Actually, I have no idea whether it sucks or not, because even though I signed up for the beta program months ago, I’ve yet to hear word one from Yahoo, not even a “thanks for your interest, we’ll get back to you”. In many ways, this is the inverse of what Joel Spolsky wrote about a few weeks ago, namely holding your cards too close to the vest. Now, I understand why Yahoo is being extraordinarily deliberate about rolling out such a radical UI change to the general population (after all, Yahoo Mail is used by millions of “ordinary” people), but I’m technically savvy, an early adopter, and willing to endure spotty service from time to time to get early access, not to mention that I want to give my feedback on how things can be improved for all those ordinary people. Why on earth doesn’t Yahoo want to take advantage of my offer of free labor?! So, while I have no idea whether Yahoo Mail Beta sucks or not, the very fact that I don’t sucks in itself. Ah well. I’m no longer interested in being a Yahoo customer anyway, since they’re apparently the phone company now. Speaking of not hearing word one, I haven’t heard a peep from Yahoo about that earlier post either, not even from Yahoo’s voice in the blogosphere (who also didn’t respond to email on the subject), and not even after getting a link from Doc, which no doubt got my sob story in front of many more eyeballs than would otherwise have seen it. So, it would appear my friend is SOL. I’m sure all those people who are emailing him at Yahoo will understand why he’s ignoring them. And I’m sure the years worth of data he’s accumulated at Yahoo can be easily recreated. Technorati Tags: softwareasaservice, web20, yahoo

Daniel Griswold: “This will send a chilling signal. It is just assuming that if a company is from the Middle East it is de facto disqualified from investing in the United States, and I think that is a terrible message to send.” Technorati Tags: flatworld

I didn't really want to write three articles about bash in a row, but after my last article about Bash prompts Ralph Aichinger emailed me asking about a feature he had in zsh, where his xterms show him the current process and whether it was possible to do that in Bash. Never one to refuse a challenge, I had a go and my latest article is the result.

Although I was still busy, I tried to build d-i image for AMD64/EM64T (x86_64) today. To do try & error, I rented DELL SC430 EM64T machine from my friend DD Shigeo (Thanks!). This machine is really good showcase to demonstrate how we can support tricky machines.

• 64bit architecture.
• Keyboard is connected via USB. There isn't legacy PS/2 emulation.
• CD-ROM drive is connected with parallel ATA, but HDD is connected with serial ATA.
• NIC is a kind of Broadcom. Although tg3 driver is for this, kernel 2.6.8 needs to take firmware from somewhere.

In short, official Sarge d-i can't work on this machine. Using backported kernel 2.6.15 and other things, I succeeded to build experimental installer.

1. Download mini.iso (small CD image to launch network installer) or netboot.tar.gz (for TFTP boot) from here. (I've tested only netboot.tar.gz version)
2. When installer asks a mirror site, set "osdn.debian.or.jp" as host and "/~kmuto/sarge-amd64" as directory.
3. If you meet "no disk" error, go another virtual terminal (Alt+F2) and run "modprobe ata_piix". Then back installer screen (Alt+F1).
4. Remains are as same as normal installer. Choose other official mirror at 2nd stage.

Known bugs:

• Discover doesn't load ata_piix if piix (ide_generic?) is loaded before.
• USB keyboard list provides only a few choices. Use US map at this time.
• For CJK people, you may find 2nd stage screen won't show in local language. This is because some kernel images don't include fbcon driver and jfbterm can't run.
• I haven't tweaked RAID/LVM yet. So it may not work.

I'm trying to make auto-build script also. Although it's still under developemnt, you can see svn repository; http://kmuto.jp/svn/d-i/sarge/

It's maybe a little fashionable to use terms like "information overload" and that all our technology is making us less productive. I'm starting to buy into this theory a little more though. I'm having a lot of trouble keeping myself focused on any one task for an extended period of time. I constantly jump between task A to task B to check email C, making a little progress here and there, but I think I'm hurting myself with all these context switches. I can't seem to stop myself anytime I have to wait for something (even very briefly), my focus switches to something else.

