I second that: DenyHosts is now mandatory on all the Linux servers I manage, and allows one to protect servers against that type of attacks with minimal effort.
Please note that the author did not mention Denyhosts since his servers run OpenBSD, which incorporates DenyHosts functionality through ''pf'', its packet filter/firewall software (see the brute-force configuration of pf for more details).
I think this article points to the fact the author is retarded.
Considering the retarded author in question is someone who is a respected author on OpenBSD ''pf'', firewalls and security in general, I think your answer prove you are the retarded one.
I believe you can trust OpenBSD totally but it lacks many of the features and much of the convenience of the main Linux distros. It is rock solid and utterly secure though, and the man pages are actually better than any Linux distro I've ever seen.
Three points:
1) See the above discussion: you cannot trust anything that you did not create and compile yourself. With a compiler you wrote yourself. On a machine you created yourself from the ground up, that is not connected to any network in any way. OpenBSD does not make any difference if your compiler or toolchain is compromised.
2) Speaking of which, I cannot but note that OpenBSD had a little kerfuffle a while back, about a backdoot planted by the FBI in the OS? (Source 1) (Source 2). I am willing to bet that (a) it's perfectly possible (though not likely), (b) if it was done, it was not by the FBI and (c) that the dev @openbsd.org are, right now, taking another long and hard look at the incriminated code.
3) Finally OpenBSD lacking features and convenience? Care to support that statement? I have a couple of computers running OpenBSD here, and they are just as nice - or even nicer - to use than any Linux. Besides, you don't choose OpenBSD for convenience - you use it for its security. Period.
The possibly bigger problem is that no matter what OS you use you can't trust SSL's broken certificate system either because the public certificate authorities are corruptible. And before someone says create your own CA, sure, for internal sites, but you can't do that for someone else's website.
This goes way beyond a simple question of OpenSSL certificates - think OpenSSH and VPN security being compromised, and you will have a small idea of the sh*tstorm brewing right now.
Nope. But they can shut down abruptly, like Groklaw and Lavabit did.
No, they are part of a much larger conglomerate. Said conglomerate may choose to cooperate with NSA/TLA agency, and choose not to divulge the fact to their users. (This being said, Slashdot has had problems of that nature before, although much less dire). The only solution would then be for the Slashdot crew to take the high road and resign "en masse", while publicly stating why as the Lavabit founder did.
I bet a LOT of people would be freaked and outraged by such an event.
I am not so sure of that, unfortunately. (sigh)
Hell, imagine the fallout if something like Wikipedia were to suddenly shut down with no explanation beyond a message like the one currently sitting on Groklaw.
Been there, done that. Maybe that is what is needed: worldwide protest against the NSA? Black pages everywhere? Again, I am not sure that this would change anything, but one can dream.
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.
What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.
This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.
Sincerely, Ladar Levison Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC
He has also stated that he could be arrested for shutting down his site:
You don't have to be a dick about the "her site, her rules" stuff. We, as her readers, are entitled to express our opinions about the closure just as she is entitled to do as she sees fit.
True, but a reminder about who owns the site is always a good thing. Besides, what are you doing here, except expressing an opinion ? (I'll grant you it's not on Groklaw itself, but still...)
Furthermore, she may well intend to serve our interests anyway, so our input as her readerbase would be welcome, presumably.
She is taking pre-emptive action, in the interests of her readers and contributors. I respect that.
1) It's HER site. If she does not want to continue, for whatever reason, it's HER choice. Disagree with her? Create your own Groklaw. 2) Especially given the Lavabit precedent, I can understand her decision.
Remember: you may be secretly ordered to spy on your own users, and secretly prevented to even mention this to anyone - including your own lawyers - and threatened with criminal prosecution if you decide to do right thing and shut everything down. Big Brother wants to be able to watch you. All the time.
As for being a ''gutless coward'' (your words, not mine), try running a high-traffic, high-visibility web site for a while, with all the attendant legal problems and shenanigans (see above), and we will talk about it for while, mmmmmkay?
As a reminder, DES was THE standard crypto algorithm, vetted and approved by NSA. It could be cracked by EFF only because of Moore's Law and some serious budget and effort.
