Monthly Archives: May 2010

Swedish Pirate Party is now hosting “The pirate bay”

It should be very interesting to see how this turns out.

Original link Here

campaign finance reform bill

Looks like the NDP is introducing a “Campaign Finance Reform bill” because of the government (In Victoria) blatantly ignoring the people about NOT brining in HST. They speak of making sure the people have more democratic power instead of who is financing the government / parties, but lets face it, as long as your choices are “I’ll give you $150,000” and “Just do what we ask” … doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a lot of people will go for the money, especially since if they “do the right thing” it usually means a battle with the other guys, not exactly a lot of incentive.

I fear this change will not be enough. We need to make changes to our whole system. We need to move towards The Venus Project.

Here is a little bit more about the “Campaign Finance Reform bill

Digital Economy Consultation

Here’s something interesting. The Canadian government is taking public input regarding how Canada should adopt a more dominant role regarding technology moving our economy forward. Although a nice though, I personally believe we need to start taking more drastic steps then simply taking public opinion on how to keep the current broken economic systems going. We need to start thinking of other possible systems like a resource based economy.

You can check out the “Digital Economy Consultation” Here

Funny pics

I was looking through my pictures folder getting rid of stuff I never actually look at, when I came across my funny pics folder. I thought I should post a few here ^_^

The Owned one reminds me of some guy I played with in SC2 (beta) about a month ago, he demanded I play like him, and when I didn’t, he did nothing but complain to every one.

The cheque one I think is just funny ^_^

Internet can be taken down through the BGP

This is a little disconcerting. Basically the internet can be taken down through the border gateway protocol in about an hour (Its a protocol that tells internet traffic how to get to its destination). There is no security to verify that the BGP routes are legit (they auto update each other in order to know where everything is) so some one could put out some fake BGP packets and have routes go to the wrong place (where they usually just get dropped). This has happened a few times already, but more due to mistakes in setting up new routers then actual malicious intent, which took down certain parts of the internet for certain people. What is really odd is that this is a known issue since before 1995. The problem with a fix is that every one would have to be on board, and large company’s usually only act when its in their best financial interest. So to sum it up, until it is actually exploited in a large and devastating way, not much is going to be done about it.

You can read the article here.

Ubuntu Light

Seem as though Canonical (Ubuntu guys) has created a version called “Ubuntu Light” which can boot in 7 seconds to a working web browser on a dell mini 10v using a solid state drive. They are still actively developing it, so its not in its final release yet, but may be of interest to people who are tired of waiting for the computer to load when all they want to do is check email or Facebook. This will definitely give Google a strong competitor vs. their “Chromium OS” since Ubuntu Light still runs apps off the local disk, as apposed to Chromium which runs most things off the cloud (aka internet servers).

You can get more info Here

Good point about Windows & Ubuntu

I read a good article about how people say “Linux is not user friendly” but what they really mean is “Linux is not Windows”. They are so used to windows that they expect all other OS’s to be exactly the same. If you take a person who has no experience with computers, they’ll probably pick up Ubuntu faster then windows.

Click Here for the article.

Canadian DMCA

I think this is worth noting, since it will effect a lot of people.  This was originally posted by the Pirate Party of Canada.

“After bill C-60, C-61 and the ACTA, Stephen Harper now wishes to enable a Canadian version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This ain’t only a blatant attack on our rights as it jeopardizes fair use, it also kills competition and free expression. This will not be tolerated.”

New Web Server

I have just moved all my sites over to a new virtual server!  Mostly because the one I was using did not have an easy way to upgrade PHP without breaking the web interface.  So far it seems to run with less resources and be a bit faster.

Let me know if any oddities occur while using my sites.

Organizations assuming customers computers are infected

This is actually a good way to think when your providing Internet related services.  Assume the worst has happened to your clients computers and create things that are still as secure as possible.

” “For years, security experts, analysts and even users have been lamenting the state of desktop security. Viruses, spam, Trojans and rootkits have added up to create an ugly picture. But, the good news is that the desktop security battle may be over. The less-than-good news, however, is that we may have lost it. Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, said Thursday that many organizations, particularly in the financial services industry, have gotten to the point of assuming that their customers’ desktops are compromised. And moving forward from that assumption, things don’t get much prettier.”

“It goes on to speculate about home routers being targeted and infected.” “

It’s kind of scary to think of your router being infected though.  It would be very hard to detect unless you connected a machine in between the Internet and your router to analyze traffic (if at all possible with some ISP’s all in one gateways).  The hacker could redirect all or certain traffic to a computer that analyzes the data for passwords, user information, etc.