Recently in Linux Category

I wish I could remember who first observed that modern life has endowed with thousands of new ways to communicate and nothing more to say. At this moment, however, it seems particularly apropos. I finally decided to integrate my blog pages with the notes feed in my Facebook account. Some weeks ago, I displayed my twitter feed on my blog page. I have four private email accounts -- my own domain, gmail, yahoo, and hotmail -- plus a Google Wave account. I keep a list of public bookmarks on Del.icio.us. I am connected and integrated on my home computer, my laptop, my blog platform, and &mdash God help me — my iPhone, which I tote around from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and not because I am making phone calls. I have word processors, CMS systems, text editors, version control systems, and email clients. True, I get a certain perverse pleasure out of setting all this up and keeping it running; it's a hobby. But to what end? Shakespeare was able to accomplish more with a quill pen in a day than the Internet in all its digital glory will in a lifetime.

Information Cards, also referred to by the moniker InfoCards or the Microsoft brand name Cardspace, have been a long-promised (and little implemented) addition to the identity and security landscape for some time now. The idea is essentially that they would work like a personal digital ID card that would securely sign you in to any site you to which you belong. Rather than memorizing dozens of usernames and passwords, you could just plug in your handy digital ID and 'Open Sesame." In general, Infocards are touted as being more secure than passwords because they are highly encrypted. To keep your card safe, you would only need to know one password, stored locally on your computer or thumb drive, so that your co-worker or other random person couldn't pirate your card. The piece of software used to store and deploy InfoCards is known as an Identity Selector; there is a new one available that works with Linux and Firefox 3.5 called openinfocard.

A series of on-line lectures and tutorials introducing users to the Ubuntu Linux operating system begins November 2, 2009 with Ubuntu Open Week. Anyone who wants to get more out of his or computer should consider attending.

As I move forward with the discussion of Benjamin Wittes' Law and the Long War initiated by bloggers Thomas Nephew and the Talking Dog, Mr. Wittes' article in the Washington Post on the President's efforts to close the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay caught my eye. In general, I find much to disagree with in Mr. Wittes' approach as I dip into his book, but I do think that he makes an important point in his recent article.

Mr. Wittes' comment that the President is enjoying a Dick Cheney moment by deciding to close Guantanamo through unilateral executive action is a cheap shot. Dick Cheney pursued a relentless effort to aggregate greater power to the executive in order to pursue an unlawful campaign of terror, murder, torture, and domestic espionage. While I agree with Mr. Wittes that it would have been preferable for Mr. Obama to have acted with Congressional cooperation, the exercise of executive power on a mission of mercy, however bad the precedent, is just not the same as its exercise for Dick Cheney's unabashedly murderous ends.

Mr. Wittes is right about one thing, however. Our approach to the treatment of prisoners is now a hopeless muddle; the tenuous structure of international human rights law shattered beyond recognition by the reckless adventurism of President Bush and his cowboys. By going to war on false pretenses, President Bush and his supporters squandered the moral authority bestowed by the unprovoked attack on 9/11, sapped American credibility, and sent thousands of young men, women, and children to needless early deaths. The Administration then used its unjust and unnecessary war to bootstrap a ruthless attack on American Constitutional rights by engaging in torture, open-ended detention, and hitherto unprecedented surveillance. As someone who works two blocks from the White House, if I die in the next terror attack I pray that I will die a free man in a free society, not the Orwellian Republic that Bush has initiated and Obama seems determined to perpetuate.

I actually agree with Mr. Wittes that the appropriate treatment of prisoners is one thing our national debating society, the Congress, might be able to get right, if it had strong and principled leadership from the White House. Frankly, I would wish for a strong reassertion and expansion of the principles of the Geneva Convention, coupled with an equally strong vindication of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. I am skeptical that this could be accomplished in this age of Chicken Little-ism in the face of the threat from the cave dwellers of Afghanistan. However, the Congress has, with strong leadership from the White House, occasionally risen above its general level of moral cowardice, as with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Perhaps it could do so again, and prove Mr. Wittes right in his contention that questions of prisoner treatment should not be left in the first instance to the Courts.

Microsoft has a Password Checker and tips on generating passwords. However, it seems to me that a better, easier, simpler way to generate secure passwords is Diceware (but you need five dice).

CNET's Charles Cooper celebrates SCO's lawsuit against IBM with ill-disguised glee. The lawsuit apparently alleges that IBM included SCO's proprietary Unix code in contributions to Linux. Cooper seems to feel that the suit is the beginning of open season on Linux and Open Source development. What is less clear is why he writes with such overt animus.

Scripting News in Manila

'Eric Kidd, a 27-year-old programmer, writes about The Missing Future in software. "What if I have a great idea, and I want to change the world?" he asks.'

RAV AntiVirus Website - Reliable AntiVirus Solutions, Antivirus Research, Statistics

GeCAD Software has announced a definitive agreement with Microsoft Corp., of Redmond, Wash., USA, by which Microsoft will acquire GeCAD�s antivirus technology. Microsoft has stated its intention to integrate GeCAD�s technology into products and services that will help secure customers.

This announcement is significant because GeCAD is the only company I know of that produces antivirus software for Linux. While viruses are perhaps not a huge threat to Linux at the moment, I thought the software was worthwhile. Now that Redmond is acquiring the company, I expect its Linux support to wither.