Individual Accountability: Even Linus Torvalds Needs to be Civil

by Dietrich Schmitz

It runs counter to common sense.  Bad behavior is bad behavior.

How you conduct yourself on the Internet should closely parallel what you do in the physical world.

When you meet a person in a public setting, if you cast insults, the likelihood that 'face meets fist' increases proportionally to the degree to which you engage in such activity.

Internet users, on the other hand, seem to think that they are not accountable for their bad behavior.

And it was put to the test by one young developer, who in an on-line exchange stood up to none other than the Grand Poobah, Linus Torvalds.

Linus has earned a reputation for being quite caustic, if not insulting, in his style of communication with his Linux kernel development community peers.  While many of his exchanges have reached the news with sensationalistic reaction, it points to how one should not act.

Finally, someone with some moral fibre stood up to Linus in a LKML mailing list exchange [<==<< Edited link to point to LKML source].  A relative 'newbie' developer, Sarah Sharp, took issue with Linus' communication style.  In his usual intimidating, uncalled for manner, Linus shot off an insult-laden rebuke to which Sarah fired back her candid appraisal of his behavior:

"Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable?Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence. Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse. Not *fucking* cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists. Let's discuss this at Kernel Summit where we can at least yell at each other in person. Yeah, just try yelling at me about this. I'll roar right back, louder, for all the people who lose their voice when they get yelled at by top maintainers. I won't be the nice girl anymore."

Three cheers for Sarah.

It's gotten so this kind of behavior is incorporated into the arrogant swagger of many developers who think it is 'appropriate' to be less than polite in communicating anything.  It has gone too far.  Linus Torvalds, you are a role model, like it or not.

Sarah Sharp was interviewed regarding her LKML exchange with Linus by The Wired and had this to say:

"You can be direct without being aggressive. You can give negative feedback without cussing people out. 

There’s a fine line between showing your displeasure and verbally tearing somebody apart. How do you tell someone that their code is crap without making it into a personal attack? This discussion is going to be ongoing. I don’t expect Linus to change overnight. He’s been this way for 20 years. The only thing is: I just want to open a discussion channel and have a frank discussion with this, and have it among kernel developers."

Sarah went on record following her exchange with Linus in her own blog story No more verbal abuse.

I am glad she stood up to Linus.  He is no different from anyone else and it doesn't matter what the issue is at any point in time -- one can get their message across in a polite way and still be an effective communicator.  

What the world needs is more Sarah Sharps to maintain civility and reasonable discourse.

There is no place for verbal abuse whatsoever on the Internet.  

So Linus, please take note: Do the mature thing, tone down and get your act together.

--Dietrich

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Netrunner 13.06 Enigma Tweaks for the Memory Deprived PC

by Dietrich Schmitz

I've been living with Netrunner 13.06 Enigma for about a week now and am still quite happy with it.

Yet, I am not satisfied to just use any Distro with its 'out of the box' setting for long before the urge sets in to make changes.

Mostly, for my purposes, I want the ram footprint of the GUI to be as small as it can possibly be. (Image credit: smithsonianmag.com)

Where KDE is concerned, while it does weigh in in the 400MB+ range at start-up the Acer Aspire One D260 in default configuration is quite acceptable speed-wise.  I half-expected that would not be the case and was happy to know the system was carrying the weight of a full KDE Plasma Workspace implementation nicely.

So, the lust to tweak set in and here's what I did.

Unneeded Services

I disabled the following services

Akonadi (set StartServer=false in ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc)
cups and cups-browserd (sudo update-rc.d -f cups remove && update-rc.d -f cups-browserd remove)
krunner
Added the below contents to file ~/.kde/share/autostart/krunner.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=krunner
Hidden=true
X-DBUS-StartupType=none
Name=Command Runner
Type=Service
X-KDE-StartupNotify=false
OnlyShowIn=KDE;
X-KDE-autostart-phase=1

klipper (sudo apt-get purge klipper)
nepomuk (off by default; set autostart=false in ~/.kde/share/config/nepomukserverrc)

3D Effects

System Settings, Workspace Appearance, Desktop Effect, uncheck 'Enable Desktop Effects at Startup' and on the Advanced tab, switched from OpenGL to xrender.

