Into.the.Void.

Ο Δημήτρης έχει μια αρκετά καλή ανάλυση ενός attack σε ένα honeypot που έχει στήσει για πειραματισμούς. Αξίζει να του ρίξετε μια ματιά…

Επιτέλους μας την έπεσαν

Filed by kargig at 18:16 under General, Greek, Internet, Linux, Networking
No Comments | 250 views

A friend of mine just ordered a macbook here in Greece. 2.4GHz CPU, 2Gb RAM, 160GB disk. No extras.
Looking at www.applestore.gr this macbook costs 1066E without tax. Tax here in Greece is 19% so the final price would be: 1294,72€
I decided to take a look at other applestores and compare the prices.
applestore.com lists it at 1299$. Using www.xe.com to convert that money to Euros: 843.403€ !! (there might be some kind of taxing missing from here. If you know something please correct me with a comment)
applestore.se lists it at SEK 11.795,00 with tax included. Using www.xe.com to convert that money to Euros: 1,266.38€
applestore.co.uk lists it at £829.00 with tax included. Using www.xe.com to convert that money to Euros: 1,049.31€
applestore.fr lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.de lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.it lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.nl lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.es lists is at 1.149,00 € with tax included.
applestore.pt lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.no lists it at kr 10 390,00. Using www.xe.com to convert that money to Euros:1,304.20€
applestore.fi lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.

to summarize, from least expensive to most expensive (tax included):
US: 843€
UK:1049€
Spain: 1149€
Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal: 1199€
Sweden: 1266€
Greece: 1294€
Norway: 1304€

Now, should I be happy or sad that in my country it costs a lot more than most other European countries ? It surely costs more than any other country in the Euro zone. If someone takes into account that the minimal monthly payment here in Greece is at 600€, then this macbook here in Greece costs more than 2 months of work. Shouldn’t the price be exactly the same as all other countries in the Euro zone since we are using Euros (€)? What’s the big deal with Greece ? Even the site looks different than all others.. :S

Filed by kargig at 15:00 under General, Internet
5 Comments | 1,726 views

Since I was tagged by comzeradd to show my Desktop..here it is.

To see what’s all that just click the image and check the notes of flickr.

I tag dstergiou, hsoc, stsimb and thatha

Filed by kargig at 15:05 under General, Internet
10 Comments | 408 views

Σήμερα το μεσημέρι βρίσκω στην εξώπορτα της πολυκατοικίας ένα ειδοποιητήριο της ACS.

Έχω κάνει blur τον αριθμό του πακέτου και το όνομα…

Όπως κάποιος θα παρατηρεί, το ειδοποιητήριο αναφέρει επάνω του:

“Παρακαλούμε όπως επικοινωνήσετε μαζί μας στο ανωτέρω τηλέφωνο για την παραλαβή το ταχύτερο δυνατόν.”

Αν βλέπει κανείς τηλέφωνο επάνω στο ειδοποιητήριο να μου το πει και μένα…
Ανοίγω Firefox, πηγαίνω στο site της ACS, click στο “Καταστήματα” και εμφανίζεται ένας ωραιότατος χάρτης σε Flash. Clickety click στο νομό, ανοίγει νέα σελίδα με κανένα κατάστημα…Clickety click σε άλλο νομό, τα ίδια… ξανά click στο δικό μου νομό…πάλι τίποτα. Βλέπω ένα link “εργαλείο αναζήτησης”..το χρησιμοποιώ, βρίσκω το τηλέφωνο του καταστήματος και τηλεφωνώ

- Γεια σας, τηλεφωνώ σχετικά με μία παραλαβή. Στο ειδοποιητήριο αναφέρει ότι προβλέπονται 3 προσπάθειες παράδοσης. Πότε μπορείτε να το φέρετε ξανά το δέμα ?
- Αύριο.
- Μπορώ να έρθω να το παραλάβω μόνος μου σήμερα ? Και αν ναι, μέχρι τι ώρα είστε ανοιχτά ?
- Ναι, μπορείτε. Είμαστε ανοιχτά μέχρι τις 19:30.

