Archive for the 'General' Category

Polish Protests Put ACTA ‘On Hold’ | TorrentFreak

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

“I share the opinions of those who from the beginning said that consultations were not complete,” Tusk said, according to a report in Wirtualna Polska. The 54-year-old prime minister added that a Polish rejection of ACTA is now on the table, and admitted that he had previously approached the agreement from a “20th century” perspective, [...]

Software as a social concern

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

Our society teaches people to judge programs solely based on practical convenience. To ask: – How easy to use is it? – How reliable? – How efficient? – What does it cost? And to ignore more important, deeper questions, like: – If I use this program, what does it do to my freedom? – What [...]

Microsoft to add Antivirus to Windows 8

Monday, November 21st, 2011

This is a good thing. All current antivirus vendors are snake-oil salesmen. A team of security experts working for the OS vendor itself should be responsible for this. Mind you, it is Microsoft, so the implementation will be horrendous and half baked. But it’s still a good idea on paper, and it’ll be as effective [...]

A Day In the Life of Privacy

Sunday, October 16th, 2011

“Everyday we Make Compromises in the Face of Privacy, and None of us Have as Much Privacy as we Want.” This article paints a pretty good picture of the various ways in which new technologies pry into our personal lives in ways most people don’t suspect. New products and technologies are adopted every day by consumers [...]

Pre-#Occupied

Sunday, October 16th, 2011

The message behind #Occupy Wall Street, a movement against social inequality which has spawned clones in cities around the world, appears quite multi-tonal. Ask any individual protester and you’ll receive, seemingly, a different set of reasons this is taking place. There are a lot of reasons, even now, that people would want to get up [...]

GNU Grub 1.99 Released

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

GNU Grub 1.99 has been released and includes a long list of enhancements over its preceding version. I’ve been using its beta and release candidate versions for the past two years to boot my GNU/Linux systems directly with /boot on LVM and MD RAID, and it’s been flawless at doing that. GRUB is of course [...]

HOWTO: Free Up Resources under Ubuntu Server

Sunday, May 8th, 2011

Ubuntu Server ships with a few expensive (memory, CPU, disk) periodic processes which are quite unneeded and suck up precious resources on Amazon EC2: apt-get remove landscape-client apt-get remove consolekit apt-get remove update-motd apt-get remove update-notifier-common apt-get autoremove Reclaimed 20% of my RAM right away – also, CPU and swap usage dropped like a stone. [...]

Disabling Ubuntu’s new Mac-like menubar

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

Ubuntu 11.04′s new menubar is a user interface disaster. Here’s one way I’ve found to turn it off: echo ‘unset UBUNTU_MENUPROXY’ >> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/81noappmenu You can also probably remove /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80appmenu, but a package update will put it back.

Geek Odyssey – Online Filesystem Expansion using the Linux Storage Stack

Friday, April 29th, 2011

/dev/mapper/vg01–vol1-storagepool1                      2.7T  2.0T  579G  78% /export root@localhost:~# mdadm –add /dev/md3 /dev/sdf1 root@localhost:~# mdadm –grow /dev/md3 –raid-devices=4 root@localhost:~# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md3 : active raid5 sdf1[3] sdi1[2] sdg1[0] sdh1[1] 1953519872 blocks super 0.91 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU] [>....................] reshape = 0.2% (2396040/976759936) finish=1458.9min [...]

Dropbox Dupes.

Monday, April 18th, 2011

https://www.dropbox.com/terms#privacy Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement Requests; Protection of Dropbox’s Rights. We may disclose to parties outside Dropbox files stored in your Dropbox and information about you that we collect when we have a good faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) comply with a law, regulation or compulsory legal request; (b) [...]