Worth repeating; Trust and Open Source

I first encountered Mark Shuttlesworth in person at an Ottawa Linux Symposium a few years ago, and passed along a reply from Dag, responding to some controversial comment Shuttlesworth had made at the time.  I choose not to use Ubuntu or Debian as my primary X desktop, but that said, there are 6 machines running one of those two distributions powered on in my office at the moment, so I am not a stranger there, either
He was being 'up front' about the fact that Amazon search results are being trialled for an upcoming Ubuntu version
He points out, and it bears repeating, the following:

[Question: ] Why are you telling Amazon what I am searching for?
[Answer: ] We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err.

The boldface are important, but I carry the context as well here.  When you use any computer operating system, you in the role of: user are  implicitly placing trust in the decisions and the commitment of those who put it together to 'do the right thing', or to make it right when things go awry
Do you trust your vendors?  Your actions may be pointing out a dissonance, if you said: no

What do you discuss?

Great minds discuss ideas
Average minds discuss events
Small minds discuss people
  -- Eleanor Roosevelt

lost memories

From time to time, "we" 'clean house' and find the black trash bags. It is no surprise to me, of course for and earlier me have done to work of carefully tied packaging closed, and cacheing treasures up in the attic; from time to time, I am instructed to 'get rid of that clutter' as the now grown kids 'will never use those again' I am slow to act on this injunction

The Brio trains, the metal Erector set, the cast lead soldiers and molds, the Duplo blocks, the stuffed animals, Lincoln logs, the McGuffey readers, the arrow and ax heads collected in the fields, have all fallen to head of the queue for disposition over time. Stuffed animals were in the dock this past weekend. At that point, I usually nod silently, carefully re-tie the sack, and set it to one side for a moment. Then my new task is to find a new hiding place for the bag in question after her attention turns to other matters

But a grandchild's mother and the child were delighted with the animal figures from my preservation efforts, even if the spouse was not as well pleased to see 'those old things' again

A few weeks ago, the Brio train set that was set aside in a cardboard box, up in the dark to rest almost two decades ago came out. It moved in with a grandson infatuated with rolling stock and was 'new' again; The Erector set, the melting pot and molds, all gone (not to return with current day safety rules — choking hazard of the nuts and bolts, heavy metal fumes). I am on the lookout for a replacement McGuffey reader set (that friend of books that taught me to read upstairs in a quiet room as the adults 'talked' downstairs), so I can 'seed' a room for young visitors

The flints and shaped stones? I was not attuned to their disposition occurring; a 'sharpie' sweet-talked a sale for a pittance from a elderly family member when 'cleaning up' prior to closing down a house before sale. That lot of childhood treasures also carried out the door the minnie balls I dug from the earth at Gettysburg

Entropy won a round that time; I know we'll battle again.

---

[An earlier version of this appeared at Victor Niederhoffer's Daily Speculations, which aggregator I recommend]

Life in the Fast Lane

Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.
Just kickin' down the cobble stones.
Looking for fun and feelin' groovy.

  -- Simon and Garfunkel

I picked up my wife at the airport late Wednesday night as she returned from a trade association conference related to her job. As we drove home, she talked about the unusual that happened there. It seems 'New Media' and 'Social Networking' tools have popped up on their radar, but her peers are wrestling to understand the motivations, and how to participate. It seems she astonished them, describing the FOSS stories and tools used that I 'bring home' as I recount the day at the dinner table: websites, wiki, mailing lists public and private, user group meetings, IRC, blogging, Twitter, VOIP, and so forth. They were 'wowed' that an old guy like me had used Twitter and a quick Google tour into the Wikipedia, to answer a son's question raised by an Admiral in a meeting at his job consulting for the federal government in metro DC a while back in seconds of a question coming up

I suppose I take the pervasive availability of such tools, which largely are implemented through a foundation on the fruit of the 'Software Libre' movement for granted, and live a comfortable existence in this virtual reality. Although my hair has been gray for a couple of decades, it is not the me of my self-image, where I still feel 25 and full of vigor. That I whistle, and know the words of pop tunes from 40 years ago and play word games on the tunes at the coffee shop with the barrista does not jar me, although if I get a young one, they clearly have no idea what I am riffing on

