SPAM дарение

Post Syndicated from RealEnder original https://alex.stanev.org/blog/?p=267

По-миналата седмица попаднах на статия в Капитал как SPAM регистърът на КЗП получил дарение. Определено се зарадвах, че са направили нещо, което да опростява справките в регистъра и следователно да го направи по-ефективен. Когато погледнах отблизо зъбите на харизания кон обаче, ми стана ясно, че стъпката е отново в страни. Технологичното решение, което колегите са предложили е .NET desktop приложение, към което се сваля криптиран файл със съдържанието на регистъра. Проверката става, като потребителя изготви файл с електронните адреси на получателите, а приложението го филтрира в съответствие със съдържанието на регистъра.

От това веднага трябва да е станало ясно, че ключа за декриптиране вероятно е забит в самото приложение. След прилагането на не-чак-вуду-техники (strings and friends), нямащи нищо общо с reverse engineering, става ясно, че регистърът е криптиран с DES-CBC, а 20 минути по-късно декриптирането се свежда до една команда с OpenSSL:

alex@volatile:~$ openssl des-cbc -d -K [find_it_youself] -iv 00f00ab00bc00cf0 -in 29112010.TXT -out spam.txt

Разбира се, изпратих поща на КЗП за проблема, описвайки и възможността недоброжелател да декриптира регистъра и да го постне по руските и китайските спам форуми. След това резултатът е ясен, а действието ефективно ще подкопае и без това крехките устои на SPAM регистъра.

Отговор вече повече от седмица няма.

Handy binaries for Thecus NAS boxes

Post Syndicated from Laurie Denness original https://laur.ie/blog/2010/11/handy-binaries-for-thecus-nas-boxes/

I recently took delivery of the rather splendid Thecus N5500 which I love; it’s the perfect mix between “it just works” and “oh, let’s stick SSH on there and poke around”. With 5 hot swap disk shelves, and 2TB hard drives you’ve got a serious amount of storage.

For your money you get a very nice little piece of hardware in a pretty nice shell (it strikes me as a touch tacky in places but then again it’s hardly going on show) with software that gets the job done. NFS, AFP, Samba, iSCSI, iTunes DAAP support, and plenty of modules to tickle your fancy (Logitech Squeezecenter, for instance).

But who am I kidding, I’m a sysadmin. 10 minutes after powering the thing on I was dying to log in using SSH so I could watch /proc/mdstat to see the RAID build. Luckily, the modules from the Thecus N5200 work fine; which means you’re a couple of clicks away from a root terminal.

  1. Grab the SSH and SYSUSER N5200 modules, and unzip them (a mistake I made.. How embarrassing.)
  2. Upload them using the webinterface, and enable them.
  3. SSH to the NAS box using the user “sys” and the password “sys”
  4. Enjoy your shell, and remember to run `passwd sys` to change the password to something else.

Now, you’ve got yourself a pretty handy, albeit it BusyBox-ridden install of Linux. The whole point of this post, is so I can pimp a few statically compiled binaries that might come in useful to you; they did to me anyway.

(You may wish to install the UTILITIES module, which gives you a proper version of top and ps, amongst other things, available here)

You can simply untar and drop the binaries into /raid/data/modules/bin folder so that they’re in your path, and stored on your disks rather than the flash units which are rather limited in space. By the way, these modules should also work fine on the Thecus N5200 NAS boxes too.

The binaries are available here: http://denness.net/thecus/binaries/

The list includes (all the latest versions as of the date of this blog post):

  • ethtool, handy for network interface prodding
  • iftop, a very useful “GUI” app that shows incoming/outgoing network bandwidth (let’s face it, this is fun on a NAS. NOTE: you may need to execute this one using `TERM=vt100; iftop`)
  • iostat, for hard core disk stats porn. Run it with `iostat -mx 1` and watch the megabytes fly
  • rsync, particularly handy if you want to synchronise/backup data from one place to another, so particularly handy on a NAS.
  • vim, just in case you were planning on writing a lot of code on the Thecus 🙂
  • GNU screen, a nice place to store your terminals and detach and come back later. (NOTE: you may need to execute this one using `TERM=vt100; screen`)
  • The command line version of PHP, in case you were planning on writing any scripts in PHP to run on the Thecus.

Any suggestions/comments, let me know.

MonitorControls – Utilties for monitor management on Windows

Post Syndicated from Laurie Denness original https://laur.ie/blog/2010/11/monitorcontrols-utilties-for-monitor-management-on-windows/

When I ended up using Windows to power the overhead information screens at Last.fm, I lost the ability to have a one line crontab entry that shut the monitors into DPMS standby (and wake them up) when we’re in and out of office hours. Makes no sense wasting power, but more importantly shortening the length of screens having them on when the office is empty.

I didn’t think I would have any issue finding a utility to place the screens in to standby mode. I didn’t; but unfortunately they were either not free, massively complicated or simply didn’t work.

So I found a code snippet online, fired up a copy of Visual Studio and compiled two exe files; MonitorOn.exe and MonitorOff.exe. MonitorOff sends a signal to all attached monitors on the system to go in to sleep mode, and if you move the mouse you can wake them up as normal. Or you can run MonitorOn which will send the signal manually. Simply place these into the Windows Task Scheduler, and you have a simple, effective way to manage your information screens.

You can download MonitorOn and MonitorOff here.

