From eric at yikes.com Sat Jun 1 00:46:57 2002 From: eric at yikes.com (Eric A. Perlman) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:29 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [jtsmoore@pacificnet.net: REVOLUTION OS is now authorized for UC Santa Cruz screening] Message-ID: <20020601074657.GA62209@yikes.com> I imagine this message is in the waiting-to-be-approved queue, but I figured I should forward it along for you nightowls... See you tomorrow, at 1pm! Eric -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "J.T.S. Moore" Subject: REVOLUTION OS is now authorized for UC Santa Cruz screening Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:18:29 -0700 Size: 5453 Url: http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/pipermail/sluglug/attachments/20020601/65636f96/attachment.mht From dwalker at cats.ucsc.edu Sat Jun 1 05:17:29 2002 From: dwalker at cats.ucsc.edu (Daniel Isacc Walker) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [jtsmoore@pacificnet.net: REVOLUTION OS is now authorized for UC Santa Cruz screening] In-Reply-To: <20020601074657.GA62209@yikes.com> Message-ID: I guess you really do get what you want if your nice.. Although I think he was responding to my comments , and yours .. Anyways, I'll be there with the movie, at 1pm .. (I'm getting a little sea sick ..) Daniel On Sat, 1 Jun 2002, Eric A. Perlman wrote: > I imagine this message is in the waiting-to-be-approved queue, but I > figured I should forward it along for you nightowls... > > See you tomorrow, at 1pm! > > Eric > From tech at linux-tech.com Sat Jun 1 15:24:12 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] REVOLUTION OS is now authorized for UC Santa Cruz screening Message-ID: <20020601152412.B23671@linux-tech.com> Hello, I would like to say thanks for your kindness and allowing the presentation of REVOLUTION OS at UCSC. I think understand your concerns, however if you had not done so I would have missed the chance to see it. I have not been inside a commercial movie theater in more than 12 years (except the Nickelodeon Theaters in Santa Cruz). The documentary was great, not only it was very informative, it also made me feel part of history since I had been present in some of the public activities filmed. No, I could not find myself in the movie, but i was there : ) Anyway, I just wanted to take some time to say thanks for all your kun fu (time and effort), is the least I can do. I know there is no "free ride" someone always pays the tab. In this particular case, you and the tax payers that fund UCSC. Best Regards, David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From peterbe at sonic.net Sat Jun 1 18:02:23 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing Message-ID: <200206020102.g5212N46011087@newbolt.sonic.net> I would like to add my thanks for allowing the showing of RevolutionOS this afternoon. I found the discussion of the issues regarding free/open-source software, and the development of the open-source philosophy, very interesting. I attended the show with an instructor at Cabrillo College, who will be interested in obtaining a videotape version of the film, when that's available for educational purposes. He is teaching some Linux system administration classes at that college. I must say I would agree with your initial reaction to this showing (as I agreed with the Bill Gates/Altair open letter to the Home Brew Computer Club back in the '70s - I attended a few meetings of that myself, and first encountered Bill and the Apple Steves there). Creative people do have to make a living! On the other hand, with respect to software, I believe that it is best for all if operating systems and software tools be easily available and cheap - that promotes software development by a larger number of people, etc, as the film brings out. Hopefully this showing will help promote the film. When I hear of the showings at the Camera theater(s), I'll let some friends 'over the hill' know about that. Also, I suspect that the Nickelodeon in Santa Cruz might be willing to screen the film (they have recently acquired a 2nd theater downtown, by the way). I must take issue with Richard Stallman on some points - he was a bit inaccurate in claiming that password protection of accounts was a new thing in the '70s. It goes back long before that - in the context of timesharing systems, to the mid-'60s, and for earlier batch systems, at least user accounts were needed to submit jobs. Also, software was only free in the university environment - otherwise you had to pay IBM or Control Data or whatever for it. At any rate, I'm a great admirer of Stallman, not only for his stand on free software (though I'd take Linus's side on that issue), but also for is stands on civil rights in general, particularly on his web page ( http://www.stallman.org/ ). Thanks again for letting this showing happen! - Peter Belew http://www.sonic.net/~peterbe/index.php3 From peterbe at sonic.net Sat Jun 1 20:28:43 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Down with MSFT IE! Message-ID: <200206020328.g523She2018219@newbolt.sonic.net> Here's a page worth linking to: http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ Their links page looks pretty good. I just put one of their buttons on my home page (after discovering that my credit union's web site can't be used anymore with my Linux Netscape 4.7x). Peter From rick at linuxmafia.com Sat Jun 1 23:01:17 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: <200206020102.g5212N46011087@newbolt.sonic.net> References: <200206020102.g5212N46011087@newbolt.sonic.net> Message-ID: <20020602060117.GI25192@linuxmafia.com> I gather that substantially all of the videocassettes of "Revolution OS" that people have been waving about, lately, must be derived from three showings in March 2002 on the Sundance cable channel. People taped or otherwise captured that broadcast, and so here we are. Meanwhile, filmmaker JTS Moore -- who, to remind everyone, ran up personal consumer debt funding this film out of his own pocket -- is struggling to book theatrical showings that might actually recoup some of his money, not to mention funding (legitimate) release and distribution on VCR and/or DVD. But rather than dwell on all that, I thought I'd address this bit about Bill Gates's "Open Letter to Hobbyists", which Peter Belew dragged into the discussion. Peter, I happen to be one of the old-timers, too, and my memory is perhaps a little better than yours. The letter was _not_ to the Homebrew Computer Club (of which I was a member at the time), but rather to a the MITS Altair Users' Newsletter, in New Mexico. David Bunnell was then newsletter editor, and he lobbed a copy to us at the Homebrew club, among other people. Which is how we got it. (And this was in early 1976, not 1977.) The letter caused quite a flap. For one thing, this complaint from the General Partner of "Micro-Soft" over in Albuquerque wasn't entirely honest. The software in question had been created on a taxpayer-subsidised PDP-10 (running a 8080 emulator) at Harvard, and also there was very strong, reasonable suspicion that Gates, Allen, and Davidoff had "borrowed" from several other people's BASIC inplementations without their authors' permission. Also, and less relevantly, Micro-Soft was already getting a reputation for questionable business deals: If you were buying MITS dodgy boards, Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC was $150. If not, the same product was $500, which was a hell of lot in those days. Which was not a good reason to misappropriate it, although the questionable ancestry of Micro-Soft's 4kB interpreter arguably _was_. Nobody understood software licensing back then. For one thing, software had never really been though of as a product before 1975-6. We had only a rough sense of the hacker ethic to work from -- but this involved authors' work being shared because they _wanted_ it shared. I was vocal among the Homebrewers who, following the flip side of this logic, wanted to give Gates (and Micro-Soft) the obscurity he was demanding. We already had TinyBASIC and other freely-distributable dialects -- which flourished after Gates's nastygram. We didn't _need_ his $500 boondoggle. But the hacker ethic was never about ripping off creative types. If anything, one of the distinguishing traits of the free software movement since the late 80s is that some of us actually _do_ bother to take licence agreements seriously. I still think that, if more Homebrewers and others in the hacking community had more consistently adopted my viewpoint and said "The hell with Altair BASIC and the horse it rode in on", we'd have had an open source explosion a decade sooner than we did, and the 1980s would have been a lot more fun. -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Sun Jun 2 00:29:18 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: <20020602060117.GI25192@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: Rick Moen spat forth: > Peter, I happen to be one of the old-timers, too, and my memory is > perhaps a little better than yours. The letter was _not_ to the > Homebrew Computer Club (of which I was a member at the time), but rather > to a the MITS Altair Users' Newsletter, in New Mexico. David Bunnell > was then newsletter editor, and he lobbed a copy to us at the Homebrew > club, among other people. Which is how we got it. (And this was in > early 1976, not 1977.) Looking it up in Fire in the Valley concurs with this info. > Also, and less relevantly, Micro-Soft was already getting a reputation > for questionable business deals: If you were buying MITS dodgy boards, > Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC was $150. If not, the same product was $500, > which was a hell of lot in those days. Which was not a good reason to > misappropriate it, although the questionable ancestry of Micro-Soft's > 4kB interpreter arguably _was_. Which was actually Ed Roberts' work, not Gates' work. It's such a shame because I keep really wanting to love the guy. If you want an actual deal to blame Gates for, blame him for DOS v. CP/M when the PC came out. CP/M was a full hundred dollars more. Although, I suppose IBM shares blame there. After all, they kept Gary from suing by promising him that CP/M was going to be their primary operating system. Oh, worth noting. Mike Swaine received a copy of the original source for that interpreter and attributed it completely to Gates, Allen, and Davidoff. -Phil/CERisE From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Sun Jun 2 00:30:16 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Down with MSFT IE! In-Reply-To: <200206020328.g523She2018219@newbolt.sonic.net> Message-ID: Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo LYNX!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (the web browser for the discriminating hacker) -Phil/CERisE Peter Belew spat forth: > > Here's a page worth linking to: > > http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ > > Their links page looks pretty good. > > I just put one of their buttons on my home page (after discovering > that my credit union's web site can't be used anymore with my > Linux Netscape 4.7x). > > Peter > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From rick at linuxmafia.com Sun Jun 2 09:20:06 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: References: <20020602060117.GI25192@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: <20020602162006.GK25192@linuxmafia.com> Quoting Phil White (cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com): >> Also, and less relevantly, Micro-Soft was already getting a >> reputation for questionable business deals: If you were buying MITS >> dodgy boards, Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC was $150. If not, the same >> product was $500, which was a hell of lot in those days. Which was >> not a good reason to misappropriate it, although the questionable >> ancestry of Micro-Soft's 4kB interpreter arguably _was_. > > Which was actually Ed Roberts' work, not Gates' work. Hmm. I think there's some risk of confusion, here. Ed Roberts was founder of MITS, the model rocketry and computer _hardware_ company. As such, it needed a BASIC interpreter for its Altair 8080-based box, and college kids Gates and Allen telephoned him offering to write one under contract, which Roberts thereupon signed (for MITS) with their ad-hoc partnership, Micro-Soft. At which point, Gates, Allen, and a fellow they hired named Monte Davidoff actually sat down and wrote [/copied/stole] the fool thing in Harvard's PDP-10's 8080 emulator, printed it out and punched paper tape, and flew Allen down to Albuquerque to show Ed Roberts that it more or less worked. Later, they delivered to MITS a number of less-buggy versions, though others here in the Valley did a somewhat better job of debugging it than they did. But it wasn't "Ed Roberts's work", except in writing the contract for it. Roberts wasn't a coder. He was strictly a hardware guy. > Oh, worth noting. Mike Swaine received a copy of the original > source for that interpreter and attributed it completely to Gates, > Allen, and Davidoff. Correction: Swaine wrote in DDJ about _others_ (such as Dave Mery and Ian Griffiths) coming across a copy of the source code left behind a filing cabinet, more or less by accident, in Pusey Library at Harvard. Nobody is allowed to "receive" (copy) the library copy, only examine it in place. Among other things, Swaine noted these three comment lines: 00560 PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF. 00580 BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF. 00600 MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE That much was of course known to everyone back in the day. But the question wasn't who were _claimed_ to originated the work, but rather who actually did. Versions such as those Dan Sokol duplicated on an ASR-33, around here, seemed suspiciously similar to other people's BASICs who had _not_ been asked permission for such re-use and were not credited on Micro-Soft's "product". -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From jtsmoore at pacificnet.net Sat Jun 1 00:18:29 2002 From: jtsmoore at pacificnet.net (J.T.S. Moore) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] REVOLUTION OS is now authorized for UC Santa Cruz screening Message-ID: <3CF87545.F4E3FDC8@pacificnet.net> To all, I have read the series of e-mails related to the unauthorized UC Santa Cruz screening that was scheduled for June 1. I sincerely appreciate IEEE's good faith effort to correct the mistake. Consequently, so as not to inconvenience the people planning to attend the screening, I want to give IEEE and SlugLUG permission to screen REVOLUTION OS at 1 PM on June 1. I would ask the members of SVLUG to hold off on attending the screening for the simple reason that I am trying to get REVOLUTION OS booked into the Camera 3 in San Jose, and I would prefer that SVLUG's members have a chance to see a nice 35mm print of the film. If my distributor is unable to book the film into a theater in the Bay Area, I promise that I will work with SVLUG to quickly set up a screening for its members. I realize there may be some members of SlugLUG who are unhappy that I originally requested that they not hold an unauthorized screening of REVOLUTION OS. There are several reasons why I made the request, and none of them have anything to do with me wanting to be a jerk. One SlugLUG member commented that it was odd that a movie about the Open Source movement would not be available for open viewings. Another SlugLUG member remarked that my request smacks of Bill Gates Open Letter to Hobbyists. The bottomline is that I did make a film about the Open Source movement, but to assume that automatically means that the film is itself Open Sourced seems to be a little bit of a stretch. If I made a movie about the history of vegetarianism that would not automatically mean I'm a vegetarian. I simply thought Open Source and Free Software were compelling subjects worth exploring and documenting. As a result, I came to admire many aspects of the Open Source movement and chose to focus the documentary on the movement's positive history. However, I do not think I should be punished for telling the story of Free Software and Open Source by having my intellectual property misappropriated. More practically, my feelings about Open Sourcing REVOLUTION OS are abundantly clear when you see the explicit copyright notice at the end of the film's credits. I realize that making a videotape copy for personal use from a TV airing is considered fair use. I believe in a healthy fair use doctrine. However, there is a big difference between viewing your personal copy at home with a few friends and holding a publicly advertised screening on a university campus. So I freely admit my objection to unauthorized screenings of REVOLUTION OS does echo Bill Gate's letter. Personally, I believe that the creator of a piece of intellectual property should retain the choice to Open Source their IP. If the Open Source movement is not voluntary then it is really just piracy. One of the reasons I am concern with unauthorized group screenings of the film, is that my distributor is planning in a few weeks to begin selling VHS copies of the film for educational/institutional use with a license permitting noncommercial large group screenings. We hope to use the money from these sales to fund the authoring and replication of the DVD. I want to release the DVD as soon as possible, but I cannot afford to take on anymore REVOLUTION OS-related debt. Thus the importance of preserving the educational/institutional market. Frequently, I will read comments on Slashdot and other mailing lists that justify the piracy of music on the grounds that it benefits the artists and only hurts the greedy record labels. Well, in the case of REVOLUTION OS there is no multinational media conglomerate to punish. It's just me. I made and financed the film on my own. I have worked full-time for almost three years without a salary. The only way I will get out of debt and have a chance to make another film is if people seek out legal opportunities to view REVOLUTION OS. I truly appreciate the enthusiasm of the Open Source community for REVOLUTION OS, and I am grateful that people do want to see it. If you will just bare with me, I will figure out a way for all interested persons to legally view it. I hope the dust up over the unauthorized, and now authorized, screening at UC Santa Cruz has not inconvenienced anyone. Sincerely, J.T.S. Moore Director, REVOLUTION OS From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Sun Jun 2 13:14:07 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: <20020602162006.GK25192@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: Rick Moen spat forth: > But it wasn't "Ed Roberts's work", except in writing the contract for > it. Roberts wasn't a coder. He was strictly a hardware guy. As any other human being with an understanding of pronouns would have gotten, the deal was Ed Roberts' work. You made it sound as though Gates was the evil business dealer there. Kind of a fun story while we're on it. Legend has it that when Gates was on the plane, he suddenly realized that a loader hadn't been written. Working on napkins and the like, he finished the loader for the interpreter. > Correction: Swaine wrote in DDJ about _others_ (such as Dave Mery > and Ian Griffiths) coming across a copy of the source code left behind a > filing cabinet, more or less by accident, in Pusey Library at Harvard. > Nobody is allowed to "receive" (copy) the library copy, only examine it > in place. Among other things, Swaine noted these three comment lines: > > 00560 PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF. > 00580 BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF. > 00600 MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE > > That much was of course known to everyone back in the day. But the > question wasn't who were _claimed_ to originated the work, but rather > who actually did. Versions such as those Dan Sokol duplicated on an > ASR-33, around here, seemed suspiciously similar to other people's > BASICs who had _not_ been asked permission for such re-use and were > not credited on Micro-Soft's "product". That's correct. Except for a couple of points: 1) BASIC wasn't written in BASIC, but rather machine code. 1a) Even if it were, there should be rem statemsnts before those... 1b) The code was shoehorned into 2k (if memory serves). They wouldn't have wasted so much memory with mere graffiti. 2) He also chatted with Gates about it. He did some footwork and didn't find cause to mention that it was plagiarized. Nothing personal Rick, but I'll trust Mike's word about PC history any day of the week over yours. -Phil/CERisE From rick at linuxmafia.com Sun Jun 2 15:06:23 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: References: <20020602162006.GK25192@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: <20020602220623.GN25192@linuxmafia.com> Quoting Phil White (cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com): > You made it sound as though Gates was the evil business dealer there. I have no interest in who was being "evil" -- nor in who determined the code's pricing model. The subject I was addressing was why some people in the Homebrew Computer Club found Mr. Gates's claim upon them to be questionable. And, -=to repeat=-, these were not _my_ views, just those that were aired at the time. > That's correct. Except for a couple of points: > 1) BASIC wasn't written in BASIC, but rather machine code. I did not _say_ Altair BASIC was written in BASIC. _Obviously_ it was 8080 assembler. I'm simply quoting what was observed in the library's printout, which presumably was not just the bare interpreter: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/18915.html > 1a) Even if it were, there should be rem statemsnts before those... To reiterate, I am only repeating what Dave Mery and Ian Griffiths reported seeing in a printout that included a version of Altair BASIC. If you want more detail, you'll have to inquire with them or the Pusey Library staff. > 1b) The code was shoehorned into 2k (if memory serves). Memory does _not_ serve, then: Altair BASIC required 4 kB of core. Possibly, you're thinking of Tom Pittman's interpreter. > They wouldn't have wasted so much memory with mere graffiti. Kindly note that I nowhere stated that those comments were loaded into RAM for any purpose whatsoever, just that they were observed on the printout in Pusey Library. > He did some footwork and didn't find cause to mention that it was > plagiarized. May I ask where Mr. Swaine's views and reasoning on this subject might be found? I recall only his August 2001 DDJ column, which said nothing of the sort. Frankly, I personally did not then, nor do I now, give a tinker's damn how much in Altair BASIC was original to Gates, Allen, and Davidoff. Their attitude, pricing, and code quality all sucked, and better alternatives beckoned from others. A more rational reaction would have been "Fine, we'll ignore you, then." I could have sworn I said pretty much all of this once already. In fact, I did. -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Sun Jun 2 17:18:55 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: <20020602220623.GN25192@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: Rick Moen spat forth: > I have no interest in who was being "evil" -- nor in who determined the > code's pricing model. The subject I was addressing was why some > people in the Homebrew Computer Club found Mr. Gates's claim upon them > to be questionable. And, -=to repeat=-, these were not _my_ views, just > those that were aired at the time. You may have no interest, but your writing suggests it. In order to be historically accurate, you should mention that it was Ed Roberts who was guilty of the price inflation. It's a matter of accuracy. You shouldn't bash Gates just because it's fashionable to do so. Nor should you write in such a matter. For further analysis, contact an English professor. > I did not _say_ Altair BASIC was written in BASIC. _Obviously_ it was > 8080 assembler. I'm simply quoting what was observed in the library's > printout, which presumably was not just the bare interpreter: > http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/18915.html Those line numbers appear to have nothing to do with 8080 assembler, hence my reasoning that it was lines of BASIC. I'm awfully curious where they came from. In fact, I believe that's reason to doubt the authenticity of the article until a reasonable explanation is given. You'll notice that they're AUTO 20 increments... Never mind that the Register has never struck me as a reliable source of information. They appear to follow the Guide's view on reporting. Of course, for definitiveness, one need only contact the library. > Memory does _not_ serve, then: Altair BASIC required 4 kB of core. > Possibly, you're thinking of Tom Pittman's interpreter. The interpreter itself fit in 2k. It required another 2k for program space. (By _Fire_In_The_Valley_) > May I ask where Mr. Swaine's views and reasoning on this subject might > be found? I recall only his August 2001 DDJ column, which said nothing > of the sort. I believe it to be implicit in his discussion. Mike's one of the good guys about this sort of thing. You will notice that he made the statement that the evidence bears the conclusion that Gates & Allen were/are good programmers. I would have liked a bit more detail, but I know enough 8080 to guess at the tricks in use. Oh, and keeping with my policy, this is my last reply to you on this matter. -Phil/CERisE From peterbe at sonic.net Sun Jun 2 19:40:00 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: <20020602162006.GK25192@linuxmafia.com> from "Rick Moen" at Jun 02, 2002 09:20:06 AM Message-ID: <200206030240.g532e0dk008049@newbolt.sonic.net> > Hi - That's pretty much what I understand, too: > At which point, Gates, Allen, and a fellow they hired named Monte > Davidoff actually sat down and wrote [/copied/stole] the fool thing > in Harvard's PDP-10's 8080 emulator, printed it out and punched paper > tape, and flew Allen down to Albuquerque to show Ed Roberts that it > more or less worked. As I heard, there was maybe one instruction that needed to be changed. The emulator was probably pretty good. The only thing that might have been a bit dicey would be getting the Altair's TTY interface I/O right. Anyhow, that's pretty indirect knowledge on my part. For a few years after MS got established in Bellevue, maybe up to the time that they finally moved from their first 3 locations in Bellevue to the Redmond campus, they mainly used PDP-10-series computers (by then DEC 20's) for software development. When I first dealt with Gates and Allen in their First Bank offices in downtown Bellevue (Aug through Dec 1980), they were using a DEC-20 running the TOPS20 OS. During that Fall, I ran into Charles Simonyi up there - he was about to be hired by Gates to work on software like Word (he was the author at PARC of the BRAVO word processor, which I used a lot in the mid-'70s). They were still using those DEC systems 2 years later when I was working on porting Multiplan to my employer's system in the Northup Way office, next to the Burgermaster drive-in (which gave its name to a memory-management module in Windows 1.x and possibly 2.x). Anyhow I know BillG is smart enough to fix the bugs himself. He was pretty impressive back in 1980 - my task was to help negotiate the design of a Basic - with graphics - for my employer's PC, which originally was designed with a 68K cpu, and then changed to a Z8000, because BillG had a Z8000 Basic (without graphics) and a 8086/8088 Basic (because of the parallel IBM deal, which of course we didn't know about for 2 years), but no 68K Basic. Too bad - our original design was just like the first Mac, 4 years earlier - but with no mouse (which would have been a hard sell to management in 1980). (Also we didn't have as good a development team as Apple did - I was the only PARC 'graduate'). > > Later, they delivered to MITS a number of less-buggy versions, though > others here in the Valley did a somewhat better job of debugging it than > they did. Did the Calif. people disassemble the MITS binaries, or how did they get the source? > > But it wasn't "Ed Roberts's work", except in writing the contract for > it. Roberts wasn't a coder. He was strictly a hardware guy. Absolutely true. > > > Oh, worth noting. Mike Swaine received a copy of the original > > source for that interpreter and attributed it completely to Gates, > > Allen, and