Other Services

In system settings, Advanced, Service Manager, I unchecked and stopped:

DNS-SD
Drive Ejector (my Netbook has no CD drive)
Free Space Notifier (I've never run out of disk space)
Nepomuk Search Module
Remote URL Change Notifier
Wacom Tablet (don't have one)
Write Daemon

System Settings, Desktop Appearance, Widget Style, Configure, Animations, I unchecked 'Enable Animations'.

Preload

Preload uses caching algorithms to intelligently preload software based on your user habits.  I installed with:

sudo apt-get install preload

zram

I've been using zram for several days.  I will tell you that this change alone will make a big change in the speed of any PC -- it doesn't matter how much ram it has.  In fact, it's going to be present in the Kernel 3.11 as zswap, but currently, it exists if you are using a Linux kernel 3.2 or greater as zram.  Users of Netrunner get a 3.8 kernel with the 'bonus' of an enhanced LZO compression library.

The command to install:

sudo apt-get install zram-config.

There isn't anything else you need to configure for zram -- it is now mapped and loaded as a kernel module (zram.ko) to two block swap devices with the name /dev/zram[n] where n is the core of your PC.  In my case with the Atom N450, it's /dev/zram0 and /dev/zram1.
If you would like to see your zram swap activity, I would suggest installing ncurses-based 'glances' (sudo apt-get install glances).

So, that's it.  Now things are absolutely 'honkin' fast.

P.S. those using Fedora will find zram installables here.

Good Luck.

-- Dietrich

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An Unmet Need: Privacy Integration on the PC Desktop

by Dietrich Schmitz

I had a nice chat (Google Plus) today with +Aaron Seigo regarding RetroShare.

He came to the realization as I have that really, thus far, there isn't any form of integrated privacy control built into any computing Desktop system.

Should there be?  We both agreed that the answer is a resounding 'YES'. (Image credit: Wikipedia.org)

It begs the question:

Should privacy software become an integrated feature, much as having a Microsoft Office or LibreOffice?

It also begs the follow-on question:

Is Internet Privacy-mandated software for general utilitarian email, chat, file sharing, voip, needed?

I submit that we are now confronted by the PRISM effect which has revealed that surveillance is ongoing with the assistance of ISPs, software vendors and the like.  Whether the assistance given to the U.S. government is voluntary or involuntary (National Security Letter) is a separate matter.

Has the government run 'rough-shod' over U.S. and foreign Internet users' privacy rights?

That question will be answered eventually and history will show whether privacy truly matters.

But in the meantime, the PRISM story has galvanized public reaction both domestically and internationally and spurred action by national concerns to begin moving their current tenancy on U.S. Cloud ISPs to off-shore safe-haven equivalents.  The general public are left without a solution to the dilemma that presents:

To what extent should I conduct my personal activities on the Internet?

This question will continue to linger and create fear, uncertainty and doubt unless an effort is undertaken to immediately shore up the general perception that Internet privacy is 'non-existent' with exception to a few limited use cases relegated to corporations and technology elite.

At least, with Federally mandated privacy laws in place, e.g., enacting an email encryption standard would have for example manifold benefits.

For one, folding the aged clear text MIME rfc standard into a layer of GPG encryption would ensure email is readable only by its intended recipient(s).  Email encryption is already being used by a small minority of corporations who must secure their correspondences.

But, there is nothing in the way of designing and implementing a 'turn key' drop-dead simple application to which the general public can avail themselves.  To date, the only application on the horizon which approaches the needed degree of usability I have found is RetroShare, and, it has the best opportunity for being further enhanced so as to become more user-friendly and a candidate for Desktop integration, since it is written in trending Qt and is ported to Windows, OSX, Linux and BSD versions.

If such a Federal mandate were legislated, it might also offer financial assistance to developers to defray their cost to create and/or modify software applications so as to become compliant.