OpenFest 2010

Post Syndicated from RealEnder original https://alex.stanev.org/blog/?p=264

OpenFest 2010 беше особено интересен тази година. Наред с това, че се видяхме с банда приятели, с които за съжаление все по-рядко ни се отдава да пием по бира, имаше и доста нови познанства. Споделените идеи са особено ценни, а когато има с кого да ги обсъдиш става все по-интересно. Вече има и предложения за следващия фест, но дотогава има време, а и, надявам се, локални събития:)

Както обещах, презентацията ми от тази година, както и от минали събития, можете да дръпнете от тук.

systemd for Administrators, Part IV

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-4.html

Here’s the fourth installment of my ongoing
series about
systemd
for administrators.

Killing Services

Killing a system daemon is easy, right? Or is it?

Sure, as long as your daemon persists only of a single process this might
actually be somewhat true. You type killall rsyslogd and the syslog
daemon is gone. However it is a bit dirty to do it like that given that this
will kill all processes which happen to be called like this, including those an
unlucky user might have named that way by accident. A slightly more correct
version would be to read the .pid file, i.e. kill `cat
/var/run/syslogd.pid`. That already gets us much further, but still, is
this really what we want?

More often than not it actually isn’t. Consider a service like Apache, or
crond, or atd, which as part of their usual operation spawn child processes.
Arbitrary, user configurable child processes, such as cron or at jobs, or CGI
scripts, even full application servers. If you kill the main apache/crond/atd
process this might or might not pull down the child processes too, and it’s up
to those processes whether they want to stay around or go down as well.
Basically that means that terminating Apache might very well cause its CGI
scripts to stay around, reassigned to be children of init, and difficult to
track down.

systemd to
the rescue: With systemctl kill you can easily send a signal to all
processes of a service. Example:

# systemctl kill crond.service

This will ensure that SIGTERM is delivered to all processes of the crond
service, not just the main process. Of course, you can also send a different
signal if you wish. For example, if you are bad-ass you might want to go for
SIGKILL right-away:

# systemctl kill -s SIGKILL crond.service

And there you go, the service will be brutally slaughtered in its entirety,
regardless how many times it forked, whether it tried to escape supervision by
double forking or fork bombing.

Sometimes all you need is to send a specific signal to the main process of a
service, maybe because you want to trigger a reload via SIGHUP. Instead of going via the
PID file, here’s an easier way to do this:

# systemctl kill -s HUP --kill-who=main crond.service

So again, what is so new and fancy about killing services in systemd? Well,
for the first time on Linux we can actually properly do that. Previous
solutions were always depending on the daemons to actually cooperate to bring
down everything they spawned if they themselves terminate. However, usually if
you want to use SIGTERM or SIGKILL you are doing that because they actually do
not cooperate properly with you.

How does this relate to systemctl stop? kill goes directly
and sends a signal to every process in the group, however stop goes
through the official configured way to shut down a service, i.e. invokes the
stop command configured with ExecStop= in the service file. Usually
stop should be sufficient. kill is the tougher version, for
cases where you either don’t want the official shutdown command of a service to
run, or when the service is hosed and hung in other ways.

(It’s up to you BTW to specify signal names with or without the SIG prefix
on the -s switch. Both works.)

It’s a bit surprising that we have come so far on Linux without even being
able to properly kill services. systemd for the first time enables you to do
this properly.

systemd Status Update

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd-update-2.html

It has been a
while since my last status update on systemd. Here’s another short,
incomprehensive status update on what we worked on for systemd since then.

