How much I love a distro is directly proportional to how good its user community is, and for this reason I love Gentoo the most. I’ve never seen such a consistent, centralized source of information for solving distro problems than what can be found at forums.gentoo.org; that place rocks.

I had a problem with courier-imap today after returning to a screened emerge -u world. Evidently, courier-imap was updated to a new version that handles authentication differently. Well, this obviously broke my mail system since I couldn’t log in anymore.

Well, after just a couple of searches on the forums and like 10 minutes of conf file trickery, I was good to go. This has happened to me dozens of times; the forums never fail me. This is why I buy Gentoo products in order to support the project and try and give back to the forums whenever possible.

Long live Gentoo.

This story on /. discusses the latest bit of copyright idiocy.

Evidently, an artist was given the rights to create a giant, shiny metal structure in the middle of a public park in Chicago. Fair enough, but this guy thinks that anyone that takes pictures of it should have to payhim to do so. Wow.

An excerpt:

“Photographers taking pictures of the sculpture have been charged money by the city. The park district is claiming that pictures of the park violate the designers’ and artists’ copyrights. Quoth Karen Ryan, the press director for the park’s project, “The copyrights for the enhancements in Millennium Park are owned by the artist who created them. As such, anyone reproducing the works, especially for commercial purposes, needs the permission of that artist.”

So let me get this straight — the idea was to put a gargantuan fucking shiny thing in the middle of a public park (something that’s bound to attract a bit of attention), and then charge the public to take pictures of the thing?

There are only two options here; either 1. The artist didn’t want anyone to see his 110 ton metal thing, thought it was going into someone’s private home, and at the last moment the city switched it on him and put it in the middle of a public hotspot. If that’s the case then the city owes the artist some money. Or, 2. The artist knew the giant, metal shiny thing was going to end up right where it is, and was hoping no one would notice the whole “can’t take pictures” thing until it was already in. If that’s the case, then he’s an idiot crook who should be stuffed in a container and shot at the sun.

Either way, this is the sort of abject stupidity that should be seen by a single elected city official and banned within 45 seconds. The fact that this hasn’t happened, and that there are people in high places debating the issue, is quite scary.

A friend of mine has posted an absolutely excellent writeup on using a particular Postfix option to reject spam. I suggest anyone running Postfix check it out:

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/postfix-HELO.html

Del.icio.us (pronounced delicious) is something you need to get into immediately or sooner. It’s completely sick. Let me show you why:

Bookmark Storage

First and foremost, del.icio.us is an online repository for all your bookmarks, i.e. you can use it to get to your favorite sites from multiple systems and/or while traveling. No big deal, right? I’d agree, were that all that it did.

The coolest thing about the online bookmark storage though, is the fact that you can subscribe to your bookmarks via RSS. Using Firefox (or any other cool browser), you can have all your favorites instantly brought to your fingertips by subscribing to a single RSS feed. It’s quite nice. Here’s a link on my buddy’s site on how to do it.

Connecting To The World

The absolute coolest part of Del.icio.us, however, is not the easy access to your bookmarks from anywhere — it’s your ability to share interests with other people.

The way this works is through a concept called tags. Tags are basically subject titles that you assign to the various bookmarks you have. When you post a link to CNN on your del.icio.us page, for example, you need to come up with how you want to classify it. It’s obviously a news site, so “news” is a good choice for a tag, but the trick is that you can use multiple tags. So, you can not only give it the “news” tag, but also the “daily” tag — since you check it daily.

This means that two tags would be assigned to the link, and in your del.icio.us display — which shows all your tag categories — you’ll be able to see CNN when you go to either news OR daily. Let’s try a more complex one:

What if you have a link to Snort. Well, snort is a tool…it’s a program…it’s security related…etc. I choose to call mine an “application”, and also give it the “infosec” tag. Notice I’m not saying “infosec_application”; that wouldn’t allow us to do the next step — which is completely wicked.

By breaking tags up granularly in this fashion, i.e. using “infosec” and “application” rather than “infosec_applications”, it allows one to combine tag searches for users (or even the entire system). Say you want to know about all links that someone has that pertains to infosec applications. Well, assuming they have both of those tags defined (which I do), you can combine tags within a search. Check this out:

This is for my username — with both “infosec” and “applications”: http://del.icio.us/danielrm26/infosec+applications

Here’s one for a buddy of mine — with “writing” and “reference”: http://del.icio.us/jtpowell/writing+reference

Discovery

The key here is that you can see what resources other people — all over the world — find useful. How many times have you come across a site that you wish you knew about a long time ago? Tons, I’m sure. Well, this is the place to find hundreds more of exactly that type of link.