Presumably, such a mandate would have to be on a phased schedule to come into full implementation over perhaps one or two years.  And with those dollars such software would be then made available as part of a larger privacy integration package on the Desktop.

The other perhaps as important benefit of such a mandate is that with open standard GPG keys for the sender and recipient, the currently abused/exploited MIME rfc spec sender id field could no longer be 'forged' by spammers.

ISPs could under Federal guidelines for handling email on Mailer daemon transfer agents shunt 'non-compliant' email off-line entirely if the sender's GPG key were not signed by the recipient.  The U.S. postal service could also have their own GPG postal key which by default all users would sign to receive USPS-routed email.  But as with ISPs, the USPS would also not forward email unless the sender's subkey was signed by the recipient.  That would result in a reduction of spam approaching zero and save billions of dollars spent annually on anti-spam software measures and labor expense.

Extending this idea further, having privacy integration in the Desktop ought to include support for other Internet-related activities:  Chat, file sharing, Voice over IP.

So, you begin to see that software such as RetroShare does have a large potential to be adapted for general public use to enforce mandated privacy measures for access to the Internet.

I hope that this post spurs additional feedback and moves the agenda forward for implementing standards of privacy for all who use the Internet.

-- Dietrich

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Never Again

by Dietrich Schmitz

Never again.

Those two words make a pretty bold claim but I've looked at it from every technical perspective during the past two weeks of research.

If you've been looking for a solution that holds up under pressure to scrutiny, look no further.

If you've had it with feeling like you've just visited a proctologist when using the Internet, now is the time for a change.

• Never again will your chats be wiretapped.
• Never again will your video/audio calls be wiretapped.
• Never again will your emails be read by third parties.
• Never again will your emails come from someone you don't know personally (SPAM)
• Never again will your emails be laden with trojans ready to spawn and compromise your PC
• Never again will your innocuous file sharing with Friends be viewed by ISPs as suspect illegal sharing.

Never.  All of the above is true provided that you make one personal commitment.

Always use RetroShare.

-- Dietrich

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Get Your PC's MoJo Going with zRAM

by Dietrich Schmitz

Using a Netbook has both advantages and disadvantages.  Mine, an Acer Aspire One D260 (Intel Atom N450) came with 1GB DDR2 ram.  I added another 1GB to bring it up to 2GB ram total. (Image credit: wallpaperswa.com)

Overall, using the Netbook has been a great value proposition.  Because Linux does so well with limited ram, some Distros better than others, I've managed to get along just fine.

Very recently, I made a switch from Fedora 19 to Netrunner 13.06 Enigma and have been doing various tweaks of the Desktop to configure it to my liking.

Very little in fact, needed to be changed from the start, which speaks well for KDE and Blue Systems.  Blue Systems, in particular, have done a superb job in putting together Enigma.

By chance today, I came upon a feature which landed in the Linux kernel 3.2, called zRAM.

If your PC has 2GB ram or less, then zRAM is for you.  In Linux kernel 3.8, a new LZO compression library update is present that in testing shows roughly double speed improvements for compression/decompression.

zRAM uses LZO to create compressed swap space in RAM.

Beyond the install step, there's no special configuration required -- zRAM loads on boot and sets itself up in RAM with a higher priority than your default swap partition.  The result is that zRAM is engaged first, if full, then your SDD/HDD partition will do the more I/O-intensive swapping which, of course, is vastly slower.

I've been using zRAM all day and must say it was well worth the trouble of installing.  The speed improvement is pronounced.  And it just so happens Enigma, released this past Friday (July 5) uses a 3.8 kernel.  So the newest LZO compression library is installed also.

Using Chrome typically is memory-instensive and if I open 6 or more tabs, I notice swapping begins to slow things down.  I usually am careful about closing unneeded tabs just as soon as I am done with them to avoid hitting that memory maxed-out wall where swapping starts to kick in.

Now, I have not hit the 'wall' once since installing zRAM and everything snaps to screen as though this machine was equipped with 4GB of ram.  I kid you not.

