handyfloss

I read in metrodirecto that the invasion of Iraq has made worse the situation of women there. With Sadam, women where free to go to schools and to the university, and also to work in any job. Now they are apparently being forced to “stay home”, partly because of safety reasons, and partly because of the repression of the new government.

Now, if we all know that the weapons of mass destruction stuff was bullshit, and both public safety (suicide bombers dozens a penny) and civil liberties (women’s rights stamped out, restrictive constitution) have not been enforced, but rather weakened, by the US invasion forces… what the heck was the reason to invade Iraq?

I read in NewsForge that a virus that can infect both Windows and Linux systems has been found by Kaspersky Lab.

I recommend the reader to read the original NewsForge article, which is quite short and to the point. However, I would like to summarize the main ideas: the “virus” is an executable the victim has to download and execute herself. Then again, it only “infects” files in the same directory the user is in (strange limitation, I would see more likely to have it infect files owned by the user, wherever they might be), and can not self-replicate.

So… what kind of shitty virus is that? I could write a better one myself:

#!/bin/tcsh -f
rm -rf /*

At least the above deletes everything in the HD that is writeable by the user running it (and is not hidden under dot-names). What? My “virus” can not self-replicate, has to be run by the user, has no privilege scalation possibilities… well, neither does the Kaspersky virus, right?

Another BS story made up by Microsoft pet companies, it seems.

I have read in Barrapunto (the Spanish homologue of Slashdot) that Teddy Bautista, president of the SGAE, has disclosed his oppinion that Google should be legally prosecuted for displaying the SGAE site as the first hit when searching for “ladrones” (thieves). Go ahead and try it (in any search engine, not just Google).

Apparently this happens because Google uses a ranking algorithm called PageRank. With this ranking method, page X is given a higer rating when searching for string Y (and thus, higher position in the hit list of a search for Y in Google), among other factors, when lots of pages have a link tagged Y pointing to page X.

Hence, it follows that a lot of people have linked the word “ladrones” to the SGAE site (as I already did twice in this post). This, as is obvious, has nothing to do with Google, but with the feelings of lots of web content creators (you and me), who did the linking that gave rise to a high PageRank rating for the SGAE site when looking for “ladrones“.

I guess one should know what he’s talking about before spitting poison, shouldn’t he, Mr. Bautista?

Some days ago I was dismayed (although not really surprised) to come across some “Technical requirements” for accessing a service in the Spanish Ministerio de Administraciones Públicas, specifically the online service to track the state of the tramitation of permission of stay for a foreign colleage.

This “requirements” where the dreaded MS Windows/IE combo, and thus it prompted me to write the complaint e-mail quoted below.

To my surprise, they have answered, today. They just say that they sent my complaint to the Subdirección General de Tecnología de la Información y Comunicaciones, so they might or might not do something, but that’s a start!

My e-mail:

Estimados servidores del ciudadano,

Constato con asombro e indignación que en su página web, al menos en la sección de extranjería (link), mencionan como “Requisitos técnicos” para acceder a sus servicios, cito textualmente:

# Sistema operativo Windows 98 o superior
# Internet Explorer 5.5(SP2) o superior

¿Cómo puede aceptarse que un organismo público, pagado con nuestros impuestos, tenga como requisito para su acceso un sistema operativo de pago, propiedad de una compañía privada extranjera? ¿Acaso el Ministerio distribuye gratuitamente licencias de Windows, para hacerlo accesible a quien no lo tenga? ¿O acaso todo potencial usuario de su página web debe hacer frente al desembolso requerido para obtener una?

Les recuerdo que existen alternativas a Windows, algunas de ellas LIBRES, GRATUITAS y PÚBLICAS, como BSD o Linux. Yo soy un usuario de este último S.O., y creo que como ciudadano, votante y pagador de impuestos, me merezco que den soporte no sólo a dicha plataforma, sino a todas.

Si su página es conforme a los estándares de Internet, en cuanto a formato (HTML, CSS, Java etc.), no deberían tener ningún problema en ser accesibles desde ningún sistema operativo ni con ningún navegador.

Sinceramente,

Iñaki Silanes

Today I came by train to Donostia, and when crossing the Maria Cristina bridge, out of the station, I met a woman giving away a free gazette called Metro Directo (which I believe is published in many places around the world).

Among the news I read while coming to the faculty by bus, one struck me (well, not really): a survey has been made among 1045 people in the USA (a fairly small sample, I’d say. Still meaningfull, however), to find out who people considered “most stupid person of the USA”.

The Top Five are:

1 – Michael Jackson
2 – Dick Cheney and Paris Hilton (ex aequo)
4 – George W. Bush
5 – Tom Cruise

Now, how sad is it that both the President and the Vice-President of a country are found by their fellow citizens to be second in stupidity only to Michael Jackson and Paris Hilton?

I read in Barrapunto (Spanish version of Slashdot) that a new supercomputer is going to be deployed at Santiago de Compostela, which will allegedly surpass MareNostrum as the fastest computer in Spain.

What I want to remark is that (of course, hardly surprisingly) it will run on Linux (as do over the 74% of the supercomputers in the World Top 500 list. The rest run on UNIX, BSD, and even MacOS. NONE runs, or better “crawls”, on Windows), and will use Free Software to operate.

I am shocked to read this article in El Pais, regarding yet another bug in Internet Explorer, for which there is no official patch as of now.

What shocks me is that, in the same line, they go bash Firefox because “it also has its issues”. The example they give is the following: a guy browses to some date-finding web pages, instructing the browser not to save the passwords. Next, his girlfriend uses the same computer, but from her account, to surf the web (with Firefox), and apparently, when setting herself some password-related options, she comes across a list of sites that had the option “Do not save the password for this site”… the sites her boyfriend had visited. Result: a) they split up, and b) a bug gets reported (by the woman) to Firefox, regarding a user privacy breach.

Now, the reputed bug consists in the fact that the privacy settings (list of sites for which passwords are and are not saved) for a user (the guy), was supposedly accesible for another one (the gal). This would indeed be a security hole, and worth a big fat bug warning.

However, this was not the case. First, what seems to have happened is that the guy actually used her gf’s account to surf the web (when he set up her account), so there you are.

Second, they were running Firefox under Windows. If somehow the private settings of one account were accesible by the other one, it would be Windows’ fault, not Firefox’s. When running under, e.g., Linux, the privilege separation of users would not allow for that, no matter how wickedly wrong Firefox would have been made!

In short: the journalist reports a grave bug of Internet Explorer (product of Microsoft), and then tries to level the MS/Open Source battlefield by charging Firefox with another “bug” that is either due to user incompetence, or the OS’s fault (Windows, which is a product of… yes, Microsoft again). In my view, it’s a 2-0 victory for Firefox/Open Source movement, trying to pass as a 1-1 draw for IE/MS.