Something that surprised me is that I made it on both Digg and Reddit, with 12 and 26 hits respectively thus far. I must admit, as of the time of this writing, I caused the most recent dig on Digg.com, but the point is that I was not the one to submit it! This gives me warm, fuzzy feelings all over.

Though being on Digg and Reddit is amazing, showing up on the following site is certainly the most perplexing. Click here to go to that page, or just look at the picture below.

Since I am the geek son of the school’s founder, Paula Gorman, I help out with their technology whenever I am in town. For the first year of it’s existence, New Generation was running Windows XP. Since this resulted in a computer lab that was unusable more often than not, it was an easy sell to convince Mrs. Gorman to switch to Ubuntu Linux.

This morning, the school was having problems with it’s Comcast cable Internet connection, so Mrs. Gorman decided to call Comcast tech support. During the course of the of the phone conversation, the tech support agent requested that Mrs. Gorman click various buttons to try to open up the Windows XP graphical interface for ping, at which point she informed them that she was not running Windows, but Ubuntu. Mrs. Gorman is no geek, but she does know how to use the ping command in the terminal, so she offered to do just that. However, the Comcast tech support agent at that point would not help further, due to his inexperience with Linux.

Mrs. Gorman decided to obtain a case number, so that I could call later on her behalf, to determine the issue. However, the support agent refused to give her the case number, restating the fact that Comcast does not support Linux. He even went as far to say that the company supports Windows, Mac OSX, and even Unix (note that both Linux and OSX are a form of Unix), but not Linux. Needless to say, Mrs. Gorman was not pleased with this response. I would not want to have been the Comcast employee during the resulting conversation. For the next several minutes, she chastised the employee about the evils of discriminating against a customer due to their choice in operating system. Once thoroughly chastised, the employee was more forthcoming with the case number. The funny thing was, the Internet was working again just a few hours later, without me touching any of the networking equipment and without Comcast fixing anything

The teachers at New Generation school have enjoyed using Ubuntu Linux over the past several years, and do not take kindly to being discriminated against by a telecom company. Therefore, they are looking at switching to T1 Internet service via AT&T. Perhaps AT&T will be more friendly to Linux users.

I think it would be rather fun to make the displeasure of Comcast’s Linux customers loudly known. If you would like to spend a few minutes letting Comcast know that is wrong to discriminate against customers due to their choice of operating system, the phone number to the Lake City, Fl. office is (386) 752-6161.

“We cannot rely on laws to protect us. We must use mathematics.”

- Bruce Schneier

The ability to have a private conversation via email is vital. Yet due to the nature of both email and the underlying technology, most emails are far from private. Privacy can be achieved via encryption, but the truly secure forms of encryption (aka PGP and GPG) have not really been designed with the non-geek in mind.

For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking of writing a simple yet comprehensive guide to email security. Now that I have a bit of time on my hands, it is probably a good time to do so. I have started a wiki for this purpose, at crashsystems.wik.is, and I am looking for volunteers. This guide will be focused on using the PGP standard of encryption via the Open Source GnuPG project, plus a few extra tools. I want this guide to be useful for users of Windows, Mac and Linux, so I need volunteers who use these operation systems.

I intend upon expanding this project, and recruiting help from geeks across the world. However, I want to develop a core group of people, and some initial content, before I start advertising the project. So please check it out, sign up for an account on the project’s wiki, and start giving input.

However, it was just past 12 a.m., and felt like throwing caution to the wind, and therefore upgraded. At first I used my web host’s “simple scripts” feature to try to upgrade the site. After all, this is what I used to do the initial installation, as well as the upgrade to 2.5.1. Bit mistake!

After getting a rather uninformative error message from simple scripts, I bit the bullet and did the manual upgrade (the way God intended!). Five minutes latter, I was up and running.

I’ve only been using 2.6 on crashsystems.net for the past few minutes, but I already like it.

One thing that should be interesting to see is how many plugins will need to be updated to run on 2.6, and how long this update will take. I’ll probably upgrade tomorrow, but I hope this doesn’t break compatibility with my beloved plugins!

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” - United States Constitution, Amendment I.V.

Earlier today the United States House of Representatives voted in favor of the bill titled “FISA Amendments Act of 2008.” To become law, all that is now needed is for the Senate to also vote in favor of the bill, plus the president’s signature. Given the fact that it is the administrative branch that introduced this bill, there is no chance that George W. Bush will veto it, and it is also highly unlikely that the Senate will stand against it.

Don’t let the word “foreign” in “Foreign Inelegance Surveillance Act” fool you: this law claims to give the Feds permission to spy-on/search anyone they want. However, this goes directly against the Forth Amendment to our Constitution. Our legal system provides methods for changing and removing things from our Constitution, and those methods have been used 27 times in the past. Not one of the subsequent 23 Amendments have altered the 4th, therefore making today’s legislation unlawful.

What does this say of the people who voted for this unlawful legislation? There are many opinions on this, but I would say that it makes the people who voted in support of it criminals, as they have violated our laws. Criminals by our law are unfit to hold an elected position in our government.

I sent an email to my representatives yesterday, telling them that I would actively campaign against them if they voted for this legislation. This is just the beginning of my fulfillment of that promise:

• The Honorable Lamar Alexander: (202) 224-4944
• The Honorable Bart Gordon: (202) 225-4231

Image copyright Linux.com

Dimdim is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees.

Basically, the software lets you create a virtual meeting place online. In a meeting you can communicate via text, voice and chat. The software also gives the presenter the ability to present power point presentations and share PDF files with the viewers. All attendees have access to a “white board” where they can draw (diagrams and slimy faces, I suppose), and presumably take notes.

The software comes in three versions, the first being the full blown proprietary version (which must be paid for, of course), the free hosted version, and the “Community Edition“, which is licensed under the GPL V3.

I haven’t had the chance to test it out yet, but Dimdim certainly seems worth looking into. What do you think? For those YWAMers who are reading this post, do you think that this program might be useful for digital communication within our mission (aka, comment section below)?