Log

Free Speech. Why is it important? Because it's an extension of Free Thought. Should we be able to think whatever the hell we want? Yes we should. Controlling Free Speech is about nothing more than controlling Free Thought. "You're not allowed to say this, because somebody might not agree with it. You're not allowed to say that, because somebody might feel hurt by it". What they're really trying to do is control what you can think. Trying to generate a "mindset", a "zeitgeist". Brainwashing is more like it. Well, fuck that. I'll think about whatever the hell I want and as long as I'm thinking it, I'll be saying it.

So fuck the Dutch government for trying to outlaw Free Thought, and keep on publishing cartoons showing Mohammed, wearing t-shirts implying cops are corrupt (which they are), making Death-Threat Raps and telling the public about how the politicians are the real terrorists. Remember that little rhyme you used to use when you were a kid? "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"? Guess what? Kids are smarter than our police, politicians, religious fanatics and the whole government. Grow the fuck up.

This country is going to shit. Time to move to Cuba, where you're allowed more freedoms these days.

I just finished writing an article for my blog. It took me most of the evening. Researching, writing, proof-reading, rewriting, linking to articles, etc. I click save, and only one-third of the article shows up in WordPress. The rest? Gone. Hours of my hard work? Gone. Careful proof-reading, rewriting, analysis, unbiasing, rereading? Gone.

THANK YOU WORDPRESS, YOU PIECE OF SHIT SOFTWARE!

I'm guessing it's wordpress' auto-save functionality. This isn't the first time this has happened (it happened about six times so far, always with articles that I spent the most time on), but it will be the last. This will be the last article I ever write using WordPress. I hate the product, and from now on, I will use every means at my disposal to discredit it as a useful piece of software.

WordPress sucks, and you shouldn't use it! Spread the word people!!

I'm starting a conversion of my blog to MvBlog tomorrow.

Customers (as well as business partners, prospects, etc) are not:

• Aliens
• Humour impaired
• Poisonous
• Unreasonable
• Inhuman
• Somehow invulnerable to the same problems we all face in day to day business.

Even if they're wearing suits!

According to many, Wikipedia's biggest problem is that it can't be trusted because anybody can edit it. Personally, I feel that the problem is that experts are allowed to edit it.

Hypercholesterolemia
Conditions with elevated concentrations of oxidized LDL particles, especially "small dense LDL" (sdLDL) particles, are associated with atheroma formation in the walls of arteries, a condition known as atherosclerosis, which is the principal cause of coronary heart disease and other forms of cardiovascular disease. In contrast, HDL particles (especially large HDL) have been identified as a mechanism by which cholesterol and inflammatory mediators can be removed from atheroma. Increased concentrations of HDL correlate with lower rates of atheroma progressions and even regression. The relation of cholesterol to CHD, termed the "lipid hypothesis," is still hotly debated.

This is from the article on Cholesterol – from the 'clinical significance' section. I mean, really, is there anybody who hasn't got a PhD in biology that understands all this? All I want to hear is if/why cholesterol is bad for you. 'Hypercholesterolemia'?? Why not just say 'high blood cholesterol'?

Now, this is one of the easier articles (I picked it because I happened to have it opened in my browser), but there are tons out there that are a million times more complicated. (for instance, check out this section which has no introduction and almost no explanation. Compare it to the section before it, which is much better). That's the problem with experts: they tend to lose sight of the overview and can only focus on details. But Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a textbook on transfinite recursion.

Then again, Wikipedia hasn't been an encyclopaedia for a long time. Wikipedia's is quickly becoming the largest collection of human knowledge there is. It's got information on traditional encyclopaedic topics, movies, books, comics, everything. I guess having all this information available in one place is better than not having it available at all or having it available in a million different places.

Come to think of it.. Wikipedia is what the Internet should have been: A big collection of information. The Internet, instead, has become something entirely different: A big collection of advertisements. I guess Wikipedia isn't so bad.

The ANGRY Whopper, with ANGRY onions and ANGRY jalapenos!

Hey, BurgerKing?! Your ANGRY advertisement just caused you to loose an ANGRY customer. Angry onions? Spare me. There's no way this ad wasn't made up by an American advertisement company. Well, guess what? I don't like companies making me feel stupid when buying their products, so I'll never buy one of your products again.