  • Fedora F15 (Rawhide) now includes a split up
    /etc/init.d/rc.sysinit (Bill Nottingham). This allows us to keep only
    a minimal compatibility set of shell scripts around, and boot otherwise a
    system without any shell scripts at all. In fact, shell scripts during early
    boot are only used in exceptional cases, i.e. when you enabled autoswapping
    (bad idea anyway), when a full SELinux relabel is necessary, during the first
    boot after initialization, if you have static kernel modules to load (which are
    not configured via the systemd-native way to do that), if you boot from a
    read-only NFS server, or when you rely on LVM/RAID/Multipath. If nothing of
    this applies to you can easily disable these parts of early boot and
    save several seconds on boot. How to do this I will describe in a later blog
    story.
  • We have a fully C coded shutdown logic that kills all remaining processes,
    unmounts all remaining file systems, detaches all loop devices and DM volumes
    and does that in the right way to ensure that all these things are properly
    teared down even if they depend on each other in arbitrary ways. This is not
    only considerably faster then the traditional shell hackery for this, but also
    a lot safer, since we try to unmount/remount the remaining file systems with a
    little bit of brains. This feature is available via systemctl --force
    poweroff     to the administrator. The --force controls whether the
    usual shutdown of all services is run or whether this is skipped and we
    immediately shall enter this final C shutdown logic. Using --force
    hence is a much safer replacement for the old /sbin/reboot -f and does
    not leave dirty file systems behind. (Thanks to Fabiano Fidencio has his
    colleagues from ProFUSION for this).
  • systemd now includes a minmalistic readahead implementation, based on
    fanotify(), fadvise() and mincore(). It supports btrfs defragmentation and both
    SSD and HDD disks. While the effect on boots that are anyway fast (such as most
    stuff involving SSD) is minimal, slower and older machines benefit from this
    more substantially.
  • We now control fsck and quota during early boot with a C tool that ensure
    maximum parallelization but properly implements the necessary high-level
    administration logic.
  • Every service, every user and every user session now gets its own cgroup in
    the ‘cpu’ hierarchy thus creating better fairness between the logged in users
    and their sessions.
  • We now provide /dev/log logging from early boot to late shutdown.
    If no syslog daemon is running the output is passed on to kmsg. As soon as a
    proper syslog daemon starts up the kmsg buffer is flushed to syslog, and hence
    we will have complete log coverage in syslog even for early boot.
  • systemctl kill was introduced, an easy command to send a signal to
    all processes of a service. Expect a blog story with more details about this
    shortly.
  • systemd gained the ability to load the SELinux policy if necessary, thus
    supporting non-initrd boots and initrd boots from the same binary with no
    duplicate work. This is in fact (and surprisingly) a first among Linux init
    systems.
  • We now initialize and set the system locale inside PID 1 to be inherited by
    all services and users.
  • systemd has native support for /etc/crypttab and can activate
    encrypted LUKS/dm-crypt disks both at boot-up and during runtime. A minimal
    password querying infrastructure is available, where multiple agents can be
    used to present the password to the user. During boot the password is queried
    either via Plymouth or directly on the console. If a system crypto disk is
    plugged in after boot you are queried for the password via a GNOME agent, or a
    wall(1) agent. Finally, while you run systemctl start (or a similar
    command) a minimal TTY password agent is available which asks you for passwords
    right-away if this is necessary. The password querying logic is very simple,
    additional agents can be implemented in a trivial amount of code (Yupp, KDE folks, you
    can add an agent for this, too). Note that the password querying logic in
    systemd is only for non-user passwords, i.e. passwords that have no relation to
    a specific user, but rather to specific hardware or system software. In future
    we hope to extend this so that this can be used to query the password of SSL
    certificates when Apache or other servers start.
  • We offer a minimal interface that external projects can use to extend the
    dependency graph systemd manages. In fact, the cryptsetup logic mentioned above
    is implemented via this ‘plugin’-like system. Since we did not want to add code
    that deals with cryptographic disks into the systemd process itself we
    introduced this interface (after all cryptographic volumes are not an essential
    feature of a minimal OS, and unncessary on most embedded uses; also the future
    might bring us STC which might make this at least partially obsolete). Simply
    by dropping a generator binary into
    /lib/systemd/system-generators which should write out systemd unit
    files into a temporary directory third-party packages may extend the systemd
    dependency tree dynamically. This could be useful for example to automatically
    create a systemd service for each KVM machine or LXC container. With that in
    place those containers/machines could be managed and supervised with the same
    tools as the usual system services.
  • We integrated automatic clean-up of directories such as /tmp into
    the tmpfiles logic we already had in place that recreates files and
    directories on volatile file systems such as /var/run,
    /var/lock or /tmp.
  • We now always measure and write to the log files the system startup time we
    measured, broken up into how many time was spent on the kernel, the initrd and
    the initialization of userspace.
  • We now safely destroy all user session before going down. This is a feature
    long missing on Linux: since user processes were not killed until the very last
    moment the unhealthy situation that user code was running at a time where no
    other daemon was remaining was a normal part of shutdown.
  • systemd now understands an ‘extreme’ form of disabling a service: if you
    symlink a service name in /etc/systemd/system to /dev/null
    then systemd will mark it as masked and completely refuse starting it,
    regardless if this is requested manually or automaticallly. Normally it should
    be sufficient to simply call systemctl disable to disable a service
    which still allows manual activation but no automatic activation. Masking a
    service goes one step further.
  • There’s now a simple condition syntax in places which allows
    skipping or enabling units depending on the existance of a file, whether a
    directory is empty or whether a kernel command line option is set.
  • In addition to normal shutdowns for reboot, halt or poweroff we now
    similarly support a kexec reboot, that reboots the machine without going though
    the BIOS code again.
  • We have bash completion support for systemctl. (Ran Benita)
  • Andrew Edmunds contributed basic support to boot Ubuntu with systemd.
  • Michael Biebl and Tollef Fog Heen have worked on the systemd integration
    into Debian to a level that it is now possible to boot a system without having
    the old initscripts packaged installed. For more details see the Debian Wiki. Michael even
    tested this integration on an Ubuntu Natty system and as it turns out this
    works almost equally well on Ubuntu already. If you are interesting in playing
    around with this, ping Michael.

And that’s it for now. There’s a lot of other stuff in the git commits, but
most of it is smaller and I will it thus spare you.

We have come quite far in the last year. systemd is about a year old now,
and we are now able to boot a system without legacy shell scripts remaining,
something that appeared to be a task for the distant future.

All of this is available in systemd 13 and in F15/Rawhide as I type
this. If you want to play around with this then consider installing Rawhide
(it’s fun!).

In Defense of Bacon

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/16/bacon.html

Jono Bacon is currently being
criticized
for the manner in which
he launched
an initiative
called OpenRespect.Org. Much of
this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support
of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve
experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his
situation.

To be clear, I’m not even a supporter of Jono’s OpenRespect.Org
initiative myself. I think there are others who are doing good work in
this area already (for
example, various
efforts
around getting women involved in Free Software have long recognized and
worked on the issue, since mutual respect is an essential part having a
more diverse community). Also, I felt that Jono’s initiative was
slanted toward encouraging people respect all actions by
companies, some of which don’t advance Free Software.
I commented
on Jono’s blog to share my criticisms of the initiative when he was
still formulating it. In short, I think the wording of the current
statement on OpenRespect.org seems to indicate people should accept
anyone else’s choice as equally moral. As someone who believes software
freedom as a moral issue, and thus view development and distribution of
proprietary software as an immoral act, I have a problem with such a
mandate, although I nevertheless strive to be respectful in pursuit of
that view. I would hate to be declared disrespectful merely because I
believe in the morality of software freedom.

