Archive for the ‘Frank Bell’ Category

This really should come as no surprise: the Guardian reports that FBI agents have been going undercover on Facebook and other social networking sites looking for criminals. And they’ve been finding them.

This doesn’t refer to persons promoting bogus FB apps designed to steal identities.

They are finding criminals who maintain profiles, sometimes public profiles, under their real names with photographs of their real faces:

Law enforcement agencies have long used internet chatrooms to lure child pornography traffickers and suspected sex predators and with a warrant, can seize suspects and defendants’ email records. But Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites provide a wealth of additional information, in photographs, status updates and friend lists. In many cases, the information is publicly accessible.

In a section entitled “utility in criminal cases”, the document says agents can scan suspects’ profiles to establish motives, determine a person’s location, and tap into personal communication, for instance through Facebook status updates.

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone. What’s notable is that the Electronic Freedom Foundation got hold of an internal Department of Justice slideshow (presumably a PowerPoint presentation) dealing with this topic. The excerpts in the news story are fascinating.

The article goes on to point out that social networking sites are often checked as part of employment background checks–again, not news, although not necessarily publicized. I happened to be with a personnel guy when he checked the social networking page (not Facebook) of a job applicant. The picture of the applicant smoking a joint did not further the applicant’s chances for employment (no confidence was violated–I didn’t know who the applicant was or what the applicant looked like).

Mentioned, but not resolved, in the Department of Justice slideshow was the question of whether an agent’s creating a Facebook account under an assumed name violates Facebook’s terms of service. Given that undercover police work has a long history, I suspect this practice would be considered equivalent to working under cover, but I am not a lawyer.

Folks need to remember that the internet is a public place.

The FCC is offering a broadband speed test as part of its efforts to encourage better broadband service.

United States broadband users can participate in the test by going to Broadband dot gov.

From the website:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) was signed into law by President Obama on February 17th, 2009. The FCC is currently working in coordination with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to perform the FCC’s role under the Recovery Act. Specifically, in conjunction with the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program established by the Act, the FCC has been tasked with creating a National Broadband Plan by February 17, 2010. The Recovery Act states that the National Broadband Plan shall seek to ensure all people of the United States have access to broadband capability and shall establish benchmarks for meeting that goal.

I think we should help them gather the data they need.

My ISP tested out at about 15,000 kbps down and about 4,000 kbps megs up at the FCC; in contrast, Speedtest dot net, a site that Jeffrey introduced to me, reported 7.91 mbps down and 3.35 mbps up (the FCC reports in kbps, Speedtest in mbp/s). The “down” speeds differ significantly and I cannot account for that. The two sites might be using different testing methods: The FCC says that

Users are randomly assigned the Ookla or M-Lab application.

Once you complete one of the tests, you are given the option of trying the other.

The disparity of results between the FCC tests and Speedtest was similar in Firefox and Opera, though the reported download speeds were faster in Firefox (I have Firefox v. 3.0.17 and Opera v. 10.10 on my Ubuntu v. 8.x netbook here).

I don’t know what my ISP advertises; it was them or Verizon; the very few times I’ve had to call Verizon’s 800-number regarding my landline, the convoluted menu system there has made me reluctant to avail myself of their services when an alternative is available to me. (The real live human beings, once I got to them, were wonderful, but getting to them was an unnecessarily difficult adventure, he said tactfully.)

I learned about this at Balloon Juice.

Ultimately, wires will be involved with your wireless devices. Bloomberg reports Time-Warner wants to provide some of them:

Time Warner Cable Inc., the biggest pay-television provider in New York City, is pitching phone companies including AT&T and Verizon Wireless on a service that uses its underground cables to carry mobile calls and Web downloads — easing the congestion spurred by data-hungry users of smartphones like the iPhone.

The service, known in the industry as wireless backhaul, has become Time Warner Cable’s fastest-growing business after revenue tripled last year, said Craig Collins, senior vice president of business services. Across the cable industry, sales from wireless carriers may reach about $3.6 billion in 2012, according to researcher GeoResults Inc.

The story goes on to say, without quoting any statistics, that iPhones use twice the capacity of other smartphone (I wonder how an iPhone compares to my Android) and that backhaul may ease congestion from one cell tower to another, but won’t help between a tower and the phones in our pockets.

A while ago, I posted here about Fluxbox on Debian Linux. Fluxbox is a window manager or graphical user interface for Linux and Unix environments running X.

Thursday night, I gave a presentation on Fluxbox at my local LUG. You can download a PDF of the handout here.

The handout is not a stand-alone document; it was written to accompany the presentation and the accompanying hands-on demonstration, but it can give you an idea of some of the things you can do with Fluxbox.

At the end of the document are links to sources of detailed information about Fluxbox.

I have just installed VirtualBox on one of my Slackware computers. I should have fun testing stuff on that and letting you all know what I find out.

In my last post about Slackware Linux, I mentioned how Slackware does not automatically resolve dependencies.

Tonight, I had to deal with a dependency issue in order to run Opera, my favorite browser ™. Here’s how I dealt with it.

I downloaded and installed Opera. It installed without errors, but, when I tried to start it, it didn’t.

So I opened a terminal window as root and started Opera from the command line, like this:

cd /usr/bin
./opera

It threw an error message that it needed the file libqt-mo.so.3.3.8.

The whereis command revealed that there was no file in a default Slackware Linux 13.0 installation whose name started with libqt-mo.so.

I teleported into my Slackware Linux 12.2 box and found the file. In fact, I found several files whose first name was libqt-mo.so. I scp’d them all over to my Slackware 13.0 box and copied them to the /usr/lib/qt/lib directory, which was the name of the directory in which I found them on the 12.2 computer.