Hof veroordeelt bedreiger Balkenende tot celstraf.

Ik vraag me af waarom deze man wel celstraf krijgt, en iemand als Theo Maassen, die toch ook zo'n beetje heel de wereld al heeft bedreigd met de dood, niet. Lekker kieskeurigheid weer in Nederland. "Straf optreden, zolang we maar geen slechte publiciteit krijgen!". Want het is natuurlijk meer dan duidelijk dat Theo Maassen alleen maar vrijheid van meningsuiting vertoont, maar dat deze man een werkelijk grooootte bedreiging vormt voor Balkenende..

Als het zo door gaat in Nederland met de burgerrechten, dan zou het me niet verbazen, noch spijten, als er eens een paar mensen omgebracht worden. Balkenende moet dood, omdat zijn kapsel me niet bevalt. Zo, eens kijken of ze ook achter mij aankomen; heb gehoord dat het goed vertoeven is in zo'n gevangenis. Gratis eten; beetje tv kijken, en als ze je slecht behandelen, dan zoek je gewoon even de media op. Helemaal top.

Nederland holt achteruit. Nog even, en het is hier net zo gesteld met de burgerrechten als in die fijne U.S. of A.

Dutch minister of Justice, Hirsch Ballin, is being pressured by dutch christian and labour parties to force Dutch ISP's to start censoring the Internet:

A translation of the dutch NU.nl article:

AMSTERDAM – The NOS [Dutch Broadcasting Institute] on friday reports that a majority of the Dutch parlement have demanded that internet providers be forced to block child pornograpy.

Currently, providers have the freedom to cooperate with blocking activities, but they are not required to. The Korps Landelijke Politiediensten [red; Dutch National Police Corps] keeps a list of websites that spread child pornography, which ISPs can use to filter. The UPC cablecompany is the only one currently using the list.

The CDA [red; Christian Democrats], the ChristenUnie and the PvdA [red; labour party] parties have demanded that minister Hirsch Ballin forces ISP to start blockin child pornorgraphy, according to the NOS. The topic has been a long-running point of discussion between Hirsch Ballin and Internet providers.

First off, I'd like to explain that I am NOT AT ALL for child pornography or anything of the sorts. That said, censorship is never the solution to a problem. If you're thinking 'But what about..', NO! Censorship is never, ever the solution to a problem.

Now, who is this blocking of child pornography supposed to help (or stop)? There are only three possible answers: The children, the people trying to get their hands on child pornography or the people who accidentally stumble upon child pornography. Does this solution really help any of these parties? No. Children featured in child pornography are already hurt, so it doesn't help them. Paedophiles looking for child pornography aren't going to be stopped by this blocking. They'll simply use any of the existing routing networks such as Tor, which don't allow blocking, or they'll find some proxy in a foreign country. The only party it might help are people not actively looking for child pornography but who see it by accident. But come on, have you ever encountered child pornography by accident?

A big problem with this kind of blocking is that it is about fighting symptoms instead of causes. We shouldn't be blocking this content; we should be prosecuting the people hosting it and those that are actively looking for it. By blocking child pornography you run the risk of hiding the actual problem. It appears as if something is actively being done about child pornography, but the problem is still there; except now it's hidden from the public's view. And paedophlies? Where will they go for their needs? Underground, perhaps, making them harder to trace? Or will they simply create their own supply, harming even more children in the progress?

Another problem is that once you start censoring, where do you stop? Right now, the Dutch government is planning on blocking child pornography, terrorist sites and sites with content possibly useful to terrorists (bomb-making manuals, etc). Next up? Who knows? Sites presenting views our government doesn't agree on (anti-religion, discriminating sites, right-wing, left-wing)? Where does it stop? As we all should know, when looking at history, it won't stop anywhere. The entry barrier to censoring is high, but after that it's just like dancing: Getting on the dance floor and making the first step is hard, but after that, all bets are off.

And something that hasn't been discussed by our government is: Who monitors the monitors? Right now, there are no plans for actually making anybody accountable for what gets on the censoring list and what doesn't. Smells ripe for abuse to me.

So we're looking at a system that won't actually help anybody. A system which, in fact, will do more harm than it'll do good. A system that's open to abuse and can only lead to an uncontrollable, unmonitored system.

Sounds like another good idea by our government to 'think of the children!!'.

