When Wikipedia is brought up to a technical crowd, invariably there are many negative opinions. The disaffected horde grows by the day; Alienated by the bureaucracy and those who enforce it, many former contributors are quick to voice their discontentment with the direction the project has taken. The project as a whole is losing momentum — Both in edit frequency and article creation rate, and it doesn’t take a statistician to see the relationship between increased bureaucracy and the decline of Wikipedia.

The fact that the edit count and article creation both peaked in 2007 is quite telling. While article creation would theoretically dwindle as we approached documentation of the sum of human knowledge, it’s laughable to think Wikipedia is approaching that. Given increasing Internet penetration, I posit that potential contributors are arriving faster and faster — But being driven away more quickly than their numbers grow.

A key fallacious argument made by the deletionists is that increasing the amount of content stretches existing editors thin. This is inherently false because by increasing the scope of Wikipedia, new communities are included: If there is an article on competitive knitting, people who knit competitively will, in time, notice and expand it. Limiting the scope of a project like Wikipedia based on arbitrary criteria is a good way to kill it. If a large number of free software articles are excised (as has been happening recently) who is alienated? Free software users and programmers, who would otherwise gladly contribute. Per Who Writes Wikipedia? the majority of contributors are casual, and aren’t interested in the bureaucracy.

When contributors are mired in bureaucracy, their non-malicious edits reverted, their articles nominated for deletion, what happens? They’re alienated, and they disengage. For better or for worse, the vast majority of users do not wish to learn the many policies to successfully bring their work back into good standing, and so more potentially valuable contributors are lost. So much for “Whatever one decides to do, every Wikipedian is presumed valuable.”

The last post was read well over ten thousand times, with some five hundred responses, the vast majority echoing these sentiments. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia for the people, by the people. To allow an extremely vocal minority to control a much larger number of users via their heavy-handed enforcement of policy is a very bad thing. Some people are naturally drawn to such things. I don’t want to go after them personally, as when you attack them, they unify. Instead, the prudent action is to fix the policies which they so readily abuse to suit their ends.

To reiterate a few points and add to the last post, the problems are severalfold. Firstly, source reliability policies are detrimental to free software as much legitimate free software coverage is self-published, and Wikipedia is strongly biased against self-published sources. Secondly, canvassing policies are extremely reactionary and seem intended to dismantle any chance at debate when new users come to defend what they’re passionate about — Regardless of whether they’re making coherent arguments or not. In some cases, the discussion pages for articles up for deletion are protected specifically so new users cannot participate. Looks like assuming good faith isn’t a terribly high priority these days.

As with all large bureaucratic constructs, Wikipedia does have many faults, but these two are particularly egregious and of particular importance to the cause at hand.

It’s time to take action. Not against Wikipedia, but against the deletionists who enforce their extremely narrow vision of Wikipedia onto those less well-versed in the bureaucracy. This is not a call to vandalize articles or user pages, Wikipedia policy excels at getting rid of such users. Nor am I calling for a boycott of the project, as that would merely leave the deletionists with fewer opponents. Instead, I propose a campaign of logic and reason. As several have already done, make yourself heard. It’s very much worth reading the failed proposal, Notability of free open source software, as it provides many good arguments yet was largely derailed by the actions of a few users coupled with typical hard-line enforcement of policy.

The good news is that the dwm deletion review was closed, endorsing the original decision — That there was no consensus, and that the article should therefore be kept. That’s not an indefinite free pass, and unless broken policies are fixed, it may come up for deletion again, and what if nobody notices it at that point? It may suffer the same fate as dozens of other free software projects the community didn’t notice in time. A week’s discussion isn’t long when your account is in jeopardy if you so much as mention a deletion discussion outside of Wikipedia.

Possible avenues for debate include the Notability and Reliable Sources talk pages, which both have somewhat-related discussions ongoing. To be very clear, constructive debate is what’s warranted here. Personal attacks just give the administrators an excuse to invoke one of their canvassing criteria and ban another swath of users.

If you feel so inclined, please do support free software by making yourself heard. Wikipedia is a great resource and it would be a shame to see it further exclude free software. The ties between Wikipedia and the free software community ought to be strong, given that it’s based on our principles, using Creative Commons licensing for content and running on GPL software.

I want to highlight the misconduct that occurred during the dwm proceedings: ArneBab is still indefinitely blocked for “vote-stacking” despite merely notifying dwm users that the deletion discussion was ongoing. Yet again the administrator’s noticeboard proves useful, highlighting that the indefinite block stems from false accusations, with the blocking administrator never replying to another user’s opposition. Those so bureaucratically inclined may wish to raise the potential misconduct issues at the Administrators’ noticeboard incidents page. The same administrator also banned the developer of dwm for around a week before someone else had the common sense to reverse it. There are also a number of others still banned, such as all users in this category. To underscore the point, the administrator responsible for this mass banning publicly advertises himself as a deletionist. What are the banned users guilty of? Supporting a good cause, and making remarks like:

Keep: While it is true that the article fails a literal reading of the notability criteria, for a program that is only 2000 SLOC, it has inspired a number of other window managers – as the current article points out. While there hasn’t been any mainstream media coverage, surely in the software world the amount of code directly derived from (forked) or inspired by the original program is as significant a currency of notability as column inches in technical journals or other independent publications? And as the program’s author points out, there is a large and active user base in the free software community that supports this project

Such users aren’t trying to run Wikipedia into the ground. Is it truly necessary to respond with permanent blocks (and to reject all appeals)? This transcends wrongness; this is disgusting.

So go out, and make yourselves heard. Do so in a calm, respectable manner. Let them know permanent banning of users solely because they showed up is completely unacceptable. Let them know that systematically annihilating knowledge (as they’ve been doing to tiling window managers) is disgusting and wrong.

Cross-referencing a few names revealed that the last post was read and responded to by a few Wikipedia administrators. I implore you few to think, and at the very least hold the administrator responsible for the dwm mass-banning accountable for his actions.

To quote Jimmy Wales, “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” I think that’s a commendable goal, yet current policy makes such a goal unattainable in the best of circumstances.

Wikipedia’s downward trend of alienation and bureaucracy need not continue if we all band together. It’s supposed to be a project by the community; Let’s take it back from those who would destroy it.

To preface, this post covers the recent controversy over the attempted deletion of dwm, among other things. The first few paragraphs are an introduction to Wikipedia’s environment and policies for those unfamiliar with it. If you do happen to be familiar, the “mad as hell” portion starts about two paragraphs above the image.

It’s an ambitious and commendable goal, to make a free encyclopedia based on the contributions of millions. However, with large size comes logistical issues that must be dealt with. Wikipedia’s solution to this was to create dozens of policies and guidelines, which can be seen here. Now, considering who writes Wikipedia, some may see that as a bad thing… And they’d be right.

Casual contributors would rather contribute their knowledge than spend hours reading the exhaustive list of policies and guidelines. Wikipedia purports to understand this, and exhorts that new users should be able to contribute effectively without reading the rules, even having a policy titled “Ignore all rules”, but it’s not what it seems. While casual editors do contribute new content, veteran editors rarely do. They gleefully list their staggering edit counts on their profile pages, but those edits aren’t content. They’re minor changes to syntax, grammar, phrasing, and most importantly, curt reversions of the work of others.

