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Give an Internet Freedom Disk
An anonymous reader, perhaps the blogger himself, writes to tell us about a new blog aimed at getting non-techies excited over the idea of running from a Live CD. The blogger doesn't call it that, preferring instead "Internet Freedom Disk"; Linux is never mentioned. The submitter adds: "This is just a great gift to drop on your non-geek friends and potentially wake up a sleeping giant." Cheap, last-minute, and you can make them yourself. The blogger isn't selling anything; he provides links to Ubuntu and Knoppix Live CDs. Or pick your favorite.
If we don't support freedom, the terrorists have already won!
Normal people dont get excited about operating systems. PC's are either tools or toys to them. Getting another operating systems is about as exciting as changing the wash cycle in their dishwasher for most people.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Retake your Internet! Once again browse any page! Click any item! Surf with impunity!
1 - I've failed to "take my internet" so far, how will I retake it?
2 - I can already browse any page
3 - I can already click any item
4 - Does this mean I can download kiddie porn without fearing the police?
Seriously though, as soon as I read that first line, I stopped perusing this blog. It sounds very silly and useless...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A blogger linked to Ubuntu? Great story guys. Very worthy of the front page.
There are a few different IFD's out there. The geeks call them Live-CD's. They don't look to alive to me, but the geeks have a habit of choosing bad names for things, sad but true. You will have to know what an .iso file is and how to burn it. If that just scared you then just buy a large pizza with extra cheese and a six-pack of beer. Then invite your geek friend over to do it for you. This way is much easier and more fun.
So basically, once non-tech folks are excited about live-CDs and have downloaded the iso, they're freed and... need to con a geek into coming to their home to do the job because n00bs can't figure it out. Great, I'm sure countless people needed that advice.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It looks like the purpose of this CD is to protect users from Trojans, spyware, and other malware. The author of this page encourages users to click on anything they want on the web and not worry about the source of the executables that they are running. Encouraging users to continue to be ignorant and reckless sounds like a horrible idea. Sure, right now there doesn't happen to be much malware for Linux, but if more dumb people start running Linux, it will be produced. Even though Linux is more resistant than Windoze to being broken into by traditional exploits, if the user deliberately runs some malicious program, the system cannot protect itself. No system that allows the user to administer their own machine can protect from these kinds of attacks. We need to educate users AND give them Linux. Doing either one without the other will leave the our public Internet in worse shape and our fellow users just as bewildered and dangerous.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Exactly what freedoms are available to you when you run a linux live system off a cdrom that are unavailable to you on your fully functional windows system?
Repeat after me.
Non-techies don't care about this shit.
Non-techies don't care about this shit.
Non-techies don't care about this shit.
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
It is the only disk that enables me watch CNN video, Yahoo! video, and videos on http://www.youtube.com/ and http://www.video.google.com/ and http://http//www.grouper.com with no tweaking whatsoever.
This disk also enabled me play Yahoo! games which means Java was [properly] installed. Sound and video worked great and the fonts for the first time, looked better, though more work was still needed on this front.
One thing I did not like was the CnR warehouse for it complained about my email address being invalid and complained again that the same email address had already been used!
The other complaint I have with Freespire is the fact that I could not customize my KDE to my liking. But overall, this Freespire distro is the best I have seen for the desktop in the Linux world.
"Woohoo! Yay! Uncle Bobby got me an Internet Freedom Disk!"
I can just the happy children smiling now.
Please, cut it with the fads. Just call it by its normal name -- an Internet French Disk.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Sorry, but this reminds of of Scientologists offering "A Free Personality Test".
Omitting to mention, oh by the way, we're a Weird Religious Cult.
I don't think I was ever allowed to put the "cheese" on the wonderful macaroni art I used to make as a kid.
I probably would have just eaten the cheese powder anyways.
Karnal
Non-techies don't care about this shit. (x3)
Agreed. But the next time I see the phrase "repeat after me" on Slashdot, I'm going to go down to Fry's and sling giant vats of flaming bat guano all over the aisles until the police drag me away, kicking and screaming, babbling on about trite, overused expressions on Slashdot.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's called an Internet *French* Disk, you insensitive clod... oh wait... never mind, it is an Internet Freedom Disk.
