gmane.linux.elitists

Re: RIP Ed Foster

Greg Folkert — 2008-08-03T16:15:54

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RIP Ed Foster

Karsten M. Self — 2008-08-01T22:43:05

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Re: Brett Glass speaks out against Net Neutrality

Greg Folkert — 2008-07-31T16:30:11

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Brett Glass speaks out against Net Neutrality

Teh Entar-Nick — 2008-07-31T14:56:56

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/29/AR2008072902077.html

Re: [rms< at >gnu.org: Re: Defective By Design]

Greg KH — 2008-07-27T23:24:35

Oh, that quote is _so_ going into my next presentation! greg k-h

One more thing on DRM...

Don Marti — 2008-07-27T21:49:36

From the political news files: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/26/michael-savage-lawsuit-ag_n_115103.html "In her ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said people who listen to a public broadcast are entitled to use excerpts for purposes of comment and criticism." Of course, if the comment and criticism had used a circumvented copy of a DRM-restricted work, no such exception applies. Anyone got an example of a straight-up _political speaker_ who's using a DRM-restricted format, and a comment on or criticism of that speaker?

Re: [rms< at >gnu.org: Re: Defective By Design]

Don Marti — 2008-07-27T21:39:51

(If you're against cruelty to veal calves, do you make a reservation at a veal-serving restaurant, ask the waiter if the veal was humanely raised, and walk out?) If there's to be a protest, why not one against the non-Apple portable music player manufacturers for unforgiveable crap-assitude and product-wrecking iFanboyism? Yes, I bought the Samsung that plays Oggs, and it sounds OK and plays all the right formats, but the interface is hopelessly confusing. Where is the non-DRM music organizer application/device combination that will work with Amazon or Magnatune anywhere close to as well as the Apple iTMS/iTunes/iPod chain works? Rhythmbox is pretty good, but major label music ordering is still wishlist: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480633 And device manufacturers seem more concerned with copying the superficial aspects of the iPod (ooo! white headphone cord!) than making a usable product. Why not make something that's different, but good in its own way? http://www.linuxworld.com/community/?q=node/135 Don't forget the accessories market: all proprietary iPod connectors, all the time. We didn't tell people to "burn all GIFs" until the PNG format was at least usable for most web sites. Even RMS had a hit text editor first, manifesto later. A Gentoo CD and a Philips screwdriver is closer to a Macintosh than the current non-Apple music products and services are to iTMS/iTunes/iPod. The audience for an anti-DRM protest is not the Most Powerful Man in Music and his employees, but the people who are watching the Most Powerful Man in Music use DRM to eat their lunches. The record cartels have gotten a clue (a little late to avoid creating the Most Powerful Man in Music problem, though), and the independent musicians never lost it. The stores are pretty good -- try buying a Magnatune album from your favorite Free music organizer. The music organizer apps are a little wannabe-iTunes for my taste, but not bad. (Good enough to see me through until I finish my headless homebrew one that doesn't make the user play music librarian. Think 3 commands: "sucks" "rules", and "pause".) So where's the suckage...I mean "Opportunity Hole(tm)"? DRM-free online music value chain 2008 (TM) =========================================== Source -> store -> music organizer -> device -> add-ons -> user (indies, (Amazon, (Rhythmbox, ????????????????? +++ cartel) Magnatune) amaroK) GAP OF SUCKAGE: SHOW +++++ +++ ++ Devices are half- US LET'S GOOD PRETTY ass iPods; add-ons SOMETHING GO GOOD locked in REAL ALREADY NOT YOUR iPOD TRIBUTE PRODUCT

Re: Defective By Design

James Morris — 2008-07-27T20:21:05

Ugh. If they had any class, they'd set up an apple-haters blog which is so compelling that every hilarious post ends up at the top of Digg & Reddit next to photos of Martian sunsets. - James

[rms< at >gnu.org: Re: Defective By Design]

Aaron Porter — 2008-07-27T20:13:27

----- Forwarded message from Richard M Stallman gnu.org> ----- From: Richard M Stallman gnu.org> CC: linux-elitists< at >zgp.org Subject: Re: [linux-elitists] Defective By Design Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:14:51 -0400 Is it just me, or is it the FSF that seems to have gone defective? Maybe neither. I think you and some others have misunderstood and misjudged our protest. Their latest anti-iPhone campaign[1] crosses some lines I'm not too pleased with. They're urging people to setup a meatspace denial of service attack against the "Genius Bars" in Apple Stores world wide That's not what we are doing. We have asked people to go to Apple stores and show Apple's staff their opposition to Apple's DRM. Describing this with terms such as "denial of service" and "disruption" is untrue. Calling it an "attack" is an exaggeration. When people go one by one to a store and tell the staff what they think, that's not an attack. When Apple implements DRM, when Apple deactivates unlocked iPhones, that's an attack. "Voting with your feet" means individually rejecting DRM. Of course you should do that, but acting collectively is stronger than acting individually. The movie companies organize, the record companies organize, and a large company such as Apple is lots of people who are organized to achieve an aim which in this case is unjust. To overcome them, we must organize too. It would be a shame if DRM prevails because we artificially limited ourselves to individual action in response to a well-planned attack on our freedom. So if you recognize DRM as a threat to your freedom, please participate in this and other protests. If even 5 protestors visit a store in a day, the protest will be a success there, but we cannot take that much participation for granted. I am not a supporter of Linux, and I am not on the linux-elitists mailing list. So it is likely that my response will not get through to the list. If it does not, would you please forward it there? ----- End forwarded message -----