Davidoff. Who's Mike Swaine? - the name sounds vaguely familiar. > > Correction: Swaine wrote in DDJ about _others_ (such as Dave Mery > and Ian Griffiths) coming across a copy of the source code left behind a > filing cabinet, more or less by accident, in Pusey Library at Harvard. > Nobody is allowed to "receive" (copy) the library copy, only examine it > in place. Among other things, Swaine noted these three comment lines: > > 00560 PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF. > 00580 BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF. > 00600 MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE > > That much was of course known to everyone back in the day. But the > question wasn't who were _claimed_ to originated the work, but rather > who actually did. Versions such as those Dan Sokol duplicated on an ... Interesting. BTW, speaking of PDP-10s and Microsoft, Paul Allen owns a French PDP-10 clone system, which is actually on the internet. (Hopefully, my ISP's got their DNS working today - they are moving during this weekend, so this email will go out - I had a lot of email bounced this AM) - Peter From rick at linuxmafia.com Sun Jun 2 19:51:54 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: References: <20020602220623.GN25192@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: <20020603025154.GP25192@linuxmafia.com> Quoting Phil White (cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com): > You may have no interest, but your writing suggests it. We _could_ just stop with "I have no interest". > In order to be historically accurate.... Suggestion: There are plenty of perfectly fine hobbies for you to investigate. > ...you should mention that it was Ed Roberts who was guilty of the > price inflation. Really? You must have copies of the relevant private business undertakings between MITS and the Micro-Soft partnership, then! Splendid. > You shouldn't bash Gates just because it's fashionable to do so. Was there some _specific_ part of "these were not _my_ views, just those that were aired at the time" that you failed to understand last time, or was it the entire thing? > Those line numbers appear to have nothing to do with 8080 assembler, > hence my reasoning that it was lines of BASIC. I can't help noticing that this is utterly irrelevant to what I said. > I'm awfully curious where they came from. Fine. Let us know when you get back from your visit to Pusey Library. > In fact, I believe that's reason to doubt the authenticity of the > article until a reasonable explanation is given. OK, Dave Mery, Ian Griffiths, Andre Warusfel, and Andrew Orlowski are all crackpots. Fine. > The interpreter itself fit in 2k. It required another 2k for > program space. (By _Fire_In_The_Valley_) I'm sorry, that's not accurate. The thing barely shoehorned into a 4 kB machine with just a _little_ headroom for program code. I remember quite well. That's one reason more efficient implementations thrived, such as TinyBASIC. >> May I ask where Mr. Swaine's views and reasoning on this subject might >> be found? I recall only his August 2001 DDJ column, which said nothing >> of the sort. > > I believe it to be implicit in his discussion. Your belief is a most peculiar one. But you're welcome to it. -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From rick at linuxmafia.com Sun Jun 2 20:04:36 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: <200206030240.g532e0dk008049@newbolt.sonic.net> References: <20020602162006.GK25192@linuxmafia.com> <200206030240.g532e0dk008049@newbolt.sonic.net> Message-ID: <20020603030436.GQ25192@linuxmafia.com> Quoting Peter Belew (peterbe@sonic.net): > Did the Calif. people disassemble the MITS binaries, or how did they > get the source? A lot of people disassembled the MITS code, to the best of my understanding. (I was just a high school kid at the time, and much more interested in minicomputers, honestly.) > Who's Mike Swaine? - the name sounds vaguely familiar. Writes for Dr. Dobb's (of which he was for a while editor in chief), was formerly at InfoWorld. Engagingly broad interests as a columnist. -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From josh at unixmercenary.net Sun Jun 2 20:41:08 2002 From: josh at unixmercenary.net (Josh Neal) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Down with MSFT IE! In-Reply-To: References: <200206020328.g523She2018219@newbolt.sonic.net> Message-ID: <20020603034108.GB462@unixmercenary.net> On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 12:30:16AM -0700, Phil White wrote: > Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo LYNX!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lynx is so ... 1994 of you. links (http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/) is a wonderful replacement. > (the web browser for the discriminating hacker) Try again. "Best Viewed with telnet to port 80" http://sartre.dgate.org/~brg/bvtelnet80/ -josh -- Josh Neal "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer." -- Homer Simpson From peterbe at sonic.net Sun Jun 2 20:42:46 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Basic questions Message-ID: <200206030342.g533gkHj011737@newbolt.sonic.net> Speaking of Tiny Basic and so on, someone please fill me in on how that differed functionally from the original MS/MITS Basic. I didn't use either one, so I only knew about them second-hand. My impression is that Tiny Basic was (at least at first) integer-only, but I don't know that for sure. MITS Basic apparently had floating-point arithmetic and math functions (later versions of course did). When I worked for Imsai in 1977, Microsoft Basic had been worked on for a while, and Imsai sold it. There was also a compiled Basic that was available at that time - I think that came from Seymour Rubinstein. (My programming was in 8080 and 8048/8748 assembly code at that job). In the next year or so after that, I worked for a while for Apple, doing some documentation and some testing of the floating point Basic I had - which I believe was written by Microsoft. I was not impressed - floating-point arithmetic was really bad: you would expect f(x) = n * x to be a monotonic function (n a floating point constant , x a f.p. variable). It wasn't. There was also a fixed-point Basic in the ROM - I think Woz wrote that. (Some Apple ][ expert please chip in to correct me if my memory has slipped). BTW that was my first real experience with Basic. The only 8080 Basic I ever used was North Star Basic, which came with their floppy-disk system. I used that for an accounting package I wrote for someone in the summer of 1979. N.S. Basic was decimal - all numeric variables were stored in decimal (BCD) form, 4 bits per digit, rather than in binary. Since I was writing code for handling B-trees on the disk, the coding was excruciating, with only 2-character variable names available. Later in 1979-1980 I worked for a Santa Cruz company that was building TRS-80 and Apple ][ hardware - so for a while I used the Apple (Microsoft) Basic again. Also TRS-80 Z-80 assembler code - using a Microsoft assembler and linker. Around 1982-1983 I ported Microsoft's 'GW Basic' to my Italian employer's 8086 system - using refined versions of graphics code which I'd been involved in for the earlier Z-8000 system. That was the last I ever had to do with old-style Basic, the kind with crummy variable names and line numbers for labels. I did write some vbscript for a class last fall (ASP stuff), but that sort of resembles a real programming language. By the way, regarding BillG and business practices: I don't know anything about the workings of deals for the 8080 Basic, but he was extremely reasonable in pricing the Z8000 Basic he sold to my Italian employer in 1980 - they took a loss, at least initially, on the deal, though they did exact a small per-system royalty. But that did help them get started in a much more commercial market that the MITS deal years later. (Before we bought the Z8K Basic, they had created graphics Basics for a couple of Japanese systems). - Peter From peterbe at sonic.net Sun Jun 2 20:51:37 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: <20020603030436.GQ25192@linuxmafia.com> from "Rick Moen" at Jun 02, 2002 08:04:36 PM Message-ID: <200206030351.g533pbnL012282@newbolt.sonic.net> Hi - Thanks - I think Mike Swaine may have been involved in the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park, which I often visited around 1976-1979. This was originally a spinoff from the People's Computer Company, along with Dr Dobb's. I know I met the person who was selling the Jolt computer there. I might well have run into you there, don't remember. What school did you go to? Another person who showed up there for a while was John Draper, aka Captain Crunch. He demoed his bluebox to someone there, but the FBI got him soon afterward, as I'm told. Now he's supposedly very much reformed, and is friends with a NYT technology reporter friend of mine, who was in my bike-racing club back in the mid-'60s. Peter > > Quoting Peter Belew (peterbe@sonic.net): > > > Did the Calif. people disassemble the MITS binaries, or how did they > > get the source? > > A lot of people disassembled the MITS code, to the best of my > understanding. (I was just a high school kid at the time, and much more > interested in minicomputers, honestly.) > > > Who's Mike Swaine? - the name sounds vaguely familiar. > > Writes for Dr. Dobb's (of which he was for a while editor in chief), was > formerly at InfoWorld. Engagingly broad interests as a columnist. > > -- > Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense > Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. > rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From rick at linuxmafia.com Sun Jun 2 20:57:51 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing In-Reply-To: <200206030351.g533pbnL012282@newbolt.sonic.net> References: <20020603030436.GQ25192@linuxmafia.com> <200206030351.g533pbnL012282@newbolt.sonic.net> Message-ID: <20020603035751.GA23785@linuxmafia.com> Quoting Peter Belew (peterbe@sonic.net): > Thanks - I think Mike Swaine may have been involved in the Community > Computer Center in Menlo Park, which I often visited around 1976-1979. > This was originally a spinoff from the People's Computer Company, > along with Dr Dobb's. I know I met the person who was selling the > Jolt computer there. > > I might well have run into you there, don't remember. What > school did you go to? It's possible. I hung out a lot at the PCC offices on Menalto Ave. during high school. Which was Menlo School, Valparaiso @ University Avenue -- but I bicycled everywhere. (These days, I live not too far from there, and just a bit downhill from the SLAC Auditorium where the Homebrewers met for most of their history.) A friend of mine had an IMSAI 8080, but I couldn't see lavishing the money on such a thing, at the time, especially given how anemic they were compared to, say, the timeshare systems at my school. Boy was *I* wrong! -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From peterbe at sonic.net Sun Jun 2 21:04:26 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Down with MSFT IE! In-Reply-To: <20020603034108.GB462@unixmercenary.net> from "Josh Neal" at Jun 02, 2002 08:41:08 PM Message-ID: <200206030404.g5344QKd013263@newbolt.sonic.net> Way cool! Actually, I tried telnetting to various web servers just the other day. This really does work (oh, it requires a bit of work to connect to a page that is password-protected - haven't figured out the protocols for that yet). (begin unpaid commercial) My ISP does have links - I just tried it to connect to the site below. (The ISP is sonic.net in Santa Rosa - they use RH Linux, have shell access as well as GUI access to a lot of stuff, and will give a DSL customer 4 static IPs if requested - while they last, of course). (end of commercial). Thanks for the 'telnet' URL! Cheers, Peter > > On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 12:30:16AM -0700, Phil White wrote: > > Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo LYNX!!!!!!!!!!!!!! > > lynx is so ... 1994 of you. links (http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/) is a wonderful replacement. > > > (the web browser for the discriminating hacker) > > Try again. > > "Best Viewed with telnet to port 80" > http://sartre.dgate.org/~brg/bvtelnet80/ > > -josh > > -- > Josh Neal > "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer." > -- Homer Simpson > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Sun Jun 2 21:11:54 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Down with MSFT IE! In-Reply-To: <20020603034108.GB462@unixmercenary.net> Message-ID: Links isn't so bad, but not as good as lynx. You'll notice a larger binary and slightly slower speed. 8) I forgot about the telnet 80 campaign 8) Still, if I might channel Clinton for a moment, telnet isn't exactly a web browser ; ) -Phil/CERisE Josh Neal spat forth: > On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 12:30:16AM -0700, Phil White wrote: > > Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo LYNX!!!!!!!!!!!!!! > > lynx is so ... 1994 of you. links > (http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/) is a > wonderful replacement. > > > (the web browser for the discriminating hacker) > > Try again. > > "Best Viewed with telnet to port 80" > http://sartre.dgate.org/~brg/bvtelnet80/ > > -josh > > -- > Josh Neal > "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer." > -- Homer Simpson > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From peterbe at sonic.net Sun Jun 2 21:19:35 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Down with MSFT IE! In-Reply-To: from "Phil White" at Jun 02, 2002 09:11:54 PM Message-ID: <200206030419.g534JZem014213@newbolt.sonic.net> Well, that was the first time I ever ran links. It does seem to have a nice (text) popup when you encounter graphics - to prompt for downloading the graphics. I could see a scenerio where that's useful - say you're running a web server on a system with no X installed, but on browsing the web from said system's shell, using links, you could download the images at incorporate them in pages. Telnetting is something I did for sort of an exercise, or existance proof. Interesting someone has made a bit of a game of it ... 