Posts Tagged ‘free software’

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HMG goes cloudy

Monday, February 20th, 2012

The UK Cabinet Office has announced the winning bidders to supply IT goods and services to UK Government under its new framework contract called “G-Cloud”. The winners are listed on a new website called the CloudStore which, supposedly, allows HMG procurement specialists to search for the goods and services they want to purchase. The new framework is supposed to break the old cosy relationships in HMG procurement circles between the big suppliers and HMG Departments. Politics and personal prejudice aside, I think Francis Maude’s intentions in setting the new services framework is actually quite honourable. But, frankly, the results baffle me.

I picked “Infrastructure as a Service” as my first choice and the list I was presented with gave several suppliers for which the description said “The supplier did not provide a description of this service, please click on the link to find out about this service.”. Of course, clicking the link merely confirms what the description says – no info. So I tried a search for “open source software” on the IaaS page and got no results. I also got no results when similarly searching “Software as a Service”. Excuse me? Am I expected to believe that not one supplier of the 255 successful companies even mentions open source software in their offering of IaaS os SaaS? Has no-one heard of the LAMP stack?

I then widened the search to include any and all service by any and all provider and got just one result – for some company called “Cloud Cache and Archive Limited”. The description says:

“Cloud Cache And Archive Limited is a privately funded software company with development based in London. Cloud Cache and Archive provides a game changing solution to allow the rapid integration of legacy applications and databases; and the deployment of new enterprise services and Web 2.0 applications on the Cloud. The solution leverages “big data” technologies; a 100% open source software; and cloud native platforms to provide Agile Information Integration and Agile Information Management all based on a cloud native platform. The proven solution is designed for Governments and large commercial organizations.”

I’m sorry, but that is just marketing drivel. WTF does that actually mean? What solution? To what problem? What is a “cloud native platform”? And how will this help a government procurement specialist (who, trust me, will not be an ICT specialist) choose a supplier?

Answers on a post card please.

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Posted in free software, trivial musing | No Comments »

tomorrow the world

Monday, January 30th, 2012

A slightly breathless new post over at omgubuntu proudly boasts that the market share of Linux on the desktop jumped “from 0.96% in January 2011 to 1.41% by the year’s end.” (That could equally be be written as a close to 50% rise in Linux’ popularity). No doubt this will scare the pants off Steve Ballmer.

I can’t help being amused by the comments below this post which run like this:

1. Thanks to Unity!

2. Despite unity.

3. Despite unity & gnome shell.

4. Thanks to gnome & despite unity.

5. Thanks to Ubuntu.

6. Thanks to Linux Mint.

This sort of united, combined front in opposition to proprietary software is exactly what will drive free software to say, oh around 2% of the desktop.

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Posted in free software, linux and unix, trivial musing | No Comments »

moxie’s proxy

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher probably best known for his SSL proxy tool, likes google even less than I do. His googlesharing website says:

“Google thrives where privacy does not. If you’re like most internet users, Google knows more about you than you might be comfortable with. Whether you were logged in to a Google account or not, they know everything you’ve ever searched for, what search results you clicked on, what news you read, and every place you’ve ever gotten directions to. Most of the time, thanks to things like Google Analytics, they even know which websites you visited that you didn’t reach through Google. If you use Gmail, they know the content of every email you’ve ever sent or received, whether you’ve deleted it or not.

They know who your friends are, where you live, where you work, and where you spend your free time. They know about your health, your love life, and your political leanings. These days they are even branching out into collecting your realtime GPS location and your DNS lookups. In short, not only do they know a lot about what you’re doing, they also have significant insight into what you’re thinking.”

His solution to this problem was interesting. He came up with the idea of a proxy system which would intercept all google queries, strip off identifying material (such as cookies and UserAgent strings and other HTTP headers) substitute new identifiers and mix the requests up with those from other users before forwarding to google. Implementation depended upon a Firefox addon (nothing for other browsers) which identified google queries and forwarded them to the proxy. All other traffic was untouched.

image of googlesharing proxy

I stopped using google (except via scoogle) some time ago, and when Moxie’s new proxy first surfaced I thought it interesting but susceptible to the same problem I discussed in mid 2009 when writing about Hal Roberts’ experience of GIFC – all you are doing is shifting knowledge of your searches from google to a new intermediary. However, Moxie later addressed this problem with the release of version 0.20 of his addon so I thought I’d take another look at it. Unfortunately the addon won’t work with FF 9 (which I am using). Moxie’s proxy is not the only one out there however. Because he released the code under an open source licence, others have picked it up. I found one at gs.netsend.nl. They also provide an updated FF addon which will work with versions up to 15 (i.e. probably around next wednesday given the speed with which Mozilla is currently shipping new FF releases).