That to one side, I still revel in the wonder of the tangible world; a world of taking the family to the State Fair, or working with my hands, wood, and tools repairing a grandchild's wagon. I wrote the first draft of this piece -- a blog post -- with pen and paper with no plan on my mind beyond reconnecting with myself after a hard week, not just the CentOS matters, but in my local physical world as well; I should perhaps rather say, this piece wrote itself, flowing out of my hand's motions, creating, and editing on the paper before me, with strike-through's, insertions, and circled blocks of test indicating movement of thoughts into a flow

I got no deeds to do, no promises to keep.
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep
Let the morningtime drop all its petals on me
Life, I love you, all is groovy!

Thinking back as to how I write, I sorely miss the older times of a ready steno-typist, secretary trained in shorthand, and later a ready 'Dictaphone', and the 'gal Friday' legal secretary who helped organize my worklife for many years. I did the creative work, and she straw-bossed the rest behind the scene, as I turned to face the next 'fire'. Each hard work in its own right, and a great and productive partnership. She's dead of lung cancer now -- was a smoker. Ah well

The economics of such luxuries are prohibitive to most in an era where a person who cannot touch-type is perhaps now considered not yet fully literate. Welcome to the next lap of the rat race in this brave new world

When the positions of transcriptionist, book-keeper, and sales clerk, along with the others mentioned above disappeared, and 'progress' came to the smaller enterprise, they were replaced by the small individual computer, word-processing, Quick Books, etc. Oh, and a subtle transfer to self-service responsibility to do all the work with less facility for delegation. Layers of support costs disappeared, as did the middle management, as entities had to flatten the organizational chart, or be outraced by their competitor

Of course, the workload did not go away, any more than a completely 'paperless office' has emerged, The load shifted up to what were formerly more 'knowledge work' folks -- supervisors, or in a small enough firm, the entrepreneur owner, or just was no longer done ... sometimes the customer is 'drafted' to scan bar-codes and pay a cold machine, and no human hand on the part of the vendor can be found. Just try to find a phone number for eBay or Amazon live support some time

We as a culture have weakened and removed spare resource capacity needed to build and nurture long term repeat customers, in favor of cost efficient transactionalism. Gresham's Law, all over again

Ba da da da da da da ba bap a dee...

During the week I too must prioritize, and work away at the hottest items in Covey's Quadrant One, as my schedule dictates them to me, Less important dreams and promises, desires and goals are left for an open dated 'later.' In my heart of hearts, however, I know that later will never come. Those 'heart's desire' are left behind on the horizon of each new day, for dead

I can offer no remedy, save a caution that when building that schedule, to not mistake a capability to act immediately, with a mandate to do so

Where does the answer lie?
Living from day to day
If it's something we can't buy
There must be another way

We are spirits in the material world

  -- The Police, Sting

---

06 Aug 2009: edited for a typo/grammar fix, layout error

Who is in charge, here?

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
   -- Through the Looking Glass

A U S Supreme Court memorandum order (called a 'Slip Opinion' here) today said:

PER CURIAM.
The writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently
granted.
It is so ordered.

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/07-1216.pdf

Some Latin in there. 'PER CURIAM' is: By the Court as a complete panel and entity, without specific attribution of the action to any particular Justice. A 'writ of certiorari' is: a publicly stated intent of the Court to receive a case for presentation and argument, and possibly (usually) decision.

That a matter is characterized as: "improvidently granted" is not Latin, but is a 'term of art' -- basically: It turns out we (as a decision making body) cannot, will not, or should decide after, and we decline to consider the particular aspect of the case we initially though we should hear for the present.

It happens -- maybe with one member of the Court ill, the Court decided it needed to lighten its load; perhaps some conflict came to light in the investment portfolio of some Justices that the remaining (non-recusing) panel members of the Court felt now that fairly they could not hear and decide the matter, to avoid the appearance of making a biased, short handed, or improper decision.