Η ώρα ήταν ήδη 17:00 οπότε αποφασίζω να πάω προς το μαγαζί. Παίρνω την ταυτότητά μου αλλά ξεχνάω το ειδοποιητήριο σπίτι. Φτάνω εκεί, μπαίνω μέσα και ήταν μια υπάλληλος:

- Τι θα θέλατε ?
- Έχω λάβει μια ειδοποίηση για ένα δέμα.
- Έχετε το ειδοποιητήριο μαζί σας ?
- Όχι, το ξέχασα..
- Το όνομά σας ?
- ΧΧΧ…
- Μισό λεπτό…
(το ψάχνει για 20-30 δευτερόλεπτα, βρίσκει το δέμα και το φέρνει)
- Μένετε στην οδό ΥΥΥ ?
- Ναί, ΥΥΥ αριθμός ΖΖΖ.
- Βάλτε ολόκληρο το ονομά σας και υπογράψτε εδώ…
(συμπληρώνω τα στοιχεία μου και υπογράφω)
- Ορίστε (μου δίνει το δέμα)

και έτσι έφυγα από την ACS με ένα δέμα χωρίς να μου ζητηθεί καν ταυτότητα.

Θα μπορούσε κάποιος πολύ άνετα να πάρει το χαρτάκι από την πόρτα της πολυκατοικίας, το οποίο αναφέρει το όνομα του παραλήπτη, να πάει στην ACS και να πάρει το δέμα μου χωρίς εγώ να πάρω χαμπάρι. Δεν θα έπρεπε να με είχε πάρει τηλέφωνο κάποιος από την ACS αφού δεν με βρήκαν σπίτι για να με ειδοποιήσουν για την αποτυχημένη παραλαβή ? Πραγματική ασφάλεια…

Filed by kargig at 00:06 under General, Greek, Privacy
3 Comments | 388 views

Ένα post για το πώς πήγε το πρώτο OpenCoffee event στα Ιωάννινα υπάρχει στο: http://opencoffee.gr/2008/05/13/opencoffee-ioannina-i-minute/

Filed by kargig at 17:19 under General, Greek, Internet
No Comments | 258 views

Κατά τη διάρκεια του Fosscomm που έγινε στην Αθήνα στις 21-22/03 συζητήσαμε με τον Γιώργο Τζιραλή την πιθανότητα διενέργιας ενός Open Coffee στα Γιάννενα. Μετά από μερικές ημέρες συννενοήσεων πλέον μπορούμε να ανακοινώσουμε πως την Παρασκευή 9 Μαΐου θα διοργανωθεί στα Γιάννενα ένα Open Coffee “event” στο καφέ “Θυμωμένο Πορτραίτο”.

Περισσότερες λεπτομέρειες για το τι είναι το Open Coffee καθώς και για παλιότερα events μπορείτε να διαβάσετε στο site του Open Coffee.

Μακάρι να πάει καλά και να έρθει αρκετός κόσμος. Είναι μια καλή ευκαιρία για κάποιον να ακούσει και να ανταλλάξει καινούργιες ιδέες καθώς και να γνωρίσει κόσμο με κοινά ενδιαφέροντα. Θα τα πούμε εκεί!

Filed by kargig at 12:25 under General, Greek
No Comments | 407 views

*UPDATED με ώρα/μέρος*

Την Τετάρτη 23 Απριλίου του 2008 στη Θεσσαλονίκη θα διεξαχθεί συνάντηση για συλλογή/ανταλλαγή υπογραφών σε pgp/gpg κλειδιά. Για τη συμμετοχή σας θα χρειαστείτε κάποιο επίσημο έγγραφο που να πιστοποιεί την ταυτότητα που αντιστοιχεί στο κλειδί σας, και αρκετά αντίγραφα από το ψηφιακό δακτυλικό αποτύπωμα του κλειδιού σας και του ονόματός σας γραμμένα σε χαρτί.

Περισσότερες πληροφορίες για τη διαδικασία που θα ακολουθηθεί (Informal Method Party) υπάρχουν εδώ.

Το ακριβές μέρος και η ώρα θα ανακοινωθούν μέσα τις επόμενες μέρες.
Το meeting θα γίνει μάλλον σε cafe της πόλης ώστε να μπορέσουμε να συζητήσουμε και να γνωριστούμε καλύτερα.

Όσοι πιθανώς ενδιαφέρονται ας κάνουν ένα comment εδώ ή στο blog του Πάτροκλου για να μετράμε συμμετοχές έστω και στο περίπου.

