erroneous thoughts

Cory Doctorow has written a piece on what would happen if Google… well, stopped not being evil. The short essay describes a hypothetical association between Google and Department of Homeland Security, a recent security US security agency. Although I’ve not finished reading it, the think the most amazed me was, how plausible the described scenario is. I’m not saying it is (or it is not) true. I’m saying that unlike some other dystopian scenarios, this one, despite being an extreme one, looks surprisingly plausible.

WHAT IF GOOGLE WERE EVIL? Cory Doctorow imagines the worst

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” —Cardinal Richelieu

“We don’t know enough about you.” —Google CEO Eric Schmidt

I might further edit this post after I finish reading the essay…

EDIT: I am now writing a couple of days after the initial post. I’ve finished reading it, and while I did not actually enjoyed the end (seemed a little far fetched, reminded me of the ending of Brave New World…) the essay itself is a joy to read. I wonder what Google guys must have thought of this… I mean, I’ve never worked at Google (though I did apply once…), but from I’ve read, it appears that most of the guys of work there, enjoys their work very much. For instance, quoting Peter Norvig, here’s what he says about his own job (he is currently Director of Reseach at Google):

Note to recruiters: Please don’t offer me a job. I already have the best job in the world at the best company in the world. Note to engineers and researchers: see why you should apply to help.

And this “working enthusiasm”, lacking a better description, appears to be pervasive at Google. So how can an IT company with such devoted workers come so close to ending privacy worldwide? This is not an easy question, but I think that this may be similar to judging the nature of scientific developments: it depends not only on the developments per se, but also on the use that they are given.The scientific development in discussion here is a great search engine, one whose greatness is only surpassed by the enormous abuse possibilities (as so many science and technological wonders before it). I think they new this for a while back, and that may have been one of the reasons for their world famous motto: “Don’t be evil”. But they already caved to Chinese censorship laws, and with the US becoming a more police state as each day goes by, one can only become wary of possibilities… Reminds me of a quote by Reagan that I previously posted:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free

A final note to say that subcontracting intelligence gathering to the private sector, something referred to in the essay, is not fiction; it is a proposed measure by the US government (will post link to it when I find it).

Some simply funny linux commands follow (sourced from here):

% cat “food in cans”
cat: can’t open food in cans

% nice man woman
No manual entry for woman.

% “How would you rate Quayle’s incompetence?
Unmatched “.

% Unmatched “.
Unmatched “.

% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].

% ^How did the sex change operation go?^
Modifier failed.

% If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many (’s.

% make love
Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop.

% sleep with me
bad character

% got a light?
No match.

% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.

% !:say, what is saccharine?
Bad substitute.

% %blow
%blow: No such job.

% \(-
(-: Command not found.

$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense
no sense in pretending!

$ drink matter
matter: cannot create

This one goes dedicated to Nine Inch Nails fans out there [pay special attention to the first minute and a half of video!]

This is one of the articles in Slashdot today:

The BBC has a nice high-level overview of some technologies for surveillance developed in the US and the UK. ‘The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game …

And this is one of the comments:

 

 

This reminds me of my youth in Poland.

(Score:5, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 16, @09:19PM (#20630867)

I grew up in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the sort of shit we dealt with each day.

The Communists claimed to have devices that could read minds to determine one’s intentions. Now, we didn’t know if this was true or not. But seeing as many of us wanted to live another day, or at the very least not get tortured, we assumed they did.

It seems that the citizenry of the UK and the US are now in a very similar position….

Funny how the tables can turn in such little time… makes one wary of what freedoms can you really take for granted these days…

Sometime ago at work I needed to perform some calculations, and a co-worker showed me how to work with GNU bc: a powerful command line calculator. Now I’ve found a great tutorial for it, that I wanted to share in here.

I make a special note regarding the following: by default bc perform integer divisions. To override that behaviour, use the ‘-l’ option, or set the scale variable according to your preferences (that variable basically says how many numbers you want after the dot…)

I learned Lisp in my sophomore year in college, and back then I thought it was a cool language, but way too different from, well from pretty much everything else to be useful. Sometime later I came across a quip that described Lisp as the “programmable programming language”: for me it meant that my first impression on the language was right. Back then we used for Artificial Intelligence and since then, I stop programming in Lisp (for being way too busy with other projects). I have now finished my graduation, and I don’t remember exactly in what circumstances, but sometime ago I got back to Lisp programming. Looking back with hindsight, I guess the reason was that after my first encounter with Lisp, I learn a whole bunch of other languages and technologies, but somehow got disenchanted with them, and starting looking at Lisp from a whole new perspective. Moving along, in order to program you need an editor or IDE to write the code in. Back in the beginning, I used a certain widespread so-called operating system and for Lisp, our teachers told us to use a Lisp IDE from a company called Franz (I think). Since then a lot of things changed, and now my editor of choice is Vim, right along with its graphical counterpart, GVim. So when I went back to programming Lisp again, it was only natural to want to do so in Vim. And so I did. As it turns out, Vim, although more suited to other languages such as C and Python, also has great support for Lisp. But then I started reading about …. Emacs. It is written in Lisp, and so it is much more integrated not only with the language, but also with the development model: with Vim you write the code, and then go to the terminal, reload the file and test the changes. In Emacs, you don’t have to leave the editor… As I dug some more about Emacs, I got to understand that quip that says: “Emacs is a good operating system”. And them I learned about Slime, and of the possibility of having that same integration with other languages. So naturally I searched for the same for Vim.

