Moving this blog to LiveJournal Although 20six.co.uk has served me well for a couple of years, I found LiveJournal to be better suited for my current needs. The new location for the Enterning the Networked World blog is http://jabolins.livejournal.com/  See you there! J.D. Abolins

23.11.07 05:41 Permalink / comment

Fourth of July 2007 Fourth of July fireworks (photographed on July 3rd) Ewing, NJ J.D. Abolins

4.7.07 03:53 Permalink / comment

More on Prof. Walter Murphy, Including His Interview Coming Up Topics: Security & Insecurity, Privacy & Liberties, TSA, Censorship, Watchlists, Privurity Follow up to:Prof. Walter Murphy's "No Fly" Incident Not Likely to Have Been Punishment for Speech Open Source with Christopher Lydon "the blog with a radio programme" is going to interview Prof. Murphy for the show "On the Watch List". The blog page for the show has some additional info on Prof. Murphy's experiences with a watchlist hit on his name, a sampling of blog commentaries on the matter (including my posting), various references, and reader comments. A recording and/or podcast of the show should be online in a few hours at the "On the Watch List" page. By the way, I looked at Daniel J. Solove's blog snippet posted on the page and followed the link.  Reading Solove's full posting on Concurring Opinions, I found some good points, especially his conclusion: --- The airline screening lists are clandestine and inscrutable. There is no way we could obtain systematic evidence of any bias or improper conduct in placing people on the list. [...] This raises a larger question. When the government is engaging in secret activities, how does the public evaluate them without transparency? How can people work up the political will to get more information about these programs? It is often hard to get any political traction without dramatic claims of abuse such as Professor Murphy's. This does not mean that one should simply make up claims. But it does mean that speculative and anecdotal evidence should not immediately be discounted and ignored. Maybe, instead of being skeptical of Murphy's claims about why he was on the list, we should direct that skepticism to the lists themselves. --- These considerations become even more important as the use of various watchlists and background checks are becoming more common in other areas of life than air transportation. Bruce Schneier mentions a non-aviation watchlist in his post "Ordinary People Being Labeled as Terrorists". The particular watchlist there is the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control's list of "specially designated nationals" and "blocked persons". This watchlist, unlike the aviation one,  is accessible to the public. You can find the SDN list at http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/ and see if you are on there. (I check it myself to make sure that some namesake out there isn't being a really bad boy.) If Soundex is used for some checks, things can get even more interesting. See also Bruce Schneier's posting on Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE). About a different data system than the aviation watchlists or the SDN, but gives bit of an idea of the challenges in building such lists and databases. J.D. Abolins

11.4.07 03:45 Permalink / comment

English Churches and Controversy Over Renting Steeples for Cell Phone Masts Topics: Networked World, Interesting Tech, Religion, Economics, Cell phones Tonight's Public Radio (US) Marketplace programme had an interesting story, "To some, church cell towers send bad signal". The report tells about a controversy over the practice some English churches have of renting their steeple space to cell phone companies. Such an arrangement can bring in as much as $20,000 (approx. £10,000) per year. Helpful income to help with maintenance. More than 50 English churches benefit from such arrangements. (In the US, about 1% of cell phone towers are reported to be housed in church steeples.) The vicar of St Peter and St Paul Church in North London wanted to have a cell phone mast installed in the church's steeple. Some parishioners objected and the matter was referred to an ecclesiastical court. The ruling, which was against allowing steeples housing cell phone masts, had an interesting and unexpected twist. It might be thought that the objection would be along the lines of entanglement of spiritual matters with commercial matters. No, the objection was based on the concern that cell phone towers might convey some pornography. There may be an appeal to the ruling. Two Years before the [Cell Phone] Mast J.D. Abolins

10.4.07 04:22 Permalink / comment

What is "Privurity"? As I was looking through the blog of David Harding, a fellow member of the Linux Users' Group in Princeton (LUGip), I notice a tag for "privurity". For a while, I pondered upon its meaning. Even Googled it to no avail. Then it dawned on me what there word meant. It is the hybrid of "privacy" and "security". Nice combo. One of the things this tag does is remdis us that privacy and security are not mutually exclusive. J.D. Abolins