The most problems are at work. Now I'm fairly sure the environment has a lot to do with it. It's an open concept type, with a few cubicle walls here and there. People are constantly interrupting me with questions and random conversations can break out frequently. For the most part I really like these aspects, but it can be very hard to concentrate on a task. Home isn't much better though. I have trouble just concentrating on one task, I almost always have a movie or TV going at the same time, and I can't seem to turn it off.

I also have so many half finished projects and good ideas (or so I'd like to believe) that I never get around to getting anywhere with out. I'm really enjoying my classes, but I don't put in the time I should to improve (I'm jealous of mricon's dedication to ).

Do other people feel like this? Does anyone have tips to better allow one to concentrate on a single task at a time, and better follow through on tasks? I mean there are some obvious things I should be doing, but I'm having trouble with those even. Outside the box ideas?

Since Joey Hess posted a short conversation we had on IRC today about the role of the DPL, I thought it's a good time to express some of my thoughts. Basically, I think that most people have a bad understanding of which tasks are really involved in being DPL (e.g. much more purely administrative crap that nobody else wants to do) and that they're quite naive about what the DPL can achieve, at least in the current climate. Let's just look at the current discussions on the -vote list. It's this time of the year when everyone pretends that its Christmas, expresses their feelings of what's wrong with Debian and where Santa Claus^W^Wthe candidates reassure them that everything will be fine. "Will you fix NM? Fix or replace ftp-master? etc." "Oh, sure I will, all of that (and more)." Honestly, would you elect someone if they told you they won't or can't? The strange thing is that the same questions get asked every year, and yet people don't get the hint and look for other solutions. I'm not overly happy with any of the candidates this year, and I was seriously considering running again, not next year but possibly later. However, this Christmas wankfest reminded me again why that may not be such a good idea after all. I remember how much time I spent answering questions on -vote myself, and while I'm all for transparency, many of the questions were just a waste of time. This year, the questions were relatively sane in the beginning but now it's just a waste of time most questions are posed in a way that it's clear what kind of answer people want to hear. I spent hours and hours answering questions, but at some point I thought "cannot we just stop talking for hours about what I'd do if elected and actually start doing all that stuff?". That would have been so much more productive. Instead of asking the DPL what they'll do to solve All The Problems In Debian, why don't you ask yourself what you can do to improve the situation? There's a bottleneck with the DAM, you say. Right, the chances that you'll be added as DAM are relatively small. But have you ever considered helping the DAM and to make their life easier? How about signing up as an Application Manager and producing such good reports that it'll be a piece of cake for the DAM to approve people based on your reports? Right, it won't fix the bottleneck, but it will make the situation so much better. Instead of bitching about the security team, why don't you prepare a package, write the text for the DSA and get everything ready in a way that a DSA member can simply take your work, recompile the package and issue the advisory? Now I'm sure some people will say that they've tried that and failed. Yes, not every upload for DSA will be accepted as it is, but how hard have you tried? And people always complain about the cabal and how hard it is to join teams. And while I agree that this is partly true, there are so many counter examples too. Look at me as an example. In 2.5 years, I became the most productive Application Manager, joined (and took over) the NM Front Desk, became a "senior" Quality Assurance member, and got elected as project leader. Am I special? No, in no way I just put in a lot of effort. Look at Jeroen van Wolffelaar, who joined at the end of 2004, and who is involved in QA (especially MIA) and lintian, is the co-author of the new packages.d.o code and an ftp assistant. Andi Barth (who got an account in January 2004) has done important QA work (bts2ldap), is a maintainer of the developers reference and a release manager. So it's not possible to join a team, you say? Maybe you're just not trying hard enough (and the right way!). (Hint: "make me a DAM/ftp-master/whatever" doesn't work as well as "how can I make your job easier?"). What I'm trying to say is that people should stop believing that the DPL will fix everything and that they should actually help out themselves. If we all work together and put effort into the areas that need work we might actually achieve something. People have been asking for a strong leader and this urge got stronger over the last few years. But, face it, we currently don't have a culture which accepts a strong leader. Joey Hess mentioned that he wants to see a DPL who pushes technical changes. I did that too, to some degree (mostly in private since that works much better than on a mailing list where a big flamewar is guaranteed). For example, I kindly asked Joey to lower the priority of the non-free question so it would not get asked in a default installation. And he did because Joey is a reasonable guy. (He also told me that me making this request made it easier for him to justify.) However, unfortunately, not everyone is like Joey. And what are you going to do if a maintainer refuses to listen, as many do? I mean, seriously, what can you do? Some are increasingly talking about the good old times of Bruce Perens who would tell people what to do and make decisions. The urge for a strong leader increased over the last years. I think that's partly a reason why Branden got elected last year people expected him to completely shake things up. I haven't talked to him and I wasn't part of the leadership team, so I don't really know what happened, but from what (little) I've heard, it seems that he tried, quickly realized just how rigid some of the structures are and gave up. You have to see things in a historical perspective (and I can only recommend that people who have access to the debian-private archives take the time to read through them). There's a reason we have had "weak" leaders since Bruce. While now a large number of people think that Bruce was the best thing since sliced bread, lots of people were really pissed off back then with him commanding people around. And what was the result? A constitution that would ensure that no leader would ever have such power again. And that's what we're currently stuck with. I think that one of the biggest problems Debian is currently facing is the inability to make decisions. There are so many endless, completely futile (and repetitive) discussions going on. We need someone who comes in, tells people to shut up and makes a decision on behalf of the project. A decision people will follow, even if they personally disagree with it. But seriously, do you think our culture would currently accept such a leader? I can tell you from experience that even people who have been asking for a "strong" leader won't actually follow a leader who tells them to take a certain course of action. We really need to fix this problem, and the problem is in our culture. And since our culture is defined by who we are, you should start with yourself first. Start by asking yourself a few questions. Do you think before posting something to our lists, and ask yourself twice whether it really adds value to the discussion? If there's an area that is problematic, will you try to help out? If asked to do something you're not particularly interested in but which is good for the project will you do it? And most importantly, will you contribute to make our culture something that is fun? The project leader is important, but don't wait for them to fix all of our problems. If there's a problem, try to figure out a way how you can solve it!

