Bullshit Buster

If nobody is up to the challenge of removing laws against criticizing, mocking or insulting, then I’d propose we replace these laws for a single law against the dissemination of false information. So, nothing that isn’t proven true can be taught as such, and can only be accompanied by an appropriate disclaimer of conjecture or fiction. I guess all religions will be crushed pretty quickly then, for the betterment of everyone.

Stop SOPA

In about eight hours, the Wikipedia website, as long Reddit and many others, will join in an unprecedented effort to stop a dying industry from hijacking the freedoms of American citizens. The intellectual property wars is escalating, and it can only become harsher if the governments of the world don’t understand that the most common forms of intellectual propery (patents and copyrights) are obsolete and should be entirely removed from law, as evidenced by Rick Falvinge in his blog. The intellectual property wars will not end until that happens. What’s left of our right to share and create are in great peril. Let’s not give up these freedoms to corporations and governments as we have been doing in the past. There’s no place for patents and copyrights on the Internet.

If you’re thinking that you’re safe from laws like SOPA and PIPA because you’re outside of the USA. Think again, many of the laws that your country abides by are pushed from Washington.

Ubuntu Private Folder

I’ve been using full home directory encryption in my Ubuntu system for awhile. Although it works very well, there’s a slight performance impact. Not a big deal, but still, I don’t need to encrypt everything in my home directory, just some sensitive stuff. I decided to decrypt it, but still use an encrypted «Private» folder for sensitive files.

To create a Private folder, I used the ecryptfs-setup-private command. This was fairly straightforward. The interesting part came later: using symbolic links to allow applications to find sensitive data in the Private folder.

First, let’s move the Firefox passwords:

mkdir ~/Private/Firefox
mv ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/{key3.db,signons.sqlite} ~/Private/Firefox
ln -s ~/Private/Firefox/* ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/

Next step, my Bitcoin wallet, stored in ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat:

mkdir ~/Private/Bitcoin
mv ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat ~/Private/Bitcoin
ln -s ~/Private/Bitcoin/wallet.dat ~/.bitcoin/

Finally, the GnuPG keys:

mv ~/.gnupg ~/Private

Other sensitive files that aren’t related to any particular application I can also place in the Private folder to protect them from eavesdroppers. Now I don’t have to encrypt my whole home folder to protect a few sensitive files. In any case, full home directory encryption works very well in Ubuntu, and is the fastest encryption overlay I’ve used.

Internet Explorer finally goes below 50%

I said once that I was going to make a party when Internet Explorer market share dropped below 50%, but now given that its market share slowly dwindled instead of quickly dying, I find it all but surprising that we’re already at that point. Although Internet Explorer 9 is a decent effort to keep it alive, open source web browsers have already won the fight, for the better: thanks to them we have a more sophisticated and faster web.

But there’s still work to do, older Internet Explorer installations (versions 8 and lower) are still very much alive, and they need to die before the web can benefit from a wealth of good things that newer standards and browser implementations allow.

The fall of Internet Explorer is one of the biggest motivators for the new web technologies that we shall see in the near future. This is a victory of open source software and open standards, and a blow to Microsoft’s embrace-and-extend practices and disrespect for compatibility.

I also feel somewhat happy about the punishment that corporations that stuck with Microsoft no matter what received in the last few years. After Internet Explorer 6 was rightfully shot in the head and buried without honors, older sites and applications meant only for it could no longer work, prompting the businesses that depend on them to spend great amounts of resources to replace them. In a way, they got what they deserved. They should’ve known better than to help Microsoft dominate the web with incompatible proprietary standards.

Fortunately, it seems the web is meant to be free, and it rids itself from leeches sooner or later. I hope Flash becomes the next victim of standards, although it doesn’t need to be shot, only honorably discharged.

Now, when is it that an open source operating system will finally replace Windows?

Dropping computers from helicopters

I admit that using helicopters to drop computers in remote locations and leave the villagers to learn how to use and support them sounds like a terrific plan to me. I suppose that at least the smart kids will figure out clever things to to do with them. I hope it actually gets done.

The sods must be crazy: OLPC to drop tablets from helicopters to isolated villages