Once the addon is installed, it gives you two proxy options in the preferences settings – one is the original proxy.googlesharing.net, the other is gs.netsend.nl itself. In testing I found that the original googlesharing proxy seemed to be off-line, but when using the netsend.nl proxy I was reassured to see the message “Search results anonymized by GoogleSharing” added to the google homepage. I was even more reassured that my sniffer showed a connection to vps1101.pcextreme.nl on 31.21.98.201 and not to any known google network.

So, will I use it? Maybe. But the proxy mechanism seems to be unreliable. In many tests, the proxy connection seemed to be bypassed and the connection was obviously made direct to google (as evidenced by my sniffer). I think this failure is doubly unfortunate because it does not fail safe (i.e. the connection does not simply fail with an error message, it passes you direct through to google). This could lead the unwary to think that they are protected when in fact they are not.

I prefer not to use google at all. And in those cases where I do want to compare results with another search engine I prefer to do so via tor. But it is one more option in my toolkit if used carefully. And if using it pisses off google, then it is worth it occasionally.

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Posted in free software, net tools, network (in)security, privacy, tips, tricks and howtos, trivial musing | 4 Comments »

dis-unity

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

The reaction to Ubuntu’s move to Unity seems to be getting wider coverage. Over at LWN, Bruce Byfield blogged recently about the rift between the Ubuntu developers and its users. In particular he highlights Tal Liron’s entry to the Ubuntu launchpad bug wiki under bug number 882274. In that entry, entitled “Community engagement is broken” Liron gently rebukes the developers for their apparent lack of enegagement with the community, saying:

“The bug is easy to reproduce: open a Launchpad bug about how Unity breaks a common usage pattern, and you get a “won’t fix” status and then radio silence. The results of this bug are what seems to be a sizable community of disgruntled, dismayed and disappointed users, who go on to spread their discontent and ill will.”

Both Liron’s bug entry (and the subsequent commentary) and Byfield’s analysis of that discussion bear reading. I found myself frustrated by the obvious lack of understanding of (and impatience with) Liron’s position apparent in Mark Shuttleworth’s responses. Byfield concludes that:

“[Suttleworth] sounds impatient, resorting to personal attacks and invoking his personal authority or the necessities of design or standard practice instead of offering explanations. At times, he seems to address issues that at best approximate what others in the discussion are saying. Exactly why this change has happened is uncertain, but it adds a sting to Shuttleworth’s once-humorous title of Benevolent Dictator for Life.”

Meanwhile, over at El Reg, Liam Proven offers his analysis of the Ubuntu upheaval. In that article, Proven describes the differences between GNOME 3, GNOME 2 and Unity and explains how these changes (or more properly, the management of these changes) have led to the difficulties now facing a wide range of users. Proven concludes:

“Ubuntu is gambling that Unity will attract floods of new Linux users in such numbers as to outweigh those abandoning it for its spin-offs and rivals. If it’s correct, then Ubuntu will continue its rise to near-total dominance of the Linux desktop. But if it’s wrong, it will leave the Linux world more fragmented than ever.”

In my view Ubuntu (or more precisely Canonical and Shuttleworth himself) is wrong and will regret this decision not to properly engage with its user base. I don’t blame them for changing the desktop, after all, the GNOME developers have forced that change upon them. But I do agree strongly with Liron’s position. Ubuntu could do well to listen more.

And in a nice summary of Xfce, Scott Gilbertson today explains why previous GNOME users are moving to that desktop in the wake of the GNOME 3 and Unity changes. It seems I’m in the company of a growing number of other users.

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Posted in free software, linux and unix, trivial musing | No Comments »

fully minted

Sunday, November 6th, 2011

After exploring the alternatives to Ubuntu, I finally settled on Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) running Xfce as the desktop. I am now Ubuntu free and have a desktop that looks the way /I/ want it to look rather than the way some design nut wants it to look. I am also hopeful that the desktop will stay that way in future.