So, if you have a machine with 2GB ram or less, I strongly recommend you give zRAM a try, and especially if you are using Linux kernel 3.8 or greater.

There you have it!

-- Dietrich

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The Chromebook Juggernaut

by Dietrich Schmitz

I have to laugh.  While traditional PC sales are flagging, quite the opposite is happening to sub-$300 Notebook sales, which are growing by leaps and bounds for Google Chromebook.

Is it any wonder -- they keep opening new sales channels.

Market research done by the NPD group confirms that the Chromebook is the fastest growing segment for devices priced under $300.

Chromebooks according to NPD have garnered 20 to 25 percent of the sub-$300 Laptop U.S. market during the last eight months.

And with their newest agreements with U.S. national chain stores Walmart and Staples in place, it should be a banner year for Chromebook sales for the 'back to school' and Holiday seasons.  (Image credit: Wikipedia.org)

This Chromebook is a Juggernaut and cannot be stopped.

Mwuahahahahahah  (ah hem.  sorry.)

-- Dietrich

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Charting a Safe Course in Times of Uncertainty with Netrunner 13.06 Enigma

by Dietrich Schmitz

I get surprises every day.  Some are good and some less than good.

The other day I came across a really good surprise: Netrunner 13.06 Enigma, released on July 5, 2013, turned up just when I needed it.

One of the LA private community members asked, what has happened with Fedora 19 Xfce?

Well, to that I say: Life is subject to change.

And changed it has.  Here's my assessment of the current state of affairs:

Technology Check List

Will Fedora be around in 5 years: Yes
Will Debian/*buntu derivatives be around in 5 years: Yes

Which package manager is best (YUM vs. APT):  YUM

Which repository system has the most diverse set of applications: Debian/Ubuntu

What is the best Desktop GUI: KDE

Which Distro has the best out of the box KDE experience: Netrunner 13.06 Enigma
Is there a trend for moving applications and Desktop GUIs to Qt: YES

Is KDE Qt-based: YES

Blue Systems KDE Brain Trust

However, the thing about Netrunner that is most interesting and unique is that it is developed by Blue Systems, who also do development for Kubuntu and Mint.  +Martin Gräßlin is a key 'brain trust' of Blue Systems and lead developer for KDE with a focus on core development, namely KWin.  The work of Blue Systems is clearly evident in Netrunner.  The 'fit and finish' is silky smooth and quite reminiscent of early days of Ubuntu.  KDE is most likely to be embraced by those with Windows experience.  It is feature-complete and intuitive.

Beware of Quick Sand XMir/Mir

Also, now that Canonical shifted their policy away from Wayland to using XMir/Mir in Ubuntu 13.10, KDE is the safer course as +Aaron Seigo and Team plan to support X.org way into the future as well as Wayland.  They will not be supporting Mir as it is a 'one-off' display driver (Ubuntu Unity only).

A Shift to Qt Development

Kubuntu and Lubuntu's lead developers have already opted-out of support for XMir as it is deemed to be a 'shim' emulation layer which will slow down the responsiveness of the Desktop appreciably.  LXDE project has begun a new project, LXDE-Qt, to port LXDE code to Qt.  See a preview of the desktop here.

So, you see, never say 'never'.  Keep a close watch on the Linux eco space.  It changes like the weather.  ;)

Given all of the rapid change, Netrunner today is the safe choice.

That is my assessment.

-- Dietrich

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Privacy Activists Get Involved: Looking for Able-Bodied RetroShare Testers

by Dietrich Schmitz

[Update: I've put up my F2F key on cryptobin.org -- here: https://cryptobin.org/g247b695 -- reach me by email: dietrich shift 2 linuxadvocates dot com to obtain the password. ]

Have you heard of the expression 'talk is cheap'?

With all of the controversy generated by the disclosure of NSA's PRISM surveillance program, you'd think there'd be a groundswell of interest in taking action to mount new privacy legislation.

Not so far.  But legislation isn't good enough.  What the public needs is an effective countermeasure to ensure that Privacy is maintained.