2.4.07 04:31 Permalink / comment

Note About "Root Password" in Kubuntu and Such One intially confusing thing when I first installed Kubuntu was what was the root password for certain administrator functions. It had me puzzled for a few minutes. Then I dug into the Kubuntu FAQ and found pointers to the answer. Turns out that Ubuntu family of GNU/Linux distros have a different approach than some other distros where you set up the root password during installation. Ubuntu locks the root account and you cannot login as root or use su to get root access. Instead the installer setup sudo to handle functions that need root privileges. The password required for the such functions is the password of the user account set up during the install. Full details, include some excellent tips and cautions, can be found at the Root Sudo Ubuntu documentation page. For a moment, I thought Kubuntu was "root-less". J.D. Abolins

1.1.07 20:46 Permalink / comment

Starting 2007: Out with SuSE, In with Kubuntu Over the New Years weekend, I finally got around to backing up my data and installling Kubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux on my computer. It was project waiting for some spare time since mid-November. I switched from SuSE 10.1 to another distro primarily to lend support to Nicholas Petreley's call for shunning Novel/SuSE for their deal with Microsoft under shady circumstances. Normally, I am "live and let live" in the politics of free and open source software, but the implications of "deal with us and we won't sue your customers" deal could not be ignored. So, although SuSE mostly worked well for me over the past five or so years, I've binned it. Why Kubuntu? Why not? There are many distros and I wanted to try a variant of Ubuntu but prefer the KDE environment over GNOME. I went for 6.06.1 LTS (Dapper) instead of the 6.10 (Edgy) for the sake of Vmware compatibility. Assorted Notes About the Process Archiving emails: In previous Linux systems overhauls, I have often lost my archived emails. This round, I used Hypermail to create HTML archives of the kmail emails I want to keep. I don't really need to have the archives stored in their native mailbox format; just in form in which I can do text string searches. Here's the basic steps I used to archive my emails: Created a kmail folder for the emails, making sure it was an mbox not an mdir type. Copied in the emails I wanted to archive into that folder. Opened a terminal window and went to my kmail's mail directory. (.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/ under my home directory) Created a directory to hold the HTML output. Ran Hypermail with the -m (source mbox), -d (destination directory), and -p (show progress) switches: hypermail -m source_mbox -d destination_directory -p Hypermail worked so-so in this round. It did a fine job of converting the contents of the source mbox to HTML files into the destination directory. The indices, however, were mangeled and mis-linked. Also, the email headers were not carried over. Normally, not problem for my general purposes, but I have to rremember to archive the "source" of any emails where the headers are relevant. (E.g.; examples for my studies of spam, malware, and other emails that go bump in the networks.) It may well be that I have missed some of the options and settings for Hypermail. I'll have to study the documentation further. Remembering to backup bookmarks, crypto keys, email address books, etc. Sometimes, it is easy to forget such important data when rebuilding a system. I have lost many bookmarks this way over the years. Crypto keys, such as ones for GnuPG, are even more serious to lose. (You did remember to created a revocation certificate for your GnuPG primary public key and stored it in safe place off-the computer, right? ) My years of systems wipes & rebuilds paid off and I learned from my mistakes here. Now I am free to discover new mistakes. Kubuntu Install The install from the bootable DVD I burned from the downloaded .iso worked smoothly. Because I am retaining my Windows partions and having a dual-boot system, I choose to use the manual disc partitioning option. It was easy, much easier than than when I first dabbled with Linux. Hardware compatibility One of my big concerns in the transition was the compatibility of the new system with some of my Acer 5672 WLMI laptop's hardware, especially the network cards. (They, especially the wireless card, had been fiddly with some other distros a while back, including Fedora. SuSE 10.1 was the first one I found that handled the wireless properly without special tinkering.) I am glad to report, Kubuntu did fine with both of the cards. For a moment, it did appear that I might have external mouse problems with the Kubuntu. When I first booted up after the installation, the external mouse wouldn't work. I thought that I'd have to start tinkering with the configuration files. But, before going that route, I tried unplugging and repluging the mouse's USB plug. It solved the problem. Overall, I am a well satisfied customer of Kubuntu. Now to learn some more about it and continue customising. Cheers and Best Wishes for the New Year, J.D. Abolins

1.1.07 19:47 Permalink / comment

 [next page]