Russell Coker: Appropriate Talks about Porn
There is currently some discussion about a talk which used pornographic imagery and jokes to illustrate points about Ruby programming [1]. A similar event happened in 2006 here is the description of the event from the author - which includes an unreserved apology [2].
It seems to me that the current discussion focusing on what is inappropriate for a public lecture is the wrong way to do it as there is a vast range of inappropriate material. I suggest that instead a white-list of appropriate references to porn in lectures will be more effective - if nothing else it makes for a much smaller list. Here is a first draft of such a list:
- Pornographic web sites handle a lot of traffic. There are significant technical problems that need to be solved. A lecture from an employee of an Internet porn company which covers the solutions to those technical problems would be of interest to many system administrators. Of course such a lecture should not promote the Internet porn company or show any samples of their products.
- Digital processing of images is an interesting topic. Having a digital editor from a magazine such as Vogue describe in detail how they do their job would be really interesting. There is a lot of overlap between the range of pictures displayed in Vogue and those displayed on porn sites. Having an employee of a porn company demonstrate how they touch up the picture of a fully clothed model would be an interesting technical topic, but of course it would be totally inappropriate to make any specific mentions of how the parts of the picture which are not PG-13 rated are edited. Even showing a picture of a porn star might be controversial, but I m sure that the same work could be reproduced with a photo of someone who has a more respectable career. Touching up a picture of RMS to make him look like a politician would make for a challenge for the presenter and an interesting lecture.
- The image known as Lenna is a photograph of a Playboy model named Lena that is widely used to test image compression [3]. While the image remains controversial, it seems to me that it would be impossible to give a complete and factual account of the history of image compression without mentioning it.
- The police have great discretionary powers to determine which crimes should be actively investigated. Senior police decide how many resources to assign to each case. I believe that in many jurisdictions the police will assign a much lower priority to a hacking case if the victim is running a porn service. Rumor has it that porn sites put a lot more effort into system security than most Internet services, partly due to not having as much protection from the police as other industries and partly because their customers don t want to be identified. I would be very interested in attending a presentation about practical computer security by a system administrator from a porn site. As an aside I m always interested in talking to people who do security work, so I would like to have a chat with someone who does such work for a porn site.
- A few years ago I attended a lecture about the security implications of porn surfing. It had some scary statistics on the number of porn sites that try to deploy malware on the computers of the people who view porn, and it made a good business case for banning porn at work without reference to HR issues (which is very relevant for the jurisdictions where viewing porn at work is not considered to be a social problem). I would like to see a new version of that talk with statistics based on more recent research, my theory is that modern porn sites are more toxic than the old ones due to the general increase in criminal activity on the net - but I have no evidence to support it.
It is time for stupid, empty politicians slogans once again in my dear country. And, as always, while we had lively, controversial presidential elections three years ago (and I won't rant this time on why so many Mexicans still believe the current president can only be called a de facto president), the mid-term elections... Fail to get any attention and cause only bored reactions.
I am writing today mostly because I stumbled upon 
I'm in the market for a new laptop. I've got almost 4 years out of my Dell
D610 (which I've been despising from not long after purchasing) and decided
that I'll never buy from Dell again.
I used to be very down on ThinkPads because of the placement of the Escape
key, but since I've been using one at work for the last 3.5 years, I've
gotten used to the Escape key location, and found the laptops themselves to
otherwise be very solid and well supported by Linux.
So Lenovo it is.
Next question: T400 or X301? I've seen both, and the X301 is very sexy in
terms of thickness, weight, and having all the latest bells and whistles,
but boy, is it expensive.
I did a side-by-side comparison between a T400 decked out the way I wanted,
and an X301 decked out the best I could choose, and I've opted for the T400.
The main problems I had with the X301 were that there was no choice of
processor, and the processor available seemed significantly slower than what
I could get in the T400, and of course the cost. I seemed to be paying
nearly $1000 more for a slower processor, just to get something extra thin
and light, with LED backlighting and an SSD disk.
What finally swayed me to spending less money and getting an arguably
"better" laptop was if I paid less now, I'd be more comfortable possibly
getting something in less than 4 years time down the track. So if it came
down to the X301 for 4 years or the T400 for 2 years, the T400 seemed like a
better deal.
What will hopefully end up happening is I'll end up using the T400 for four
years and not end up hating it by the end of that time.
Here's what I ended up going with:
I've said it multiple times, but all mailing list managers suck. Especially mailman. (On that topic SELinux is nasty, Emacs is the one true editor, and people who wear furry boots are silly.)
Having setup some new domains I needed a mailing list manager, and had to re-evaluate the available options. Mostly I want something nice and simple, that doesn't mess around with character sets, that requires no fancy deamons, and has no built in archiving solution.
Really all we need is three basic operations:
Just this week I went to the movies to check the 
How inspiring can that be?
You can find the original 
I have made a couple of references in my blog to the new software suite I am writing, which I am calling Alue. It is time to explain what it is all about.
Alue will be a discussion forum system providing a web-based forum interface, a NNTP (Netnews) interface and an email interface, all with equal status. What will be unusual compared to most of the competition is that all these interfaces will be coequal views to the same abstract discussion, instead of being primarily one of these things and providing the others as bolted-on gateways. (I am aware of at least one other such system, but it is proprietary and thus not useful to my needs. Besides, I get to learn all kinds of fun things while doing this.)
I have, over several years, come across many times the need for such systems and never found a good, free implementation. I am now building this software for the use of one new discussion site that is being formed (which is graciously willing to serve as my guinea pig), but I hope it will eventually be of use to many other places as well.
I now have the first increment ready for beta testing. Note that this is not even close to being what I described above; it is merely a start. It currently provides a fully functional NNTP interface to a rudimentary (unreliable and unscalable) discussion database.
The NNTP server implements most of 
I have decided that is high time to declare 
With all the discussion about SHA-1 weaknesses and generation of new OpenPGP
keys going on there's some concern about how the web of trust will be affected.
I'm particularly interested in the impact on Debian; while it's possible to add
new keys and keep the old ones around that hasn't worked so well for us with
the migration away from PGPv3 keys. We still have 125 v3 keys left, many of
them for users who also have a v4 key but haven't asked for the v3 key to be
removed or responded to my email prodding them about it. I don't want to repeat
that.
I was given a lot of old photos and scanned them in.
Since quilt 0.46-7 (see