*Update*
Ημερομηνία συνάντησης: Τετάρτη 23/04/2008
Ώρα: 16:30
Μέρος: Καμάρα Θεσσαλονίκης

Filed by kargig at 11:25 under General, Greek, Internet, Linux, Privacy
No Comments | 1,195 views

Aggelos Orfanakos, one of the two greek gentoo developers, has created a google map where every gentoo user in Greece can place his coordinates so we can easily spot each other and maybe “create” a community, do some meetings and have some fun

You are all welcome to join!

Gentoo Users in Greece

Filed by kargig at 13:19 under General, Gentoo, Internet, Linux
No Comments | 282 views

While fooling around on the net today I bumped into QR codes. I had seen them on some contact cards and some websites before, but I didn’t really pay any attention back then.

Creating a code is easy, there are a bunch of ways to do it. Nokia has a generator offering two modes, Datamatrix (default) and QR (look at the bottom of the page): http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/create.jsp.

Reading the code is quite easy too. You just need a code reader for your mobile phone. Nokia’s reader couldn’t work on my Nokia N70 but Kaywa Reader worked just fine. Go the their site, login with bugmenot and download the reader for your own mobile phone.

Then just play with it.

Here’s how it looks like:

Weird(?) thing is that I couldn’t find any applications for linux (open source if possible) to able to “ocr” the images and provide output of the code inside them. Do you know any ?

Filed by kargig at 01:03 under General, Internet, Linux
No Comments | 226 views

In one of my previous posts (titled: It’s official: Western Digital hates me and I hate them too) I described how 3 Western Digital drives I owned crashed in 2 months.

Last week I left the city I live to go to Athens, Greece where fosscomm was taking place. When I returned I checked the logs of my machines and in one of them I found this:


hdi: lost interrupt
hdi: status error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdi: status error: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdi: no DRQ after issuing MULTWRITE_EXT
hdi: status error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdi: status error: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdi: no DRQ after issuing MULTWRITE_EXT
hdi: status error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdi: status error: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdi: no DRQ after issuing MULTWRITE_EXT
hdi: status error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdi: status error: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
pdc202xx_new: Primary channel reset.
hdi: no DRQ after issuing MULTWRITE_EXT
ide4: reset: success
hdi: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
hdi: DMA timeout error
hdi: dma timeout error: status=0x80 { Busy }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdi: DMA disabled
pdc202xx_new: Primary channel reset.
ide4: reset: success
hdi: lost interrupt
md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0
raid5: Disk failure on hdi1, disabling device. Operation continuing on 5 devices


This the fourth crashed WD drive in 2 months! It’s not an april fool’s joke.. it’s still 31st of March..


Model Family: Western Digital Caviar SE family
Device Model: WDC WD2000JB-55GVA0
Serial Number: WD-WCALL1025118


Of course it’s out of warranty. Again.

As Fuzz said, this whole thing must be a logic timebomb planted inside WD disks years ago to force us move to SSD drives.

I’m getting pretty tired of it though…

Filed by kargig at 18:57 under General, Linux
No Comments | 255 views

Since sotiris asked, here’s a recent desktop screenshot.

Ok it’s not so recent (12/Nov/2007)…but it hasn’t changed at all since then

It’s Fluxbox with ROX Desktop and of course it’s Gentoo!

Interested in what comzeradd, agorf and Charmed[] have for desktop ?

Filed by kargig at 23:44 under General, Linux
2 Comments | 439 views

About a month ago one of the hard disks in my PC started showing DMA errors on syslog. It was a Western Digital WD1200JB with manufacture date: 13 MAR 2002. Luckily on that disk I only kept temporary data like downloads, some music and videos, and some pretty old backups. As soon as I saw the DMA errors on syslog I placed a spare 200Gb drive on the box and tried to rsync all data to it. I saved most of the needed data but I lost some of my old backups. The case is that I didn’t really know what was inside them, there were some directories named like: “/Backups/OLD/foobar/backup_older/random_crap”. I guess it was crap after all. I never needed anything from inside that directories for at least the last couple years.

2 weeks ago I returned from a trip to Athens. I checked my mails where I get reports from ossec on various servers I manage. One of these mails reported that a RAID5 array with 6×200Gb disks was degraded due to a hard disk failure. Yes, it was a Western Digital, again. Model Number:WD2000JB, manufacture date: 26 AUG 2004. I had another 200Gb drive at home where I keep my backups. Since I couldn’t afford the risk of not having a spare disk for my home backups, I bought a Seagate ST3500320AS. Since the new disk was 500Gb I copied all my data from the “spare” 200Gb disk and also made a full backup of my boot disk which is 120Gb. I then replaced the faulty 200Gb on the server with the “spare” 200Gb drive I had at home.