My main desktop now looks like this:

image of linux desktop

and my netbook looks like this:

image of linux desktop on my netbook

(click on either image to get full sized views)

I chose LMDE rather than Xubuntu partly out of pique with the way Canonical is taking Ubuntu, and partly out of a genuine desire to move to a distro which is closer to the ideals of the FOSS community which Ubuntu used to espouse and which Debian always has done. For me, LMDE now offers the best compromise between a truly useable modern desktop (with all that implies for proprietary codecs) and the purity and stability of Debian. I know where things are in Debian and I much prefer the Debian package manager to RPM (which immediately rules out Fedora or SUSE). Having now spent some time playing with Xfce I find myself surprised that I didn’t move to it much earlier. It is clean, relatively lightweight, fast and eminently configurable.

On my main desktop machine (which is running the 64 bit version to take full advantage of the 8 Gig of RAM I have installed) everything works as it should – even the dreaded flash (yes, I occasionally watch youtube). On the netbook (32 bit version) everything except the RHS card reader works. Hot plugging works on the left, and the right /will/ work if there is an SD card in place on boot. (But no, I /still/ can’t read Sony memory sticks. I have sort of given up on that now anyway since I no longer use the PSP to watch videos.)

Now to convert my wife.

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Posted in free software, linux and unix, trivial musing | 4 Comments »

time to ditch ubuntu?

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

I’ve used Ubuntu on my desktops/laptops and netbook for some time now. I think my first installation was 6.06 (the version 6.04 which was late by two months) and my desktops currently all run 10.04 LTS. I got over the minor irritation of the move of the window control buttons from the top right to the top left (a la Mac OSX). But I disliked the first version of 10.10 I tried on the netbook (sporting an early version the unity desktop) so much I quickly switched that back to to 10.04.

I have used the LTS versions of Ubuntu because, in my view, it provides the best trade off between bleeding edge and stability. I’m a huge fan of Debian and use it on my servers and slugs, but Debian is too conservative (and too purist about non-free software such as multimedia codecs) to make it a truly attractive OS for the modern desktop without a lot of additional work. So, the fact that Ubuntu was based on Debian, but with a rather faster release schedule and added usability has made it an obvious choice for some time. And it has become hugely popular. It still ranks number one at distrowatch and there are many other distributions which are based upon it. But Canonical have been taking some controversial decisions of late, many of which have split the user base.

After trialling the unity desktop on the netbook edition in Ubutu 10.10, Canonical merged the netbook and desktop versions into one with 11.04. This meant that users upgrading from an earlier (GNOME based) version were suddenly faced with a radically different looking desktop. The GNOME desktop (called Ubuntu classic) was still available as a fallback from unity in 11.04, but from the latest release (11.10) this is no longer the case, instead you get a 2D version of unity. So, you have unity or you have a worse version of unity.

Ubuntu may be using the GNOME libraries (and it is now using the GNOME 3 libraries rather than those for GNOME 2 as it did when unity was first launched) but many people, myself included, cannot understand why Canonical did not simply work with the GNOME project on version 3. But Canonical have form here. As a company they have been criticised many times in the past for taking rather too much from the FOSS community and not putting enough back. Without Debian, Ubuntu would never have existed. Ian Murdock (the “ian” in Debian) himself expressed concern some time ago that the Ubuntu codebase could diverge too much from Debian unless Canonical developers pushed changes back into the upstream projects. Furthermore, unlike companies such as Intel and Redhat, Canonical developers seem to be almost entirely absent from the linux kernel development community. An interesting, indeed almost comical, statistic emerged recently showing that Microsoft was the fifth most productive contributor to the Linux 3.0 kernel behind only Redhat, Intel, Novell and IBM respectively. As admin magazine notes however, this position owes much to the fact that Microsoft employee K. Y. Srinivasan made 343 changes. Most of those changes were to clean up the code implementing a driver for Hyper-V virtualization. But this is just a statistical blip – I fully expect Microsoft to drop out of the top five, or even top twenty five, shortly.

Canonical also got into a spot of bother when they ditched the GNOME audio player Rhythmbox in favour of Banshee. Rythmbox is decidedly “free software” and links users to free music downloads from Jamendo and paid for music from Magnatune, whilst Banshee looks far more commercially oriented (it linked to Amazon’s MP3 store for downloads in mid 2010 and Canonical used it to link to its own Ubuntu One music store in the 11.04 release. Such decisions can upset people (and make Canonical begin to look like Apple). If they introduce any form of DRM then there will be hell to pay.

