erroneous thoughts

The following video offers an engaging explanation of why money, in our current societies, is essentially, debt. If you find yourself thinking what exactly does that mean, watch the video. If on the other hand, you’re thinking that’s nonsense, then just ask yourself this: what exactly is the substance of money? And then watch the video.

The only way to embed this video is to use iframes, which is not allowed in WordPress. so instead you can go the page where the video is hosted, here. Alternatively, you can download the video from this url.

;-D

Via Coding Horror

It’s crap like this that makes me qualify Americans like idiots. UTTER HOPELESS IDIOTS! Now don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure some US folks would (and probably will, really soon now) complain loud and bitterly about this. But how does an entire nation get to the point of allowing their education system to be subdued and subverted by corporations?!

Pro-copyright lobbyists and anti-piracy outfits have a clear idea of what is needed to manipulate the minds of the younger generations. The MPAA most famously handed out a “merit patch in respecting copyright” to LA Boy Scouts, and now the Copyright Alliance has entered US classrooms in an attempt to educate today’s youth about the benefits of copyright.

For all the reasons this is bad, the worse is that the value of good education should be, more than the gathering of knowledge, the gathering of critical thought skills: for as knowledge might eventually be forgotten, the skill of being able and willing to think critically, once learned, remains (and indeed, keeps improving as one uses it again and again) for the rest of one’s life. Thus, I quote the end of the above quoted article:

[. . .] kids should be taught to think critically so they can make up their own minds instead of being brainwashed with pro (or anti) copyright propaganda.

In all my intellectual humbleness, I can only speculate on why prefering to “spoon-feed” US youngsters with all this “copyright is good” rubbish instead of doing the right thing, viz. providing the students with the facts about copyright. And I think that’s because if they tried to do so and argue in favour of copyright, even the most intellectually challenged students would be able to see through the hollowness of such argumentation, that copyright has outlived its usefulness. But that also means that if you draw a salary from copyright related activities, you’re boned. Traditionally, when such a thing happens, you either adapt, or change to a different business. This is seldom done without a fight, which is a natural reaction: nobody likes to be put out of business. But to go as far as to (ab)use the education system to protect their industry (or any other industry or business, for that matter) is nothing short of unacceptable, and any teacher or education responsible that thinks otherwise does not deserve to be in office. On normal circumstances, I would hope for the government to step in and stop this lunacy, but given some of the past positions of the current US Vice-President, I doubt anything of the sort takes place any time soon.

I’ve already explained why the so called intellectual property is a baseless concept. But intellectual property broadly encompasses not only copyright law, but also trademarks and patents, which are not the issue here. Maybe a more detailed explanation on my stance on copyright is in order. I’ve stated that one must first get the facts, and then discuss and argue based on them. Let’s see how long it takes to follow my own advice.

One of the first things I did after changing to Ubuntu was searching for a replacement for the one and true music player, amaroK. After much, much, much searching, I came to the inescapable conclusion: you can’t. But I had to, and so I kept searching. And earlier today I stumbled upon the discovery: my inescapable conclusion is still, well, inescapable (you can’t beat amaroK ), but as it turns out, you don’t have to. That’s right, amaroK has been “ported” to Gnome, thus giving birth to exaile. Granted, the name could be less… tacky, but the software is great. It has one small catch: searching, specially complex searches, can be noticeable slower than with amaroK. I don’t know if that has to do with the fact it is written in Python or not, but still, I found my replacement! YaY!

Apesar do título em inglês, este artigo é sobre a nossa lusa nação, e, pasme-se, é para dizer bem. Eu, que tanto critico os nossos governantes, desta vez tenho que dar a mão à palmatória: o ministro da cultura, José António Pinto Ribeiro, disse isto a respeito da “3 strike law”:

Nós somos um país que tem uma história e um regime de Estado de Direito específicos. A história é que vivemos 48 anos sobre a ditadura e portanto não compreendemos facilmente soluções que tenham uma leitura possível censória – que alguém está a ver o que estamos a fazer.

Mas não ficou por aqui. Para além de mostrar claramente que o copyright nunca poderá justificar a censura, o ministro foi mais longe dizendo que fazer o download de filmes ou músicas da net é “como alguém encontra notas de banco no chão [. . .] são de quem as agarrar”.

