Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

With reports about Belgium being the 3rd most insecure country in the world, only being beaten by Russia and China and our nice country featuring in Wired with what could be the plot for Oceans 17 ...

Maybe it's time to refocus my career a bit more on security again ...

Just maybe ...

The slides from the presentation I gave last friday at Lsec are now online, both at My Site and on Slideshare

I learned a lot last friday , I`ll be talking to some more people about the technical details , but be expecting some of my findings on Virtualization.com soon :)

<conspiracy mode>
Claudio , Isn't it obvious, Sun doesn't want you to use Linux, they will do everything in their power to prevent that , such as slowing down releases of software for our preferred platform, so that you might even start to consider choosing for Slowaris
</conspiracy mode>

Harald has a nice overview of the FUD that is being spread again by some company from RedMond ..

Now why are they targeting TomTom ? Surely because Canon and Sony and different others are to big to sue, Both my EOS400D, Ixus400 and K800i , are using a way to FAT filesystem to store files on,
I tried putting ext2 formatted disks in them but that failed :)
(Not running Linux or already having paid up might be another reason)

Harald notes that there is no difference between the Kernel.org FAT implementation and the TomTom implementation so why aren't they going for a bigger fish ?

I`m sure there are plenty of other companies shipping Linux based products that are allowing people to use their own Flashdisks hence using the FAT code.

TomTom is originally from The Netherlands, yet the case is
filed somewhere in the US. I wonder how the EC would react to such a suit.

Oh well.. interresting times ahead ...

Grab your calendars and mark the following dates :

• T-Dose 2009 will be held on 3 and 4 october in Eindhoven again.

  Last year we had a nice Drupal track, some great MySQL talks and , a great unplanned Cloud talk , and different other interesting talks, so this year promises also to be very interesting.
  (PS. Drupal Themers.. you might want to propose a new theme for the T-Dose site, who knows you'll even win something)

• For the first time , 2009 will be the year that Belgium will have it's own Security Conference, BruCon has just announced Christofer Hoff as a KeyNote speaker , BruCon will take place on 18 and 19 september... obviously in Brussels ;)
• While we mention VirtSec I obviously should plug my own upcoming VirtSec talk at the LSec Secure Virtualization seminar on next Friday 13th

Last Wednesday after the LSec event with Bruce Schneier and the R ans S from RSA , we already had a mini AdHoc GeekDinner in Leuven, one that pretty would have matched Philips requirements for having it called Geek dinner

Philip has been ranting this week about different events titled "Geek" not attrackting real geeks. that know hex and binary is but merely atrackting the Startup/Web crowd, now there's nothing wrong with both crowds, and I happen to be part of both but it can cause strange situations
Geekdinner.beTom K arranged a nice deal with De Troubadour so foodwise it promises to be great.

And with the list currently showing a variety of
Linux and BSD geeks, (both on Kernel and System Level it seems) the Apache geeks , some Ruby geeks, some Legal geeks, some Java geeks, etc that part should be covered ..

So I`m pretty sure that the majority of Geeks at the upcoming Geekdinner will realize there are only 10 kind of people

Still missing however from that list are the Drupal and PHP folks, the Django crowd, some Distribution geeks, some Gnome Geeks and some KDE geeks. Heck you all know I`m talking about you .. so go and subscribe here

I hope we aren't scaring away too much folks with this really Open Source oriented GeekDinner :)

PS. And yes I think it's time for Elise to organise a Real Belgian Girl Geek Dinner :)

I`m one of those guys that really doesn't like to agree with certain EULA's

While it's sad enough that Dell still fails to sell an Ubuntu based laptop in Belgium and claims they have to charge extra for removing the irrelevant software from Redmond hence trying to trick you into paying more money for freedom there are things you can work around easily, I won't be accepting the EULA that comes with those new boxen.

However back when I last installed a virtual instance of some software from Redmond one of my test Xen servers , I was presented with a screen that that urged me to press F8 in order to accept something I didn't want to accept.

Back then I just asked a friendly guy from the office next door , to come in and press that F8 button, he didn't mind.

But with with this new amazing technology, I don't even need to use the services of the windows admins anymore .. I can just call my cat onto the table and have her do the dirty work :)

Over the past few years I have joined several social networking sites and continue to use a few of them regularly. These sites serve different purposes for me and I have started to come up with strategies of whom to connect with where. Here are the general guidelines that I have developed (subject to spontaneous change and arbitrary override).

1. On LinkedIn I only link with people that I know in person , worked with in real life or have worked with online intensively in different open source projects. , have communicated with over different media. there are couple of exceptions in my connections from my early days when I didn't have my own set of rules yet. (Some of them have been unlinked now actually)

   LinkedIn is my personal Addressbook, not a public Phone guide :)

2. I only follow people who inform and/or entertain me on Twitter and I don't care about followers, so don't expect me to follow you back.
   (I`m not using Identi.ca anymore .. given no relevant userbase)
3. On location based services (like Tripit, Dopplr ), I connect to people that I would genuinely like to meet up with when traveling and who I trust not to rob my house when I am away. If we haven't met yet, but you want to meet this is the place to connect !
   (Forget about Dopplr.. only Tripit for now..)
4. Yes, I did Poken, but obviously only with people I meet in person, and I`m still waiting for that first Poken with someone I don't know yet. (I was close but ... :)) (Update: Poken is kinda obsolete, and my battery is s dead anyhow)
5. Sadly I`m using Facebook again , I only connect to people I know, and I generally Ignore all group invites, and block all applications. I'd actually prefer not using it at all.
6. I`m keeping an Eye on Google+ .. but I`m not seeing much action
7. I'm so not Plaxo, Xing and Ecademy anymore, I sometimes log on there, once every 6 months hoping nobody was stupid enough to send me a message there ..
8. To me Wink, Spock, Naymz and some others I forgot are Dead
9. I join new social networks often with no intention of actually using them, but just to make sure Tom doesn't sign up impersonating me

Well, those are my rules and I’m stickin’ to ‘em… at least, for now and when I don’t forget them.

(Idea shamelessly copied from Seth :))

Just read it !

The only unrealistic part about the scenario is that I fear that most purchasers within a government agency won't be asking these questions, yet.

Unless you are doing it wrong.

And sadly I`m seeing more and more people doing it wrong.
To a lot of people Open Source means that they have a piece of software that does almost what they want and which they can modify to their best wishes and use internally.

So they fork locally,, they don't redistribute their code , but they aren't contributing their changes back upstream, chances are these changes wouldn't be accepted upstream anyhow as they are really customizing the code for their specific cases. At first sight this doesn't look so bad , at second sight ..

When weeks or months later the upstream project releases an urgent security fix, the local fork has deviated soo much that it can't upgrade anymore and stays with an insecure version.
Often it's worse.. a feature that could have been accepted upstream has been implemented slightly different in the local fork, the result being that newer features depending on the first one also can't be integrated anymore

Some projects are prepared for local contributions, they have a modular framework that allows you to build on top of the project while not having to touch the core of a project, Drupal and openQRM are great examples of those, but not all projects are that smart. Needless to say that when you have such a modular framework you really shouldn't be modifying the core part of the platform, unless you are fixing a real bug.

But the general rule of thumb is that when you fix bugs, make sure they are inserted upstream , or implement new features.

Now sometimes there is no easy way to get your code accepted upstream, in which case you should announce clearly that you want to contribute but you are blocked and publish the patches somewhere else ...

Don't let the community work for you, but work with the community !