Re: Defective By Design

Rick Moen — 2008-07-26T23:14:41

Quoting Aaron Porter (atporter< at >primate.net): The FSF go through recurring cycles of either being spot-on in their public actions or making you shake your head. It probably depends on volunteer staffing. The initiative you cite appears to be that of Matt Lee, "Chief Webmaster for the GNU Project and Campaigns Manager at the Free Software Foundation". http://mat.tl/ee/ http://groups.fsf.org/index.php/User:Mattl http://www.advogato.org/person/mattl/ http://identi.ca/mattl

Defective By Design

Aaron Porter — 2008-07-26T20:31:54

Is it just me, or is it the FSF that seems to have gone defective? Their latest anti-iPhone campaign[1] crosses some lines I'm not too pleased with. They're urging people to setup a meatspace denial of service attack against the "Genius Bars" in Apple Stores world wide in an effort to educate Apple about it's product is "restricting your freedoms". They previously posted "5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G"[2], a brief but quite valid list of reasons users might want to avoid the iPhone (curiously omitting the lack of any support for non-iTunes activation, use, etc). Their last reason for avoiding the device -- "iPhone is not the only option." seems to negate the militant tactics they're adopting now. I've been a longtime supporter of the FSF (up to but not including prefixing Linux with GNU), contributing my own time and money as well as pushing through software "purchases" by my employers. I'm not sure I want to be associated with the group after this. Sure the iPhone is sexy, but there has been sexy hardware for decades that lacked free software support. I have and continue to "vote with my feet" -- making purchasing decisions for myself and my employers based on our ability to use products in the way we desire. I have and will continue to try to educate others and convince them to do the same. I don't think I'll every be convinced that deliberately disrupting a legal business practice and denying a valid service to users who have made different ethical choices than my own will have a positive result in freeing anything. [1] http://www.defectivebydesign.org/apple-challenge [2] http://defectivebydesign.org/5-reasons-to-avoid-iphone-3g

Re: Applications and the infamous DNS vulnerability

Rick Moen — 2008-07-24T21:37:21

Quoting Don Marti (dmarti< at >zgp.org): There are some benefits to doing so, but it does rather little to prevent cache poisoning -- which can affect a variety of nameserver hosts that do recursive-resolver service and then cache the results, even those that don't accept recursive queries from public networks. So: A recursive-resolver server that's on an IP different from your "public" DNS is no less threatened. Note that even the "stub resolver" built into Linux libc / glibc is vulnerable to some deviltry on account of _its_ recursive queries not originating in randomised source UDP ports but rather always coming from port 53. However, the results thereof don't get _cached_, so any poisoned information gets flushed right away. (Running nscd would be bad, in this context -- but then, it sucks, and if you use it at all you should always disable its caching of DNS data on general principle.) Absence of caching likewise mitigates the horrific vulnerability of pretty nearly everyone's cheap SOHO router appliance. Yes, they'll be easy to hit with forged DNS RRs, but they're too anemic to spare the RAM to, so to speak, refrigerate the poisoned meat. OTOH, those same El Crappo appliances will also tend to de-randomise, during NAT conversion, the outbound recursive queries from people's carefully upgraded inside-the-firewall nameservers. That's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's going to happen -- nor would I want to trust app coders with handling network security in the first place.

