I just found The Crypto Project. This bit, from an interview with their representative Sir Valiance, needed to be quoted:

The Internet is the greatest creation of mankind and we cannot sit back and watch as the beautiful freedom it allows be stripped apart by the greedy, selfish, and power hungry individuals who which to control it. It is the duty of those who have the knowledge and ability, whether you are a developer, cryptographer, or security expert to protect that freedom, because if we don’t preserve it, there are those who will strip it away from us.

After about four years of no blogging, Gnu Girl seems to be back in the blogosphere, with a marvellous new theme! And some funky avatars for commenters (mine looked mostly like a pink sausage with curly hair but it matched the theme perfectly).

Welcome back!

What do people use to combat comment spam on Wordpress blogs these days? I used to use something called Spam Karma, which worked great but seems to have been discontinued. Since upgrading Wordpress a few months ago I use Akismet but it lets quite a few spam comments through.

What are the options? I refuse to resort to CAPTCHA or to require registration before commenting.

I Void Warranties

Originally uploaded by jonsson.

Seriously, I didn’t even think there was a warranty for Firefox?

The other day I did something really really stupid. I deleted all installed Linux kernels on my Kubuntu system. The result, of course, was that the system would not boot.

Why did I do this you might ask? I was about to upgrade from Kubuntu Lucid to Maverick and the installer complained that there was not enough free space on the relevant partition. Since I knew I had several kernels installed I figured I could just delete a few and the problem would go away. Whenever there is a kernel upgrade in Ubuntu, the new kernel is installed but the previous kernel is not automatically removed. Obviously this is a good thing, since it means that should the new kernel not work well on your system, you can just reboot with the previous kernel. However, in time you will have quite a few kernels taking up space, unless you manually do something about this. It was a good idea to remove a few. It was a bad idea to remove them all, which I accidentally did…

Since I have a non-standard setup with disk encryption and whatnot, and have less than 1337 skills, I spent the better part of a day salvaging my data and then installing the new system (which I was going to do anyway). So trust me, you do not want to delete all your kernels…

I just stumbled across the site GuitarBT today. The site distributes “backing tracks” submitted by users. Seems like a great idea, but obviously not quite legal when the songs are copyrighted. A backing track is simply a re-recording of a song without vocals and/or some of the instruments, in the case of GuitarBT typically without the guitar parts. Such a track is usefull for guitarists who can then instead play the guitar parts themselves, for fun and to improve their playing.

Unfortunately the site has just received a cease and desist letter from one of my favourite guitar players, Steve Vai. Well, it was from his lawyers of course but if they are acting by themselves he’s at least guilty of not keeping an eye on them.

I haven’t heard the backing tracks in question (I’m not quite ready to play Vai’s guitar parts anyway) but if they’re anything like the other tracks on the site then yes, they are most likely infringing on Vai’s copyright in the compositions. But why bother? Even if it’s suggested in the comments at GuitarBT that Vai plans to release backing tracks himself I cannot see these amateur creations (sorry guys, and remember, I haven’t heard them) competing with the real thing?

Waiting for Maiden, again

Originally uploaded by jonsson.

METAL!

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the world’s most popular free software license.

Yesterday was “Legal Day” with all the lawyers working on the national CC licenses. Today the public conference starts. A BIG thank you to all the people, and companies, who donated the money for the scholarships.

The Swiss Creative Commons licenses will be launched today at the Tweakfest in Zürich.

Congratulations Urs, and everyone else at CC Switzerland!