A little bit later than promised, I just uploaded the slides of my talk from the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage about backporting and backports.org to my website. I hope I found and fixed all remaining typos.

Gianugo Rabellino, Matt Asay and others have been discussing "the meaning of open source". This touches on two things:

1. Free Software Business. How to make money with or from open source software. There was (still is, it's just not active) a mailing list, "Free Software Business" where this topic was rehashed several times in a number of interesting permutations, and all of the different business models were covered. The participants were all free software fans, with varying motivations that mostly centered around a free market view of the software world, and a desire to discuss ideas about how free software could be self-sustaining economically. Despite having some of the best minds in the business (people like Bob Young, Brian Behlendorf , Michael Tiemann, Russ Nelson [the list's host]) and a few economists, I don't think there was ever really a 'conclusion'. There are several models out there that work, but none of them is "perfect". They either involve holding something back (dual licensing, for instance), or don't really solve the problem of getting paid to produce software - service/support businesses are best when the consultants are working on paying gigs rather than creating software from scratch. It's more than obvious that there is a great deal of value in free software, and it's an extremely beneficial thing for companies that know how to take advantage of it. What's not so obvious is how to transfer enough of that value to the creators of the software to keep them going. The point being, "free software business" is not a solved problem, so expect to see various models, as people try things out. Some of them will have problems, and won't survive.
2. This leaves us with the crux of Gianugo's "rant", that some of these companies and groups are doing open source, but not in the true, open, community-oriented approach. I think he's right, but where I don't agree is with this:

   Also, I m not buying what Matt, Matthew and Ugo are saying about some sort of Darwinian selection being able to discriminate the good from the bad (assuming there is actually good and bad - I just tend to think we have different objectives): it s hard enough to move the CIO masses beyond the Open Source means Linux meme, go figure explaining why they should care to consider the difference between Open Source built within the virtuous cycle of community based development and Open Source as a pure distribution model of conceptually proprietary and closed to participation code.

