Back in 2006 Ross Anderson (Professor of Security Engineering at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory) announced on his blog that he had published the full contents of the first edition of his book “Security Engineering
Now the second edition of Security Engineering
Well, I asked for feedback on putting adverts on the previously and got all positive responses, so I’ve now activated Google AdSense text-only adverts using the excellent no-adverts-for-friends WordPress plugin.
So, if you don’t like adverts, just leave an appropriate comment somewhere and you won’t see them. Either that or use Firefox and the great Adblock Plus plugin!
If for some reason you want to see adverts after leaving a comment I’m afraid you’ll need to go and delete any cookies for www.csamuel.org from your browser first.
Westall Secondary School in Clayton South, Melbourne, has started using KDE under KUbuntu Linux to allow them to replace the 3.0GHz Intel PC’s they were using with older 2.1GHz PC’s, extending their lives and avoiding landfill. The systems use KDE’s Kiosk framework to let the staff lock down the systems for their library system. The 3.0GHz machines released from this role will be going back into the main school for teaching duties there.
In explaining why the school went for Kubuntu, Stefyn said the students responded well to CDs put out by the Ubuntu project. Many had tried Ubuntu at home, which led to a decision to provide a familiar working environment at the school as well.
They got help both directly from Peter Lieverdink and also from the Linux Users of Victoria. They are also encouraging students to experiment with Linux, with old PC’s as a prize:
During our last hardware cleanout, we challenged the students to create the best Linux install and customization, and the winners would get to keep the hardware once it was decommissioned.
and all that apparently unnecessary desktop bling helps to get attention, according to the schools IT manager and teacher:
The kids were rapt with Compiz Fusion and this scored magic brownie points, because even the magical Vista couldn’t compete with the graphics. This was a great step into having them explore the other functionalities of Linux
Great stuff!
So Jeff Waugh has announced the “Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report” has been published as a PDF (( or you can buy a hardcopy version )), hopefully the first of many.
Come and see what Open Source really does for Australia!
Our conservative projection of earnings suggests that the Open Source industry generates $500 million in revenue each year, with over 50% of that being directly related to Open Source.
The report is covered by a CC license:
The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report is published as a freely downloadable PDF on the Census project website and is redistributable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives license.
Ed Felten has posted two articles describing bugs in New Jersey’s electronic voting systems. Briefly, the total votes for all of the candidates add up to more than the number of votes the machines believe were cast.
The voting machine company, Sequoia, has proffered an explanation of the bug, but Ed Felten points out in his second article that one of the tapes now analysed shows this to be inadequate as the total number of votes is more than the “public counter” which is the voting machines own total of the count. He writes:
Each machine has a “public counter” that keeps track of how many votes were cast on the machine in the current election. The public counter, which is found on virtually all voting machines, is one of the important safeguards ensuring that votes are not cast improperly. […]
The public counter is important enough that the poll workers actually sign a statement at the bottom of the tape, attesting to the value of the public counter.
Unfortunately..
The public counter says 105, even though 106 votes were reported. That’s a big problem.
Oops..
Get it while it’s hot folks, the brand new shiny WordPress 2.5 is now up for people to grab!
Just upgraded here from RC2 to the release version – please let me know if you find anything that has broken.
OK, now running 2.5 RC2. You know the usual drill – please comment, blog with a trackback or email about problems!
After the previous benchmark of btrfs I thought it’d be interesting to revisit ZFS using FUSE under Linux, so after updating to the current tip (02d648b1676c) in the Mercurial trunk I created a 30GB LVM volume for testing and gave it a go. Now you can’t compare it to previous results as this is completely different hardware, but the numbers look quite respectable in comparison to the in-kernel file systems tested yesterday.
Well I’ve just completed an amazingly painless upgrade to the first release candidate ofWordPress 2.5, the only thing that caught me out was an old functions.php file left over from a previous release that caused a PHP5 error about redefining a function!
There’s bound to be some hidden breakage that I’ve not yet spotted, so leave a comment (if you can) or drop me an email as chris (at-the-domain) csamuel.org with the details please.
Update: After a few days of playing around with it I’ve got to say I like it the new admin interface. I’m finding it much easier to navigate and compared to the other WP 2.3 sites I admin the dashboard seems a lot less cluttered and that ever-so-subjective word, “clean”.
The only niggle I’ve got so far is that now in the widgets view you can only see the one column of widgets at a time, so if you’re using a 3 column theme (as the current one here is) you can no longer move a widget directly from one column to another. But I can live with that.
Just a quick update to explain the lack of commits to SVN recently!
I’ve found that Vacation does not handle folded RFC2822 headers correctly (at all in fact) and so I’ve been working on fixing that.
In the process I’ve come across a rather nice dual license BSD/GPL string library called bstrlib (http://bstring.sourceforge.net/) and I’ve started converting Vacation over to it as it both promises to make life easier for me and safer for you (it has far better security than the standard C string functions).
Current state of play is that my new code for reading email headers seems to work in a test harness and I’ve now got to start porting all the old code over to using it.
It’s a non-trivial update but one that I believe is well worth doing.