8=) Peter > > Links isn't so bad, but not as good as lynx. You'll notice a larger > binary and slightly slower speed. 8) > > I forgot about the telnet 80 campaign 8) Still, if I might channel > Clinton for a moment, telnet isn't exactly a web browser ; ) > > -Phil/CERisE > > Josh Neal spat forth: > > > On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 12:30:16AM -0700, Phil White wrote: > > > Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo LYNX!!!!!!!!!!!!!! > > > > lynx is so ... 1994 of you. links > > (http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/) is a > > wonderful replacement. > > > > > (the web browser for the discriminating hacker) > > > > Try again. > > > > "Best Viewed with telnet to port 80" > > http://sartre.dgate.org/~brg/bvtelnet80/ > > > > -josh > > > > -- > > Josh Neal > > "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer." > > -- Homer Simpson > > _______________________________________________ > > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > > > > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From josh at unixmercenary.net Sun Jun 2 22:32:14 2002 From: josh at unixmercenary.net (Josh Neal) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Down with MSFT IE! In-Reply-To: References: <20020603034108.GB462@unixmercenary.net> Message-ID: <20020603053214.GC462@unixmercenary.net> On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 09:11:54PM -0700, Phil White wrote: > Links isn't so bad, but not as good as lynx. You'll notice a larger > binary and slightly slower speed. 8) Possibly. But the table handling and Javascript (necessary for $DAY_JOB's internal web apps) are well worth the loss of a few hundred Kb of memory. > I forgot about the telnet 80 campaign 8) Still, if I might channel > Clinton for a moment, telnet isn't exactly a web browser ; ) Ooh, does this mean I can channel Gary Condit? He had somebody whacked. -josh -- Josh Neal "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer." -- Homer Simpson From brucem at mail.cruzio.com Sun Jun 2 23:13:17 2002 From: brucem at mail.cruzio.com (Bruce R. Montague) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] software licensing, ms basic Message-ID: <200206030613.g536DHU00732@mail.cruzio.com> Two minor elaborations that might be of interest: --- > The software in question had been created > on a taxpayer-subsidised PDP-10 (running a 8080 emulator) > ... suspicion... "borrowed"... The following is an interesting quote from "Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry", Stephan Manes and Paul Andrews, Simon & Schuster, 1999, which elaborates on the early intellectual ancestry of MS BASIC: "In the DEC world software was largely free. The best source was DECUS, the DEC User Society. It was from DECUS that Bill Gates got hold of paper tapes containing the source code to a version of BASIC and an assembler for the PDP-8. He used them to begin work on a project he considered fun: his very own edition of a BASIC interpreter." With a small, tight program like this you don't really have to "copy" it once it's fully seeped into your brain, which I guess cuts both ways. The PDP-8 originally had 4K of 12-bit words, later versions had another 4K accessed via explicit bank-switching (I once knew a 19-bit version (yah, segments) of the PDP-8 made by _IBM_ in Europe!). ---- Another minor point of interest re: > Nobody understood software licensing back then. Agreed, I understand the point, but believe things weren't that clear cut outside the nascent microcomputer software industry. In many ways the microcomputer software industry developed independent of the older, existing commercial computer software industry. The mainframe software industry (companies such as SAS and Informatics) had comfortably developed the modern software license by this time. And things cost a lot (I think DEC's BLISS compiler, arguably a better system programming language than C, licensed for $13,000/year). When you planned your annual budget, you went down and "ticked-off' a license "check-list". By this time (early 1970s) licenses from software-only companies were routine, and largely indistinguishable from the modern game MS would like to play. SAS licenses had to be renewed every year or so, SAS would start printing out a "license expiration" count-down within a few months of expiration (literally a warning banner on all jobs, something like "this program will become unavailable unless the license is renewed by ---"; that got the users (and thus mgrs) attention - sound familiar?). As soon as the micro industry started to mature, practices from the established industry started moving in with a vengeance. The historians that play in "IEEE Annals of Computing"( http://www.computer.org/annals ) appear to have concluded that the modern perpetual software license, as "universally" adopted today, was developed in 1968 by Informatics. Informatics developed Mark-IV, the first "killer app" developed by a software-only company (I used/supported both Mark-IV and SAS, Mark-IV evolved from a program developed for the USAF). The historians give the nod to Mark-IV as the first "modern" software product with a modern perpetual software license (see the IEEE Annals papers at the end of this doc): http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/informatics.html http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/cbi130.htm ADR (Autoflow), appears to be considered by the Annals community to have become the first "modern" software company in 1964, using a license developed from equipment lease licenses to protect itself from customer swapping of their software. Customers had become used to swapping "free" IBM open source software, and ADR was competing with a free IBM-provided program developed by IBM's customers. By the mid-60's IBM was apparently shipping something on the order of a million card-images a month of "open source" customer-developed software. Obviously, a lot of this stuff was simply in the air at the time... Papers have been written on the process of license development, including by the guy that developed the Informatics license (Postley); he appears to have been somewhat deliberate in what he was trying to do and had closely studied IBM's software marketing. His competitors, most evolving from consulting companies, immediately adopted his strategy, as it provided high up-front rates of return followed by guaranteed income. See "Mark-IV, evolution of the software product, a memoir", Postley, and "A view from the 1960's: how the software industry began", Luanne (James) Johnson, both in IEEE Annals, v20n1: http://www.computer.org/annals/an2002/pdf/a1003.pdf In any case, companies like SAS and Informatics were very much playing the software licensing game (SAS still seems to be going as strong as ever in the skill with which it plays this game. MS may be trying to figure out how to catch up with them.) I haven't had any involvement with SAS since the mid-70s, they seem to have formed SAS as a company in 1976 but the program first shipped in 1968: http://www.businessleader.com/bl/nov99/cover.html I completely agree with Rich's core point that homebrewers and hackers (or _someone_) should have done more to organize an open "DECUS/SHARE style software collection" and made times more interesting and fun... A number of folks _did_ try... seems to be happening now with the various *ix package/port systems. Maybe things just had to settle down to standard platforms for it to happen. sigh. - bruce From mlist-sluglug at theory.org Mon Jun 3 01:52:19 2002 From: mlist-sluglug at theory.org (Jeremy Avnet) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Down with MSFT IE! In-Reply-To: <20020603034108.GB462@unixmercenary.net> References: <200206020328.g523She2018219@newbolt.sonic.net> <20020603034108.GB462@unixmercenary.net> Message-ID: <20020603085219.GE23445@in.theory.org> * Josh Neal (josh@unixmercenary.net) said: > On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 12:30:16AM -0700, Phil White wrote: > > Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo LYNX!!!!!!!!!!!!!! > > lynx is so ... 1994 of you. links (http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/) is a wonderful replacement. There is also w3m at http://w3m.sourceforge.net/ All three suck / rock in their own ways. -- jeremy avnet / brainsik .:. From peterbe at sonic.net Mon Jun 3 07:07:04 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Dijkstra on BASIC Message-ID: <200206031407.g53E745s015978@newbolt.sonic.net> Here's what Edsger Dijkstra had to say about BASIC: It is practically imposible [sic] to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Courses/134/dijkstra.html http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Courses/134/history.html What I'm searching for is a quote from Dijkstra or someone else famous of the same generation who said something like "the invention of the microcomputer has set computer science back 20 years", sometime in the later 1970s. This was basically because the limitations of the small systems meant you couldn't do what you could do with large computers, with more memory and large word sizes. Also, it meant that a lot of novices would start working on computers, with little or no training. And, from looking at some recent postings here, it meant that the business would have to be reinvented from scratch. Peter From peterbe at sonic.net Mon Jun 3 15:03:24 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Serious SMAUG meeting tonight Message-ID: <200206032203.g53M3Oxe029839@newbolt.sonic.net> 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall Tonight 8 pm http://www.scruz.org/meeting.html 8=) Peter http://www.sonic.net/~peterbe/ From peterbe at sonic.net Tue Jun 4 10:53:52 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] A mascot for SlugLUG? Message-ID: <200206041753.g54Hrrbq015579@newbolt.sonic.net> Forget penguins, here's one for SlugLUG: http://www.sonic.net/~peterbe/maxlimax.html The cool thing is that 'limax' (Latin for 'slug') rhymes with 'linux'. 8=) Peter From phig at phig.org Tue Jun 4 14:09:50 2002 From: phig at phig.org (Karsten Wade) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] A mascot for SlugLUG? In-Reply-To: <200206041753.g54Hrrbq015579@newbolt.sonic.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 4 Jun 2002, Peter Belew wrote: > Forget penguins, here's one for SlugLUG: > > http://www.sonic.net/~peterbe/maxlimax.html > > The cool thing is that 'limax' (Latin for 'slug') > rhymes with 'linux'. Okay, where's the cartoonists in the bunch? We need to take ol' Sluggo and outfit him with a tuxedo and a handheld running Pocket Linux. :) - k' '`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'` Karsten Wade "As sharp as the leading karsten@phig.org edge of a ball bearing." http://phig.org/gpg/ - Dallas Dobro From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Tue Jun 4 20:19:00 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] XFS-How-To Message-ID: So after probably a month or so to struggle to get my system onto XFS and then the struggle to get everything working again, littlegreenmen has been reformed back to my liking. I thought that other prosumers might want to know what they're in for when migrating. 1) XFS has no support anywhere. You can't convert an ext2fs to an XFS partition. You can't resize partitions. You can't do an awful lot of anything with an XFS partition except create it. Quotas are still experimental (but seem pretty stable). It also isn't in the mainstream kernel source. 2) SGI's CVS sucks. I attempted a couple different compilations with success, however, it succeeded in freezing my system around 10 mins after bootup. It seemed due to disk access. I tried several different configurations &c. with little to no success. 3) SGI's patch wants to believe that it's a whole new kernel version. For 2.4.18 it swaps over to 2.4.18-xfs-1.1 which doesn't seem too awful. Heck, it even seems cool until you realize that all your modules start whining at you about it. So, with those warnings in mind, here's how to do it. First off, a Gentoo CD is handy to have around for emergency boots. It groks XFS and was the only distro that I had handy which did. Get the latest stable kernel and the SGI patch for it. untar both and apply the patch by cd /usr/src/linux ; patch -p1 Oh, one other thing. Make sure to edit the root level Makefile. The line that says 'EXTRAVERSION = -xfs-1.1' should be changed to just 'EXTRAVERSION =' -Phil/CERisE From graham at calteg.org Wed Jun 5 09:20:33 2002 From: graham at calteg.org (Graham Freeman) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] XFS-How-To In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [notes on XFS left unquoted] That's helpful. Thanks, Phil! -- Graham Freeman Executive Director, CalTEG tel: +1 831 466 0853 http://www.calteg.org/ From bran at cats.ucsc.edu Wed Jun 5 10:07:07 2002 From: bran at cats.ucsc.edu (Brandon Bickford) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] XFS-How-To References: Message-ID: <3CFE453B.6040109@cats.ucsc.edu> Since you seemed to have researched it well, do you have any idea which distributions let you do an xfs install? Brandon Phil White wrote: >So after probably a month or so to struggle to get my system onto XFS >and then the struggle to get everything working again, littlegreenmen >has been reformed back to my liking. I thought that other prosumers >might want to know what they're in for when migrating. > >1) XFS has no support anywhere. > You can't convert an ext2fs to an XFS partition. You can't resize >partitions. You can't do an awful lot of anything with an XFS >partition except create it. Quotas are still experimental (but seem >pretty stable). It also isn't in the mainstream kernel source. > >2) SGI's CVS sucks. > I attempted a couple different compilations with success, however, >it succeeded in freezing my system around 10 mins after bootup. It >seemed due to disk access. I tried several different configurations >&c. with little to no success. > >3) SGI's patch wants to believe that it's a whole new kernel version. > For 2.4.18 it swaps over to 2.4.18-xfs-1.1 which doesn't seem too >awful. Heck, it even seems cool until you realize that all your >modules start whining at you about it. > >So, with those warnings in mind, here's how to do it. > >First off, a Gentoo CD is handy to have