I'm going to strip the names and identification from the e-mails I'm going to quote, but know this: The first one was a public post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List and the rest stem from that one. The person who wrote the original mail claims to have a PhD - he's never stated what that PhD is in, but lets just assume that he is telling the truth.

Now for a bit of background: In Linux "mounting" a drive refers to telling the OS to attach the contents of the drive to the filesystem at a given point and "root" is a special account in Linux that, historically, has full access to the system and is capable of telling it to do *anything* and have it done. For security reasons you are not supposed to use root for more than basic system administration tasks, and then it's recommended you do it through a wrapper program such as 'sudo' (which will run a specified command as root).

Here's the opening mail:


Now first note that he is requesting something of the "Fedora Core 7" developers - that is a distribution of Linux, but has very little to do with the traffic on LKML - which is all about the OS kernel and nothing else. Then note that he is complaining about having to give a password to log in as root - and claims to need to do it on a very regular basis (and, apparently, logs in and runs everything as root, period).

I responded to this by pointing out the idiocy of always being logged in as root, explained why the dichotomy exists and gave him pointers as to how to solve his problems (and yes, I also told him that, if he really needed or wanted a feature, to go implement it himself because that was the nature of F/OSS stuff). I ended my reply with "Now go away, Troll"

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if he's just mis-informed or if he really is as clueless (and potentially stupid) as he appears to be from this exchange.


Just checked my mail and he's responded again, once more appearing to not have the brain power of a flea.



I mean, WTF? Has he not heard of Google? Does a search for "jargon file" not return the actual "Jargon File" on the first page of results? Heh - I've tested the last and the first result (first few results, actually) are the Jargon File. So... I'm trying to figure out how someone that holds a PhD could be that dead-brained. (Unless, as has been suggested, the PhD is in "Aromatherapy" or something similar)

Tags: college degrees, computers, idiocy, linux
Current Location: home
Current Mood: amused

I was recently notified by red_tailed_hawk (Arrow Quivershaft) that the University of Wisconsin had been contacted by the RIAA, in writing (apparently), requesting that a letter be forwarded to students who they believed were illegally downloading copyrighted music—effectively sidestepping the court system and making the UW its de-facto representative.

Amazingly the University told the RIAA to shove it where the sun don't shine—using nicer words ("get a subpoena")—and then sent out the following mail to the "UW Colleges" and their student bodies (all names and mail headers removed by request):


In other words, they are doing all that they possibly can to protect their student body and make sure that said student body understands the consequences of downloading copyrighted content - not just Music, but movies and everything else.

When I was first informed of this I was ready to go ballistic on the RIAA, because I was told that the RIAA had sent an e-mail saying not to download music.


My initial reaction was "The RIAA is telling people to not download any music? They are stepping way outside their legal limits, because there is a lot of music on the internet that is completely and totally free." After reading the mail I gained new respect for the staff at UW and the CIO—one "Dick Cleek"—simply because of how they have handled this situation.

Of course the RIAA went to one of the judges they have in their pocket (note that the preceding statement about the RIAA having judges on their payroll is a matter of opinion) and got the subpoena. That move, however, was pointless, as none of the IP addresses in the list the RIAA used to procure the subpoena were connected to the UW network—in other words, they have no proof that the names they requested are, in fact, guilty of anything.

(Note: I made a mistake here. red_tailed_hawk has informed me that there are two main parts of the University of Wisconsin. The UW Colleges (a set of 2 year schools) and the UW Universities. While the UW Colleges were not involved in any of the downloading, the UW Universities were. Sorry for the mistake.)

---

Many thanks to red_tailed_hawk for alerting me to this situation. Slashdot has covered this situation as well, and one of the lawyers for the University of Wisconsin has posted a very detailed article about it on his own blog. I suggest you skip the Slashdot post and just read the lawyers blog entry, myself.