The functional effect of such a terse statement is to leave intact and in effect the next prior lower court's ruling

---

While a lawyer's craft is well depicted in television crime procedurals, the more cerebral parts of avoiding issues which make one interesting for television, are decidedly more valuable services a lawyer provides to the general society, when advising a client. A lawyer's opinion can help the client see the areas to avoid; how to structure its affairs. The Court speaks in a completely understood fashion here, to communicate just what it intends to say, and nothing else

The recent 'mob rule' in Congress of vilifying and proposing to punishingly tax the folks at AIG who had clear contracts for payment of a 'retention' and performance bonus, in exchange for staying on as the ship of AIG seemed to be sinking (and indeed staying and doing their contractual duty) show how fragile civilization is. All the hollow words about 'fairness' and populist anger cannot mask the fact that Congress successfully pointed the finger of blame away from itself and the government, and toward a tiny minority of our society. If a Constitution, contracts, and rule of law are so readily cast aside, no one is safe. Paris 1789 and following, all over again. Whom shall the mob turn to next?

The use of words is how we explain to another, and sometimes to ourselves, what we are thinking; why we believe what we believe; permit us to reflect and find weak points in our thought processes. Structured words -- Court decisions, Constitutions, laws, opinion letters from lawyers are part of an ongoing societal dialog

We are all diminished when cheap talk trumps reason

"It's different, this time"

The British born, formerly American investment manager, Sir John Templeton, is attributed the following as to his craft:

The four most dangerous words in investing are 'This time it's different.'

I suspect the quip is over-constrained in limiting it to just investing. But I am meditating about another Briton's work

At last night's COLUG meeting, the presenter addressed the emergence of the latest round of internet based 'social networking' applications: twitter, facebook, blogging, multi-features personal information devices (cell phones, Blackberries, iTouchs, digital cameras and the like). I say latest round, because the assertion was made that: "Terrorists have never used photo reconnaissance" and contrarian I suggested that the people of Dresden might have a different point of view

The takeaway from the matter had to be a thoughtful person needs to be mindful of the obvious and non-obvious implications of these new technologies

The ability to build a 'mosaic' image of a person, from their public 'internet persona' is only getting easier, and more accessible to a wider audience of potential prying eyes. What once required the resources of a government or major multi-national corporation to 'dig out' are perhaps thoughtlessly revealed with all good intention. See, e.g., the 'Sarah' PSA: ("Online Sexual Exploitation - Everyone Knows Your Name"), which ends with the outline: "... so think before you post"

But the information leakage is much broader than that already, and at this point not controllable by any individual. When a member of a 'private' or 'backwater' mailing list uses GMail to subscribe, every poster suddenly is added to Google's indexing corpus; when someone at a local meeting snaps a cell phone picture and posts it publicly, it feeds the automated identification algorithms publicly known (Google's Photo), and otherwise (Think: the Tampa Bay Super Bowl photo identification effort of the crowd). Note the date of the Register article just cited: 7th February 2001. This was no Bush-ian crypto facist over-reaction to the 9/11 hijackings

During the presentation last night, the first advert link offered was for anti-aging patent drugs, along side the meeting photo (full of several grey haired and bald male persons; the second link was of 'Valerie Bertinelli -- Bikini Babe!' and had a weight loss advert in the 'doubleclick' advert box on the top right; but our presenter is interested in and follows a television show 'The Biggest Loser' and is browsing weight control related sites and mailing lists. A third, rather personal example from the presenter's prior experience completed the circle to make it clear that Google's advert engine is reading every word we read or write

The first time is an occurence; the second a co-incidence; after the third, one has to stop shaving with Occam's razor as the blade has gone dull

I took a screenshot (full-size image) of what I am offered as to Valerie, and you'll notice that the upper right panel is blank. This is because some years ago, I amended the DNS records which computers using my DNS servers are provided, to return '127.0.0.2' for all of 'doubleclick.net'

[root@xps400 conf]# grep -i doubleclick *.conf
NULLROUTE.conf:127.0.0.2 ad.doubleclick.net.
[root@xps400 conf]#

Adding that value (which causes the request for an advert to never reach the central advert monitoring and image feeding servers), and several more was part of a campaign for a corporate client I was consulting for at the time. The Windows 98 desktop computers which were issued to the staff did not have effective software installation access controls, to preventing addition of random malware and time wasters. Memos and meetings had not stopped the practice of a staffer downloading, say, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and showing all her friends in that department how to do the same. Bandwidth exhaustion was becoming an issue; I assume that management also had some thoughts about lost productivity