RetroShare is a true prototypical software application which immediately offers the following benefits:

• Serverless, completely decentralised
• Multiple simultaneous downloads / uploads
• Search Friends
• Messages
• Forums
• Channels
• Voice over IP
• Instant messaging
• Groupchat
• GnuPG Authentication
• OpenSSL Encryption
• adding downloads via website links
• Plugins support
• UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding support
• Graphical User Interface written with Qt4 toolkit
• System tray integration

fyi, I wrote a RetroShare installation how-to yesterday.  Help me test usability cases and establish feedback with the RetroShare developers.

If there are any issues which make its use difficult, they need to know.

For RetroShare to become mainstream, it needs to become 'drop-dead' easy to use.

It's not quite there yet, but it has come a long way.

Help with the testing.  Let me know if you'd like to participate.  Get involved.

-- Dietrich

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RetroShare: True Internet Privacy Requires a Change of Habits.

by Dietrich Schmitz

I've been thinking about making changes to how I currently use the Internet.

One thing is for sure, it's hard to break old habits.

Of course, it's convenient to use Gmail.  And that it is unencrypted along with everything else including Drive is beside the point.

This convenience must be dealt with.  If your privacy is going to be protected, Americans, your only recourse is to employ encryption--unbreakable encryption.

And, I've been looking at RetroShare.

I think that RetroShare is perhaps the best example of what privacy-enabled software should offer.

But making a commitment to force oneself to adopt the needed technology is key.  It's not that hard to put into play.  I have RetroShare on my Netbook.  Let's see what it took to set it up.

Environment

First, I will say this is a discussion regarding the use of your 'home' PC.  I use PC to generically refer to your computing device.  It's an old term, and, I'm getting old.  Had an IBM PC in '83.  But I digress.  So, okay.  You are home and wondering how you can boost your privacy?.  Let's take a look at your Wireless Router.  Mine is a Cisco Linksys E3000, which I reflashed with DD-WRT, but yours may be any kind which supports uPnP.

Let's have a look at the router.  Bring up yours (my ip is 192.168.1.1) and login with your admin login id and password:

Enable uPnP support on your Wireless Router

The location of this information will vary according to your manufacturer's design.  Straight away, I am strongly recommending you use uPnP.  Why?  Because it will automatically make all of the port forwarding decisions for you.  Otherwise, you do have the choice to manually select an inbound TCP and UDP port and define the forwarding ip address of your PC on your home LAN.  But, I won't show how.  Just use uPnP if you have it.  Most routers support it.

RetroShare Software Installation

Okay with that out of the way, I am now taking you to the RetroShare website's download page.  On my PC, I am running Netrunner 13.06 Enigma, an Ubuntu derivative with KDE Plasma Workspace.  I'll just call it KDE.  I hope +Aaron Seigo and +Martin Gräßlin won't mind.  Anyhow, that means I can follow the directions pertaining to Ubuntu:

RetroShare installation instructions for Ubuntu

Sweet.  This should be easy.  And, it was.  I won't show you how to do the install steps.

So, great.  We've got RetroShare installed, you've input your name, email address, and created the needed GnuPG key and should arrive at this screen:

RetroShare main screen

There it is.  The main screen of RetroShare.  On the bottom of the window, note NAT and DHT.  If you are using uPnP on your router, both will be initially red and NAT will turn yellow and eventually green.  Both will become green all on their own without any further action on your part.  This is why I suggest uPnP.  It's the most painless way to get up and running.

If, however, your router doesn't support uPnP, you'll need to do some extra legwork on both the router side and on RetroShare in settings.  Let's take a brief look at settings:

RetroShare>Options (Gear)>Server screen

Click the gear on the left of your RetroShare, then Server and you'll see the above.  If you need to manually configure port forwarding on your router, you'll need to switch your settings to "Manually port forwarded" here.  This is the hardest part of setup on RetroShare.  But we are striving for maximal privacy here, are we not?  Yes.  I hope you will prevail and conquer this.  Be proud you did it.