And then I found this:

For many years I thought that the heretics of the Emacs clan [1] were clearly insane – the followers of Vim were obviously following the True Path. And then I was snared by the dark side.

I am (should I say was?) pretty gun-ho regarding Vim, but now the path is muddy. I guess for now I’ll stick to Vim, but that post really got me thinking…

Problem: I revoked my till then current GPG key, and everything worked fine, except for Enigmail: when using it, it insisted in using the previous (revoked) key rather then the new one. Eventually I found that this was due to a rather silly mistake of mine; I found this through a somewhat obscure page, which like I post here should it be helpful to someone else: http://www.mailinglistarchive.com/enigmail@mozdev.org/msg00489.html

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Stephen Petersen wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> First, thanks for the great program and the supporting forum!
>
> Now, to the question:  I recently revoked an old gpg key and made a new
> one, but when I try to sign a message with enigmail it still tries to
>
> use the old revoked key, and I get an "unusable secret key" warning.
> (In the commandline it's clear it attempted to use my old key.)
>
> I feel like I've looked everywhere, but I must be overlooking something
>
> - how do I get enigmail to acknowledge my /new/ secret key?

It sounds like Enigmail is setup to use the email address to select the signing
key. If that is the case it will match on the first key it locates, usually the
older key.

For the email account in question, open the 'OpenPGP Security' tab, select the
'Use specific OpenPGP key ID' button and enter the key ID of your new key
(0xdecafbad) or you may use the 'Select key...' button.

You should also check gpg.conf and verify that the old key is not specified as
the default-key.

Now if the reader belongs at least to the relatively educated, all sort of origin of life theories are probably no surprise. Well, setting all theories and ilk stuff aside, here’s a fact: in the place were I work, there is a porch, and in the porch there is a vase. So far so good, right? In that vase, there is… well in the beginning there was pretty much only dirt. As time went by, some of my co-workers who smoke start using it as an ashtray, and a dumpster for cigarette butts. As more time went by the environment inside that vase could only worsen, and after some more time went by, viz, today, the surprise:

If life can survive in there, Mars, the cold outer space or the inside of a underwater volcano are no match for it! Despite the ugliness of the image, a somewhat weird sense of awe ensues…

If, like me, the reads happens to use Linux, and own an ATi graphics card, then surely you need not be lectured on how much said drivers suck. In my case, I own a Radeon 9600, and whilst in Winblows it works reasonably good, in Linux it just sucks big time. For instance when I tried to play Unreal 2004, it always crashed under 30 seconds! [note 1: by "crash" I mean I had to hard reboot the machine; note 2: in the few seconds the game lasted, it work rather smoothly, i.e. the graphics hardware was working fine]

Well, now it appears that ATi is going to open source some of their drivers. Let’s hope this inspire some major changes in what Linux drivers are concerned.

You know it’s one of those when

1) you get to the office, and there’s no network;

2) you realise that not only exterior connections (aka internet) are gone, but also interior (i.e. connections to machines in your local network) are gone;

3) you are flabbergasted and ask how in the heavens name is such thing possible? (you go to the server dorm and check all machines are plugged in and running);

4) You realise that the particular SSH connection to the machine you need is not actually gone, it’s just taking way too long because it needs reverse DNS mapping, and the DNS server has been blown to smithereens (figuratively speaking, of course!)

5) You thank the heavens the fact that you know how to easily circumvent that problem (just hack the particular DNS mapping for that machine right into /etc/hosts and presto, it’s light speed again!)

6) You realise the bulk of network problems this morning is due to the fact that the ISP provider closed the service… go figure…

7) You curse the bastards and use that old vodafone wireless broadband card for internet, (while using good old eth0 to local network access) and get to work

8 ) You realise that you can’t stop scratching your eyes, and the idea of staying in bed begins to take form in your mind…

9) You are able to fulfil an amazing amount of work, but lunch hour gets you…

10) You realise that all that work is to be trashed when you’re told that a change in the graphics suite being used is due (you’ve guessed it, all that work I so proudly did was with the old graphics suite…)

Lesson to be learnt: trash the alarm clock!