One does not succeed at Wikipedia by adding content. One succeeds by reverting un-sourced edits, and nominating pages for deletion. They even have a group for this, the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians, who, in their utter lack of logic, seem convinced that adding content to Wikipedia dilutes it. This is despite the fact that the other side has realized that Wikipedia is not paper and thus is not constrained to the limits of a paper encyclopedia. Of course, the Association of Deletionist Imbeciles have their little size breakdown, which implies it’s difficult to find what you want when more content exists. Clearly, these people have not heard of search algorithms.

The key is this: Adding content is hard. To comply with Wikipedia’s bevy of policies, a new article must initially have some substance, else it may fall into the thirty or forty criteria for speedy deletion. To avoid being nominated for a traditional deletion, it must also cite a number of reliable, verifiable sources, else the Wikipedia deletionists will slap their favourite tags on it, which proudly state at the top of the article that it may not be suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia and may later be deleted. On one side of the fence, you have the content creators.They must be passionate enough to write about something, spend time searching for sources, and do all this in a timely manner, else the deletionists will nominate the articles for deletion. The deletionists have it easy. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of Wikipedia’s many policies (Fitting, isn’t it?) and largely exist to slap notability tags on articles and later nominate them for deletion, repeatedly quoting policy so that it’s unnecessary for them to actually engage their brains at any point.

One of Wikipedia’s favourite guidelines is the one on canvassing. You see, if an article you’re interested comes up for deletion, it’s not permissible to contact outside sources that may know more about the topic, because they are likely biased. Canvassing will often get you a severe warning, or banned. Linus’s law states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” On the other hand, Wikipedia’s collective belief is that bringing new people with new perspective to something is a heinous offence… After all, it might upset their precious status quo.

In fact, their canvassing guidelines were instrumental in derailing a discussion about perhaps improving Wikipedia policies.

The catalyst for this article was the furor generated when dwm was placed up for deletion. People got mad, it hit Reddit and snowballed from there. Of course, Wikipedia does not like outside influence. It could influence the status quo, so they banned the user responsible for much of the canvassing. They also banned many of the people who came to dwm’s defense and then closed the deletion “debate” and restarted it because they felt it had been unduly influenced by outsiders. The horror! The closure, of course, did not quell the anti-deletionist sentiments, so in the second quasi-debate, the pseudo-intellectuals again made their case for deleting a prominent window manager, throwing various policies at any who opposed them. Finally, it was closed as “No consensus”. A day after that, it was listed in deletion review, hoping to overturn the closure so the article can be deleted. The deletionists almost always win. Wikipedia’s policies make it far easier to exclude something than to include it, and the deletionists are established users. When they come out in droves? That’s a typical deletion “debate”. When supporters of the article come out, they are branded “meat puppets” or “sock puppets” and banned.

This is what happens when you try to combat deletionism.

The dwm controversy is dying down. Users have been banned so they cannot argue against the deletionists, and by prolonging the process it has faded from the spotlight. Their end goal of deletion grows closer as public awareness dies, but this should not be allowed to be swept under the rug.

This is where the hammer falls. I’m a free software advocate and the attack on free software by deletionists appears to be far from over. Wikipedia’s precious source reliability flies in the face of common sense, and they’re bent on maintaining the status quo. It’s worth noting that common sense is relegated to a section of an informal essay at Wikipedia, and is swiftly followed by a paragraph titled “There is no common sense”.

To quote one particularly brazen imbecile:

If you keep closing and restarting the discussion, the canvassing will never stop. Let it run its seven days, let them complain because they refuse to actually provide a secondary source, close based on actual policy not votes, let the slightly more sophisticated complain to WP:DRV and lose there, and then finally, let the craziest whiners start vandalizing and get blocked. Then some blogs will be out ranting about the horrors of wikipedia because their random obscure thing isn’t kept here. It’s the normal pattern and what can be expected.

There you have it. Combined with many of the comments here, it’s obvious there’s continued bad faith. Ubuntard is, of course, the blog ranting about the horrors of Wikipedia. Also critical is the following quote:

I’ve closed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dwm (2nd nomination) as a temporary measure because of renewed off-site discussion about it, this time on reddit, Y Combinator, FriendFeed (and probably a few more places). Everything that could be said about that topic has been said. If an admin wants to make a different decision, he can do so based on that AfD and the previous one, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dwm, which was closed under similar circumstances just before the 2nd one opened. Together these have about 125Kb already. There’s no point in having another insanely long repetitive discussion like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/JWASM (175Kb).

Yet again, it’s very clear that Wikipedia’s deletionists are not interested in actually determining the notability of something up for deletion, they simply want it to be uncontroversially removed so that their corrupted vision of Wikipedia is brought to fruition.

Sadly, dwm is not the only one suffering here. It’s fairly prominent and may well survive this final deletion review. QVWM and Evilwm were not so lucky. Another example of the continued bad faith on the part of Wikipedia’s deletionists is this discussion about Habrahabr.ru. The justification for bringing this up was that it is used numerous times as a source on free software articles. In order to erode their already-questionable Wikipedia notability, it was necessary to remove this source. So it was done, and now there’s arguably one less source that can be used against the deletionists.

It may not be that all deletionists strive to be pseudo-intellectual bureaucrats. They may simply lack the will or the ability to use common sense, and instead rely purely on their precious policies. The ability to use policy to ban swaths of passionate users who attempt to support software with logically-valid yet Wikipedia-policy-violating arguments should not exist. Nor should the ability to instantly declare a source unreliable because it’s not a professional publication. If you were to write an article about a lesser-known Linux kernel subsystem and cite the personal blog of one of its developers, it would be deleted. You see, the blog is self-published, which casts strong doubt on it. The only way to save it is to have the author be a “recognized expert”. It would appear that our friend the developer is just one of the hundreds of relatively-unknown kernel hackers, and has not authored any scientific papers. So he’s unreliable. Now the article is left with no reliable sources, so it’s not notable or verifiable. Deleted.

The fact that such a situation can occur even hypothetically is terrible. It’s an obvious flaw in the sourcing and notability policies, but the deletionists love it. They’re lazy. They don’t want to actually think. They want to simply slap a “Delete: Fails WP:V, WP:N” on and be done with it.

Wikipedia’s policies are archaic and ill-conceived. Commercial video games, other software, books, movies, albums? They’re all notable, most of the time. All of those categories have many professional publications catering solely to them. Outside of sycophantic journalists who flip-flop between declaring it to be the year of Linux on the desktop and parroting Microsoft FUD, the free software community has little professional coverage. You’ve got lwn.net, Heise Online, Linux Journal and a handful of others. There’s always the well-known O’Reilly books, as well. Most of these primarily cover things that are already prominent, because no advertiser will pay for ad space in a magazine that deals solely in niche window managers and Vim scripts.