On Thursday I came back from an one-week trip, this time to my hometown. All was fine until Friday noon. Then I tried to open a text file inside my home dir (which is a seperate partition on my boot disk) that I keep some random notes and the machine started crawling. I couldn’t open the file. I tried to copy the file to another disk without success. I only got some beautiful I/O errors on the terminal and DMA errors on the syslog. Guess what! The disk was a Western Digital 1200JB with manufacture date: 14 DEC 2001. Under different circumstances I would cry at my bad luck…but the only thing I could do was laugh. I couldn’t stop laughing about this mess. I placed the 500Gb Seagate on a external USB case and started to rsync the root dir on top of my 2 weeks ago rsync. A couple of files couldn’t be read from the boot disk but they were already on the “backup” so I saved everything. Since I had no spare disk left at home I went out and bought another hard disk. I couldn’t find any 250 or 320Gb Seagate drives so I bought another 500Gb Seagate ST3500320AS. What was funny was that the salesman at the local store tried to convince me to buy a Western Digital 320Gb without success of course, I wonder why…
I placed the new 500Gb disk in my box, booted iloog, partitioned the disk and rsync-ed my data from the “old” 500Gb disk to the new.

YES, I am using smartctl/smartd on all of my boxes even at home. Smartctl was not showing ANY errors at all before the first DMA errors appeared on syslog. I am regularly testing all my disks with smartctl’s tests: short, long and conveyance (where it’s supported)

The first disk is in complete unusable form right now. I tried partitioning it and formatting it but it moans painfully when it is accessed. It currently shows more than 100 S.M.A.R.T. errors. It’s dead.
The second one has about 4-5 S.M.A.R.T. errors logged. It doesn’t make any strange noises when operating but I haven’t extensively tested it yet. It surely cannot be trusted…
The third disk has bad sectors and about 20 S.M.A.R.T. errors. Most of them were “created” during the check for bad blocks process and every time a bad arrea is accessed more errors are added to the log. During operation it makes an annoying sound which is like scratching metal parts against each other.
Funny thing is what smartcl reports for all disks, even for the first one:

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

I am well aware that all disks were over their guarantee (3 years), that’s why I was keeping backups (of important stuff) over separate disks, but I don’t think I’ll be buying any Western Digital drives in the near future…I need some time to get over this month of crashes…

Any other Western Digital haters out there ?

Filed by kargig at 18:02 under General, Linux
7 Comments | 469 views

All software companies make errors.

A great deal of those companies correct these errors as soon as someone finds them.
A few companies correct them as soon as they can. But that can sometimes take months.
One company not only does it not correct the errors it makes, it tries to standardize them.

It’s not about how big or small an error is…it’s about the attitude.

Filed by kargig at 16:54 under General, Internet
No Comments | 186 views

Magenta is a greek software company which among others has a product called OfficeSuite 2008 Professional, which is based on OpenOffice. Nothing bad in that. This is very good news indeed.

The last couple of days though they have been spamming the “Greek internet” with emails about their wonderful product. I got the same spam to at least 4 different emails and mailing-lists that I am subscribed. It’s very very annoying. It is also known that magenta’s people have been reading emails on some of those lists, they have used them in the past, but none came forward these last couple of days to say that they are sorry for spamming us and that it won’t happen again, etc, etc. Advertising is one thing, spamming is something very very different. I expected that company to be a bit more serious about their marketing tactics, shame on them.

All spam emails come from the address: listmaster@magentadb.gr If any mail administrators are out there…PLEASE PLEASE block them.