Live CD is to "Internet Freedom Disk" as shovel is to "hand-held low-pollution manual excavation utility"
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
You could save a lot of time by removing that other appendage instead.
Friends I have that don't use Linux can't seem to comprehend the idea of a free OS. If I dropped copy of Ubuntu on their lap at Christmas, they'd immediately be suspicious of it. On booting, they'd complain that it wasn't Windows and that'd be that.
Reminds me of giving out mince pies in front of church on Saturday - most people couldn't understand why we would possibly give away mince pies. It was just a nice idea for shoppers walking past. Same with OSes - people expect to be charged, if they're not, they instantly assume that it's of low quality and crap, or there's some kind of benefit in it for you. Linux has more chance of being taken up if it was a $500 OS. Then it'd be a status symbol and everyone under the Sun would want it, or aspire to own it.
Can you bail me out of jail?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
You'd probably get pissed if someone tried to force their ideology down your throat so why should you force yours on others?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
wait, what? Is it just me, or is this really stupid? I get the idea and all, but I can just picture this guy and his 'friends' sitting in mom's basement donned in their Che Guevara t-shirts and giggling with glee as they talk about how this is going to bring down the capitalists that have taken over 'their' Internet. Of course, none of them know who the hell Che Guevara is nor do they understand the fundamental precepts of capitalism, but 'man this is gonna be cool'! Thank goodness Slashdot's helping get the word out. Viva la revolution! Who ate my Spaghetti-O's!
I think this is the most pathetic thing I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Why would anyone want to routinely run from a LiveCD. Ubuntu from a LiveCD runs like shit, and what about downloading stuff? The moron suggests you just put it flash drive. Yeah, and then I'm going to take out the LiveCD and run the file I just downloaded on my normal OS. So I'm still going to need virus protection, and I'm still going to need to be sane about where I get files from on the internet, but I'll just add ages of fucking around with a LiveCD. And how about bookmarks? You going to explain to people how that's going to work? Or how about in the time it takes to download a LiveCD, tweak it to your liking, and burn it, you just install a free anti-virus program, a free firewall and firefox?
A LiveCD will be about as useful as a coaster as it will be as an 'IFD'. If some moron gave me one of these things I would have absolutely no choice but to beat some sense into them.
One advantage of running off a live CD is that it doesn't, under normal circumstances, touch your hard drive. This is why the author claims that you don't have to worry about trojan, viruses, spyware, etc. It's not that you don't get infected, but these malware programs are erased from main memory everytime you turn off the computer. However, the author assumes that a malware doesn't scan your computer and mount existing physical hard drives to infect. This could conceivably happen.
There is a better way. Get VMware player and an Ubuntu virtual machine appliance, and run Firefox off it. That also protects your host computer, and you can always revert your disk image to a pristine stage if you were infected. At least with great likelihood, malware from a guest OS does not penetrate virtual machine.
I once had a signature.
RETALIATION.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I tried giving away The Open CD (or something similar) to my students. This was a class of biology majors at a community college, so the geek quotient was higher than the general population, but a lot lower than slashdot. I got zero response. Zero interest. Not a single student ever even tried it. I think OpenOffice is a particularly lackluster thing to try to get ordinary people excited about, because they already have word. If they have a good income, they have a legal copy of Word; if they're starving students, they have a pirated copy. They already have tons of Word files on their computer, and no motivation to mess around seeing if OpenOffice will mangle the formatting or not. This is one of the realities we have to deal with: OSS is not an option for most people, for most tasks, because they're locked into proprietary formats.
OSS games also don't seem to impress people, for several possible reasons: (1) they're crude compared to commercial games, (2) in many cases, they don't work well with the video card, so you get poor performance, and (3) people are used to being able to play flash games for free. I hate to say it, but clubpenguin.com is a lot slicker than most Linux games. Similarly, people are used to getting all those Google AJAX apps for free, and they don't lie up at night worrying about whether Gmail is open-source.