   I see open source as being really strong right now, and do not deem it likely that that will change - it's survived Microsoft so far, survived the dot com bust, survived people trying to label it as a political movement, survived venture capital... Fundamentally, it just has too many things going for it. There's too much value, too much diversity, and ruddy health. So I think that where he sees people "not getting it", I see a competitive advantage for those who do. Things will sort themselves out with time.

Warning: Very long post ahead. You have been warned! What? Tor is a Free Software project (revised BSD license), developed by Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, which creates an infrastructure for anonymous TCP communication. From the project website:

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features. Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

Tor also allows you to set up and/or use a so-called Tor hidden service, i.e., a server which offers some service (a website, ssh access, or similar) without revealing its IP to its users. Why? Why would you want to use Tor? Well, because you probably don't want anybody (neither state agencies, nor companies, nor "hackers", nor any other individuals or groups) to be able to record, analyze, and (ab)use information about your web browsing habits, or any other communication habits. For instance, you don't want Google to have a complete search-profile of you, which — even worse — might some day get in the hands of other parties. In the days of massive data retention you don't want all your electronic traces to be recorded, stored for ages, analyzed, and data-mined for dubious reasons and with even more dubious results and false conclusions drawn which might negatively affect you. If you're a human rights activist in China, you want anonymous communication. If you're a whistleblower, you want anonymous communication. The list is endless. For securing your communications, so that nobody is able to sniff your emails, your chat messages, your passwords, your private documents and conversations, you use encryption. For communicating anonymously you can use Tor. Combine both, and you have secure and anonymous communication. In case you're wondering whether criminals might abuse Tor, read the Tor Abuse FAQ. Short answer: yes, but if you're willing to break the law, you already have anonymity (open access points, stolen/prepaid mobile phones, etc.). You don't need Tor to do bad things if you're a criminal. If you're one of those horrible "oh, but I don't have anything to hide" guys, consider this: Say you have a drug/alcohol problem and want to visit an anti-drugs/anti-alcohol website or forum for help. Would you want the whole world, your neighbors, your co-workers, your boss, to know that, or would you rather want to keep that a secret? Say you have AIDS and want to get information on the web? Or, to make the example even more dramatic: Would you want some random guys to be able to watch you while you fuck your wife? No? So you have something to hide after all, right? My point is: Everyone has something to hide, even more, it is a basic human right to have the ability to hide something. It's called privacy. How? Tor implements a form of onion routing to, basically, push encrypted data through multiple Tor nodes (servers), before it reaches the final destination (e.g. a website). The result is that neither the website owner, nor a local eavesdropper, nor any single Tor server knows who requested that specific website, hence you are communicating anonymously. For more technical details, read the Tor overview and the Tor documentation pages. In order to use Tor, you have to install and run a local Tor client/daemon (this is not necessarily a Tor server!). On Debian, type apt-get install tor, on other systems you can get the respective binary packages or download the sources and compile Tor yourself. Usually Tor is used together with Privoxy, a configurable HTTP proxy which sanitizes your web-browsing experience by removing nasty banner ads, pop-ups, JavaScript, webbugs, cookies etc. etc. So: apt-get install privoxy. After installing and starting Tor and Privoxy, you can now configure your webbrowser to use Privoxy as an HTTP proxy (see below), and Privoxy will in turn use Tor to anonymize your communication if you add "forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 ." to your /etc/privoxy/config. Anonymizing various applications Most (but not all) of the following information is also covered in the very useful Torify HOWTO in the Tor wiki (I will add the missing information there, ASAP). As I'm pretty paranoid, I have checked every single of these configurations with Ethereal to ensure that the traffic is really anonymized. However, if you are paranoid, you shouldn't trust me, but rather test this stuff for yourself! Warning: DNS Leaks:
The biggest problem with many applications is that they leak DNS requests. That is, although they use Tor to anonymize the traffic, they first send a DNS request untorified in order to get the IP address of the target system. Then they communicate "anonymously" with that target. The problem: any eavesdropper with more than three brain cells can conclude what website you visited, if they see that you send a DNS request for rsf.org, followed by some "anonymous" Tor traffic. The solution: use Tor together with Privoxy, that prevents DNS leaks. Many non-HTTP-based applications are usually torified using a small tool called torify (e.g. by typing torify fetchmail), but often this approach has DNS leaking problems, see below.

