for a while now and I really
like it. I just created a security domain/role for the freenet daemon to run in. If someone exploits it and gets a root shell they will be trapped in freenets domain which is restricted to least priviledge. Even if they get root they cannot hurt the system. Mandatory Access Controls take the fangs out of root. I have put up my freenet domain config file for your viewing pleasure
here. Note that it is still a work in progress. SE Linux is very flexible and secures the entire machine from any root exploit I have seen used in recent years. It would have prevented my personal box from being rooted by that ssh bug that came out a couple years ago!

As they say, it is "Military grade security at Open Source prices!"

The Martin Pool/linuxcare.com.au project seems to be unrelated to the SnapFS in the original announcement, now owned by Mountain View Data. There's a README on the Pool project here. It does seem to be dead, which is OK since it didn't offer the full filesystem rollback capability. In addition, it was a true filesystem, unlike the other, which was designed to sit in another layer above Ext3.

If anyone has an old tarball of the now-MountainView SnapFS, please let me know...

mp3.com, pressplay.com, cnn.com, getmusic.com, akamai, yahoo, what more are we waiting for?

Some quotes ...

Tracy Reed: If you access pressplay.com or getmusic.com your music and videos will be routed through a Linux HA firewall thanks to me. :)

Paul G Allen: And if you access cnn.com, M$ downloads, Premier Radio station sites, and about a 1000 other corporations web sites and subsidiaries, you'll be routed through any one of a number of Linux servers, firewalls, broadcasters, etc.

Anyone who says Linux can't play with the "Big Boys" is down right misinformed and/or wrong (I hear ppl say it all the time).

Here are a few references ...

http://www.ultraviolet.org/mail-archives/kplug.199 8/9794.html Quotes an article, starting:

GOVERNMENT NEWS
GCN July 13, 1998

Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water
By Gregory Slabodkin
GCN Staff
The Navy?s Smart Ship technology may not be as smart as the service contends.

There were some other juicy pieces from people in the navy, but URLs have changed. Try attacking the archives with Google.

The butt hinge? From one of my home pages:

Microsoft has recently innovated and patented the door hinge as part of its runnaway embrace and extend strategy. This is no joke! One step closer towards Gates' promised and detailed World Domination.

But they do make decent mice. Software, on the other hand...

That's funny, my mom uses Linux just fine. So does my 8 year old little brother. Check out: http://www.ultraviolet.org/treed/easy.ht ml