around for emergency boots. It >groks XFS and was the only distro that I had handy which did. > >Get the latest stable kernel and the SGI patch for it. untar both and >apply the patch by cd /usr/src/linux ; patch -p1 >run make config or menuconfig depending on your preferences then make >dep. DO NOT proceed to make the kernel image, nor modules > >vi /usr/src/linux/include/linux/version.h and change the UTS name back >to 2.4.18! the patch will change it to 2.4.18-xfs-1.1 which will mess >up your modules! If you're feeling really paranoid, you could grep -R >2.4.18-xfs-1.1 | xargs sed 's/2.4.18-xfs-1.1/2.4.18/' FAILURE TO >CHANGE VERSION.H WILL CAUSE HEADACHES. TRUST ME. I KNOW FIRST HAND. > >Continue with make bzImage modules install modules_install ; >/sbin/lilo. Snag the SGI XFS tools to tweak XFS. > >Start migrating accordingly. Having an extra disk is almost the only >way to do it. I did, fortunately. I suppose you could do it with >CD-Rs. That's not a bad method either. There's some suggested args to >mkfs.xfs on SGI's site. Probably not a bad idea to go with. > >Once you've got your nice and shiny new XFS based system, proceed to >snag the latest set of quota tools and such. compile/apt-get/upgrade >-c/whatever/ > >At this point, life should be good. Disk access is light speed to >ext2/3 and faster to the trained eye than ReiserFS. So far, in my >trials, I've found only two annoyances with XFS: >1) Recovery of a deleted file is highly improbable. >2) After an improper termination of service, you might find some files > are now full of binary nulls. As SGI rather callously puts it, if > it hurts, STOP DOING IT! > >-Phil/CERisE > > >_______________________________________________ >Smaug mailing list >Smaug@lists.svlug.org >http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/smaug >Smaug home page: http://www.scruz.org/ > > > > From rick at linuxmafia.com Wed Jun 5 11:35:19 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] XFS-How-To In-Reply-To: <3CFE453B.6040109@cats.ucsc.edu> References: <3CFE453B.6040109@cats.ucsc.edu> Message-ID: <20020605183519.GS20206@linuxmafia.com> Quoting Brandon Bickford (bran@cats.ucsc.edu): > Since you seemed to have researched it well, do you have any idea which > distributions let you do an xfs install? http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#nativesupport says: Distribution: Support since: Mandrake Linux Version 8.1 SuSE Linux Version 8.0 Gentoo Linux Version 1.0 JB Linux Version 2.0 Debian 3.0/woody unoffical options (from http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips): woody/3.0 install floppy images with 2.4.x kernels, and support for XFS and ReiserFS filesystems, software RAID, and LVM (Ionut Georgescu): http://www.physik.tu-cottbus.de/~george/ woody/3.0 install floppy and netinst-CD images with 2.4.x kernels and support for XFS and JFS filesystems (Angelo Ovidi): http://xfdeb.sourceforge.net/ woody/3.0 install floppy images with 2.4.x kernels and support for XFS filesystems, software RAID, and LVM (Eduard Bloch): http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/ (After installing onto XFS, you may be best advised to replace your XFS driver and support code from CVS checkout, according to this article: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fs10.html) -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From isolis at igso.net Wed Jun 5 13:22:34 2002 From: isolis at igso.net (Ignacio Solis) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Grads] linux and c# In-Reply-To: <200206051948.MAA04329@sundance.cse.ucsc.edu> References: <200206051948.MAA04329@sundance.cse.ucsc.edu> Message-ID: <1023308554.5345.1.camel@rasa> On Wed, 2002-06-05 at 12:48, Ira Pohl wrote: > i would be interested in knowing if anyone > here has downloaded MONO -linux C# compiler > and tried it. Wouldn't this question be more appropriate to the sluglug list? Nacho -- In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they are different EEE8 08C9 FBAE B471 9691 CE7A 1CC8 D3DE B31E 10AB GPG Public Key: http://www.igso.net/isolis.gpg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/pipermail/sluglug/attachments/20020605/57411bf9/attachment.pgp From astitt at cats.ucsc.edu Wed Jun 5 15:27:20 2002 From: astitt at cats.ucsc.edu (Andrew Stitt) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] XFS-How-To In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Brandon Bickford wrote: > Since you seemed to have researched it well, do you have any idea which > distributions let you do an xfs install? > > Brandon > source mage linux also has an option to build some or all of your partitions as xfs (as well as ext2/3 or reiser). I highly recommend it for experienced users who _like_ installing from source and optimizing for your architecture, without sacrificing the ease of package management (shudder) systems. Source mage also has a number of 'safe' kernel configs that let you use xfs hopefully without having all the other crap phil went through, some of these are also 2.5 level kernels (for those who want to live on the edge) www.sourcemage.org news.souremage.org Andrew From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Wed Jun 5 17:46:20 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] minor extra clarifications and such In-Reply-To: <20020605183519.GS20206@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: Improper termination of service is a reboot or shutdown performed in an improper way (e.g. the big red button, pulling the plug, killing the power supply, etc, etc, etc.) Rick's list seemed pretty complete to me. Unfortunately, I don't think my latest favorite distribution (Sorceror) has support for it =( Slackware also has it in the brand-spanking-new 8.1 and/or current. One other note: Rick Moen spat forth: > (After installing onto XFS, you may be best advised to replace your XFS > driver and support code from CVS checkout, according to this article: > http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fs10.html) Let me say *from experience* ignore the CVS checkout. Keep track solely of the kernel level patches unless you're suicidal or purposely keeping a couple steps ahead of stable. The SGI kernel is not a stable one and it shows after about 10 minutes of uptime with disk access. -Phil/CERisE P.S. Anyone who wants a look at the new FS is welcome to do so on littlegreenmen. Just ssh littlegreenmen.armory.com (or l.armory.com for the lazy) and login as request with no password. From peterbe at sonic.net Wed Jun 5 18:31:38 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] minor extra clarifications and such In-Reply-To: from "Phil White" at Jun 05, 2002 05:46:20 PM Message-ID: <200206060131.g561Vcsm023136@newbolt.sonic.net> > > > -Phil/CERisE > > P.S. Anyone who wants a look at the new FS is welcome to do so on > littlegreenmen. Just ssh littlegreenmen.armory.com (or l.armory.com > for the lazy) and login as request with no password. Hmmm ... seems to demand a password. P > > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Wed Jun 5 18:35:53 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] minor extra clarifications and such In-Reply-To: <200206060131.g561Vcsm023136@newbolt.sonic.net> Message-ID: That is odd. I didn't know that ssh prevented blank logins. d'oh password = request then. 8) -Phil/CERisE Peter Belew spat forth: > > > > > > -Phil/CERisE > > > > P.S. Anyone who wants a look at the new FS is welcome to do so on > > littlegreenmen. Just ssh littlegreenmen.armory.com (or l.armory.com > > for the lazy) and login as request with no password. > > Hmmm ... seems to demand a password. > > P > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > > > > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From isolis at igso.net Wed Jun 5 19:15:38 2002 From: isolis at igso.net (Ignacio Solis) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1023329738.6087.10.camel@rasa> I just wanted to state my opinion that I don't like this crossposting. I know the subject can be relevant to both groups, but I still don't think it should be done. If somebody is interested, they can subscribe to both, I know a few of us are. Also, while I'm crossposting this message, I want a key signing party soon. Everybody stepped up to the plate last time but nothing happened. So if nobody steps up now I'll take over. I don't have the URL now, but I'm sure somebody will post it, just search if you need it now. Nacho's super quick and dirty procedure: - create key (for those that don't have one) - mail me key (or tell me where to get it) - print your fingerprint (or write it) on a piece of paper, or memorize it. - carry fingerprint with you (wallet/purse) and with your id. - bring id + fingerprint to party. Date: don't know yet. Real reason for key signing party: I'm going to Costa Rica at some point in the summer. The LUG in Costa Rica requested me to bring my chain with me to expand the reach of the debian (and others) trust circle. If someone who knows what they're doing better than me wants to take over, please do so, but _do_it_. Nacho P.S. If you want to exchange signatures come send me mail and come by my office Basking Engineering 399C, UCSC. -- In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they are different EEE8 08C9 FBAE B471 9691 CE7A 1CC8 D3DE B31E 10AB GPG Public Key: http://www.igso.net/isolis.gpg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/pipermail/sluglug/attachments/20020605/b96db0a8/attachment.pgp From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Wed Jun 5 19:40:14 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: <1023329738.6087.10.camel@rasa> Message-ID: I'm happy to hold it at the Armory (a couple of blocks from campus and near a bus stop) 8) Plenty of terminals abound for those who haven't created keys yet. -Phil/CERisE Ignacio Solis spat forth: > I just wanted to state my opinion that I don't like this crossposting. > I know the subject can be relevant to both groups, but I still don't > think it should be done. If somebody is interested, they can subscribe > to both, I know a few of us are. > > Also, while I'm crossposting this message, I want a key signing party > soon. Everybody stepped up to the plate last time but nothing happened. > So if nobody steps up now I'll take over. > > I don't have the URL now, but I'm sure somebody will post it, just > search if you need it now. > > Nacho's super quick and dirty procedure: > - create key (for those that don't have one) > - mail me key (or tell me where to get it) > - print your fingerprint (or write it) on a piece of paper, or memorize > it. > - carry fingerprint with you (wallet/purse) and with your id. > - bring id + fingerprint to party. > > Date: don't know yet. > Real reason for key signing party: I'm going to Costa Rica at some point > in the summer. The LUG in Costa Rica requested me to bring my chain with > me to expand the reach of the debian (and others) trust circle. > > If someone who knows what they're doing better than me wants to take > over, please do so, but _do_it_. > > Nacho > > P.S. If you want to exchange signatures come send me mail and come by my > office Basking Engineering 399C, UCSC. > > -- > In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they are > different > EEE8 08C9 FBAE B471 9691 CE7A 1CC8 D3DE B31E 10AB > GPG Public Key: http://www.igso.net/isolis.gpg > From rick at linuxmafia.com Wed Jun 5 22:02:15 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] minor extra clarifications and such In-Reply-To: References: <20020605183519.GS20206@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: <20020606050215.GW20206@linuxmafia.com> [Prior cross-post honoured, but Reply-To set.] Quoting Phil White (cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com): > Rick's list seemed pretty complete to me. Unfortunately, I don't think > my latest favorite distribution (Sorceror) has support for it =( For whatever it's worth, this review claims it's supported: http://www.distrowatch.com/review-sorcerer.php -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From peterbe at sonic.net Wed Jun 5 22:16:23 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] minor extra clarifications and such In-Reply-To: <20020606050215.GW20206@linuxmafia.com> from "Rick Moen" at Jun 05, 2002 10:02:15 PM Message-ID: <200206060516.g565GNQ2006182@newbolt.sonic.net> > > [Prior cross-post honoured, but Reply-To set.] > > Quoting Phil White (cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com): > > > Rick's list seemed pretty complete to me. Unfortunately, I don't think > > my latest favorite distribution (Sorceror) has support for it =( > > For whatever it's worth, this review claims it's supported: > http://www.distrowatch.com/review-sorcerer.php Yeah, apparently not only was sorcerer revived but also it was forked into Lunar and Source Mage (I was just looking at all their pages a little while ago). So there's a bit of choice there. So many distros, so little time ... > > -- > Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense > Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. > rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > 8=) 8=) 8=) 8=) 8=) 8=) 8=) 8=) 8=) 8=) 8=) 8=) Elwood: What kind of music do you get here ma'am? Barmaid: Why, we get both kinds of music, Country and Western. From astitt at cats.ucsc.edu Thu Jun 6 08:13:11 2002 From: astitt at cats.ucsc.edu (Andrew Stitt) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] minor extra clarifications and such In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > > > Rick's list seemed pretty complete to me. Unfortunately, I don't think > > > my latest favorite distribution (Sorceror) has support for it =( > > > > For whatever it's worth, this review claims it's supported: > > http://www.distrowatch.com/review-sorcerer.php > > Yeah, apparently not only was sorcerer revived but also it was forked > into Lunar and Source Mage (I was just looking at all their pages > a little while ago). So there's a bit of choice there. > > So many distros, so little time ... > just some more clarification/elaboration, sorcerer was the original distro that used the sorcery package management suite, however due to the original authors actions to unsupport sorcerer (removed all links and took down website), one group of users decided to continue mainatining sorcerer (this is now