Explore and enjoy. ::

Is it just me or has Security Focus moved more and more into the Microsoft apologist role over the last 6 months or so?

I haven’t done research or anything, but it just seems like a really high number of their pieces have had this “leave Microsoft alone” feel to them.

In my view, this is caused by one or more of the following:

1. It’s not happening at all, i.e. I’m reading into and/or seeing things. 2. The gurus are realizing that Microsoft isn’t so bad. 3. There are forces of evil at work.

I’m thinking it’s either 1 or 3, but that’s just a gut feeling…

**Note: 2 and 3 may be related.

Bruce Schneier points out a very important concept with this picture: If security is easy to get around, it doesn’t matter how good it is.

One of the coolest things in Firefox is its ability to do Google searches via the address bar; I use this all day long.

This is done simply by, in my case, typing: g searchterm ** I changed the prefix from “gg” to “g”.

So if I am looking for some Gentoo information related to Postfix, I can type: g gentoo postfix

Well, with the launch of MSN’s new search engine, and my recent discovery of Technorati – A Blog Search Tool, I decided to spend the 15 seconds required to add this same functionality for them into Firefox. Here’s how:

1. Create a new bookmark in Firefox.
2. For the URL, add the text below for MSN: “http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=%s&FORM=QBRE”
3. For the prefix, add “m” (or whatever you want to use).
4. Create another bookmark.
5. Add this for the URL: “http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=%s”
6. Use “t” for the prefix (or whatever you want to use).

That’s it. Now, when you want to search Google, type Control-L to take you to the address bar, and then: g searchterm(s)

To search MSN, do the same but type: m searchterm(s)

To search a topic being blogged about: t searchterms(s)

I also have one set up to search dictionary.com using “d”: d searchterm(s)

Hope you get as much out of these as I do…

Upon further reflection, I am going to give OS X at least another revision, i.e. Tiger. I want to go ahead and get myself a G5 tower and experience the next release of OS X; after that, however, I am going to start looking heavily at options. Here are some considerations:

OS X Benefits

Hardware Detection: OS X detects things like my Firewire drive and Sony digital camera without incident, i.e. I do nothing to make them work. When I get to that point in Linux, it’ll be time.

PDA/Phone synchronization: I’ll need my Linux box to work with whatever uber-device I’m using at the time as seamlessly as could be accomplished on OS X. When that’s possible in Linux, it’ll be time.

Nifty Interface Perks: I’d be lying if I said that certain things like Expose and the overall GUI feel didn’t appeal to me. They do. This is a significant, albeit minor, advantage to OS X.

Linux Benefits

No lame DRM crap: I’ll be less inclined to subscribe to services such as iTunes music store that fail to reward the artist and at the same time limit what I can do with what I have purchased. I’ll find superior models for rewarding artists while getting unpoisoned content in the process.

The Squeaky-Clean Feeling: Call it ego, the desire to condescend, or whatever — there is no feeling like running an open, free operating system. It makes everything seem more pure, from the participation in forums to the simple act of using email. I guess I need to explore whether or not this is completely ego-based, but regardless of the reason — it’s very real.

IBM has re-published an 87 page report detailing the testing of various open-source security software solutions on their network. Here’s an excerpt:

An IBM report that tested the suitability of Linux software to secure an network its entirety has come to light months after it was originally published. Tested over three months at IBM’s Linux Test Integration Center (LTIC) by a seven-person team, the 87-page report set out to test a wide range of open-source Linux products supported by IBM to see whether they could adequately protect a middleware environment. Only open source products were used. The answer to this question was a resounding “yes”, backed up by detailed technical description of the specification and configuration of the systems used in the testbed. Where alternative products were available to do a similar job, the report makes technical comparisons and comes up with judgments on their respective merits. Security functions looked at included network, web and host-based intrusion detection system (Snort, Hogwash, ModSecurity, PortSentry Port Scan Attack Detector), Firewalling (iptables/netfilter), logging/auditing (Lire and Swatch), authentication (OpenSSH, MIT Kerberos), remote scan (nmap and Nessus), and system hardening (Bastille Linux).

I just saw some completely cool Linux desktops in DSLR’s Unix forum, and images like these are just too cool to ignore. This, coupled with the fact that I had my first negative DRM experience on OS X the other day, is making me want to move to Linux more and more.

I’m not ready to make the switch yet, but I truly can’t wait until I am. Moving away from Mail.app will be hard, but the gain of GPG vs. PGP 8.x will be more than worth it just by itself.

The bottom line is that I just want to be free. No DRM, no proprietary this or that–just free (speech and beer), open computing. I can’t wait.