lix blog

It all started as a discussion on security. I’ve never considered this an issue of importance before, even as an avid computer user. But it was made clear to me that the world is changing and apparently not in the “right” direction. Eager to get out of my shell of microsoftian comfort, I decided to try GNU/Linux, when Lx kindly offered to install it for me. He guided me through the process like the patient “older brother” (note that I purposely didn’t use “big brother”) teaching the younger sister how to ride a bike. Which is why my old windows OS was kept intact in a different hard drive. Kind of giving me a “safety” feeling, like those little wheels on kid’s bikes. I needed the reassurance that my computer world as I knew it, was still going to be available for me, two clicks away. It wasn’t difficult to get on the road of open software this way. And the curious thing is that I haven’t accessed my “little wheels” (the windows hard drive) ever since I got the new one cause I don’t seem to need it. I can ride smoothly on the GNU/Linux and it has that “cool toy” aura to it. But it is important that I could do everything I needed to, and remarked that some things work even better now! (like video chatting and the general performance of my computer). So far, I don’t miss anything (beyond some unimportant shortcut and some spanish character) and I’m overall quite happy with the change. I had prejudices, like most people, because we tend to think that things are to be valued by their price, rather than by their nature. Like most people, I too thought that open software “can’t” offer enough because it’s free. As if there was an intrinsic correlation between high price and high quality. Reality dictates this is a fallacy that we choose to ignore.

That’s all for now. I’ll continue my quest of riding GNU/Linux and sharing my experiences with all of you who want to read about it.

Links:
GNU/Linux Ubuntu
GNU Project
Linux Newbie Guide
GNU/Linux Ubuntu Forum

… ouch!

Christian Kienle just found a disturbing privacy issue affecting Preview.app. If you wanna see a demonstration simply watch his video. He’s making this issue public so that every user can find out about it and is able to prevent bad things from happening with their (private) data.

“Neger. Für uns “Weisse” spielen aufgrund unserer Erziehung Neger häufig eine geheimnisvolle, oftmals auch erotische Rolle. Sie stehen für Hitze, Leidenschaft, Rhythmus. Der Neger in Ihrem Traum ist deshalb vielleicht als Hinweis auf verborgene Wünsche aus dem Triebbereich zu deuten.”

Quelle: Buch über Traumdeutungen.

“Nigger. For us “white” people Negro play, due to our raising, a mysterious and often erotic role. They stand for heat, passion, rhythm. The Negro in your dream therefore might be interpreted as an indication to hidden desires of the driving area.”

Source: Book about the interpretation of dreams

Lx *3. September 1976

“How can such a pretty wife make such a bad coffee?”
“Honey! You killed the petunia!” – “You admit? You’re coffee really is murder!”

host:~ user$ wget http://193.198.207.6/wiki/file/xyz/z.gpg
host:~ user$ gpg -d z.gpg > z_encrypted.7z #Passphrase: "ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#"
host:~ user$ 7z x z_encrypted.7z

… then further (in this case extracting cables from “Embassy Lilongwe”):

cat cables.csv | grep -i "Embassy Lilongwe" | grep "^\"" | awk -F "," '{print $1}' > malawicables_numbers.txt
cat malawicablenumbers.txt | awk '{print "grep -A 999 \"^\\\""$1"\" cables.csv | sed \"/^\\\"$\/,\/$d\/d\" > MalawiCables_"$1".csv"}' | sh

[Update 4th September 2011]
To visualise the cable data, one could use cable2graph. (Source: Annalist. – Thanks, Fefe.)

Result: Malawi Cables

… =^.^=

References:
Cryptome
BoingBoing
PasteBin

«A man is a man and not a man,
A cow is meat,
A tiger is a tiger»
– Pseudonym –

Image: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Che Guevara

… and where’s actually Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed remaining?

Heres an excellent documentary by ARTE in french and german: The streets of terror from 1979 to 2001

… ouch!
“Wikileaks: Guardian journalist negligently published password to unredacted cables (Update: Guardian denies)”

… ouch that one hurts:
“WikiLeaks Sues the Guardian Over Leak”

… nooo!! don’t hit me again, I’m bleeding!
“The decrypted file is “z.7z,” 368MB, which unzips to “cables.csv,” about 1.7GB in size, dated 4/12/2010″

… perfidy? – Gimme a break!
Wikileaks wirft OpenLeaks-Gründer “Niedertracht” vor

Julian! Daniel! Stop this fucking act of deception and heteronomous self-distruction!