called source mage), the other group is lunar linux or lunar penguin. The about a month ago sorcerer comes back with a non-gpl license, source mage had to change its name since it was now in conflict (and is now refered to as source mage). If you are going to try any of the three, try source mage. Dont use sorcerer because the author may decide to unsupport it at any moment, and anything he does isnt under the gpl. Lunar seems to be more conservative in its approach with new packages(spells) and improving the sorcery(tools). Source mage has a devel, testing and stable set of spells, and is currently very active. They are also migrating to gcc3 so those of us who have modern computers can actually optimize for our architectures. and to correct Phil, (although i think i told him), it does have xfs support. Andrew From tech at linux-tech.com Thu Jun 6 09:29:47 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] key signing In-Reply-To: <1023329738.6087.10.camel@rasa>; from isolis@igso.net on Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 07:15:38PM -0700 References: <1023329738.6087.10.camel@rasa> Message-ID: <20020606092947.K8705@linux-tech.com> On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 07:15:38PM -0700, Ignacio Solis wrote: > - create key (for those that don't have one) - maybe some should consider having a key larger than 1024 http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/1/263924 - generate a revocation certificate and make a backup http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html Regards, David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From tech at linux-tech.com Thu Jun 6 10:01:06 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] apt-get ported to slackware Message-ID: <20020606100106.L8705@linux-tech.com> I have not tried this yet, however some in here might be interetsed testing this soon. "apt-get ported to slackware. Now debian users can use slackware and see how much better slackware is. But still have the upgradability debian does." http://www.linuxpackages.net/details.php?name=apt-get -download http://project-csi.sourceforge.net/ Regards, David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From rick at linuxmafia.com Thu Jun 6 13:05:17 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] apt-get ported to slackware In-Reply-To: <20020606100106.L8705@linux-tech.com> References: <20020606100106.L8705@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: <20020606200517.GD20206@linuxmafia.com> Quoting David Correa (tech@linux-tech.com): > "apt-get ported to slackware. Now debian users can use slackware and > see how much better slackware is. But still have the upgradability > debian does." David, thanks for the forward. If Debian/Libranet's upgradeability were solely a product of using the apt suite of tools, this would be true. Unfortunately, that's not where the magic is, but rather in the enforcement of distribution/packaging policy. Nathan Myers did as good a job of explaining this as anyone: http://www.advogato.org/article/169.html Claudio Matsuoka and Alfredo Kojima at Conectiva confirm this in describing the obstacles they found in implementing the apt system on their Brazilian distribution after porting the utility to RPM: http://www.advogato.org/person/claudio/diary.html?start=111 http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/182/ -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From rick at linuxmafia.com Thu Jun 6 13:14:41 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] key signing In-Reply-To: <20020606092947.K8705@linux-tech.com> References: <1023329738.6087.10.camel@rasa> <20020606092947.K8705@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: <20020606201441.GE20206@linuxmafia.com> Quoting David Correa (tech@linux-tech.com): > - maybe some should consider having a key larger than 1024 > http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/1/263924 To quote Bruce Schneier (http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0203.html#6): Last fall, mathematician Dan Bernstein circulated a paper discussing improvements in integer factorization, using specialized parallel hardware. The paper didn't get much attention until recently, when discussions sprang up on SlashDot and other Internet forums about the results. A naive read of the paper implies that factoring is now significantly easier using the machine described in the paper, and that keys as long as 2048 bits can now be broken. This is not the case. The improvements described in Bernstein's paper are unlikely to produce the claimed speed improvements for practically useful numbers. There's of course more, but I didn't want to quote the entire piece. Note that you can (always) get a little extra "future-proofing" protection against hypothetical future improvements in factoring techniques by doubling keysize, but it'll cost you a significant slowdown every time the key must be used. -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From tech at linux-tech.com Thu Jun 6 13:47:03 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] apt-get ported to slackware In-Reply-To: <20020606200517.GD20206@linuxmafia.com>; from rick@linuxmafia.com on Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 01:05:17PM -0700 References: <20020606100106.L8705@linux-tech.com> <20020606200517.GD20206@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: <20020606134703.Q8705@linux-tech.com> Thanks for sharing this info. David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From tech at linux-tech.com Thu Jun 6 13:54:29 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] key signing In-Reply-To: <20020606201441.GE20206@linuxmafia.com>; from rick@linuxmafia.com on Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 01:14:41PM -0700 References: <1023329738.6087.10.camel@rasa> <20020606092947.K8705@linux-tech.com> <20020606201441.GE20206@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: <20020606135429.R8705@linux-tech.com> > > - maybe some should consider having a key larger than 1024 > > http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/1/263924 I did not write, "change your 1024 key", i meant to say, if you need a _new_ one it _might be_ a good idea to make it > 1024 Thanks for the pointers. David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Thu Jun 6 22:00:07 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] apt-get ported to slackware In-Reply-To: <20020606100106.L8705@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: I can do better than that! Get Sorcery for linux! Download packages from source and have them auto compiled 8) -Phil/CERisE David Correa spat forth: > I have not tried this yet, however some in here might be interetsed testing > this soon. > > "apt-get ported to slackware. Now debian users can use slackware and see how much > better slackware is. But still have the upgradability debian does." > > http://www.linuxpackages.net/details.php?name=apt-get > > -download > http://project-csi.sourceforge.net/ > > Regards, > > David Correa > Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com > Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From astitt at cats.ucsc.edu Fri Jun 7 12:54:26 2002 From: astitt at cats.ucsc.edu (Andrew Stitt) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] apt-get ported to slackware In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, 6 Jun 2002, Phil White wrote: > I can do better than that! > > Get Sorcery for linux! Download packages from source and have them > auto compiled 8) > > -Phil/CERisE or instead of bastardizing your distro, just use source mage to begin with! ;) > > David Correa spat forth: > > > I have not tried this yet, however some in here might be interetsed testing > > this soon. > > > > "apt-get ported to slackware. Now debian users can use slackware and see how much > > better slackware is. But still have the upgradability debian does." > > > > http://www.linuxpackages.net/details.php?name=apt-get > > > > -download > > http://project-csi.sourceforge.net/ > > > > Regards, > > > > David Correa > > Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com > > Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 > > _______________________________________________ > > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > > > > > From peterbe at sonic.net Fri Jun 7 13:40:38 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Swapmeet in Oakland Message-ID: <200206072040.g57KecNu002953@newbolt.sonic.net> I'm considering driving up to a swapmeet in Oakland tomorrow. Anyone interested? Info linked via my page http://www.sonic.net/~peterbe/robertaustin/ and a coupon for getting in free tomorrow is at http://www.sonic.net/~peterbe/robertaustin/coupon.html (The coupon appears to be lynx-friendly) There's another one next Saturday at the Cow Palace near San Francisco. The Oakland show is accessible from BART, though, and the convention center there doesn't smell of cows. Peter From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Fri Jun 7 18:10:30 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Swapmeet in Oakland In-Reply-To: <200206072040.g57KecNu002953@newbolt.sonic.net> Message-ID: John, Irene, and probably Andrew and I are going. -Phil/CERisE Peter Belew spat forth: > I'm considering driving up to a swapmeet in Oakland tomorrow. > Anyone interested? > > Info linked via my page > > http://www.sonic.net/~peterbe/robertaustin/ > > and a coupon for getting in free tomorrow is at > > http://www.sonic.net/~peterbe/robertaustin/coupon.html > > (The coupon appears to be lynx-friendly) > > There's another one next Saturday at the Cow Palace near > San Francisco. The Oakland show is accessible from BART, > though, and the convention center there doesn't smell of cows. > > Peter > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From peterbe at sonic.net Sat Jun 8 08:58:19 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] No Oakland trip for me after all Message-ID: <200206081558.g58FwJMK028816@newbolt.sonic.net> I won't be going to the swapmeet in Oakland after all - I hurt my knee yesterday afternoon and will be staying home. Peter From mlist-sluglug at theory.org Mon Jun 10 22:58:16 2002 From: mlist-sluglug at theory.org (Jeremy Avnet) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: References: <1023329738.6087.10.camel@rasa> Message-ID: <20020611055816.GA9568@in.theory.org> * Phil White (cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com) said: > near a bus stop) 8) Plenty of terminals abound for those who haven't > created keys yet. Uhmm.. the idea of making your private key on a public computer (or at least a computer you have little control over) is just a little unsavory. Best do it on machine you trust enough. --jeremy/brainsik-- From mlist-sluglug at theory.org Mon Jun 10 23:00:58 2002 From: mlist-sluglug at theory.org (Jeremy Avnet) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Key Signing / Debian developers Message-ID: <20020611060058.GB9568@in.theory.org> Is anyone who is interested in the key signing a Debian developer? I need my key signed by a developer so I can start the new developer process. I already have a mentor, but they are in Japan and unable to reasonably sign my key. Please contact me. Thank you. -- jeremy avnet / brainsik .:. From mlist-sluglug at theory.org Mon Jun 10 23:07:05 2002 From: mlist-sluglug at theory.org (Jeremy Avnet) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Efficient Group Key Signing Method In-Reply-To: <1023329738.6087.10.camel@rasa> References: <1023329738.6087.10.camel@rasa> Message-ID: <20020611060705.GC9568@in.theory.org> Created by Phil Zimmerman (PGP), Werner Koch (GPG), and Len Sassman, this process was used at CodeCon: http://sion.quickie.net/keysigning.txt From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Mon Jun 10 23:38:18 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: <20020611055816.GA9568@in.theory.org> Message-ID: On a computer where you have an account however...The beauty of ssh and all that... -Phil/CERisE Jeremy Avnet spat forth: > * Phil White (cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com) said: > > near a bus stop) 8) Plenty of terminals abound for those who haven't > > created keys yet. > > Uhmm.. the idea of making your private key on a public computer (or at > least a computer you have little control over) is just a little > unsavory. > > Best do it on machine you trust enough. > > --jeremy/brainsik-- > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From phig at phig.org Tue Jun 11 09:20:33 2002 From: phig at phig.org (Karsten Wade) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Phil White wrote: > On a computer where you have an account however...The beauty of ssh and > all that... Just promise me you'll turn off the key loggers. Promise? Really? You mean it? Okay. Next time you can use the terminal at my house. :) - k' > > -Phil/CERisE > > Jeremy Avnet spat forth: > > > * Phil White (cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com) said: > > > near a bus stop) 8) Plenty of terminals abound for those who haven't > > > created keys yet. > > > > Uhmm.. the idea of making your private key on a public computer (or at > > least a computer you have little control over) is just a little > > unsavory. > > > > Best do it on machine you trust enough. > > > > --jeremy/brainsik-- > > _______________________________________________ > > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > > > > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > '`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'` Karsten Wade "As sharp as the leading karsten@phig.org edge of a ball bearing." http://phig.org/gpg/ - Dallas Dobro From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Tue Jun 11 11:49:30 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Except for the part that I really mean it when I say terminal. We have several WYSE-60s and Tektronix Xterms. Now maybe you know something I don't, but the last I checked, the capability wasn't there. Not a whole lot of places to store that info. Of course, the term server could, in theory, intercept all traffic. But then, it's all encrypted data. Nothing personal, but I don't think anyone's life on this list is so interesting that I'd put littlegreenmen to work in decoding those transmissions. -Phil/CERisE