Because folks in South Africa have limited or nonexistent Interweb access, these guys came up with a vending machine solution to make Open Source Software more accesible. The Freedom Toaster will burn a CD or DVD (that you provide) containing your favorite Linux distro (and some other OSS), hot and fresh, and at no cost to you. What a cool idea!

Excellent paper that is not just relevant to security, but also software design in general.

Check this satellite image of a mammoth oil tanker on Google Sightseeing. Scary to think what these birds can see that we don’t know about.

Whelp, my stuff is back online again. I decided to upgrade from Redhat 9 to Fedora Core 4. Instead of migrating everything, I decided to start from scratch. After researching, I figured I would be better off in the long run re-installing. I had a lot of fluff on this box that I needed to do away with, plus I was afraid it would take me longer to fix everything after upgrading as opposed to rebuilding. Now, I’m running the latest versions of Wordpress, Postfix, etc. (yippee!!!). The process was really not as bad as I was expecting, mainly because I had been using rsnapshot to do my backups to an external usb drive. “Piece-o-cake” to get any old config info from my backup. I highly recommend rsnapshot.

The main problem that I had getting everything going again was SELinux. I kept getting weird “permission denied” errors with Postfix as well as SquirrelMail. It was easy to fix once I figured out the culprit. It seems that if there are problems like this caused by SELinux, they are not logged (at least not by default in FC4) in any of the logs in /var/log. I ended up discovering the problem only by strace‘ing Postfix.

Being a huge fan of Foo Fighters, I bought their newest album In Your Honor a few weeks back. I did notice that it had a label on it that stated that the CD was ‘copy-protected’, whatever that means. I read this story about how the record companies have decided to implement yet another bonehead DRM scheme on several new CD releases. The DRM on my Foo Fighters CD is really non-existant if you use Linux. I had no problems ripping IYH to mp3s, just like any other CD that I have. What’s the point of DRM again?