Filed by kargig at 12:40 under General, Internet, Linux, Privacy
1 Comment | 364 views

I’ve finally managed to get the theme for my blog XHTML 1.1 validated. The first time I checked it with W3C Markup Validator it had 99 errors. Most were about some br and ul,li tags. The part that I had some difficulty into making it valid, was meebo’s chat flash code. Meebo serves this to paste in websites:

<!-- Beginning of meebo me widget code. Want to talk with visitors on your page? Go to http://www.meebome.com/ and get your widget! -->
<embed src="http://widget.meebo.com/mm.swf?EunEtULzWx" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="160" height="250"></embed>

Which is not XHTML 1.1 valid. To make it valid I transformed it to something like this:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
data="http://widget.meebo.com/mm.swf?EunEtULzWx"
width="160" height="250">
<param name="movie"
value="http://widget.meebo.com/mm.swf?EunEtULzWx" />
<img src="noflash.gif"
width="160" height="250" alt="" />
</object>


according to this: Flash Satay.

You can now check the validator that my blog is OK

References:
http://learningforlife.fsu.edu/webmaster/references/xhtml/tags/
http://alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay

Filed by kargig at 12:54 under General, Internet
5 Comments | 598 views

Ένα απολαυστικό δείγμα του υψηλού επιπέδου…

(Ό,τι είναι μέσα σε πλαίσιο είναι αυτά που έγραψαν οι φοιτητές, τα υπόλοιπα είναι σχόλια του καθηγητή)

Διαβάστε περισσότερα στο: Καφές και Τσιγάρο – ΖΗΤΩ ΤΟ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΟ ΠΑΝΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΙΟ

Filed by kargig at 20:20 under General
1 Comment | 180 views

Just…enjoy

Filed by kargig at 11:28 under General, Internet
3 Comments | 458 views

I can’t even comment on that…

Filed by kargig at 21:03 under General, slogans
No Comments | 866 views

Linux is a multiuser operating system “designed to be secure by design”. Each user has it’s own home directory and can only execute applications that the Administrator (root) of the system has allowed him to. That means that users that want to run priviledged applications must either have root’s permission to do so or are asked for a password to escalate their priviledges. So every linux user not only knows the difference of a simple user and the “root of all evil”, but is well aware of where/when to use passwords, what are file permissions and so on and so on. A linux user has (or had, until recently) given up pretty graphics in favor of a more stable, more secure and more “free” operating system.

Windows is a (multiuser?) operating system with emphasis on usability. Since the first windows versions, the users of windows got used to being able to do almost everything without ever being asked for another password than the one at the login screen. Sometimes there wasn’t even such a login screen. A windows user is used to doing administrative tasks with his every day account. Most windows users don’t even know about file permissions and how to use them on their system. That makes life both easier and riskier.

Until broadband came to our lives at the very end of the 20th century, when Windows 98 and ME ruled the IT universe, windows users had very little to fear. While they only exchanged files with their friends on floppies and cdroms, and their computers were not 24/7 online, remote exploits, internet worms and trojans were unknown words to them. A decent antivirus was the only thing required. Windows 98/ME did not even have “services” running on them by default (apart from shared folders). During that time Microsoft only had to worry about making their users’ OS easier and more beautiful. And they were pretty successful in that.
Their server (NT) version though had tons of problems. It was very incompatible with a lot of software and was easily attacked by internet worms. The number of service packs for NT reached a ridiculous number, and still Microsoft couldn’t handle all the problems. Their enhanced server edition, Windows 2000 was a lot better than NT, but the security weaknesses remained. What made Windows NT and Windows 2000 so insecure was that they were supposed to be 24/7 online. The bad guys attacked WinNT and Win2K because they could then use them for their own purposes. A hacked win98 box behind a dialup was useless compared to an always online windows server. While more and more windows 2000 servers were getting online and worms hammered them, more and more people started bitching Microsoft about it. Microsoft tried to fix problems those problems with numerous service packs, but that wasn’t enough.
Then came Windows XP, the first Microsoft OS for users that had various services enabled by default. At the same time more and more people started having broadband at their homes. Now the bad guys had something new and more powerful to fiddle, and it wasn’t long until the first remotely exploitable problems appeared. The bad guys created worms and trojans that attacked WinXP, the OS of millions users. Users’ machines are millions more than server machines, and they were all probable targets/victims for those worms. If a remotely exploitable vulnerability was somehow found for Win98, the impact would be a lot smaller because the number of online PCs was a lot smaller back then . Every remotely exploitable hole found for XP drove users crazy. XP was not designed to be secure, it was to designed to be a _lot_ more beautiful than 98/ME. It was designed with multimedia, games, office work, etc in mind. People started asking for more than an antivirus for their PCs and a new word came to every windows user life, “Firewall”. Then came service pack 1, then service pack 2…and problems still existed and will exist even if a service pack 3 is launched sometime in the future. One of the basic problems with Microsoft XP is that it doesn’t help users understand how and when to use the Administrator account. Most users create a user with Administrator privileges during XP’s installation process and then run their machines with that admin account. This is _plain_ wrong. Every windows XP user feels that he can do everything he wants with his PC without ever being asked for a single password. So when something infects their PC and runs with their user’s privileges, it actually runs as the administrator of the machine. This leads to total destruction.