• Webbrowser: Firefox, Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, ...:
  Most browsers can be torified by using Privoxy as an HTTP(S) proxy, i.e. using 127.0.0.1 as proxy host and 8118 as proxy port.
  For example, to torify Firefox go to Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Connection Settings -> Manual proxy configuration and configure:
  HTTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
SSL Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
FTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
SOCKS v5

  For Konqueror, go to Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Proxy -> Manually Specify the proxy settings -> Setup and configure:
  HTTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
HTTPS Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
FTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118

  Warning: Although Privoxy doesn't support FTP, you should configure the browser to use Tor + Privoxy for FTP. By doing that, you get an error message when you try to access ftp:// URLs, but at least you don't send untorified traffic without noticing.
  Warning: Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" (RSS feeds) are a problem if you switch from a torified to an untorified state sometimes (by switching or enabling/disabling the proxy). Firefox periodically requests all the feeds you're subscribed to. If you turn off Tor + Privoxy usage, they will be requested non-anonymously, and you won't even notice it! Solution: remove all "Live Bookmarks", or never switch to untorified browsing.
• HTTP-based tools: lynx, links, w3m, wget, curl, ...:
  Most other HTTP tools, such as wget, can be torified by setting the respective values for the http_proxy and HTTP_PROXY environment variables. Applications which don't honor http_proxy probably have a configuration option to set the HTTP proxy.
  Add this to your ~/.bashrc or similar config-file:
  http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8118/
HTTP_PROXY=$http_proxy
export http_proxy HTTP_PROXY

  Warning: links is a notable exception here. It does not honor the http_proxy environment variable! However, you can add http_proxy 127.0.0.1:8118 to your /etc/links.cfg and/or to your ~/.links/links.cfg. Or go to Setup -> Network Options and do the same there. Or use the -http-proxy 127.0.0.1:8118 command line option.
• Instant Messaging: Gaim:
  Go to Preferences -> Network -> Proxy and configure this:
  Proxy type: Socks 5
Host: 127.0.0.1
Port: 9050

  Gaim doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
• Debian: Apt:
  Setting http_proxy is enough, as apt-get honors the http_proxy environment variable. But you can also add this line to your /etc/apt/apt-conf:
  Acquire::http::Proxy "http://127.0.0.1:8118/";

  apt-get doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
  Warning: This will only work for deb/deb-src lines in /etc/apt/sources.list which use HTTP, because Privoxy does not support FTP.
• RSS-Reader: Akregator:
  Which RSS feeds you are reading tells quite a lot about you, and it's probably an information some people or organizations would be very interested in, I imagine. So anonymizing your feed-reader is quite important, IMHO. Akregator (a KDE RSS-reader application) uses Konqueror internally, so if you have set Konqueror to use Tor + Privoxy as HTTP-proxy, Akregator is safe, too.
  Akregator doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
• Podcast Client: iPodder/Juice:
  Got to File -> Preferences -> Network settings and configure this:
  Use a proxy server: enable
Address: http://127.0.0.1
Port: 8118

  iPodder/Juice doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
• Secure login: ssh:
  In order to torify all your ssh communications (ssh, slogin, sftp, etc.), edit your /etc/ssh/ssh_config and/or ~/.ssh/config and add:
  Host *
ProxyCommand socat STDIO SOCKS4A:127.0.0.1:%h:%p,socksport=9050

