Thanks to a tip from a colleague - Anshu, I found out further confirmation that the Secureboot issue, that I blogged about earlier, is going to bite us badly just as we expected.
According to this post of the Software Freedom Law Center, Microsoft has recently revised it’s Windows 8 Hardware Certification requirements to lock out all alternative OSes from the ARM-based mobile devices that it ships on.
The Certification Requirements define (on page 116) a “custom” secure boot mode, in which a physically present user can add signatures for alternative operating systems to the system’s signature database, allowing the system to boot those operating systems.
Don’t try this in India yet, but in US, a district court is about to judge on whether you have to hand over encryption keys to the law if asked. Or can you decline because that is akin to self-incrimination? Given that the general pattern in our country of late is that you are guilty till proven innocent, trying this at “home” is probably only going to get yourself convicted,
.. the easing of reinstalling it. I am not joking. Here is the official blog post about this: Refresh and reset your PC
As Business Insider says it well:
Think about any other product that is so unreliable and degrades in performance with such predictable regularity that the next version will have a feature that makes it easy to WIPE IT CLEAN and start over. Is that a product you’d be super-excited to buy?
For those who aren’t aware of this, FSF (Free Software Foundation) has been running a campaign for the last few months about Microsoft’s malicious Secureboot initiative (which FSF calls restricted boot). Given the mostly Microsoft friendly corporate IT environments out there, I think this is one topic on which most employees should be very aware.
A nice summary of the issue can be read up at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/18/fsf_windows_8_campaign/
Apparently, Microsoft is practically arm-twisting OEM manufacturers to implement Secureboot to be able to install Windows 8 on their systems - it is a Windows 8 requirement.
There was a time when I used to blog frequently. After the age of twitter, it reduced. But rather than keeping on writing, I focused on an issue which was a lower priority - splitting up blogs so that the topics do not collide. That was in 2008, today it is 2012. I have posted only about two dozen entries in over 3 years.
Do you know how many blogs I have ended up maintaining?
I have been noticing that writing a commit message in git just like I have been doing in svn or CVS gives me a rather colorful output (see the credited link below for a screen grab).
Searching on the web led me to this post about someone else who found it odd and actually posted about it.
Turns out that the vim syntax file is trying to point out git commit messages best practices.
Spending all my time at work with Redhat’s suite of products and at the same time sticking to having my primary working OS to be Ubuntu was causing too much dissonance. So I finally decided to move to Fedora as my primary OS after 6 years of Ubuntu. My guess was that as a desktop user, beyond packaging issues, the transition is going to be minimal. But as with any new release, there are always some niggling issues, and I am going to document them here in one place as I continue to find them.
The only annoying this I find in the otherwise indispensable GNU Screen is the fact that once you have launched screen (not resume) and have detached and logged off the first time, ssh-agent magic stops working in the screen sessions.
Obviously this is because the next time you login, your ssh agent socket changes but the screen sessions still only have the location of the ssh-agent socket when you launched screen for the first time.
We Indians have been cribbing about ISP data caps for broadband called very insultingly as Fair Usage Policy (FUP), but I have heard few making a very good case about why this is a bad idea for the market. And how the ISP’s justifications of minority data hoggers is a case of 💩.
But I just heard about a very good case being made against such data caps in the US broadband market.
Here is a quick tip which I have gleaned from multiple sources which makes using procmail filters a breeze. I subscribe to dozens of mailing lists, and it really is somewhat of a chore to create filters for every mailing list I signup for so that mails for that list goes to a separate folder.
However, it is possible to setup procmailrc in such a way that you really don’t need to update procmailrc for every new mailing list that you signup for.