Schneier has a wonderful link to FixAVote.com - election consultants
He questions whether it is a hoax or not, but it is hard to say…
Monthly Archive for October, 2006
So I had to fill out a tax return a few months ago as I had done some self-employed work over the summer. I probably could have got away with not bothering, but didn’t really want to try cheating the tax man. As it turned out I got a refund anyway (don’t ask me how though).
In order to use the online system, I had to get a online government ID, which can also be used for many more things. For the basic things you just need to register and they send you a registration code and userid by post (I don’t know if the address needs to match any other records, or how they verify it). I have now received an email from the national blood service saying that I can use the same site and ID to book donor appointments etc.
For the more complex parts of the site (I have no idea what that is though) you have to have a digital ID issued by verisign or a similar company. These are not particularly cheap though, but then neither are the ID cards the government wants us to pay for. I would rather have a digital certificate than an ID card, and then be able to use that certificate for all sorts of things. Voting for one could be done if everyone had a digital ID.
I have to wonder what else I can do through this site if I have a digital certificate. It would be nice if the government issued a digital ID along with the new ID cards, after all they will already have everything else about you in a database, why not allow you to save some time by using a digital ID to do things online
So after writing about setting up the wireless on my desktop, I now have got it working on my laptop. All it needed was the wpasupplicant package and the ipw2200 network driver (and of course the ieee80211 network stack), though I installed all those ages ago, so cannot remember what was involved, but I think they are in a standard kernel.
It wasn’t all that hard to get encryption working, though it does appear that my patch to wpa_supplicant does change the way it was intended to work. I am not sure if it is a general wpa_supplicant change, or a Debian specific change, but to launch wpa_supplicant I am supposed to use the “wext” driver, instead of the ipw one which relates to my network card.
This was in the Debian readme for wpa_supplicant, but I did spend a while trying to use the ipw driver in wpa_supplicant before finding it. For completeness, I have 2 of my config files below (the only ones needed in fact)
/etc/network/interfaces
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid ant-wifi
wpa-driver wext
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicanteapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1
network={
ssid="ant-wifi"
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
psk="****"
priority=2
}
The next stage will be trying to get the WPA-EAP/LEAP working at work. That WILL be more challenging
Slashdot pointed my to an article which summarises the long problem between Debian and Mozilla. Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed covers some of the basics behind the problem which is hard to believe.
The basic premise of the argument, which may stop Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird shipping in Debian, is that the logo’s for the software are trademarked, and hence are not free for anyone to use. Debian has a strict policy on what is included in a release, and non-free software just doesn’t make it. So Debian want to ship Firefox without the logo’s, but you can only call it Firefox if you use the logo’s. There are also problems with code changes to the software, as Debian often fixes problems, or changes the code slightly to make it fit into Debian better.
Essentially the Mozilla foundation don’t want to let Debian use the name Firefox without the logo’s and without checking the code changes (and even build options) first. At this rate, as Etch is supposed to ship around the end of the year, or early next year, Firefox will only appear in Debian under the name IceWeasel!
This should never have got this far. There must be a better way of working the problem out… All I can say is that if this continues, Firefox could have competition from IceWeasel, as the Debian packagers are really good at patching the Mozilla codebase.
I don’t know if it is the wpa encryption, or just the extra latency of wireless, but mplayer plays funnily over my new wireless lan.
I figured out how to make mplayer work mplayer -cache 4096 certainly made it work, but did mean several seconds longer startup as it had to cache another 4Mb of data before beginning playback. I could put that option in my mplayer config file and then I won’t have to type it, but it is not the proper solution. Really I want the mounted network filesystem to do some read ahead caching for the data, but I have no idea whether samba can do it (I certainly cannot find an option for it).
I suppose I could look at using nfs to share my files (this is between 2 linux machines after all) but have never done much with nfs, so don’t know if it will actually work any better.
Anyone know a samba option or used nfs much?
A lady goes to her priest one day and tells him, “Father, I have a problem. I have two female parrots, but they only know how to say one thing.”
“What do they say?” the priest inquired.
They say, “Hi, we’re hookers! Do you want to have some fun?”
“That’s obscene!” the priest exclaimed; then he thought for a moment. You know,” he said, “I may have a solution to your problem. I have two male talking parrots, which I have taught to pray and read the Bible. Bring your two parrots over to my house, and we’ll put them in the cage with Bill and Jacob. My parrots can teach your parrots to pray and worship, and your parrots are sure to stop saying that phrase in no time.”
“Thank you,” the woman responded, “this may very well be the solution.”
The next day, she brought her female parrots to the priest’s house. As he ushered her in, she saw that his two male parrots were inside their cage, holding rosary beads and praying. Impressed, she walked over and placed her parrots in with them. After a few minutes, the female parrots cried out in unison: “Hi, we’re hookers! Do you want to have some fun?”
There was stunned silence.
Shocked, one male parrot looked over at the other male parrot and exclaimed, “Put the beads away, Bill, our prayers have been answered.”
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