As a technical fix the IS department was asked to remove it when found (done, but not persistent without effective access controls), and asked again. I was escalated in, and went to work with tcpdump

It turns out that the software designers at Yahoo knew their craft well. From memory, it first tried the universal Firewall Transversal Protocol (http), and then secure http and FTP

I blocked each new approach in turn. It fell back to nntp, and as I recall ntp. I do not recall that it tried to use dns content tunneling, but I certainly would have. The eventual solution had both port blocking and domain blacklisting

There is nothing new, nor indeed to my thinking, wrong for the owner of an asset to seek to profit maximize with it. But I think my thoughts and my words are my property, and on occasion on a 'think piece', I'll add the copyright reminder tag

.-- -... ---.. ... -.- -.--
Copyright (C) 2009 R P Herrold
herrold@owlriver.com
My words are not deathless prose,
but they are mine.


I also hold to the quaint notion that I am not a number, but an individual and the property of no one but my God. Silly, I know, but there you are

---

edit: typo fix

No sparrow falls, but that ....

Letters, we get letters ...

> I saw a blog posting recently where you
> commented that RHEL 2.1 was based on RHL
> 8.0. My memory /understanding is that
> RHEL 2.1 is based on RHL 7.1... or maybe
> 7.2... but not 8.0.

memory fades ... let me dig a bit

Let's see ... I was on Red Hat's 'tester-list' external beta tester (under NDA) program

The watershed email (which put my memories in the RHL 8 timeframe) was:

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 14:06:07
From: Michael K. Johnson
To: testers-list@redhat.com
Subject: Heads-up -- change coming [Red Hat Confidential]

This mail contains only Red Hat Confidential material. ...

But there had been rumblings ever since RHAS 2.1 issued, which made me want the 'insurance policy' community RPM based distribution

Which led previously led to me setting off with Greg Kurtzer to get cAos going. Greg and I discussed an enterprise product from the earliest cAos meetings (earliest I have a record of is: 29 Apr 2003). Greg, Rocky Mcgaugh and I pitched this product concept and extension of the 'two Linux' policy to an IBM VP at SuperComputing 03 in November 2003 at Phoenix, AZ. I remember flying down from Las Vegas for the meeting

And it matured quickly. Parallel efforts were underway by others -- Tao Linux, Xos, and more. There was a mailing list: rhel-rebuild list <rhel-rebuild-l@uibk.ac.at> but I've not seen a post on that list for eons

Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 09:30:23 -0600 (CST)
From: Rocky McGaugh
Reply-To: caos@caosity.org
To: caos@caosity.org
Subject: cAos] Announce: centos

The cAos-EL projects have been officially renamed to:
centos (Community ENTerprise Operating System)

Sadly, Rocky has died, too young. Greg (sensibly for his needs) stayed with the cAos part. And I am an old, tired dog, am left on the CentOS part... Does anyone not not die too young while they are still young of heart?

so thus my recollection of late 2003 ...

http://www.owlriver.com/redhat_versions.html
RHL 8 general release Sept 30 2002
RHL 9 general release Mar 31 2003
RHL 7.3 GA May 6, 2002

http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/
RH AS 2.1 General Availability: May 17, 2002

negative rebuild report under 7.2
http://www.redhat.com/archives/rpm-list/2003-April/msg00001.html
April 2003

So .. it seems true that RHAS 2.1 was on a pre RHL 8 base. But RHL 7.3 was so good, and RHAS 2.1 ... wasn't. Perhaps that led me to conflate the fork point

A 'tip of the hat' to the sharp eyed blog reader Scott Dowdle who noticed the matter and called it to my attention

If I have seen further ...

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

-- Isaac Newton

---

Jon Postel
August 6, 1943 - October 16, 1998

Jon Postel served as editor of the RFC series from April 7, 1969 (its inception) until his death in October 1998. Full details of the debt we all have are outlined in the eulogy by Vint Cerf.

He died a decade ago, now -- we are poorer without him.