  This requires socat, so: apt-get install socat.
  ssh doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
  Warning: Simply using torify ssh does not suffice, it leaks DNS requests!
• Email: fetchmail:
  Properly torifying fetchmail is pretty ugly. Basically, torify fetchmail should be enough (one would think), but that leaks DNS requests! All tips offered in the Torify HOWTO suffer from this problem. The ideal solution would be to use tor-resolve (a small utility which resolves DNS requests via the Tor network, and hence anonymously) before fetching the emails, but I haven't found a good and simple solution for that. What I do right now is to hardcode IP addresses in my ~/.fetchmailrc config-file and then use torify fetchmail, which doesn't leak DNS requests. However, it leads to some ugly "fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: foo.bar.com != xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" warnings.
  I always start fetchmail manually, often by clicking an icon in my IceWM toolbar. So I use the following line in my ~/.icewm/toolbar config-file:
  prog Fetchmail fetchmail xterm -e torify fetchmail

  Sometimes I invoke fetchmail from the command-line, too, so I have this alias in my ~/.bashrc:
  alias fetchmail='torify fetchmail'
Warning: Just for the record: torify fetchmail alone (i.e. used with hostnames in ~/.fetchmailrc) does not suffice, it leaks DNS requests!
• IRC: XChat:
  Go to Settings-> Preferences -> Network -> Network setup -> Proxy server and configure:
  Hostname: 127.0.0.1
Port: 9050
Type: Socks5

  Then make sure you check the "Use a proxy server" checkbox in the preferences dialog of the IRC server you want to use.
  XChat doesn't leak DNS requests.

You might also want to check out toraliases, a small shell script you can source from your ~/.bashrc file. It defines some functions and aliases which transparently direct the traffic of some (but not all!) programs through Tor. Applications which cannot easily be torified Anything not using TCP usually cannot be torified, as Tor only works for TCP.

• Non-TCP traffic from tools like ping, host, dig, nslookup, nmap, traceroute and lots more: as Tor only supports TCP, you're out of luck. However, you can safely use web-frontends such as dnsstuff.com over Tor + Privoxy (if they don't block Tor users, that is).
• whois: Although torify whois google.com leaks the DNS request for the whois-server (in this case whois.crsnic.net), it doesn't seem to leak the host you wanted to lookup. Can somebody confirm this? The safer method is to use a web-frontend, though.
• FTP: Although torify ncftp works, it leaks DNS requests! I haven't yet found a way to fix this (help is appreciated!). I also tried a few other FTP clients, without luck.
• GnuPG: Using gpg anonymously should work by using a proper http_proxy environment variable and by using a hidden Tor server as keyserver.
  Add this to your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf:
  keyserver x-hkp://yod73zr3y6wnm2sw.onion
keyserver-options honor-http-proxy broken-http-proxy

  This works in theory. However, I noticed a problem: while gpg --recv-keys seems to work fine, gpg --refresh-keys leaks DNS requests! It seems GnuPG hard-codes the keyserver to keyserver.pgp.com in that case and leaks the DNS request for this domain name.
• Sending email (SMTP): Not sure how to do this with Tor. Many Tor nodes block SMTP per default. A better solution is probably Mixmaster/Mixminion.
• CVS, svn, Bittorrent/Azureus (untested HOWTO), usenet clients (pan, slrn), xmms: TODO. Haven't checked, yet.