Como não podia deixar de ser, isto enfureceu muita gente, que acha o copyright um direito sacrossanto, que deve ser protegido doa a quem doer. Já escrevi muito sobre o porquê de tais posições estarem erradas, não me repito aqui. Termino com uma nota final: é muito positivo termos um governante que não cai no exagero em que infelizmente caiu o governo francês. No entanto é preciso ter em conta que o senhor Ribeiro não é nenhum “radical” do copyright, uma vez defende a extensão do mesmo, por exemplo. Mesmo assim, do mal, o menos.

A former college professor of mine once wrote in a slide something like: “passwords are the cornerstone of computer security”. There’s a fair bit of truth in that. Email accounts, home banking, endless forums, remote logins, subversion accounts, twitter and it’s friends, social networks, the list seems endless. This poses the question of how to manage so many credentials. The simplest of answers (and here I mean in it the naïve sense), is to use the same password for everything. Make no mistake about it: it is an incredibly stupid idea. I mean would you use the same password for your main email account and to subscribe one of those forums that asks you for an email address upon subscription, and then give you a link to go when you have “lost your password”, and when you do that, they just email you your old password, in plain text? I doubt it.

But, never mind it’s stupidity. Every single time I was asked about this, and tried to explain why it is a lousy idea, I get the same retort: yeah right, but that’s never going to happen to me, it only happens to others. I careful, I’m not stupid, I’m not going to do something stupid. And so, the inescapable conclusion is once more yielded: I’ll keep using the same password for everything. I’m secure.

No, you’re not. And I’m going to give two real life examples: one mine, the other one from Jeff Atwood, the guy behind the Coding Horror blog.

Ok, mine first. A long time ago, I was given a subversion account for a repository we used at work. And we used a web front-end to access it, viz. trac. And, you’ve guessed it, accessing trac (authentication included) was done over plain old (unencrypted) http. Nobody cared back then because, well, back them there were less then a hand full of people with subversion accounts. This one day, I finished up my task, and committed the code. Moments later, one of my colleagues shouts: “Guess who’s password just passed right in front of me!”. Yep, he happened to be debugging a piece of code using a network sniffer, and as the connection to subversion server was not encrypted, he got my password. Now I, being your all time favourite paranoid, noticed beforehand that the connection to the server wasn’t encrypted, and so I chose a password I wasn’t using for anything else. And so I dodged one more.

The one with Jeff is narrated by himself in two different posts. To make a long story short, he used an insecure password to manage a site of which he is admin (!), while also using the same password in an account for another site, which stored passwords insecurely. Somebody connected the dots, and was able to login into the admin account.

Both of these situations would have been impossible if passwords were not shared. Don’t get me wrong: the problem here is not using weak passwords for accounts with modest security requirements. The problem is sharing the password: if it’s a strong password, you’ll end up using it some place with poor password management, compromising the other accounts. And I’m not going to take the trouble of explaining why you should not share a weak password. Get a decent password management scheme (I use a variation of this) up and running, train your memory, do whatever works for you, but don’t share passwords. After all, they’re the cornerstone of computer security.

This should absolutely be a part of the compulsory reading at any half decent Computer Science undergrad curricula. Quoting:

So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I’m going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will.

And one more thing:

IT’S NOT THAT HARD.

And as that last phrase says, it really isn’t all that complicated. It takes 20 minutes to read thoroughly, and it WILL save you a LOT of debugging time in the future (I speak out of experience). The more low level/hardcore explanation is here, for those interested.

If you’re a computer programmer, do yourself a favor and read this. After that, burst into laughing frenzy.

Incidentally, that site just gave me the most accurate description on to how convey my opinion of Cobol:

1959 – After losing a bet with L. Ron Hubbard, Grace Hopper and several other sadists invent the Capitalization Of Boilerplate Oriented Language (COBOL) . Years later, in a misguided and sexist retaliation against Adm. Hopper’s COBOL work, Ruby conferences frequently feature misogynistic material.

For some weird reason, probably related to some of the default settings of video acceleration (I now have an nVidia), playing DivX5 videos caused a green vertical bar to show up. This happened with all the players. I don’t know where the definitive solution lies, but for VLC I found the solution in this thread:

Go to the preferences menu in VLC and go to the video options, in the output i just played with the settings and X11 works for me.

This exact thing worked for me.