Still no luck. Opera continued to complain that it could not find the file in /usr/lib/opera/10.10.

Never one to use a scalpel when a hammer would do, I muscled them right into /usr/lib/opera/10.10.

Bingo! Opera ran.

It’s busy synchronizing itself right now.

This is the last post in a series on installing Slackware Linux.

The earlier posts:

Part 1: Considered why some persons find Slackware difficult to install.

Part 2: Partitioned the hard drive for a clean install, as opposed to an upgrade or a dual boot installation.

Part 3: Formatted the swap drive and target drive and pointed the computer to the source media.

Part 4: Installed the operating system and included software and configured LiLo (the Linux Loader).

Part 5: Configured the network, time zone, mouse, and root password.

This post covers some in no particular order miscellaneous things I’ve learned that have made using Slackware more easier and enjoyable.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the fifth of series of posts on installing Slackware Linux. The previous parts:

Part 1: Considered why some persons find Slackware difficult to install.

Part 2: Partitioned the hard drive for a clean install, as opposed to an upgrade or a dual boot installation.

Part 3: Formatted the swap drive and target drive and pointed the computer to the source media.

Part 4: Installed the operating system and included software and configured LiLo (the Linux Loader).

This post looks at the final steps of configuring the system.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the fourth part of a series on installing Slackware Linux.

Part 1: Considered why some persons find Slackware difficult to install.

Part 2: Partitioned the hard drive for a clean install, as opposed to an upgrade or a dual boot installation.

Part 3: Formatted the swap drive and target drive and pointed the computer to the source media.

Now it’s time to put Slackware on the box.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we looked at using cfdisk to partition the hard drive (this morning, I changed to the title of that post to make it more accurate).

Today we will look at formatting drives and selecting the target drive for the installation.

We left off yesterday by exiting cfdisk and returning to the command line. To enter the installation program, type “setup” at the command line and press enter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Update: I changed “formatting” to “partitioning” in the title to make it more descriptive.

This is the second of several posts on installing Slackware Linux. The first post is here.

Before installing Slackware or any operating system, you have to have the installation media. I use CDs because some of my computers are old enough that they do not speak “bootable DVD.” For most Linux distributions I try, I simply download *.ISO files and burn CDs from them. Almost every DVD/CD burning program includes the ability to burn CDs from *.ISO files, but sometimes you have to hunt around a bit to find it.

(If you haven’t burned from an *.ISO file before, read the burner help file; all that copying the *.ISO to the CD does is give you a backup of the file, not a usable disk. I know; I’ve done it even after I knew better).

The computer needs to be set to boot from the CD drive before booting from the hard drive; this setting is found in the BIOS. See the note at the end of this post for pointers about setting the computer to boot from the CD.

Slackware 13.0, which I used in this test, comes in a six CD set; three of the CDs are installation CDs. Three contain extra programs and source code (under the terms of the GPL, source code must be made available to users–hence the term “open source”). Slackware does not have a live CD, which allows you to boot from the CD and test the OS without installing it, but there is a Slackware-based live CD project called “Slax.”

So, let’s boot this puppy.

Read the rest of this entry »

For some time now I’ve wanted to write a post on how to install Slackware Linux. I even had a bunch of pictures taken and kept getting distracted, then a new version came in the mail. I’ve finally sprung the time to set it up and will devote several posts to installing and configuring Slackware Linux.

About Slackware:

Slackware is the oldest named Linux distribution. It is also supposed to be the “most Unix like.” I cannot speak to that because I’ve never used Unix. I can say that in the Unix user group in my new area, my first impression is that most of the old Unix heads seem to be using Slackware.

Indeed, Slackware is venerable enough in the short history of Linux that it has given its name to a family of distributions, which are described as Slackware-based, Debian-based, or Fedora-based. (Of the ones I’ve tested, Ubuntu is Debian-based and CentOS is Fedora-based. I am currrently using Ubuntu on my laptop and my netbook because they came that way from the factory and if it ain’t broke etc.; my desktops all run Slackware.)

Slackware is conservative, not cutting edge. In the choice between “new” and “stable,” stable wins out.

Ease (or Not) of Install:

There are some Linux users who will claim that Slackware is difficult to install. (They do not, of course, use Slackware.)

Others, true geeky snobs, take the position that anything less than Slackware really is not Linux. There is one fellow currently participating in the newsgroup, alt.os.linux.slackware, whose signature includes something like this (I’ve edited it slightly):

“Ubuntu”: an African word meaning “I can’t figure out Slackware.”

The truth is this: Installing Slackware is not very difficult, but it is more difficult than installing and using many other Linux distributions. This is primarily because Slackware expects the user to be able to use either Linux fdisk (command line) or Linux cfdisk (menu-driven) to prepare the hard drive to receive the installation. (Linux cfdisk is similar to DOS fdisk). Most other distributions I’ve tested default to suggesting a formatting scheme and giving the option of doing it yourself.

Consequently, someone who has never formatted a hard drive is quickly confronted by a bunch of unfamiliar stuff to do and can understandably go up a tree complaining that “This Slackware stuff is too hard for me.”

Testbed:

The computer I’m using is a Pentium III 1000 with three hard drives:

• 40 GB IDE drive jumpered as master.
• 4 GB slave IDE drive jumpered as slave.
• 4 GB slave SCSI drive jumpered as slave (the primary drive when the computer started its life as a WindowsNT server; I added the other two).

Over the next several days, I’ll describe the initial installation and configuration of the operating system. This is not intended to be a text book install–I’m hardly qualified to write a text book–but rather one person’s lessons learned.