Pitfalls to be aware of

• Rule #1: Don't spoil your anonymity by being stupid!
• IRC: Don't use nicks which hint at you, such as your real name, real-life nickname, acronyms which are known to "belong" to you or identify you. Don't use things like DCC which might reveal your real IP or real information about you. Disable all possibly "leaky" features/commands such as CTCP, VERSION requests, automatically accepting files from other IRC users, etc. etc.
• Don't accidentally access Tor hidden server URLs in an untorified browser. For example, if you would try to access the fictitious hidden server abc1234.onion, this request would travel over the net unencrypted and untorified. An eavesdropper could sniff that, enable Tor on his computer, go to abc1234.onion, and would know what you wanted to look at.
• Double-check that all applications you use don't leak DNS requests.
• Do not only configure your ~/.foobarrc config-files but also the config-files in /etc. Otherwise you might eventually use wget, ssh, lynx or other tools as root (instead of your normal, non-privileged user account) resulting in untorified traffic!
• Disable all "check for updates automatically", "notify upon new release" and similar "phoning home" features in all your applications. Most such features are probably not Tor-safe, i.e. will send/receive untorified traffic. Some candidates are Firefox, Adobe Acrobat reader, Gaim, and others.
• Never, never, think that Tor encrypts your traffic! It does not! The person who runs a Tor exit node can easily sniff all plain-text traffic! Tor only anonymizes your traffic, but it can still be sniffed plain-text at the beginning and at the end of the onion route! So don't do any HTTP-auth, or plain-text password sending for e.g. POP3, telnet, and so on. Always use encryption in addition to Tor!
• In general, spread only a minimum of information. Disable referrer sending (e.g. using Privoxy), disable cookies, kill webbugs (Privoxy), and so on.
• Watch your language, especially in public forums or IRC. A linguist can probably easily figure out which country/region you're from if you speak/write broken English or use certain idioms or false friends. This might or might not be a problem for you, but it's something you should bear in mind.
• If you're extra paranoid, you could set up your firewall to block all outgoing DNS traffic and force all applications to use Tor to resolve names. You could probably also block all outgoing non-Tor traffic...
• Another good idea is probably carrying an Anonym.OS LiveCD with you, so you can have a (more) anonymous communication wherever you go.

More information More information is available in the Tor documentation, the Tor wiki, and especially in the Tor FAQ. In addition, there's an IRC channel on Freenode (#tor), some slides and a video (torrent) about Tor you might find interesting. If you would like to help, you can run a Tor server, donate some money, or volunteer to do other things (code, debug, document, translate, and more). That's it for now. I'm very grateful for comments and suggestions, especially for hints on how to anonymize more applications. Also, if you notice any dumb mistakes I made, please leave a comment. Update 2006-03-07: Fixed typos, added link to the toraliases project (thanks Benjamin Schieder).

David writes that, while momentum is a very good way to keep flames away, it's really solidified by proper code of conduct. I don't disagree with either of these positions, but they're both characteristics of a good culture that enables things to get done in a productive atmosphere, rather than the causes themselves.

One of the problems is that you can't enshrine, 'don't be a tool' in a code of conduct. Yes, you can legislate away personal attacks, so there's no more Serious problems with Mr. Troup, but it's still entirely possible to completely subvert the development process while still remaining within the bounds of any particular code of conduct. The key here is that the code of conduct is just a rough guide to, and a method of enforcement of, any given culture that you wish to enforce.

If you want to change Debian's current developmental culture, you'll need more than just a document: you'll need a landslide mindshift within the entire developer base, which will be extremely difficult to achieve, given that some particular developers seem to champion their lack of social skills, delight in annoying others, and glorify petty arguments on mailing lists as being superior to actually achieving anything. When you get this, the code of conduct is really just fluff, because it becomes almost entirely self-enforcing. The general tone of the list and attitude of the developers discourages people from being idiots, and you don't have to point to the code of conduct except in serious cases.