Installfest for Schools

Andrew Fife — 2008-07-24T20:00:50

Hi Folks: I'm very pleased to announce that Untangle & ACCRC have teamed up with LinuxWorld (Aug 5-7) for our second Installfest for Schools. The first ACCRC/Untangle Installfest for Schools in March refurbished 350 Ubuntu computers for schools[1]. This time we've gotten a large booth on the expo floor and will have workstations setup for volunteers to refurbish recycled computers with Ubuntu and GnewSense. We particularly need help with the following: 1)Installing Ubuntu and/or gNewSense 2)Hacking older hardware and identifying good/bad components You can signup for a work station here: http://www.untangle.com/installfest Also, if you know of a school in need of computers that’s willing to try GNU/Linux please nominate them here: http://www.untangle.com/index.php?option=com_collect&task=installfestNominate&Itemid=1426 And if you have an older computer that you want to donate or recycle, please bring it to LinuxWorld. ACCRC will have a collection booth setup and can provide tax deductable receipts. PIII and newer systems will be refurbished with Ubuntu for schools. Older systems will be recycled properly by the ACCRC. Lastly, we are always looking for help getting the word out. If you want to give the event some love on your blog, Digg, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, or some crazy forum please link to the main installfest page, which is http://www.untangle.com/installfest Thanks so much for your help! -Andrew P.S. The LinuxWorld Expo free if you register before the conference starts here: https://register.rcsreg.com/regos-1.0/lnsf2008/ga/index2.html References: [1]Here is a writeup of the first event: http://lwn.net/Articles/273770/ and here are some pictures: http://www.untangle.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=355&Itemid=139 -- Andrew Fife Untangle - The Open Source Network Gateway www.untangle.com/download 650.425.3327 desk 415.806.6028 cell _______________________________________________ linux-elitists mailing list linux-elitists< at >zgp.org http://allium.zgp.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-elitists

Re: Applications and the infamous DNS vulnerability

Matthew Galgoci — 2008-07-24T17:38:14

Or send a flood of spam with rfc1918 addresses in the headers that you actually happen to use internally.

Applications and the infamous DNS vulnerability

Don Marti — 2008-07-24T16:40:04

On a properly set up home or office network, it should be difficult to poison the nameserver completely from the outside -- for a long time it's been best practice to put your public DNS on a separate machine. Of course an attacker can easily trick an application on the inside into doing a bunch of DNS queries -- the simplest example is that a user could visit a malicious web page with a bunch of images. Should applications that handle untrusted data be keeping track of the number of times they get NXDOMAIN for subdomains of one domain -- some kind of wrapper around getaddrinfo -- then refusing to query again if there are so many that it looks like an attack? Maybe with a "I'm not looking up another randomcrap.example.com domain for you" dialog, or maybe just stop processing the offending web page or whatever other data source is causing the queries?

Re: Obfuscated TCP

Tony Godshall — 2008-07-19T00:04:15

Very cool. Thanks for posting this. On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 10:16 AM, Don Marti zgp.org> wrote:

Obfuscated TCP

Don Marti — 2008-07-18T17:16:08

Anyone following the "Obfuscated TCP" kernel patch set and userspace library? http://code.google.com/p/obstcp/ Fast opportunistic crypto at the TCP level. Looks like a useful way to make it difficult for ISPs to use services such as Phorm and NebuAd to collect user tracking data and ad revenue -- so webmasters should be all over it. And, of course, it's protection against forged RST attacks. Doesn't work if the attacker is willing to spend more and do an MITM attack, though.

Spam complying with CAN SPAM

Don Marti — 2008-06-14T18:10:59

Looks like the Marketing types of the world are getting emboldened by our pro-spam FTC... http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/2008/06/ftc_says_yes_yo.html I'm starting to see spam that looks like it traces back to a semi-legit company. Anyone else getting spam linking to disposable domain names that copy the content from patchperfect dot com -- with the company's actual contact info and an apparently working unsubscribe link? whois has officialtvwebsite822 dot com at the same postal address as the original site: 6070 Mission Gorge Rd. Suite 1, San Diego, CA 92120. Either this is a very good joe job, or it's another attempt by DMA types to push the boundaries. Looks like an opportunity for another Gevalia-style lawsuit. Of course, the infomercial impresarios behind this grass seed company will start another company selling something else, but there's probably enough money to make it worthwhile for a small ISP or mail host with a reasonably priced lawyer.

Re: USB-Serial and pppd

Greg Folkert — 2008-06-13T03:04:19

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Re: USB-Serial and pppd

Greg KH — 2008-06-12T23:32:47

That's good, but you should update your .24 one to .25 to make sure. You might want to just turn that off then :) Ok, I can't understand what you are saying here, is it that you got 512K/second just like someone else using os-x did? If so, what is the problem? Also note, I forgot to mention this the first time, but some people's data plans cap the throughput to a specific level. I proved this to someone by using my card in their laptop with the exact same driver and device type. My data plan has no caps, his did. So, you might want to check with your phone company :) And this is related to throughput of a driver how? Please... Ok, please measure up and down throughput separately, as they are very different. If you can rebuild your kernel, here's some things you can try to change these numbers. In the file, drivers/usb/serial/sierra.c, make sure that the buffer sizes and numbers all show: #define N_IN_URB 4 #define N_OUT_URB 4 #define IN_BUFLEN 4096 If not, increase them to those levels. If they are set to those levels, then you can try to increase the number of URBs from 4 to 8, but it's usually a level of diminishing returns, the network is usually too slow that you really need more than that big of a buffer in flight at once. But try it and let me know what happens. And use 2.6.25, no one cares about 2.6.24 anymore :) thanks, greg k-h

Re: USB-Serial and pppd

Greg Folkert — 2008-06-12T19:45:25

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