Don’t panic about the possibility of Internet censorship here in Australia, here comes the cavalry!
The U.S. State Department has been given $15 Million by Congress to develop anti-censorship tools and services which could help Internet users breach electronic firewalls
So the announcement is up on the KDE website, Kubuntu has announced its packages and for the past week or so I’ve been running KUbuntu Hardy Heron (currently in alpha, will be 8.04) with it installed and trialing it with a “kde4” test user!
Not bad actually, the final release seems like a massive improvement over earlier versions and I’m not running into the killer bugs that I found previously (to much relief!). The new desktop effects in KDE4 work well with this Intel G33 graphics card (once I’d dropped the Xorg acceleration method back to the old XAA from EXA) and I must admit to being sorely tempted to try it out as my main desktop. I think I might create yet another user for that an experiment first though with a copy of my .kde files.. 🙂
Catching up on my backlog – a few weeks ago I received a letter saying:
13th December 2007
Dear Mr Samuel
On behalf of the Government and the people of Australia, I am delighted to advise that your application for Australian citizenship has been approved.
Yay! I’m going to be an Aussie (( well, OK, to be precise, a dual-national UK/Aussie ))!
Back in the middle of the year I decided that after having lived in Australia for almost 5 years it was about time to do the right thing and apply to be a citizen of my new home. I was hoping to get to vote in the 2007 general election, but changes in the process and travelling overseas meant that the interview that should have happened in September didn’t occur until the 7th December. So they moved pretty quickly from that to the approval! 🙂
I am still a PR (permanent resident) until I do the “Pledge of commitment” which will be some time in the next 6 months or so, but once that happens my PR visa will cease and I’ll need to get an Aussie passport to go with my UK one.
Update: Turns out that “in the next 6 months or so” is actually going to be this coming Australia Day, January 26th!
Some folks wonder why Christmas is on December 25th given there is absolutely no clue in the bible, so here’s a handy passage from Professor Ron Hutton’s (( Wikipedia entry )) excellent book “The Stations of the Sun
It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same 25 December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and revelries the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day
Now 354 CE is the earliest calendar (that of Philocalus) which gives that date, but Prof. Hutton goes on to point out that the pagan festival that Syrus mentions was just 80 years old then, hardly an ancient practice. He says:
It had apparently been decreed only in 274 CE, by the emperor Aurelian, as a major holy day of a new and syncretic state cult with the sun as its official chief deity.
This in turn was built upon the older Syrian “Unconquered Sun” cult, which had its major festival in late summer. I suppose that last bit makes it almost appropriate for Australia. 🙂
Ohio has published a report on an investigation into electronic voting machines, Wired reports on it, summarising one particular finding thus:
They found that a voter or poll worker with a Palm Pilot and no more than a minute’s access to a voting machine could surreptitiously re-calibrate the touch-screen so that it would prevent voters from voting for specific candidates or cause the machine to secretly record a voter’s vote for a different candidate than the one the voter chose. Access to the screen calibration function requires no password, and the attacker’s actions, the researchers say, would be indistinguishable from the normal behavior of a voter in front of a machine or of a pollworker starting up a machine in the morning.
…and if you think that’s bad enough, then here’s an interesting comment from a collection of complaints about voting in Florida in 2006 that were assembled after an FOI request:
Vote for one candidate registered as vote for different candidate
Upon opening ballot for first time voter saw “x” by Katherine Harris’s name though voter had not touched screen yet.
So the machines are quite capable of getting things wrong without a malicious attack (well, assuming that wasn’t the cause in the above events).
So, who would you like to win today ?
(Via Bruce Schneier)
Condiments of the seasoning to all!
Donna and I have been flat out recently (still are I guess given it’s gone 1am and we’re both still up!), which is why things have been so quiet here.. Still, we’re both doing well and very much appreciating all the rain we’ve had, the garden is loving it!
I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas…
In July I was commissioned to write an article for LinuxWorld called “Emerging Linux Filesystems” which they published in early September in three parts. Part of the deal was that there was a 90 day exclusivity period for them before I could republish it elsewhere, which has now lapsed.
So you can now read the article in its original (single page) form complete with inline images and graphs and covering Ext4, NILFS, btrfs, Reiser4, ChunkFS and ZFS under both FUSE on Linux and OpenSolaris. Enjoy!
My thanks to Don Marti of LinuxWorld for commissioning (and paying for) the article and to Dragan Dimitrovici of Xenon Systems for the loan of the test system!
Finally, a change of government here!
Now it’s just a question of whether John Howard will loose his seat as well.. 🙂
Marshall Kirk McKusick and the “Unix Heritage Society” have released a 4 CD set that contains, amongst other treasures, a complete set of the various BSD UNIX releases ever done, from 1BSD through to 4.4BSD (both regular and “lite” (sic) versions).
The whole set costs just under USD $100..
The government of the Republic of South Africa has published (( on the RSA Open Source Software in Government website )) the latest version (4.1) of its Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) for Information Systems in Government, which now includes ODF as their document format:
The main thrust of the framework (in line with international best practice), is the adoption of a structured approach with regard to information systems. To achieve this approach, and to ensure the enhancement of interoperability across Government, a minimum set of standards are included in this document as a required Government-wide standard. To this end, this updated version of MIOS contains an explicit definition of Open Standards as well as the inclusion of the ISO (International Standards Organisation) Open Document Format.
It also says that they will consider open source software favourably for their IT systems:
In developing open information systems, open source based solutions are to be considered before proprietary ones
This is expanded upon in their new Policy on Free and Open Source Software use for South African Government, which codifies it as:
1) The South African Government will implement FOSS unless proprietary software is demonstrated to be significantly superior. Whenever the advantages of FOSS and proprietary software are comparable FOSS will be implemented when choosing a software solution for a new project. Whenever FOSS is not implemented, then reasons must be provided in order to justify the implementation of proprietary software.
2) The South African Government will migrate current proprietary software to FOSS whenever comparable software exists.
3) All new software developed for or by the South African Government will be based on open standards, adherent to FOSS principles, and licensed using a FOSS license where possible.
4) The South African Government will ensure all Government content and content developed using Government resources is made Open Content, unless analysis on specific content shows that proprietary licensing or confidentiality is substantially beneficial.
5) The South African Government will encourage the use of Open Content and Open Standards within South Africa.
They are also being reassuringly pragmatic about it, rather than dogmatic, as the justification says:
This is not to say that FOSS/OC solutions are currently available or appropriate in every situation or for every user, a reality accommodated in the revised policy.
So, all in all, quite a positive outcome!