Yet, despite the fact that I disagree with some of the details of
Jono’s initiative, I believe most of the criticisms have been unfair.
First and foremost, we should
take Jono at his word
that this initiative is his own and not one undertaken on behalf of
Canonical, Ltd. I doubt Jono would dispute that his work at Canonical,
Ltd. inspired him to think about these issues, but that doesn’t mean
that everything he does on his own time on his own website is a
Canonical, Ltd. activity.

Indeed, I’ve personally been similarly attacked for items I’ve said on
this blog of my own, which of course does not represent the views of any
of my employers (past nor present) nor any organizations with which I
have volunteer affiliations. When I have things to say on those topics,
I have other fora to post officially, as does Jono.

So, I’ve experienced first-hand what Jono is currently experiencing:
namely, that people ignore disclaimers precisely to attack someone who
has an opinion that they don’t like. By conflating your personal
opinions with those of your employer’s, people subtly discredit you
— for example, by using your employment relationship to put
inappropriate pressure on you to change your positions. I’m very sad to
see that this same thing I’ve been a victim of is now happening to Jono,
too. I couldn’t just watch it happen without making a statement of
solidarity and pointing out that such treatment is unfair.

Even if we don’t agree with the OpenRespect.org initiative (and I
don’t, for reasons stated above), there is no one to blame but Jono
himself, as he’s told us clearly this isn’t a Canonical initiative, and
I’ve seen no evidence that shows the situation is otherwise.

I do note that there are other criticisms raised, such as whether or
not Jono reached out in the best possible way to others during the
launch, or whether others thought they’d be involved when it turned out
to be a unilateral initiative. All of that, of course, is something
that’s reparable (as is my primary complaint above, too), so on those
fronts, we should just give our criticism and ask Jono to change it.
That’s what I did on my issue. He chose not to take my advice, which is
his prerogative. My response thereafter was simply to not support the
initiative.

To the extent we don’t have enough respect in the FLOSS community,
here’s an easy place to improve: we should take people at their word
until we have evidence to believe otherwise. Jono says OpenRespect.org
is his own thing; we should believe him. We shouldn’t insist that
everything someone says is on behalf of their employer, even if they
have a spokesperson role. People have a right to be something more
than automatons for their bosses.

Disclosure: I did not tell Jono I was going to write
this post, but after it was completely written, I gave him the chance to
make a binary decision about whether I posted it publicly or not. Since
you’re reading this, he obviously answered 1.

In Defense of Bacon

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/16/bacon.html

Jono Bacon is currently being
criticized
for the manner in which
he launched
an initiative
called OpenRespect.Org. Much of
this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support
of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve
experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his
situation.

To be clear, I’m not even a supporter of Jono’s OpenRespect.Org
initiative myself. I think there are others who are doing good work in
this area already (for
example, various
efforts
around getting women involved in Free Software have long recognized and
worked on the issue, since mutual respect is an essential part having a
more diverse community). Also, I felt that Jono’s initiative was
slanted toward encouraging people respect all actions by
companies, some of which don’t advance Free Software.
I commented
on Jono’s blog to share my criticisms of the initiative when he was
still formulating it. In short, I think the wording of the current
statement on OpenRespect.org seems to indicate people should accept
anyone else’s choice as equally moral. As someone who believes software
freedom as a moral issue, and thus view development and distribution of
proprietary software as an immoral act, I have a problem with such a
mandate, although I nevertheless strive to be respectful in pursuit of
that view. I would hate to be declared disrespectful merely because I
believe in the morality of software freedom.

Yet, despite the fact that I disagree with some of the details of
Jono’s initiative, I believe most of the criticisms have been unfair.
First and foremost, we should
take Jono at his word
that this initiative is his own and not one undertaken on behalf of
Canonical, Ltd. I doubt Jono would dispute that his work at Canonical,
Ltd. inspired him to think about these issues, but that doesn’t mean
that everything he does on his own time on his own website is a
Canonical, Ltd. activity.

Indeed, I’ve personally been similarly attacked for items I’ve said on
this blog of my own, which of course does not represent the views of any
of my employers (past nor present) nor any organizations with which I
have volunteer affiliations. When I have things to say on those topics,
I have other fora to post officially, as does Jono.

So, I’ve experienced first-hand what Jono is currently experiencing:
namely, that people ignore disclaimers precisely to attack someone who
has an opinion that they don’t like. By conflating your personal
opinions with those of your employer’s, people subtly discredit you
— for example, by using your employment relationship to put
inappropriate pressure on you to change your positions. I’m very sad to
see that this same thing I’ve been a victim of is now happening to Jono,
too. I couldn’t just watch it happen without making a statement of
solidarity and pointing out that such treatment is unfair.

Even if we don’t agree with the OpenRespect.org initiative (and I
don’t, for reasons stated above), there is no one to blame but Jono
himself, as he’s told us clearly this isn’t a Canonical initiative, and
I’ve seen no evidence that shows the situation is otherwise.

I do note that there are other criticisms raised, such as whether or
not Jono reached out in the best possible way to others during the
launch, or whether others thought they’d be involved when it turned out
to be a unilateral initiative. All of that, of course, is something
that’s reparable (as is my primary complaint above, too), so on those
fronts, we should just give our criticism and ask Jono to change it.
That’s what I did on my issue. He chose not to take my advice, which is
his prerogative. My response thereafter was simply to not support the
initiative.