Current Mood: content

Think about that question for a few minutes. If you are like most people you probably answered "HELL NO!". Well, in a sane world - or at least a sane nation, you'd be correct. But here in America there is this little law called the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act", and according to the AACS-LA (Advanced Access Content System, Licensing Administrator) it makes it legal to claim ownership of a randomly generated 128bit number under certain circumstances.

What are those circumstances and why do I know this? I'll start with the latter question -  the AACS-LA has sent out 1.8 million letters demanding that keys to allow decryption of AACS material be removed from websites, threatening lawsuits under the DMCA.  The condition that they claim make it legal to "hold ownership" to a 128bit number is that it be used as a key for encryption or decryption of protected content. Protected content, in this case, is any copyrighted material that has been encrypted.

So (IIRC) Professor Ed Felten has written a small Haiku, placed it under copyright, and is encrypting it using randomly generated 128bit keys, then signing over all rights to the number and the encrypted haiku to whoever views the blog entry about it. After learning about said page I took control of my own 128bit number - 83 8B B1 49 8A 02 28 BD D5 55 F9 A7 3D 17 50 32. And if the AACS-LA's interpretation of the DMCA is held up in court, that means that all that has to happen for all numbers from 0 to 2^128 - 1 (that is, 2 to the 128'th power, minus 1 - the maximum limit of how large a number a 128bit number can hold) to be owned is for that many numbers be generated and used to encrypt content.

Is it insane? Yes, it is, but before the day is done I plan on getting several more numbers for myself - just to prove a point. After all, it is the same reason I no longer buy anything produced by Sony or Sony-BMG (they proved to be idiotic with that "rootkit" copy protection scheme), watch movies starring Tom Cruise (Scientology *shudder*) or give Microsoft any business (massively evil business practices).

Want to get in on the action? Go get you number today!

Current Mood: annoyed

After running into a mental block trying to work out how to make the "insert style" functions of the editor work I decided to step back from that project and work on something else entirely. During a conversation withmwbard  about potential projects he mentioned that the Xanadu story universe created by Bryan Derksen didn't have a central archive for its stories. So I decided to take the challenge and come up with one. Before I started I got permission from BD because I wanted this to be the single, official archive. After getting BD's permission I put together the archive, basing the code off the template system from my website and using an XML parser from the examples at php.net to store the story and news list.

Now I'm certain that my new Xanadu archive could have a lot more of the information added to the XML database - truthfully I could make the backend a lot more complex. But for the moment the backend is as complex as it needs to be and no more. And because it is a given that the archive will, at some point, require a more complex backend, I've left it capable of being extended. If you're wondering what this "Xanadu" thing is, I'd suggest you start reading with Bryan Derksens story Xanadu — it started the whole thing.

The archive is accompanied by a set of forums, unimaginatively titled the "XanaChat Forums". They are empty right now, because I haven't had the time to work on them, and nobody has added any information to them. They are intended as a place to find information on the universe without needing to read all the stories in the archive. Until they get going the information can be found in the stories themselves and the original FAQ/Writers Guidelines for the universe.

Happy reading and if you happen to be an author of a Xanadu story and would like it in the archive, send it to me at xanadu@keil-draco.com. If you are an author and a story of yours has appeared in the archive without your permission, contact me at the above address - I will follow your wishes as to how to handle the story: Removal, Changing the Attribution, etc…

Tags: archive, news, update
Current Mood: creative

The open library system is on hold while I finish up work on my rich-text editor, which just entered the beta phase. As far as it goes even the beta-code of the editor is limited to browsers that have something approaching DOM2 compliance. This is not because the RichText system I'm using is part of DOM2, but because all the functional code uses DOM2 features and the DOM1 event system. In practice that means that the code won't work on any version of IE - none of them support enough of the DOM for it to function. (personally, with how MS has custom sets of functions that mimic the DOM spec to some extent, I feel that MS is non-compliant as a lock-in method)

BAFH part 3 is complete and online. Just visit Anthro to read it, the title is "Fish, Barrel, Dynamite" and it is the longest part yet. BAFH part 4 has entered the writing phase, with Corvus once again taking the lead. We don't have a title for part 4 yet, but never fear - we will have a good one by the time it goes live.