So, yes, these people (NSA/GCHQ) are very good at what they do. They have had at least 10 years of head-start, since cryptography was considered for many years just a branch of mathematics in academic circles. These guys work on nothing but crypto and digital/analog communications, year in, year out. Do not underestimate them.
3) One of the first electronic computers, was delivered to the NSA in the 1950s. NSA later suggested improvements to the company that built it. The first Cray supercomputers were delivered straight to NSA. Again, that was in the 1950s, when most computer companies (IBM comes to mind) were still struggling to define what a computer was good for. Source:
4) The NSA and GCHQ have a long history of backdoors. They love these things, as they make their life so much easier. Read on Venona, Enigma, Ivy Bells: all of these were made possible by intercepting/copying one-time pads, selling "unbreakable" German encryption machines and tapping undersea Russian cables. And I am willing to bet these are just a small fraction of what these people have done over the years. Source:
Again, this is just a small fraction of what NSA and GCHQ have done over the years. So, yes, suspecting backdoors in open-source software is... shall we say... only natural.
If I was paid to be a professional paranoid, I would be taking a very long hard look at my computers and telecom equipment right now.
This is sometime in the future, in a country strikingly similar to the USA.
You are a young woman.
You are pregnant, due to a rape - maybe your scumbag boyfriend did it, maybe a stranger, maybe even a relative - does not matter.
You decide to terminate the pregnancy.
Since your state does not allow abortion (or puts so many ridiculous rules it's almost impossible to get one), you contact - through a secure email address - a clinic in another state and request an appointment, how much it is going to cost, what's the procedure, etc. and get answers from a doctor. All that information is stored on your laptop, either with full disk encryption (best solution), or in an encrypted file (not-so-good).
Finally, you manage to borrow/beg/steal enough money to go to the clinic, where a doctor performs the abortion. You go home and try very hard to forget about the whole thing.
One day, due to some mistake on your part -- let's say you talked to the wrong person -- state police knocks on your door, arrests you for terminating the pregnancy, seizes your laptop and discovers the incriminating evidence is encrypted.
Since they can charge you with terminating the pregnancy and/or not respecting the state rules on abortion and/or not communicating properly your intention to terminate the pregnancy, but ONLY if they have some solid evidence, they put pressure on you to give them your secret key.
What do you do? Plead the 5th. And then it becomes a case of "he said/she said"... And you get off scot-free, since there is no incriminating evidence, except for some testimony.
So, yeah, given the conservative and regressive nature of the abortion policies in many states, this may, unfortunately, become a possible scenario in the near future.
Now, change a few words in the above story - make abortion ''sexual experimentation that your local laws frown upon'' for instance - and you have another very plausible scenarion EVEN TODAY.
What you do with your own body should be nobodies business but your own.
You're confusing Europe for the United States. We just made labor exploitation legal. Not exactly a new concept -- the H1-B visa program might have screwed up, but we built our entire railways at the turn of the last century on the backs of chinese immigrants. The European Union has much stricter laws regarding labor exploitation, and also immigration. It's flat out near-impossible to immigrate into many of those countries.
Nope. First of all, re-read the original article: we are talking about people working illegally in European countries. It is entirely possible to move to Europe illegally - just like in the USA, get there with a student (or tourism) visa and just stay in the country instead of going back home. Sure, it sucks because you can be caught (asked to provide valid ID, etc.) and sent back to your country, opening a bank account, renting a place, etc. all of these things are somewhat harder to do when you are illegal, but they can be done in every European country that I know of.
Second, European laws are sinking very fast to the level of the USA. More and more EU countries, under pressure by the same kind of people that are described in the article, are dismantling the only thing that makes life bearable: the protection they gave to their workers. In France, where I reside currently, a law is being considered that would make hiring/firing even easier than in the USA, while reducing social benefits, including firing compensations and unemployment benefits. And it's the same thing pretty much all over Europe.