To the extent we don’t have enough respect in the FLOSS community,
here’s an easy place to improve: we should take people at their word
until we have evidence to believe otherwise. Jono says OpenRespect.org
is his own thing; we should believe him. We shouldn’t insist that
everything someone says is on behalf of their employer, even if they
have a spokesperson role. People have a right to be something more
than automatons for their bosses.

Disclosure: I did not tell Jono I was going to write
this post, but after it was completely written, I gave him the chance to
make a binary decision about whether I posted it publicly or not. Since
you’re reading this, he obviously answered 1.

In Defense of Bacon

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/16/bacon.html

Jono Bacon is currently being
criticized
for the manner in which
he launched
an initiative
called OpenRespect.Org. Much of
this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support
of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve
experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his
situation.

To be clear, I’m not even a supporter of Jono’s OpenRespect.Org
initiative myself. I think there are others who are doing good work in
this area already (for
example, various
efforts
around getting women involved in Free Software have long recognized and
worked on the issue, since mutual respect is an essential part having a
more diverse community). Also, I felt that Jono’s initiative was
slanted toward encouraging people respect all actions by
companies, some of which don’t advance Free Software.
I commented
on Jono’s blog to share my criticisms of the initiative when he was
still formulating it. In short, I think the wording of the current
statement on OpenRespect.org seems to indicate people should accept
anyone else’s choice as equally moral. As someone who believes software
freedom as a moral issue, and thus view development and distribution of
proprietary software as an immoral act, I have a problem with such a
mandate, although I nevertheless strive to be respectful in pursuit of
that view. I would hate to be declared disrespectful merely because I
believe in the morality of software freedom.

Yet, despite the fact that I disagree with some of the details of
Jono’s initiative, I believe most of the criticisms have been unfair.
First and foremost, we should
take Jono at his word
that this initiative is his own and not one undertaken on behalf of
Canonical, Ltd. I doubt Jono would dispute that his work at Canonical,
Ltd. inspired him to think about these issues, but that doesn’t mean
that everything he does on his own time on his own website is a
Canonical, Ltd. activity.

Indeed, I’ve personally been similarly attacked for items I’ve said on
this blog of my own, which of course does not represent the views of any
of my employers (past nor present) nor any organizations with which I
have volunteer affiliations. When I have things to say on those topics,
I have other fora to post officially, as does Jono.

So, I’ve experienced first-hand what Jono is currently experiencing:
namely, that people ignore disclaimers precisely to attack someone who
has an opinion that they don’t like. By conflating your personal
opinions with those of your employer’s, people subtly discredit you
— for example, by using your employment relationship to put
inappropriate pressure on you to change your positions. I’m very sad to
see that this same thing I’ve been a victim of is now happening to Jono,
too. I couldn’t just watch it happen without making a statement of
solidarity and pointing out that such treatment is unfair.

Even if we don’t agree with the OpenRespect.org initiative (and I
don’t, for reasons stated above), there is no one to blame but Jono
himself, as he’s told us clearly this isn’t a Canonical initiative, and
I’ve seen no evidence that shows the situation is otherwise.

I do note that there are other criticisms raised, such as whether or
not Jono reached out in the best possible way to others during the
launch, or whether others thought they’d be involved when it turned out
to be a unilateral initiative. All of that, of course, is something
that’s reparable (as is my primary complaint above, too), so on those
fronts, we should just give our criticism and ask Jono to change it.
That’s what I did on my issue. He chose not to take my advice, which is
his prerogative. My response thereafter was simply to not support the
initiative.

To the extent we don’t have enough respect in the FLOSS community,
here’s an easy place to improve: we should take people at their word
until we have evidence to believe otherwise. Jono says OpenRespect.org
is his own thing; we should believe him. We shouldn’t insist that
everything someone says is on behalf of their employer, even if they
have a spokesperson role. People have a right to be something more
than automatons for their bosses.

Disclosure: I did not tell Jono I was going to write
this post, but after it was completely written, I gave him the chance to
make a binary decision about whether I posted it publicly or not. Since
you’re reading this, he obviously answered 1.

In Defense of Bacon

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/16/bacon.html

Jono Bacon is currently being
criticized
for the manner in which
he launched
an initiative
called OpenRespect.Org. Much of
this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support
of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve
experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his
situation.

To be clear, I’m not even a supporter of Jono’s OpenRespect.Org
initiative myself. I think there are others who are doing good work in
this area already (for
example, various
efforts
around getting women involved in Free Software have long recognized and
worked on the issue, since mutual respect is an essential part having a
more diverse community). Also, I felt that Jono’s initiative was
slanted toward encouraging people respect all actions by
companies, some of which don’t advance Free Software.
I commented
on Jono’s blog to share my criticisms of the initiative when he was
still formulating it. In short, I think the wording of the current
statement on OpenRespect.org seems to indicate people should accept
anyone else’s choice as equally moral. As someone who believes software
freedom as a moral issue, and thus view development and distribution of
proprietary software as an immoral act, I have a problem with such a
mandate, although I nevertheless strive to be respectful in pursuit of
that view. I would hate to be declared disrespectful merely because I
believe in the morality of software freedom.

