Serving Linux to the Refugees

It’s all about freedom. What does it take to improve your service to the Kingdom? What can I do to remove unnecessary limitations?

I am by no means a Linux evangelist. Some people are better off running Windows, and I try to keep my skills current for that. Some people need something else, and I try to explore the alternatives just enough to keep track of what works, what can be made to work, and what is probably not worth the trouble. Still, I only know what I know, and I’m really not interested in just every little project out there. The ones which matter most are the ones which don’t become a distraction by consuming too much time and effort. Folks who need another hobby don’t need my help.

Most of you already know the easiest Linux to use is Ubuntu. There are plenty which are as easy to install, but none so far offer the same long-term support as the LTS releases of Ubuntu, which is part of the definition of “easy” in their minds. Without LTS, it’s just a hobby unless you intend to become a serious technician. I’ve poked around Red Hat 6.0 the last couple of weeks, preparing for the release of CentOS 6, which is derived from it. I found CentOS 5 just manageable enough to write a migration guide for Windows refugees. I’m pretty sure I can’t do that for 6.

The primary issue is the difficult install. Most ordinary home or small office users don’t have time to learn the various incantations to get RHEL/CentOS 6 to boot on some machines. Lots of folks are complaining about it. If it’s that difficult, it’s too difficult. That’s not a slam on the RedHat way of doing things; it didn’t stop me installing it. But that is too much to ask for someone who has no need for my background in Linux and other OSes. Such people happen to be all of my clients, and I’m pretty sure it will be true of all my future clients. Nor do the folks who produce this stuff feel insulted, since Red Hat and CentOS remain committed to the enterprise technicians, not ordinary users.

So while RHEL 6.0 is one of the best Linux distros I’ve ever tested, I can’t recommend it to my clients without a lot of training. It’s too easy to get something almost as good with Ubuntu without that training. Sometime in the near future I’ll be writing a migration guide for those clients whom I cannot for some reason do a hands-on installation of Ubuntu.

Wikileaks and Clarity

As a card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe, I just wanted to gibber a little more about Wikileaks.

Apparently Assange made a deal with Israel to let their government agents censor his document troves before publication. Whether they now keep their bargain and rescue him from this honeytrap business in Sweden remains to be seen, but it could happen without much notice. That is, the alternative press will make note of it, but only if Israel throws him under the bus will it make the mainstream news.

Still, we can see the whole thing remains mostly theatrics. As noted previously, it is painfully obvious Israel was not hurt or embarrassed in the least by this leak of cables. Nor was the US, actually:

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

So all this bluster about taking down someone who dares to threaten our troops is mindless idiocy, the trademark of the American public. Consider the logic of this noise: If the issue is a threat to our troops, then it’s the Presidents, Congress, Haliburton/KBR, and a the apathy of the US voters which are most at fault for killing our troops in senseless wars for lies. Punish them first, then you’ll have moral standing to go after Assange. Did I mention slaughtering over a million citizens of other countries?

Besides, Assange didn’t even break any of our laws.

But in the United States, generally publishing classified information is not a crime. The sort of information that a news organization can be prosecuted for publishing is limited to: nuclear secrets (Atomic Energy Act), the identities of covert agents (Intelligence Identities Protection Act), and certain forms of communications intelligence (Section 798 of the Espionage Act).

Perhaps lamenting that the U.S. does not have an Official Secrets Act like the United Kingdom, right wing columnists have consistently misinterpreted these Acts, or have cited other provisions of our espionage laws which almost surely do not apply to Wikileaks.

Purely on grounds of Aristotelian logic the US government has no right to even keep secrets:

In the case of a state in which the people are sovereign, (which is to say that the people are the state), the state cannot morally conceal its actions, intentions, and international communications from the people, which is to say itself…. In a state where the people are sovereign, state secrets are maintained for one reason and one reason only: to permit certain elements of the state to operate freely without taking into account the will of the other elements of the state. This is why state secrets are intrinsically authoritarian and invariably lead to the loss of human liberty over time.

Even the attempts by Anonymous and their Payback project is just noise. Blocking access to a few websites, and even some of the Mastercard operations, will not be very persuasive. Keep it up and it only justifies the planned draconian Internet controls. The only effective action, should Anonymous really intend to cost the bad guys money, is to crack the servers themselves, breach the security and take control over the data stored there. The real heavy here is not Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, et al. Evil as they may be, the real heavy is the US government. Tie up the official bureaucratic processes which transact over the Net, then you’ll be doing something which affects the bad guys. And you’ll also have the Internet security officials breathing down your necks, but this petty DDoS attacks on websites means nothing. It’s just more noise playing into the hands of the scripted propaganda.

Meanwhile, most of what you see and hear from conventional sources is propaganda theater. It’s true of everything they say. We have this “global warming” gathering in Mexico while the first taste of a new ice age hits Europe and parts of North America. It’s caused in part by the changes in the Gulf Stream resulting from BP’s oil leak. People in the Gulf of Mexico are sick and dying from unprecedented poisoning of the water by both raw petroleum and dispersants. The US government is helping to cover this up, as it does the banking mortgage frauds. Our manufacturing base continues off-shoring at a blistering pace, even as the government works as hard as possible to cripple the economy further. And the press talks about our “recovery.”

Yes, it is all intentionally, knowingly, attacking you and me and the whole world because it’s profitable for a select few.