Vista is said to have a different approach to security though. It has supposedly been built from scratch with security in mind. Users are now ‘just users’ and their default account does not have administrative privileges. So every time they want to do an administrative task dozens of warnings appear before them. That supposedly ensures that nothing can run with administrative privilege unless the user explicitly wants it to be that way. Someone I know who used Vista told me that Vista makes you think that it’s for more advanced users than XP was. All these notifications that pop up asking you for permission to do this and that, makes you feel a bit uncomfortable. New users of computers, that first stumble upon Vista will feel much more uncomfortable with that OS than they would feel if their first OS was XP. And that’s bad for a “Windows OS”, every version until Vista was easier to use than the previous one, apart from Vista…which is harder.
Microsoft with Vista acts as parent who has spoiled their children for a veeeery long time, giving them free chocolates and candies even though they knew that by doing this they hurt their children’s health, and are now trying to put them on a diet. And this just can’t be done. Windows have spoiled users for more than 10-15 years and it’s too late to start telling people, “Hey mind your security!”. “Your account is now on a diet, no more candies for you”.

When Vista starts spreading among users (maybe in 1 year from now?), users themselves will eventually understand more and more about security concepts. They will start to understand why it is so important that the administrative account is something completely different than theirs and why they should only “touch” it occasionally. Vista might be a lot more beautiful as an OS but it will be a lot more difficult for users to “manage”. Nag screens will be all over the place. Passwords might be frequently asked to change something fundamental for the system.

Where does this lead ? Users will get more and more acquainted with the whole administrator’s rights idea and Linux will not look so much like an alien OS to them. The transition from Windows to Linux for users will get easier and easier as linux becomes (slowly and painfully) more good looking and windows becomes (slowly and painfully) more secure.

Every OS has a different beginning and a different approach on evolution, but they tend to meet at some place in the future. They have just taken different roads to reach their goal. Windows prefers user-friendliness over security and stability and linux prefers it the other way around.

Filed by kargig at 03:28 under General, Internet, Linux, Privacy
1 Comment | 837 views

I’ve made a few changes to the sidebar of my blog, I’ve added last.fm Recent Tracks listing and a Meebome widget. The meebome widget is a very nice flash application that let’s you chat with visitors of your site while being online on meebo. I was introduced to meebo sometime ago by thatha. It is an “Instant Messaging Portal”, you create an account and then you can log in to your msn, icq, yahoo, aim, jabber and gtalk account. I use it whenever I am away from my pc, since I find it a lot more “comfortable” to log in to the networks I am interested through meebo than through Portable Gaim that I keep on my usb flash drive.

btw…Gaim is so broken these days…Looks like noone is interested to fix the aging problems it has. No nat-to-nat transfers, random crashes even on normal filetransfers. Even the developer(s) suggest that you use the beta version to log in to msn. How dumb is this ? What are they waiting for ? Since even the developer promotes the beta in favor to the “stable”..shouldn’t the beta be named as “stable” now ? Noone is still using Gaim 1.5.0 …all the latest gnome based distros use 2.0-betaX…

I’ve steadily become more and more unsupportive of OLPC. There are many reasons to this. First of all I think that it made by western people believing that they know what is better for africans or asians. That’s plain wrong. In my view the OLPC is something that western rich kids will enjoy far more than poor africans or asians. It’s a “western toy” for “western rich kids”. Then comes the “open-ness” of the whole project. In the beggining everything looked very promising, then came the closed source drivers and firmwares. I don’t care for whatever reasons Marvell doesn’t open source the wifi driver, but if someone touts for a “complete open source project”, then e v e r y t h i n g must be open source. Not whatever we like. Oh, and then came the added sd card slot in order for the OLPC to be able to run a version of windows. That’s open source too right ? More bashing of the OLPC on beranger.

Filed by kargig at 03:47 under General, Internet
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