The free software community is fairly self-contained. Outside of it, people think free software means freeware, and question whether something that’s free of cost can ever be as good as something they paid $100 for. Thus, the majority of good coverage comes from within, from the enthusiastic developers of software like Jono Bacon. Of course, no matter how active your blog, forum, mailing list or IRC channel is, that doesn’t confer notability. Indeed, even when there’s a large outpouring of community support when a Wikipedia article is up for deletion, the most they do is attempt to disqualify all those people by repeating the words, not the purpose, of their precious policies and guidelines. If that fails, they opt to restart the debate multiple times until they’ve finally shaken loose, demoralized, beaten down and/or banned all those who oppose their will.

The entire reliability premise is flawed. Even in the good old days of print journalism where magazines employed large editorial and fact-checking departments, false information was routinely printed. This is because journalists aren’t experts. By their very definition they are generalists in the extreme, and this is why the vast majority of scientific coverage in the mainstream media is garbage. They can’t understand the papers, they misinterpret the abstracts and in the process of dumbing things down further for their readers, get every detail wrong.

I’ll take an amateur blogging about his passion any day over a journalist dumbing down content for mass consumption. What has been brought up many, many times is that even if print journalism once was reliable, it is no longer. The advent of the Internet has killed many print publications, forced nearly all others to downsize substantially, and since many purely online publications rely solely on ad impressions and clicks, they’re really no better. The end result is that the average quality of amateur and professional journalism is converging. The latter lacks its past fact-checking and the former is ever growing to supplement the shortcomings of supposed professionals.

As I mentioned earlier, deletionists are lazy. Moving to a sane model of sourcing, wherein any source may be used provided it’s demonstrably accurate? That’s far more work than “Delete: Sources are hosted on blogspot.com, thus are unreliable.” You’d have to vet sources individually, and that requires using your brain. It’s easier to just disregard thousands of sources because of their domain name or because they lack corporate backing.

It’s worth noting that one of Wikipedia’s many informal suggestions regarding deletion nominations is that you should avoid commenting if “A nomination involves a topic with which you are unfamiliar.” Good luck finding that one exercised in practice.

Unless archaic policies are changed, Wikipedia will end up circling the drain. Utterly devoid of “non-mainstream” coverage, with topics solely consisting of what dying news empires opt to cover. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will have moved on to getting their news and information from social news aggregators like Reddit and Digg. It’s laughable that a site dedicated to sourcing does so in a substantially inferior manner to social news aggregators. On Wikipedia, you need only mention that a source is self-published to disqualify it in nearly all circumstances. On the other hand, if a false story shows up at a social news aggregator, what happens? People vote on it. The type of source does not matter. It can be the New York Times or something hosted on Freewebs. Regardless, the content will be vetted by the community, and given the large size of said community, there will be an expert there to provide insight.

As a side note, as with nearly all web properties, both Digg and Reddit have been nominated for deletion in past. Reddit was even tagged for speedy deletion for a short time in 2009.

The fact is that Wikipedia’s broken, and a substantial portion of its community doesn’t want it fixed.

The catalyst for this article was the furor generated when dwm was placed up for deletion. People got mad, it hit Reddit and snowballed from there. Of course, Wikipedia does not like outside influence. It could influence the status quo, so they banned the user responsible for much of the canvassing. They also banned many of the people who came to dwm’s defense and then closed the deletion “debate” and restarted it because they felt it had been unduly influenced by outsiders. The horror! The closure, of course, did not quell the anti-deletionist sentiments, so in the second quasi-debate, the pseudo-intellectuals again made their case for deleting a prominent window manager, throwing various policies at any who opposed them. Finally, it was closed as “No consensus”. A day after that, it was listed in deletion review, hoping to overturn the closure so the article can be deleted. The deletionists almost always win. Wikipedia’s policies make it far easier to exclude something than to include it, and the deletionists are established users. When they come out in droves? That’s a typical deletion “debate”. When supporters of the article come out, they are branded “meat puppets” or “sock puppets” and banned.

This is what happens when you try to combat deletionism.

The dwm controversy is dying down. Users have been banned so they cannot argue against the deletionists, and by prolonging the process it has faded from the spotlight. Their end goal of deletion grows closer as public awareness dies, but this should not be allowed to be swept under the rug.

The only differing opinion that contains content beyond a knee-jerk reaction is Joe Brockmeier’s post, “Real Linux advocates educate, not humiliate”, and it’s what this article is a response to.

Block-quoted material is sourced from his posting and duplicated here to facilitate response to individual sections.

The Ubuntard opinion (as outlined in Choosing an OS is Not a Team Sport) is that Linux is not well-served by gaining the average user. It would seem that few are cut from an appropriate cloth to contribute to the free software ecosystem — The majority are content to exist with a modicum of technical knowledge, deferring to their more technical friend(s) when problems occur.

Inclusionism does not serve free software well: Would the Linux kernel be where it is today if half-baked solutions from novice programmers were readily integrated into mainline? The kernel is a shining star of what’s achievable through open development because it’s developed by some of the sharpest minds in software development, with their collective oversight ensuring high-quality results.

To make my point at a more end-user level, look at the bug tracker for any major piece of software, and for every legitimate bug, there will be multiple WONTFIX or INVALID bugs, as inexperienced end-users are being taught to report whenever they encounter an issue, though they may lack the knowledge to provide adequate documentation, reproducibility, and other qualifiers. All this form of inclusionism does is waste valuable development time.

So, here we have member of the Linux community that’s dripping with contempt for people who cover technology that aren’t as expert as they are.

And, indeed, a case can be made that this happens frequently: A writer or journalist that covers tech “discovers” Linux and decides they want to spread the word. In their enthusiasm, they bite off a bit more than they’re ready to chew, and get some (often many) things wrong, and put up a piece that more expert Linux users recognize as flawed. The results of which can vary from mildly amusing to somewhat harmful if the author has given either a very wrong impression or faulty advice that might lead others to futzing up their systems.

Technology knowledge tends to be highly compartmentalized. There exists no person who can explain every facet of each kernel subsystem, let alone write code for each of them. Likewise, a database administrator may not be the person to talk to when setting up BIND. The key is that people should play to their strengths, and not attempt to exceed their own capabilities. The author here has delved far too deep with apparently zero oversight.

So, by all means, a response is called for. It’s the flavor of response that I disagree with. Where some might approach the author and gently correct their errors, and perhaps even offer help and resources to allow them to create better materials, others take the piss out of the hapless author and try to demonstrate their superiority by ripping mercilessly on the author.

Ubuntard is not about being nice, coddling people and patting them on the head when they make mistakes, telling them, “You’ll do better next time, champ!”. Line-by-line analysis of technical articles is supposed to illustrate the author’s incompetence through many egregious mistakes. As has been said before, someone who posts such factually-inaccurate dreck is likely to be a lost cause.

Which brings me to the title of this post: Real Linux advocates educate, not humiliate.

This is the same sort of exclusionism that was being criticized moments earlier. To dismiss all other view points as invalid is to put your own opinions on a tremendous pedestal. The fact is, certain actions do deserve bitter rebukes, regardless of original intent. A user who tells another that you can copy a disc via dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/sda deserves punishment because their misinformation would likely cost a trusting newbie their boot disk. While the advice given out in the original article isn’t quite that egregiously wrong, teaching rm -rf dir $DIR as the appropriate way to remove a directory is bad.