Remember that unemployment is rising to never-before-seen levels. Youth unemployment stands around 25%-30% in Southern Europe, and sometimes much higher. In the meantime, start-ups are looking at illegal immigrants for techie jobs... Why is that? Because, yes, these people want to stuff as much money in their pockets as possible.
Again, this has nothing to do with finding labor - it has everything to do with screwing Joe Techie. Same as the US H1-B visas.
It's more like: "We don't want to pay proper wages for good techies, so we are breaking/bending every rules to exploit cheap illegal labor and keeping more of the venture capitalist money for ourselves".
Seriously, I have seen this in many a start-up, in France and elsewhere: pay people low - even though their knowledge is what makes your bloody start-up possible - and fire them as soon as they start demanding correct wages and reasonable working hours. Meanwhile, the CEO is looking for the nearest Porsche dealership. It's simply disgusting, and it has nothing to do with France laws and regulations (which can be a pain in the neck, I admit).
... And it's called Slackware. Around 2GB if you install everyhting and much, much less than that if you know what you are doing. Easy to keep out stuff like X11, KDE, XFCE, or anything else for that matter - simply make sure the little checkbox is not checked while installing.
But, hey, why take my word for it? Go ahead and install it, you will see.
(Oh, and don't bother whining ''Slackware is hard to learn'' yadda yadda yadda - you wanted customization, right? Live and learn)
Here in the real world Slackware blows as a VM and is irrelevant to the future of cloud computing.
Right. This is why I have Slackware VMs all over the place, with uptimes in the hundreds of days.
Oh, and "cloud" computing can be based on any distribution - not just Ubuntu or Fedora. Slackware is ideal for this, since it is (IMHO) much easier to personalize, manage and configure on a daily basis.
Yeah, Netcraft confirms it is dying, yadda, yadda, yadda, etc... Linus said they were masturbating monkeys, the 1990s called, and they want their rthreads back, etc... etc...
Seriously, folks, if you haven't tried OpenBSD before, give it a spin, you might like it. Sure, it ain't no penguin, but that nice pointy fish is stable, solid, secure and quite a nice little beast to work with. I have had nothing but good experiences with that OS.
Is why I will never install Ubuntu again, and why this distribution is doomed to irrelevance.
Seriously, though, OpenGL? WTF? Fluxbox is good enough for me. XFCE, not far behind.
Don't misunderstand me: Ubuntu is fine if you are an absolute Linux beginner. For the rest of us, frankly, this is just one more nail in its coffin, as far as I am concerned, Ubuntu is fast becoming the Mandrake of the 20xx.
Of course, there is always Slackware 14 and NetBSD 6.0, who both just came out and promise tons of (non-OpenGL) goodness.
Some plastics can already can laready be synthsized from plant starch. They are bio-degradable as well, which makes them even better, since plastics are the worst pollution offenders (see "Pacific Plastic Patch").
Lubricants can also be synthesized from plants - the best ''natural'' lubricant, if I remember well, is the oil extracted from hemp. Also, diesel engines can work very well with hemp oil - some even say that Diesel himself designed his engine with that oil in mind.
Overall, I think generating jet fuel is the most important application from this technology - IF it proves viable and real, which is another story altogether...
Slashdot Mirror
I second that: DenyHosts is now mandatory on all the Linux servers I manage, and allows one to protect servers against that type of attacks with minimal effort.
Please note that the author did not mention Denyhosts since his servers run OpenBSD, which incorporates DenyHosts functionality through ''pf'', its packet filter/firewall software (see the brute-force configuration of pf for more details).
I think this article points to the fact the author is retarded.
Considering the retarded author in question is someone who is a respected author on OpenBSD ''pf'', firewalls and security in general, I think your answer prove you are the retarded one.
Try this one: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD10
I have to say, this is shaping up to be a very interesting release. Bhyve, in particular, sounds very promising...
I believe you can trust OpenBSD totally but it lacks many of the features and much of the convenience of the main Linux distros. It is rock solid and utterly secure though, and the man pages are actually better than any Linux distro I've ever seen.
Three points:
1) See the above discussion: you cannot trust anything that you did not create and compile yourself. With a compiler you wrote yourself. On a machine you created yourself from the ground up, that is not connected to any network in any way. OpenBSD does not make any difference if your compiler or toolchain is compromised.