Here is a similar project I've been working on to do a promotional CD of free textbooks. I haven't had much time to work on it since the semester started, however. (Yes, I know the link to theassayer.org is down -- DNS troubles, which should be fixed soon.)
Find free books.
Yeah, Damn Small Linux is good, but I prefer Puppy Linux because I've found it to be more easily customizable. Using Puppy Unleashed, I've made a custom version that includes the software I consider essential (vim, screen, sshfs, mplayer, mp3blaster, ratpoison, etc). Each of those is not available on the standard live-cd, but I added them to my custom version - and got them working the way I like - with a few hours of work. Most of that time was spent burning test CD-RW's to make sure that everything interacted correctly (elinks needs to know how to play nice with screen, ~/.bashrc needs to included vim specific variables, among other details).
Boot process (for my somewhat large ~85MB version) is under 1 min on the machine I most recently tested (a 1.4ghz athalon box with 512MB RAM). That is faster than the WinXP boot process for that machine. Several versions of Puppy fit on a 50MB buisiness card sized CD and load even faster.
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
What a great idea. Give your parents a CD to shove in their working computer.
I can feel the love already coming from my Mum: Why does it take an age to start? Why does it say it can't install my wifi driver? Now I've managed to install a Linux Wifi driver, what's my Hex key? Where's IE? Where've all my bookmarks gone? What exactly have I gained by this gift?
Most modern translations are trying to strike some balance between readability, preservation of the nuances in the original languages, continuity with familiar readings from earlier well-known translations, introduction of better copies of original texts that weren't available to previous translators, better availability of other original-language material that helps us understand the way the language was used at the time the original documents were written, and of course there's the problem of dealing with poetry.
The King James translation was fairly conservative for its time (finished 1611), trying to retain much of the familiarity of the popular Geneva translation (which was politically awkward, because that had a lot of Puritan notes and commentary printed with it, and the King wanted stuff that was politically Anglican), and the Geneva translation retained a lot of continuity with Tyndale's and other translations, so even though the English language had been changing radically during the 1500s, and almost all of the "thee" and "thou" and "ye" and "hast" had gone out of popular usage by 1600, a lot of late-1400s grammar was in the translation. On the other hand, the KJV is still very accessible today, partly because it gradually became influential, partly because Shakespeare remains influential, and partly because the translators, while they were trying for broad readability, were a bunch of Southerners (that's London, Oxford, Cambridge, not Alabama
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... meet a girl late at night at a bar...
Back at her house she asks, "Have you got some, umm, Protection?"
"Yeah, in my wallet".
The night then proceeds in a manner that is disappointing to all concerned.
Okay, here we go. Time to get rained upon. My karma must be around Plus50 by this point, and I'm gonna need every bit of it to survive this one. Time to say hello the Penguinator. I'm moderately bright, but I have no luck. (I racked up $25,000 in surgery playing badminton.)
3 51/
Is there such a thing as a CD that boots itself with minimal adjustments to windows, so I could host an office "Experimental Freedom Friday (EFF)" so that we can all oooh and aaah, then avoid breaking anything?
Part of the demo would be the fewest keystrokes possible, and all It would have to do is run Firefox, Open Office and Mp3s. Part of the presentation pitch would be "look, it only takes 4-6 commands I can write down on an index card".
We could coin a distro name. BulletProof Linux.
Anyone want to take up the challenge? I am humbly offering myself as the TestBird, like the Canaries in mines. I'm your dream audience. Clueless, nervous, and adventurous. Get me going, and I can pitch this to hordes your Non-Caring Average Users.
I am also changing my Slashdot settings, so I can some of you some email questions to avoid flooding the forum.
I definitely fear the penguins, despite the tagline at the top. Here's a pic of Tux glaring at me.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robot-fotomat/321614
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I learned recently (it took me a while to really learn this lesson) to stop recommending computer systems to friends and family.