As for the title of this post, I am referring to the fact that more exists than the extremes. Criticism is not useless. While highly acerbic, the past post did provide the exact reasons why each piece of advice was flawed, painting it a nice shade of grey. It’s at once mocking, yet informative.

The Linux community is, unfortunately, saddled with a reputation for being populated nearly exclusively with arrogant elitists who enjoy mocking noobs and generally being asses to people who know less than they do. The “Ubuntard” response to this author simply reinforces this attitude.

Worse yet, instead of helping to correct the situation they’ve put a writer or journalist on the defensive and made it entirely likely that the author will either stop writing about Linux and FOSS out of fear of getting it wrong again, or ensured that they now have a negative attitude about Linux which is unlikely to benefit the community at large should they choose to cover Linux again.

We should be better than this.

What’s being described here is not what’s happening in my earlier post. There, the original author is mocked for getting things consistently wrong, taking the time to type the individual commands into a terminal yet not bothering to actually test them, and, most importantly, spreading this disinformation in a location where it’s likely to be encountered by newbies who may well perpetuate the disinformation cycle.

Furthermore, with the substantial exposure the original post got, it’s almost assured that the author was notified of the inaccuracies, yet no effort has been made to correct them. I don’t see that as a well-intentioned newbie posting misguided tips, I see that as a mediocre journalist posting a hacked-together list to get a few pageviews without regard for the aftermath.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a lack of knowledge, but turning to evangelism with insufficient knowledge does nothing but damage the reputation of what you’re attempting to promote. I’m firmly not in the “Linux for everyone” camp, but even for those that are, I can’t see poorly fact-checked top-10 lists being of any use to the Linux community at any level.

Not for a minute am I suggesting that the article go uncorrected. By all means, drop the author a note or leave a comment that gently corrects the errors. For added bonus points, offer to help spot-check the next piece they care to write, or point them in the way of some better resources.

I give the original author credit for a few things:

• They actually sign their name to the things they write. In my book, you lose several thousand points of credibility unless you’re willing to use your name when writing, unless you have genuine reasons for not doing so. (i.e., someone living in an oppressive regime that fears reprisal for political commentary — not someone taking the piss out of named tech authors online.)
• They were actually trying to be informative. OK, minus many points for missing the mark, but they tried.
• They have enthusiasm for the command line. Getting some CLI stuff wrong doesn’t irk me half as much as the “OMG, not the CLI!!” pieces that pop up so often about how Linux is unsuitable because you might need to touch the shell once in a great while.

I don’t see how anonymity (or lack thereof) should factor into this. Choosing to withhold your details does not say anything about your character, contrary to what “If you aren’t guilty, then what do you have to hide?” fear-mongers would have you think.

The results of ‘trying’ have been discussed several times, and I believe spreading disinformation vastly outweighs the benefits of one advocate.

The last point is valid, in that it’s rare for a Windows-centric journalist to not immediately deride *nix for its archaic command line roots. However, as above, teaching the rm -rf-as-default doctrine does nothing but harm.

That’s material that can be worked with. Yes, the original article was flawed. But if approached correctly, many of the writers who want to cover Linux can be helped to get it right. And what we want, at least what I want, is more people spreading the word about Linux. The odds of the humiliation approach being effective are zero. You’ve just gotten off on the wrong foot with a potential advocate and this approach will do absolutely nothing to correct the next newbie journalist before they write their first flawed article, because they’re not going to read this sadistic diatribe before penning their first piece. It’s only perpetuating the arrogant elitist stereotype, which many others have been working quite hard to correct.

Our opinions differ hugely on this matter, so I won’t address the first bit, as I can’t do so objectively. It’s true that humiliation causes people to retreat, but that’s not far from the intent. The elitist attitude is not all-encompassing. Most of the cynical “RTFM” answers given out in IRC channels and on forums have been quashed, and I, along with many, many others, spend time helping new users that are legitimately interested in Linux, yet have difficulties that can’t be solved with a five-second search.

The fact is, Ubuntard is not mainstream Linux reading material. It’s cynical, it’s caustic, and it’s an outlet, albeit an entertaining one for those with similar perspectives. Generally, it draws mostly from the latter half of “contructive criticism”, and that’s fine.

It’s important to remember that most journalists are generalists, not experts. And right now, most of those generalists are scrambling like mad to meet deadlines and try to pump out as much material as possible. Yes, they’ll get things wrong from time to time. Most people eff up in their jobs from time to time, the primary difference is that journalists and bloggers do so in full public view. Nearly every error is going to be on public display. (Plus the ones made by subsequent editors and people in the editorial chain, assuming one is working for a publication that still has an editorial chain, but I digress…)

As I mention in response to the first paragraph, technology knowledge is hypercompartmentalized. Combine this with the generalism of journalists and the often-minimal editorial oversight of online publications, and authors are suddenly left largely to their own devices. Those that do not adapt to this deserve to be ridiculed, for they are spreading disinformation by not checking their own facts at any level. If you’re a new user and encounter a guide such as this and can’t differentiate fact from fiction, you’ll likely blame the software, not the author, as it’s commonly assumed that journalists have some amount of integrity and check their own facts.

It’s okay to get a few facts wrong when you’re writing a thousand-word piece on climate change, but writing a short top-ten list wherein more than half the commands are demonstrably broken? That’s shoddy by any metric.

It would seem Linux users can’t catch a break. Every year, blow-hard journalists will try out a Linux LiveCD, decide it’s actually worthwhile, and declare date +%Y to be the year of Linux on the Desktop, only to run around screaming about how Linux isn’t ready for mainstream users after they manage to screw their system over while fiddling with sudo.

Combine that with the fact that the majority of journalists who do routinely cover Linux do so as an off-shoot of their Windows coverage, and thusly you end up with ignorant writers “informing” the masses. There are precious few good sources of Linux news (cough, lwn.net), yet a truly staggering amount of shoddy journalism.

Today’s target is ideal. It’s at once highly superficial, yet the misinformation communicated is dangerous in the minds of ignorant users. Of course, per usual, the misinformation is spread far and wide due to the collective unintelligence of social media sites.

In the introduction paragraph alone, the article gets several things wrong. The very first sentence being:

“This article is equal parts opinion and fact, as the most powerful commands depends on what one needs them for; someone who is running a network of Linux machines will require different commands than an individual user.”

This is completely true, of course. You see, when administrating multiple systems, GNU Coreutils are thrown out the window, replaced by networked magic.

“For example, you may need to use su instead of sudo or nothing at all, if you’re running as root.”

I’m sure su rm will do you loads of good, assuredly doubling your productivity while you sit there staring at su: user rm does not exist.

“Note: to see a full list of possibilities for commands, type ‘command –help’ in the Terminal.”

Truly, we are living in the future. Everybody uses software with GNU-style long options, and there exist no programs that only feature -h, or, perhaps, eschew help output for a man page.

With three inaccuracies in the first paragraph alone, things aren’t looking good for this article. Proceeding on to the actual commands, we see that the very first entry is the venerable ps. Aside from some misconceptions and generalizations, this entry’s fine — If only because you can’t actually do any direct damage with a program that only parses the contents of /proc/.