Yet, despite the fact that I disagree with some of the details of
Jono’s initiative, I believe most of the criticisms have been unfair.
First and foremost, we should
take Jono at his word
that this initiative is his own and not one undertaken on behalf of
Canonical, Ltd. I doubt Jono would dispute that his work at Canonical,
Ltd. inspired him to think about these issues, but that doesn’t mean
that everything he does on his own time on his own website is a
Canonical, Ltd. activity.

Indeed, I’ve personally been similarly attacked for items I’ve said on
this blog of my own, which of course does not represent the views of any
of my employers (past nor present) nor any organizations with which I
have volunteer affiliations. When I have things to say on those topics,
I have other fora to post officially, as does Jono.

So, I’ve experienced first-hand what Jono is currently experiencing:
namely, that people ignore disclaimers precisely to attack someone who
has an opinion that they don’t like. By conflating your personal
opinions with those of your employer’s, people subtly discredit you
— for example, by using your employment relationship to put
inappropriate pressure on you to change your positions. I’m very sad to
see that this same thing I’ve been a victim of is now happening to Jono,
too. I couldn’t just watch it happen without making a statement of
solidarity and pointing out that such treatment is unfair.

Even if we don’t agree with the OpenRespect.org initiative (and I
don’t, for reasons stated above), there is no one to blame but Jono
himself, as he’s told us clearly this isn’t a Canonical initiative, and
I’ve seen no evidence that shows the situation is otherwise.

I do note that there are other criticisms raised, such as whether or
not Jono reached out in the best possible way to others during the
launch, or whether others thought they’d be involved when it turned out
to be a unilateral initiative. All of that, of course, is something
that’s reparable (as is my primary complaint above, too), so on those
fronts, we should just give our criticism and ask Jono to change it.
That’s what I did on my issue. He chose not to take my advice, which is
his prerogative. My response thereafter was simply to not support the
initiative.

To the extent we don’t have enough respect in the FLOSS community,
here’s an easy place to improve: we should take people at their word
until we have evidence to believe otherwise. Jono says OpenRespect.org
is his own thing; we should believe him. We shouldn’t insist that
everything someone says is on behalf of their employer, even if they
have a spokesperson role. People have a right to be something more
than automatons for their bosses.

Disclosure: I did not tell Jono I was going to write
this post, but after it was completely written, I gave him the chance to
make a binary decision about whether I posted it publicly or not. Since
you’re reading this, he obviously answered 1.

In Defense of Bacon

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/16/bacon.html

Jono Bacon is currently being
criticized
for the manner in which
he launched
an initiative
called OpenRespect.Org. Much of
this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support
of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve
experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his
situation.

To be clear, I’m not even a supporter of Jono’s OpenRespect.Org
initiative myself. I think there are others who are doing good work in
this area already (for
example, various
efforts
around getting women involved in Free Software have long recognized and
worked on the issue, since mutual respect is an essential part having a
more diverse community). Also, I felt that Jono’s initiative was
slanted toward encouraging people respect all actions by
companies, some of which don’t advance Free Software.
I commented
on Jono’s blog to share my criticisms of the initiative when he was
still formulating it. In short, I think the wording of the current
statement on OpenRespect.org seems to indicate people should accept
anyone else’s choice as equally moral. As someone who believes software
freedom as a moral issue, and thus view development and distribution of
proprietary software as an immoral act, I have a problem with such a
mandate, although I nevertheless strive to be respectful in pursuit of
that view. I would hate to be declared disrespectful merely because I
believe in the morality of software freedom.

Yet, despite the fact that I disagree with some of the details of
Jono’s initiative, I believe most of the criticisms have been unfair.
First and foremost, we should
take Jono at his word
that this initiative is his own and not one undertaken on behalf of
Canonical, Ltd. I doubt Jono would dispute that his work at Canonical,
Ltd. inspired him to think about these issues, but that doesn’t mean
that everything he does on his own time on his own website is a
Canonical, Ltd. activity.

Indeed, I’ve personally been similarly attacked for items I’ve said on
this blog of my own, which of course does not represent the views of any
of my employers (past nor present) nor any organizations with which I
have volunteer affiliations. When I have things to say on those topics,
I have other fora to post officially, as does Jono.

So, I’ve experienced first-hand what Jono is currently experiencing:
namely, that people ignore disclaimers precisely to attack someone who
has an opinion that they don’t like. By conflating your personal
opinions with those of your employer’s, people subtly discredit you
— for example, by using your employment relationship to put
inappropriate pressure on you to change your positions. I’m very sad to
see that this same thing I’ve been a victim of is now happening to Jono,
too. I couldn’t just watch it happen without making a statement of
solidarity and pointing out that such treatment is unfair.

Even if we don’t agree with the OpenRespect.org initiative (and I
don’t, for reasons stated above), there is no one to blame but Jono
himself, as he’s told us clearly this isn’t a Canonical initiative, and
I’ve seen no evidence that shows the situation is otherwise.

I do note that there are other criticisms raised, such as whether or
not Jono reached out in the best possible way to others during the
launch, or whether others thought they’d be involved when it turned out
to be a unilateral initiative. All of that, of course, is something
that’s reparable (as is my primary complaint above, too), so on those
fronts, we should just give our criticism and ask Jono to change it.
That’s what I did on my issue. He chose not to take my advice, which is
his prerogative. My response thereafter was simply to not support the
initiative.

To the extent we don’t have enough respect in the FLOSS community,
here’s an easy place to improve: we should take people at their word
until we have evidence to believe otherwise. Jono says OpenRespect.org
is his own thing; we should believe him. We shouldn’t insist that
everything someone says is on behalf of their employer, even if they
have a spokesperson role. People have a right to be something more
than automatons for their bosses.