Karsten Wade spat forth: > On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Phil White wrote: > > Just promise me you'll turn off the key loggers. > > Promise? Really? You mean it? > > Okay. > > Next time you can use the terminal at my house. > > :) - k' From isolis at igso.net Tue Jun 11 14:27:07 2002 From: isolis at igso.net (Ignacio Solis) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1023830828.11177.6.camel@rasa> On Tue, 2002-06-11 at 11:49, Phil White wrote: > Except for the part that I really mean it when I say terminal. We have > several WYSE-60s and Tektronix Xterms. Now maybe you know something I > don't, but the last I checked, the capability wasn't there. Not a > whole lot of places to store that info. It needs to run some software. I don't think the terminal comes with an ssh IC. If it's a dumb terminal, connected to a server, then the server could log everything. There must be some communication somewhere. And just in case, there's always a hardware key logger. > Of course, the term server could, in theory, intercept all traffic. > But then, it's all encrypted data. You meant to say that the WYSE-60s and Tektronix Xterms encrypt their communciation to the server? Or that they perform end to end encryption? If the former, then the server has to translate, which would mean it can see the clear text. If the latter, then it's not a terminal. > Nothing personal, but I don't think anyone's life on this list is so > interesting that I'd put littlegreenmen to work in decoding those > transmissions. Nothing personal but why should anybody trust littlegreenmen? Also, are you saying that our communications are not worthy of decryption/breaking? ;-) Nacho -- In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they are different EEE8 08C9 FBAE B471 9691 CE7A 1CC8 D3DE B31E 10AB GPG Public Key: http://www.igso.net/isolis.gpg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/pipermail/sluglug/attachments/20020611/7279ecef/attachment.pgp From peterbe at sonic.net Tue Jun 11 16:33:10 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Mr Gates with pie on face, metaphorically Message-ID: <200206112333.g5BNXAFD015647@newbolt.sonic.net> This is linked from the FreeBSD web site: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/04/01/020401hnunixcamp.xml From peterbe at sonic.net Tue Jun 11 17:36:25 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Mr Gates with pie on face Message-ID: <200206120036.g5C0aPLu022312@newbolt.sonic.net> Regarding my earlier posting: A check of www.wehavethewayout.com on www.netcraft.com's "what's that server" running page shows that the site changed from FreeBSD to IIS/5.0 on W2K on 2 April 2002, which is most amusing. 2 days later, they shifted their IP from a Verio netblock to a Unisys netblock, for some reason (change of hosting ISP?) That's suspiciously soon after the article I mentioned was published. I wonder if the FreeBSD people noticed that. A little while I sent the URL for the article to a friend who's an ex-Microsoft manager. He pointed out the 1 April dateline on the article, so I checked Netcraft. He thought the whole thing might be an April Fool's joke, but they really were running the site on FreeBSD - until the next day after the article 8=) From mlist-sluglug at theory.org Tue Jun 11 22:06:25 2002 From: mlist-sluglug at theory.org (Jeremy Avnet) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20020612050625.GA26408@in.theory.org> * Phil White (cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com) said: > Except for the part that I really mean it when I say terminal. We have > several WYSE-60s and Tektronix Xterms. Now maybe you know something I > don't, but the last I checked, the capability wasn't there. Not a > whole lot of places to store that info. There are recording devices that go in between the keyboard and its port. Just drop it off and pick it up later. Realistically, it's probably safe to do it at your house. I am just pointing out risks and good practices. I'm working under the tenet that it's better to be aware of potential risks rather than ignorant. It's up to each person to weigh risk vs inconvenience. Some people won't check email on anything other than their personal laptop which never leaves their side .. others store their private keys on group servers. As a bonus, knowing the risks someone takes helps you assign a trust value to them. -- jeremy avnet / brainsik .:. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/pipermail/sluglug/attachments/20020611/e00d5c1c/attachment.pgp From tech at linux-tech.com Wed Jun 12 07:22:06 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: <1023830828.11177.6.camel@rasa>; from isolis@igso.net on Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 02:27:07PM -0700 References: <1023830828.11177.6.camel@rasa> Message-ID: <20020612072206.A8799@linux-tech.com> On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 02:27:07PM -0700, Ignacio Solis wrote: > Nothing personal but why should anybody trust littlegreenmen? Why should anybody trust a drivers license that can not be fully verified as a legitimate ID at the moment of signing the gpg key of a person we have not seen before? > Also, are > you saying that our communications are not worthy of > decryption/breaking? ;-) http://www.sfgate.com/news/special/pages/2002/campusfiles/ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/06/12/MN87302.DTL http://www.ummah.net/albayan/cointelmain.html Regards, David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From peterbe at sonic.net Wed Jun 12 08:33:46 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: <20020612072206.A8799@linux-tech.com> from "David Correa" at Jun 12, 2002 07:22:06 AM Message-ID: <200206121533.g5CFXkDl013113@newbolt.sonic.net> > > On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 02:27:07PM -0700, Ignacio Solis wrote: > > Nothing personal but why should anybody trust littlegreenmen? > > Why should anybody trust a drivers license that > can not be fully verified as a legitimate ID at the moment of signing the > gpg key of a person we have not seen before? > > > Also, are > > you saying that our communications are not worthy of > > decryption/breaking? ;-) > > http://www.sfgate.com/news/special/pages/2002/campusfiles/ I remember the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing in San Francisco, in the Spring of 1960, at which the police responded to students protesting against being kept out of the hearing room (only supporters were given tickets to the hearings) were washed down the steps of City Hall with high-pressure firehoses. Some people in my dorm at Stanford were there, and came back practially in a state of shock at the police's behavior. The government later took some news footage of the event and edited it to look like the students provoked the whole thing. Other people made another version, in real time order - both were later shown together at Stanford, to show how propogandists can manipulate information. Read up on the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. In the late '60s, the FBI and police raided the Stanford Daily offices to find out the sources for some articles the paper printed. The Daily fought back in court ... a fairly famous case. In the late '50s, my brother was in the Army. He was refused entry into Officer's Candidate School because our father had a college friend at UC Berkeley who had been in left-wing organizations, back in the early 1930s. Given the sort of people that are in power today in the Federal Government, surveillance of the people is definitely the order of the day. Wiretapping is really common; legal barriers against wiretapping are frequenly ignored at all levels of police activity - modern phone switches make tapping easy to do and hard to detect. David's links are worth reading in detail. - Peter > > http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/06/12/MN87302.DTL > > http://www.ummah.net/albayan/cointelmain.html > > Regards, > > David Correa > Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com > Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 > _______________________________________________ > Sluglug maillist - Sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu > http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug > From rick at linuxmafia.com Wed Jun 12 13:27:32 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: <20020612072206.A8799@linux-tech.com> References: <1023830828.11177.6.camel@rasa> <20020612072206.A8799@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: <20020612202732.GX19833@linuxmafia.com> Quoting David Correa (tech@linux-tech.com): > Why should anybody trust a drivers license that can not be fully > verified as a legitimate ID at the moment of signing the gpg key of a > person we have not seen before? 1. Are you suggesting trust must be all-or-nothing, or are you asking why a signer might have any confidence whatsoever in such a document? 2. What does the phrase "fully verified" mean in this context? Those are rhetorical questions. The only reasonable rule about identity verification is to use your head, and then use gnupg's trustlevels mechanism as appropriate on keys and signatures. -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From isolis at igso.net Wed Jun 12 16:25:19 2002 From: isolis at igso.net (Ignacio Solis) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] Re: [Smaug] Crossposting and key signing In-Reply-To: <20020612072206.A8799@linux-tech.com> References: <1023830828.11177.6.camel@rasa> <20020612072206.A8799@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: <1023924319.12295.14.camel@rasa> On Wed, 2002-06-12 at 07:22, David Correa wrote: > On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 02:27:07PM -0700, Ignacio Solis wrote: > > Nothing personal but why should anybody trust littlegreenmen? > > Why should anybody trust a drivers license that > can not be fully verified as a legitimate ID at the moment of signing the > gpg key of a person we have not seen before? We'll, all we're doing is associating a key with an "legal" ID/persona. The similar question is, why would I go to somebody's house to get my "legitimate ID" done? How can I tell that they are really generating an ID for me and are not making a copy or a fake identity with my info? Actually, the problem would be with the passprase. I know, I know, you can change that. Making a trojan ssh client that browses your file sistem, reads off your private key and decripts it with the captured passphrase is probably more complex, but why risk it? Isn't it already bad enough that you shouldn't really trust your own computer? ;-) Nacho -- In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they are different EEE8 08C9 FBAE B471 9691 CE7A 1CC8 D3DE B31E 10AB GPG Public Key: http://www.igso.net/isolis.gpg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/pipermail/sluglug/attachments/20020612/15d7990b/attachment.pgp From tech at linux-tech.com Thu Jun 13 16:46:52 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [SPAM] Real Driving License or ID ? [was ID and key signing] Message-ID: <20020613164652.C20973@linux-tech.com> I just received this email, I thought I share it as an example of why looking at a picture ID is not enough to verify a persons ID. Check out also: http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/1997/feb972.htm http://www.fakeidreview.cjb.net/ ----- Forwarded message from John Doe ----- >From john@doe.com Thu Jun 13 23:02:42 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: tech@linux-tech.com Received: (qmail 23344 invoked from network); 13 Jun 2002 23:02:41 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO shahin) (212.72.17.16) by lago.weblibre.org with SMTP; 13 Jun 2002 23:02:41 -0000 From: "John Doe" To: Subject: Real Driving License or ID Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 02:53:57 Status: RO Content-Length: 1364 Lines: 53 These are NOT FAKE These are REAL Driving license or Ids printed with FT 3008 Printers and laminated with M600 Laminating machines, THE SAME ONES USED IN ALL US DMVs 100% Original, Exactly like the ones issued by the DMV except YOU WILL NOT BE REGISTERED IN THE DMVs COMPUTER SYSTEM. Guaranteed to pass under blue light or any other test. No more problems with Getting into clubs Driving license US $ 65.00 ID US $ 55.00 S&H US $ 15.00 Order BOTH and get free S&H. For legal reasons we can't except credit cards, checks or money order. CASH ONLY Your Ids will be made and shipped from the United States, Please send two passport size photos with your: 1- ID or Driving license No. (if no Number is given we will Give you a random one .) 