The next? rm, of course. The perennial favourite power tool of the ignorant neophyte, with which they can trivially hack their limbs off. So full of misinformation that it can be barely contained by the PNG format:

The signal to noise ratio is decidedly in favour of noise, here. It seems to be common for idiots to deem -rf (Which equates to the long options –recursive and –force, respectively.) necessary to the operation of rm. However, this is arm-gnawingly stupid. If you’re carelessly using wildcards and match a directory without arguments, rm will refuse to delete the directory. Those files you carefully made non-writable? They’re gone, too, because –force overrides the default behaviour, which is to warn when attempting to delete read-only files.

That’s not even to mention the fact that rm -rf dir $DIR will obviously delete dir and $DIR, and that ‘dir’ is in no way a part of rm’s syntax. Moving past that, we run into the most monumental bit of stupidity yet: “rm -rf dir / will delete the home directory.” Ah, to be young and stupid. To write articles for a publication whose editor is either non-existent or sufficiently inept to not actually test or even glance at the commands being published. I’d riff on the fact that the terminal image is actually depicting rm - rf dir which would obviously cause rm to attempt to delete -, rf, and dir, but frankly I think the author has already illustrated her own stupidity sufficiently at this point.

Moving on to #3, pstree. While it produces pretty output, ps can do everything it can do with or without a tree view. Combine that with the fact that ps produces better output for grepping, and you’ll find that not many serious users have a use for pstree.

#4, history, conveniently omits the fact that shell histories are written asynchronously, and thusly, an open terminal won’t have written its activities to disk until it’s closed. Most comically, the author illustrates gross ineptitude with the terminal, piping output to “adobe” and leaving trailing pipes, then failing to compile an application before giving up and installing a binary through the package manager.

As for #5, apropos, there’s only a hint of misinformation. See, apropos is not magical, but, alas, technology does appear magical to the wholly ignorant. Being equivalent to man -k, there’s really no need for apropos — Why use a second application to essentially grep through the NAME field of man pages, when that’s one of the basic abilities man already has?

ls. What lousy list of commands would be complete with the most obvious command of them all, the command necessary to actually display files, directories and their properties? Of course, this paragraph cites invocation as LS and LS -LH. As any user with more than two brain cells knows, by default, Linux (Most *nix, really.) filenames are case-sensitive. So, assuming you can get /bin/ls to actually run, you’re left with the arguments -LH which are entirely disparate to -lh, the former dereferencing symlinks and the latter doing… absolutely nothing.

I’m surprised to find grep here. It’s something the mouth-breathers tend to forget about, but that does not forgive previous transgressions. Again, idiotic syntax is advocated: Simply because grep can take [aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkK] as an argument doesn’t mean it’s useful, or efficient. Anybody with more than two brain cells will opt for a range, such as [a-z]. Secondly, CamelCasing your input is dumb, and you should just use the -i option, which disables case sensitivity.

Yet another often-omitted tool, if ls is a pair of pruning shears, find is a chainsaw. However, true to past experiences, this article does a very poor job of describing and selling it. As literally every Linux sysadmin should know, /etc/passwd does not contain password information, unless you have managed to deliberately disable shadow passwords, and you do not edit the hashes in /etc/shadow without making use of the passwd utility. Stupid example aside, the author then goes on to mention “commands” that can be used with find, which are, of course, simply compiled-in arguments.

Unsurprisingly, yet more idiocy. Capitalizing “terminal” as though GNOME Terminal is the only terminal emulator, and, in the second paragraph, giving a time example of 04, 07, 23, 45 * * * *. What will this do? Explode horribly, mostly. See, cron is picky, and you should ideally not violate the format by throwing extraneous spaces in. 04,07,23,45 * * * * would work fine, of course.

Perhaps the most clueless statement is “If you would like a command to run every specific set of minute intervals, add an asterisk after the minute command”, though. Running at minute 5* is equivalent 5,50-59. What actually works would be minute */5. Lastly, the image is quite funny, as if pasting a crontab entry into your terminal will do anything besides cause your shell to spew errors about unrecognized commands.

Having seen this before (Blind Leading the Blind), it would seem this is the trendy, stupid mistake to make. You know what -m does? It mirrors. It does not download page requisites, and it recurses infinitely. Enjoy your gigantic mess.

Last but not least… the author. A “self-appointed Linux guru”, to be sure. It would seem that the worst dreck always comes from those who think they know something. The overconfident make stupid mistakes, such as this article, which is nothing but a series of stupid mistakes.

The author demonstrated knowledge roughly comparable to that of consumer-level support such as Geek Squad, but at least they have the decency to supply their employees with a handbook and some fire-and-forget utilities so that the employees’ ineptitude doesn’t actually do damage, most of the time.

Perhaps the Laptop Logic people should stick to pricing out laptops and writing video game guides, where hopefully their terrible advice isn’t able to do any serious damage.

As is written on our About page, novice users have an annoying propensity towards zealotry. They may not be able to install and update packages without a GUI, but damnit, Ubuntu is the best operating system around, and they’ll try to force it on everyone they meet.

The key fallacy herein is as such: Market share doesn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. The majority of free software developers develop in such ways for practical and philosophical reasons — The ease with which third-party developers can submit patches, and the vast amount of available, reusable code provided by thousands of other projects, among many other things.

The average zealot behaves like a drunk at a sports bar. By the end of the night, he’s no longer able to articulate exactly why he likes the teams he does, but that doesn’t cause him to diminish his volume. The bartender would’ve stopped serving him hours ago, but he tends to get violent when deprived of what he wants.

Go team, go!

The free software movement is not tied to market share, and in my experiences, most good developers will find their way to a project on their own. Seldom do valuable contributors arise after having something forced upon them, in which they had no initial interest. Many smaller projects exist to serve the developer’s personal interests, and as such, a lack of users will not cause the project to die. In such a case, the primary purpose of distributing and open-source licensing of the software is to solicit feedback, and perhaps bug-fix patches.

Using a computer has grown ever simpler. Those so inclined are able to use a computer while knowing nothing of its inner workings, or even why the actions they’ve memorized have the results they’ve grown to expect. The fact is that the majority of users simply want to use, not learn. They don’t want to contribute code, feature requests, or even bug reports. At most, they will pester the person who inflicted this Linux thing on them, or perhaps clutter up help forums with questions that have been asked dozens of times before.

Some argue that increasing free software’s market share diminishes the hold of proprietary applications, and this is somewhat true. If not for the rise of standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, web developers would still be spending the majority of their time writing hacks to make sure their sites rendered correctly in IE 6.

It’s true that Adobe released an x86-64 version of Flash for Linux before Windows due to a persistent demand for it, but don’t think for a minute that was brought about by novice users. No, that was likely a result of persistent lobbying by enthusiasts, while the novice users were busy thinking that x86-64 was only for systems with over 4GB of RAM.

Market share does not affect smaller ecosystems, and in some cases, advocating alternatives can create a divide. To provide an example: In the slow-moving world of corporate IT, many intranet services work only with IE 6 and earlier. As such, installing a Linux distribution on a friend’s work laptop may do both parties harm. The installer is deluged with questions and complaints as to why Linux doesn’t work with the company’s software, and in the end, the user is left with a bad taste in their mouth, viewing Linux as difficult to use and incompatible with existing software.