2) Speaking of which, I cannot but note that OpenBSD had a little kerfuffle a while back, about a backdoot planted by the FBI in the OS? (Source 1) (Source 2). I am willing to bet that (a) it's perfectly possible (though not likely), (b) if it was done, it was not by the FBI and (c) that the dev @openbsd.org are, right now, taking another long and hard look at the incriminated code.
3) Finally OpenBSD lacking features and convenience? Care to support that statement? I have a couple of computers running OpenBSD here, and they are just as nice - or even nicer - to use than any Linux. Besides, you don't choose OpenBSD for convenience - you use it for its security. Period.
The possibly bigger problem is that no matter what OS you use you can't trust SSL's broken certificate system either because the public certificate authorities are corruptible. And before someone says create your own CA, sure, for internal sites, but you can't do that for someone else's website.
This goes way beyond a simple question of OpenSSL certificates - think OpenSSH and VPN security being compromised, and you will have a small idea of the sh*tstorm brewing right now.
Nope. But they can shut down abruptly, like Groklaw and Lavabit did.
No, they are part of a much larger conglomerate. Said conglomerate may choose to cooperate with NSA/TLA agency, and choose not to divulge the fact to their users. (This being said, Slashdot has had problems of that nature before, although much less dire). The only solution would then be for the Slashdot crew to take the high road and resign "en masse", while publicly stating why as the Lavabit founder did.
I bet a LOT of people would be freaked and outraged by such an event.
I am not so sure of that, unfortunately. (sigh)
Hell, imagine the fallout if something like Wikipedia were to suddenly shut down with no explanation beyond a message like the one currently sitting on Groklaw.
Been there, done that. Maybe that is what is needed: worldwide protest against the NSA? Black pages everywhere? Again, I am not sure that this would change anything, but one can dream.
Educate yourself: Lavabit founder has specifically stated that he did not wat to compromise the privacy of his users.
Source: https://lavabit.com/
My Fellow Users,
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.
What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.
This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.
Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC
He has also stated that he could be arrested for shutting down his site:
Source: http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/13/20008036-lavabitcom-owner-i-could-be-arrested-for-resisting-surveillance-order?lite
I may be ''rather fucking stupid'' as you say, but, at this stage, I trust Lavabit more than I trust the NSA.
And please learn the difference between "convent" and "convenient". I am not a religious person and I have no intention of ever becoming a monk.
You don't have to be a dick about the "her site, her rules" stuff. We, as her readers, are entitled to express our opinions about the closure just as she is entitled to do as she sees fit.
True, but a reminder about who owns the site is always a good thing. Besides, what are you doing here, except expressing an opinion ? (I'll grant you it's not on Groklaw itself, but still...)
Furthermore, she may well intend to serve our interests anyway, so our input as her readerbase would be welcome, presumably.
She is taking pre-emptive action, in the interests of her readers and contributors. I respect that.
But here is the horrible thing: even if /. has received a National Security Letter... They can't tell you.
Think about this for just a second. They. Cannot. Tell. You.
Relevant graphic: https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Graphics/nsa_1984.gif
And #slashdot is not #twitter, you moron.
Seriously, enough with the hashtags already. Learn how to type proper messages!
And. Get. Off. My. Lawn!! ;-)
Pj, you gutless coward! Come back!
Two points:
1) It's HER site. If she does not want to continue, for whatever reason, it's HER choice. Disagree with her? Create your own Groklaw.
2) Especially given the Lavabit precedent, I can understand her decision.
Remember: you may be secretly ordered to spy on your own users, and secretly prevented to even mention this to anyone - including your own lawyers - and threatened with criminal prosecution if you decide to do right thing and shut everything down. Big Brother wants to be able to watch you. All the time.
As for being a ''gutless coward'' (your words, not mine), try running a high-traffic, high-visibility web site for a while, with all the attendant legal problems and shenanigans (see above), and we will talk about it for while, mmmmmkay?
Let me add a few datapoints here, as a reminder...
