Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Free Internet for the masses?

Look out. It seems that the FCC's "free but censored internet" may be losing the "but censored" part:
Even though Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Kevin Martin is leaving in a matter of weeks, he still hopes to push through a major policy decision he’s been backing for months: One that would create a nationwide free wireless broadband network for use by all.

Until now, this ambitious proposal has met with resistance from everyone from incumbent wireless service providers such as T-Mobile USA, worried the new network would cause interference to its users to consumer advocacy groups, which have particularly objected to Martin’s idea of filtering adult content available on this public network. Well, in an interview published by Ars Technica on Dec. 29, Martin said that he has dropped his porn filtering idea in hopes of garnering more support for the open network proposal.
Unfortunately, the decision was not made because it's the right thing to do -- it was made because it would make it more popular and easier to support.

The end result, however, is the same -- making unrestricted and unfiltered access to the Internet, vital in this day and age to compete and to be able to communicate our ideas with the same ability as everyone else, just another public good.

The idea of being given access to all the Internet save the parts disapproved of by our government was hailed in some circles. Instead, if this measure passes, it'll be a strong blow to the same groups who promote a conservative Christian nanny-state.

Friday, December 26, 2008

Some suggestions for the Paranoid Linux

Alright... I'm hardly a UNIX guru, or even a UNIX initiate. Copyleft immediately strikes me as a danger sign in any software project: either they assumed the goodwill of the FSF without reading the GPL, or they read the GPL, understood it, and maliciously accepted it. But no matter what these guys did, you have to admit that their work is exciting and essential to the future: Paranoid Linux.

For the unfamiliar, Paranoid Linux is a once-fictional Linux distribution that is being made real. Designed for Chinese and Syrian dissidents, it's now being made real not to protect against second- and third-world dictators, but first-world conservative nanny states that want to ensure you're always following the Good way.

These are my humble suggestions to the project.

Damn Small Linux: Right now, the project is basing itself on one of the larger distros, Incognito Linux, which in turn is based off of Gentoo Linux, one of the largest, most bloated, all-the-toppings-deep-dish-with-extra-cheese distros out there. This will result in having to take a very large system and whittle it down.

In Little Brother, the book that inspired Paranoid Linux, our protagonist mentions "you can run ParanoidLinux on just about anything." And when you want to get a machine running in as little memory as possible, you don't want to start from the top -- start from the bottom. The PL Wiki defines "a P1 MMX 200, with 128MB memory, a 7.5G hard drive, and an ATI Xpert98 video card" as being 'just about anything.' DSL, on the other hand, does this better -- a 486DX, 16 MB of ram (with 128MB, it can load the entire OS in memory, handy for zeroing out your entire session later), and run off a 64MB flash drive. It's the Windows 95 of the Linux world, except that it's actually still supported and still useful.

Running off a tiny flash drive should be a priority. Reporters that won't be able to bring computers, cameras, or even notebooks into a country won't be prevented from having their watch, multitool, eraser, batteries, pens, or the like. The entire 'loading once into ram on install' thing would be handy, too, as it'd extend the life of your flash drive or even let you remove the drive after boot, leaving no physical evidence visible that the machine was booted any way but normally.

Of course, I'm biased because DSL includes Fluxbox by default, one of the few Linux WMs I actually like.

XPde: I'm aware that this is the red-headed stepchild of the Linux desktop environment world, but hear me out. Part of the goal of PL is stealth, being unnoticable in a world increasingly bent on noticing very hard what you're doing.

No matter what you do, eventually you're going to have someone looking over your shoulder. In the third world (where open-source software has very little penetration because there is no company to 'play ball' with the tin-pot dictators), XP and the like are basically the only options you have.

When the Morality Police comes by and sees your typical GNOME or Fluxbox desktop, they will be confused. A confused cop with absolute power will result in another dissident or reporter being jailed and disappearing. Instead, give them nothing to worry about -- use XPde and custom themes to make it appear like a standard XP install (yes, even with the eye-destroying Chiclet colors). This has the additional ability of being able to be dropped into most internet cafés on a single USB key.

(There are other distros . XPde is just one of the more mature projects that have been around for a while.)

This brings me to another point. Whenever possible, Paranoid Linux in action should not look like anything other than a standard Wintel box. In fact, I'd highly suggest that the words "Paranoid Linux" appear nowhere in the distro, in text or image form, or even in the iso's filename. Nothing about the program should tip off the untrained eye (or even the modestly trained but disinterested eye) that Paranoid Linux is designed to circumvent dictatorships.

Wireless 'burst' networking: I know it exists, I just don't know where... Create a network where your system isn't broadcasting for 90% of the time (99.9% of the time would be better); use encrypted 'burst' transmissions from wireless-enabled device to wireless-enabled device, passing the data along until it hits someone with a satellite uplink modem (or someone across the border with less restrictive laws). If you're not broadcasting, they can't find you.

Obviously this would be no good for regular internet browsing, much less anything more than a megabyte or so at a time, but as long as you're content with POP3 e-mail and Usenet -- the old-school keystones of social networking -- you'd have a basically invincible network for you and all your subversive buds to enjoy.

Kibitz: Not a program that exists that I know of, Kibitz is using the power of Turing-test-passing chatbots for a force of good. Basically, it's a chaff-dispenser. While you're doing things you don't want to be seen, Kibitz is quietly sitting in the background holding chats on big IRC networks. It'll talk about cars, relationships, cooking, the weather, reminiscing about school and bygone days... everything BUT the big three of religion, politics, and economy. Several 'personality' files (which can be randomized to make yours unique) ensure that each user running Kibitz has a different signature from other Kibitz users, so it can't be easily filtered.

While it normally runs minimized in the taskbar, you can full-screen it, both to amuse yourself with your bot's chattiness and to provide a cover for your real activities. And to keep users absolutely safe, messages that could be possibly disapproved of by the Morality Police (by human users wanting to be jerks) just won't be shown in full screen mode or kept in memory, so you can AFK with confidence.

And if you're really being evil, you could have a variant of Kibitz play World of Warcraft. Nothing says "burned-out lifeless internet otaku, move along" like seeing thousands of packets going to and from Blizzard servers.

Subversive files: This would really fall more into the lines of a seperate project, but while we're at it, we could help the revolution(s) along by giving them some reading material. Given a 16-GB flash drive (the most we can expect with today's technology), we can fit in full copies of Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikihow, and selections of Project Gutenberg, with all the software needed to read (and in the case of wikis, edit) them offline. Make sure to include some plain "fun" things to do, to promote the love of reading in people trapped in nations that restrict literature to religious purposes. Hmm... Twain, Paine, and Verne for the masses, anyone?

Welcome to the Daily Yiff

Welcome to the Daily Yiff. Let me clear two misconceptions:

1) It's not going to be daily. It's going to be catch-as-catch-can, as life permits.

2) It's not going to be about yiffing. The name was purely chosen because nothing else on the Internet had taken it yet.

3) It's going to be extremely liberal. I'm so far off the left wing (compared to US mainline liberal views) I need a parachute to compete in politics.

So welcome. Hopefully, you'll have fun and learn something.