It would seem that rampant fanboy antics are mostly confined the technological sector — You won’t find someone telling others off for their choice in shoe brand. Though advocating operating systems versus shoes are rather disparate affairs, to those who have interest in neither, the outcome is the same: The person being set upon for their choices feels they’re being attacked, grows alienated, and tunes out the other party.

Linux is everywhere. The majority of servers run Linux, as do the vast majority of supercomputers, many cars, cell phones, and appliances. But when consumers interact with Linux-powered devices, it’s not a conscious choice. Joe Sixpack doesn’t care what operating system Google uses in their data centers, as long as Youtube continues to serve him funny videos of cats.

The average user doesn’t choose their operating system. In fact, They don’t actually know what an operating system is. Given that the average user thinks the definition of operating system ranges from “Asus” to “MS Word”, telling them their operating system is inferior causes their eyes to glaze over in much the same way as a physicist explaining quantum entanglement to a four-year-old.

There are five programming books in this beard. Can you spot them all?

The core point is this: In its infancy, Linux attracted those who had worked with Unix, with voluminous beards in which they could hide copies of C reference books. These days, Linux attracts two types of conscious users, cut from the same cloth: those who are philosophically opposed to proprietary software, and those who have practical, typically usability- or bug-related issues. Pushing Linux onto those who are reasonably happy with Windows seldom ends well, so it’s best to only introduce it to those who aren’t — Or, ideally, they could find Linux themselves. It’s not as if it’s hard to Google (or Bing, for some irony) “free Windows alternative”.

Follow us on Twatter

As per the existing no-nonsense layout, we’ve opted to provide increased functionality without degrading readability — Here’s looking at you, site with half a dozen floating objects and in-line ads.

In order to move to FeedBurner, we’re redirecting our RSS feed via a redirect header. Some clients don’t play nicely with the redirect, so if your feed drops, please pull out your LART and beat your feed reader into submission. Also, if you’re not subscribed already — do so, for extra slack.

We’ll be sending out secret decoder rings to all RSS subscribers; don’t miss out on this excellent piece of kit. Sign up today!

That is all. ^D

twatter image credit

I began using Linux in Fall of 1989, and have since learned many things that help me day-to-day. Being dedicated to the community, I thought I’d share some of my knowledge, to help make Ubuntu faster and more usable than ever.

Linux in the days of yore.

Let’s start with the configuration file used by the Bourne-again shell, .bashrc. As the configuration file for the most popular shell used with Linux, it plays an important part in how friendly the command line is.

The $PS1 was unveiled by Sony in 1994, achieving worldwide release in 1995. It was discontinued in early 2006, though it is still in use by a large number of Linux distributions. In order to greatly speed up the shell, you might try replacing the antiquated $PS1 with a $PS3, introduced in late 2006 and featuring a vast array of features.

To do this, open a terminal and run sed -i 's/$PS1/$PS3/g' ~/.bashrc. If you want to apply your changes immediately use source ~/.bashrc

Once you’ve done this, your shell should be running orders of magnitude faster.

A little usability tip, now. I find it to be useful to get coloured output from ls and grep, so echo -e "alias ls='ls --color=auto'\nalias grep='grep --color=auto'" > ~/.bashrc and you’ll have colour for both commands. The former may already be provided by the default Karmic Koala .bashrc. While alias duplication has never hurt anybody, output redirection often has.

On to lower-level optimizations. With the quest for lower boot times, cruft has been trimmed down. Less services are started at boot time, and in general, the boot process is highly optimized. However, nobody’s perfect, and there are number of flaws that cause the boot process to be delayed. For example, the file /boot/vmlinuz has its name not for any logical reason, (some rationalize it as the ‘z’ indicating compression, which is untrue) but instead originated as a typo which has become so ingrained that boot loader developers have had to work around it, to the detriment of boot time.

Some say Ubuntu's performance is stuck up a tree.

Note that since these are low-level system modifications, they all require superuser privileges. It’s tiresome to prepend each with sudo so you might instead su root or, if you don’t have a root password set, sudo su.

Due to the slow execution speed of the boot loader, checking various locations for the Linux kernel executable delays the boot by several seconds. To remedy this, you can mv /boot/vmlinuz /boot/vmlinux and your system should boot several seconds faster, as the boot loader need not do as many heuristics.

Next, the filesystem. During boot, a number of files are accessed and modified, and the writes that the system must do to update the timestamps on these files slows the boot process. To combat this, you can use a text editor of choice (I recommend vim) to edit the fstab file, as such: vim /etc/fstab and change every instance of defaults to defaults,noatime. Noa time is a new method of time-stamping that is both more accurate and faster than regular time-stamping, using Noa units, which are directly analogous to Swatch Beats.

A very important step that many users miss is the device tree. With a generic configuration, most devices will be mounted at /dev/sd*, but this is sub-optimal for performance. What few know is that each category in the device tree is intended for a family of devices. For your benefit, here’s a list of several common device prefixes:

• /dev/fd: Floppy and Flash drives.
• /dev/hd: Hard disk drives and high-definition televisions.
• /dev/lp: Line printers and vinyl records.
• /dev/sd: Solid-state drives and Secure Digital cards.
• /dev/tty: Cannot be mentioned in polite company.

If you wish to determine which device names your storage devices are using, run fdisk -l. If you find your hard drives are using the /dev/sd prefix, worry not! You can run a simple for loop to correct the issue: cd /dev/ && for i in sd*; do mv $i $(echo $i | sed 's/sd/hd/'); done

The loop can be modified as you see fit. Keep in mind that as hard disk drives and high-definition televisions are quite different, the shared driver for the two device families is rather generic and bloated. The hard disk’s read/write heads operate on the platters in a similar manner to a cartridge and needle reading a 12″ LP. As such, you may wish to do the following to optimize your hard disks: cd /dev/ && for i in hd*; do mv $i $(echo $i | sed 's/hd/lp/'); done

Another large performance bottleneck is the number of TTYs spawned by default. Each getty process uses up to several hundred kilobytes of memory, and given that Ubuntu spawns six by default, they can eat up a substantial portion of your resources. While no longer bleeding edge, my Thinkpad 760 ED is still formidable with its 16 MB of RAM and 133 MHz Pentium, and yet Ubuntu would waste a substantial percentage of my memory if I didn’t disable the needless TTYs.

To remove them, edit the appropriate file, vim /etc/default/console-setup and change line seven’s range from"/dev/tty[1-6]" to "/dev/tty[1-2]", and then rm /etc/event.d/tty{3..6}.

As any experienced user knows, all the great things in the world run on steam: Locomotives, kettles, the majority of ships from the 19th to 20th century, and, of course, politicians. For this reason, it’s highly recommended to install sl, a package available in the Universe repository, as it provides an adequate quantity of steam.

Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far, you now have a highly-optimized system and are ready to impress your friends with the responsiveness of your computer.

Lastly, a bit of inspirational prose:

Sudo or do not, there is no
-bash: try: command not found

If you're not careful, hackers can do this to your computer.

This guide covers a number of common Linux security flaws that make using the shell an unnecessarily risky experience.