1) The AES competition was launched in part because DES and 3DES were cracked by EFF using FPGA-based brute-force decryption machine. Source :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML/19980716_eff_des_faq.html
As a reminder, DES was THE standard crypto algorithm, vetted and approved by NSA. It could be cracked by EFF only because of Moore's Law and some serious budget and effort.
2) Public-key cryptography was invented separately at GCHQ (UK NSA) and NSA itself, several years *before* Diffie-Hellmann. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#History
So, yes, these people (NSA/GCHQ) are very good at what they do. They have had at least 10 years of head-start, since cryptography was considered for many years just a branch of mathematics in academic circles. These guys work on nothing but crypto and digital/analog communications, year in, year out. Do not underestimate them.
3) One of the first electronic computers, was delivered to the NSA in the 1950s. NSA later suggested improvements to the company that built it. The first Cray supercomputers were delivered straight to NSA. Again, that was in the 1950s, when most computer companies (IBM comes to mind) were still struggling to define what a computer was good for. Source:
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_quarterly/digitalcomputer_industry.pdf
http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/370/mathematica/m1_eniac.pdf
4) The NSA and GCHQ have a long history of backdoors. They love these things, as they make their life so much easier. Read on Venona, Enigma, Ivy Bells: all of these were made possible by intercepting/copying one-time pads, selling "unbreakable" German encryption machines and tapping undersea Russian cables. And I am willing to bet these are just a small fraction of what these people have done over the years. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
Again, this is just a small fraction of what NSA and GCHQ have done over the years. So, yes, suspecting backdoors in open-source software is... shall we say... only natural.
If I was paid to be a professional paranoid, I would be taking a very long hard look at my computers and telecom equipment right now.
This is sometime in the future, in a country strikingly similar to the USA.
You are a young woman.
You are pregnant, due to a rape - maybe your scumbag boyfriend did it, maybe a stranger, maybe even a relative - does not matter.
You decide to terminate the pregnancy.
Since your state does not allow abortion (or puts so many ridiculous rules it's almost impossible to get one), you contact - through a secure email address - a clinic in another state and request an appointment, how much it is going to cost, what's the procedure, etc. and get answers from a doctor. All that information is stored on your laptop, either with full disk encryption (best solution), or in an encrypted file (not-so-good).
Finally, you manage to borrow/beg/steal enough money to go to the clinic, where a doctor performs the abortion. You go home and try very hard to forget about the whole thing.
One day, due to some mistake on your part -- let's say you talked to the wrong person -- state police knocks on your door, arrests you for terminating the pregnancy, seizes your laptop and discovers the incriminating evidence is encrypted.
Since they can charge you with terminating the pregnancy and/or not respecting the state rules on abortion and/or not communicating properly your intention to terminate the pregnancy, but ONLY if they have some solid evidence, they put pressure on you to give them your secret key.
What do you do? Plead the 5th. And then it becomes a case of "he said/she said"... And you get off scot-free, since there is no incriminating evidence, except for some testimony.
So, yeah, given the conservative and regressive nature of the abortion policies in many states, this may, unfortunately, become a possible scenario in the near future.
Now, change a few words in the above story - make abortion ''sexual experimentation that your local laws frown upon'' for instance - and you have another very plausible scenarion EVEN TODAY.
What you do with your own body should be nobodies business but your own.
And, at about the same time, Basic on a CP/M machine at my high school...
Later more Basic on Commodore 64, moved on to Pascal and Modula-2 on Atari ST.
You're confusing Europe for the United States. We just made labor exploitation legal. Not exactly a new concept -- the H1-B visa program might have screwed up, but we built our entire railways at the turn of the last century on the backs of chinese immigrants. The European Union has much stricter laws regarding labor exploitation, and also immigration. It's flat out near-impossible to immigrate into many of those countries.
Nope. First of all, re-read the original article: we are talking about people working illegally in European countries. It is entirely possible to move to Europe illegally - just like in the USA, get there with a student (or tourism) visa and just stay in the country instead of going back home. Sure, it sucks because you can be caught (asked to provide valid ID, etc.) and sent back to your country, opening a bank account, renting a place, etc. all of these things are somewhat harder to do when you are illegal, but they can be done in every European country that I know of.
