Links December 2008

A teacher in Arizona steals Linux CDs from a student and then accuses a Linux distributor of being a criminal [1]. Even though she had used Linux in the past she didn’t believe that software was free. Of course that implies that in the past she had performed actions that she believed were criminal.

Neat Little Mac Apps interviews Marshall Kirk McKusick – he describes how the BSD Daemon logo was designed and one of his most significant bugs [2].

OurDelta.org offers MySQL builds with some extra features and support [3]. I was recommended to use their builds by Arjen Lentz of Open Query [4], as one of my clients is going to use the services of Open Query it seems best to use the Our Delta builds if only to get better support from Open Query. The extra features in the Our Delta builds seem interesting, but I’m not sure that my client needs any of them at this time.

The Global Guerilla blog reports on a man who single-handedly invaded the most heavily guarded power station in Britain and shut it down to protest against new coal power stations [5]. The entire blog is worth reading, the author has a lot of interesting ideas.

PhpMyVisites is a free web site analytics system that competes with Google Analytics [6]. I haven’t implemented it yet, but it looks promising. It seems that PhpMyVisites is not being updated any more (not even security updates) and the replacement is Piwik [11].

Andrew Lahde was a fund manager who made significant amounts of money by betting on the inability of US mortgagees to repay their debts, he wrote an interesting goodbye letter (Telegraph.co.uk) [7]. He now has a Wikipedia page which gives some interesting background to his career [8]. An Employee of the Financial Times is famous for flaming Andrew [9], I have submitted a comment pointing out that being famous for flaming someone who is more successful than yourself is nothing to be proud of and suggesting that he advocate his own political views when criticising those of others – I doubt that it will get through moderation. It’s a pity that Andrew doesn’t have a blog, I would like to read more from him.

At CCC a paper by Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, and Benne de Weger on how to crack the PKI infrastructure used for SSL signing was presented [10]. The root cause is some CAs still using MD5 even though it was broken a long time ago.

Updated to note that Piwik is the replacement for PhpMyVisites.

• [1] http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our-kids-back.html
• [2] http://www.neatlittlemacapps.com/show/nlma-episode-048-interview-marshall-kirk-mckusick
• [3] http://ourdelta.org/
• [4] http://openquery.com.au/
• [5] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/12/journal-climate.html
• [6] http://www.phpmyvisites.us/
• [7] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3219870/The-astonishing-sign-off-of-a-wealthy-fund-manager-in-full.html
• [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lahde
• [9] http://blogs.ft.com/gapperblog/2008/10/yours-truly-angry-mob/
• [10] http://www.phreedom.org/research/rogue-ca/
• [11] http://piwik.org/