For the security-conscious, choosing an open-source operating system like Linux should be simple common sense. The open-source development model encourages third-party scrutiny by its very nature, whereas closed-source models inherently mandate none. Companies often do little internal auditing, additionally prohibiting reverse-engineering through complex end-user license agreements.

The fact is that it’s very easy to corrupt a proprietary application from a security perspective: management decides on  a subversive feature and the developers are obliged to implement it, while in an open-source environment,  nobody has the final say. Those who strongly oppose a change may simply fork the project, and time will decide which project made the right decision. On the other hand, those who oppose questionable changes in a proprietary application are terminated by their employers via papers or private military corporations.

Contrary to public belief, large, current distributions are often a poor choice for security. As time goes by, projects are increasingly tainted by corporate and governmental interests, to the detriment of security-conscious users. Likewise, newer software is not necessarily better — New software is continually scrutinized for vulnerabilities, and as such is less secure than its long-forgotten predecessors. Without compromise, all users should find and use a suitably archaic set of software (such as Linux kernel 2.0) such that no new vulnerability analysis is taking place. Likewise, older software tends to be more compact — It is easier for a user to analyze the source of the Linux 2.0 than it is to read the millions of lines within Linux 2.6. However, being pragmatic, Ubuntu is a good choice because the upstream Debian patching often fixes software (and warps it in interesting ways) such that general-purpose exploits become infeasible.

When securing a distribution, there are a number of common pitfalls — applications that are often accepted by novices, yet carry a significant security risk with them. As any experienced, security-conscious user will tell you, the average default installation performed by many of the more user-friendly distributions is often lacking in security, catering more for general use. But what of the dangerous exploits that can turn your power supply into a bomb?

It looks innocent, but is your power supply plotting to kill you?

Below is a list of common applications that are responsible for the vast majority of damage inflicted during system compromises.

• ls: Many see ls as an innocuous command, useful for finding files within a directory and determining their attributes. However, this command is commonly replaced with malicious binaries due to the frequency with which it is invoked. I recommend moving the ls binary to a 16 or 32-character random location, such as /usr/bin/OGh1eoL2hDqZOBl8. To generate this with sufficient entropy, I asked an acquaintance afflicted with severe multiple personality disorder. As this string has been disclosed, it is now to be considered compromised and should not be used for security purposes.
• cp: Another seemingly innocuous command. In the dream land full of rainbows and marshmallows that most users concoct in their heads, cp is used to duplicate files. This may seem innocent, but in practice it is more often used for malicious ends. After a hacker has compromised the root account and finished compiling a malicious binary, he will use this to copy it into the place of an existing binary, an attack I mentioned in the last paragraph. A cp-savvy attacker is far more dangerous than one who only uses mv, as the former is capable of replacing multiple binaries at a time, and has a back-up in the event his activities are noticed.
• dd: While some will insist it can be useful, it should never be touched. A hacker can easily use this to erase the filesystem from one of your devices, or copy the filesystem of a malicious device onto your system. This utility is highly dangerous, being responsible for a large number of catastrophic data wipes, and is to be avoided at all costs. Any distribution that packages dd is ideally avoided. Note that this often means creating your own distribution, as dd is included in GNU Coreutils, a commonly-packaged suite of applications ranging from the mundane to the critically dangerous.
• cd: While technically a shell built-in, this highly damaging command deserves its own entry. While it would be beneficial to start users in a random, deeply-nested directory without a $PS1 (or pwd support), due to cd’s default behaviour of navigating to the home directory when called without arguments, this potentially useful security technique is rendered useless. Likewise, the tilde (~) expands to the home directory’s path, and it too is often used when compromising a system. Ideally, this command would not be compiled into the shell. The other dangerous link cd makes use of is “..”, which allows the shell to traverse up the directory tree without actually knowing the name of the parent directory. This is the equivalent of allowing a blind lunatic with a chainsaw into your home and playing Marco Polo with him.
• bash: Commonly used to interact with the computer in a text-based way. This is the most common shell on Linux systems, and as such, it facilitates the vast majority attacks. Capable of executing arbitrary commands and code, it alone is responsible for over 99% of the damage inflicted during attacks. You should remove this as a first step in securing your system, along with any fall-backs such as ‘ksh‘, ‘zsh‘, and ‘dash‘. Busybox, functioning as a minimal replacement for the shell and GNU Coreutils, is a better alternative, but remember: A system you can log into is a system you can compromise.

The file /etc/passwd contains important information about your users and their shells. An attacker reading this file now only has to guess the password of the user account, which makes username security worthless. Remove this and use a 32-character randomly-generated string for your username. Do not generate the username through /dev/urandom or any such device, as it is not a true random number source, producing pseudo-random output which can be predicted by severely obsessive-compulsive individuals like myself. Likewise, Internet servers providing so-called ’secure’ random numbers are likely fronts for governmental agencies interested in harvesting your data, so you should find your own source of entropy.

The Internet: An unnecessary security risk?

The Internet is the vector through which the vast majority of attacks occur. A common application which uses the Internet is the browser, which communicates over HTTP, typically using port 80. This port is commonly used by hackers to send malicious data to unsuspecting users, and as such you should read ‘man iptables‘ and drop all packets being sent to port 80 on your machine in order to reduce the chances of an attack. It is also wise to drop packets on 443, which is used by HTTP over TLS/SSL, a supposedly ’secure’ protocol utilizing government-vetted (and thus highly suspect) algorithms.

Remote access is another primary attack vector. So-called ’secure’ remote access utilities such as OpenSSH use algorithms such as RSA, DES and AES to secure their payloads, all of which were developed or analyzed by major governmental cryptography agencies, and as such are likely to have back doors allowing the government (and other knowledgeable, malicious entities) to read your confidential information as it is sent over the wire. I recommend xor and rot13 for maximum data security, as they are uncommon and thus your data will be secure. If you feel you need additional security, utilize rot14. While rot13 is able to be decoded in the same manner as it is encoded, rot14 must be run 26 times for the message to be deciphered. It is also possible to rot -1, but this is a highly sophisticated attack that few are capable of.

There is a directory on every machine, /usr/share/man, which contains information on much of the software you have installed. Through this facility, attackers can determine what you have installed, and compromise your system through vulnerabilities in these applications even if they aren’t running: That’s how deadly /usr/share/man can be. Keep in mind that man pages are created by the people who package software for your distribution, and sometimes by the upstream developers themselves.This is clear evidence of the system deliberately working  against the user. While it is impossible to determine whether your ‘rm‘ binary is intact, I suggest attempting to use it as such: ‘rm -rf /usr/share/man‘. If it has not been compromised, this directory will be removed and your system will be markedly more secure.

Hackers can also determine what you are running via the process list, and this cannot easily be stopped. You might try unplugging your ethernet cable, but due to electromagnetic emanations from your computer, data can be gathered without a direct connection and without a wireless networking device. At the lowest level, all attacks are facilitated by power. Be it 110 or 220V, 50 Hz or 60 Hz, on a 15, 20 or 30 amp circuit, without power, no attack is possible. The Paranoid Schizophrenic would thusly recommend unplugging your Linux machine to ensure data integrity and security, if it did not impact uptime in a negative manner. If you are particularly uncompromising, you may wish to do this. Data security is paramount for some, and this is one of the best ways to ensure it.