Disclosure: I did not tell Jono I was going to write
this post, but after it was completely written, I gave him the chance to
make a binary decision about whether I posted it publicly or not. Since
you’re reading this, he obviously answered 1.

In Defense of Bacon

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/16/bacon.html

Jono Bacon is currently being
criticized
for the manner in which
he launched
an initiative
called OpenRespect.Org. Much of
this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support
of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve
experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his
situation.

To be clear, I’m not even a supporter of Jono’s OpenRespect.Org
initiative myself. I think there are others who are doing good work in
this area already (for
example, various
efforts
around getting women involved in Free Software have long recognized and
worked on the issue, since mutual respect is an essential part having a
more diverse community). Also, I felt that Jono’s initiative was
slanted toward encouraging people respect all actions by
companies, some of which don’t advance Free Software.
I commented
on Jono’s blog to share my criticisms of the initiative when he was
still formulating it. In short, I think the wording of the current
statement on OpenRespect.org seems to indicate people should accept
anyone else’s choice as equally moral. As someone who believes software
freedom as a moral issue, and thus view development and distribution of
proprietary software as an immoral act, I have a problem with such a
mandate, although I nevertheless strive to be respectful in pursuit of
that view. I would hate to be declared disrespectful merely because I
believe in the morality of software freedom.

Yet, despite the fact that I disagree with some of the details of
Jono’s initiative, I believe most of the criticisms have been unfair.
First and foremost, we should
take Jono at his word
that this initiative is his own and not one undertaken on behalf of
Canonical, Ltd. I doubt Jono would dispute that his work at Canonical,
Ltd. inspired him to think about these issues, but that doesn’t mean
that everything he does on his own time on his own website is a
Canonical, Ltd. activity.

Indeed, I’ve personally been similarly attacked for items I’ve said on
this blog of my own, which of course does not represent the views of any
of my employers (past nor present) nor any organizations with which I
have volunteer affiliations. When I have things to say on those topics,
I have other fora to post officially, as does Jono.

So, I’ve experienced first-hand what Jono is currently experiencing:
namely, that people ignore disclaimers precisely to attack someone who
has an opinion that they don’t like. By conflating your personal
opinions with those of your employer’s, people subtly discredit you
— for example, by using your employment relationship to put
inappropriate pressure on you to change your positions. I’m very sad to
see that this same thing I’ve been a victim of is now happening to Jono,
too. I couldn’t just watch it happen without making a statement of
solidarity and pointing out that such treatment is unfair.

Even if we don’t agree with the OpenRespect.org initiative (and I
don’t, for reasons stated above), there is no one to blame but Jono
himself, as he’s told us clearly this isn’t a Canonical initiative, and
I’ve seen no evidence that shows the situation is otherwise.

I do note that there are other criticisms raised, such as whether or
not Jono reached out in the best possible way to others during the
launch, or whether others thought they’d be involved when it turned out
to be a unilateral initiative. All of that, of course, is something
that’s reparable (as is my primary complaint above, too), so on those
fronts, we should just give our criticism and ask Jono to change it.
That’s what I did on my issue. He chose not to take my advice, which is
his prerogative. My response thereafter was simply to not support the
initiative.

To the extent we don’t have enough respect in the FLOSS community,
here’s an easy place to improve: we should take people at their word
until we have evidence to believe otherwise. Jono says OpenRespect.org
is his own thing; we should believe him. We shouldn’t insist that
everything someone says is on behalf of their employer, even if they
have a spokesperson role. People have a right to be something more
than automatons for their bosses.

Disclosure: I did not tell Jono I was going to write
this post, but after it was completely written, I gave him the chance to
make a binary decision about whether I posted it publicly or not. Since
you’re reading this, he obviously answered 1.

In Defense of Bacon

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/16/bacon.html

Jono Bacon is currently being
criticized
for the manner in which
he launched
an initiative
called OpenRespect.Org. Much of
this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support
of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve
experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his
situation.

To be clear, I’m not even a supporter of Jono’s OpenRespect.Org
initiative myself. I think there are others who are doing good work in
this area already (for
example, various
efforts
around getting women involved in Free Software have long recognized and
worked on the issue, since mutual respect is an essential part having a
more diverse community). Also, I felt that Jono’s initiative was
slanted toward encouraging people respect all actions by
companies, some of which don’t advance Free Software.
I commented
on Jono’s blog to share my criticisms of the initiative when he was
still formulating it. In short, I think the wording of the current
statement on OpenRespect.org seems to indicate people should accept
anyone else’s choice as equally moral. As someone who believes software
freedom as a moral issue, and thus view development and distribution of
proprietary software as an immoral act, I have a problem with such a
mandate, although I nevertheless strive to be respectful in pursuit of
that view. I would hate to be declared disrespectful merely because I
believe in the morality of software freedom.

Yet, despite the fact that I disagree with some of the details of
Jono’s initiative, I believe most of the criticisms have been unfair.
First and foremost, we should
take Jono at his word
that this initiative is his own and not one undertaken on behalf of
Canonical, Ltd. I doubt Jono would dispute that his work at Canonical,
Ltd. inspired him to think about these issues, but that doesn’t mean
that everything he does on his own time on his own website is a
Canonical, Ltd. activity.