2- Full Name 3- Address 4- Date of Birth 5- Blood group 6- Donor or Non-Donor 7- What you require, Driving license or ID (if both add zero for S&H) 8- Your State 9- Exact CASH Please send your application to the following address Shahin M P.O. Box 63917 Diera - Dubai UAE Allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery. NO Registered mail please (with the amount of response we are getting daily we cant afford to go to the post office and sign for every one). We have made over 12 thousand Driving license and Ids with NO COMPLAINT. We guarantee each and every one of it. ----- End forwarded message ----- David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com Thu Jun 13 17:04:43 2002 From: cerise at littlegreenmen.armory.com (Phil White) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [SPAM] Real Driving License or ID ? [was ID and key signing] In-Reply-To: <20020613164652.C20973@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: So why didn't you post this when I was underage? ; ) Absolute trust is a pipe dream. I think that's a given though. I can think of a couple of answers to this question, but why trust anyone? -Phil/CERisE David Correa spat forth: > I just received this email, I thought I share it as an example > of why looking at a picture ID is not enough to verify a persons ID. > > Check out also: > http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/1997/feb972.htm > http://www.fakeidreview.cjb.net/ From tech at linux-tech.com Thu Jun 13 17:30:24 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [SPAM] Real Driving License or ID ? [was ID and key signing] In-Reply-To: ; from cerise@littlegreenmen.armory.com on Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 05:04:43PM -0700 References: <20020613164652.C20973@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: <20020613173024.D20973@linux-tech.com> On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 05:04:43PM -0700, Phil White wrote: > So why didn't you post this when I was underage? ; ) > > Absolute trust is a pipe dream. I think that's a given though. > > I can think of a couple of answers to this question, but why trust > anyone? In terms of key signing what i do is to get to see if I can trust the person first (or at least get to know the person somehow), then is easy to see if you really have his gpg key, with simple challenge response questions, in any way that I feel comfortable communicating with the person(telephone, irc, email, smoke signals =). David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From rick at linuxmafia.com Thu Jun 13 17:57:03 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [SPAM] Real Driving License or ID ? [was ID and key signing] In-Reply-To: <20020613164652.C20973@linux-tech.com> References: <20020613164652.C20973@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: <20020614005703.GO19833@linuxmafia.com> Quoting David Correa (tech@linux-tech.com): > I just received this email, I thought I share it as an example > of why looking at a picture ID is not enough to verify a persons ID. I assume this is intended to be relevant to the notion of gnupg keysigning parties, on the subject of which you seem to retain some really very bizarre and persistent notions. The cited articles aren't relevant -- for the exact same reason earlier posts of this sort weren't relevant. gnupg store keys and signatures in your keychain and trust database. Those effectively associate key or signature hashes with name / e-mail address couplets that are claimed to be associated each with a particular person. Consider for example this chain: pub 1024D/700A0551 2000-08-10 Evan Prodromou (Securant Technologies, Inc.) sig 700A0551 2001-06-08 Evan Prodromou (Securant Technologies, Inc.) sig 0167CA38 2001-06-14 Seth David Schoen sig 0CF0AE07 2001-06-16 Aaron Brick sig 34984B9C 2001-06-15 Tony Godshall (togo) sig 9B936C95 2001-06-19 Colin Walters sig 3B047084 2001-06-20 Mike Markley sig E0A38377 2001-06-22 Daniel Jacobowitz uid Evan Prodromou Let's say you got that downloaded into your keychain by querying a keyserver about "Evan Prodromou". You know a guy by that name, want to be able to exchanged signed and/or authenticated e-mail with him. Unfortunately, he's now 3000 miles away, else you'd just meet for lunch and exchange keys. So, you get his information from a keyserver. Big problem, though: You don't know if the key on the top line is from _your_ Evan Prodromou, or actually if it's even from any Evan Prodromou at all. There's a signature vouching for it that purports to come from a Mike Markley, and you know a Mike Markley, but don't know that it's _your_ Mike Markley, or even from any Mike Markley at all. If you could determine the signature's really from _your_ Mike Markley, and you know that Mike Markley to be a generally competent and careful guy, then you might be able to estimate how much faith to put in his signatures, which in turn would let you estimate how confident to be that the signed key really belongs to _someone_ generally accepted to go by Evan Prodromou, to your friend Mike's satisfaction. Mike might have been fooled for decades: "Evan Prodromou" might really be master criminal Keyser Soze carrying out a sinister and protracted masquerade. But the point is that Mike's signature attests to an association between a _persona_ with the moniker "Evan Prodromou" (with attached mailbox) and a key hash, a persona that Mike claims to have encountered in the flesh and believes is real enough to deal with as such. This is the sense in which keysigning parties establish "identity". The last link is, of course, whether you can believe that the signature really came from your Mike Markley. This is where _your_ participation in at least one keysigning party helps. Looking further down your keychain, you find this: pub 1024D/3B047084 1999-10-23 Mike Markley sig 3B047084 1999-10-26 Mike Markley sig 0167CA38 2001-06-14 Seth David Schoen sig 700A0551 2001-06-14 Evan Prodromou (Securant Technologies, Inc.) sig 66FBC18C 2001-06-14 M. Drew Streib sig E0A38377 2001-06-22 Daniel Jacobowitz uid Mike Markley Now, it just happens to be the case that you attended a keysigning party with Seth David Schoen, and signed his key after verifying that it belongs to him -- and you know Seth well enough to believe that _he's_ not master criminal Kesyer Soze in disguise, either. So, that gives you enough information to cryptographically verify Seth's signature of Mike's key, which in turn lets you verify Mike's signature of Evan's key. And so you have a chain of signatures that lets you estimate how much credence to put in Evan's publicly-filed key. The gnupg toolset includes a feature to formally record the degree of trust you put in a particular person's key, or in a particular person's signatures, hinging on how reliable you consider him. This is the trustlevels feature I mentioned earlier, and is stored in the trustdb, which is kept separate from your keychain and never uploaded. gnupg can display what resulting composite degree of trust you are placing in a key based on the weighting of available signatures and of the key itself. -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From tech at linux-tech.com Thu Jun 13 18:15:19 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [SPAM] Real Driving License or ID ? [was ID and key signing] In-Reply-To: <20020614005703.GO19833@linuxmafia.com>; from rick@linuxmafia.com on Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 05:57:03PM -0700 References: <20020613164652.C20973@linux-tech.com> <20020614005703.GO19833@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: <20020613181519.E20973@linux-tech.com> On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 05:57:03PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > I assume this is intended to be relevant to the notion of gnupg > keysigning parties, on the subject of which you seem to retain > some really very bizarre and persistent notions. The cited articles > aren't relevant -- for the exact same reason earlier posts of this sort > weren't relevant. Rick, It only has to do with how i do my key signing. I realize that this is "bizarre" to you. I don't intend to participate in any "key signing parties". I only present views of what i look for when i use encrypted email. All I care to know is that I trust that i have the right person on the other side. There are different ways to do that. Not one is a 100% perfect. I don't intend to be the rule. I do not impose this on anyone. I am not in a contest of "who knows more either". BTW, could you post your emails with out getting so personal? Thanks, David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From rick at linuxmafia.com Thu Jun 13 18:23:16 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [SPAM] Real Driving License or ID ? [was ID and key signing] In-Reply-To: <20020613181519.E20973@linux-tech.com> References: <20020613164652.C20973@linux-tech.com> <20020614005703.GO19833@linuxmafia.com> <20020613181519.E20973@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: <20020614012315.GR19833@linuxmafia.com> Quoting David Correa (tech@linux-tech.com): > It only has to do with how i do my key signing. In that case, the point remains: The adequacy of allegedly government-issued IDs as an ultimate authority for "identity" is completely irrelevant to key signing. It suggests a misconception about how gnupg and trust works. Thus my detailed example of same. > There are different ways to do that. Not one is a 100% perfect. Now you're repeating what *I* just said, except without the detail. > I don't intend to be the rule. I do not impose this on anyone. Irrelevant to the discussion. > I am not in a contest of "who knows more either". Likewise. > BTW, could you post your emails with out getting so personal? My only half-way personal comment was that you seem to have some bizarre views on gnupg keysigning and "identity". Deal. From tech at linux-tech.com Thu Jun 13 19:31:40 2002 From: tech at linux-tech.com (David Correa) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [SPAM] Real Driving License or ID ? [was ID and key signing] Message-ID: <20020613193140.G20973@linux-tech.com> On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 06:23:16PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > In that case, the point remains: The adequacy of allegedly > government-issued IDs as an ultimate authority for "identity" is > completely irrelevant to key signing. It suggests a misconception > about how gnupg and trust works. Thus my detailed example of same. What is a valid key? My way: - a key is considered valid only if you signed it personally (you decide to sign/revoque the key based on your day to day experience with the person) Web of trust method ( a key K is considered valid if it meets two conditions: 1.it is signed by enough valid keys, meaning - you have signed it personally, - it has been signed by one fully trusted key, or - it has been signed by three marginally trusted keys; and 2.the path of signed keys leading from K back to your own key is five steps or shorter. The web of trust method is a more efficient method. However, this is the key Signing party participant's role summarized: 1.Generate A Key Pair 2.Send Public Key To Designated Keyserver (or Coordinator) 3.Send Public Key Info To Coordinator 4.Show Up At The Party 5.Verify Your Key Info At The Party 6.Verify Everyone Else's Key Info At The Party 7.Sign All The Verified Keys 8.Send The Signed Keys Back Up To The Designated Keyserver (or the key owner) What Participants Should Bring to the Party 1.Themselves - you cannot participate virtually 2.Two forms of positive picture ID - a driver's license and passport are good 3.Key ID, Key Type, Hex Fingerprint and Key Size info 4.A Pen/Pencil I see some contradiction with your statement: "government-issued IDs as an ultimate authority for "identity" is completely irrelevant to key signing" and item #2 here Are you saying that #2 is optional? or that any other documents with positive picture ID is valid (like the ones on the url i posted)? David Correa Network Engineer http://www.linux-tech.com Key fingerprint 7F2C E072 479D 71B4 008B 373E A284 8CDE 7659 F5D8 From rick at linuxmafia.com Thu Jun 13 20:52:09 2002 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] [SPAM] Real Driving License or ID ? [was ID and key signing] In-Reply-To: <20020613193140.G20973@linux-tech.com> References: <20020613193140.G20973@linux-tech.com> Message-ID: <20020614035208.GB19833@linuxmafia.com> Quoting David Correa (tech@linux-tech.com): > What is a valid key? Completely undefined term in this context. You would seem to be changing the subject. Which is fine, but not my cup of tea. > The web of trust method is a more efficient method. However, > this is the key Signing party participant's role summarized: [...] > 7.Sign All The Verified Keys Nope. Not that simple. Suggest you read up on keysigning, some more. > I see some contradiction with your statement: > "government-issued IDs as an ultimate authority for "identity" is > completely irrelevant to key signing" and item #2 here > > Are you saying that #2 is optional? or that any other documents > with positive picture ID is valid (like the ones on the url i posted)? Did you fail to understand the term "ultimate authority"? -- Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are. rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler From phig at phig.org Fri Jun 14 17:20:38 2002 From: phig at phig.org (Karsten Wade) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] DSL at FSH Message-ID: Well, almost as if my rain dance had meant something, DSL is now going to be available at Family Student Housing. AIUI, my friend's connection will be going live in one week. Apparently the SBC rapid expansion finally put in their mini-CO on campus. So, call and order today! BTW, if you are looking for enhanced DSL, expect to have a difficulty ordering "self-install" from SBC. The story I got today was that after complaints to the PUC by idjits who had ordered self-install in the past and couldn't do the work, SBC/PacBell mandated that all enhanced DSL (read: static IP addies) installs be accompanied by a technician. What does this technician do? Nothing that I need done, but they have to come anyway, and my only recourse is to refute the charge afterwards. Will someone tell me why it costs $100 to provision 5 IP addresses? How much time _can_ that take? - k' '`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'` Karsten Wade "As sharp as the leading karsten@phig.org edge of a ball bearing." http://phig.org/gpg/ - Dallas Dobro From peterbe at sonic.net Fri Jun 14 20:44:48 2002 From: peterbe at sonic.net (Peter Belew) Date: Mon Mar 20 15:51:30 2006 Subject: [SlugLUG] DSL at FSH In-Reply-To: from "Karsten Wade" at Jun 14, 2002 05:20:38 PM Message-ID: <200206150344.g5F3imcX008854@newbolt.sonic.net> As I mentioned before, Sonic.net (http://www.sonic.net) does a good thing with DSL. Get service from Sonic, they handle getting DSL. $18.95 plus $39 for DSL. 4 IPs if you want, no extra charge. Since FSH is getting wired, Sonic can probably arrange the connection. Sonic deals with the IPs. These people are INFINITELY more helpful and responsive than SBC. They interface with SBC *for* you. SBC provides the hardware at your home, including the frame-relay or ATM link to Sonic. You don't have to deal with SBC's crappy web site or spam-ridden email. Check out Sonic's home page. Peter > > Well, almost as if my rain dance had meant something, DSL is now going to > be available at Family Student Housing. > > AIUI, my friend's connection will be going live in one week. Apparently > the SBC rapid expansion finally put in their mini-CO on campus. > > So, call and order today! > > BTW, if you are looking for enhanced DSL, expect to have a difficulty > ordering "self-install" from SBC. The story I got today was that after > complaints to the PUC by idjits who had ordered self-install in the past > and couldn't do t