Commonly used by computer professionals, RAID, or “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks” is commonly used for a variety of reasons, ranging from increased speed to improved data security in the event of drive failure. I cannot condone RAID1, because it is then possible for an assailant to steal one of your drives without you being any the wiser. RAID0 is the optimal solution, across multiple disks and with multiple partitions per disk. This way, a drive failure (or damaging one drive in any way, such as airlifting the computer back to the Pentagon for analysis) is guaranteed to render the data unusable. You should pick a block size based on that you are storing — With small files, a large block size may be sufficient to store entire incriminating files. It’s recommended to use a very small block size in that case, such that the file, even if partially recovered from one drive, is useless.

At a very low level, there is also the file system. If you are running a newer file system such as ext3, ext4, or reiserfs, your computer may be SPYING on you. Everything is written to a ‘journal’ before being committed to the disk. Do you know anything about this journal? I thought not. In practice, this journal may be harvested and transmitted to governmental agencies who will be able to replay disk activity. Meta-data journaling is also an option, wherein entire files are not written to the journal — But this can still prove to be incriminating evidence. It is inadvisable to open your hard drive and have a go at the platters with a chisel, because it is difficult to identify the location of the journal.

J. R. "Bob" Dobbs: Can he be trusted?

Lastly… Can strangers be trusted? Can your friends be trusted? Can your mother be trusted? Can you be trusted? I think not. Under duress you may be willing to allow others to compromise your system, and that cannot be allowed. For perfect security, you should write your data onto floppy disks, bury them individually in crates across a large expanse, and then bludgeon yourself repeatedly in the head so that you cannot remember their locations.

Big bold headlines found their way to Digg and Reddit, proclaiming the revelation.

Karmic Koala’s New Login Screen Revealed

Let’s take a gander!

Cumbuntu

Hmm… I was expecting something a little more, uh climactic, with all the hype and buzz that surrounded the posts.

A few quotes from the critics:

Looks so smooth and stylish…

That’s hot

Sexy…

About time! Now I’m really going to do a fresh install… T_T It is best to start fresh if the next version have a lot of major changes, just like now…

Linux is finally ready for the desktop now that we can log in with style.  Those of us rebooting our boxes more frequently than every few weeks will certainly be in for a treat.

The Die Hard

Bio:  The Die Hard is out in force on Ubuntu forums and social media, commenting on blogs and tweeting about the latest upcoming Ubuntu features.  The drivel this guy spews is inane and forgettable stuff, characterized by comments that treat Ubuntu as if it is the only distribution in existence.   He downloaded Ubuntu 2 years ago after seeing his leet hax0r friend running fluxbox at university.

Blog Title: WTF Ubuntu FTW

Ubuntu Flavor: Ubuntu Alpha pre-release

Experience Level:  Moderate

Catch Phrase: “I can’t wait for Karmic, it’s supposed to boot in 10 seconds and the new boot splash is AWESOME!”

The Excited Newbie

Bio:  Newbie downloaded Ubuntu at the advice of his friend after losing his Windows partition to the typical viruses and trojans clueless users tend to pick up.  Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn’t come with a clue stick, let alone install one alongside Windows.  Newbie’s cluelessness follows him into the Linux world while he posts questions and floods IRC channels with the most trivial questions.  Newbie adds as many third party repositories at once as possible, eventually rendering his system as inoperable as the Windows machine he previously abandoned.

Blog Title: Coming Soon!!!!11

Ubuntu Flavor: Ubuntu via Wubi

Experience Level: Clueless

Catch Phrase: “WWOW! automatix is awesome, my nvedia gfx and dvd are werking!!  btw ubuntoo is awesome!!!11eleventy”

Mr. Misinformation

Bio:  Mr. Misinformation switched from Fedora years ago after getting confused by the RPM system.  Unable to upgrade Gaim without tearing his installation apart package by package, he gave in and downloaded Ubuntu.  While not exactly an idiot, Mr. Misinformation isn’t quite the guru he thinks he is.  He hangs out in Ubuntu IRC channels and forums, answering anything the Excited Newbie can come up with.  The trouble is, Mr. Information doesn’t research his answers, and often replies with half-truths or dangerous commands off the top of his head which result in unfortunate consequences for the unsuspecting noob.

Blog Title: Ubuntu Tips and Trix

Ubuntu Flavor: Any ‘buntu – Latest Stable

Experience Level:  Just Enough…

Catch Phrase: “Oh, you need to clear your firefox profile.  Just rm -rf ~ /.mozilla and you’ll be good to go.” (Ed: Notice the space after ‘~’)

The Evangelist

Bio:  The Evangelist almost understands the GNU philosophy, but really gets off on the concept of the African word and philosphy of ubuntu itself.  She is mainly a user of mailing lists, interjecting with questions about how best to get her local school running Ubuntu to save money and topple the evil Microsoft monopoly.  Typically,the Evangelist is easy to take in small doses, but spending too much time around her can begin to grate.  There are only so many times you can be told to refer to Linux as GNU/Linux without wanting to bash her head in.

Blog Title: Ubuntu for the Masses

Ubuntu Flavor:  CrunchBang on a P-II 300MHz

Experience Level:  Clueless to Clueful

Catch Phrase: “It’s really unfair that Linux Torvolds gets all the credit for our movement — please give credit where it’s due and refer to this as GNU/Linux.  That’s with a hard G, as in gifted.”

The Poser

Bio:  The Poser doesn’t actually run Ubuntu, but that doesn’t stop him from expounding on it.  A frequent of Digg.com, Poser likes to chime in on articles related to Linux in order to feel like one of the crowd.  Perhaps he doesn’t quite have the guts to run without Windows yet, or maybe he uses a Mac and suffers from multiple personality disorder.  The Poser is characterized by commenting on an article, blog post, or social media item without actually adding any opinions or substance.

Blog Title:  Just Another Wordpress Blog

Ubuntu Flavor: Snow Leopard / Windows 7

Experience Level: N/A

Catch Phrase: “Wow! This is useful! Great blog!”

The Old Timer

Bio:  The Old Timer has seen and done it all.  He’s an old-school retired Solaris or HP-UX admin who’s spent one too many days behind a CRT.  You wonder if his brain may be melting from the EMF those old green-screen teletypes used to pump out.  Regardless, this guy knows his stuff, but sticks to Ubuntu because he can’t be bothered to administrate his systems anymore.  Ubuntu is safe and easy, and in his old age, that’s the way he likes it.

Blog Title: Our Vacation Pictures

Ubuntu Flavor: Vanilla Ubuntu

Experience Level: Masterful, but unwilling

Catch Phrase: “Where can I find a Korn shell .deb?”

The Graduate

Bio:  The Graduate has been running Ubuntu since its early days, and is ready to get out.  Tired of all the characters above, the Graduate is experimenting with Arch Linux, FreeBSD, Red Hat, and Slackware on his quad-core rig with VirtualBox.  Nearing enlightenment, he takes a deep breath and fires up fdisk to repartition his Ubuntu drive.

Blog Title: Development with C++

Ubuntu Flavor: Ubuntu, Coaster Edition

Experience Level:  His Kung-Fu is Strong

Catch Phrase: “So long, suckas.”