Second, European laws are sinking very fast to the level of the USA. More and more EU countries, under pressure by the same kind of people that are described in the article, are dismantling the only thing that makes life bearable: the protection they gave to their workers. In France, where I reside currently, a law is being considered that would make hiring/firing even easier than in the USA, while reducing social benefits, including firing compensations and unemployment benefits. And it's the same thing pretty much all over Europe.
Remember that unemployment is rising to never-before-seen levels. Youth unemployment stands around 25%-30% in Southern Europe, and sometimes much higher. In the meantime, start-ups are looking at illegal immigrants for techie jobs... Why is that? Because, yes, these people want to stuff as much money in their pockets as possible.
Again, this has nothing to do with finding labor - it has everything to do with screwing Joe Techie. Same as the US H1-B visas.
Yeah, right.
It's more like: "We don't want to pay proper wages for good techies, so we are breaking/bending every rules to exploit cheap illegal labor and keeping more of the venture capitalist money for ourselves".
Seriously, I have seen this in many a start-up, in France and elsewhere: pay people low - even though their knowledge is what makes your bloody start-up possible - and fire them as soon as they start demanding correct wages and reasonable working hours. Meanwhile, the CEO is looking for the nearest Porsche dealership. It's simply disgusting, and it has nothing to do with France laws and regulations (which can be a pain in the neck, I admit).
But, hey, why take my word for it? Go ahead and install it, you will see.
(Oh, and don't bother whining ''Slackware is hard to learn'' yadda yadda yadda - you wanted customization, right? Live and learn)
Here in the real world Slackware blows as a VM and is irrelevant to the future of cloud computing.
Right. This is why I have Slackware VMs all over the place, with uptimes in the hundreds of days.
Oh, and "cloud" computing can be based on any distribution - not just Ubuntu or Fedora. Slackware is ideal for this, since it is (IMHO) much easier to personalize, manage and configure on a daily basis.
In 3... 2... 1...
ccAdvertising is an American company, you [insert favourite insult here].
Go ahead. I'll wait right here.
Related webcomics
... Until one of your rockets explode while going up, or even on the launchpad.
Not to belittle SpaceX, but they have had, what? Four successful launches so far? Ariane has had 62 successful launches out of 66.
And don't get me started on Soyuz rockets - the first one flew in 1966 - with 1600+ successful launches to its credit.
Wake me up when SpaceX has had 60+ launches without a hitch. Until then, Musk is just talking P.R. for his firm.
Yeah, Netcraft confirms it is dying, yadda, yadda, yadda, etc... Linus said they were masturbating monkeys, the 1990s called, and they want their rthreads back, etc... etc...
Seriously, folks, if you haven't tried OpenBSD before, give it a spin, you might like it. Sure, it ain't no penguin, but that nice pointy fish is stable, solid, secure and quite a nice little beast to work with. I have had nothing but good experiences with that OS.
Just my US$ 0.02.
Is why I will never install Ubuntu again, and why this distribution is doomed to irrelevance.
Seriously, though, OpenGL? WTF? Fluxbox is good enough for me. XFCE, not far behind.
Don't misunderstand me: Ubuntu is fine if you are an absolute Linux beginner. For the rest of us, frankly, this is just one more nail in its coffin, as far as I am concerned, Ubuntu is fast becoming the Mandrake of the 20xx.
Of course, there is always Slackware 14 and NetBSD 6.0, who both just came out and promise tons of (non-OpenGL) goodness.
Some plastics can already can laready be synthsized from plant starch. They are bio-degradable as well, which makes them even better, since plastics are the worst pollution offenders (see "Pacific Plastic Patch").
Lubricants can also be synthesized from plants - the best ''natural'' lubricant, if I remember well, is the oil extracted from hemp. Also, diesel engines can work very well with hemp oil - some even say that Diesel himself designed his engine with that oil in mind.
Overall, I think generating jet fuel is the most important application from this technology - IF it proves viable and real, which is another story altogether...