freemode.net

25m downloads in 100 days    [ Geekiness ]

Slashdot has the story, links and commentary.   Go Firefox go!

Authoritarian America?    [ Politics ]

Plastic has an interesting discussion on facism in the United States, not spurred by angry Bush-hating liberals, but from articles by conservative think-tank members, anti-war right-wingers, and former assistant Cabinet members.

The real problem here is not fascism, and calling it that does not necessarily help solve it.   Authoritarian government, whether it be fascism, communism, socialism with Chinese characteristics, dictatorship or a monarchy is the problem.   Any large, powerful, centralized government is prone to committing abuse if left unchecked.   When this is coupled with an ideological or religious calling that allows it to ignore rationality and moderation, those in power will inevitably cause great harm to the country's citizens and others.

The worst terrors of the 20th century came about because of centralized power and centralized belief in the State.   I don't believe that the current administration is deliberately seeking to overthrow the principles of American democracy, but I am truly and deeply worried that their policies lead in that direction and establish terribly disturbing precedents.   Perhaps it is because the United States survived the last century without fighting wars on its own soil, without losing millions of civilians to purges, genocide and the ravages of invasion brought on by authoritarian governments that many now are not immediately and profoundly concerned by these signs of centralized power.

This is what George Orwell warned about in 1984, not just communism, but the State as the arbiter of truth and reality and the human cost of ideologies.

Calendar links    [ Site Info ]

Thanks to a snippet of code over at Scotticus Blogicus and turning on daily archives, the per-day links in the calendar now take you to an archive of all that day's posts, instead of the last post in that day.

All you have to do is replace this snippet in the calendar-invocation code

<MTEntries lastn="1"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTCalendarDay$></a></MTEntries>

with this:

<MTEntries lastn="1"><a href="<$MTEntryLink archive_type="Daily">"><$MTCalendarDay$></a></MTEntries>

Rebuild and hey presto, it works.

Cisco security    [ Software ]

There's a good article on Cisco's latest security vulnerability on attrition.org.   In a nutshell, Cisco has IP-based videoconferencing phones that have a hard-coded SNMP community string turned on by default.   This is perhaps easy for administration purposes, but bad bad bad bad bad for security purposes.   Like the article says, no network equipment vendor should be shipping devices with a default SNMP string turned on, let alone a hard-coded one that can't be changed.   This isn't entirely Cisco's fault, these products came to them via an acquisition; but one wonders why you wouldn't run a security audit and fix these sorts of problems before you slap your corporate logo on a product.

Cisco's response is interesting, in that they WILL NOT provide any fix for this issue, but say to either block SNMP traffic to these devices or buy some new devices to replace these.   I have to say that I agree with the article's stance, that this is not the way to handle a vulnerable product.   Unfortunately, Cisco is not very good at handling these sorts of issues with recently-acquired products.

Nukes and missile defense    [ Politics ]

It's official, North Korea has nukes and the Russians have an operational ICBM that our Star Wars missile defense program can't shoot down.   At least the Bush administration is proposing cuts in the $10 billion/year program.   Gee, backing out of the ABM treaty hasn't really helped matters.

The real problem here is that by spending so much international credibility on pursuing WMDs in Iraq, the Bush administration now will have a much tougher time convincing allies and other countries to cooperate with any response to North Korea.   Like I've said before, Iraq posed a very small threat compared to the one that North Korea presents.   The DPRK has already sold nuclear and missile technology to Libya, Pakistan and other rogue regimes, and it's not a terrible stretch of the imagination to think that al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups could buy or otherwise obtain these sorts of devices.

In short, I don't think the Bush administration's policy has made the U.S., our allies or the rest of the world much safer, despite their statements to the contrary.

Death watch for TiVo?    [ Geekiness ]

Linked from hackaday - Engadget has a TiVo death watch going.   Not surprising, the tech's cool, but TiVo doesn't seem to know how to make money on their devices.   Guess they'll end up in the same pile as the Amiga and the rest of the old computers that time has passed by.

Farm subsidies    [ Politics ]

The Heritage Foundation has an interesting article on farming subsidies in the United States - big surprise, they find that the money paid out goes overwhelmingly to the wealthiest farmers, who often have no relation to the "poor family farmers" that are trotted out to support the subsidies.

Fresh links    [ News ]

Some fresh new links:

What the Democrats should have said in response to Bush's State of the Union speech:   Sulli's journal on Slashdot

Some good public-domain rendered wallpaper images:   http://dchky.info/

Details on the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell Processor from Ars Technica:   Part I, Part II

Carly Fiorina calls it quits:   El Reg