Michal Čihař: Gammu has ODBC support
One of features for Gammu SMSD which was for quite a long time in my head was ODBC support. With unified SQL backend we have right now it should be pretty easy to add support for it so I gave it a try.
It really did not take to long and the ODBC driver is committed to git and will be part of next release. The great benefit of this is that we get native database support on Windows without need to linking against database libraries, which is always painful.
The ODBC driver behaves like any other SQL based driver for SMSD, so if you are familiar with it, the configuration won't surprise you:
[smsd]
service = sql
driver = odbc
host = dsn_of_your_database
user = username
password = password
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but you ll be traveling the world while reading him.
My questions are in bold, the rest is by Christian.
Who are you?
I am a French citizen (which is easy to guess unless you correct my
usual mistakes in what follows). I m immensely proud of being married
for nearly 26 years with Elizabeth (who deserves a statue from Debian
for being so patient with my passion and my dedication to the
project).
I m also the proud father of 3 wonderful kids , aged 19 to
23.
I work as team manager in the Networks and Computers Division of Onera
the French Aerospace lab , a public research institute about
Aeronautics, Space and Defense. My team provides computer management
services for research divisions of Onera, with a specific focus put on
individual computing.
I entered the world of free software as one of the very first users of
Linux in France. Back in the early 1990 s, I happened (though the BBS
users communities) to be a friend of several early adopters of Linux
and/or BSD386/FreeBSD/NetBSD in France. More specifically, I
discovered Linux thanks with my friend Ren Cougnenc (all my free
software talks are dedicated to Ren , who passed away in 1996).
You re not a programmer, not even a packager. How did you come
to Debian?
I m definitely not a programmer and I never studied computing (I
graduated in Materials Science and worked in that area for a few years
after my PhD).
However, my daily work always involved computing (I redesigned the
creep testing laboratory and its acquisition system all by myself
during my thesis research work). An my hobbies often involved
playing with home computers, always trying to learn about something
new.
So, first learning about a new operating system then trying to
figure out how to become involved in its development was quite a
logical choice.
Debian is my distro of choice since it exists. I used Slackware on work
machines for a while, but my home server, kheops,
first ran Debian 1.1 when I stopped running a BBS on an MS-DOS machine
to host a news server. That was back in October 1996.
I then happened to be a user, and more specifically a user of
genealogy software, also participating very actively in Usenet from
this home computer and server, that was running this Debian thing.
So, progressively, I joined mailing lists and, being a passionate
person, I tried to figure out how I could bring my own little
contribution to all this.
This is why I became a packager (yes, I am one!) by taking over the
geneweb package, which I was using to publish my genealogy
research. I applied as DD in January 2001, then got my account in July
2001. My first upload to the Debian archive occurred on August 22nd
2001: that was of course geneweb, which I still maintain.
Quite quickly, I became involved in the work on French localization. I
have always been a strong supporter of localized software (I even
translated a few BBS software back in the early 90 s) as one of the
way to bring the power and richness of free software to more users.
Localization work lead me to work on the early version of Debian
Installer, during those 2003-2005 years where the development of D-I
was an incredibly motivating and challenging task, lead by Joey Hess
and his inspiring ideas.
From user to contributor to leader, I suddenly discovered, around
2004, that I became the coordinator of D-I i18n (internationalization)
without even noticing 
The text I ve cropped too eagerly says Choosing a secure password is an essential part of protecting your personal information , or thereabouts. I duly chose a complex password that fitted the requirements, and to my surprise it was rejected. I tried another, and it was rejected; then a third and a fourth. By trial and error I worked out what was going on:
1. The password must contain only the listed special characters, not just include one of them.
That s a bit of a problem, because even assuming a basic ASCII set, 15 characters are unavailable to users; 80 are left, so that s about a 15% fall in the available combinations*. Not a good start.
More concerning is the presence of a security question field. It s used for resetting the password in the event losing it, but this technique for recovery has 
Actually the first form, not shown here, initially just asks for a username, giving an error message if it isn t registered, and here s another problem:
3. The password reset process confirms the existence, or non-existence, of a given username half the credentials required to log in to any visitor.
I d be prepared to take a bet that most users will choose What was the name of your first school? as a security question. The first pet you have is often at such a young age you can t remember it clearly; the name of the street you grew up on might change a couple of times if you moved house. But first school I attended? I ll never forget that, so it makes most sense to use as a backup password . It s also the best one for an attacker to try and find out from public sources.
But that aside, as you can see the password is not generated at random and communicated to the real account holder out-of-band, in the manner of many other sites. Instead:
4. A new password is immediately set to a value already known by the attacker.
Once inside, an attacker can also change the security question or answer, or both, so you can t even regain your account by telephoning the company unless you can convince them you re genuine, in which case the security question was a total waste of time anyway. I awarded some marks for notifying the user by email that the password has been changed, but immediately docked them again because bingo! You re now a victim of identity theft!
Let s assume you ve been locked out, the security question has been changed and you want your account back. ALLOW don t let you telephone them; you either have to dig around and find an address to send an email, which we all know can be intercepted, or (and you re encouraged to) contact them through a form on the site. You ll probably include some personal details, because you want to convince them of your real identity; indeed, two of the options on the form are I ve got a question and Something doesn t work . I sent my findings through this very form, under the latter heading, and to my surprise:
5. Despite promises of full encryption of all data at all times, full implementation of secure socket layers , the contact form is transmitted to ALLOW in the clear, with no protection whatsoever.
So now anyone listening in your connection knows all about you too: your ISP, any of the peers along the route, the deep packet inspection advertisers if your ISP is less than reputable, and the neighbour who connects to your wireless and slips you a fiver every month for the privilege. Nice work, privacy specialists.
(For the record:
As mentioned 
I'll collect here links to the various linux-2.6 distribution trees based on the longterm release 2.6.32. I won't go into details of bigger external patches (grsec, openvz, rt, xen, ..), which in consequence also aligned themselves on 2.6.32.
Important bug fixes usually are connected to some bug report, which may be publicly viewable. So from the patch and changelog entry one can usually assume if a certain patch satisfies the 
I'm sure this new attractive look will improve user experience of upcoming 3.4 release. You can expect beta release with new theme soon and then we will hopefully smoothly continue through one (or more) release candidates to final release.
While making this theme default one, we've also offered team membership to 
I used to maintain a membership with 
Once again, there will be another round of the Summer School Advanced Scientific Programming in Python . This year in St. Andrews, UK.
Quoting from the 
I picked up a couple of cheap Linux devices at the weekend. First of all, a $99 Android tablet from CVS, made by Craig. It's a generic RK2818 device and of course it's lacking any kind of GPL offer in the documentation. As far as I know the only company that's released any Rockchip source so far has been Archos, and even then they haven't released the tools you need to actually build an image - they seem to be floating around the internet anyway. But it's straightforward to get it to run the Android market, and it runs 
As the results are quite persuating, this gives no space to discuss.
Next question was about inclusion of additional theme in standard download kit:
While two themes still have big majority, people are not that convinced about it.
The last question of the survey was which theme should be included as additional in the download kit:
I think this is most interesting result - while in question about default theme Graphite theme was clearly the second one, in this question people have indicated that Original theme should stay in the download kit.
I would like to thank to all 228 people who have participated (the number is low because the survey required email confirmation, but I still think it is better way than thousands of votes which are easily scriptable).
Everybody hates Xperia
When I first got Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 it was running on Android Donut (1.6), my frustrations followed soon after mostly because it was greatly 
Google, please hurry up 
I was going to make this a comment against