Those of you that have been waiting for me to update "The Hero Factor" are going to have to wait even longer. The muse still refuses to talk to me about anything but the Library, Editor and, of course, the Assassins. But never fear, I haven't forgotten about Fliegel, Jam'ta, Arrow, Leng, Sanger or "The Geyser" - those characters are to wonderfully complex for me to ever forget about. In fact, I have plans for several stories centering on them - though I don't have any idea what the stories will cover.

Finally: I am going to try my hand at writing a complete application using XUL when I've got the other projects completed. What it will do is anyones guess, though I'm leaning towards something like a feature complete IRC program or FTP program. Those two have been ideas of mine before, and will remain such - to the point that I'm thinking of using the XUL libraries instead of XULRunner or having it embedded in FireFox. Beyond that its just a potential project.

Current Mood: cynical
Current Music: Beastie Boys: Paul Revere

Well, people, I'm sure you haven't missed me any, so I decided to make another entry.

I've been quite busy - doing my share of the writing of the BAFH series (that link is to part 1) and working on a number of somewhat advanced web applications. The one I've spent the most time on lately is my "open library" system - it's far from complete and still in the early stages, but it's planned to be a general archive for short fiction. The Library is currently tested as each component is completed on 3 versions of Internet Explorer (5, 5.5 and 6), two versions of FireFox (2 and 3alpha3), version 3.5.5 of the KHTML rendering engine and Opera 9.02. Because of this extensive testing I do not expect the front end to be done any time soon, although the back end - slated to be written in PHP - shouldn't take  more than a few weeks to complete once the  front end is stabilized and functional.

A project I don't have many plans for, beyond use as an aid for the BAFH collaboration, is my rich-text editor. I'm warning everyone now that its a very early alpha only functional in FireFox and there are a lot of bugs that I won't be getting to until I finish the code for loading and saving documents. When it's complete it will have approximately equal functionality in FireFox and Internet Explorer. Early testing shows that it is non-functional in browsers based on the KHTML rendering engine version 3.5.5 and the related Apple WebKit and WebCore based browsers. The same early testing shows that it retains most functionality when run in Opera 9.02, though there are problems with the feature support in Opera. Because of the rapid speed of developement in JavaScript and the limited differences between the various browsers implementations of the Rich Text controls the Editor will probably be complete within the next week.

I am still undecided as to whether to keep the source for both projects close, but that is a decision I don't have to make until I've finished the code.

Other than that my life has been pretty humdrum, and that happens to be how I like it.

I've been doing a hell of a lot of writing recently. No, nothing I'm going to share with the world just yet - but be assured that it's a good deal of stuff that has to do with my two favorite story universes - TBP and Xanadu.

As far as things go, the story I once called "From the Good Life To A Mere Shadow of Humanity" was long ago retitled "Kill Me If You Can" and has had large portions rewritten, edited and rewritten again. Hopefully Cubist will be done with the edits before the new year, but thats only a hope. In the Xanadu universe I've started, stopped and restarted the same story several times, and have to face the fact that it really cannot be written in First Person. And strangely, I cannot seem to break myself of the first person habit.

In other news, the next part of the BAFH saga is going to be stalled, as the holiday arrived before Raven could finish the third "Reaper" section of part 3. This means that I haven't gotten my hands on it to add the end and it will need to hit the editor before it is even close to ready for posting.

Beyond that I've been working on getting another story about Max Grant - the innie from "Kill Me If You Can" - and it hasn't been easy. I started writing KMIYC before I had fully developed the character, and though I've made sure to include all the nuances I thought of later in KMIYC... Well, for one thing Grant's senses and being are so different from the human baseline that he's effectively an alien. My problems don't end there - his new existence is designed for multi-tasking and he does that naturally. For KMIYC I just ignored that, but for the next story I really cannot do that.

Anyway... That's everything I've been up to for the past few weeks. Time sure does fly.

