A common trait of virtually all of the media in Mexico -and, as far as I have been able to see, in Latin America- is the push for society to be afraid. The government and the media (which go hand-in-hand, mainly due to a series of favors owed to each other - currently stemming from the government's illegitimacy and lack of trust from the general population) wants us all to think the country is as violent and as dangerous as it has never been before.
And yes, I cannot and won't try to deny that there are many critical points that need attention - But the answer cannot be militarization, cannot be further restraining the civil liberties, cannot be criminalization.
The only way to prevent crime is to reduce poverty. And poverty is not reduced by giving foreign "investors" (bah, ask people living on cities that border the USA if the
maquilas have brought any kind of investment or somehow bettered the living conditions of the population!) access to segments of the economy so far limited to the government - Poverty will only be reduced when the government starts reviewing the tax systems to remove the legal loopholes that make it possible for a large enterprise to get tax exemptions on most of their income, and make the lower income people pay zero taxes, even get social aid.
But back to the topic: Since the 1994 crisis (the "decembrine errors"), we are being constantly bombed about the raging insecurity in Mexico. Maybe we have been bombed with that same ideas for more time, but I was not very politically conscious before that. When things go a bit smoother on the political side, the media relaxes the "we are so fucked" mantram.
When our
de facto president current ruler took power, on December 2006, he had so much opposition he could not for months attend a single public event. So far, he is still avoiding them; everywhere he goes, the place must be cleared and sanitized of anybody who might show he just does not agree with the imposition we had. What was his first government action? To decree that every branch of the government would get a 10% budget cut on the salaries - but the security forces (the army, the different police corporations) would have a 46% raise.
After almost two years of ineptitude, they keep chanting the old "oh, we are living such dangerous times" mantra. The security forces recently got yet another raise, and everybody in the media says this country cannot be lived in anymore.
And people buy that crap.
Up to a month or two ago, the general outcry is that the drug lords had taken over the country - And, yes, in several areas of Mexico, their presence is bigger than the official security, or the security agencies are completely coopted by them. But not even
His Majesty Felipe Calder n I "El Ileg timo" can say with a straight face that "we are winning the war against the drug lords" (a war brought by himself, of course - Think of it as Mexico's Irak. Think of Calder n as Mexico's Bush.) - A new attention sink was needed.
Of course, this country is not safer than Finland. But crimes do happen there as they happen here. Here, we have got a tremendous movement because of
one brutal kidnapping in August, and everybody now thinks that everybody is at risk of dying kidnapped.
So today, after over a month of bombarding us with fear about kidnaps, I am sick of reading stupid reactions. What made me post this was a request for ideas at a local Free Software-related portal about
monitoring known potential criminals. Of course, such a proposal would violate the right to anonimity and to lead a personal life even a convicted criminal has. And, of course, the cries of people that think the society should castrate rapists and kill kidnappers, basically going back 4000 years in history. People, let me hand you a stone and a stick so you can club the whole society to death.
The first step towards getting out of this security nightmare perception we have is to be critical towards what the media tells us - and to understand (and _really_ understand. I won't buy your argument that "it's easier to rob somebody for MX$4000 than to work a full day for MX$100", as it's only easier on one level, but it is a tremendous cost on many others) what makes
good people act against the society.
OpenSSH can be compiled against OpenSC. Since the latter has support
for the Belgian electronic ID card, that means you can use your eID card
to log on to a remote server using OpenSSH. To do this is fairly
simple, once you know how it works.
First, obviously, you need to have ssh compiled against opensc.
Unfortunately, the Debian package comes with that option disabled, but
it's easy to enable that:
Now that 
(including English!)
The string freeze of Debian Installer officially ended at 23:59
yesterday (Sept. 20th). Indeed, this was extended a bit to today, with
agreement by Otavio Salvador who I thank for this.
That allowed Zak to "save" Tagalog and also the Welsh and Latvian
translators to polish their work.
We now have to decide about some of these languages: those that failed
to meet the release criteria but were formerly activated in D-I. There
are four such languages: Amharic, Welsh, Estonian and Northern Sami.
Please find below the mail I just sent to debian-i18n and
debian-boot. I promised that this discussion would happen in
public. It will (but it will be short as we can't delay the release of
the installer for ages....and I think that my proposals are
reasonable!)
So I thought it would be an interesting project to do something similar, albeit just focusing in the ‘word sketching’ part, as described in 
Following my first idea of a 
A few days ago I was awarded 
Many people that know me, know how fond of my music collection I am. They
quickly notice that my CDs are sorted alphabetically with precise rules
(surnames first, articles ignored, etc), and that with my digitalised music I'm
almost obsessive. All my 50+ gigs of compressed music follow a
precise filesystem scheme, with a metadata file on each album in 
My primary e-mail domain deuxchevaux.org was offline for one and a
half week due to my (former) domain provider Korypet went bankrupt and
probably hadn’t paid the registrar’s invoice for deuxchevaux.org
although I had paid Korypet’s invoice. (The domain wasn’t expired. Its
expiration date was somewhen in 2009.)
Korypet itself just told its customers (and told it only on request)
that they a) will shut down their business because it doesn’t pay off
and that b) their service won’t be as good as usual since their head
is currently in hospital. I should have noticed that there is
something fishy and some details were missing at lastest when they
told customers (also only on request) that they have to shut down some
services earlier than announced because one of their providers has
terminated their agreement with Korypet at short notice. I also should
have expected that they couldn’t keep their promise to continue
domains and DNS until May 2009 as they couldn’t keep other promised
grace periods.
I’m quite sad about how Korypet went down and how bad blood they
caused — 
Nearly a week after its release, I suspect most of my audience has seen
the FSF's Freedom Fry video of Stephen Fry wishing the GNU project and
the free software movement a happy birthday. While 