And so we have presumably done the router configuration, installed RetroShare and can see we are on-line by the number of users across the peer-to-peer server-less system.

Connecting With Your Friends

Fantastic if you've gotten this far.  But, we are not doing much until we establish one or more Friends connections with people we know.  That sentence is subtle but the distinction here is important.

This isn't like a Bittorrent or Tor P2P system.  No, it is quite different and very restrictive.  It is a 'Friend-to-Friend' (F2F) 2048-bit RSA encrypted key system tunneled over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) where all data moving along the Distributed Hash Table node list is multi-plex encrypted.

What that means is that all of the data is gibberish to anyone other than you and your designated 'Friends' with whom you have explicitly taken the crucial step to share your F2F public key.

Isn't that what you really want?  Yes, it is.  And one of the many benefits you will find in using RetroShare is that the exclusivity of F2F means that nothing will be on your private channel but what you choose, including email.  Yes, email will only go to and come from your Friends.  That means, NO SPAM.  Guaranteed.  Assured.  Isn't that great?

Alright, so sharing your public F2F key is something which you will want to exercise care doing.

Technically, you can go straight into email and send from RetroShare a Friend request to one of your gmail Friends.  But, if you take the 'ultra-paranoid' point of view (cough NSA PRISM), that email can be read by any third-party concern.  And, a rogue 'imposter' could conceivably assume the identity of one your supposed dear Friends.  That wouldn't be good.

What to do?  I think the simplest way to share privately your F2F key is to coordinate with them 'by phone call' a session for sharing, using either cryptocat.org or cryptobin.org.

It just so happens that I've tested both and they work quite well and are relatively easy to use and will become 'routine' after using once or twice.

The first thing you need to do is get a copy of your F2F key.  Where is it?  It is in Options>Profile>Certificate.  Don't be intimidated by what you see.  It's how encryption works.  You need to copy the certificate to the clipboard with the copy to clipboard button, or, right-click, select All, then right-click, copy to accomplish same.

There.  You've got a copy of the key.  Our goal here is to contact your Friend, have them do all of the preceding steps so they have RetroShare installed and ready to exchange F2F keys.  Here's the screen for the certificate:

RetroShare F2F Certificate screen

You'll notice, I intentionally erased a bit of the image to defeat anyone from copying my current F2F key.

Off we go with our Friend to cryptobin.org.  You'll see below, I have pasted in my F2F key, set the time to expire to 1 day and generated a password using the 'Generate' button.  If you leave the screen without recording the password, then your Friend won't be able to unlock the screen.  Ideally, if you have them on the phone, manually create a mutual strong password (no need to press Generate in that case).

If the user is not currently available, bookmark the url created by cryptobin and email it to your Friend.  Have them call you for the password.

Cryptobin.org screen where you can share your F2F key with your Friend securely.

And, they will do the same with you to exchange their F2F key.  Don't forget to press the 'Bin It!' button, which will encrypt your message and create the needed url for your Friend to access when they have time.

So where does the F2F key get added?  Click Add a new Friend, then select 'Enter the certificate manually' and press Next:

RetroShare Add a new Friend screen.  Select 'manual' and press Next

Now, you need to take the Friend's certificate which they sent to you using cryptobin and paste it into the second empty window and press Next:

Paste your Friend's certificate in second window

This is the Make Friend screen.  If I shared my F2F key with you, you'd be seeing my name as shown.  Only sign F2F keys for people you know personally.  This is important as GnuPG is based on the Web of Trust principle.  Here's a screenshot:

RetroShare Make a Friend screen

As you know this Friend personally, you should sign the key.  Click Finish and you are done!

Congratulations!  You are now connected to your Friend(s).

Now the fun begins with total privacy assured for Chat, email, file sharing, voice and video calling, Chat forums, and Channels.

As always, act responsibly, be a good Netizen, and obey all laws for your respective country.

I hope you will make a commitment and change your habits to reclaim your privacy.

Best of Luck and Be Safe.

-- Dietrich

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