With the release of 11.04, Ubuntu Studio, the Ubuntu based distro aimed at multimedia creators, defaulted to retaining GNOME in preference to unity, saying in its release notes “Ubuntu Studio does not currently use Unity. As the user logs in it will default to Gnome Classic Desktop (i.e. Gnome2)”. Shortly thereafter, in May of this year, Scott Lavender, the project lead for Ubuntu Studio announced that they would move away from unity (and GNOME) and use the lightweight Xfce desktop as the default environment in future.

Criticism of Ubuntu (and of Canonical the company) has become so loud and frequent of late that Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community “spokesman” reacted by founding openrespect.org apparently as a means of deflecting some of that criticism. The openrespect website says:

“OpenRespect was founded out of a concern that discussion and discourse in the Open Source, Free Software, and Free Culture community has become a little too fiery and flamey in recent years. The goal of OpenRespect is simple: to provide a simple declaration that distills some of the core elements of showing respect to other participants in discussions.”

But as itwire points out, the timing here is rather odd since it is only now “when Canonical has its feet held to the fire, we have a new website called OpenRespect.org registered and volumes of spiel being generated by Bacon.” Quite so.

Jono Bacon has also popped up in a variety of fora getting all defensive about Canonical’s design decisions. He even fronted an article in the July 2011 issue of LinuxFormat magazine where he “interviewed” four key players at Canonical (including Mark Shuttleworth). That interview included such unbiased questions as “Unity is an exciting new vision. What are your goals and inspirations?” Worse, the article did not bother to mention that Bacon was a key Canonical employee.

I have no doubt that Canonical will make unity work. The installed base of Ubuntu users is so large that developers will be forced to make it work, but I don’t have to like it. My problem is that GNOME itself has also changed radically in the move from 2.30 to 3.0. And I don’t like that either. I find myself in good company though, back in July of this year, Linus Torvalds called GNOME 3.0 an “unholy mess” and announced that he was ditching it in favour of Xfce. Although unlike Linus, I never liked KDE, even before the KDE 4 debacle

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Posted in free software, linux and unix, trivial musing | 6 Comments »

one reason I don’t use apple

Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

Being a linux and FLOSS fan has its advantages, not least the fact that most, if not all of the software I would want to use (and indeed, /all/ of the software that I actually do use) is free as in beer as well as free as in speech. And given the much smaller target offered by my chosen desktop in comparison to the widely used proprietary offerings, my systems are amost entirely unbothered by malware.

Most of my friends use proprietary systems. A few insist on paying over the odds for Apple products and, perversely, seem to take some pride in doing so. One or two even seem to think that simply buying Apple products marks them as more discerning, cultured and intelligent than the great unwashed who buy their systems from PC World.

In the course of a recent series of email exchanges on this topic, I was therefore delighted to receive this image from another friend. I know he uses windows 7 – I’ve seen it.

(copyright “stickycomics.com” gratefully acknowledged.)

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Posted in linux and unix, trivial musing | 6 Comments »

a graphical web of trust

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

I recently stumbled upon sig2dot, a gpg/pgp keyring graph generator. In fact this seems to have been around for some time, but I’d never come across it before. It can be used to generate a graph of all of the signature relationships in a GPG/PGP keyring, and, like other visualisation tools, this graphical image producing program can give new insight into relationships between objects.

The sig2dot program itself is available in the debian/ubuntu repositories in the package called “signing-party”. But unless you want to install a shed load of other unnecessary cruft along with it (exim? for god’s sake, why?), I recommend you simply pull the perl code direct from the author’s site. Along with the sig2dot program itself, you will need “neato” from the graphviz package and “convert” from the wondrous imagemagick package suite. If you don’t already have those installed then it is pretty safe to pull them from your distro’s package repository.

That done, try the following:

first create an ascii graphviz dot file ready for neato

$ gpg –list-sigs –keyring ~/.gnupg./pubring.gpg | sig2dot.pl > ~/.gnupg/pubring.dot

now convert to a postscipt file

$ neato -Tps ~/.gnupg/pubring.dot > ~/.gnupg/pubring.ps

before using imagmagick to convert to a png graphic

$ convert ~/.gnupg/pubring.ps ~/.gnupg/pubring.png

Those of you with gpg keyrings may wish to try it out (and no. I’m not going to show you mine).

