Julien Danjou: Entering the Emacs world
In February 2009, my friend dim tried to force me using Emacs. I know a couple of people using it and Gnus for reading their mail, and it always made me curious. At that time, more than a year ago, Emacs 22 and Gnus did not seem usable from my point of view. But around mid February, with the help of dim, I tried again to start using Emacs. Actually, this was not something new for me. I (very basically) used Emacs between 2000 and 2006. In 2006, when I finished the university and started working at Easter-eggs, I met a couple of vim enthusiasts. They taught me how to use it in various ways, and I started to know more about vim than Emacs, so I switched. This time, I started by configuring it, but reading the manual and also learning a bit of Lisp. It took me several weeks, but step by step I learned many, many things. And I must admit, I liked it. I've configured and starting to use some very important mode, like Gnus, Muse, the famous Org mode or even ERC. I'll probably talk about various Emacs related things in the near future, since I already wrote more than a thousand lines of Lisp in the last 2 months. Anyhow, I'd just conclude by asserting that my new Emacs/Gnus/Org/ERC setup beats my old vim/mutt/nothing/irssi to the death with a baseball bat. :-)
So for awhile, I've been questioning on why very few FOSS programs use newsgroups (or USENET on moderated groups) as their primary means of communication between developers. I personally find email to be a clunky way dealing with mass-mailings, and while switching to alpine and mutt have helped, I feel newsgroups would work better in place of mailing lists.
Actually, on second thought, this isn t a farewell. There is no goodwill on either side of this bitter parting. Facebook 
It is now possible to subscribe to Ubuntu bugmail for the packages you care about, without having to use Launchpad (and subscribe on a per-package basis there). This is implemented as a new opt-in 
A scandal has been brewing in Latvia over the last half year and yesterday the activity spiked shocking the media and some IT people in the country. I ll go back and explain what happened first, what is happening now and why this could have a heavy impact on IT and journalists in Latvia.
At the end of last year, there were rumours that the IT system of Latvia s Internal Revenue System was hacked and millions of documents had been downloaded by multiple organizations. Shortly thereafter more details on the glaring security hole became public (after it was closed).
There is a full electronic interface to give all reports to the IRS electronically (at http://eds.vid.gov.lv) and as part of that system you could also view and export monthly report summaries about your organization into XML and PDF files. After the system checked that you are authorized to access the report, you were redirected to the URL to actually download the report by report ID (as a single param in a GET request). Unfortunately, report IDs were predicable and the script that gave the reports for download did not check if you were authorized to get that report. It did not even check if were logged into the system.
There were suspicions that the authorization was disabled on purpose to allow to leak data on purpose, but apparently it was an error of forgetting to disable debug code in production environment.
The error was discovered only because the firewall administrator noticed an unexplained stable increase of traffic, especially during night hours when typically the traffic fully stopped. Apparently a single hacker (who later identified himself as Neo to the press) discovered the flaw and wrote a script to just try all possible report ids and get as much data out as possible. This had been going on for months, before someone noticed.
After the flaw was discovered and a bit of time passed, Neo made his first move he published the list of top salaries in a governmental company, that clearly showed that the top leadership of this company failed to cut their salary by 40%, like everyone elses during harsh budget cuts of 2009. He stripped the names and ids of the specific employees, but named the company which made it pretty easy to figure out who was who.
The society was outraged that the top managers in a government owned company failed to comply with the strict pay cut that everyone else in government had to endure. But after a few weeks the outrage subsided and no action followed from the government or law enforcement.
Neo continued to release documents detailing salaries of top managers in different Latvian government companies. And each time after short outrage, nothing happened. Neo gave an interview where he said that he was disappointed in the passivity of the Latvian people in face of such blatant injustices.
After a few month Neo went silent, promising to return before parliamentary elections this fall.
However, this week a new development shocked everyone in the middle of the night two police SWAT teams went into action: one detained Ilm rs Poik ns, a researcher in artificial intelligence at the University of Latvia s Computer Science department and another raided the home of a Latvian TV journalist Ilze Nagle who interviewed Neo. Poik ns confessed of being Neo the next day and was released (with travel restrictions, pending trial) today.
Politicians reacted immediately opposition demanded the resignation of the Interior Minister over such blatant disregard of freedom of press and another politician (who is also a famous lawyer) Aleksejs Loskutovs volunteered to defend Neo pro-bono (on Twitter, no less). Almost all Latvian online media have the arrest of Neo and the raid on the home of a journalist as main stories of the day.
As a legal titbit, we also know that Neo is being charged with breaking statutes 145 and and 244p2 of the criminal law. Statute 145 is hard to find applicable in this situation as talks about actions done by people authorized (..) to access [private] information . Statute 244p2 will also be hard to pin down as it mentions influencing system resources of (an IT system) and if such action caused severe harm . It looks like the first part talks about at least a DoS attack (which did not happen in this case) and also there was no measurable harm from these leaks.
Also Neo was careful to strip all personally identifying information (such as names, social security numbers and addresses of the employees in question), so it will be hard to pin him on that. Also no actual breaking or other modification of an IT system occurred. And no specialized software was used beyond a trivial script such as :
Since October of 2002, 
the usual short overview about my RC bug activities:
