Link, for gnash users

E often hear about the need to rebuild the Internet or at least rethink and revise its whole design. The problem, however, is not the Internet’s design. The Internet was built under the assumption that nodes in the network are well behaved and those that are not can be pulled out of it.

What do you get when one single node and one evil mastermind controls millions of these nodes? That’s where the poor security — a wet dream to government that wanted back doors available in every PC — comes into play. Windows is on the brink of destroying the Web. Sadly, the mainstream media does not give this much coverage, for obvious reasons. The article cited here (via one bloggers’ interpretation) talks about the Storm botnet.

“Storm” is nothing compared to the whole. Vint Cerf, one of the fathers and architects of the Internet, says there are 100-150 Microsoft Windows zombies out there. That’s a large proportion of the PCs in the world and it’s a ticking time bomb. The criminals use only a fraction of the PCs’ capacity at the moment, but they do some test runs sometimes, e.g. knocking down DNS almost, i.e. ‘killing’ the Internet. That one type of attack came from Korea about a year ago.

There were also those botmasters who were also doing some heavy spamming last Xmas (while system administrators are away). Mail servers were knocked offline and some bloggers had their accounts suspended. There is also the attack on Estonia, among many other incidents. The cyber-criminals are just afraid of getting caught, but they have enormous (and scary) potential. The only solution to botnet is probably to make Microsoft Windows obsolete. The operating system is, at present, broken beyond the point of being repairable. We are yet to suffer the consequences of this for years to come because old PCs will continue to be hijacked. They will not have secure software take over them.

T is becoming increasingly hard to tell apart Free software from what is enterprise open source software. The two are very different, yet the terms by which they are referred to are similar. There is no subtle difference here; it’s night and day.

So how does one measure “freedom” or “openness”? Assigning a number would be a subjective thing to do (choosing weighting for factors which some people consider more important than others). All in all, you could establish something similar to a troll test (troll-o-meter) and obtain a number on a finite scale. That number, which you then attribute to some certain scale/acid test, can be used to — let us say — sort/categorise/group projects for purpose X, based on its level of openness.

How you weigh the worth of redisribution, access to all code, programming language (e.g. open source project that is tied to SharePoint ain’t quite so, is it?) is debatable, and depending on who you ask and what interest (or software) that person has, you’ll get different answers. Just look at the anomaly and differences in the ESR/RMS/Linus perspectives. This could sometimes lead to flamewars, not debates.

How precious.

People giving birth to lots more people even though the planet is overly congested. This leads to global warning and hostility among overcrowded or hungry populations. But… when it comes to animals, well… some have decided that you might as well just assassinate them just to make more space and clear up some room for people. Utterly appalling.

Adopt this dog or we’ll kill it

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Those among you who remember when it was all fields round here may also recall the famous January 1973 cover of National Lampoon which carried a pic of someone holding a gun to the head of a rather worried looking mutt and the headline “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog”.

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The fund’s Alex Aliksanyan told Reuters: “This is happening … in our country, in our back yard. It’s been kept underneath a blanket of niceness and sweetness. So we said, ‘Lets put the truth in front of the consumer – either do something about it, or at least realize you’re a partner.’”

How about birth control? How about going back to fostering nature? Our existence is not a race for expansion of human population size. The planet cannot contain this.

OW here’s a company that has so far shown that you can make a lot of money without annoying the community, without doing proprietary stuff (RHEL code is still available if you jump through hoops), and without strutting around in suits, commissioning ‘studies’, and making kitschy adverts.

If you think that Red Hat’s business is plateauing, you’re focusing on the wrong area. It’s not about middleware (e.g. JBoss). Global Desktop is coming next month and Red Hat already has an agreement for deployments (Australia at the least, probably with H-P and other OEMs/ VARs). If Red Hat can do on the desktop what it has done in the server room, then the future is bright for digital independence. Ubuntu (Canonical) also leaves me optimistic.

For the record, this is not “O/S war”. This is not a “my dick is bigger than yours” thing. It’s about freedom, which isn’t the case in an Apple vs. Microsoft debate (both are proprietary and lock-in oriented). Microsoft sees Linux as war and treats it in this way using propaganda (blatantly anti-Free software advertisements). It’s time to demand change.

I’ve given Sun a lot of pain because of their attempt to steal Linux’s thunder, but let’s never forget all the wonderful things they have given us — from OpenOffice.org to Java, which is now Free as in “free speech”.

Nothing fancy to see here, but it’s an important lesson for people to take.