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Posted in free software, images, tips, tricks and howtos, trivial musing | No Comments »

email address images

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Adding valid email addresses to web sites is almost always a bad idea these days. Automated ‘bots routinely scan web servers and harvest email addresses for sale to spammers and scammers. And in some cases, email addresses harvested from commercial web sites can be used in targetted social engineering attacks. So, posting your email address to a website in a way which is useful to human being, but not to a ‘bot has to be a “good thing” (TM). One way of doing so is to use an image of an address rather than text itself. Of course this has the disadvantage that the address will not be immediately usable by client email software (unless, of course you defeat the object of the exercise by adding an html “mailto” tag to the image) but it should be no big deal for someone who wants to contact you to write the address down.

There are a number of web sites which offer a (free) service which allows you to plug in an email address and then download an image generated from that address. However, I can’t get over the suspicion that this would be an ideal way to actually harvest valid email addresses, moreover addresses which you could be pretty certain the users did not want exposed to spammers. Call me paranoid, but I prefer to control my own privacy.

There are also a number of web sites (and blog entries) describing how to use netpbm tools to create an image from text – one of the better ones (despite its idiosyncratic look) is at robsworld. But in fact it is pretty easy to do this in gimp. Take a look at the address below:

This was created as follows:

open gimp and create a new file with a 640×480 template (actually any template will do);
select the text tool and choose a suitable font size, colour etc;
enter the text of the address in the new file;
select image -> autocrop image;
select layer -> Transparency -> Colour to Alpha;
select from white (the background colour) to alpha;
select save-as and use the file extension .png – you will be prompted to export as png.

Now add the image to your web site.

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Posted in images, linux and unix, privacy, tips, tricks and howtos, trivial musing | No Comments »

ubuntu 10.04 – minor, and some not so minor, irritations

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

If and when the teething problems in 10.04 are fixed and the distro looks stable enough to supplant my current preferred version, I will be faced with one or two usability issues. In this version, canonical have taken some design decisions which seem to have some of the fanbois frothing at the mouth. The most obvious change in the new “light” theme applied is the move of the window control buttons from the top right to the top left (a la Mac OSX). Personally I don’t find this a problem, but it seems to have started all sorts of religious wars and has apparently even resulted in Mark Shuttleworth being branded as a despot because he had the temerity to suggest that the ubuntu community was not a democracy. Design decisions are taken by the build team, not by polling the views of the great unwashed. In my view that is how it should be. The great beauty of the free software movement is the flexiibility and freedom it gives its users to change anything they don’t like. Hell, you can even build your own linux distro if you don’t like any of the (multiple) offerings available. Complaining about a design decision in one distro simply means that the complainant hasn’t understood the design process, and further, probably doesn’t understand that if he or she doesn’t like it, then they are perfectly free to change that decision on their own implementation.

In fact, it is pretty easy to change the button layout. To do so, simply run “gconf-editor” then select apps -> metacity -> general from the left hand menu. Now highlight the button_layout attribute and change the entry as follows:

change
close,minimize,maximize:
to
:minimize,maximize,close

i.e. move the colon from the right hand end of the line to the left and relocate the close button to the outside. Bingo, your buttons are now back where god ordained they should be and all is right in the universe.

Presentation issues aside, there are some more fundamental design issues which are indicative of a worrying trend. As I noted in the post below, it is now pretty easy to install restricted codecs as and when they are needed. Rhythmbox will happily pull in the codecs needed to play MP3 encoded music with only a minor acknowledgement that the codecs have been deliberately omitted from the shipped distribution for a reason – the format is closed and patent encumbered. Most users won’t care about the implications here, but I think it is only right that they should know the implications of using a closed format before accepting it. It is also worth bearing in mind that some software (including that necessary to watch commercial DVDs) is deliberately not shipped because the legal implications of doing so are problematic in many countries.

So, whilst from a usability perspective, I may applaud the decisions which have made it easy for the less technically savvy users to get their multimedia installations up and running with minimal difficulty, I find myself more than a little unhappy with the implications.

But it gets worse. Enter ubuntu one.

Ubuntu one attempts to do for ubuntu what iTunes does for Apple (but without the DRM one hopes….). The new service is integrated with rhythmbox and allows users to search for and then pay for music on-line. The big problem here is that the music is all encoded in MP3 format when ubuntu, as a champion of free software, could have chosen the (technically superior) patent free ogg vorbis format. The choice smacks of business “realpolitick” in a way that I find disappointing from a company like Canonical. Compare and contrast this approach with the strictly free and open stance taken by Debian and you have to wonder where Canonical is going.

Watch this space. If they introduce DRM in any form there will be an unholy row.

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Posted in free software, linux and unix, tips, tricks and howtos, trivial musing | No Comments »

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