The next Leap for Linux – an article in the New York Times
Yet another positive response to the Linux community and once again its Ubuntu and Dell that are bringing the awareness of free software to the masses….
Plug and … be happy/surprised/whatever
Just bought a random 12€ 5.1 surround pci sound card at a hardware retailer in order to provide my moms ubuntu workstation with sound functionality.
Well, inserting the sound card in the motherboard was just about it…
Finally, plug and play is working the way it always was intended to (since 1995 😉 )
Btw. Gutsy has now reach final beta stage and is due to be released on October 18th.
Nedap voting computers abandoned in Netherlands
Looks like the effort of Rop Gonggrijps project group Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet (we dont trust voting machines) has finally paid off.
Nedap voting computers will no longer be used for voting in the Netherlands.
In 2006, Rop Gongrijp appeared on a documentary hosted by a dutch tv station to demonstrate the flaws of the Nedap voting computers used in elections in which he proved that manipulating a voting machine isnt that hard at all.
The Chaos Computer Club manged to replace the firmware memory of a voting machine in less than one Minute as seen here
Spiegel.de – Ubuntu Diary (german)
Free, functional and secure – 3 options that have the potential to blow MS Vista and Mac OS X out of the way and pave out the road to success for a mainstream Linux.
Easy for beginners to install and use, it consists of the Debian base prefered by the veterans in the Linux sector. The german news magazine Spiegel is taking a look at Ubuntu in a practical context…
Comment: Ok this guy seems to be a good test subject since he is a real noob. In the article he writes that he obtained a usb wlan device in addition to his integrated one in order to surf faster on the net…
Upgrading a 802.11b (11 Mbit/s) to a 802.11g (54 Mbit/s) device will do squat if you only have a 4MBit Internet connection unless you are actually using technology that is about 10 Years old (regarding original 802.11 hardware used from 1997-1999 with 2 Mbit/s) 😉
First look at Gutsy on a Thinkpad R60
Since i will be replacing my laptop pretty soon i am currently looking for a worthy successor for my old Acer Aspire. Critical Factors this time are CPU Power and Hardware Virtual Machine Support (such as Intel VT in the current Core 2 Duo models) and mobile battery life.
I dont really care about the host system since that will not drain the resources from the hardware ( but be sure, the virtual machine lab will 🙂 )
Currently still in the battle are a Lenovo Thinkpad R60 and a Macbook 2,2 ghz (black) which are about the same price (where the Thinpad has a 3D card and the MacBook a bigger Hard Drive)
On the other hand, i might consider getting an Inspiron 6400 from Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled.
I have had quite some experience now with Thinkpads from the field, solidness, data security and well… several small issues that can drive me crazy.
As a testing platform i performed a Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 Horde 5 install which will be going final a few weeks.
Setting up the system was as always quite easy and the first boot revealed that practically all hardware components were working (didn’t try out the fingerprint scanner yet).
Sound was no problem although the default System Beep is very annoying. Lan and WLAN connection worked instantly and will connecting you out of the box if you are connecting to a dhcp device.
The proprietary drivers for the wireless Intel 3945 network card were installed as for the other restricted driver devices (gpio and ATI radeon card) were waiting to be enabled.
The system correctly installed an smp kernel and load balancing seems to be working fine.
Some of the hardware keys were running (try playing with the thinpad-keys packet) such as the volume control and the screen brightness. So after just 30 minutes, i hade a fully operable system with essentials like an office suite (OpenOffice) email applications (Evolution) and a Webbrowser (Firefox 2.0.0.6) running.
So far no drivers required to be installed yet 🙂
The performance test was done overall with beryl and compiz and running pretty smooth with the onboard 3d card.
Fail2Ban – Slackening brute force attacks
Fail2Ban is a phyton script that analyzes failed login attempts in logfiles and implements firewall rules to ban brute force attackers. Classic brute force targets on the web are:
- ssh
- ftp
- Apache
- mySQL
Here is a basic example for Apache in /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf:
[apache]
enabled = true
port = http,https
filter = apache-auth
logpath = /var/log/apache*/*access.log
maxretry = 5
By default, the global ban time is 600 seconds.
Installation for Debian and Ubuntu is quite simple, as always:
apt-get install fail2ban
Checkt out http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page for other installation packets and further info. If you are running servers on the web, i highly reccomend using somesort of method to disable brute force attacks…and of course, using strong passwords 🙂
Meta Rheinmain Chaos Days coming up…
and that will probably be my final event for this year regarding IT related conferences…
Having been to Berlin twice this year already (LinuxTag and Chaos Communication Camp) i prefer locations that are not on the complete opposite side of germany, so the Chaos Days will be pretty close and i probably wont attend the Chaos communication Congress this year.
From the event page:
The “metarheinmain chaosdays” is a conference for those who are interested in the it sector and especially the it security aspect of it. Our goal is to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and the meeting of like minded individuals. The mrmcd110b – the sixth metarheinmain chaosdays – written in binary 110b – is an event sponsored by the university student group “chaos darmstadt”, a part of the ccc germany.
Check out the fahrplan (shedule) for the weekend as well…
Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” announced by Jono Bacon
Jono Bacon, community manager of Ubuntu has just announced the 8.04 release with LTS support.
Jono’s Growing Ubuntu speech @ LinuxTag 2007
By now everyone schould be getting the connection between the release names and the date of release, so obviously.. it will be released in April 2008 😉
from jonobacon.org
I am delighted to have the pleasure of announcing the Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04), the next version of Ubuntu that will succeed Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10, due for release in October 2007). Not only will the Ubuntu community continue to do what it does best, produce an easy-to-use, reliable, free software platform, but this release will proudly wear the badge of Long Term Support (LTS) and be supported with security updates for five years on the server and three years on the desktop. We look forward to releasing the Hardy Heron in April 2008.
Back from FrOsCon
Just came back from FrOsCon, what a weekend…
The Conference was a lot smaller than Linuxtag but the social event was very cool.
Some food and drinks were sponsored by Google and O’Reilly and the overall prices were pretty cheap 🙂
The lectures were interesting and i returned with a new bag of tricks and tools which will come in handy at work.
Another event on my yearly event schedule.
I took a few photos that can be found here
Torrent criminal legally forced to use Windows
I allways thougth the 8th amendment of the US bill of rights protected anyone from cruel and inhumane punishment.
Well i guess legaly forcing an open source user into using Windows because the government is incapable of writing tracking software to monitor him perfectly fits the label Bullshit made in the USA.
Slashdot article
Whats next? The DOJ forcing american citizens into using Windows because CIPAV may have problems spying on secure operating systems?
Besides all this and the discussion whether a non-violent crime as copyright infringement should be punished by jail time and confinement and if this sentence about forcing such criminals into using proprietary software if they want to use a computer again there is actually only one point i want to make in this post:
Is the fact that the US government is not able (or not willing) to write tracking software and other forensic foo for Linux to spy on people good marketing for Linux and other open source operating systems?
Hell yeah!!! 🙂
If you want to keep your computer and your data private take some time and stop by here for a good start