Indeed, I’ve personally been similarly attacked for items I’ve said on
this blog of my own, which of course does not represent the views of any
of my employers (past nor present) nor any organizations with which I
have volunteer affiliations. When I have things to say on those topics,
I have other fora to post officially, as does Jono.

So, I’ve experienced first-hand what Jono is currently experiencing:
namely, that people ignore disclaimers precisely to attack someone who
has an opinion that they don’t like. By conflating your personal
opinions with those of your employer’s, people subtly discredit you
— for example, by using your employment relationship to put
inappropriate pressure on you to change your positions. I’m very sad to
see that this same thing I’ve been a victim of is now happening to Jono,
too. I couldn’t just watch it happen without making a statement of
solidarity and pointing out that such treatment is unfair.

Even if we don’t agree with the OpenRespect.org initiative (and I
don’t, for reasons stated above), there is no one to blame but Jono
himself, as he’s told us clearly this isn’t a Canonical initiative, and
I’ve seen no evidence that shows the situation is otherwise.

I do note that there are other criticisms raised, such as whether or
not Jono reached out in the best possible way to others during the
launch, or whether others thought they’d be involved when it turned out
to be a unilateral initiative. All of that, of course, is something
that’s reparable (as is my primary complaint above, too), so on those
fronts, we should just give our criticism and ask Jono to change it.
That’s what I did on my issue. He chose not to take my advice, which is
his prerogative. My response thereafter was simply to not support the
initiative.

To the extent we don’t have enough respect in the FLOSS community,
here’s an easy place to improve: we should take people at their word
until we have evidence to believe otherwise. Jono says OpenRespect.org
is his own thing; we should believe him. We shouldn’t insist that
everything someone says is on behalf of their employer, even if they
have a spokesperson role. People have a right to be something more
than automatons for their bosses.

Disclosure: I did not tell Jono I was going to write
this post, but after it was completely written, I gave him the chance to
make a binary decision about whether I posted it publicly or not. Since
you’re reading this, he obviously answered 1.

In Defense of Bacon

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/16/bacon.html

Jono Bacon is currently being
criticized
for the manner in which
he launched
an initiative
called OpenRespect.Org. Much of
this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support
of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve
experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his
situation.

To be clear, I’m not even a supporter of Jono’s OpenRespect.Org
initiative myself. I think there are others who are doing good work in
this area already (for
example, various
efforts
around getting women involved in Free Software have long recognized and
worked on the issue, since mutual respect is an essential part having a
more diverse community). Also, I felt that Jono’s initiative was
slanted toward encouraging people respect all actions by
companies, some of which don’t advance Free Software.
I commented
on Jono’s blog to share my criticisms of the initiative when he was
still formulating it. In short, I think the wording of the current
statement on OpenRespect.org seems to indicate people should accept
anyone else’s choice as equally moral. As someone who believes software
freedom as a moral issue, and thus view development and distribution of
proprietary software as an immoral act, I have a problem with such a
mandate, although I nevertheless strive to be respectful in pursuit of
that view. I would hate to be declared disrespectful merely because I
believe in the morality of software freedom.

Yet, despite the fact that I disagree with some of the details of
Jono’s initiative, I believe most of the criticisms have been unfair.
First and foremost, we should
take Jono at his word
that this initiative is his own and not one undertaken on behalf of
Canonical, Ltd. I doubt Jono would dispute that his work at Canonical,
Ltd. inspired him to think about these issues, but that doesn’t mean
that everything he does on his own time on his own website is a
Canonical, Ltd. activity.

Indeed, I’ve personally been similarly attacked for items I’ve said on
this blog of my own, which of course does not represent the views of any
of my employers (past nor present) nor any organizations with which I
have volunteer affiliations. When I have things to say on those topics,
I have other fora to post officially, as does Jono.

So, I’ve experienced first-hand what Jono is currently experiencing:
namely, that people ignore disclaimers precisely to attack someone who
has an opinion that they don’t like. By conflating your personal
opinions with those of your employer’s, people subtly discredit you
— for example, by using your employment relationship to put
inappropriate pressure on you to change your positions. I’m very sad to
see that this same thing I’ve been a victim of is now happening to Jono,
too. I couldn’t just watch it happen without making a statement of
solidarity and pointing out that such treatment is unfair.

Even if we don’t agree with the OpenRespect.org initiative (and I
don’t, for reasons stated above), there is no one to blame but Jono
himself, as he’s told us clearly this isn’t a Canonical initiative, and
I’ve seen no evidence that shows the situation is otherwise.

I do note that there are other criticisms raised, such as whether or
not Jono reached out in the best possible way to others during the
launch, or whether others thought they’d be involved when it turned out
to be a unilateral initiative. All of that, of course, is something
that’s reparable (as is my primary complaint above, too), so on those
fronts, we should just give our criticism and ask Jono to change it.
That’s what I did on my issue. He chose not to take my advice, which is
his prerogative. My response thereafter was simply to not support the
initiative.

To the extent we don’t have enough respect in the FLOSS community,
here’s an easy place to improve: we should take people at their word
until we have evidence to believe otherwise. Jono says OpenRespect.org
is his own thing; we should believe him. We shouldn’t insist that
everything someone says is on behalf of their employer, even if they
have a spokesperson role. People have a right to be something more
than automatons for their bosses.

Disclosure: I did not tell Jono I was going to write
this post, but after it was completely written, I gave him the chance to
make a binary decision about whether I posted it publicly or not. Since
you’re reading this, he obviously answered 1.

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