NU.nl reports about a (English) Report about the safety of the web. In it, CA reports:

Browsers are one of the most commonly used applications today. Many people believe that Mozilla Firefox is more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer, but their vulnerabilities are on par. In the first half of 2007, NIST reported 52 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer of which half were medium or high severity. And there were 53 vulnerabilities reported in Firefox of which almost half were medium or high severity.

The numbers are climbing. In 2006, 96 vulnerabilities were reported in Internet Explorer and 103 reported in Firefox.

Even less popular browsers have more security holes. More than double the vulnerabilities have been reported in the Opera browser. NIST reports 14 vulnerabilities this year versus seven last year, and more than half of this year vulnerabilities are medium or high severity.

Apple Safari has 19 newly reported vulnerabilities this year nearly twice the number reported last year, and half of them are medium or high severity.

When will researchers understand that the number of vulnerabilities reported / fixed are not a good way to determine how secure an application is? The problem is either that these people don't understand software development, or that these people wish to backup their pre-determined claims with hard evidence, so they start looking at reported vulnerabilities. It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. There are way too many variables not accounted for:

• First off, where are the sources for their data? They only mention NIST, but no criteria they looked at at all. This immediately invalidates their findings.
• They look at 'reported' vulnerabilities, but these are third-party reports. Does NIST only reports vulnerabilities listed in the application's release notes?
• Do these statistics include reported, but unfixed bugs? Firefox maintains an open bug reporting facility where every user can report bugs. Not all of those vulnerabilities may have been fixed. Are those included in the statistics? If so, how can they compare those reports against the reports done on a closed bugtracking system such as IE, Safari and Opera?
• Where is the proper trend analyses? "In 2006, 96 vulnerabilities were reported". Trend analyses should be done over multiple years, IMHO.
• What were the severities of the reported/fixed vulnerabilities? For all we know, IE had 100 minor problems that were only exploitable when the moon was full and it was friday the 13th, but Firefox had 50 extremely severe vulnerabilities.
• What are the sources for the severities? The vendor? Hardly reliable information, as vendors like to downplay their own vulnerability's severity.
• The report doesn't take in account the user-base of the products. Nobody uses Firefox, Safari and Opera, whereas everybody uses Internet Explorer. That makes it a much bigger target for black-hat exploiters. No, it doesn't say anything about the security of a product from a technical point of view, but it does from a practical point of view.
• The report mentions, briefly, the security of third-party browser plugins such as Flash, Java, etc. But they make no relation to the different browsers. Firefox has a very easy to install and use Flash / Java blocker. It also has a very good Javascript blocker. Javascript is probably the number one source of vulnerabilities in Firefox. Since it's not installed by default, I can understand they don't focus on this, but at least the security potential for Firefox is higher because of this.
• No mention is made about ActiveX. ActiveX only works on Internet Explorer and is a HUGE contributor to security vulnerabilities.
• One of the most important things: Reality! People like to ignore it (which I can understand), but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. How many vulnerabilities have actually led to exploits in the wild?

In defence of CA, their report doesn't specifically say that Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or whatever is more secure than the other. They just imply it. As usual, media outlets are twisting the view on reports in order to make for better news and scare-mongering.

"This will be the year of Linux on the desktop!". This has been the topic of tech-predicting articles on the web since at least 2001. It's been repeated (and proved wrong) so many times, it's even become an Internet meme. But ladies and gentlemen, rejoice. For the year of Linux on the desktop has arrived! I have witnessed it with my own eyes. How do I know? Because my 60-year old mom is using Ubuntu on her new laptop!

The new machine

Let me tell you how this came about. My mom, who is 60 years old, used to run Microsoft Windows 2000. It was the only Windows version fast enough for her old 300Mhz machine. I sometimes thought about blowing new life into her machine by installing some version of GNU/Linux, but I was afraid it would be too incomprehensible for her. So I always kept her with Windows.

Now, about three weeks ago, my mom decided she wanted a new computer. She found a nice Packard Bell budget laptop for sale at the local electronics store, so she asked me if it was okay. I told her, "sure, looks like a nice machine". A 1.8 Ghz with 1 Gb of memory ought to be more than enough for her computing-habits: surf the internet, watch a couple of movies online, write a letter, chat on MSN, manage her photos, print a document, write an e-mail.