I used to go as far as helping them pick out peripherals, specs, and even order it with them on the web. Now I say "Go to dell.com and get at least a gig of RAM." The conversation stops there.
Why? Because the more I help influence their decision, the more they expect me to support that decision afterward. They're not being mean, they're just naturally extending the help I initally offered them.
Why would I want to give a non-geek a Linux disk? They're going to come back to me with all sorts of questions about software compatibility, drivers, printing, etc. No one else they know will support them, even paid companies like their OEM or their ISP. And if they're running a business off this computer, then now I'm liable for what may happen to it.
When will the geek world realize that Linux is not the answer to everything?
-David
Of course not, and even if someone does feel that way that doesn't mean they are being oppressed.
/., and others) have been fed a steady diet of business-first thinking -- the notion that we should view every issue chiefly in terms of business interests. The posters are usually young, they haven't read much, but they aren't stupid, merely ignorant of the long struggle many people make to ensure freedoms for themselves and others. They've also been taught to not give any mind to the condition of others, so speaking and thinking in narrow economic ways is de rigeur. For them, business-first thinking is never seen as pushing something down someone's throat, that ideology has the privilege of being viewed as the norm. So when someone talks in terms of freedom (or, perhaps, ethics and social solidarity), that talk must immediately be reframed as inappropriate. One easy way to do this is to mock them for being "religious" which gives others readers a cue that such talk isn't tolerated. After all, businesses greatest achievement is convincing people to divorce their work from ethical examination; we musn't have people asking questions like what kind of society they want to live in.
But many who post to websites like this (Digg,
Digital Citizen
That said, I think this is a wonderful idea. Someone mentioned that people don't get excited over Operating Systems. Well, not when you put it like that. Just show off some of the things about it, and people WILL get excited about it. Wobbly windows are awesome. The first time I saw that, I wanted to install Linux JUST for that, to play with them. I think that is kind of the point here. It's just getting people to USE the thing, hoping the features will sell themselves.
Personally, I think it's genius. It also has the potential to help the USER to switch to Linux. Granted there is a pretty big difference in just running a LiveCD, and actually installing the thing, but many installers these days are becoming simpler for those new to the show. There's a part of me that wishes this would get more publicity, just because it has the potential to create some really good happenings for the Users.
In short, people would see how Linux stacks up against Windows (the good, bad and the ugly), and some will undoubtedly make the switch. As Linux captures more of the OS market share, along with MacOS-X, Microsoft will scramble to keep pace. This could create very REAL, and VIABLE competition for Microsoft, which I think would be beneficial to EVERYONE. The ONLY reason that MS is still on top, is because people find it too hard, or too inconvenient to make the switch to Linux (for various reasons). This has the potential to go a long ways towards overcoming that hurdle.
All in all, (and this coming from an MS Fangirl), well done. Very well done. The real question is, will this make it to enough people, and will it actually accomplish what I'm thinking it could.
Given that many full installable distros like Ubuntu require a long and complicated edits to configure connection to a WPA PSK AP, it seems a little optimisitc to assume these live CDs can be handed out with strong confidence that newbies, esp with wireless laptops will be able to boot and connect. I've used about 8 of them (from DSL to Knoppix) and while they're pretty good at detecting wired connections (although some recent wired LAN chipsets still don't get supported right away), I've rarely found wireles, esp with encryption to work without a lot of manual configuration - which is really self-defeating if a RO live CD makes you do it everytime. Much as I wish it were'nt true, Windows (Vista -for example) does an excellent job of finding wireless hdw, spotting an access point and correctly guessing the kind of encryption key the AP is looking for - which is ironic, since there's no such thing as a Windows live CD (except for PE which is really an installer boot environment). I don't believe Microsoft can see a licening model for live CD that works as long as CD/DVDs can be copied. (Maybe live CDs that HAVE to be connected to clock a charge-per-minute of run time :-))
So, when DSL can accurately detect and quickly configure wireless (and still run totally out of 128MB or more of RAM) I'll give out tons of these to newbies.