Current Mood: apathetic

I've done a lot in the past few months, and watched the website I had disappear when the server decided to thrash the hard-drive I had all the home directories on. This surprised me, as that hard drive had been in three different machines running Linux and it wasn't until the latest one (a repurposed Dell) and my decision to use FC5 on it that there was a problem.

I learned of this problem because my local mail server started rejected all attempts to send mail (something was wrong in a helper app, I think) and on trying to restart it with that helper app turned off... Well, the mail daemon (Postfix) refused to come back online. So I rebooted the server and watched it freeze at the bootloader prompt. This signaled a problem with the drive, and after booting a Knoppix disc I learned that the drive itself had been trashed so thoroughly that the filesystem needed massive repairs before I could even mount it. This *might* have been exaggerated by the first run of e2fsck just "replaying the journal" but...

Anwyay, after seven hours of trying to pull the data off the drive I gave up and just reformatted *all* of them into a single LVM volume and reinstalled FC5 - this time skipping everything that wasn't strictly necessary for the system to do its job as a server.

On a high note the first two episodes of BAFH seem to have been a success and though the deadline for the current issue was missed (my co-writer on the series got a bad case of writers block) we are on track for having episode 3 in the next issue of Anthro. Beyond that I've also located the originals for a more of my stories so when I get my site back up and running there will be even more content.

Well, I think thats about all... Later!

Current Music: Barenaked Ladies - One Week

Seems the TF Wars was a resounding success. Most of the contestants who stayed in until the end have continued the characters into spin-off stories, me included. The series is called "Bastard Assassins From Hell" and is the continued story of the Reaper and Strider characters.

The main storyline has been picked up as a regular feature by Anthro and part 1 is currently available. Sorry about the lack of crazy destruction and violence in that part, but it's setup for the rest of the series. On the other front there will be a second set of stories featuring the BAFH partners, posted as a set of stand-alone episodes to the TSA-Talk, TFWF and Furry-Lit mailing lists.

In other news, my novel The Hero Factor is slowly growing again. I should have it completely finished by this time next year.

Final thoughts: The BAFH authors, myself and a fine chap that goes by the name of Corvus, and our editors (the pair in charge of Anthro - Michael Bard and Quentin "Cubist" Long) are thinking of doing a comic based on the exploits of Reaper and Strider. We can't offer any money, but are looking for interested parties. Please note that the stories are rather SF in nature and will require being able to draw the crazy action the pair take center stage in.

Current Mood: blank

Well, here it is - "May Day". Cinquo de Mayo aint that far off and again, it'll be a dry day for me. No money for a party.

In better news, my novel project - The Hero Factor is on temporary hiatus due to a minor case of writers block. The TF Wars I organized in March has just come to an end, strangely enough it was a natural one for a game that had go-modding and powerplay as it's core tenets. Thanks to the TF Wars, however, there is a new project in the works - a serial Story me and my good friend Corvus are writing as a new regular feature for the 'zine Anthro.

The serial is titled "Bastard Mercenaries From Hell" and focuses on the travels of Reaper and Strider, a pair of uber-deadly killers that travel the multiverse making friends and solving problems by the application of egregious amounts of deadly force. It's going to be organized into a number of "Books" that will somewhat stand on their own as long short stories. The first "Book" planned is a continuation of a plot that developed during the TF Wars that just ended, so don't be surprised if there are names or events that you can't place.

Away from the stories I have several coding projects in progress. Once is tentatively titled "dlang" and is a scripting language for defining 3D scenes. A second is a private archiving tool I wrote to get used to several libraries and am working on extending and improving. Then there is the as-yet unnamed Zork/adventure style game which is still in the planning stages. Finally there is the Trade Wars 2020 style game I'm also working on. So far only the private compression tool has made any real progress. (If you want to help, let me know!)

Well... enough chatter and wasted bandwidth.

ShadowWolf says "Until I get the urge to blog again!"

Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: B. E. P. "Pump It"