Rosio Pavoris a blog

A while ago I got tired of messing with ndiswrapper to get my wireless internets to work, so I switched from Debian back to Ubanto Ubuntu, because despite everything else, the restricted drivers manager is pretty nice. Today a new edition of Ubuntu came out (8.04, Hardy Heron), and while these new editions tend to add needed features (for instance, in 7.04, the restricted drivers manager couldn’t deal with my video card; 7.10 fixed that), each new edition also seems to go out of its way to break things in creative ways, and packs on tons of bloat, so I was rather wary of upgrading.
And rightly so, it turns out.

For one thing, my wireless stopped working again. No idea why. My video card driver (also non-free) still worked, though.
Then I noticed Firefox was much slower, and the standard buttons were more Web 2.0, and the address bar was completely useless for entering URLs, and all of my buttons in the status bar were missing: for some reason, Hardy Heron comes with Firefox 3.0b5, which broke all of my installed extensions (to wit: Flashblock, Live HTTP Headers, Long Titles, NoScript, QuickJava, TorButton, Web Developer; AdBlock Plus claimed to still work, but didn’t).
And suddenly half the websites I frequent looked like ass, either because of Firefox 30b5’s default settings or because Hardy Heron decided to randomly drop some fonts.
And it seems my screen’s brightness was stuck on maximum, with no way to adjust it. I’ve never been able to adjust it under Ubuntu (though Debian deals with it just fine), but it used to be stuck on a much lower brightness, which was suitable for both dark bedrooms and dusty classrooms. Maximum brightness just gives me a headache and drains my battery.

So I reinstalled Debian. The wireless doesn’t work there either, but at least it doesn’t take three minutes to boot (seriously, three minutes; 7.04 went from power-on to fully running in fifteen seconds flat).
Hardy Heron might be marginally alright for desktops, but for laptops it’s once again worthless. Which sucks, because now I have to find a different distro to advise newbies to use, and PCLinuxOS is a stupid, stupid name.

People need to stop fucking with my cats.

A while ago I mentioned we had cats now. What actually happened was that my neighbors had cats (two of them), but their kids abused them and they couldn’t be bothered to house-train them so they spent most of their time in our backyard and, eventually, inside our house. Eventually my neighbors noticed and the guy just gave us the paperwork and told us we could have them.
Then, a few months ago, the wife moved out and took the kids, and the kids took our fucking cats. The neighbor wouldn’t tell us where they went (and possibly didn’t know himself), and it didn’t seem worth the hassle of a lawsuit, so we eventually let it go.

We thought that was the end of it, until my sister noticed this.
“Belleke” (we called her Walter, which is a rather more dignified name, I think) was left at the animal shelter because she “didn’t get along with the other cat of the house” (whom we called Evarist; I think they called her Mousti), which is obviously bullshit.
That’s just rude. It’s not like they don’t have our phone number.

We’re seeing about getting her back tomorrow. And after that people seriously need to stop fucking with my cat.

Update: It’s a different cat, people. My sister is blind.

In case you’re one of the three remaining peope who doesn’t know what Tor is, it’s basically an anonymising proxy on steroids.
Any request you make over a network (say, to retrieve a web page to display in your browser) is sent to a random node in the network, which then passes it on to the next node, which passes it on to the next node, and so on, until it finally reaches its destination. Each node only knows about the previous and the next node in the chain, so it becomes impossible to trace who made the original request.

Everything’s encrypted except for the final step between the last node and the webserver (for example), so some care should be taken when entering passwords and things, as a malicious exit node can intercept those if you don’t use things like TLS or other end-to-end encryption.
This is, of course, just as much of a risk on the internet in general (and one too many people aren’t aware of, too).

It’s pretty slow, since far more people are running clients than nodes (I’ll be setting up a node myself as soon as my ISP stops sucking; I’m giving it another week), but it’s not meant for general browsing (and certainly not filesharing) anyway; there’s a plug-in for Firefox that lets you turn it on briefly when you need it, and disable it when you don’t.

As with all privacy-preserving tools, genuinely undesirable activity is an issue (see picture), but the potential for good is considerable. While it may seem paranoid in (much of) the West (though maybe not even), much of China, for instance, depends on tools like these.
And you never know, you may need it yourself one day, and it’s better to become acquainted with it now than when it’s too late.

Get it here, if you don’t have it already. You don’t have to run a node (you can just set up the client (complete instructions for configuring Firefox to use it are there)), but if you can, please do. People depend on it.