Windows Vista

The new laptop came pre-installed with Windows Vista, the latest 'hot' operating system from Microsoft. "Great", I thought, as Windows 2000 was becoming a bit of a nuisance. I once thought about installing Windows XP on my mom's old machine, but was afraid it might be too slow. Now she could have the latest Windows version with a clean install on her brand new laptop.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Vista wasn't such a good deal as we thought it was. Even though we're talking about a brand new 'Vista-ready' laptop, the horrors of The First Boot where mind-shattering. Mom's brand new, out-of-the-box laptop was slower than her old 300 Mhz machine! The cause? Windows Vista! Sure, it's a budget laptop, and it's not the fastest machine around, and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't make a great gaming platform, but it sure should be enough to run a simple Operating System!

Another big problem was Vista's new 'security'. My mom is a paranoid lady. If she doesn't trust something, she'll back off. And when she doesn't understand something, she won't trust it. You'll never find my mom entering her address, personal or bank information anywhere on the Internet, for instance. This is probably the reason why she never gets spam, nor has she ever been conned. The problem with Windows Vista is that it alerts the user about everything and then makes them choose. A clever way to delegate the burden of responsibility of security to the user instead of the Operating System. After about half an hour of working with Vista, we must have seen at least fourteen security related pop-ups. I personally couldn't make heads nor tails of the 'possible security problems', let alone my mom. It's common knowledge that when you let the user choose each and every time anything happens, they'll quickly adopt the Don't-read-just-click-okay mindset. Hell, I'm a paranoid security freak and even I started to just click okay without reading any of the warnings.

I tried tweaking and configuring Vista so that it would run faster. I tried turning off the annoying security and placing restrictions on the default account the default user uses. I tried and tried and tried, but all that happened was a botched up Vista that was either still incredibly slow, annoying or wouldn't boot anymore. Enough was enough. Time to pop the big question: "Mom… what about Linux?".

Ubuntu installation

My mom agreed to me putting Ubuntu on her laptop. If it wasn't satisfactory, I'd get some illegal version of Windows XP from somewhere and install that instead. "Can I write email/chat on MSN/manage my digital photographs?". Sure! Everything my mom wanted to do on her computer was easy with Ubuntu, so no worries there.

I started my very first Ubuntu installation (I'm a Debian user) and started clicking 'Next'. Everything in the install worked pretty easy, with some notable exceptions:

• The 'Next' button on the next screen didn't work when I left the mouse cursor on it. I had to move the mouse of the button, then back on it, and then I could click it.
• I couldn't partition and format the harddrive. It kept complaining with some kind of error during the creation of the ext3 filesystem. Turns out I had to reboot the machine after creating the partitions, but that wasn't mentioned anywhere.
• When I brought the machine over to my mom's house, there was a particularly nasty problem where the machine would hang during or right after booting. It turned out there was a bad WiFi network around my mom's house somewhere which caused the machine to halt with a 'SOFT BUG ON CPU#0' bug. Removing all the propriety closed source drivers fixed the problem.

After installation, I tested all her hardware: the digital camera, the wireless mouse, etc. Everything worked like a charm. Watching video on the internet? No problem. Listening to internet radio stations? A breeze! Making sure her own software is up-to-date with the latest bug and security fixes? Easy as pushing a button.

The verdict

My mom's verdict: "This is just like Windows, except faster?! I thought I had to do stuff with a lot of white-on-black text, like I always see you do?! This is much easier than I thought, and I can even watch internet movies!". Don't worry mom. I wouldn't have put Ubuntu on your desktop if you'd had to learn how to use the terminal.

She's been working on it for a few days now. Of course, there's some stuff she still needs to learn, simply because the programs are different then what she's used too, but she's coming along just great. My mom already used Thunderbird and Firefox for her emailing and browsing. She's picking up the other new programs fairly quickly.

Would she have been able to do the installation herself? Well, probably yes, if it wasn't for the problems mentioned above. That's more than I can say for Windows, cause she's never been able to install that herself.

So there you have it! Linux on the desktop. 2007 was the year. Kudos to all who predicted it.

Deathproof, the new Tarantino movie.

A murderous stuntman and a bunch of women. A long conversation and one car chase.

The verdict: Awesome. Go see it before it's out of the theatre.