So that's the really hard part. Debian has a destructive culture that has led to debian-devel and debian-private becoming the pointless landfill it is today. Which is no slight on Debian developers as a group, or any particular developers; it's just the way it is today. How it got that way is entirely unclear, but how it's going to move on from there is an equally perplexing question.

And, in response to Joss, the two go hand in hand. Once you've stopped arguing for the sake of it, you're infinitely more productive as a result. So I don't think calling people advocating change in Debian's social norms 'teletubbies' is at all useful: these people aren't advocating turning Debian into a sewing club where we all turn up and talk about how much we love each particular developer. What they're advocating is change of the current Debian social culture such that trainwreck threads full of personal attacks, mindless bitching, and argument for the sake of it, don't exist anymore. You can have robust debate within that framework, and you don't have to completely vet every statement you make so it's a glowing reflection on everyone and everything mentioned. If you have the right culture, you can simply tell trolls once to go away, and they get utterly ignored, instead of having their threads blown up into huge all-consuming flamewars by people who seem to love seeing their name in the mailing list index. I don't see how you conclude that any hypothetical code of conduct exists purely to facilitate trolling either, but maybe I'm missing something.

The current problems in Debian with people being unable to relate to fellow developers, so instead getting bored and flaming them into the ground instead, isn't a techincal problem in the least. It's a social problem. The entire point of this debate isn't, 'which MTA should we install by default, if any', but 'how do we fix Debian's current culture?'. I don't see how this is a technical problem, but it does have technical ramifications (e.g. releases take years of banging our collective head against a very large wall).

We left the university in Chemnitz about half an hour after my talk ended. The drive home was okay, took us less than two hours (new record). Now I'm tired, but already uploaded the remaining pictures. Updating (uhm, yes... some typos) and uploading the slides of my talk to my website and the new ion3 upstream release to Debian unstable have to wait till tomorrow.

Josselin Mouette thinks name-calling makes his point. I quite disagree. His approach does nothing to make Debian better; in fact, it only serves to reduce many people's interest in working on Debian at all. David's point about development momentum is very good. I completely agree with it. I sort of started on this line of thought in my DPL platform draft, although David took it further and said it better. Momentum can only be increased if the people involved are having fun; they will have fun if momentum is increased. If something prevents development from gathering momentum, or saps the fun out of working on Debian in some other way, things fall apart. For quite a number of people, flame wars are fun suckers. "Stop energy" sounds like a good term to me. I'm talking about flame wars. I'm not talking about discussion, debate, or disagreement. It's perfectly possible to have those without getting actively aggressive, passively aggressive, repeating your opinion 75 times per day, resorting to name calling, or employing any of the other charming tricks that Debian mailing lists see. That's enough talk, and enough attention paid to bumps in the road. Time to enhance my tools so that I can find and fix all the remaining bugs in Debian.

Apparently it's been a month since I've said anything. No wonder people say I don't update this blog enough. A few weeks ago, Simon came to visit/make supper for some of us down here. It was good to see him again. Unfortunatly, after he left my fridge had stuff in it, so I had to leave it plugged in. That stuff I mentioned was mostly flavoured vodka and ice cream.

The weekend after Simon visited, I visited Victoria to see Gordo, who was on his last weekend on the west coast. I partied it up pretty hard with him and had quite a walk around Victoria saturday night while trying to find Esquimalt.

Before my mother arrive last saturday I figured it was a good idea to get rid of the ice cream and vodka in my freezer. So, I got to watch spaceballs with some friends while mixing some vodka smoothies.

My mom and auth Faye were down last week. I was partial tour guide, partial tourist this last week as we explored big basin, Stanford and San Francisco. It was fun to have visitors for once. I even got a lamp, some bowls and some wine glasses out of the deal.

Tonight, I went out to the Dana St. Roasting Company to see what was going on in Mountain View. To my surprised, tonights show was belly dancers. There was some very impressive dancers. It was a good night to go out.

(less than 900 emails to catch up on)